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discuss Do You Run Your Own Domain Portfolio Website?

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DanBingham

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If so -

Is it working for you?
What are the benefits?
Did you DIY?

If not,

Why?

Interested to know your thoughts....
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
@domeen - I would not say that having your own website is old fashioned at all. But like you said. Most of my customers have bought thru Afternic/GoDaddy. So what's the point? The point is provide a more personal/flexible service than the potential customer will find at a place like Afternic. I also use my website for the management of my domains. and it also gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, apart from the costs involved ;)
 
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Owning your own domain sales site is so 2000 or something like that.
What's the point? There is none.

List at afternic + activate fast transfer and you sell a lot more.
If you don´t like to park with afternic, use sedo or something like that.

maybe if you own 100 000+ domains, it has some point.

Or maybe if you sell some country .tld-s. And you need the marketplace to be in specific language
Oh you're so right. We should all just quit right now :xf.grin:. The doom and gloom of developing one's own site, the horrible good feeling it gives us, the sheer bewilderment that we can keep 25% more of the money the buyer pays, the depressing feeling of sharing the work one has done with others, the total feelings... of being back in the Y2K.:xf.eek::xf.confused:O_o:xf.rolleyes:

...doom ...depression ...thunder clouds... etc...
 
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Oh you're so right. We should all just quit right now :xf.grin:. The doom and gloom of developing one's own site, the horrible good feeling it gives us, the sheer bewilderment that we can keep 25% more of the money the buyer pays, the depressing feeling of sharing the work one has done with others, the total feelings... of being back in the Y2K.:xf.eek::xf.confused:O_o:xf.rolleyes:

...doom ...depression ...thunder clouds... etc...

If you are cheapskate you will always be a cheapskate!
In order to make money, you have to spend money.
Think about it.
You cry about 25%, id say afternic is worth every penny of that 25%
 
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If you are cheapskate you will always be a cheapskate!
In order to make money, you have to spend money.
Think about it.
You cry about 25%, id say afternic is worth every penny of that 25%

I always make the buyer pay this 25% at Afternic, over and above my asking price on my own website. From my experience, the buyer chooses to buy from Afternic rather than from my website, most of the time :)
 
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Just make your own website - I think it just adds some credibility :)
 
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Like @stub - I use both. For buyers that want the security of Afternic, they can buy my domains there, and I have most there with buy now prices. Nice to wake up one morning and see one of my domains sold for $8,000 without me having to do any negotiating. (Of course, I only received $6,400, but I had built extra into my price to cover that cost.)

However, I have also sold domains through my website ... and the website gives me an internet presence as a domain investor, which I have complete control over.
 
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Slowly building my own at concepti.st

I enjoy it as a hobby for myself + set up automatic twitter presence as well + it gives me an opportunity to branch out to add-on services

However, I need to sort out captcha for sending messages as I get tons of spam + still trying to figure out analytics.

Last 6 months been switching 2 months at Efty, 2 months my own, now planning 2 months at DAN (as I need to fix some of the bugs on the website)

I still think Efty/Dan etc are better solutions if you just want to sell, whilst building your own marketplace gives you more in terms of "brand building" for potential spin-offs and upsell
 
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Yep I developed Nameed, I have a few sales through it.

There's no feelling like being independent on your own business.
And as someone else said, it does force me to be more organized.
 
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I tried to develop my own site (a couple of times), but in the end I just didn't have enough time to dedicate to it because of my day job. So I've used one of the ready-made sites to list my names.
 
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I run my own marketplace for my own domains. But since buyers prefer well known marketplaces (as @stub mentioned above), whoever visit my domains gets to the domain's landing page with the following purchase options:
  • Escrow.com (fess on me)
  • Undeveloped (fees paid by the buyer)
  • Sedo (fees paid by the buyer)
  • Afternic (fees paid by the buyer)
  • GoDaddy premium listing (fees paid by the buyer)
  • Bank wire (no fees) for the EU & US customers only. They can choose USD / EUR / CZK currencies.
All domains with "buy it now" prices are 9% higher @ dan.com and 20% higher @ afternic or GoDaddy, that should motivate the buyer to stick to the escrow.com option. Sample
 
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Is it working for you? - Yes
What are the benefits? - $17k-$25k in extra profits from commission savings and added lease-to-own functionality
Did you DIY? - Yes

I put a lot of thought into this back in April for a similar topic:

https://www.namepros.com/threads/ho...-domain-portfolio.1130416/page-2#post-7176239
I think it is important to keep in mind that everything in your sales process gives an impression.

My foremost reason for creating a marketplace/portfolio site was for cost savings. At the point where I put together a marketplace, I had 1-2 sales per month and I felt it was really dumb to give away a percentage of my sales to commission, when the traffic originated from my domain in the first place. I still don't mind spending 20% on commission when the traffic comes from elsewhere because they are adding a lot of value, but if the sale comes from my own traffic, it makes no sense.

At this point, with 1-2 sales per month you are at about 18 sales per year, around $25k in revenue, and $5,000 per year in commissions @ 20% (ouch).

I started off cheap with nameimprove.com as the domain and a simple website where I listed my portfolio. What I noticed over time is that the offers I received via the site, and negotiations, seemed to be low-ball more often than not compared to what I previously received on sedo/afternic/parking sites. So then you need to wonder, how much are you really saving when your overall offer amounts go down because of the impression you are giving? So I bought BetterNames//com soon after for $1,700 and paid a designer to come up with a better site design for about $500 (which now is now 10 years old and needs a redesign).

Before I upgraded the site, I started looking into marketing ideas much more and found that there are some small things you can do to give yourself a stronger position in negotiation and establish your authority in your industry with very little effort. By establishing a sense of Authority in the industry, you are much less likely to receive random low ball push-back from serious buyers. For me, the basics of doing so were the following:
  • Domain Name - to sell premium domains, you at minimum need a domain that is not "bad". Mine (NameImprove.com) wasn't horrible, but I knew it wasn't great, and to sell higher end names I think you are far better off with a good or great name.
  • Web Site Design - Whether using a template, a service, or doing it yourself just make sure it looks like a good professional website. As a developer, I've learned I'm not a designer and avoid coming up with designs from scratch even after 20 years of development and design editing.
  • Logo - similar to your domain, the logo matters. Unless you are a real designer, I would avoid doing it yourself. Hire a designer, or you can generate some good ones via logoshuffle.com or logojoy.com. At $30-$50 it makes no sense to use a bad logo.
  • Email Address - (myname@betternames//com) gives a much better impression than [email protected] did, and much better than a personal email address.
  • Email Signature - come up with an email signature that makes sense and give yourself a title. I would avoid "Owner" or "CEO" unless it is obvious that your business has multiple employees.
It is much harder to recover negotiations that have started with the customer trying to cut away at the value of the domain. If you establish your authority early in the customer engagement process, I've found that it is less likely that a knowledgeable buyer will take this path.

The items above are some simple ways you can start establishing authority and help you negotiate from a stronger position.

As a side note, if you are not going to have an end result that is "great" for the items above, you should probably just keep your 20% commission landing pages as your end result will likely be better, or use one of the landing page services that keep you anonymous. For me, the process was going to save me a few thousand dollars a year in commission to start, so investing $2-3k was an easy choice.


https://www.namepros.com/threads/ho...-domain-portfolio.1130416/page-3#post-7177609

I agree with that, no one comes to my site and looks around for a purchase. I've done zero SEO work for BetterNames//com because it doesn't really matter if people find me searching for "premiums domains" or something like that. I did it for landing pages only. The only reason I have a marketplace is so the buyer sees it as a big store and is more likely to think that I know what I'm doing.

I'm currently receiving 8,000-8,500 visitors per day via my custom landing pages, and over 120,000 page views per day, though it is likely many of the page views are from bots and crawlers. The other thing I've noticed is that search engine crawlers do not get forwarded via registrar URL forwarding. So for years and years my website and domains weren't indexed by search engines at all. I switched to my own custom DNS servers (ex. ns1.buy-this.com). Now, if you look up any of my domains on google (ex. search for "comerelax//com" and it will be the first listing in the search engine). This makes a significant difference when you have thousands of domains.

The huge advantage that you have with a custom landing page over the offer coming in via Sedo or Afternic is intelligence. In most cases I can figure out who a buyer is before responding to them if it comes from my website. From Sedo or Afternic, I have no idea. Imagine how your negotiation goes when you know who the buyer is as opposed to not knowing anything about your buyer.

I only get about 35% of my sales from landing pages in regards to upfront, buy-now sales. The other 65% come from external marketplaces (afternic).

But it is important to keep in mind that once you have your own site, you can implement any idea you want and because of this 100% of my lease-to-own agreements come via my landing pages as well. There were 9 in the last year and I currently have about 30 active lease-to-own agreements. So if you add these into my sales numbers above, about 50% or more of my revenue comes via my custom landing pages.

So while I originally put up a portfolio/marketplace to cut down on my $5k commission costs, it is now a vastly different situation. I would say in terms of negotiation advantage and lease-to-own deals that never would have existed otherwise, the amount of extra profits that are generated from my portfolio/marketplace are at minimum $17,000 per year and more realistically about $25,000+ per year. So, I'd say the initial investment of $1,700 for BetterNames//com wasn't too bad. :xf.wink:
 
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Keep in mind -having a marketplace is simply a marketing tool, nothing more. It alone won't sell a single name.

If your looking to have the type of biz that you are networking, getting interest in your products & (more impt) content, handing out biz cards, speaking at conferences, etc.. - then you need a full website & marketplace. A marketplace that works for your brand. - I would say in that case, chat with @Tia Wood . Because, you don't want someone's style you have to force your brand into.

If you really just want nice landers, with action items, & portfolio & design - pick your poison. The difference here is your not basing your biz/marketing efforts on driving traffic a particular site (reoccuring content traffic, not 1 time sale traffic) - a better fit may be a true domain sales & management platform.

I would recommend getting a platform that does more than sales pages, alone. A "business management" platform as @Josytal mentioned above - you need more to manage a decent portfolio.

Hope that made sense - just pointing out there is a difference in a site to list, promote, a sell Domains vs. a Branded homesite or a Blog -ish kind of deal.

Good Luck,
Brian
 
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Most portfolio sites list the domain, niche, tld, and maybe with short description on each domain.

I think it's helpful to make visitors read a generic sales-pitch, just 1 page that hits home with all types of buyers. Important to to get it right, because depending on how you word it, you could easily hinder a sale too. I do it on mine, a few points to get someone excited. See what i mean at: used.best

Once you have your own site, you are in control of the traffic you may bring. You can employ a myriad of ways to drive traffic from sources. Many visits will not be someone looking exactly for your domain...Since so many 'organic' visits come without the intent to buy the domain, you might still be able keep them on your site and sell them something similar.

The best part of building your own is that you can transform it into whatever works at a given time.
 
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@JayT - There are 2 sides to using your approach:

1. You don't need to have to spend time dreaming up a sales-pitch for every domain you own. Which can get very stale, repetitive, and duplicated if you have many domains. With a lot of effort needed in creating each domains sales pitch for every domain.

2. You are not actually selling the domain itself to any end user. Why should the visitor buy your domain rather than somebody else's. You are also kinda doing the sales pitch for all the domains you DON'T own.

Where I think this could be useful. Is to have this as the default sales pitch for every domain (without having to input it into every domains details), so that any domain will have this default sales pitch, and not a blank space, which so often happens. And you could also have a section in the domain record with a detailed sales pitch for this domain, excluding all the generic reasons above.

Thanks for this suggestion. It shows thought and innovation.
 
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^ yes, I am proud to promote domaining even if it does mean my own names. I wouldn't be investing if I didn't think it's great, and it only helps to get more people thinking the same.

The same pitch on all names is really easy, like you said. Even easier, using wordpress, I use a plugin 'widgets in posts'. Now, all I have is a widget that I can adjust, any update are made across ALL my posts.

wordpress is very powerful, you just need to KNOW WHAT YOU NEED.
 
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Another good question for a thread @DefinitelyDomains ! You add a lot to the NamePros community.

Personally I do run my own website but I am not at all sure that the effort is worth it. I have managed to get decent search results on some specialized terms (not on many others) but overall modest traffic. I think only a very few of my sales were a result or even encouraged by my website.

In the early days of domain investing I planned to do sales mainly directly from the website - I had earlier run a home-based tiny business on a similar model, and that combined with in-person local sales seemed to work. For domains, it seemed to me that it did not, for me at least. So I switched a bit and while keeping my own site, I made the links for actual purchases to be through DAN, Afternic, Sedo, registrar marketplaces, etc. My thinking was that customers would have more trust in transactions through third parties. So I have a site, but don't really use it to directly sell domain names hardly ever.

I think if your website is mainly just a listing of domain names you have for sale, maybe with logos, there is little benefit to running your own when your DAN portfolio or your Efty marketplace can readily do that with almost zero effort. However, if your site can offer unique content, such as information on the niches you specialize in that is not available elsewhere, it may be worth the effort.

All of this could be summarized as my answer is: I don't know :xf.grin:

Bob
 
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I used to think that having a domain portfolio website may be worthwhile, but I find it better to just forward all of my domains to Sedo offer pages.
It seems that buyers tend to put trust in large marketplaces, like Sedo/Afternic rather than an unknown domain portfolio website.

A domain portfolio website isn't bad, but it isn't very beneficial either(unless one is willing to spend on SEO and advertising).
It isn't worth it for a small or midsize domain portfolio, maybe only for tens of thousands of domains or more.
 
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I have my own platform at namedawn.com mostly to keep organized and to show something in the landing page "about" section > example at MapleRepublic.com

I prefer to keep my options open about what escrow service to use for each sale. Buy now goes directly to escrow.
I could script something like "if you prefer to use afternic - go here and buy it directly" but I kind of prefer to keep visitors on my platform if they reached there.
After all - if they go to afternic / sedo / etc. they might find something else that they like. :)

I don't show my portfolio on the platform website. I only show basic info.
 
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I don't show my portfolio on the platform website. I only show basic info.

That's a strange idea. Why do you NOT list your domains on your portfolio website? Isn't that the whole point of having a portfolio website?
 
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That's a strange idea. Why do you NOT list your domains on your portfolio website? Isn't that the whole point of having a portfolio website?
I understand this. While not giving it quite the importance I did in the past, my thoughts were that giving a potential buyer access to your “strategy” in acquiring domains by listing all of them in one place, gives them the idea that there are may alternatives to the domain you are trying to sell to them! You don’t want the buyer who typed in your domain to suddenly reconsider a buy it now purchase due to huge list staring them in the face.

Which is also, conversely, a great reason to have your names listed on the various other venues (Afternic/Sedo, etc) in addition to landing pages of your own. I suspect many of my sales have been as a result of my names being sold as the better choice (price & or quality) due to a keyword search performed in the major marketplaces. Lots of your perfect buyers will never directly type your domain before hitting “buy-it-now”. They didn’t even know it existed.

My ideal: Landing page to my own marketplace, but also have them listed (most with buy-it-now pricing) on the majors.
 
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Nice thread. Lot's of interesting approaches being highlighted.

It really isn't that hard to build your own landers and marketplace. I've been pondering on this idea of doing a tutorial on here that'll cover some basics, you know just to get you going.

Nothing too fancy so even if you're not that technical you can do it but just enough so you can build on it and expand if you like.

Do you guys think there's enough interest in something like this to make it worth my time? Should I poll it to see where we're at in terms of demand?
 
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I understand this. While not giving it quite the importance I did in the past, my thoughts were that giving a potential buyer access to your “strategy” in acquiring domains by listing all of them in one place, gives them the idea that there are may alternatives to the domain you are trying to sell to them! You don’t want the buyer who typed in your domain to suddenly reconsider a buy it now purchase due to huge list staring them in the face.

Which is also, conversely, a great reason to have your names listed on the various other venues (Afternic/Sedo, etc) in addition to landing pages of your own. I suspect many of my sales have been as a result of my names being sold as the better choice (price & or quality) due to a keyword search performed in the major marketplaces. Lots of your perfect buyers will never directly type your domain before hitting “buy-it-now”. They didn’t even know it existed.

My ideal: Landing page to my own marketplace, but also have them listed (most with buy-it-now pricing) on the majors.

What he said.

+ I mostly started with the platform to keep organized
As I found out the hard way - keeping organized is very important in domaining if you want to do it for profit.
 
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Nice thread. Lot's of interesting approaches being highlighted.

It really isn't that hard to build your own landers and marketplace. I've been pondering on this idea of doing a tutorial on here that'll cover some basics, you know just to get you going.

Nothing too fancy so even if you're not that technical you can do it but just enough so you can build on it and expand if you like.

Do you guys think there's enough interest in something like this to make it worth my time? Should I poll it to see where we're at in terms of demand?
Yeah, I reckon you'd find a fair bit of demand.
 
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I always make the buyer pay this 25% at Afternic, over and above my asking price on my own website. From my experience, the buyer chooses to buy from Afternic rather than from my website, most of the time :)
Hi @stub, I’m interested to know – is it just that you do a much higher % of sales through Afternic, or do you actually know that customers have come to your own website then chosen to buy through Afternic afterward? {I assume you'd know this if you have links giving them either option.} If the latter, what sort of value range domains are they doing that for (choosing to pay an extra 25%)?... Thanks
 
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Hi @stub, I’m interested to know – is it just that you do a much higher % of sales through Afternic, or do you actually know that customers have come to your own website then chosen to buy through Afternic afterward? {I assume you'd know this if you have links giving them either option.} If the latter, what sort of value range domains are they doing that for (choosing to pay an extra 25%)?... Thanks

I cannot say with 100% certainty that they go to my website first before making an offer a domain at Afternic. I'm basing it on the fact that all my domains point to my website. But most of my sales (about 80%) come thru Afternic, which is the first time I here that somebody is interested in my domain. Of course, it is possible that somebody who is interested in a domain, hasn't type the domain into their browser. But I suspect, most do, or would.

I only sell thru Escrow.com, But I'd say its about as rarely as 1 per year, which go thru Escrow.com without any intervention from me. This may be because I make the buyer register on my website if they want to buy a domain from me. Also. Most of my domains are still Make Offer despite my intentions to begin selling more domains at fixed prices, as a new year's resolution in 2019. I also insist that people who want to make offers register, as well. Which probably puts some people making offers, off. But, for me, I want to know who I'm selling too, as best I am able too.

The highest prices I've sold domains at 100% mark-up at Afternic are about $10k. These are situations where I got a direct inquiry and last quote to them about $5k, before negotiations soured. So I priced them at 100% markup on Afternic. Most priced domains at Afternic are only 25% increase over my own website. I don't sell anything below $1k. My average selling prices range between $2.5k - $10k. It's mostly a break-even existence.
 
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