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advice Five Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting Domaining

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I am a regular Reddit reader, and one discussion that caught my eye was a Life Pro Tip (LPT) that recommended searching for “things I wish I knew before starting” before starting a new venture or hobby. This way, you’ll typically find useful tips to taper your expectations when starting something new.

I wanted to create something similar for domain name investing, so here are five things that I wish I knew before I started domain investing. Feel free, as always, to add your own suggestions below.


1. Quantity Doesn’t Necessarily Equal Quality

It’s a trap that many new investors, including myself, have fallen into. The idea of buying up hundreds or thousands of domain names with the expectation that no matter what type of domain you’ve acquired, a buyer will come along and make you an incredibly high offer.

This is unlikely to happen. If you’re like me, you’ll find that it is far more likely that you’ll keep the majority of these domain names for a year without selling a single one, before letting them expire upon realizing that you can’t afford the renewal fees.

I’ve personally found that starting small and growing is the best means of developing a successful portfolio. This may mean that you need to conduct outbound sales to keep a cash flow going so that you can invest in new domains.


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2. It’s more time intensive than you may think

I had no idea that domain name investing would be such a time consuming venture. Domaining certainly doesn’t involve rich investors registering a few domain names, only for them to sit back and wait for the six figure offers to come in.

There is a lot of work that should go in to finding investment grade domains, and that might involve looking through lists of hundreds of domain names to find a single name that you are likely to go on to acquire. If you have a day job, be prepared to spend your lunch times and evenings at a computer screen.


3. Don’t fall for domain appraisal scams

I will admit to something now that I’m not proud of at all, but we all make mistakes. After I bought my first ever batch of domains, I received a supposed inquiry that gave me an offer for my domain, but they needed it professionally appraised. Of course, this led to me paying for a domain appraisal, and the buyer soon disappeared.

New investors can be vulnerable to the domain appraisal scam, which is why I think that this deserves a mention. You can find out more details on domain appraisal scams by searching NamePros. Morgan Linton also wrote a useful article about spotting domain appraisal scams that may be of interest to new investors.


4. Don’t buy domain names straight away

If you do consider domain name investing as a hobby or a new money making venture, it’s likely that you found out about the industry through a high profile sale, such as a seven figure Rick Schwartz sale, or a story boasting an extraordinarily high return on investment (ROI) within a short space of time.

Of course, this will no doubt immediately motivate you to spend some of your hard-earned money in the hope of becoming the next Rick Schwartz overnight. Don’t rush in. Spend some time researching what a good domain name is, take advantage of the thousands of public sales that are available for you to analyse, and give yourself a basic understanding of domains and the domain industry before you contemplate buying a domain.


5. Continually educate yourself

The domain industry is constantly changing, with new companies, new opportunities and new domain extensions appearing regularly. Five years ago, the domain industry was a completely different space than it is today, and it will no doubt look completely different again in five years time.

There are a number of people who regularly publish blogs, give advice and are generally extremely helpful. It’ll pay in the long run to read a handful of blogs regularly, while monitoring daily or weekly domain sales statistics.





What do you wish that you knew before you started domaining?
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
The 1. thing is the best one.
 
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Although this was touched upon, I think it is important to realize that apart from single dictionary words and 3Ls and 4Ls, etc., domains are not very liquid. Even very good names can take a long time to sell unless you are willing to accept a loss.
I was "lured" into thinking selling domains was easy because the first name I bought to resell I received 2 offers on ($5000 and $8000) within a week or two and made about $6500 profit on a $1500 name I picked up from GD auctions. My experience since has been quite different.
 
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Another insightful article, thanks James.
 
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Wish I knew about budgeting and sticking to it especially factoring in renewal fees

Great article
 
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Great article. This is helpful for my domain investment journey. Thanks a bunch.
 
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Spot-on, everywhere you look you find domain names at ludicrous prices. People new to the domaining world seem to think that you can just pull a price out of the air and voilà some mug will buy it.
 
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