Newbie’s Beware!!!

[Zutroy]

Hi folks

I am a total noob and probably have not been taking enough of my bipolar medication and have got a bit carried away buying domain names, yes I went a bit manic (you have no idea how much money mania has cost me over the years) and have brought a load of names that are probably totally worthless and yes I feel a total idiot, I should have done my research, spent a bit longer on forums like this and got a better idea of what these names were actually worth, instead of listening to things like estibot and valuate (now pretty much the same thing since estibot has been upgraded) and getting carried away, the reason that I placed any faith in them at all was that I pasted many names that were sold in sedo auctions into valuate.com (even I knew that that the old estibot was ridiculously over valued) and a lot of its estimates were fairly close to what they actually sold for, I don’t know maybe it was leaching these results and changing it’s estimates a bit to make them look credible (or am I just been paranoid?) LOL, no what was probably going on, the mistake I was probably making was comparing the names that it was displaying on its recent market activity page, I now realise that these were probably selected for having sold for a very good price and were not reflective of the kind of prices most domains actually sell for, I have since looked at some of the results from sedo’s premium domain auctions and these usually don’t reach the kind of values valuate/new estibot gives them.

Anyway I feel like a total doofuss and wish I could turn back the clock, but and perhaps this is the one potential glimmer of hope, there may be some that are worth at least something, I got an offer of $299 for touchscreenpad.com, I wasn’t sure if I should sell it or not and got it appraised on DNF and a couple of people answered and said no we don’t know how successful apples touch screen ipad and any other pad imitations will be yet and advised me to hang on a bit if I could, I agreed so I declined the offer. Anyway like I say there may be some others that have at least some value and may be worth hanging onto at least for their development value if nothing else, believe it or not I have actually developed other successful websites in the past, the most active of which got up to 20,000 uniques a day, it’s not ecommerce that I am totally new to just domaining, but my problem is I am finding it hard to tell which I should hang onto and develop and which I should just ditch and write off due to another manic episode, I have been looking at the domain appraisal forum to see what sort of value you guys give domains, but it’s hard as a total noob to tell what my names may be worth, an experienced domainer could go through my list of 200 domains in five minutes and have a pretty good idea of which ones, if any had at least some value and which ones didn’t and they would probably be pretty close, I only really want to develop the ones that have a value over say $25-$50 or something like that, the rest I will probably just let expire and put down to experience. But my problem is I can’t afford to pay $25 for each to get a professional appraisal and from what I have read they are a load of rubbish anyway and tell you your name is worth way more than they actually are, I know the appraisal forum here is wonderful and free of charge, but many of the names people post don’t get a response, I am not criticising it in any way it’s an amazing service for free and I am really grateful to those who have replied, I think it’s great that such a thing exists at all, but what I could really do with is to pay an experienced domainer or two to very quickly go down my list and give each one a very very rough value, I bet they could do the lot in less than ten minutes, so I would know which are worth holding onto and developing and which aren’t, I was wondering does anybody here offer that kind of service?

Anyway just so you know just how silly the newbie has been, here is the list of what I have brought, I have put them all on sedo with the option for people to make offers, but so far have only had the one offer, maybe I should have took it who knows? And I know I have set their buy it now prices way above what they are probably worth, although I don’t think I am the only one to do that, touchscreenpads.com incidentally is listed for $7000, LOL. Anyway I am not going to be so cheeky to ask anybody to go through the lot and tell me which I should or should not keep for free, like I say if there are experienced domainers who do that sort of thing I will happily pay, but been as I am so desperate if anybody can be bothered to look at, at least some of my list and there’s any that do stick out as worth keeping and developing, I would love to know, I am more than grateful for any advice at this bleak and early stage.

Anyway thanks for reading assuming you didn’t get bored and give up long ago, I don’t blame you if you did and I hope this may be of warning to other noobs out there in my position, remember beware the estibot.

Thanks again and take care.

Yours humbly

John


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[Zutroy]

They were all fresh regs, I spent about $2000, I have made about $1250 back so far.

 

[maxeaus]

For a "noob" i have seen bigger disasters, i actually think you MAY have some talent, given some time learning, compared to quite a few people who continuously reg shite over and over again and never listen to any one's advice.

My advice ATM is don't reg anymore names until you sort this lot out, and do us a favour and add a few more paragraphs into your posts!

 

[Doxy]

They were all fresh regs, I spent about $2000, I have made about $1250 back so far.

So you warn newbies because your just down 750$ in a business where the best way to learn is to fail a bit first then succeed.

To succeed you have to fail orelse you don't know what success is and you will never achieve it. People ask why and the reason is because you don't learn in any better way than after doing something wrong.

If you ask me I think its great you went nuts and made all theese "errors", it will only strengthen you and make you a better domainer in the future.

 

[Zutroy]

Oh I agree making these kind of mistakes is all part of the process, all part of the learning curve, actually things have not turned out quite as bad I as thought they were looking when I first started this thread, I have managed to sell quite a few and there’s still quite a while to go before the rest come up for renewal so hopefully I will sell a few more before then, that said it has still been a fair bit of work for what is still at this stage a loss and when I look at some of the crap I regged I absolutely cringe, I still don’t claim to know that much but I don’t think I would make now some of the mistakes I made then, so no maybe it’s not as disastrous as I first thought, but I still think there’s some good lessons there for those starting out. If I was to do it again I certainly would try to learn more about the market before I started, although like you say a fair amount of it will always need to be learnt on the job.

I think I mentioned the biggest surprise I got was when somebody bought couplecostumes.net on afternic for $599, did I get lucky there or what? He must have really wanted it. I have probably sold better names than that for $19, to other domainers that is, which is something else I have learnt, the huge difference in what an end user who really wants the name will pay compared to a fellow domianer, a domainer will pay you about a tenth of the price, although most of the names on that list I have been happy to sell for $19, at the end of the day it still turns what was a loss into a profit, it does make me laugh though when you post a name for $19 which isn’t bad for the price and people start busting your chops about backlinks or pr, lol we are a tight old bunch.

Anyway I just thought I would update you a bit been as one or two more people have responded to this thread. Thanks again to everyone who has advised, I really have appreciated it.

Take care

 

[Zutroy]

A perfect example of this is GogglesGlasses.com ... what exactly where you thinking when you decided not to grace delete? :p

The crazy thing is I just sold this in the namecheap market place for $16. So while I totally agree that it wasn’t a very good name to register it can be surprising just what happens sometimes. I bet there will be much better names than this that I can’t sell and after the 12 months just let expire, it’s a funny old world.

 

[Entrepreneur888]

Can it be developed?

Ok so extension is extremely important, although I already knew this perhaps I wasn’t giving it as much weight as it perhaps deserves, I love the analogy of the keywords been like the house and the extension been like the area, so it has to be a pretty dam good .net to have any considerable value.

So in order to hone your perspective further, is it possible to approximate maybe even in terms of percentages what kind of weight each factor carries, does the 2900 exact searches x $18.36 cpc for a name like mortgagewithbadcredit.net carry enough weight for the name to be worth at least something due to that particular factor alone?

Thanks for all your advice it is truly invaluable.

It is important to always think about how easy or hard it will be too rank the name that you have. Ranking anything with the words mortgage, credit, insurance etc will always be difficult and take a lot of work to keep it in the Serps. Most of the time words with high cpc are extremely competitive and ranking will be difficult.

Using tools like adwords (and others) is invaluable, personally I like to look for domains that I know that I could develop. This way I know that they will bring me an income. This means looking first to see how many searches the term gets (with adwords always make sure you have it set to "exact") the more searches for the exact term the better, less than 1000 I would think twice about unless there was mitigating factors. Also a cpc of a least a dollar shows that there is advertising (usually) for this term. Another tool you can use is spyfu, this is a great way to see how many people are advertising for a particular name or term.

Keep in mind that these tools are not always correct by a long shot but they give you a general idea of the demand for the term.

There is no magic formula for weighing in the value of different domains, it is a mixture of many different things, IMHO it is something that you get over time. With lots of practice and many reg's. For myself I always just ask myself "Can it be developed?" before I commit to buying.

 

[theSun]

I have a disorder that my eyes go blurry if I read too many words in one page. Please summarize your story.

 

[Zutroy]

Well basically I relied on things like estibot and the sales sedo splashes over their home page (a lot of them weren’t that different to what estibot was saying) to judge the market and bought quite a few names that I probably shouldn’t have, that said I have sold a few so things aren’t turning out quite as bad as perhaps I first thought, although I still have not made a profit yet and so far it definitely has not been worth the work, that said the lessons you learn as you go along are pretty valuable and it is an apprenticeship every domainer has to do, although not necessarily in exactly the same way hence my warning, if you are an experienced domainer there may not be much point in reading my full story, but there may be points in this thread that are helpful to newbies.

Recently I have been selling quite a few names through the namecheap market place of all places, not for big bucks just $20 a pop type thing, but still at least it turns what could be a loss into a profit.

Take care all