advice Track Your Costs!

[gericsb]

I still consider myself a beginner, but have been involved in domaining two times. Once about 8 or 9 years ago and have just recently got back in it.

I have received lots of good advice here. So I wanted to share some things I learned or wished I had done better.

1. Track your costs!!!

There is an endless array of names to register and I even got caught up this past Thanksgiving weekend with all the deals and coupons, registering a BUNCH of names. When it comes time to renew these at Full Price, its going to be expensive. I set a reminder about 2 weeks before each domain aito renews so I can turn off those that I want to let drop.

Each year you renew a domain goes into the COSTS column in my Excel spreadsheet.

2. Have Realistic Expectations

During my first foray into domaining, I was lucky to make 3 sales my first year. $1500 for a dot TV, $350 for a Dot-TV, $500 for a Dot com. This let me have a nice profit. And hold some names long term

3. Use Sales As Insight to Your Skills

All my sales were Keyword Domains. The 2 Dot TV sales were single keywords. The DotCom was a 2 keyword domain. I realized I had a knack for keyword domains and focused on them, mostly.

I will add more as I think of it!

Had all 3 set to much higher prices, but Auto Renewal days were coming around fast and I needed the funds

 

[WatchDogue]

Those are good points and insightful perspectives on your domain experiences.

Learning to keep my domain expectations reasonable and realistic - in particular buying and then pricing for sale - in my early domain days was my number one lesson learned.

Seems like you had 3 decent sales early on in your career!

 

[gericsb]

Yes, I was very lucky. I sold one here on NP I think. It was a long time ago. Lol

One from a Sedo Offer

And one from a Sedo Auction

Had about 40 domains back then, which was the most I ever held so having 3 sales allowed me to keep going. Renewals get expensive fast!

Having realistic expectations is very important. As you stated. Seeing all these 4 and 5 figure sales gets your blood pumping, but you also need some cashflow to hold those special names long enough to get that 5 figure offer