Domain Magnate

Over the last 4 years I’ve been using freelancers, a lot. Hundreds of different projects with at least a few hundred different programmers, designers, writers, data entry guys etc.

It didn’t always go well - in fact the first few times I was charged large sums for not working scripts or crappy looking designs. But I’ve learned from my mistakes and now finding good, reliable and affordable programmers, designers, content writers and data entry people is pretty easy for me.I use scriptlance.com for most of my new projects, be it writing, seo, or development. Like all other freelancing sites scriptlance is full of time wasters and people looking for quick money without work. However if you stick to the guidelines below you’ll be able to avoid them easily and find the best people for you work.

Here is my fail proof method to getting any programming/design/writing/data entry work done:

1. Register an account at scriptlance.com
2. Post a new project with a reasonably detailed description and be sure to use the prepaid option to show you’re serious. Make bids open and viewable to let the bidders compete amongst themselves. No need to enter budget unless you have a strict range in mind. Also note that you won’t be able to delete the project details later, so if you want to share some sensitive data in the description you can either upload a file - files are deleted after the project is closed - or send it through the message board privately.
3. Give it at least 1-3 days to accumulate enough offers.
4. Check the members with the best reviews. Simply ignore people who have average rating below 9-9.5 out of 10, or if they are very new and have less than 5 reviews - you don’t want that kind of service.   Pay most attention to those members who have perfect 10/10 feedback with over 10 reviews or at least average 9.8. Also pay closer attention to the feedback comments, freelancers with more comments implying that the webmaster would hire them again usually provide the best quality work and service.
5. Pick some of bidders with top reviews, reply to them for more details. You can request examples of their previous similar work, a quick demo (if it doesn’t take more than ~15 min to make they’ll usually do it with no commitment from you), or more details on how they plan to complete the project.
6. Discuss the details through pmb with at least 2-3 bidders you’ve picked and once you’re clear on all the details and got the best price quote - pick your winner. Do not, under any circumstances, agree on paying part of the money upfront. Use scriptlance escrow to place the whole amount, or 50% of it in escrow and it will only be released when you’re satisfied with the project.
7. Be sure to agree on all details before choosing a winner - requesting additional features afterwards might be too late.

To sum it up:  pick freelancers with best reviews, who did related projects and discuss all details before closing. Good luck!

I’m currently subscribed to 5 or 6 domaining newsletters and 4 of them send the emails [almost] periodically. They all go automatically to a special folder in my mailbox, called “newsletters”. Currently it has over 400 emails, accumulated in over a year.

While there is usually nothing interesting to buy for resellers, or domain flippers - if you’re looking for a good name for development, or investment it could be a good opportunity. Anyone can usually submit their domains to be published in the newsletter for a 10% fee in case of a sale an a 1-2 week exclusivity promise. If the domain doesn’t sell you pay nothing as a seller. The prices are almost always higher than what a domain would sell on the forums, or auctions, however sometimes bargains can slip through.

DomainsNewsletter.com by Kevin from BigTicketDomains.com wins the award for best prices and quality. There are names in varying price and quality ranges and with prices starting at only $50 even small time, beginning web developers can find good names to purchase. Even if you plan to find good names to try to resell to end users you may find them here. There are also frequent top quality generic domains for 5, and even 7 figures.
Kevin sent out 18 emails since I joined 4 months ago, or an average of about one email per week. However it’s not quite a weekly newsletter since there were 9 emails in March, none in February and only one in January this year.

DomainsForMedia.com newsletter by Eric Rice from DnCartoons.com is a close match by quality vs price as there are many good quality generics present for $xxx-$x,xxx ranges. The emails usually include larger lists of domains and note that offers will also be considered.
I’ve received 75 emails since joining in July 9, 2008, which is an average of about two emails per week.

The other two popular newsletters are by Evan Horowitz from HuntingMoon.com and Rock Latona from RickLatona.com.
Huntingmoon’s newsletter is notable because it lists the domains sold through the newsletter, along with prices, every month and also the pending delete domains, some with a drop catch service where to bid on them, such as SnapNames, or NameJet. Both these features are quite useful since it’s always interesting to see which domains actually sell and you have an opportunity to review some of the top expiring domains and pick some to bid on for free. The domains prices are usually in high $xxx to mid $x,xxx and vary significantly in quality, however resellers aren’t like to find bargains here, but end users can pick good names for development.
I’ve received 87 emails from Ivan since subscribing on October 11, 2008, which is an average of about an email every two days.

Rick Latona’s newsletter comes last in this review, but no the least. On the contrary it’s like the most popular one and has the highest number of subscribers. This newsletter usually includes a small section of text with Rick’s comments on latest event and links to his latest posts. The domains come in different forms, shapes and ranges. Lately also including names in other languages and tlds. Namely Spanish word domains which are usually priced at low-mid $xxx. Generally the quality varies, but there are frequently fairly priced domains almost in every email. This newsletter is supposed daily, however there are frequent brakes, probably because of Rick’s traveling. I’ve received 190 emails in little less than a year, making it about 4 emails per week on average.

And to add in conclusion: if you’re a domainer newsletters are a good place to try to sell your domains quickly, however it’s usually not the place to search for bargains.

About a year ago things were quite different and domainers were encouraged to invest by ever rising prices on both short domains and generics and recent buyouts (such as LLLL.com and premium letter LLLL.net’s) which proven to be quite worthwhile. Minimum prices for LLLL.com’s reached $65 during peak times and there was a healthy supply of buyers. So back in those times it made sense to buy lots of NNNNN.com’s as well and hold them because prices would rise eventually. Which is what many domainers did buying up to 1k of them each. I had 875 of them at a total cost of around $6k - several other investors purchased more than 1000 of them and now realize the mistake and decide not to renew most. read more »

Similar to Anything.com, Reinvent.com own a top generic portfolio:

Domain Names We have thousands of domain names, each representing virtual real estate that can be developed into premium online businesses. The powerful nature of targeted visitors and premium branding of generic keyword domains can give rise to a perfect storm of rapid brand recognition and visitors to an online presence. Below are a sampling of our virtual real estate portfolio that will be leveraged to branded businesses.

Reinvent was founded in 2000 by Dr. Kevin Ham.

The rapid expansion and unparalleled technologies of Reinvent – and Internet entrepreneur Kevin Ham himself, have not gone unnoticed. In 2007, Kevin was voted “Domainer of the Year” by his industry peers. He was also featured as the cover story in the June 2007 edition of Business 2.0 magazine. This year, Kevin was the recipient of the Industry Achievement Award at the DomainFest 2008 Conference, an annual gathering of the key players in the Internet industry space where Reinvent focus. read more »

Forbes has an interesting story about us!

One of the people mentioned is Steve McDonald, or karter9977 from dnforum. According to the story he managed to acquire qsd.com for $620! It was later for sale here

The article is discussed in dnf as well, domainer read more »

How do I make money domaining?

Well by most part it comes to:

1. know the market well
2. buy low
3. sell high

Domaining is a strange market. There are the end user prices and the market/reseller prices for any domain - both can vary a lot and there is a lot of money to be made on these differences.

However the risks are high, so you have to know the market very well. Being able to appraise a domain as close as possible for any specific marketplace is among the most valuable skills for a domainer. read more »

NyTimes has an interesting story on a guy who flipped a site for an awesome $173K, after buying it for $1800 and doing some changes. According to compete.com traffic estimates the site bird-cage.com only has 5-6k monthly visitors from US, so it’s strange that just 200 visits per day can provide such nice income. Besides the site only has 257 links in yahoo and doesn’t seem to have any decent google rankings for the top keywords.

So it really looks strange why would someone pay a healthy amount of money for a small site, without much traffic.

On the other hand it shows that development could bring nice profits and e-commerce sites are the money makers!

here is the article: read more »

Dnjournal has an interesting story today about the recent GeoDomain conference.

Highly recommended to all geo domain owners. Among the contest nomination for top developed city domains were such gems as:

Vegas.com
Richmond.com
Hawaii.com
Branson.com read more »

I’m finally getting more into developing my domains and at first I’m planning to build a few small adsense sites on the city names and generics.

Here is one I did this week BethelPark.com - Bethel Park is a city of 33.5k people in Pennsylvania.

This one is a small site with 10 content pages. I’m currently testing different templates to see what gives the best ctr, but I think this one should do good. The trick is to make ads blend in and fit the theme. read more »

An interesting series of posts by Rick here:

What makes a domain sellable?
What makes a domain sellable part 2
What makes a domain sellable, part 3
What makes a domain sellable, part 4

Some good tips there and I can agree with most. Domains with clear and obvious use are much easier to sell. They are however harder to find at good prices.

Short domains may have less possible development ideas, but they are a great collectible item which value will only go up.