Domain Magnate

People who are new to domaining ask me from time to time how can they get started, how to make money, how to flip, what to buy etc. It’s not a question one can give a precise answer on, but my suggestion is this: buy for quick flipping when the market is high and buy to hold when the market is down.

Back in 2006-2008 the domaining space was full of incredible flipping opportunities in generic domains, short domains, .com and many other tlds – the market was on the rise and there was always healthy demand for good domains. Those who knew the market prices well and had some cash to invest were able to profit rather easily from this. However in 2009-2010 the domaining market direction changed and quick flips were harder to come by. There are short domains to be found at considerably cheaper prices than just a few years before, but selling them higher to get a decent profit margin may prove rather difficult as well.

Educated and well planned and researched flips will still work, but now is the time to buy cheap for long term investment or development, or to try to resell the domains higher to end users. Will the market go up next year or the year after that? Maybe.. maybe not, however buying domains just because they are cheap and then hoping for the market to go up to sell higher is not the best strategy any more. It worked well in the late 90′s and 2000′s, but in this new decade as the Internet penetration growth is slowing down domain prices won’t keep rising nearly as fast as before.

A much better strategy in my opinion would be to either buy good quality cheap domains that can fit well for end users to build up a portfolio and promote it to higher end customers, or to buy names for development projects – which is mainly what I do now. But development is not for everyone, creating a profitable site from scratch can be quite a challenge for someone who does this for the first time and is only used to buying and selling names. And outsourcing your domains for cheap adsense minisites will just turn your parking revenues into development cost losses, which you may not even make back in years of ad cents revenue. Google doesn’t like autoupdated blogs and it doesn’t favor cheap mini sites much, unless you build them in good, low competition niches with high cpc and do some serious link building to gain the serps.

So depending on which of the two options you choose your best strategy now would be:
1. Building an end user targeted portfolio carefully researching and picking cheap and fitting names
2. Developing domains into profitable sites one by one through researching niches, development methods and costs and especially – finding better monetization methods.

Over the last couple weeks I’ve searching and testing various tools and software that help check and track ranks in Google mostly, but also in Yahoo and Bing. Anyone who does any SEO at all knows how important it is to check your serps from time to time to be able to see the results of your seo campaigns and link building methods. Most people naturally do it manually by going to google and checking the main terms to see if their site ranks there. Which is a fine way to do it, but can get rather time consuming if you have many keywords, many sites and most of them aren’t on the first page.

So that’s what the rank tracking software is for. And there is plenty of different types of software to do just this task, most popular are likely Market Samurai and Rank Tracker by Link Assistant. Besides the option to check your serps quickly Market Samurai also help with SEO competition analysis, finds more keywords and list and many more features. They also offer a free trial for 40 days during which you can buy it for $97 – compared to the regular price of $147. It’s a decent piece of software, but has lots of unrequired features if all you want is check your serps. Link Assistant Rank Tracker is a pretty good piece of SEO equipment that also comes with a free trial and costs a similar amount $99.75. It’s relatively easy to use and provides all the needed data.

However paying nearly $100 for something simple to check your serps might seem a bit excessive. A cheaper and good alternative is SheerSEO – they provide a 90 days free trial and their paid plans start from only $7 per month, allowing to track 20 keywords. However the main problem with it is that it’s only good for one site and if you want to track more you’ll need to buy more licenses. Besides the tracking serps they also claim to provide some monthly backlinks and directory submissions.

And finally there exist quite a few free options, both web based – such as SEOSerp and Ventio SE and Desktop software like the Free Monitor For Google – the easiest and best option for tracking serps. Free, unlimited sites, keywords and queries and very easy to use. This is a perfect option for beginners as it’s very straightforward and comfortable. Being able to also check yahoo and bing rankings would be nice, but the truth is who really cares? Officially Google has about 70% of the market, but from my own stats for my sites which rank #1 in google, yahoo and bing – Google brings over 10 times more traffic when the rest and when competing for highly targeted, but low volume keywords all the other search engines only bring negligible traffic.

I’ve been using the free monitor for a few days and despite it being free it seems to be doing its job. No need to get obsessed over your backlinks, rankings and kinds of made up metrics and various sites offer, or check your competitors in depth. All any real SEO needs from a keyword tracking tool is just to be able to see if the recent link building efforts helped improve the serps. If yes do more of what worked, if not – try other methods.

My previous site flip post generated a lot of interest and over 1500 views, so I decided to post about another one. While in the previous post I didn’t post any details that can help identify the site in respect to the buyer and since the transaction was relatively recent – about a year ago, this time I’ll post all the details. However in this case the deal was on a considerably lower amount, but the ROI much higher and my acquisition price was affordable to any newbie domainer/webmaster.

It all started 4 years ago, in Oct 2006, when I spotted an interesting site for sale on DP, probably in this thread, the site was ‘Blackjack Fiesta dot net’ ( in order to avoid the search engines picking up the name of the domain and later showing this post in the top results for it I added spaces in the urls for all the domains involved) and due to the magic of archive.org we can see exactly how it looked back then in here. It was a pretty small site with 5 pages of content explaining the rules of blackjack and listing some latest news and books for sale on the topic, also a unique flash game allowing visitors to try their lack in blackjack without losing their money and there were also some affiliate links to online casinos so the visitors can lose some money and make the site owner richer (yes, in case you didn’t know that’s how online casinos work – an affiliate only makes money when the player he referred is losing money, except poker – in that case the affiliate makes a small percent on each hand the player plays, regardless of the result). The site had a really nice professionally looking layout, but that flash game was the main reason I bought it then, ironically the company that purchased the site from me later decided to remove the flash game, but lets not jump forward yet…

I think I purchased the site for about $100. An interesting fact is that if you check carefully the other sites that were offered for sale on that thread and the other one by the seller they are all offline or virtually dead now. No wonder as that is what happens with most small sites out there. So why did I buy the site back then and how did I find it? The site looked good, but had no revenue and no significant traffic. I don’t remember exactly, it’s been a while, but I probably had some cash laying around in paypal and wanted to buy a nice site for my collection so I had been checking out the sites offered for sale on DP routinely.

After the purchase I invested a bit in linkbuilding and bought some directory submissions for the site and of course changed the ads to mine, but as you can see from an archive.org listing a year later, the site still looked almost exactly the same. I think I spent no more than $50 on the linkbuilding and no more than a couple hours in total on the site. Obviously that wasn’t enough to get any significant traffic in one of the most competitive niches on the Internet, so the site never really made much revenue. And while I still liked having it I started to think it wasn’t such a great deal after all – up to $150 spent, almost none earned. So it just kept sitting there in my hosting account with all the others waiting its turn to shine…

The second part of the story takes place in April 2008, a year and a half after purchasing the site when I received this email:

Hi there ,
If you are interested in selling ‘blackjack fiesta dot net’, please respond to this mail so that we can discuss the possible purchase of the site.
I look forward to your reply and chatting to you about the sale should this be of interest to you.
Thanks and Regards,

It was sent from an email address on ‘betting corp dot com’, so I quickly realized that this is a serious buyer – a pretty big online gambling company with millions in revenue. I replied with the regular line: “I might consider selling blackjack fiesta dot net, let me know your best offer.”I haven’t heard from them for a few days after this and started to think they somehow lost interest, but I was patient and didn’t email again. Big companies are frequently slow, gotta give them time to think and act and not rush things too much like domainers frequently do.

Then, 3 days after my last email I received a reply with an offer of $2500. I tried to push it a bit further, countering it with a slightly higher amount, but unexpectedly (for me at the time) they refused, however noted that if I wish to proceed with their original offer of $2500 they are ready to do so. Apparently they took the “let me know your best offer” line literally.

After a few more days of email negotiations I offered to use escrow.com, but they refused because of the “high costs” of transactions there, which quite surprised me, however they offered to send me a contract and upon me signing it they would wire the money, which is how it was done eventually. I signed and faxed their contract papers and they sent the wire transfer payment for $2500. They were very polite and nice to deal with, waited patiently a couple days till I could confirm the receipt of the wire (the payment came from a bank in Germany) and then I transferred them the domain and site.

Another surprising fact for me was that they wanted the domain transferred from GoDaddy to Network Solutions. While I did transfer many domains out of NetSol over the years this has been so far the only time when I had to transfer a domain in to NetSol. Apparently they had problems when transferring domains within GoDaddy due to some unexpected errors, however I offered to try to push the domain in GoDaddy to their account and it worked, so the NetSol transfer request was canceled. They then received the files and shortly after that they rebuilt the site, added lots of new content and backlinks. I’m pretty sure they’ve made their purchasing costs back multiple times over the years. Due to their existing network of gambling sites and large link buying and SEO campaign budget and with gambling affiliate programs paying as high as $500+ per depositing customer (large companies involved in online gambling promotion get much better deals from the online casinos when the regular small scale affiliates) the site probably makes more than the amount they paid me for it per month.

—

After reading this many of you will probably say it’s just luck. Sure it can be, but I don’t believe in luck. I never buy lottery tickets and can not understand why would people signup for monthly lottery subscription. The long term chances are always against them, so it’s like signing up for losing money every month and also a lot of useless anticipation and lost hopes.. If I didn’t sell the site back then I could have expanded and promoted it a bit by now so it could be earning some decent revenue. I saw something in that site that other buyers didn’t notice, some hidden potential and although I was unable to bring it to life in the 1.5 years I owned the site, that is the same potential the casino company saw in it and that’s why they bought it.

$2.5k is not a life changing amount of money by any means and hardly even significant enough to brag about, but I made this post detailed to show people how the flips actually take place and how I go about buying and selling sites. Although I don’t usually sell them proactively like domains, from time to time I’d get a decent offer and decide to sell a site.

I don’t plan for it and don’t even  consider the “site flipping” as part of business, the main business plan for me is buying and developing sites to increase cashflow and then reinvest that cashflow to acquire more profitable web assets and I believe that is a good long term strategy. However being able to sell some sites for high amounts (relative to the revenue) is always nice and as long as you focus on building and acquiring good quality sites and have no immediate need in selling them the buyers will come eventually and make you some good offers that you can not refuse.

Here is a story about one of my web adventures that might be  interesting to my readers. Along with domains I also buy/sell and maintain many websites, some of these are adsense sites with unique content, seo traffic and stable history. I purchased many of these over the years and almost all turned out to be great investments. However they are very hard to find. What you see nowdays for sale at the main marketplaces, such as flippa, DP and DNF is pure garbage: new sites, inflated and fake stats, purchased traffic, all sorts of fly by night ideas and projects that stop bringing revenue to unsuspecting buyers within a few weeks, as well as.. well things like this.

Quality sites at bargain prices can still be found, but the task would be quite time consuming due to the large volumes of websites for sale these days. This is also a task that can’t be easily outsourced. The buyers are so hungry for quality that real good established websites can sometimes sell for ridiculously high revenue multiples like 5-8 years, while the market average is around 1-2 years max.

Two years ago I spotted a site on one of the mentioned above marketplaces and within a few seconds I knew this is a quality site and one I need to buy. After a lot of checking, verifying stats and data and all the due diligence and a short negotiation I purchased the site for around $5k. The site was making around $400/month on adsense and it was a very old and well established site in a high competition heath related niche. The strange thing about it was that the adsense clicks were very high, averaging around $2 per click, which is very uncommon. But having seen stable revenue over the recent 6-12 months I was convinced that it’s a good deal.

I rearranged adsense ads for higher ctr, but even with my best efforts it was still only around 2%, and also added more content and backlinks to the site. At first the revenue jumped up to about $600-800 per month, but then dropped to just $200-300 per month. However the drop was mostly temporary due to the specific time of the year when that niche was less active and as I found it’s common with Google to see a short term drop in traffic at first when you start to promote a well established site that hasn’t been touched for a while.

I had big plans for the site, had it transferred to wordpress with a new custom template made for it in order to get considerably higher ctr and had more content prepared to put there. Then right in the middle of those plans, about a year ago, I got an email asking if I’d like to sell the site. It was sent from a gmail address so I didn’t pay much attention to it at first, thinking that  it’s most likely one of those spammers sending mass emails to purchase cheap domains/sites. So I replied with a regular message, along the lines of “we have no plans to sell, but will consider offers”.

Shortly after that a reply came in with a very respectable offer of $10k. I was very surprised at first, since the initial  inquiry didn’t look serious, so I started digging and found out that the buyer had a well established business in the niche. So he can likely earn much more from the site in business leads than I ever can from adsense. I could’ve accepted it right away and made a handsome profit on the site, but I decided not to, for two reasons: first I thought the buyer is very interested and could pay considerably more and second I liked the site and thought I could increase the revenue to over $1k per month so it wasn’t worth selling at that time.

I decided that I should try to get around $20k for it to sell. So I basically had a choice to either counter with a higher offer or accept his. I took the third option and simply rejected his offer. It was a bit of a risk, but I estimated that he had high interest in the site so he would likely offer more. As a wise man said once: “the biggest power in negotiation is the power to say no”.

The bet payed off and the negotiation continued, after a few more emails and after having reviewed the stats the buyer raised his offer to $15k and $16k, then we finally agreed on $17k and the deal went into escrow.com. The whole negotiation process took close to a month.

In the end it was a good deal for me: considering both the sale price and the revenue the site made during the 1 year I owned it and minus the link building, content and design expenses – my profit was around $16k. And I think it was an even better deal for the buyer. I’ve done quite a bit of link building prior to selling it and the results of those efforts started showing short time after the sale, so traffic was up and with his business an average lead could pay over $1k, so it shouldn’t have taken long to make that money back.

I did get a little lucky here, however just like with domains if you have good sites the buyers will come. But I even got luckier in the fact that prior to me buying the site it was offered for sale several times within a period of several weeks and no one was interested.. Usually you don’t need to be the first and quickest to grab the best deals, but rather know your market well to recognize a good deal when you see it.

Having to host dozens of different sites I have many shared hosting accounts, some VPS’s and a dedicated server.

One of these cheap shared accounts is with fatcow.com and recently I needed to add some redirects to “mask” the long and ugly affiliate urls. I usually do this with a 301 redirect through .htaccess. There are many ways and tools to do it, but this is the easiest. So when I was about to do this in the fatcow account I found out that there is no way to upload .htaccess files through ftp, or edit them through the control panel and the only way to set up the redirects is through their custom .htaccess editor tool. And apparently it can’t do redirects for inner pages on domains other than the main account domain. So after a few futile attempts I turned to their online chat for help.

After waiting about 5 min, a support guy (or more likely someone pretending to be a support guy at fatcow) joined the chat. So I explained my problem right away hoping to get a quick answer.. how naive.

First he asked my main account domain, then after receiving that info asked me to please wait 2-3 minutes while he’s checking something (?). Then he asked my secret question for verification. Then he asked to wait another 4-5 minutes to verify it. After that he asked what the problem was again. And every 5 minutes he kept asking me to wait 4-5 minutes while “he is checking for solution”.

Finally about 40-50 minutes into the whole ordeal, still with no answers or even hints to possible solutions to this problem, when I was ready to give up and “hang up on him” he finally told me that.. he can’t help me. Big surprise

Apparently there is no way in fatcow to setup up 301 htaccess redirects on subdomains or added domains in the account. What kind of hosting doesn’t have that option? Looks like I’ll have to move those sites back to good old hostgator, or find some other nice and simple method for affiliate urls redirection.

What have we learned today? Don’t be so  cheap and stop trying to save a couple dollars on hosting! It’s simply ridiculous  considering how important having a reliable hosting provider is, and is just not worth all the headache.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s not a bad idea trying to shop smart and checking the most cost effective hosting solutions (that is monthly price vs space, bandwidth, amount of domains etc), but in a highly competitive market like web hosting lower prices always come with setback – in this case a slow and inefficient support and lack of important features.

Some domainers seem to think that a logo can make or break a good site. I have news for you – it can not, unless this is a site selling logos, and even then it’s not that important.

Recently I was building some new sites and needed to get about 20 different logos done. I checked about 30 designers, looking quickly over their portfolios to see their quality. It may sound like a lot, but in fact it only takes me a few seconds to take a quick look at the designer’s portfolio to know if this is what I need or not. And after that initial glance a couple minutes maximum and I have a pretty good idea of what this designer can do.

So I received price suggestions and solicitations with portfolios and examples from these designers and picked one that was a bit more expensive than average, but the quality of his designs was truly great. All that took about an hour and around $150 (for the 20 logos). Some might consider it expensive, others would say it’s cheap, but this is the price you can get good quality logos for at various forums and freelancer sites. And I do mean good quality, highly professional which are not worse than those you can get by running a contest at 99designs.com – because in fact on 99designs.com these are the same people making your logos.

It’s true there are many people willing to pay $50 and $100 and even more for a logo, others arrange contests and ask for forum members to vote for their best choice. And I could understand when it’s a logo for a big business, a chain of sites, a company site, or  something like Bido.com (R.I.P.), but when you’re just building some mini site on a .info domain – who cares what logo you have?

What really makes a site profitable (assuming you are not just building the sites to be able to say that you’re developing your domains..) is a strategy for acquiring traffic (SEO for example, then you need decent content and lots of links) and monetization (adsense, affiliate sales, leads).  So stop fixating on your logos and go get some backlinks instead!

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!

Affilicon, Affiliate Marketing Conference & Exhibition in Israel, is taking place next week on Nov, 24-25. Around 1000 people are expected to visit the conference.

I’ll be there as well, so if you are attending drop me a message and we can meet up and chat, or just say hi.

And now you can do it on Sitepoint premium marketplace there is one for sale.

PR6 sites are seen for sale very rarely and PR7 even less than that. But here is a real PR9 site! With this SEO weight you can rank in google for pretty much anything with limited amount of content and work put into it.

The sales thread also reports some $4,5K monthly revenues, but you can probably get more by just selling a few links on it.

This little quote at the start of the sales thread reveals a bit about the buyer interest: read more »

BankRate Inc made a few surprising purchases lately, paying millions of dollars for small one man sites.

First was CreditCardGuide.com, a site that provides credit-card comparisons. According to compete.com it receives close to 200K monthly visitors from US. Still hard to imagine the site revenues being able to justify the $32 million pricetag the company paid a month ago. read more »