Domain Magnate

DomainMagnate.com presents an interview with Daniel, or tetrapak on NamePros and DNForum. Daniel is 23 and a full time domainer/web developer

- How long have you been into domaining and how did you get into it?
The story how i got into the domain industry is a bit funny, at least i can laugh now.. 4 years ago i’ve been helping a guy developing his Dubai related business website, and he promised a lot of things, like to be partners and such. I already had a website under developement with the first domain registered by myself, since then it is my biggest website with over 100k uniques per month, but that is another story. So this guy obviously haven’t paid for my work, but he introduced me the so called domain parking.. He sent me over an XLS file with his earnings of the last month. I was simply amazed when i saw that such domains as *Company*Properties.com (TM name..) can earn $8,000 / month purely by registering it and changing the nameservers. So with his help i figured i would register similar domains, as his top 10 domains were all earning 1k$+ / month, i thought i have nothing to lose. First i registered Properties*Company*.com/.net/.org.. and quickly parked them. Now i was officially R I C H. Then came the surprise… Day 1, no earnings.. Day 3 no earnings.. Day 6 ONE unique visitor! Now, i contacted the guy about my “problem”, and i told him that i believe he has faked his stats.. He said his brother is the one dealing with the domains, so he has nothing to do with them, but he knows a way to get a 50k offer on a domain. Which was…: Sedo Featured Listing! Yes, you guess it right, i had another 40$ burned. No sale… Of course he was surprised, but he asked me a favor, to bid on his domain (regfee name..) on Tdnam for 8k, he said there would be people to overbid me anyway. Sure. This was the end and luckily i had no contact with him since then. The good thing is, i started to earn with Adsense, and everything i earned i have reinvested in domains that were suggested by the friendly guys at over Namepros. The first serious sale was of a regfee hyphenated name for 8k that i registered in my first year.

- How many domains do you own and what is your primary focus?
Xxx names, it changes every day. No dot mobis and no dot asias I mostly own .com’s, but i prefer any other tlds for developement. I had success with .info’s as well, they are my lovely cheap ones (except the renewals!). read more »

If you, like over 95% of other domainers, want to develop some of your domains with minimal effort and expenses into a site that can bring revenue, here is one of the best and easiest methods: Set up a bidding directory.

What is a bidding directory?

It’s a regular web directory based on the auction system. Webmasters can submit their links and the links with highest bid will appear on the frontpage of the directory. For example here is one of mine: Casino Bidding Directory, as you may see the highest bid is $100, and the lowest bid on the main page is $60. So a bid of at least $61 is required to be listed on the front page. Minimum bid to submit a site to the directory is set to $9, and you can see that most bids listed in categories are about that amount, for example in advertising

The main advantage of a bidding directory is that its completely automated. read more »

Our programmers just finished this, check out the new small site on Mind Reading

Nothing big yet, just a flash game, but I have bigger development plans for it so this is just a placeholder.

Eventually I’d like to build it into a Mind Reading related community, with discussion boards, lots of free material and selling ebooks and other stuff. Hopefully I can get to it soon.

Any suggestions and comments are welcome.

Nothing says online chess better than Chess.com!

This is a perfect example of a truly premium domain and how it should be used.
I remember seeing chess.com for years having a one page site with some affiliate links to chess software and sets. As a true chess fan I’ve inquired on the price a couple years ago and it seemed high to me back then. Now I don’t remember what number they quoted, but seeing how chess.com got developed it sure was a fair amount to pay. Chess.com now has an alexa ranking of 12K indicating a very high traffic and most likely the biggest chess site online. read more »