Domain Magnate

I’ve worked with at least a few hundred freelance writers over the past few years, so I wanted to share some tips from the webmaster point of view on how to get more business and more clients for freelancers.  These are based solely on my own experiences.

• Always use Proper English.
  A fairly simple thing to do that many beginning writers don’t pay much attention to. If a writer I’m planning to hire uses stuff like “u, ur, coz, im”  it doesn’t matter how good his reviews are, or who recommended him, there is just no way he’s getting the job. Even if it was through an  IM conversation. I wouldn’t want any of that in my articles and I definitely expect a writer to be professional enough to use perfect English in his messages.
• Adhere to Timelines
  It’s widely known that freelancer projects are rarely completed on time, so if you want to differentiate yourself from the other writers be reliable! if you say you’ll deliver within a week, but complete the work in 3 weeks instead we won’t be working again. Plan ahead, if you know it’ll take you 3 weeks to complete say so upfront. Delivering on time or before is a great way to make sure you’ll get more projects.
• Quality, not Quantity
  It’s a very competitive market! Probably hundreds of thousands of English writers around from all over the world. But while others are lowering their prices to get more clients do the opposite – raise yours and improve the quality. Market yourself to the higher end clients who pay more per article and deliver higher quality content for it.
• Know Your Niches
  Don’t write about everything under the sun, pick certain niches, areas to focus on. Study them, publish articles in popular publications on them and be an expert. Nothing gives you more credibility in the eyes of the client than having your  articles published in large publications. Doesn’t have to the NY Times though, a wikipedia page, or a big article in any established site is no less credible to convince a client.
• Give the Clients What They Want
  More professional writers always ask for more info on what the client expects. Does the review need to be positive, balanced, recommending? Should the style be more personal or general and heavy on facts? Should be there be sub headings?
• Always Spell check
  Always go through the article after it’s complete to fix any grammar mistakes and strive to have perfect grammar in all your writing. Don’t deliver half done work.
• Research
  Make sure you know what you’re writing about, do your research, cross reference several sources, get your information from a credible source. Don’t take up heavy articles on complicated niches you don’t know much about unless you plan to spend the time to research it.
• Get Published!
  Most writers, even the more experienced and professional ones never seem to know where their articles are. A potential client will always want to see your work and it looks much better and more credible if it’s published on a popular site on the topic, than if you just copy paste the article. Anyone can set up ezinearticles profile and add a few articles – get your articles published on more credible sources, like Associated Content, Helium, eHow, Wikipedia etc.
• Have a Portfolio to Show
  Set up a simple portfolio site. Google your previous articles, or get the links from the clients to add to your portfolio. Most clients wouldn’t mind and will even appreciate a link to their page from your portfolio site. And this would be a great testimony to your professionalism for all future clients, seeing your articles live on popular sites in the niche.

Got more tips? Post them below in the comments.

I subscribe to all major domain newsletters, have been receiving them for a few years now. I even have a special folder in my email account for that and set up filters to skip inbox and send them all there, so I can store them and review later. And lately I’ve been doing just that – reviewing all the recent messages, hoping to find some bargains, or at least some decent domains at somewhat fair prices. With no luck at all, no surprise there however.

Domain newsletters aren’t for domainers! In fact I doubt domainers even buy domains through newsletters at all. For high quality, generic domains prices are usually through the roof, higher than on dnforum and higher than on auctions. For average, or mid quality domains prices are also usually in the end user levels, much higher than what any domain reseller would consider paying. Only affordable domains are.. well, the kind of domains I wouldn’t take for free.

Sure you can find some bargains or decent deals if you spend a lot of time looking through the emails, and in fact I even bought a couple domains, but the vast majority of domains in newsletters are priced for end users, which is really strange – end users don’t subscribe to domain newsletters! They usually email you when they want your domain, or look it up on sedo and make you an offer.

Newsletters must have terrible selling rates, much lower than auctions and other venues, its not uncommon to receive the same names in the email over and over again, with ever falling prices. In fact I’ve submitted some of my domains to newsletters on many occasions – those were good domains and I priced them fairly, but nothing ever sold. Newsletter owners would tell you they have extremely high selling rates to get you to subscribe and send them good names to sell. Obviously there is no way to check that, but one thing is certain – newsletters are extremely profitable for those who run them: not much is needed there, just send a newsletter with a bunch of domains and prices you’re given by domain owners every few days – and if a domain sells you get 10%. 10% is the norm in the industry for brokering: investigating, searching for all potential buyers, end users, finding an actual buyer, negotiating a price, closing the deal; newsletter owners get the same % for just sending one email.. Some domain newsletter owners only list their own names, while others only broker domains submitted to them. But everyone would usually accept good domains to broker to their subscribers and why wouldn’t they? It’s easy money if it sells.

Still feel like subscribing to some newsletters? Here are the most popular ones:

• TobyClements.com – formerly Rick Latona’s newsletter which was hugely popular and sold tons of domains weekly. Recently changed it’s format and relaunched under a different name by Toby Clements. Some of the highest quality domains, one the recent emails featured Cars.net! 18 emails received in the last 30 days, so that’s about 4 emails per week.
• DomainsNewsletter.com – managed by Kevin from bigticketdomains.com. It’s a mix of different domains, even some sites. Most are well overpriced, however there are also some decent names at somewhat fair prices. received 26 emails in the last 2 months – average of 3 emails per week. Also on that matter – there was a big discussion about Kevin Leto on dnforum, with some complaints from people who did business with him. Not quite sure what it’s all about or how it got resolved, but it seems serious if it spanned over 16 pages. I usually avoid long heated threads as they lack substance.
• DomainsForMedia.com and DnCartoons.com – managed by Eric Rice, opposite to other newsletters it frequently features domains asking for offers. Recently it’s not very often and promoting the domain madness auctions. Features many high quality domains and some at decent prices. Only 1 email this month so far, but 4 emails in April and 10 emails in February this year.
• Domainate.com by Sharon Hayes and Steve Jones. Offering many domains at $127, $99 and sometimes even $60. Not the top quality names as in the other newsletters, but many good keyword combinations. I purchased a couple great domains from here before, but even though I buy a lot of keyword domains on the forums, I wasn’t able to find anything else suitable here lately. I have a feeling the quality has gone down, or perhaps it’s only because of the change in adword search numbers a few month ago when google moved to the new keyword tool. You can see some of their domains here. It’s very convenient that they include the cpc and search count values, as well as age, I wish all domain sellers did this! 4 emails in the last 30 days. Emails aren’t on a regular patterns, but usually every week or two.
• HuntingMoon.com by Evan Horowitz is another domain newsletter, but it’s somewhat inactive lately. In fact the last one was 2.5 months ago and there were only two emails in 2010, but in 2009 the newsletters was very active with several emails per week and featuring many top quality names.
• DifferentInvestments.com by Justin Godfrey, known in dnforum as Rockefeller. The newsletter used to be active and had many good names for sale in 2009 and 2010 and but I haven’t received any emails from Justin for over half a year now.
• Dnjournal Newsletter is a newsletter by the respected DNJournal publication by Ron Jackson. There are no domains for sale here, just updates on the recent articles, editorials and sales. Highly recommended as it features top quality interviews and domaining news.

Other newsletters which I haven’t yet subscribed to, but they seem rather popular as well:  MediaOptions.com, LuxuryNames.com, DomainAgency.com, MorganLinton.com

If you want more information on domain newsletters there are also some other posts (possibly outdated) on domain newsletters at Elliot’s, Nametalent and DomainNameNews.

That’s about it. I’m sure there are others, if you have one with over 500 subscribers let me know I’ll list it too.

Over the last year or so I’ve been experimenting with xrumer, scrapebox and various other greyish (I don’t know if anything can be called black any more these days..) seo methods.
While there was quite a bit of positive effect at first, I’m now fairly convinced that these massive amounts of low quality links can do more harm than good in the long term. Sure you might say “ha, big surprise”, but you know nothing in SEO until you test it on your own. Can’t trust any “experts”: those who talk – don’t know, and those who know – don’t talk.

For those unfamiliar with what I’m talking about here: xrumer is a popular piece of software that creates forum profiles and posts and can also post to pretty much any comment form and pass by most conventional verification and spam prevention systems. It’s so powerful that it can create millions of profiles with your links in them.

Since it’s expensive and running it on your own is quite resource intensive and requires quite a bit of calibration and lots of time collecting and cleaning the databases, there are many services that do that for you. Like dripfeedblasts.com – which creates 1k profiles per day (or 30k profiles per month) for $99 per month – this is also the service I used for my testing. It’s biggest benefit is that it’s very easy to use – you just add your signature and homepage links and schedule them to run on a day to day basis.

Scrapebox is a much cheaper and easier to use software that mostly sends comments to blogs and can also handle huge volumes of millions of comments. It also has some great tools to check serps quickly, find out various information about your competition and to find some high PR on topic blog posts – which might in fact be the most useful feature. If you do it right – mostly manually and on topic – blog comments can still be useful, but in massive amount and low quality these links do little good.

Out of about 35 of my new sites I tried these methods on many have received various penalties and dropped out serps, others retained good positions, but mainly due to having other different links of better quality. Some still dance around jumping up and down in the rankings twice a week..

Overall if done in moderation these links too can have a positive effect on the serps, but the efforts outway the benefits and same or better results can be achieved with other low cost and more mainstream methods.

Many people still report different results and argue that these links can form a great seo weight basis for your link feeder sites or for all your hosted content and web 2.0 pages, however I have my doubts about how much “link juice” is actually acquired and pass on there. What are your results?

I’m glad to see Bido is back up and running and would like to wish them good luck! I had some good sales there and think it’s great to see another marketplace trying to take on sedo for real.

However, they really need to do something to increase the quality of domains there and attract some premium domains. Strangely enough there are some decent  buyers there, but no real sellers with quality domains at fair prices. An unusual gap for the industry that should get filled naturally.

A few good LLLL.com names are coming up for auctions there flob.com and  ebog.com, but the reserves seem rather high so I don’t expect them to sell.

I think bido could benefit from introducing hidden reserves and reserve auctions that start from the min price like on sedo, not the reserve price.

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.

Google recently added new case studies or “success stories” as they call them. These are mostly established sites that use adsense as either the main or the secondary source of revenue. They all look good, have nice and neat designs and lots of unique high quality content. Some are major news, entertainment  or informational portal, others are smaller niche sites.

The funny part is most success stories start with a tale of how someone decided to make a site to provide some useful information for students/patients/stock traders and one day decided to try adsense on it – put a small ad unit at the bottom of the pages and was forever surprised by the high earnings:

Furniture.ie was founded in 2003 by Richard Moyles to make the process of finding products for the home easier, with the goal of saving people time and money by allowing them to search many stores from a single location..

Finfacts.ie is a business and finance portal launched in 1997 with the aim of providing content related to business and personal finance to the Irish market..

Livecharts.co.uk is a stock market data portal covering global markets. The site started out as a hobby site in 2005 and – depending on market conditions – now gets up to 3 million page impressions per month..

Spartacus Educational started life in a small office at the home of its founder and director John Simkin in 1997. Simkin left a job as a textbook publisher to set up his own company, providing academic publications online.

I guess that is the image they want to present to the world (that is the regular people are not into online marketing) and not the one of a growing number of people researching keywords, buying targeted domains, cheap content and links and trying to maximize their adsense revenue by placing tons of ads everywhere. Adsense turned content into online commodity and made massive amounts of low quality free content available online and  profitable like never before. Not that I’d complain of course, on the contrary. However duplicity and hypocrisy rules as always.

I blogged about some of my successful site and domain purchases and sales before, but this time I’m going to tell you about a rather different story. As is known failures are a part of any business and if you don’t fail you simply don’t try hard enough. However I try to see failures as merely temporary setbacks and don’t let them stop me, but rather try to learn the lessons and make the necessary  adjustments to prevent them further along the way.

One of the first domains I purchased with the sole purpose of reselling it for more about 4 years ago was a 2 word .com generic. It had many good results in Google, quite a few advertisers in adwords. Was a solid 2 word generic and registered since 1998. Many potential end users and even the previous owner was an end user, however I got lucky (or so I thought..) as he didn’t have any further need in the domain since he was retiring from his business.

I was researching keywords manually and emailing .com domain owners to see if they might sell the domain cheap, a long and tedious job, but it is how most domainers who didn’t have the privilege of registering the top generics back in the late 90′s make their money. So I emailed this domain owner and he replied that he’s retiring from his business and willing to part with the domain. I offered $5k and he rather quickly accepted. The deal went through escrow and a few days later I was a proud owner of a 2 word .com generic domain.

There was a lot of excitement at first. I collected a large list of potential end users from Google results and ads and similar domains in other tlds and emailed them all. Several replied asking for price, but none seemed to be much interested after receiving my overly optimistic price tag of around $30k. I also tried selling it on the forums and auctions with no results. Then I decided to put it on ebay. The auction ended at only around $500. That’s when it hit me – I seriously overpaid for the domain!

So what went wrong? The domain was indeed a 2 word .com registered since 1998 and with a decent amount of google results, but it had a negative connotation – which is a very bad sign for a domain. There weren’t many searches on the main keyword and all the end users couldn’t afford to pay much for it. The advertisers on google were either low budget local companies, or even non profit organizations. I was totally wrong in my initial evaluation.

I tried to sell the domain several times after that but never got any significant offers to at least get back half the costs I paid for it. I still own the domain and it serves as a good reminder to be careful and do more and extra research and all the proper due diligence when buying. It’s a constant reminder not to be overly excited about any new domain purchase  and keep a healthy dose of realism in my evaluations.

Do I still see it as a failure? Not at all, I’ve learned many lessons on this one and they have paid off many times over since I applied them to my other purchases. I did lose quite a bit of money on that first one – especially considering that I didn’t have much cash to invest in domains back when I was just starting with it – but it taught  me some invaluable lessons which has proven to be a good trade off! Don’t get discouraged from your mistakes, but rather absorb the lessons and move on!

“Premium” is the Most Misused and Abused Word by Domainers. Seriously, why would you call your domains premium if you’re selling them for $20 each? How can you call JNVY.COM a premium LLLL.com and moreover a quad premium one?

The truth is it’s really one of those useless words to insert in sales threads. Calling a domain premium won’t convince anyone and if the domain truly is premium then there is no point in underlining that fact. Any prospective buyer would know that already.

Actually for many domainers this word likely became associated with the opposite meaning, seeing someone claiming to sell “premium” domains they intuitively expect garbage, and usually rightfully so.

The only real and beneficial use of the word in regards to domain sales is when it actually means something, for example to note that an LLLL.com domain is quad premium, or triple premium.

On a different note I’ve recently noticed that askimet marked some of the legitimate comments as spam, unfortunately due to the large amounts of I can’t go through them all, so if you had any of your comments unapproved that’s mostly the reason. If you made comments earlier on the blog and they weren’t approved post here so I can approve you and next time your comments will be posted automatically.

I was trying to register DomainMagnate ‘at’ gmail.com today and found out it’s already registered and belongs to someone else. No one else that I know of uses that username, so the only reason they might have to grab it is probably to try to sell it to me?! I’m just hoping they are not planning to use it for anything bad that might later be attributed to me..

If you have a valuable brand – get the gmail address for it before someone else does. This can also be expanded to other Social bookmarking and networking sites and in fact many companies offer this service: registering your brand name across 100+ social  sites and creating profiles, which can also be useful for SEO if all the profiles link back to your site. But lets admit it having a gmail address for your brand is much more important than some digg or twitter account.

Gmail addresses can be somewhat valuable too, just like domains. However I’ve never seen any for sale, except on ebay and then they are not really “premium”, just long and lame and cheap too.

Another interesting thought is do premium gmail addresses get “type in” traffic, that is some random email leads, for loans@gmail.com for example? How much would a loans company be willing to pay for such a domain?

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!