Domain Magnate

Despite the recession in US economy and a certain amount of uncertainty in the domaining market July 08 have been pretty good for me. I had around $50k in sales, with over 2/3 of it being profit. While most sales were private and the buyers preferred to keep them confidential, couple of the top sales are through public auctions so I can mention them here:

Dickinson.com $12K on Bido
Krom.com $5,5k through AfterNic
Harlot.com $5145 on Bido (I owned 50% of this one)

I rarely disclose my earnings and report sales, however I feel this is needed to encourage others to see the hidden opportunities in domaining. What I like most about the industry are the large gaps. Appraisals always range widely and so do auctions and sales, it’s not unusual to see domains being resold for 2x and more shortly after. read more »

Update: I’ve installed a plugin to send notices about new posts to my twitter, so you can follow my profile to get the latest posts instantly!

I’ve been hearing about it a lot lately, so finally joined myself as well.

It seems pretty basic.. a little similar to my old site post simple, so I don’t get how it became so popular.

Looks like some people use it to send updates about new posts on a blog, which sounds like a good idea. I should find some wp plugin for that.

So anyone else using twitter, what do you think about it?

Now that I’ve found the designers and content writers, after a bit of testing the mini site building is proceeding at full force. Most sites are just 7-8 pages, but I’m also doing a few that will have a substantial amount of content, some 20-50 pages, articles, videos, news, flash and other elements.

Here are a couple finished mini-sites: Go Oslo, about the Norway capital with a few short articles and MyNamibia.com - about the Republic of Namibia in Africa.

Next step is to add links from some other sites, directories and social bookmarking services to get them all indexed and well places in google. It’s also good to avoid the nofollow links as they don’t contribute much value in google and are used by most social bookmarking and news sites, like digg, propeller, wikipedia etc.

The Bethel Park site I’ve posted about earlier is getting 75-85 uniques per day, but while the adsense clicks are rather high, the ctr is not so good. Probably the ads are too “blended in”, so I might change that one.

What do you think about the designs and content?

Justin Godfrey, known as Rockefeller on dnf, recently posted about his sale of 92 LLL.com’s for $598K:

I just finished up a deal where I sold 92 LLL .coms for just about 600k, probably could’ve got more since it was only 6.5k each, but it’s nice to see people are spending freely again!

I suppose the LLL.com’s were of lower quality so this sounds like a good deal. It’s indeed good to see that there is healthy demand for the names in such quantities. The buyers are out there and ready to invest and spend money on quality domains! It’s the lower quality domains that are “in recession”, good generics and 2-3 letter .com’s are always in demand.

Myself I don’t own any LLL.com and never have. I always thought they were overpriced and not a good investment. They can’t be developed, they are too expensive for most end users and during the last half a year it’s unclear if the prices are going up or rather dropped.

So I’d much rather buy geo or generic domains.

The biggest problem of having a portfolio of over 3,000 domains is of course the renewals, but not only the decision what to renew and what to drop is tricky, but the most annoying part is the constant renewal emails.   Some registrars like to send multiple emails for each domain which creates huge amounts of emails in my inbox. I’m getting these on a weekly basis and usually tend to ignore.

Every month or so I login to my main registrar accounts and renew the domains which are to expire. Not a well organized process yet, but I don’t like to use auto-renewals and I usually renew the top domains for a couple years upfront.

There is software like dnzoom that helps automate this stuff, which is sensible for large portfolios, however giving all your registrar passwords to one site seems a little too much for me, besides it’s not really something you can’t manage manually.

Naturally sometimes I forget to renew good names and lose them..

How do you manage renewals?

Since I’ve started developing my US city domains I’ve been positively surprised by the adsense clicks.

In general my average adsense clicks are between $0.20-0.30 through out my sites, but the US city names had many clicks in the $0.5-$1 range. The traffic is as targeted as you can get and it’s easy to understand why advertisers would be willing to spend more, but these are relatively small cities, so the number of advertisers is quite limited.

These clicks are definitely nothing compared to what one could earn by attracting direct advertisers. I just read on dnjournal that PalmSprings.com earns over a million dollars a year only from the homepage! This definitely shows the potential in geo domains and pretty clear plan: get a top city domain, make some site and make it rank well in google, find advertisers to purchase banners for some annual fee. 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 »

The most popular thread on dnforum currently is this one: Domainers are Losers

As usually the dumbest threads get the highest exposure, but naturally there are also a couple good points raised in the thread. The OP intended that most people joining the industry don’t succeed that well, and this is probably right, same way as in any other business. Many domainers mentioned their successes as well in the posts.

Some interesting posts worth mentioning: read more »

DNForum Adds New Category for dropping soon domains, for a fixed price of $20.

I think it’s a great idea and I just listed a few of mines there to try it out.

Domainers deal with renewals on a weekly basis and it’s frequently a hard decision to either renew or let it go. It can be quite disturbing to see a domain you forgot to renew end up selling for 4 figures on an expired auction, but these things happen.

Here is a little something I picked up in the Prague airport.

Must be one of the most ridiculous domains I’ve seen in a while, but hey if it works for them.

Click on the image to enlarge it: Be-free-of-maybe.eu, UniCredit Group