Domain Magnate

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.

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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.

“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.

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.

Wishing an easy and efficient  fast and gemar chatimah tovah to all my fellow Jewish domainers (and yes there are quite a few ) on this Yom Kippur eve.

For everyone else wondering what is this about feel free to read up here.

Today it’s exactly 5 years since I became a member of DigitalPoint forums and it was always an important part of my business. I got started with my web business there, learned most of the basics and picked up some of my best earning sites there for rather cheap, sold many domains for good prices back in the day when people were willing to pay high for aged domains, bought and sold tons of links and services. Also hired a lot of people with many of whom I still work today.

While the marketplace is simply HUGE it’s not a place to sell or buy domains for domainers. DP members mostly don’t understand the value of domains, it is however the best place to buy cheap, bulk seo services, backlinks, web design and site building services, hire data entry people and much more. From an average thread I make about willing to buy some links for my sites, or looking to hire a writer, or designer I usually get 30-50 pms. Imagine that: you want to hire someone to design your sites and all you need to do is make a small post with information on what you need and request the designers to send samples and pricing. In a day you’ll have 30+ inquiries to choose from. Sort them by pricing and quality and pick the best one.

The vast amounts of people willing to do almost any simple job for pennies is truly overwhelming there. The extremely brutal competition on DP makes people lower the prices for their services to such ridiculous amounts that I can hardly understand how they make a profit on it.

You can hire a full time link builder, data entry person or a virtual assistant there for just $250 per month. 200+ hours for $250 which comes down to just about $1 per hour. However lets not forget that while this is merely 1/15 of a salary in the US, it’s considered a good amount to earn per month in most of the 3rd world countries. And for $400-500/month you can hire a really experienced SEO person there for a full time job to take care of all the seo needs on your sites. That is even less than most companies charge for SEO services.

Outsourcing has truly become global and DP plays an important role in the process by enabling both the service providers and service buyers find each other easily, quickly and without any additional fees. That is unlike all the freelance sites that profit well from both sides.

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?

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.

Up until today I never heard of any .co.za domain sales. Dnjournal had 3 high value sales for the South African tld in the recent report:

Property.co.za     $56,000     Pvt Sale
AutoInsurance.co.za     $36,500     Pvt Sale
Life.co.za     $14,536     Pvt Sale

These are private sales most likely to end users, so they (like most high value domain sales on dnjournal)  shouldn’t reflect the market value of these domains, however surprisingly these aren’t even the highest value .co.za sales, here is how a list of all reported top .co.za sales would look like (excluding some older and lower value sales to have only data for the last 12 months):

Domain    Sold Date    Price    Source
Fly.co.za    2/10/2010    65,000    Latonas.com
Property.co.za    9/9/2010    56,000    Private
Porn.co.za    11/17/2009    45,000    RickLatona.com
AutoInsurance.co.za    9/8/2010    36,500    Private
Furniture.co.za    3/3/2010    33,000    Sedo
Toys.co.za    1/21/2010    20,000    Sedo
Domains.co.za    4/20/2010    15,000    Sedo
Life.co.za    9/8/2010    14,536    Private
Slots.co.za    5/13/2010    10,000    Private
S.co.za    6/2/2010    8,500    Sedo
Shirts.co.za    3/9/2010    8,000    Sedo
bet.co.za    8/12/2010    5,480    Sedo
domainnames.co.za    8/25/2010    5,169    Sedo
fly.co.za    11/17/2009    5,000    Sedo
Mortgage.co.za    5/25/2010    4,920    RickLatona.com
super.co.za    12/25/2009    3,500    Sedo
indemnity.co.za    12/1/2009    2,505    Sedo
mattresses.co.za    2/18/2010    2,301    Sedo
studies.co.za    8/19/2010    2,200    Sedo
institute.co.za    8/19/2010    2,000    Sedo
bikini.co.za    1/20/2010    2,000    Sedo
bed.co.za    2/11/2010    1,900    Sedo
decorating.co.za    3/9/2010    1,800    Sedo
airconditioners.co.za    6/28/2010    1,250    Sedo
okb.co.za    5/25/2010    1,100    Sedo
ouch.co.za    6/2/2010    1,050    Sedo
diplomas.co.za    8/17/2010    1,000    Sedo
financecareers.co.za    6/16/2010    1,000    Sedo
tnt.co.za    4/20/2010    1,000    Sedo
pensions.co.za    10/20/2009    1,000    Sedo
chiropractors.co.za    8/17/2010    933    Sedo
iha.co.za    8/15/2010    892    Sedo
skouspel.co.za    12/24/2009    425    Sedo
bbw.co.za    1/20/2010    400    Sedo

First thing that comes to mind: Nice Flip on Fly.co.za – $5k -> $65k in 3 months, well done Rick!

There are no restrictions on .co.za domains and everyone can register them at different registrars. Prices can vary, for example at EuroDNS the price is 18 euro, while at Godaddy it’s $59.49.

While writing this post I researched some of the .co.za domains available for sale and there are very few. There could be bargains out there, but it’s hard to estimate the actual market value to know what a bargain is in this group.  At first I wanted to check the opportunity of purchasing some nice .za generics to build a site, rank it and monetize with affiliate offers, however the only decent affiliate program I could find in .za are for loan leads. According to Google the local traffic is pretty low for most of these terms so it’s probably not even worth the effort. But I think a premium .za generic can present a nice long term investment to diversify any domainer’s portfolio  and the South African namespace matures these names should gain more value and the end user interest will rise.

First it was NamePros down for 2 days, now it’s DNForum that is down. Hopefully this won’t last as long. I have a bunch of pms to reply to and several transactions to complete. What’s up with that?

Update: DNF is back up after a few hours of downtime, but working slowly for now and sending pms and making posts doesn’t seem to work.

Update2: DNF is down again!

Update3: DNF back up and running after 4-5 hours of downtime