What's your last regg'd domain/s

[Edwin]

Fascinating posts Edwin, especially the one about your methodology a few pages back.

Thanks. Hopefully some of my suggestions will inspire other people, there's nothing remotely magical about anything I'm doing! It's just a case of working slowly, carefully and methodically through interesting niches, mining as I go...

I'm curious about one thing, how do you weigh up what you do with the page you have for each site ie either making it an affiliate site or having a 'page for sale' holding page? The affiliate page will make you some income whilst you wait for a sale, but then people could be un-aware the domain is for sale. On the other side, people could come to the site to buy say, fencing masks and all they see is a holding page and the site for sale, therefore you have lost a bit of commission.

I'll be intrigued to hear your view on this.

Cheers

I don't bother to try and make a few pence/pounds off affiliate traffic - all the domains are pointed at my for sale site. Maximum chance of hooking an end-user fish, and that's going to be a healthier payout than any possible affiliate/ad commission I believe (since each individual domain only gets a smattering of traffic at best).

Of course, that doesn't stop me pulling the occasional domain completely out of the sales cycle to work on something, e.g. my 3dtelevision.co.uk site which I'm in the process of fleshing out. But generally that door only swings one way: once it's in the "developed" pile, it's not for sale any more...

After all, to put things into some kind of perspective, if you have a site that makes (for example) an unattended 100 pounds a month without further work being required, that's the same passive income as you'd get by parking 60,000 pounds in a savings account at 2% a year!

Sell opportunity (domain names), keep revenue streams (as long as they're passive i.e. requiring no updating - start factoring in the cost of your time on an ongoing basis, and the math fails completely)!

 

[figleaf007]

Thanks Edwin, really interesting stuff :t

 

[Brassneck]

Thanks. Hopefully some of my suggestions will inspire other people, there's nothing remotely magical about anything I'm doing! It's just a case of working slowly, carefully and methodically through interesting niches, mining as I go...



I don't bother to try and make a few pence/pounds off affiliate traffic - all the domains are pointed at my for sale site. Maximum chance of hooking an end-user fish, and that's going to be a healthier payout than any possible affiliate/ad commission I believe (since each individual domain only gets a smattering of traffic at best).

Of course, that doesn't stop me pulling the occasional domain completely out of the sales cycle to work on something, e.g. my 3dtelevision.co.uk site which I'm in the process of fleshing out. But generally that door only swings one way: once it's in the "developed" pile, it's not for sale any more...

After all, to put things into some kind of perspective, if you have a site that makes (for example) an unattended 100 pounds a month without further work being required, that's the same passive income as you'd get by parking 60,000 pounds in a savings account at 2% a year!

Sell opportunity (domain names), keep revenue streams (as long as they're passive i.e. requiring no updating - start factoring in the cost of your time on an ongoing basis, and the math fails completely)!

Just wondering if you would be able to hazard a guess as to how many on that latest list of new registrations you might sell in one year via your for sale site?

Thanks
Stephen

 

[Edwin]

Just wondering if you would be able to hazard a guess as to how many on that latest list of new registrations you might sell in one year via your for sale site?

Thanks
Stephen

I would hope 1-2 in a year, probably 2-3 over the 2 year span of the registrations. Covers the reg fees with some left over

But it's of course unpredictable - I just look at aggregate numbers and let the first few sales for the year cover the reg fees for the whole portfolio, and then I can relax...

It's not a particularly scientific approach, but it's been working fine so far.

 

[Lucky Luke]

Hi Edwin,

That was 180 domains in that last batch. At say £6 a pop, that's £1080 reg fees for the two years.

Sell just one at £2,500 and you're laughing.

Nice business model.

I don't think I have (i) the patience to find all the domain names or (ii) the balls to buy them if I had found them or (iii) the courage to ask for a high price when finally approached.

I admire what you do but I couldn't do it.

Cheers, Luke

 

[Brassneck]

Hi Edwin,

That was 180 domains in that last batch. At say £6 a pop, that's £1080 reg fees for the two years.

Sell just one at £2,500 and you're laughing.

Nice business model.

I don't think I have (i) the patience to find all the domain names or (ii) the balls to buy them if I had found them or (iii) the courage to ask for a high price when finally approached.

I admire what you do but I couldn't do it.

Cheers, Luke

Same here - I tend to sell 20 @ £100 each. That's why I was curious as to whether those really high prices for those kind of domains would be achievable.

Stephen

 

[Edwin]

Yes, at the higher price ranges, math is very much on your side. But you have to keep saying "no" a lot (for example, I've turned down 5 offers so far this week - across all my names, I mean, not the new batch).

(i) the patience to find all the domain names

Sure, it takes time - but perhaps less than you'd think. I'd hope to turn up 8-10 "usable" domains per hour of solid, undistracted domain mining. And the pace is often a lot quicker than that if I stumble across a niche that looks promising but that has been seemingly overlooked by the major domain players (my conclusion after having spent thousands of hours at this over the last few years is that end-users left to their own devices will never mine all the good domains in a niche - it takes "professional vacuuming" by domain industry experts to get at the goodies in every nook and cranny of the niche!)

 

[anthony]

Same here - I tend to sell 20 @ £100 each. That's why I was curious as to whether those really high prices for those kind of domains would be achievable.

Stephen

That's down to the way you sell goods too though. In Edwins case, the Memorable Domains web site is fairly clear, it's saying that it's a business selling domain names, so 'expect a business price', so to speak.

Whereas a parking or Sedo page, it gives the impression of a less business like approach, the perception then is make a low ball offer and see if the guy looking for pocket money bites.

If you put it another way, go into Debenhams, expect to pay a lot more than on a Market Stall for the same goods!

 

[Lucky Luke]

Edwin, correct me if I'm wrong, but...

I think Edwin has volume as a key asset. He knows that he has to have enough keyword domains as he only needs to turn over 1% of his portfolio at £2,500 a pop to make good money. 2% and he's really laughing.

Edwin's skills are (i) finding and choosing the right domains (not easy at all) and (ii) selling well (not easy at all either!).

Edwin's strategic strengths are having (i) the cash to pay the reg fees and (ii) enough keyword unhyphenated .co.uk domains that relate to products/services so that he can sell just 1% of them a year. He doesn't know which ones so he has to keep a good stock ~5000 domains sounds like enough!

(Occasionally he buys domains too, so that will affect his GP% - a bit)

I don't think Edwin has ever hidden his business model from anyone. The reason is that it is very hard to copy!

Cheers, Luke

 

[Brassneck]

That's down to the way you sell goods too though. In Edwins case, the Memorable Domains web site is fairly clear, it's saying that it's a business selling domain names, so 'expect a business price', so to speak.

Whereas a parking or Sedo page, it gives the impression of a less business like approach, the perception then is make a low ball offer and see if the guy looking for pocket money bites.

If you put it another way, go into Debenhams, expect to pay a lot more than on a Market Stall for the same goods!

I understand that, and of course I do sell at much higher prices. All I was really observing was whether it was possible to achieve such high prices for what are effectively free to reg names, albeit extremely well researched ones. Clearly Edwin has proved it is.

Stephen.

 

[Edwin]

Good summary, Luke. In fact, the break-even number is much less than 1% a year. But you're quite right - it's like fishing in an icy river using 5,000 hooks dropped through 5,000 holes in the ice. I don't know where in the river the fish are, but I know that A) there ARE fish in the river and B) the more hooks that I can drop (of an acceptable quality), the higher the [em]probability[/em] of hooking a fish.

Of course, it's rather too early to tell if my latest batch of fish hooks will catch as well as the older ones (by which I'm referring to the 800-odd names I've hand-regged in the last 6 weeks). But I'm quietly hopeful. And because the math's on my side, I can make a lot of mistakes before things go pear-shape...

GENERAL TIP
I've talked about this before in various threads, but it's CRUCIAL to understand that Google Keyword Tool does not return ALL the top results for a given keyword, especially a very broad starting keyword. You have to keep feeding it other keywords that are thematically related in an attempt to prise out all the relevant keywords from it. Just to take one example to make this clearer: if I start with "car" (exact match results ALWAYS) I get a long list of keyphrases containing "car" in them. But if I start with "sports car" I find that gets 27,100 exacts, yet when I look down the results for "car" it wasn't present on the list.

Why? Hard to say for sure, but it's like Google's trying very hard to distill a cross-section of the most relevant matches for extremely general keywords in the list of suggestions it brings back. But this spells OPPORTUNITY since if you're using the right techniques to prime the list of keyphrases you're feeding to GKT (e.g. by visiting the top 20-30 ecommerce sites relating to that niche, and checking the generic product types they list there) then you'll build up a much more complete list than somebody who just starts with the most obvious broad keyword and goes with the 100 results that Google spits back...

 

[johnnyboy]

I understand that, and of course I do sell at much higher prices. All I was really observing was whether it was possible to achieve such high prices for what are effectively free to reg names, albeit extremely well researched ones. Clearly Edwin has proved it is.

Stephen.

I agree that there are a lot of reg fee names amongst the 5,000 or so domains but there are also a lot of really good ones as well. Basic supply and demand theory applies here; the more names he registers, the less there is for everyone else meaning the value of his domains should increase with each new registration.

 

[namealot]

I think the key to domains can be summed up with Three words: research, knowledge, luck….?

 

[Lucky Luke]

I agree that there are a lot of reg fee names amongst the 5,000 or so domains but there are also a lot of really good ones as well. Basic supply and demand theory applies here; the more names he registers, the less there is for everyone else meaning the value of his domains should increase with each new registration.

If Edwin is finding new domains at his current rate, doesn't that imply that there are still plenty more domains available out there but just waiting to be regged?

 

[johnnyboy]

If Edwin is finding new domains at his current rate, doesn't that imply that there are still plenty more domains available out there but just waiting to be regged?

Yeah, there's tons of decent domains left to reg. I have at least 100 product .co.uks in my 'Availables' list that get thousands of searches a month. The point I was trying to make is that if a business is specialising in one product/service, then they would be looking for an appropriately named domain relating to their business. The more domains someone registers in one particular niche, ie. blue g strings, green g strings, yellow g strings, then that company operating in that sector are willing to pay more for one/all those domains as they place more value on it for marketing reasons.

 

[namealot]

Yeah, there's tons of decent domains left to reg. I have at least 100 product .co.uks in my 'Availables' list that get thousands of searches a month. The point I was trying to make is that if a business is specialising in one product/service, then they would be looking for an appropriately named domain relating to their business. The more domains someone registers in one particular niche, ie. blue g strings, green g strings, yellow g strings, then that company operating in that sector are willing to pay more for one/all those domains as they place more value on it for marketing reasons.

Big businesses go more for brand recognition…. Smaller companies with a few exceptions don’t tend to have marketing plans apart from traditional methods, Also remember very few started up a company just because a domain name was available they started because they could already see a demand for a product/service or they had a knowledge of the field....To a certain extent they are happy using the traditional advertising methods and don't understand just how the web can help them, Thats what you have to change... Most business plans don’t even include a web strategy …?

 

[Edwin]

Yes, there are a lot of domains left. Which is why it drives me loopy when I see people post long lists of utter junk in the appraisal forum. For a few hours of concentrated, thoughtful effort, they could at the very least be sitting on generic, descriptive domains with thousands (or tens of thousands) of searches a month, rather than on usually very BAD brandables!

I also agree that it's hard to educate end-users, but every journey starts with a few steps and then a few more. You're never going to convince everyone, but if your business model consists in trying to convince say 2 people out of 100 (2% sales rate), that's a more achievable goal in time.

Furthermore, I'm sure that my own sell-through rate could be increased if I tried to find buyers rather than waiting for them to come to me, so if anything my math is pessimistic rather than optimistic...

I think the key to domains can be summed up with Three words: research, knowledge, luck….?

Luck has very little to do with it. The third word should probably be "quantity" at least if you're taking a somewhat similar approach to me. I can NEVER predict which domains will sell next, but I can assert with very strong confidence that SOMETHING will sell within a few weeks - and that's enough to keep the wheels turning happily. And that's thanks to having a wide-ranging portfolio. If I had 50 or 100 domains, it might be several years before I saw a passive sale, simply because the number of walk-in potential leads would be so low.

In fact, I would re-cast it as: "Knowledge, research, effort, quality in quantity".

Without the knowledge, nothing else matters. Once you know what you're doing, putting in the effort to thoroughly research niche after niche will ultimately lead towards quantity. But because of the knowledge and the diligence along the way, you maintain a base level of quality even as you bulk up the quantity. Not as catchy as your version, but closer to reality!

 

[Edwin]

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[doodlebug]

That's 1 off my list Edwin > overlockermachine, was happy with that 1 aswell

Ah well, if I don't have the money then what can I do ?

No lost sleep, there's plenty more generic fish in the domain sea

 

[johnnyboy]

Can't get over how many names you've regged Edwin over the past month; had a quick scan and it must be at least 600. If you've been regging 600 domains on average every month (at say £7 a pop), that's £50,400 a year, which is equivalent to about 2/3 average salaries. That's mental!

You must have more than 1 TV in your house!