Domaining – Domain Investing

Disclaimer: As with any business, risks are involved, therefore, you can expect to potentially make a good amount of money, but there is also a chance that it leaves you spending lots of money and having quite a bit of web property that you can’t sell. Regardless this is an informational post only and I have tried my best to give you as much information and routes possible on selling domains, but you must know any investment bears its risk. So invest wisely.

Introduction

In my personal view domaining or domain flipping is one of the most rewarding business models that I have come across when we talk about Making Money Online. With the right strategy and plan you can buy a very cheap domain and sell it for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. That is the reason I personally find domaining as a low risk business model if executed well.

For a mere $9 / $10 or even less (with coupons/promotions), you can get your hands on a great domain that is good for a full complete year (with a choice to renew) and then re-sell it for hundreds of dollars, or if you know your game-plan you can hold on to it for the right buyer who is willing to pay you thousands of dollars for just the domain. Seems enticing, right?

Domaining or Domain name Investing!

Domaining isn’t new in the internet world. There are so many businesses and individuals who have made millions from some aspect of selling domain names, some are domain squatters, some snatch up dropped domains, some sell local domains. Some have portfolios of generic word domains that have sold for millions.

Just to give an idea of what a domain can be worth, here are the 25 most expensive domain names publicly reported.

25 most expensive domain names publicly reported

1. CarInsurance.com — $49.7 million
2. Insurance.com — $35.6 million
3. VacationRentals.com — $35 million
4. PrivateJet.com — $30.18 million
5. Voice.com — $30 million
6. Internet.com — $18 million
7. 360.com — $17 million
8. Insure.com — $16 million
9. Fund.com — £9.99 million
10. Sex.com — $14 million*
11. Sex.com — $13 million
12. Hotels.com — $11 million
13. Porn.com — $9.5 million
14. Shoes.com — $9 million
15. Porno.com — $8.8 million
16. Fb.com — $8.5 million
17. We.com — $8 million
18. Business.com — $7.5 million
19. Diamond.com — $7.5 million
20. Beer.com — $7 million
21. Z.com — $6.8 million
22. iCloud.com — $6 million
23. Israel.com — $5.8 million
24. Casino.com — $5.5 million
25. Slots.com — $5.5 million

* The sex.com domain name sold twice — Once in 2005 for $14 million and again in 2010 for $13 million.

Below is a Live list of Domains and more currently available for sale.

The problem with traditional domain investments is we’ve missed the boat on the good names. Unless you have a sizeable amount of money to invest (tens of thousands of dollars) then domain prospecting is not only extremely risky, but also extremely expensive.

This is all changing now.

Some of you may be able to remember your first time on the internet. I remember the very first website I ever went to, ESPN.com. I was amazed at the web, so fascinated at the availability of information, even back in the 90’s when it wasn’t a shadow of its current iteration.

If I had the forethought back then to register some domains, generic domains, even as simple as sushi.com or pasta.com or domains related to commerce, buyacar.com. You get the point. Domains like this sell all the time for tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

1 word dictionary domains on premium extensions (.com/.net/.org) will ALWAYS be valuable. There are only so many of them out there. Same thing with short 3 letter domains (these sell anywhere from $7,500-$100,000 at auction.)

Well it’s safe to say we missed the boat on most of these domains. Time has come and gone, and you need deep pockets to get in now.

But there’s something you do NOT need deep pockets for.

New Generic TLD’s.

2015 and onwards are the years of the new gTLD. DO NOT miss this train also. I’m going to give you an introduction to gTLD’s and then give you a nice variety of ways you can profit from them, both immediately (reselling) and long term (investing.)

I’m going to show you some excellent ways to invest in a new era of domaining. Relatively low risk ventures utilizing the new generic domains. You can choose how much you’re willing to invest, find a killer domain, purchase it and resell the domain. Then you’ll have a bit more capital to reinvest.

I’ve purchased a significant number of new gTLD’s already with the intention of holding most however I have successfully resold many local domains (more on this next, for a quick profit.) My main goal is to hold onto some BIG TIME domains and hold them with higher dollar price tags versus selling for a few hundred dollars profit,
although there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem I’m facing is an EXCESS of great domains out there that no one has even touched.

It’s time to get started.

Also read my post on: Domain Name Selection

Getting Quick Cash Re-selling gTLD’s

For most this will be the most viable option to profit from domain reselling. As mentioned previously I’ve immediately resold many domains, some I’ve purchased then resold just days later. You can resell these in a couple different ways, you can create a website specifically for reselling these type of domains and then place buy buttons up and direct leads to the website. You can also just resell domains without a website then (if you choose to grow your business) you can implement a website down the road.

I would recommend finding a couple KILLER domains, registering them, contacting your leads, making a profit, then repeating until you’ve grown comfortable with

1. Registering Good Domains.
   
2. The Sales Process.
3. The Investment.

First things first, what are some examples of the new generic top level domains. These domains are essentially vanity domains. They vary from generic words like .trade or .ventures to the names of cities (.berlin) or even industry domains (.auto, .casino)

I bet you’re already getting some ideas here.

Primarily I want you to familiarize yourself with the domains that are available for purchase. Don’t go out and start purchasing domains immediately. These domains are a bit more expensive than the generic .com/.net/.org so you want to be a bit more
thrifty with your cash, especially if you’re looking to bring in some dough before doing any serious investing.

I use Namecheap as my preferred domain registrar primarily because there are SO MANY awesome coupon codes available for Namecheap domains. You can use any registrar that you wish, so, head over and start browsing around and familiarize yourself with the different domains.

=> Check out the new Generic TLD’s here*

* when the page opens, scroll down and under the “Choose from” filter, select “Deals”

You’ll want to look through a variety of categories, not just one or two. DO NOT continue this post until you’ve familiarized yourself with the categories and the pages of domains. Having a list of potentials ready to be registered will mean that as soon as they’re available to register, you’ll jump in and register as many as you can, but there are still lots of marketers out there wanting to cash in as well, so you BETTER be ready. Again, go through and familiarize yourself with a variety of domains and start making mental notes.

The Method

In this section you’re looking for domains that you can purchase and then immediately resell. How does that shake down?

Step 1) Research domains and industries

Step 2) Purchase domain(s)

Step 3) Contact multiple leads in the industry

Step 4) Sell domains

Step 5) Repeat

I’m going to show you how I’ve set a system up for that and what’s been working for me, but I want to encourage you to experiment with a variety of different domain extensions as well as plan for the upcoming releases of other domain extensions. This will allow you to stay ahead of the curve, beat out competition and be ready to jump on the opportunity.

I’ve found that most of my success has come through implementing this method locally, here’s why:

#1) It’s much easier to find great domains

#2) It’s much easier to find responsive leads

#3) There’s a sense of urgency in the domains – many are 1 off’s so it encourages all your leads to jump on the opportunity and not “think about it as much”

Consider this, you purchase Seattle.Law

Now you reach out to legal firms in the Seattle area. There’s only going to be one Seattle.Law domain and you can encourage them to protect their long term web presence by being The Seattle.Law. They can merely redirect the domain to their main site, but if people begin searching using new domain extensions, wouldn’t THEY want to be the one that comes up? Give them the opportunity, because if it refers just one client for them, it’s worth the investment.

This is one angle you can go at for potential buyers of local domains and below I’m going to give you some great examples. These local domains don’t have to be city based, they can be regional or state/province based as well. You can also get creative once you start looking through all the different domain examples I’m sure your creative juices will start flowing.

Another big selling point for domains like this is the vanity aspect. You’re giving people the ability to rebrand their image with a vanity domain. Yeah it would be great to own marketing.com – but you’re not going to be able to. But with domains like this you’ll be able to own Seattle.Marketing or Seattle.Insurance. These are selling points you can include when it comes time to sell the domain (number 1 question you’ll get is “Why do I need a new domain if I already have one?” and touting the competition plus the vanity
aspects are great selling points.)

Also make sure you’re looking within industries that make a good deal of money. Instead of looking for businesses that may be run by a sole individual (a carpenter) try finding larger entities such as real estate or other larger areas of business and commerce. If they make a good deal of money, they’re usually also spending a good deal of money.

Now in the interest of getting you up and going and making some money, I’m going to give you some great example domain extensions below, some of which are available, some of which may not be, but will get some ideas flowing.

You’re going to have to do the leg work and the research on them and determine if they will work for you and the type of business you want to establish. Here are just a few great examples of potential domain ideas for local businesses you can resell to:

How awesome is that? Did you have ANY idea these kind of domains were going to be available for you to purchase? And these are hundreds more…

Now are you getting some ideas of all the different AWESOME things you could do with these domains and the companies and people who would be interested in purchasing these domains? Just add “City Name” to the beginning of most of those domains and you’ll have a valuable asset for a local business owner.

Oh and you don’t have to do only big cities. Don’t worry if you’re finding LosAngeles.Lawyer taken. There are lawyers in just about every city in the world. I would recommend purchasing domains in countries/cities where you natively speak the language of that country.

If you’re having difficulty finding a domain don’t worry, every few days new extensions are opening up to register, keep scanning through, updating your spreadsheet and using databases for different services/cities that you can add as generic prefixes to those domains. I’m not going to go into exact specifics because if I did everyone would try and do that EXACT thing, no matter what I tell them. I’ve recommended specific WordPress themes before but said to diversify, then people get upset when they realize a marketplace is saturated with that particular theme. It’s because everyone else and their mother started doing the same thing. Use your noggin and come up with something creative yourself.

Alright moving on. Step 1 is complete, find your domain.

Now you want to find who would be interested in purchasing it. I’m going to use an example that is newly launched but could do well locally.

=> See here, examples of newly launched domain extensions

.Property (example)

Let’s say for example we want to cater to Chicago property real estate companies. So we register Chicago.Property (which will be more competitive than say Branson.Property but still a possibility if you ACT when you get the notice.)

What’s next?

Next we find companies in Chicago that are real estate developers, builders or owners and reach out to them. The best way to do this is either use Yelp or use Google.

I’m not going to get into the potential SEO value of these vanity gTLD’s just because the domains are too new and I haven’t found any reliable side by side studies, plus this course isn’t about SEO – although I’m guessing there may be some value in these for high dollar keywords.

So we Google “Chicago Properties” and find a bunch of national companies like Zillow and Trulia in the normal search results, but that’s not what we’re going after. We want to find the local Chicago companies who deal in real estate property:

Also if you scroll down you’ll see some great results in the non local Google results. This site and service is tailored to finding you a rental property in Chicago. Now they would be a great lead for the domain.

Another great resource for local businesses is Yelp

There are 10 leads per page with 24 pages.

What’s next? Head over to their website, find their contact information (trust me, it won’t be hard for a real estate property company) and either call them (many of you may NOT want to do this, that’s fine) or send them an email.

Now you want to get in touch with more than a real estate agent, same thing goes for any of these companies your reaching out to. If you’re contacting a larger company you need to get in touch with the owners or someone higher up in the authority food chain. But if, for example, you’re contacting a photographer in a city, this will be much easier as generally their emails are listed on the contact page and less people work there.

There are a variety of ways to find out contact information for the owners, including LinkedIn as well as simply putting Joe@CompanyDomain.com – replace Joe with the first name of the company owner. You can also email the contact and get in a conversation with the contact and ask for contact information for those in charge of their website or who makes the decisions on the web. Most of the domains I’ve sold (over email) have been through the contact email listed on the site. If you contact a law office, most can see the value in these domains, especially with the email you’re going to send them.

I would recommend generating at least 10 leads for your domain before you craft your email. You may have an interested buyer immediately or you may have to email more leads, but you can sell these domains for a healthy profit so it’s worth your time, especially since you’ll be scaling this up later and ideally have someone else emailing for you.

Now you can go about contacting your leads any way you want. Personally I try and call them whenever possible because many times I’m attempting to sell domains for thousands of dollars, and in doing so I find a phone call to work much better than an email, plus I’ve gotten over the fear of cold calling and rejection.

You don’t have to call though !

You also don’t have to sell the domains for thousands of dollars. Your price point will depend on your niche. Niches with much higher CPC in AdWords generally are willing to pay significantly more for domains. This includes insurance, mortgage lenders, legal and more. There are entire blogs dedicated to this subject so I’m not going to get into it, I also don’t want everyone doing the same thing, do a bit more research regarding this.

Let’s get back on track. Emailing. You ideally want to find the person who is making decisions, not just a real estate agent. You’ll be surprised how receptive people can be to this. You’re not pitching them on SEO services or soliciting work, you’re selling them a valuable asset, of which there is a lot of competition for only one.

When crafting your email, there are a few important points to hit:

#1) How valuable this domain extension will be in the future

#2) How it can drive direct traffic to your website from future type in traffic

#3) The fact that there is only one. There can only be one Seattle.Lawyer or Chicago.Property, and they need to secure their place for the future

I generally keep things pretty informal, be it over the phone or email. That’s just my style. Many sales guys say that’s the wrong way to go about things. That’s fine. It’s worked for me so I keep doing it. There’s only 1 thing left to do at this point, start contacting these owners. You have a plethora of leads, it’s just a matter of the hustle at this point.

Pricing Your Domains

This is inherently going to be either their first or second question. How much does it cost to secure my future on the internet.

Again, this is something I cannot give a firm answer. There is a big difference between a legal group in New York and a plumber in Branson Missouri. There is also a big difference in the potential value of those domains to these clients. Things you need to weigh in when determining the value of your domain is the population of the area, the amount of potential competition that group has as well as the average earnings per customer. Even on the lower side though, you should be charging hundreds of dollars for domains, even if it is Seattle.Plumbing – again, these are rare and valuable

domains that can only be owned by one institution, you’re presenting them with value and the ability to secure their future against other businesses and it can mean big dollars for their business down the road.

All that’s left is collecting the payment. I use a variety of means to process payments, primarily Paypal but I also accept anything from Escrow and Cryptocurrencies to check or money orders make the transaction easier for them.

Again, before you scale this up and create a full website and purchase 50+ domains, I would recommend going and getting your first few sales and acclimatizing to the process.

It is a speculative market, and the pricing and value of domains is subjective.

Get comfortable finding and selling a few domains before you spend time and money investing without sales to back it up. This is something I learned early on. Don’t scale anything up until it’s been proven, and not just once but multiple times. More on scaling and growth after the next section though. I don’t want to overwhelm anyone when the nitty gritty is just to go out there, find a couple domains and resell them.

Long Term Investing In gTLD’s

This aspect of gTLD’s excites me even more ! Sure reselling is great and can bring in a few hundred dollars per domain sale. I’m not opposed to that one bit, in fact I’m in the process of setting up a marketplace for just the thing. But at the end of the day, I want those big sales, those ten thousand dollar domain sales to large companies who want to secure a killer, brandable domain name for their company.

You don’t have to always be city or geographically based. This is where some creativity comes into play. I’m going to take the list from above and put some other examples in, you can also look for domain generators and add these words as your prefix or suffix and ignore the .com/.net/.org and use good combinations to register for ideas (read that sentence again – I’ve bolded it because it’s a very important strategy for brainstorming)

Let’s checkout our list again and look at it with fresh eyes, now that you’ve become a bit more familiar with what we’ll be doing:

I’d be willing to guess that a few of those are already jumping out to you that could work for non-local sites. If you happen to be creatively challenged that’s not a problem, I’ve got a solution…

One great use of domain generators (and make sure you use one that will show you ideas regardless of if the domains are registered or not, like NameBoy.com) is they’ll do a lot of the work for you:

(The below is a quick example from Nameboy and using the first domain on the above list, .flights)

(You can play around with it being the second word or rhyming as well as use other generators!)

In a couple of minutes I just found 3 viable domains, thedaily.flights, myweb.flights and thebusiness.flights. There are others in there that if I reversed their order would work (like online.flights.)

See how easy that is? These are NOT localized domains but will be valuable down the road. What airline organization wouldn’t want to own thedaily.flights? What charter company or privatejet blog wouldn’t want to own thebusiness.flights?

What you want to think about are generic, non brandable domains, but domains that work with their extension and create another meaning and/or phrase. Now this is obviously speculation for the long term value of the domains, but I’d be willing to bet that thedaily.flights would be more valuable than test.flights (although test flights news may be of interest to a niche crowd… But it would be much more difficult to sell than generic words that work with their domain extension to create a meaning.)

I think Domains like this will have value. Again, I’m speculating here. I’m investing in these type of domains because of their long term potential. I’m also buying up local domains because of their short and/or long term potential.

It does not matter if you are at the bar at 2am, maybe you could be on your honeymoon. Find time to register those domains.

Waiting around to register could mean losing out on tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars down the road. There are other roads you can take, you could get into registering company specific names or products related to specific companies or brand names and so on. I’m sure many people will. I don’t condone it because it’s a gray area and I don’t want to get into a potential legal battle because I registered shop.nike or google.technology.

There are also domains like .CEO but again, not something I want to get into. Use your imagination to come up with your own ideas and experiment. Browse through your spreadsheet and make note, again I cannot recommend this enough, make a note of the domains you want to purchase, the ideas you have and prioritize them. When you get an email notifying you of their availability to register, go down your prioritized list until you find available domains, which shouldn’t take long.

Selling Domains

So what do you do when you want to sell these kinds of domains and how long do you have to wait?

This is going to be tough to say.

Some of you may snipe some domains that are SO valuable you can resell them almost immediately on an auction marketplace, some of you may want/choose to wait a while. I would, again, recommend setting up a website with an individual subpage for these long term domains as well, without a price, but a contact form.

Some domains may increase significantly in value as more and more options get registered on those extensions, so holding onto them for years will mean a much higher return on your investment.

You may also secure some generic domains that are so inherently valuable (think ad.agency) that you can then turn around on Flippa or Sedo marketplace or GoDaddy Auctions and resell it immediately, while you could of held onto it for longer and potentially made more, you could also potentially resell a $40 domain for $15,000. This is why it’s hard for me to comment on it, because there will be so many different circumstances for the domains and for your need to liquidate and/or recoup some of
your investment.

My plan is to hold onto the domains for a couple years but always be testing the waters and monitoring other similar domains (i.e. the same extension) sales history and gauging when a good time to sell will be.

Passive Income From gTLD’s

Passive income. One of the most sought after assets in web business. Who doesn’t want to build a stream of recurring income that makes money for you while you pursue other passions?

There are a variety of ways you can turn your static domains into passive income, I’m going to focus on two.

Leasing

The same way cable companies and web companies lease you their modem or cable box, you too can (and should) attempt to lease the domains to prospects. The advantage of leasing the domains out is two-fold:

• Passive Income. Obviously it would be great to receive anywhere from $500 to $5,000 a month just leasing a domain out while you do absolutely nothing but pay renewal fees.
• Speaking of renewal fees, leasing your domains is a great way to offset your renewal costs and bring down expenses across your entire portfolio, from registrations to renewals.

The biggest advantage of leasing domains (aside from the residual passive income stream) is the fact that you will not only be breaking even or making money monthly, but you’ll still retain ownership of the domains and be able to hold them in your “long term” portfolio of holdings without them becoming a financial burden.

This mean someone else is paying you to have the value of your domain accrue.

How awesome is that?

Even if you can only lease out a fraction of your domains, if you can apply that income to the overall expense of the portfolio, you’re coming out on top.

If you’re successful in buying many desirable domains, leasing them may come easier than selling, and is another option you can present to your leads. Many times local businesses may not have the cash at hand to purchase a quality domain outright but are willing to spend $50, $75 or $100, upwards of $500+ (for those higher cost-per-click niches.)

Leasing out 10 domains at $100 a month is an extra $1,000 a month that you can pocket, apply to growing your domain holdings, renewal fee’s or just stash for future expenses.

When it comes to leasing the domains, to save yourself the hassle, ensure that you setup automatic payment plans within Paypal so you don’t have to deal with invoicing, collecting and tracking payments monthly.

NOTE: Setting up automatic payment plans within Paypal is extremely simple – I’m not going to outline the steps as many of you already know how to do this and the information is readily available on Paypal’s website, just make sure when you generate
the button code, you create an HTML payment code you can email  them if they’re signing up via email!

Ensure that you work out terms and (ideally) draw up a contract for the lease. Since you possess ownership of the domain, the burden of trust lies in their hands so to alleviate their concerns offering to have a contract drawn up can go a long way. You can find a plethora of reworkable contracts on the web or if you plan to consistently lease, pay to have a template drawn up that you can reuse.

The process is as simple as having them tell you where to point the nameservers which will take you about 2 minutes. If you’re unaware of how to do this, a quick search of DNS Change + Your Host and you’ll find a stockpile of resources.

Again, pricing your lease will obviously be dependent on the implied value of the domains. Obviously you cannot charge as much as you would to outright purchase, but taking time to explain to the business how valuable the domain is and what it can mean to their traffic (especially as the popularity of these vanity domains grows) can make the sale easier.

Another option in the leasing department is the ability to lease-to-own. If this is something that interest you (and can guarantee you a certain return on your investment, albeit split up into monthly payments) then you can work out those details with the lead.

Sometimes young and growing businesses can’t afford a $7,500 domain. But they can afford $100 a month and possibly more as their business grows. Again, drawing up a contract and potentially even using third party services like Escrow can make things easier.

Parking

There are many strategies regarding domain parking. I’m no master in any of them though, however the concept is simple: If the domain gets a good deal of type in traffic, it can make a good deal of money from ads.

Almost all domain registrars and ad companies allow you to put up parking pages and monetize that traffic.

The best way to go about this is as follows. If you don’t have a “buy this domain” page setup (i.e. an entire website with redirects going to a page where businesses can purchase the domain like we talked about earlier) you can easily setup ads on your domains.

Another method is to monitor the traffic of your ecommerce website selling domains to measure which domains are getting significant traffic, and then decide which you want to park and monetize.

Sometimes domains can get hundreds of thousands of visitors from type in traffic every month. Sometimes they’ll get none. Experimenting with parking pages and ads is a great way to offset cost associated with buying and renewing domains.

Growth, Expansion & Misc. Tips

I encourage you to focus on selling local domains first and bringing in some cash before expanding.

Investing in any domain?

Risky.

Speculating in domains that haven’t even been released?

Even more risky.

The way to mitigate that risk is to start making some local sales then move into more risky ventures (i.e. the long term domain investing game.)

First point of expansion: Finding someone else to sell the domains for you.

This is going to be the most obvious place to improve upon your workflow. Get someone else to contact the leads for you. Generating the leads is pretty easy, but finding someone to talk with and close those deals is a completely different story, and can take much more time.

BUT !

Make sure you find someone who is VERY competent in your native language and is familiar with sales and has some general web experience. Yes you will have to pay a bit more, but consider the amount of time these people are working.

Let’s say you buy 10 domains focused on local leads, and you send the leads over to an outsourcer. This outsourcer will probably spend 2-3 hours sending these emails and conversing. If he can generate 1 sale for you and you pay the outsourcer $10-$15 an hour, you’re coming out on top.

But again, make sure this person is competent enough to write a professional email and interact with your leads or you could shoot yourself in the foot.

Another big point of expansion:

Setting up a website.

Also read my post: Webhosting Basics

I’m in the process of doing this myself. I’m going to be setting up a domain reselling business, essentially a place with Paypal buttons to allow for the immediate purchase of a domain. The lead gen will be the same, mostly through phone calls and emails, however now I’ll have a place to send the leads and allow them to directly purchase these domains. I’ll also be experimenting with other forms of lead generation as well (such as PPC, SEO, Media Buys, etc.)

Having a customer facing website is also much more professional looking. This can easily be done with WordPress if you’re just getting started, there are plenty of high quality WordPress ecommerce templates out there.

I would recommend redirecting the domains to the subpage of your website which will have information on the domain and the payment button. Take the time to put up a short blurb on the page regarding the domain and the advantages for the business owner (these can all be the same, just changing niche) to drive home a sale when the buyers reach that page.

One important note is when you create your Paypal buttons to only mark the number of sellable inventory as 1, so you don’t potentially get multiuple buyers of the same domain (although that’s not a bad problem to have, it’s looks bad on you if you have to refund someone the domain price.)

As you expand your operation make sure you expand your sales as well. I’ve made that mistake before, investing too much while not focusing on the one thing that will keep your business around: sales.

Scam Alert – Safe Domain Sales

While hopefully all your buyers are not out to scam you out of your domain, one way to ensure that both of you are safe in the transaction is to use Escrow.com. Escrow will allow you both to feel secure by using a third party to hold the cash and the domain until both parties are satisfied. Generally I opt for other forms of payment on smaller sales for simplicity. But when it comes to big domain transfers down the road (of which I hope you have MANY)I’d recommend Escrow. There are additional fees (of which you can split or one party can pay entirely) however the added feeling of safety for both parties can go a long way.

Renewals

Also one big thing to keep in mind, domain renewals.

Domain renewals can be quite expensive, in fact they can put you out of business if you’re not making enough money to support renewing X amount of domains per year. The renewals add up so keep those cost in mind for longer term portfolio holdings.

Coupons

One thing to keep in mind if you’re using Namecheap to register your domains, is coupons. Coupons can save you 25%-40%. That’s huge. If you have $1,000 in renewal cost per year, you’re looking at saving $250-$400. Google “Namecheap Coupons” and you’ll find a plethora of options. Try a variety of coupons and/or renewing multiple domains at a time as many times passing a threshold on a certain dollar amount can mean saving say 40% versus saving 30%. Things like this add up big time. This is another reason I choose Namecheap for my domains.

Building A Diversified Portfolio

While I would definitely invest my profits into buying more domains, also make sure you’re still out there hustling and selling local domains. I would recommend investing about 25% of your profit into the long term domain holdings. By scaling like this you
can create a long term business, one that could potentially be worth millions down the road if you can acquire quality properties, even if you venture backwards into .com / .net / .org domains – they haven’t lost any value in the last few years, that’s for sure.

This investment strategy will get you building a long term portfolio, saving cash for renewals as well as generating profits.

Conclusion

NOW is the time to strike on domains. You missed the gold rush of .com domains.

DO NOT miss the gold rush of gTLD’s.

Yes investing in domains is inherently more risky but I’m giving you more than a long term buy and hold model by giving you ideas to sell to local companies. The payoffs on both models will be well worth it.

You can contact me if you have some questions. Just hop on the Contact page in the footer below.