First Month I Have Not Bought A Domain Name For Investment
Well, the month is not over but I realized something, this is the first month in as long as I can remember that I have not bought one domain name for pure investment purposes. BUT, I have bought as many names as ever this month but mainly for development purposes.
I knew at some point this would happen, my focus on growing the business would cause a period of time to happen that switched my focus to pure development rather than investment. Now, that does not mean I am not still buying domain names for investment, just means this is the first time I have went a whole month without doing so.
That also means that I think my shift to quality over quantity purchasing is complete, I still have many names that I am letting drop as I clean out purchases from years ago to then the herd a bit.
The cause of this shift has been a surprisingly busy December. Everyone told me to expect December to be our worst month, that when selling to small businesses that December is the month to dread because in many cases you may be competing for dollars that could be going to Christmas presents for the owners' children.
We planned for this ahead of time and created packages that met our customers needs and may of helped us have one of our top months so far. Great!
This has obviously made me blog less in the past couple weeks, but for good reason, the focus has been on the business side, as much as I actually love to blog and build my domain investments at the same time it is good to focus my time on the larger business at hand.
Have a great weekend!
Random Domaining Thoughts On A Saturday
Top Gear
As I sit here and watch Top Gear on BBCA with my son on a Saturday morning I had several different blog post ideas rolling around my head but none of them were quite worthy of a full post, what does that mean. Well that means it is time for a random thoughts post:
First up, last night while hanging out with my family for a bit on my birthday (am I really 36....) we decided to have a bit of a quiz on what they learned while attending the beginning parts of my presentation at our company sales meeting a couple nights back. Something very fun happened, my lovely little daughter who is 8 was actually able to rattle off what SEO stood for and then defined it!!! Such a proud father! She did use domain name for the answer to every other quiz question thought. How many other 3rd graders can define SEO:)
Although most of my time these days goes towards growing the Localtek/Missouri.me business I am also actively working to hire a person focused purely on selling my domain names to end users. It is a concept I have wanted to try for some time but finding the right person has always been a bit interesting. One of the people I am speaking to is someone who has sold commercial real estate for years successfully. When I sent him over some research information to dig into our little domain industry a bit it was great to hear him talk about how once he started reading he was amazed at the industry and how each article/blog/site lead him even deeper into the rabbit hole. Always interesting to get an outsiders perspective.
I am back in the drop game after taking a month or two away from acquiring many names that were not specifically for my primary company I have managed to fit in some time to research domain drops again. Had a couple nice pick ups this week and one that will likely turn into a developed site rather rapidly.
After my post about dropping domain names and canceling domain names rather than keeping them around I actually GAVE AWAY around 50 names to a couple of the employees here who have interest in the domain space. To me it was less work to just do a couple big pushes to people that I know than sell them for a low cost and have to deal with all the work around that . They got some good names out of the deal and I get to focus on my core set.
For you .TV lovers, this morning I was looking at Google Trends and noticed something, out of the top 100 top search trends there were (3) .TV names, now when I say this consider that that search trends are for keywords being searched for so this means there are people typing the .TV full name into their search box which is a good indication there are a lot of people visiting these .TV sites, this is the first time in all the times I have checked Google Trends that I have noticed 3 of anything other than .COM in the top search trends, normally you do not see more than 1 or 2 full domain names in the search trends. Good stuff for the .TV crowd.
Look for some big changes on my blog over the next week, good stuff coming!
The Story Of BruceMarler.com
After reading the post over at TeenDomainer.com I thought a little bit about how the acquisition of my namesake domain name occurred and how it ended up being focused on domain investing and development.
A few years back I had done the initial check on my name and had found it taken. As someone who had the understanding of the value of a domain I knew I needed to grab my name if possible and had hoped that the person who owned it (yes, another Bruce Marler) may of not had a use for it planned and we could come to terms for me to acquire it easily. Well, after some initial emails I had no response from the individual and wrote it off for a period of time.
I should note that my Father also has the same name (except his middle is Wayne, yes my Dads name is Bruce Wayne, like Batman) but there is also one more Bruce Marler in the area I live in, unfortunately this person had the same middle name as myself except it is spelled differently and he has several pages of criminal records on the Missouri CASENET site where public records are viewable by all and I realized that it was very possible for people to run across his information and think it was me. There was no easy way to get around that but I knew one way to possibly take control of what people see and read about what I am doing compared to others was to own my name. So once again I sent an offer in the low 4 figure range for BruceMarler.com. And once again, no response. I was frustrated but after trying some other avenues I moved on again.
About six months after that last attempt I was searching Godaddy for a name and moving through the shopping cart process when I noticed something, rather than telling me that the crappy BruceMarler.name was available as I was hitting the skip to actually buy button I noticed BRUCEMARLER.COM is available click here to add to cart. I did a double take and of course bought immediately.
Yes, that is right, someone basically ignored and offer or basically mismanaged their domain registration contact info and I saved over a thousand dollars and got it at reg fee.
I was never quite sure what I was going to do with it exactly and during the initial launch I was still debating if it was going to be purely domain focused or if it would also focus on my other interests (travel, endurance sports, etc) but in the end it became obvious that focusing on domain names and domain development was what I liked to write about the most.
One thing I noticed earlier today was a search for my name plus the town I live in landed a person on my blog, very interesting, not sure why or who did that search. It is interesting to see people search for Bruce Marler and end up at my blog, are they searching for me? Are they searching for another Bruce Marler? I do not know, but I do own the search for my name now and I think that can be very important as we move forward growing our business.
I also went ahead and picked up the domain names of the rest of my little household here. My daughter has a blog on hers, she does not update it much but it is fun for her when she does, and its even more fun when she goes to Google and does a search for her name and her blog is number one. Is it a competitive term? No. Is it fun for an 8 year old little girl to see a domain name and understand what it is, SURE!!!!!
Minisite To Google First Page In Less Than Month
Its been about a month since launched the Mathbooks.net minisite. I thought it would be good to review the results of the launch of this keyword rich minisite.
First off this site was done a little different than others I have done in the past. I had originally planned to build the site myself but due to time constraints I chose to outsource to AEIOU.com. So, this site is a combination of keyword researched content written by a selected writer I use for many of my sites and SEO and site development done by AEIOU.com. I also did a bit of my own link building but the majority was done by AEIOU.com.
Rather than take you through all 15 keyword selections I chose to target we will show the results for the top two: Math Books and Mathbooks. These are the most generic terms that could be chosen other than the singular version of the words which normally means that they will also be the most competitive. Math Books was shown to have a search volume of 90,500 in the month of March per the Google Keyword Research Tool.
Before the minisite I was getting anywhere from 1 to 3 visits per day parked. This created revenue but I knew I could do better with a site if I could rank well for the terms selected.
Well, the results are in, currently if you search for the term Math books the site ranks between 4 and 6 (seems to move around a bit but always consistent) and Mathbooks is ranking in the 4th spot. That is in less than a month, first page for a generic keyword in less than a month is a very solid result and shows that the work and investment can pay off.
Traffic is more than 10 times the visits per day than parked and revenue has obviously increased along with that. I very soon will be implementing Ebay Affiliate Ads on the page as well which should allow for even further increased revenues.
Random Domaining Notes
This is not the post I planned on doing today but due to a technical difficulty I don't have the bandwidth to fix right now I thought I would post a few domaining notes that were not quite large enough to justify their own post. Here goes...
What may of been one of the coolest things in my keyword research happened today, while researching various keywords coming to my blog I noticed that I had a couple searches for "St. Louis Domainers" show up minutes before in my Statpress results. Thought that was interesting since I am in the St. Louis area. Well, literally minutes later I had a call on my cellphone from a domainer in the St. Louis area interested in meeting and discussing domains sometimes, he was the one searching. Just a cool, fun experience to see the search result in a phone call. Starting to think its a Missouri Domainer Mafia, the person today, Patrick Carleton (Associated Cities), Aron Meystedt, Tia Wood, and me. I know theres more of you out there!!!
Next note, if you are not twittering get to it. Although I have a hard time sometimes fitting what I want to say into 140 characters I find myself getting more from my Twitter communications and social network than I do from most other online networks at this point but I will admit to neglecting my Facebook account due to Twitter. I have been able to acquire domains I would not of found otherwise, create domaining relationships that would not of occurred otherwise.
I want to give a shoutout to Esa and Sri at Estibot.com. After my minisites compared post a few weeks back they have contacted me and found that when the files were transferred there was some corruption that caused some content to be truncated, etc. Great follow up by them. Esa was top notch in communications concerning this and had the team on it right away. Thanks!!!
Was just reading a post on Techcrunch concerning the changes that are coming in Digg Search. For anyone that has used Digg for link building and search traffic this could cause some changes in the traffic flow. Keep an eye on it.
I want to also thank all of you for reading, the blog has been up for a few weeks now and the results have been better than I could of expected from a networking and acceptance standpoint. Good people in this domainer group. I plan to be back to the minisite and how-tos posts in the next day or so and continue to give ideas on how to either choose names for outsource development or develop on your own rapidly.
OK, now for the biggest thing in this post, I PROMISED my daugther that I would mention that tomorrow is her 8th Birthday!!! She is standing over my shoulder right now and making sure this sentence is typed exactly to her liking. Happy Birthday Little Diva!!!!!
Why Do You Buy Domain Names?
Why do you buy Domain Names? That is a question I have asked myself before. Now to be clear, I buy them for one reason, to make money online. There are very few domains I buy without a purpose, it should either have keyword potential for minisites or immediate resell potential which is why I probably have always been so adamant against brandables with no immediate keyword value or generic potential.
After I read the post on Domain Name Wire yesterday concerning making For Sale a larger option on parked pages it made me think a bit about why people domain and the various models they use to make money (or attempt too). I think in many cases domainers are a mix of the various models below. Which model do you fit?
High End Speculator - This domainer model buys a name based on pure speculation of moving the domain at a higher price, normally at a significantly high ROI. This person does not focus on hand registration of domain names but rather on picking up premium names and moving them. This is the pure Domainer model as I see it. This model needs bigger For Sale signs:)
Hand Registration Flipper - This model works well for getting started, picking up domains on the cheap and flipping them for 2, 5, or 10 times the registration cost within a few hours, days or weeks. This is a great way for people to get started and move upmarket on domains. Normally these are sold on the forums.
Minisite Domain Flipper - Domainers doing this buy domains, put minisites on them, and then flip the domain based on revenue/traffic multiples. This works well for people looking to buy revenue names and do not want to necassarily develop them.
Passive Income Domainer - This domainer type buys domains not to sell but to create an income stream from the parking (or affiliate) income generated. This domainer really does not care about for sale signs and is more concerned about creating a stream of income that requires little upkeep or effort per day. If they happen to get an offer great, but their point is streams of income.
Site Developer - These domainers buy quality domains to develop into fully blown out websites, each domain purchase is for a specific purpose and has a specific business model associated to it. Some would say that this person is not a domainer although more and more you see people talking on the forums about this site being sold or that sold being sold, but if you look deeper it was not a domain it was as developed site. A crappy name that gets developed into a successful site and gets sold at a high price is not a DOMAIN being sold it is a BUSINESS being sold.
Domain Collector - This person just likes to pick up domains to acquire items and have them, in many cases they may not realize this (sorry if you realize this is you after reading). They really do not focus so much on the revenue or domain selling aspects as much as acquiring large quantities of domains.
Expired Traffic Domain Flipper - This person buys expired domains that have traffic from sources such as backlinks, may have Google Pagerank, and normally has revenue associated to it. They make money moving these names based on revenue multiples and do flips after a few months. They can use this money to reinvest in more revenue names or invest in quality generics.
What model are you?
I am sure there are many other models that could be defined. As much as I think bigger for sale signs are great for many domainers in some cases the focus may not be on getting the name in front of the buyer but may be on finding ways to increase CTR or PPC values.
I just put up a new poll, vote for what type of domainer you are.
On a separate note, I have a buyer looking for Blog name, should be something focused on training bloggers , blog webinars, how to make money with blogs, something that matches those topics. Needs to be a .COM and price range is in the $100 range. Please use my contact me form if you have something.
Available Names – Mathematics Keywords
As of this post the list of Mathematics Domains were available for registration, all .COMs with solid Google keyword search results. It would be great if you left a comment after registering.
GradeMathematics.com
MathematicsCalculus.com
GeometryMathematics.com
MathematicsStudent.com
MathematicsProblem.com
MathematicsConcepts.com
MathematicsStudents.com
MathematicsNumber.com
MathematicsEquations.com
MathematicsProbability.com
MathematicsMusic.com
MathematicsSkills.com
MathematicsTopics.com
MathematicsTrigonometry.com
MathematicsDivision.com
MathematicsFractions.com
MathematicsActivity.com
ConsumerMathematics.com
MathematicsWordProblems.com
MathematicsMultiplication.com
.TEL a Domainers Extension or Not?
After seeing several blog posts and much discussion on twitter the past few days about .TEL I thought it was time to run a poll on if .TEL is a domainers extension. My personal thought are that .TEL is not really a domain investors extension due to lack of monetization options. I have spent quite a few brain cycles on trying to find reasons to invest in .TEL and have pretty much concluded that I will not be.
That said, there are always people that will find a way to be profitable off new extensions, it will not be the majority but the minority that finds a way, and I believe that will be even more so the case with .TEL.
Vote in the poll to the right to show where you stand on .TEL.
Rather than repeat all the various commentary here are a few other blogs that have commented on .TEL this week: