Some Random Thoughts Before I Head Out

For the next week I will very likely not be doing many if any posts as I will be doing a week long, very intense road trip following the Tour of Missouri as mentioned yesterday. Most of my focus will be on reporting and blogging cycling news on our Tour.Missouri.me site which will start to have actual stories, videos and pictures starting tomorrow.

So here are a few random things before the week begins. First off there are a few bloggers and friends who will be doing guest posts throughout the week. I look forward to seeing what they have to say. I let them choose their own topics and find it rather fun to have other people posting as guests on a blog with my name on it, should be fun. The first one should go out on Monday.

Next topic - you never know who is reading, remember that, I got a bit of a surprise tonight after one of the communication directors for one of the elite cycling teams racing this week contacted me based on my blog post here and offered up behind the scenes access and help with communications, etc. Kudos goes out to the team at Team Type 1 , this team is based on riders who have Type 1 diabetes and still race at the top levels of the sport. Proves that with the right attitude you can overcome challenges when you are faced with them.

Congrats to my good friend Patrick Ruddell at ChefPatrick.com for being the first guest on Domainvestors.TV. Sounds like the first video will be completed sometime in November. Should be interesting, Morgan Linton has worked hard to build a true video studio in his office (interesting to say the least) and this will be a great start I am sure for many unique reports to come.

On the domain sales front, I had 3 deals go through this week, 2 smaller deals and 1 of reasonable size I hope to announce soon. It was a solid .NET that is a rather high priced product. I will hopefully be able to post details after next week.

Domain Buy Offers From My Minisites

Although I do not speak about my AEIOU.com minisites as much here of late due to my focus on my full business development of Missouri.me and my other Geo domain names I do still keep tabs on them and do link building and other items related to the tender loving care of the sites. The majority of them are revenue generating and most lived up to the 10 month ROI that I was hoping for.

But, most importantly the thing that has been most surprising is the sales that have occurred from the For Sale link on the Minisite. I was always a bit skeptical about putting a For Sale link on a domain minisite since I was concerned about it pushing actual users away from the site even if the information on the site was useful. Luckily though that seems to not of been an issue since the CTR on most of the sites is quite solid (in some cases it exceeds 20 percent).

In the past 2 months I have had offers through the For Sale link on 3 different domains, 2 of them are closed deals and a 3rd we could not come to terms but if we had even at the offer that I received and turned down it would of been a profitable transaction. Also, before someone thinks that these are $500 deals after spending $200 on a minisite plus the domain cost that would not be the case. Both of the closed deals were mid $x,xxx, oh yeah and they were .NET domains.

The percentage of offers on these names compared to parked names or minisites without an obvious For Sale sign has been a bit surprising. I did not expect the largest profit to come from domain offers compared to Adsense revenue from these AEIOU.com sites.

This is one time I am very happy to of been proven wrong, I honestly expected the offers to dry up on these names after a site was developed on it. I like surprises:)

It’s Better Than Real Estate Stupid

When explaining domain names and their value to people I usually start with a real estate reference, billboard location reference, etc and then go from there in how a domain name is even better for various reasons (probably should do a post on that....).  Well tomorrow it will be really interesting since I have to actually explain this to an end user buyer who has investors from the real estate community. Let me explain a bit.

Early last year I picked up an expired name that only someone local to St. Louis, MO would get the value of, but if you were from St. Louis you would get it in a second and if you happened to be in the entertainment or live music business you would get more attention from this name based on its history than almost any other. Plus the links to the name were from some of the top radio stations, etc in St. Louis and the region.

Well, in August I received an unsolicited email from someone interested in buying the name. The person was launching a business and was using the exact same name as the name I had based on the history that I mentioned earlier.  We negotiated a price, he budgeted for this in his plan and then he went to get financing. After initial approval the economy did what it did and the deal got put on hold. Thats fine the name pays for itself in ad revenue per month.

Fast forward 5 to 6 months and I get an email this morning saying that the project is back on and he now has external investors (from the real estate community) that are working with him to launch in July. He gets the value of the name but "the investors do not think the expense is necassary".  I almost laughed, people in real estate, specifically commercial real estate should get the value more than anyone outside our domainer community. Its all about location and thats what I have for them.

Now, let me say, I think domainers are naive many times when complaining about people just not getting the value of x name or y name. But in this case (and I wish I could release the name and it would make sense) there is no other name that works, period. It is the brand in this case. 

I sent back an email outlining that we could discuss this tomorrow and that the value of high end relavent domain names are still high even during this down turn (and referred to DNJournals YTD sales) and that every type in visitor or linked visitor they miss is a customer they missed out on. 

I am actually looking forward to the dicussion outlining why the category killer domain is valuable to their business, should be an interesting conversation if anything.