Random Domaining Thoughts On A Saturday

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!

Canceling Domain Names – Thinning The Herd With Domain Drops

As with many people over the past few years I have managed to acquire a collection of domain names that includes some that I plan on doing business development with, some domain names I plan to sell but many others that at the end of the day may have value but the return on my time invested to sell may not be worth the effort. Based on this, over the last year or so I have been thinning the domain herd that I have. Many of these domains have been acquired either through a transaction where I acquired several domains at once and they came as part of the package or were pickups I made myself through other means as individual domain names.

But, although they may be of some level of quality from an operational perspective they still can be a distraction and I would prefer to focus on a core set of domain and development investments to allow me to get the most bang for my buck/time. To give you an idea over the past year I have went from 1,300 names to somewhere around 650. Guess what, that is still too many. Over the next few months I am going to be moving to decrease the number of names even further. I preach against being a domain collector and for the most part I feel I have decreased the number of domain names that I had a few years back that I had continued to hold just based on emotional attachment (i.e. I bought it so it must be good....).

One thing that may surprise people though is I do not necessarily wait for the domain to expire. I prefer to simply cancel the name at whatever registrar it is held at and let it drop. Why not let it sit? Well as it sits it can end up being a distraction or for some reason I may decide that maybe I should keep just that one, well maybe two. I would prefer to limit the distractions and focus on the names that I feel can be developed or sold into something more profitable.

I recently sat down and did a bit of an informal review of what I had bought over the last several months compared to the few years before. Although I had managed to get some good pickups a few years back the better quality (as a percentage of names bought) really has come in the past year or so as the domain collecting stopped and domain investing and domain business development began. Sometimes you know what is right, you know the names are really worthless or not worth the effort required to sell it (50 dollar names), but it takes sometime to pull the trigger to get rid of them. What it takes is sitting down and determining what your real goals or, is it to be a profitable business or is it like baseball cards where you may have 10s of thousands that you collect but the real investment maybe in core few. Domain investing can be much like that if that is how you choose to do it, and to be honest that is ok if that is what you want. Personally I would like to focus on the profitable domains only.

Give me your thoughts, does it make sense to drop a distraction or just let them ride?