Holy Moly did this post take-off like a rocket ship! Less than 24-hours after writing it and Part 1 already has 35 comments which is GREAT to see! One thing I realized after looking through all the comments is that I need to re-iterate what I said in part one when defining my audience for this post.
This three part series is for people that have made less than $1,000 in Domaining ever and mostly for people who haven’t made a dime.
The purpose of this post was to respond to the zillions of emails that I get from people who want to be Domainers but just have portfolios full of junk and haven’t made a dime yet. If you’ve already made your money in Domaining or know how to flip and sell consistently then you really don’t need this post. What I am trying to do is create a set of standards that can help beginners get-off to a better start. So to help illustrate my point I thought I’d share one of the emails I recently received from a reader:
From: xxxxxxxxx <xxxxxxxxx@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2011 13:55:04 -0700
To: Morgan Linton <morgan@lintoninvestments.com>
Subject: My Domain Portfolio
Dear Morgan,
I’ve been reading your blog for the last year along with many of the other top blogs I have found on Domaining.com and other similar sites. Right now I have purchased somewhere around $3,000 in domain names but none of them make any money or I have been able to sell. From what everyone writes it sounds like many people are making money with this but even though I list for sale, email etc. nobody wants to buy them. I try parking with everyone but none make any money. With so many renewals coming-up should I spend the $3,000 again on these names?? Below is the list of my names:
…..
…..
When I took a look at the list of names I didn’t see a single one that would be easy to sell or monetize. I responded to the guy telling him to drop all the junk and take that $3,000 and buy one or two good names that he could develop or re-sell.
This is what I’m getting at folks. For those of you reading this that have made money in Domaining, be it through Monetization or Re-sale give yourself a pat on the back, you figured it out! However don’t forget that there are many people that have spent a fortune buying and renewing junk domains and that’s who this guide is for.
Before I move-onto Part 2 I do want to address one more point from Part 1 which was everyone’s constant slamming of Estibot. I think you’re all missing what I use Estibot for. I do not use Estibot to tell me how much my domains are worth. I do however use it to give me an idea of the order of order of magnitude. If Estibot returns $15,000 the name could be worth really anywhere between $5,000 – $90,000 but it’s probably not worth $10 and it’s probably not worth $500,000. That’s why it’s called Estibot, it’s just an estimation.
So just to be clear, I’m not saying that Estibot should be your holy grail for domain value, but Estibot can help you filter out the junk and if you’ve never made a dime in Domaining and Estibot says that every domain in your portfolio is worth under $100, there’s a good chance your portfolio is junk.
Okay now that we have that out of the way let’s take the second step in figuring out which names to drop. Now that you have the list of names to drop from Part 1 we’re going to filter through that list to make sure that there are no potential gems hiding in there, that’s what Part 2 is about.
Step 2: Take the domains that Estibot indicated were $100 or less and plug them into the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Any with an exact match search volume above 500 and a CPC above $5 that you still want to keep, add back into your portfolio. Any that have less than 500 exact-match searches and a CPC below $5 will move onto Step 3, the final elimination round!
Thanks for all the great comments on Part 1. As always whether good or bad I want you to always feel comfortable sharing your opinion on my blog! Comment and let your voice be heard!
