Domaining - The Dark Arts

Posted on 18th June 2008

Ok so the title is a little misleading but the whole subject of expired domains, domain parking, domain tasting and everything else associated with being a domainer is a bit of a black box to me. I say this because in my experience it’s a niche which is not only exclusive to a select few thousand individuals (everyone else I would classify as casual domainers) but more so very little real information on how domaining is done is available.

That’s why I call it a dark art, it has a level of mysteriousness and unknowns not found in other webmaster specialisations. Time and time again I read articles about domaining and the domain name industry only to finish the article feeling empty because the author merely covered the observable surface facts making no real attempt to answer the why’s and how’s of what actually goes on.

If you compare this to other webmaster subjects like web design, programming and even seo, then simply heading over to Google, Wikipedia, a webmaster forum or even buying a book from the local store will answer a lot of your questions. Combine that reading with some hands on experience and within 6-7 months you’re pretty much ready to go.

Try that with domaining and you won’t even get to the lets start practicing for 6-7 months part. The best you will find in terms of information is a couple of explanations on what domaining is, how cyber squatters gave domaining a bad name, and that professional domainers are making a killing online. Honestly there’s a lot of talk on the web but very little substance and hardly any practical tips on how to get started.

The Webmaster Void

Ok so there isn’t much on the web so what do you do next ? For me it was simple, I started asking around and being a full time webmaster I had friends and contacts who I thought might be able to help. I had scratched their backs in the past so surely they would scratch mine in my time of need ? Under normal circumstances you would expect someone like me to come back with some insights into the subject but my friends actually knew less than I did, this was a serious knock back but simply reconfirmed my initial thoughts about the scarcity of good practical domaining knowledge.

With no answers available I got a little desperate and fired a question on the digitalpoint (DP) forums. Surely what I wanted to know wasn’t a big deal right ? I mean all I needed from someone was an explanation of a) where people buy expiring domains from ? and b) with over 100,000+ domains expiring everyday even if just half of these go to auction it’s quite obvious that tools are needed to filter out the good from the bad. Can you filter domains by pagerank, traffic, age, alexa rank etc ? All perfectly decent questions don’t you think ? Surely someone would respond ?

You guessed it, I got a big fat zero responses to my post and with no luck trying to find decent information on the web I was beginning to lose hope. However like most things you seem to find what you need when you least expect it. It was only a few days later that I randomly bumped into an old friend on MSN. We got chatting and he happened to mention that he had previously dabbled in domain auctions. He wasn’t exactly an expert but he did point me in the right direction, which ultimately meant a bunch of links that included auction sites and some research tools he had used in the past (none of them free or cheap for that matter).

The 4 Keys To Success

Anyway armed with my friends links I went about signing up to his recommendations as well as some other sites I found along the way. After blowing almost $400 on tools and spending another 3-4 days testing them, I quickly realised there are four things you absolutely need to get started as a domainer:

• A source that generates a daily list of domains that are expiring, dropping and/or in auction.
• A tool to help you analyse these domains and filter out the stuff you don’t want.
• Access to the domain auction sites where these domains are exchanging hands.
• Some spare cash because being a domainer isn’t cheap.

In short once you have the above you can at least start to trade and gain experience as a domainer. In total I spent $800 on this discovery experience (approx $400 on tools and another $400 on actual domain auctions). Despite this upfront cost I now have a half decent understanding of how domaining works and more importantly the tools to help me find the domains I so desperately want.

Show Me The Money !!!

By now I’m sure you’re all desperate to hear which tools and auction markets are the best to go for. In fact for many including myself the auction markets I disclose may not come as a surprise but what will be of interest are the tools that I’m about to recommend.

These tools will not only help you research large lists of domains but ultimately make the whole selection and isolation phase of domain purchase possible. Lets just say without these tools picking quality domains is exactly like finding a needle in a hay stack. So let’s take a look below.

Domain Lists

My recommendation for getting daily updated domain lists is premiumdomains (PD). It costs around $25 per month and in my eyes is easily one of the best sources for domain lists on the net.

Filtering The Domain Lists

There are 2 ways to do this and you should only do one or the other so read carefully.

• Option 1: Domain Research Tool (DRT)

Domain Research Tool (see below for a $100 discount) is a desktop based research application that you can use to filter and analyse your domain lists. It’s developed and owned by the same guys that own premiumdrops (PD) which means as a bonus you can import your domain lists from your PD account with the click of a button (a very handy featured indeed).

Not only is this tool powerful but absolutely amazing at generating some great analytics from your domain lists. There is no tool that matches this for detail but I must warn you it may seem a little complex to the newbie webmaster, so if you want something a little more basic then look at option 2 (listed below).

$100 Discount: This tool is normally priced at $249 but if you want to save $100 and get this for just $149 then click this special link.

• Option 2: Freshdrops (FD)

FreshDrops is great if you’re after something a little cheaper and of course straightforward. It’s $32.95 per month and unlike DRT is 100% online based. The site sources and manages its own domain lists meaning you don’t have to subscribe to a 3rd party provider like premiumdrops.

Freshdrops definitely consolidates things making your life as a newbie domainer much easier. It lets you search through a pretty decent list of domains and even lets you filter by pagerank, age and a couple of other criteria. However just remember that these online searches are no way as powerful as DRT. 

You get what you pay for but saying that if you’re new to domaining the options available to you aren’t half bad. FD is probably the most cost effective method of tasting the whole domaining experience and as such is my recommended site for most people. On the other hand if you’re a little more confident in your abilities try out DRT because in the long run it’s the tool to have.

Domain Markets

Although there are a whole range of domain markets ready for you to jump into, I strongly suggest you keep things simple and spend time on just 1-2 sites to begin with. For this purpose my recommendations are below:

• http://www.tdnam.com (GoDaddys domain auction site, $5 signup fee, good variety and cheap)
• http://www.snapnames.com (Very reliable, good variety of domains, a little more pricey)

For reference other domain sites include Pool, NameJet, Tucows, Sedo and a couple of others that escape me right now.

Final Words

Just remember domaining is not easy, you need a budget, some practice, some luck and a lot of late nights doing your research. Despite all of these things there is no reason why you can’t use the tools and recommendations I have made to good effect.

For me getting into the domaining scene has been a win win situation. Even if I never engage it on a full time basis (because my root skills still lie with web development) I now have the tools to pick up all sorts of expired domains whenever I want. 

Combining these high pagerank, highly aged domains with fresh content, a new design and some seo could produce some really smashing sites. These would no doubt monetise much quicker than a domain registered with no history thus making my life as website flipper much much easier.

Domaining also brings with it other opportunities like traffic redirection which could be beneficial to me further down the line. All these points just go to show how useful basic domaining skills are for modern day webmasters.

In closing I’m sure I’m heading down a path with many twists and turns, so expect more commentary from me on this absolutely massive subject area. I will also try my best to share any cool stories and experiences as I start purchasing more domains. 

The SignatureBar Story - Part 1

Posted on 16th May 2008

Signaturebar.com cost me $900 back in July 2006 and was one of the first sites to enter my investment portfolio. In fact back then it wasn’t much of a portfolio or a business just a single website purchased with the intention to redevelop (a purely experimental endeavour at the time).

During my ownership the site underwent multiple changes allowing it to mature and more importantly grow both in terms of traffic and revenue. After the first year I received offers in the region of $10,000 which isn’t bad for a project that started out as an experiment. Fortunately I declined them all as not only is the site worth a lot more now but it’s continuing to grow and develop at a steady pace.

In fact a lot of what I’ve learnt about search engines, web development and community management came from my work on signaturebar.com. This series of articles is aimed at sharing the highs and lows of what it takes to truly redevelop a website and more so focus on the types of actions required to turn a bog standard $1000 website into something worth much much more.

By splitting the signturebar story over 3-5 separate posts Im hoping things will a) be more digestable and b) easier for me to explain and cover the many aspects of web development during a typical investment project.

So lets get to the details and start looking at what I went through when purchasing the site. You already know how much I paid for it but where did I get it from and what did it look like back then ? Well the venue was sitepoint.com (you can still check the original market place auction here). Take a quick read of the details but in summary the key plus points that went through my head when purchasing this site are listed below:

• It had a reasonably active forum community
• It had some earnings (approx $10-$30 per month)
• It offered a free service, people just love free stuff
• The previous owner looked after the site very well so it had some goodwill

For many of you the above points might not seem worthy of the $900 price tag (that’s over 30 months revenue and people usually only pay 12-24 months) but that’s what makes the whole business of flipping and developing web sites so great. It’s an art and there’s no right price, or way of knowing whether you paid too much or too little until you come to sell the site. It’s a highly unpredictable business and in my case I probably paid above the market rate but it’s not so much how cheap you buy a site but what you do with it after acquisition.

That’s an important concept to grasp because too many people focus simply on buying a site as cheap as possible rather than spending the time to analyse whether the site is suitable for them and carries the right ingredients for long term growth. Im not saying don’t try to grab a bargain but just remember
under one owner a site could lay dormant and untapped whilst the very same site under different ownership can come alive. I have seen it happen time and time again so you need to make sure the site is not only suitable to redevelop but more importantly suitable for you and your skill set.

For me signaturebar was a good match, it had the potential to develop over the long term and more so I felt comfortable with the subject area and how I might go about promoting it. My previously listed points were what stood out as success factors when purchasing and ultimately justified why I ended up paying the buy it now (BIN) price so quickly. A couple of hundred dollars too much back in July 2006 is minor compared to the growth I have achieved till now. It’s always more important to make sure you feel comfortable with a site before seeing how much of a discount you can lock in on purchase. It will save you a lot of time, money and heartache if you pay a little more but get the right site.

Anyway getting back to the case study one positive point I forgot to mention in the list above was that the site had a few major flaws that needed work immediately. That’s actually a very good thing for the buyer because it’s through these types of major flaws that you can very quickly add value and thus profit. The first thing which stood out like a sore thumb was the whole look and feel. See for yourself I have posted some screenshots below (grabbed courtesy of archive.org). Not only did the forums and the main site have two completely different skins but for a digital art site it just looked wrong.

The second problem was that other than a few adwords campaigns and the site getting a few new users via word of mouth recommendations it had no overall growth plan and was getting very little traffic from the search engines. It was ranked well for the term “userbars” but with a great name like signaturebar.com why limit yourself to userbar art only. There were countless other terms to rank for and these would all require some search engine optimisation work (funnily enough I didn’t know much about seo back then, but I learnt).

So that’s where the project started and this first post ends. Part 1 of the signaturebar story is really just an introduction to the overall case study. In part 2 I’m going to cover more detail on the actual changes I applied and how the site reacted to those changes. Im hoping this series of articles will be helpful to webmasters around the world and anyone who might be interested in getting into web development projects.

Remember if you found this article useful or simply want me to cover other sites within my portfolio please leave me a comment or even better sign up to the forums for more webmaster discussions.

Demons & The 1st Post

Posted on 26th April 2008

As a programmer I should have started my first post with “Hello World” but due to the nature of the site and the demon branding I thought I would atleast explain why I chose a demon as my mascot. The truth is I’ve always thought demons were cool, I love science fiction and as a child spent way too much time reading Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone books. I guess it warped my mind into thinking demons, magic and warriors were cool things. So there you go that’s why I chose a demon as my online persona, the trade being slapped on because I started life as an eBay trader which I still do whenever I have time. 

So despite thinking Im some sort of demon that makes money online I’m actually a pretty normal guy and started this site and the forums in an attempt to share what I do online. Now the best way to describe what I do is that I buy and build websites with the goal of income generation. Some projects are fixer uppers others are fresh builds. After putting a little work into them if the income is good I usually sit on them for a while otherwise I have the option to sell them on for more than I invested (also known as flipping websites). Read the full article »