Topic: I'm reviewing my domain name business to focus on Bitcoin (Read 193 times)

Older post, but why do you concentrate on .com names?  People just click nowadays - they don't care what the extension is. 

I purchased two seven letter domain names last month alone.  (Example:  sava.one)

I could give you an idea in this way.
Last year I had the brilliant idea to find nightclubs from my city and I searched all names with .club extension. I registered some of them which was available and sold them 500x higher.

I paid around around 0.99 usd from namecheap for one and I sold with 500 usd. 

The hardest part is in finding names that you can use to make money. You can buy names on the domainer forums, and wholesaler rates tendto be about 10% of the end user price, and that price difference reflects the difficulty you may have in selling names, especially if you haven't bult a retail selling site. You can use the auction sites,but the costs are fairly high, and there is no guarantee that you will sell for a profit if you are new to the industry.

One low cost way to gain experience is to use expired lists like Expired domains, and I am a member of that service. You should be aware that any names on that list will have been picked over at various stages before it gets to the list, and people wait to see the latest drops as they appear in the list,and they will grab anything that interests them as soon as it appears. This means that you will miss a good name if you do any research before you attempt to register it. I pay less than $9 for a registration, and this is possibly the cheapest way to own a viable name if you can judge its value quickly. I would start with this service, and register a couple of names. Many names offer free market sites and sales landing pages, so you should use one of those.

Valuing a name is quite difficult, as like all sales products, itd value is what somebody will pay for it. Valuation sites can help, but they are not very accurate. One service worth looking at is GoDaddy domain appraisal. Lets take my latest acquisition, and this is a "hand registered" name. This means I explored some possibilities, and found that it was available, and thus it cost me less than $9 for ownership of a one year renewable lease. This is GuardPets.com. I posted the link as I am currently building an experimental landing page and site, and I can discuss this in subsequent posts if there is enough interest. Godaddy values this at $1,500, and the keyword "guard" has average sales results of $1,999. Guard dogs are an expanding interest in the current economic crisis, so I may ask for 0.3 Bitcoin for an immediate sale. In the meantime, I will add some information pages, and some paid links to earn some revenue whilst I wait for a sale. Once I've worked out the basic structure of the site, and affrf dsome useful content, then I do a bit of search optimisation and link promotion.

I looked at some other keyword sequences, and PetsGuard.com is available for purchased at £3,474.50, and Huge Domains are offering GuardPet.com for $2,095, so I am quite pleased to have found this name, although I suspect it will take some time to find a buyer.

just having a snazzy name isnt going to get you massive income. its pot luck getting a desirable name that someone hasnt already thought of. and alot of time effort to then promote that its available

companies would rather change their brand then be made hostage to domain squatters 'lease fee' offer
companies would rather take a domain squatter to court rather than being made hostage

domain squatting is not profitable. and most just try to 'buy and flip' as quick as possible and in mass domain name amounts.
you wont get rich owning 1 domain and hoping to 10000x the value. forget it

many companies would rather find the domain registrar. inform them that they own trademarks and get them to not allow the squatter to renew next year. and they just wait a year and take it over for $10 and pay $100 for a 10 year contract to keep it

many websites value is in if it provides a service that actually has a high viewer count
take this forum. it may have only cost theymos a few dollars. but it can be worth a lot now
not just the domain notoriety. but also the data content of number of users. and the other stuff of meta data they can grab and sell

its better to make a domain with a purpose and spend that time making it worthy of a value. and then sell it
so find the niche service not the nice name

There is no simple answer to that. At the moment I am dealing almost exclusively with .com names, so my cooments are related to them. Other extensions are broadly similar though.

You need to think of a name as a leasehold house.You don't own the name, but you have the right to use it as long as you pay the annual rental fee, and there are some protections as long as you do this. The annual cost of a lease is less than $10, and you need to add hosting to that if you want to host your own landing page. Just like a house, you can make money in a variety of ways, you can rent it, or sell the lease. You can get paid to display advertising, or you can run membership clubs. Of course you can combine those to obtain revenue whilst you wait for a sale.

Flipping is buying or registering a name, and selling it within one month. Registering is finding an unused name, and claiming it through your registrar, all you pay for that is the registration fee. Buying a name is purchasing the lease from the current owner. In this case you have to pay a purchase price, and there may be some extra fees such as escrow, or adding an extra year to the lease agreement.

The skill comes from finding a good name at a price that is below market value, and then finding a buyer who will provide a profit. You may find one almost immediately, or it could take a few years to find the right buyer. In the meantime, you have to cover the ownership costs, and you can do this from advertising revenue.

I have always been curious about this market. Have you sold many domains? Is it worth holding them and paying their annuity?

Investing and dealing in domain names sits nicely alongside Bitcoin. I've decided it's rime I did something with the names I have, and maybe I should pick up a few more as the global markets change. Would any of you guys be interested in discussions about finding, monetising and selling domain names to accumulate Bitcoin?