When it comes to domain sales, it doesn’t matter what the proper wording is… Just try to sell as many of your domains to the buyers that you do deal with one way or another… So, this weekend I had an “end-user” contact me out of the blue in regards to CalgaryTourism.org which was a hand reg… So we bargained a bit back and forth and then agreed on a fair price. I have hundreds of these tourism domains, and am not attached to a single one. Easy decision.. Sell!

Once that deal was done with, I immediately offered him two more similar domains that are in Canada which there is a good chance he would be interested in acquiring as well if the price was right. So I said I have VancouverTourism.org and TorontoTourism.org as well… I gave him a nice price on both, and it was a done deal… Quick and easy. Everybody is happy. Win-win.

“Upselling is a sales technique whereby a person induces the customer to purchase more expensive items, upgrades, or other add-ons in an attempt to make a more profitable sale. Upselling usually involves marketing more profitable services or products, but upselling can also be simply exposing the customer to other options he or she may not have considered previously. Upselling implies selling something that is more profitable or otherwise preferable for the seller instead of, or in addition to the original sale. A different technique is cross-selling in which a seller tries to sell something else.

In practice, large businesses usually combine up-selling and cross-selling techniques to enhance the value that the client or clients get from the organization in addition to maximizing the profit that the business gets from the client. In doing so, the organization must ensure that the relationship with the client is not disrupted.”

That is a quick summary of what this is all courtesy of Wikipedia… So if you haven’t been doing this so far, I’d suggest you get familiar and give it a try. There is a lot of money to be made up-selling and cross-selling domains. I’ve been doing it forever now, as I always prefer to do bulk deals.

Domaining is very similar to playing the lottery but ultimately the end-result depends on your ability to shop around the domain during a set time frame and hopefully get it sold one way or another. How much? Whatever you can get… The market will set the price. You always hear all this talk about end-users all the freakin time… Blah!!

They rarely come knocking on your door, and you simply cannot rely on that as your main source of income. Especially not for your hand regged domains. Those are long shots… Dude. Get real! Unless your name is Frank Schilling or Kevin Ham who got end-users all up their ass 24/7/365… Your domains are long-shot lottery tickets, and  not even the most promising ones at that 

Look, it does happen… You can get lucky a lot more than once or twice in this game if you have the right keyword domains, but you gotta put in the hard work to be truly successful. I see most domains exactly as lottery tickets, with yearly expiration dates and an easy given option to renew if so desired. Most domains I buy I usually try to flip within a couple of month’s nowadays. I am not in this for the long run.

So when I get an “end-user” contact me out of nowhere for a hand regged domain such as LAXSTORE DOT NET the other week, I say “$499 and it’s all yours” and a few days later we have a done deal. Literally 5 minutes of work involving a few e-mail communications… You take the money, forget about that domain and move on-to the next deal.

Then I had another “end-user” sale last week from a guy who inquired about AVVA DOT NET. We bargained a bit back and forth, but ultimately met somewhere in the middle and made the deal happen at $800. It took a bit of hand holding to get the transfer completed as it sometimes does with people who aren’t that technical or familiar with the process, but probably 20 mins total of work put in… Still, not a bad result right?

The end-users are definitely out there, for all kinds of domains… Even .net, which is often overlooked by many domainers who call themselves pros… Problem is I don’t know too many domainers that make a lot of money or most of their money on end user sales because there isn’t a ton of them.

It’s up-to you to make the most of your domains, and that is done by marketing and listing them everywhere where it makes sense to. So what that it didn’t sell first or second time around and it’s been a few month’s? You try again next month, and then next month… You have one year. It’s a different pool of buyers every day pretty much. So if you do have a good domain, keep going at it. Don’t give up… But if you do not get any action, in other words not even a lowball offer or maybe even a trade… Well, that means you got crap. When the renewal time comes around, you should know what to do

I just learned that the domain Flowers.mobi was re-sold for $6,500 just the other day from it’s original owner… OUCH! It was purchased by Rick Schwartz for $200,000 just a few years ago when the .mobi extension was being hyped up as the next big thing because a “mobile” boom was coming… Some said it was a good investment, others right there and then said it was very stupid and to avoid.

I wasn’t a loudmouth back then… No blogging or too much public interaction as I went about my biz quietly. Mostly kept my investment strategies within the domain biz and other thoughts to myself, but my actions speak for themselves… I never ever believed the .mobi extension had or still has a chance to shine. That is why I never spent a dime on it. Portfolio is clear of this .mobi garbage. I wouldn’t even know what to do with .mobi domains if I was given the most premium ones for FREE… I’d say “THANKS BUT NO THANKS”

So anyways… In order to make it as an investor over the long run and be successful, not just as a domainer (domain investor type) but any type of buy-low-and-then-sell-high guy… You have to learn how to lose money first and do so really well. Doesn’t matter whether it’s few hundred bucks or hundreds of thousands… It’s the hands-on experience and lessons you take away from each and every deal.

Until you can learn how to accept the fact that you just blew all that money… You won’t have a breakthrough… Then another breakthrough… Then it becomes a pattern, thanks to the experience. Sure, there will get a hiccup here and there, everybody has bad days but gotta look at the bigger picture.

When you make speculative investments, everything is possible.  A million scenario’s… You can lose it all faster than the thought of making that deal occurred inside your heard. Now I still think flowers.mobi was absolutely a shit investment even at $6,500 but to each his own. The market has spoken. It was worth that much to somebody…. Only he and god knows the reasoning behind the purchase.

I’ve blown my fair share of money over the years on some very stupid stuff and who hasn’t?? Some on very expensive domains that never had the chance… Some on very expensive girls… But it’s all good. Live and learn

http://www.indashcdplayers.net

http://www.indashcarstereo.net

http://www.indashdvd.net

http://www.indashsystems.com

http://www.indashmp3.net

http://www.indashtv.net

http://www.indashnavigation.net

http://www.indashtelevision.com

http://www.indashcomputer.com

http://www.indashmp3player.com

http://www.indashlcd.com

http://www.indashtouchscreen.com

http://www.indashradio.com

Offers $1000+ welcome for all 13 sites… Selling as a group only. As you can see, they are currently setup as Amazon powered affiliate based stores 100% on auto-pilot. Everything has been taken care of as far as web development is concerned; design, store configuration, product selection, search engine optimization and even monetization (Amazon product feeds and Google AdSense textlinks)

Sale includes the domain + existing website/content + content management system. Some sites are already well established with the search engines and have rankings. Don’t ask for stats or anything else. Do your homework… Basically what you see is what you get. Sold “as is”.

About a dozen names total I see being offered for sale such as netlog.co, fotolog.co, metacafe.co, ebaumsworld.co, collegehumor.co, etc. Obviously they are all mostly TM infringements on extremely popular and well established websites / brands…. But whatever, to each his own.

So, these group of dozen domains below generated 71,000 type-ins (unique visitors) over the past 3 or so month’s… Not bad, right? But the parking revenue is just terrible. Only 425 clicks which total up to a whopping $58 in revenue!! Ouch. I guess this traffic isn’t all that valuable. DOH!!

When I was checking my e-mail earlier this morning and I saw the message from info@hotbrands.com come in… I said to myself, hmm… Those 12 domains look kind of familiar.

“Hello,

Please see the attached file. We are selling a group of top traffic .co domains. The screenshot show the past months of traffic. Impressive volume of traffic. However parked pages are not the best way of optimizing those. I’m sure this traffic would be more valuable if used somehow differently.

Our price for ALL domains is 6500EUR

Please let know if you are interested,

Best regards,

Antypas Makis
CEO, HotBrands.com”

Right… Then I remembered that I came across some of those domains about 2 month’s ago. This guy who is apparently from Greece was selling them over at DomainState.com which you can see for yourself, under a thread titled Huge traffic .co for sale. Fast forward two and a half month’s later, I guess there hasn’t been too much interest in these, and now the guy is spamming random domainers… Trying to offload them and move on.

Personally, I bought into only a few hundred .CO’s which I was lucky enough to get rid off already. I have about 8 or 9 domains left which I still need to get rid off and wash my hands clean. I won’t be buying anymore .CO domains… I made some decent money on these flips, and I am sure many other domainers will as well so long as you follow a few basic principles.What they are, you should already know… If you don’t, then you shouldn’t be fucking around with this stuff to begin with… IDIOT!

The fella who has owned this domain for the past 5 years is willing to part with it for only thirty grand looks like… It’s currently receiving  close to 3,000 unique visitors daily. I kinda like the domain to tell you the truth! It is catchy and has a nice ring to it… Plus all that added traffic is a nice bonus. I wonder how long it will take for this one to sell and who will be the buyer

Flipping domains is a numbers game all the way. I’ve been doing this for a long long time and what I can tell you all is that the more you try, the more successful you will become at it and the more money you will make. It’s all about consistency.

Take for example DogCostumes.net which I sold the other week for $1,200.. Now this domain I shopped around last year just about everywhere you can imagine and I had no takers for it, when I had it priced at only $500. So I decided to develop it later on… Set and forget.

Not much happened with it though as far as getting the traffic and sales I was expecting, so I decided to sell it and move on, because halloween is coming up real soon and I’d figure if it was to fetch a decent price from end-users / domainers… It would be now. Luckily for me, it did just that at almost 15X ROI.

You win some you lose some when flipping domains, especially at places such as BargainDomains.com but overall it’s fun and there is some decent money to be made if you know what you are doing and do so consistently with some good keyword domains.

Remember, it’s a numbers game. Nothing fancy schmancy about domain flipping… It’s really as simple as that. The more domains you list, the better your chances are at scoring a lot more winners at the end of the day. I originally purchased DogCostumes.net for $79 so it was a good flip at $1,200+ don’t you think?

Some of you may or may not know of Richard Gabriel… He recently sold Call.com for $1.1m, DropShippers.com for $1.5m, Auction.com for $1.7m and two other mega-sales in recent years which have gone unreported: Hgh.com for close to $6m and PlasticSurgeons.com for a cool $18m.

Who the hell would drop $18m on a domain that valuates at only $87,000? LOL… That is pretty crazy, right? No. The company who acquired PlasticSurgeons.com is noneother than Moxy Media aka Tsavo aka SWI aka like a million other things… I lost count. It’s impossible to keep up with their entity names becuase they seem to re-structure and so on every year or less… I wonder why

They needed the domain for their newly launched venture called ExpertHub. I’ve wrote about them before over a year ago over at WannaDevelop.com actually. All I can tell you is that… They are an interesting bunch with a fascinating history that have been around for a while who do a lot behind the scenes and fly under the radar as much as possible, hence the millions of different names they operate under and many divisions.

Moxy Media received $160M in funding from AmericanCapital.com back in early 2007. American Capital is a publicly traded private equity firm and global asset manager with $14 billion in capital resources under management. So few month’s later, loaded with all this money… Moxy Media / ExpertHub shelled out lots of cash for quite a few category killer domains.

I am sure PlasticSurgeons.com wasn’t the only ultra-expensive domain, but all of the biggest domain deals always happen behind the scenes and almost always go unreported. I just so happen to stumble across Richard Gabriel’s domain portfolio website and the prices for the marked sold domains were right there. Great!

Anyways, a few month’s ago ExpertHub.com was acquired by Internet Brands who is a huge player in the vertical media / community niche… They have over 100 unique properties and do close to $100 million annually in revenue… How much did they shell out for ExpertHub? We don’t know, but definitely in the low-mid 8 figures I’d say.

So you gotta wonder… What is the REAL highest price paid for a domain ever? $14m and $18m is a lot of money, without a doubt, but I think there have been even bigger deals over the years. Frank Schilling has put out a nice post recently which explains… “The World Changes But Domain Names Stay The Same” and he’s so right.

Values of category leading domains in health, finance, entertainment and few other “easy and big money” niches will always increase, today, tomorrow… Next year, the year after that, etc… and if they are put to good use thanks to proper development… Cha-ching $$$$$$

Yup, that’s right… But wait, he is not the only one. Kevin Ham does too! Between the two of them, they own well over 800,000 top keyword domains, modestly valued at a minimum $500 million today easily and maybe even as high as $1 billion… Depends who you ask

So why are they selling lots of their domains you ask? It’s simple, really… Called “house cleaning” where you try to get rid of domains that aren’t too important to you (most likely because they are not making any / enough PPC revenue) or as domain insiders like to call this offloading “liquidating non strategic domains”.

I noticed a new sales pitch on many of Frank Schilling’s premium keyword domains such as tweets.com, shelves.com, hockey.net, funquiz.com, etc.. Promoting DomainNameSales.com / Proforma Inc. Domain Brokerage Services… It’s presented in an animated flash banner in the middle of the landing pages which scroll a nice and to the point sales pitch. It goes a little something like this:

“Small business has always been one of the best investments

A high quality domain name is like prime real estate

Browse our portfolio of domains

Choose the right domain name

Buy a domain name and change your business destiny”

Kevin Ham’s domain sales website DomainBrokers.com has a pretty nice sales pitch as well, right on the main page it communicates the following:

“It all starts with the name

Owning the right domain name for yourself or your business can mean the difference between success or failure”

Pretty short, sweet and right to the point… They also had this to say as an intro on their homepage to further reinforce the sales pitch.

“In this day and age, the development of a great brand is dependent on having a strong online presence. This in part is dictated by owning the matching domain name for your brand or better yet, by owning the premium generic domain for your category”

Overall, both messages are very powerful and should get the job done. It really doesn’t require much sweet talking when it comes to selling domain names because a good domain usually sells it self but still… If you can’t afford any of Frank Schilling’s or Kevin Ham’s domains, no worries. You can find plenty of goodies over at the Domain Stryker lists. For as low as $25 – $60 you can score plenty of deals!

Once again there is a lot of buzz surrounding IDN domain names and ccTLD’s within the domaining community… So lets see, is there really any money to be made with these kinds of domains in 2010 and moving forward? Yes there is but first you have to understand a couple of very basic principles and avoid the hype.

You gotta understand that when everybody is talking about something freely, that means that the opportunity has been mined and had…  Most bloggers and media is talking about it just because somebody else is talking about it and that doesn’t necessarily mean that the investment opportunity here in IDN’s or ccTLD’s is a good one but who the hell verifies anything this days? No need… Because they take you for a fool. Yes, you… They feed you all this bullshit and you just eat it all up because it sounds so fun and exciting… YUM YUMM!

I remember few years ago when a bunch of IDN’ers popped up onto Rick Schwartz private forum and they went at it non stop rambling about all of the potential, trying to brainswash myself and others… Trying to get us behind the whole concept and on the bandwagon before it’s too late.

We tried to understand them but unfortunately we were speaking a different language it seemed. Nobody could provide any proof or make sense of things. Those IDN enthusiasts and die hard supporters of the next big thing got banned from Rick Schwartz’ forum within a few days by the man himself.

Lets face it… Most domainers and other up-and-comers in the do it yourself internet business are sheep and have the follower mentality. Maybe one out of a hundred or even five hundred is an actual leader who can come up with original ideas and dig up their own niche-within-a-niche and capitalize time and time over and over again.

Rick Schwartz’ private forum had some of the greatest domain investors of all time and those IDN’ers failed to even make an impression or provide one sound argument… But nowadays, the messages and misinformation is being spread across various other channels.

There is some valuable IDN and ccTLD domains… The category defining ones with type-in traffic that can be converted into dollars one way or another. The cream of the crop. Unfortunately all of these domains were had a long time ago by insiders… Domainers and techies who keep their mouth shut. Ones who go about their biz quietly, avoiding the spotlight as much as possible and for a very good reason.

Lets rewind for a bit… In the early years of 2001, 2002, etc… while most non US based domainers in France, Germany, Italy, etc… were following what everybody else was doing in the domaining biz, which was buying up gTLD domains such as com/net/org because those were proven extensions and selling for big bucks, only a handful had the brains to invest and diversify into other extensions, such as ccTLD’s which had a well established internet infrastructure and penetration that was increasing consistently year over year over year.

So even all those hundreds and even thousands of local domainers in Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, China, etc… couldn’t capitalize on their own ground… They missed their opportunities, in their own markets… They missed it on home soil. Most of them got the scraps left over from the real pros.

So I really find it quite hilarious seeing people from India, Mexico, Spain or Israel… Nowadays investing in ccTLD’s and IDN domains in Europe or Asia for example, when of course their kinda too late to the party. The biggest opportunity was right under their noses early on, and they had the edge by knowing local language, culture, economy, etc… But nope, they missed it.

Look, there is money to be made with any kind of traffic, but not a whole lot. Let me illustrate it this way which should make sense with a real life example: Somebody slips, falls and breaks something in a mall in Russia or Taiwan or Pakistan or Egypt or wherever… It’s highly unlikely that they are going to be able to file a lawsuit or win shit. They probably won’t even be able to get their medical expenses taken care of. They will probably get a kick in the ass and be told to go fuck themselves. That’s just the way it works in those parts of the world.

It’s really nothing new and that’s just the way it is in those countries, most countries in the world actually… While in the US, a slip and fall lawsuit can result in millions of dollars won in damages because the US justice system is well established and quite unique unlike any other. Now there are still some lawyers who handle cases and lawsuits filed in local courts in Russia, Mexico, China, etc… You just don’t get much as far as payouts go. A doctor’s malpractice will get you maybe 1/100th of what it would in the USA or Canada. You get what I am saying.

So traffic from all these international countries really isn’t all that valuable.. Even the most targeted. The US infrastructure and current internet ecosystem (publishing/advertisers) is very advanced, while the rest of the world is still playing catch up. Unfortunately all this killer ccTLD domains and IDN domains may have all this traffic but nowhere to convert into dollars, in other words to cash in. That is the problem that investors in these emerging markets have faced for 10 to 15 years… That is the problem you will face if you don’t do your homework.

We all know that category killer keyword domains get type in traffic and really, ccTLD domains and IDN’s are no exception, they get lots of traffic as well, but where the hell do you monetize it… How?? So before you decide to invest in any of these domains, ask yourself this question and you better be able to answer it, otherwise you will end up paying thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for domains that produce a whole lot of nothing… Just headaches!

So don’t believe the hype. Do due diligence. Seek the truth… It’s up-to you to put together the pieces of the puzzle and make sure that everything is 110% clear and makes sense. See first hand that this international traffic converts and then you can begin to talk about it with friends, blog about it and maybe even invest more heavily, just as you do with the proven top three gTLD’s which are .com/net/org which everybody just loves and for a very good reason… WORLDWIDE