So you’re laying in bed dreaming about what it would be like to have millions of dollars. Hell, me too, join the club. But how do we turn that dream into a reality? I obviously haven’t done it yet, otherwise I’d be writing this from a tropical beach resort instead of from the couch of my 1 bedroom apartment. However, I do find comfort in the fact that even in the serious world of business, it usually takes some crazy dream to get people talking. And that’s what it’s all about, having that crazy dream. And if you have that crazy dream than you should probably already know that sometimes you have to slow down, because there’s always someone out there looking to pull a fast one on you.
And so we come to the issue of patience. God damn, it can be the death of us all if we let it. We’re all in such a hurry to get rich, because we’re all terrified that if we don’t make it happen fast enough that eventually we’ll start to lose that dream. It truly is a horrific thought, because if we aren’t successful, than what shall we do with ourselves? I don’t know, maybe I only speak for myself, but this is how I think. Living a mediocre existence for the rest of my days isn’t exactly my dream, I don’t know about any of you.
But even with these dreams of wealth and the excitement that the idea of acquiring such wealth brings, we must still maintain our composure. You read about domain sales all of the time, or at least you should, 25k for this domain, 30k for this one, etc… And you think, hey I’ve got some nice names that I think are probably worth as much as that.
For example. I own OnlineDashboard.com. I acquired this name on a drop. I’m asking $25k for it. It doesn’t get a lot of traffic, the term doesn’t have a lot of search results, etc… However, dashboard software is becoming more popular in every industry and buyers are going to want online dashboards so they can check their figures on the run. Not to mention that some of these software packages can cost $5k per license. Would I accept less? Maybe… But we’re talking a small percentage of variance from my asking price.
See, the thing you have to keep in mind is that if you want to see your domain up on that list of high dollar sales, you actually have to own domains that you’re going to be negiotating for at high prices. But I am not talking about the domain. Remove the domain from the picture. Forget the domain completely, because I’m talking purely about price. If you aren’t asking 25k for a domain, you most likely won’t make 25k on a domain. You see how that works? Maybe you’ll get lucky and get an email from an end user with a straight out offer for 25k, I don’t know, anything is possible, but unless you own some really great domains, that’s not likely to happen very often.
So do this. Look at your list of domains and just pick your top 5 names. Obviously I don’t expect you to do this with your entire portfolio, you may need to flip some domains for cash flow or what have you, but just pick your top 5 domains. Create a seperate file and call it something like Top 5 Domains.txt or Ronald’s Crazy Experiment.txt, whatever you want… List your top five domains in the file and save it. Now look at each name and think about how much you would like to get for it. 5k, 10k, 25k, 50k, 100k, whatever. Try to keep it reasonable in the sense that a random company would actually be able to afford to buy it, but just give it a nice value that you would love to get for that name. Once you have the prices for each than save the file.
Now you have your Top 5 or what I like to call my Dream Core. Feel free to invent your very own term. Now the Dream Core (or whatever you call it) is sort of isolated in time and space. Everything else is moving along back and forth in a light tunnel, buying, selling, searching, etc… But the Dream Core exists outside of your day to day domaining activities. Because the Dream Core has patience. It just sits there, waiting to achieve it’s goal. And it’s only goal is to sell the domains within it for the prices listed next to each one.
If you start to make money in domaining and start to acquire better quality domains, you can certainly choose to swap out names with better ones. You can even add more or subtract out names from your Dream Core. You do whatever you like. The entire point is just that you have some names set aside at prices that allow you to dream.
Everyone knows that traffic is king, but what do we do with those domains that don’t have any? A lot of people are of the belief that if a domain can not pay for it’s yearly renewals via parking, than it isn’t worth owning. Nonsense! I have made a few very nice $x,xxx sales on domains that had barely any traffic and made no revenue from parking. Most of these I’ve actually been able to sell within a year or two of acquiring, so renewals weren’t my major concern. I buy low and sell high, so my ROI is usually tremendous, though I don’t own a terribly large number of domains, so sales are sporadic at best. However, I wanted to find a way to monetize these domains if possible, rather than letting them collect dust parked at Sedo.
