Do you have to pay a big bucks for names to make big profits on them? No. Are the only good names already taken and do you have to bid them up at dropcatchers to get them? No. Decent names abound at low prices and can even still be hand registered.

To illustrate, in the last week, I sold seven names. All were purchased in the last year. Three were hand registered and four were picked up at tdnam for $5 to $15 dollars, plus registration fee. What did I gross on those names? $5,240.

That’s $92 turned into $5,240, less Sedo or escrow.com fees.

And, I didn’t have much risk with these names as they were so inexpensive. Don’t get me wrong, I do buy more expensive names as well, having paid up to a several thousand dollars for a name. And I’d certainly be willing to pay $50,000 - $100,000 or more for a truly great name. But, when names get into that price range, they are invariably on a major dropcatcher’s site and there are tool many fools there spending their money like it’s 1999 in the tech bubble stock market again. No way I’m going to hang on to millions of dollars of names in a market that could bust (or change) when you least expect it. And we could likely be going into a housing led recession by next year and that will effect all investment markets…but I digress. Am I missing out on making the million dollar hit? Of course. But I do that in other business ventures, not this little hobby.

There are many thousands of dollars to be made by thinking differently, not chasing keywords everyone is chasing, being well-read and opportunistic, being a good negotiator, and most of all using your intuition — if you have it.

Technorati Tags: domain, name, domain name, sedo, dropcatcher, expired name, profit

You know, I often watch with amusement how domainers all follow the same old formula. Overture! Number of web pages! Pagerank! Sure, all that is very important, extremely important. But, that’s not all there is. You have to think differently too. In investing, anyone who does what everyone else does will end up getting clobbered in the end (watch those overpaying on snapnames in a few years).

I look at early trends, future technologies and often buy names that have none of the traditional metrics. I can get them cheap. Hell, sometimes I am able to hand-reg a name and resell it relatively quickly for a large profit.

Here’s a case in point that just happened today: I know that Virtual Worlds, in which people actually work and play, are going to be huge. Look at SecondLife already. Lots of entrepreneurial activity going on there. So, back in July I thought up the word Virtualpreneur. I may have not been the first to think it up, but I was ready to be the first to act on it.

But it had zero OVT, was not a real word and Google Search shows exactly 25 pages that have the term on it. The tlds were available (although now I see that the .biz version is taken and I cannot remember if it was back then or not). All metrics that would steer a traditional domain name investor away from the name were in place. Well, I registered Virtualpreneur.com at for $7 at GoDaddy anyway, on the basis of my perception of the future.

Today, I got an offer for a few hundred dollars on it. I countered with $750 and the buyer immediately took it. I actually should have gone for more. But, that’s over 100 times my money in less than half a year.

I’ve done this before. It’s called thinking, not following.

So, being the virtualpreneur that I am, I immediately went and bought the remaining good TLD’s for the name.

Think. Lead. Don’t follow.

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, virtual, virtual word, second life, entrepeneur

I am so sick of Sedo’s review of comments in a bidding thread before we are allowed to read them. Rather than repeat everything I wrote in the Namepros.com thread I started, I’ll just publish it here:

Listen Sedo, I’m a big customer of yours. I have 4,000 names there, I’ve sold about $30,000 of names from your site in the last year. So I think I’ve earned the right to say this for the tenth time publicly,

YOUR REVIEW OF COMMENTS SUCKS!!!

It really does.

I’ve been waiting three days wondering what a bidder is telling me in their comments with the bid. I have no idea. Who knows?

I know last week one evening I placed a comment with a bid that might have been instructive to the other party, but instead of waiting until the comment was reviewed, they canceled the transaction. What if I had said “hey, I’ll give you the .net and ,org and .info for this price too”? I’ve done thatbefore and had the thread canceled. The other party never knew.

This is so stupid, Sedo. I’ve told you over and over to get rid of this. No one likes it. What are you afraid of? Someone might call me poopy pants or something and hurt my feelings? Oh, I know, someone might send off their email to me, to get around the 10% fee. Most people are not like that. And if they wanted to, the contact info is easily found in the Whois record.

I know you only have 35 hours in European work week to think this over. But think! No one likes this. Get rid of it immediately please. We could be losing sales, so you could be losing commissions. In fact, I’m ceratin you are.

Anyone else agree?

What do you think?

I have my names for sale at both Afternic.com and Sedo.com. Most are now parked at Sedo, with the top producers at GoldKey.com. I thought you might find it interesting where my sales are being made. I would have thought Sedo sales would be higher, since they have more names in their database. But, as you can see Afternic is doing just a bit better for me. I do get more bids from Sedo though, even thought they all don’t turn into sales. But I should note that I’m negociating there on five other names at the moment.

One thing that might work in Afternic’s favor is their terrific categories. Sedo’s categories are horrible; they might as well just get rid of them. For example, I have many robotics and alternative energy names and Afternic has Business/Energy and Technology/Robotics categories. Take a look at Sedo and tell me where I can put those 800 names. No where that makes sense.

Here’s the data:

(I put my costs in for my detractors that said I didn’t know what I was doing. )

Technorati Tags: internet, domain, domain names

I just had a bad experience trying to buy a name from a domain seller. Since they have nearly 1,000 names for sale there’s a chance you may encounter them so I wanted to share with you what happened. It’s an interesting story and if you are a domain investor, I urge you to read it all. In a nutshell, the representative would not sell me the domain for the advertised price, trying to get me for another 233%.

The web site name is DomainContractors.com, on which they list the domain names they have for sale. I’ve researched the company and I see that they are associated with Corporate-Image.com, a firm that sells toll-free phone numbers.

Here’s the story:
(Read on …)