Bloggings of a Domain Flipper

SnapNames: Initial Experiences

Today I put my first 20 domain's up for sale on SnapNames.  I decided to give SnapNames a shot as I've found it a lot of work managing my domain sales through multiple services. While this is great for evaluation - I wanted to get an expert on my side to help me sell some of my domains. This is the advantage to SnapNames - you are dealing with a real human.

I had a 45-minute call with my account manager today to discuss each of my domains individually and how we thought they would do on the service. Obviously there is no magic formula to tell exactly what price a domain will sell for - but the account manager was great at providing insight into which domains had the highest potential. This was a useful exercise as we were able to spend a few minutes on each domain discussing it in detail.

With all 20 complete I felt a sense of accomplishment. The process of setting-up the sale on SnapNames is a bit more involved than Sedo or Afternic but provides for a very streamlined sales process in the end. The process is:

1) Come-up with initial prices for domains with account manager

2) Transfer domain registrar to SnapNames

3) Account manager places domains up for auction

4) Domains sold are negotiated through the account manager who ensures that you are paid for your domain and that the transfer goes smoothly.

5) Collect money for domains sold.

6) For any domains left unsold discuss new strategies with account manager and put into auction again

What I like about this process is that you account manager helps you come-up with the starting prices. This is nice because you can benefit from their experience watching these domain sales every day.

The account manager is makes money based on the domain sale price. It is essential that you know the account manager is on your side. If you think of a real estate agent, they are usually on the side of the buyer because they are commissioned by the buyer. Luckily, with domain names it's the opposite - they are commissioned by me the seller, and thus you know they are on your side. This also means of course that they will want you to get the highest price possible for your domain - because they make more money too!

By having the account manager negotiate the entire sale this saves me from having to negotiate with the buyer and ensure that I get the money and the domain transfer is successful. This is a stressful part of domain selling and I am looking forward to handing this task over to the experts.

Transferring your domain registrar to SnapNames makes the sale even easier as you don't have to contact your hosting provider and go through a complicated procedure to transfer the domain.

These are my initial experiences - so far very excited about the service. I will continue to post updates on my experiences with SnapNames, Sedo, and Afternic as well as all of my current flips!

Sedo, Afternic and Snapnames

Well - the results are very very clear now as to which site is best to do a listing upgrade with, and the winner is - Sedo! Frequentflier.mobi was listed as a featured listing on both of these sites, here are the results:

Sedo: 638 people viewed my listing
Afternic: 127 people viewed my listing

Hopefully this will help save people some time when deciding which service to go with. Please understand that I am not saying that Afternic is a bad service to list your domain. In fact, time and time again I've mentioned how I like their interface and site design much more than Sedo's. However - the more people that look at your name, the more bids you will get, and the higher price your domain will sell for. So when looking at upgrading your listing it makes sense to go with Sedo as more people will see your name.

Onto my first .mobi flip. With 638 people viewing the listing - not a single person has bid on the domain! Initially I had set a fixed price however changed this to "Make Offer" about a week ago, but still no offer. My current thoughts are that .mobi's must be in low-demand right now as you would think someone would put in an offer. Since I am new to .mobi I'll continue to shop this domain around and post my results. Hopefully this will help other .mobi investors find the best place to sell their domains.

On a different point - I have decided to list 20 of my domains with Snapnames to give them a shot and provide my readers with some information about this service. Snapnames is great because you have a personal account manager (an actual human) who helps you set a price for your names, advertises the names, and ensures that the sale goes smoothly.

I have a great account manager who seems very motivated and excited about selling some of my names. I will keep posting about this on my blog so that other domain investors can learn about this service.

Also - I wanted to thank Ann for their warning about DomainSecondHand.com. I am working to get my money back from them now. This is a scam and if you look online you'll see they've scammed a number of people. I only lost $100 - but am working now to get my money back. I'll keep you posted on this as well. The Internet is a big place and I've found that sometimes you just have to learn the hard way! Thanks again Ann for letting me know about this and a warning to all of my readers to not be fooled by this service.

Until next time! Happy flipping!

More on Sedo vs. Afternic

Well - the results are in and it looks like Sedo does a *much* better job of driving traffic to a featured domain listing. This is a bit unfortunate as I find Sedo's user interface to be much less usable than Afternic. So, here's my data:

I listed frequentflier.mobi as a featured listing (shows-up on homepage) on both Sedo and Afternic. Sedo charges $39/month for a featured listing, Afternic charges $50/month for their featured listing. My Sedo listing has currently received 328 views whereas my Afternic listing has only received 87 views.

So, it seems clear to me that Afternic is offering much a much lower value for Featured listings. Not only are the listing fees $11 more a month but the traffic is roughly 3.5 times the traffic! I will report back the final numbers once the month is over however right now it seems next to impossible that Afternic could make a come-back.

Conclusion: When listing a domain for sale, to gain maximum exposure use Sedo, with a lower price and over 3 times the traffic Sedo is the obvious choice.

If any of you have thoughts on this I'd love to hear it. Not trying to slam Afternic here - as I've said time and time again I like their interface a lot more, but in the end, it is the number of people that look at my listing that will generate a final sale.

Domain Flipping Audio Course

When searching around the Internet for domain flipping resources I noticed that almost everything costs money. It seems nowadays that if there is any concept that can make you money - there is a good chance it will cost you a heap of money to learn about it.

So, I've decided to go against the grain and start offering some free resources for novice domain flippers. The first of these resources was the article I put-out as an Introduction to Domain Flipping. I plan to continue this effort as I want someone who is interested in domain flipping to encounter a real article rather than the typical 4-page sales letter that adorns most domain flipping sites.

My next idea was to create an audio course that would allow someone to learn domain flipping while driving to work or jogging at the gym. If you think about it, we are all very very busy, that's just the point we are at in society today. This being said, there are still lots of opportunities to learn when you are waiting. Waiting in line, sitting in traffic, waiting for a flight, these are all great times to learn!

I hope that my audio course can help inspire more people to becoming interested in domain flipping. I know it has changed my life so am excited to teach people how it can help them too!

If you want to check-out the audio course (completely free of charge!) feel free to point your browser over to: www.dnflipping.com.

Okay - back to my busy life!

The Appraisals are in!

Always great to end a Friday with a fresh batch of domain appraisals...especially when they are good!

I had four domains appraised by Afternic, the appraised values are below.

digitalmusicpulse.com - $1,400
thinkoutsideofbox.com - $7,000
phonesounds.mobi - $1,500
mytreoemail.com - $900

This yields a total of $10,800! If this isn't a call for celebration I don't know what is! I'm going to head over to Afternic.com now and adjust my selling prices accodingly. I will most likely run thinkoutsideofbox.com, digitalmusicpulse.com and phonesounds.mobi as featured listings to ensure they get enough traffic to find a buyer.

I'll give a bit of history about these domains so you can better understand why I choose to invest in them.

digitalmusicpulse.com - This just came to me one day and sounded catchy - like a good title for a digital music news site. I flipped this domain in about 6-hours giving it a brand-new website and listings in all major search engines. I gave it some initial traffic with Google adwords as well (about $50/worth - 112 clicks). My total investment in this domain was $5.99 registration + $50.00 marketing = $55.99. Total Profit = $1344.01. Or - if you want to look at it in $/hour that would be roughly $225/hour - take that Lawyers!

thinkoutsideofbox.com - One of my earliest domains. This domain inspired me to keep investing in domain names. I didn't think this would be available. When it was I bought it right-away. I've been building-up its traffic and search engine ranking however it still has a google pagerank of 0. The domain has been used for a number of different sites since the name is so general. This is a great appraisal and just shows how sometimes it is all just in a name!

phonesounds.mobi - Ripe for the taking - this name had obvious investment potential. I was actually surprised I was able to get it. This has some flip potential so I may flip the name and get it re-evaluated.

mytreoemail.com - This domain is an example of an idea I had that never was. I thought it would be cool to have a webmail site formatted for the Treo - make it easier for Treo users without Outlook to do email. I'm not really sure the idea is worth pursuing but buying the domain certainly was. I bought the name for $5.99 and have put absolutely no time, energy, or money in it since then. Let's suppose it took me a whole 10 minutes of time to buy the name. This is a fun one to calculate the hourly rate on...we'll just call it $800/hour - take that high-priced Lawyer!

I'm not attacking laywers here and if I could actually make $800/hour for 40-hours a week life would be a lot different. What I am illustrating is the kind of return you can get with domain investing. It really is the real estate market of the future. I think of .cc and .ws domains as newly discovered land that is yet to be fully populated. As more and more people move-in, the values go up. So I'm ever-focused on finding my Beverly Hills within the .cc and .ws world and buying-up as much real estate as possible.

Great news to start-off the weekend, just another day in the life of a Domain Flipper!

My first article!

I decided it was time to start spreading some of what I've learned about Domain Flipping to the masses. I realized that there are very few *free* sources of information on Domain Flipping on the Internet. There are a few e-books that promise to make you rich in just a few hours a week - but we all know this is not true. Domain Flipping takes patience - certainly not a way to get rich quick - but a great way to make some very profitable investments.

I have submitted the article to be reviewed by Helium (www.helium.com) which is a great website full of articles written by experts all over the world. Hopefully it will be accepted on Helium. For now you can find it on a few different sites online - here is a link to one of them: http://www.1888articles.com/introduction-to-domain-flipping-02w355ta5b.html.

This has been a good week with frequentflier.mobi getting a nice amount of traffic on both Sedo and Afternic. My featured Sedo listing has received 97 visitors! My Afternic listing has received 37 - still not too shabby. In this case it looks like Sedo is much better at generating traffic to a listing. I'm not going to make any recommendations one way or another until I have more experience with Afternic.

This weekend I will have new evaluations from Afternic of three of my domains I am currently selling: frequentflier.mobi, digitalmusicpulse.com (very recent flip), and thinkoutsideofbox.com. It will be interesting to see Afternic's appraisal and satsifying to have the little "A" icon next to my listing highlighting that the domain is appraised.

I should have the appraisals back from Afternic by Saturday so will update then with the latest appraisals. I'm hoping to sell one of these next week so this appraisal is crucial. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

FrequentFlier.mobi's Appraisal

Since this is my first .mobi flip I really wanted to ensure that I got an accurate estimate of the sale-price. To get the best appraisal you really need to have it done manually. This will usually cost a bit more than Sedo, GoDaddy, or Afternic but they are much more accurate. I used domainsecondhand.com's manual service because I heard it recommended on several domain-selling sites.

I was very pleased to see the appraisal of frequentflier.mobi at $2,800! I purchased this domain for $40 about 6 months ago - the flip turned this into a potential $2,760 profit! You can see the appraisal here so you know that I'm not pulling your leg - http://www.DomainSecondhand.com/appraisal.asp?Domain=frequentflier.mobi.

I have the domain listed on Sedo, Afternic, and DomainSecondHand. Previously I've only used Sedo so it will be very interesting to see how Afternic and DomainSecondHand stack-up.

On another note I have started a domain flipping service - www.thedomainflipper.com. I have been thinking of doing this for a while and just struck-up the courage to take the plunge. The Domain Flipper will provide a service not yet available to my knowledge so it will be interesting to see how it goes!

More adventures to come as usual! Always a good feeling to have your domain flip work-out so well!

 

New .cc and .ws investments

I am always looking to expand my domain portfolio. New TLD's are a great way to get a name that could be quite expensive later on. I have been specifically investing in .cc and .ws domains as these are very new and there are still some great names available. Below are a list of domains that I bought over the past week:

frequentflier.ws
tortillas.cc (Great find! One-word domain!)
thinkoutsideofbox.cc
thinkoutsideofbox.ws
buildcustomwebsite.net (Just a good find - I was surprised this was available)

Right now I am listing all of my domains for sale via two services right now - Sedo and Afternic. So far I like Afternic's interface a lot more than Sedo's which I find clunky and hard to use. Sedo does seem to generate a lot more traffic towards my listings so far though and that's what really matters in the end.

I have listed frequentflier.mobi as a premium listing on both Sedo and Afternic. These have been listed for about 4-days each and my Sedo listing has received 21 visits whereas my Afternic has only had 5 visits. So it looks like Afternic may be a waste but I will know for sure by the end of the month.

Adventures with Afternic and Sedo

I use Sedo for all of my domain sales, they have been the core service enabling my domain  transactions. Sedo seem to be one of the most popular sites with big-money (over $50,000/name) transactions taking place regularly. Sedo's domain appraisal service is definitely several notches above GoDaddy's with a very thorough analysis of your domain, exposing the multitude of components that determine a domains price.  My main complaint about Sedo is that their user interface is difficult to navigate and a bit archaic. Simple tasks that you should be able to do yourself oftentime requiring emailing support. A good example is if you list a domain and later put a website on the domain, you cannot edit your listing to reflect that the domain is being sold with the developed site. Instead you have to email customer service and have them change it for you.

So lately I have been trying to find an alternative to Sedo that could offer even more great exposure for my domains. I discovered Afternic which is another popular domain sale site. I found-out about afternic through buydomains.com which seems to be just a shell on top of afternic. Afternic is quite similar to Sedo however has a much more functional (albeit still a bit clunky) UI. It was much easier to add domains and change options or re-listing a domain. Afternic has more extensive promotion tools right out of the gate allowing you to opt for expanded promotion in trade for increased commission. Domains easy get lost in the millions of domains on Sedo so its nice to see this option available.

I have featured listings running on both Sedo and Afternic this month for freqentflier.mobi. I am looking to get an offer a bit north of $3,000. It will be interesting to compare the amount of traffic my domain listing gets on each service. This will provide some very useful information as to which service really has the most effective marketing program.