Monthly Archives: November 2008

How to Sell a Domain Name

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This article if from lord Brar ..so make sure to sneak at his link below.
lord brar1 How to Sell a Domain Name

Author: Lord Brar

6 Feb

Please Note – This Post is Work in Progress and We Will Keep Adding More Tips and Ideas. Click Here to Get Regular Updates.

One of the joys of being a moderator at one of the most popular domaining forum — DNForum — is that you get swamped with private messages from people. One of the question which I get asked the most is How to Sell a Domain Name.

In this post I am going to talk about the strategies I use to sell a domain name or website. Let’s get started, shall we?

Two Important Things

There are a few things that I must tell you before we get started.

1. DO NOT buy any eBook — I have read most of the eBooks currently available in the market and they are mostly useless and provide obsolete information.

2. Subscribe to DomainingTips.com Newsletter — As the moderator of one of the biggest and most influential domaining forum (DNForum), I have access to some of the biggest players in the industry.

Subscription to the newsletter is absolutely free and you also get a free copy of my guide “8 Things You Must Know About Making Money From Domain Name”. Click here to subscribe. You will be glad that you did.

Selling a Domain Name – Know Your Market!

There are two kind of people who buy domain names — 1. Resellers and 2. End Users.

Resellers are the people who buy domains and sites with the sole purpose of reselling them. They are not interested in keeping their inventory forever and are, usually, not interested in developing the domain name.

End Users are the people who are interested in developing and running the domain. Unlike resellers, they plan to use the domain for development or promotion purposes and don’t plan to sell it as soon as they find a buyer. An end user can be an individual or a company.

Selling a Domain Name – What Actually Sells

A lot of times people will list a domain for sale and get discouraged when no one makes an offer or buys what they are selling. Most of the times it turns out that they were trying to sell to wrong people.

Let’s see what actually sells and who buys it.

1. Generic Domains. These are domains like hotels.com, cars.com, search.com, poker.com, loan.com, coupons.com etc.

The reason why these domains are valuable is because a lot of people will never use a search engine to find things but instead just type [keyword].com — which translates into highly targeted traffic.

End-Users pay big bucks for these type of names. Resellers are also willing to offer big bucks for them in hope of selling them for even bigger bucks.

2. Revenue Domains. These are the names which make revenue from parking traffic. If you have this kind of domain then resellers would totally jump at it and offer you 12-15 months of revenue for it.

3. Brandable Domains. These are the brandable names like NewYorkHotels.com or MiamiRealtors.com. The target for these types of domains is usually end users. Resellers don’t shell much money for them usually.

4. Developed Sites - There is yet another category which is domains with websites. They are much easier to sell as they usually have traffic and revenue attached to them by the virtue of their search engine rankings.

Resellers buy sites which don’t take much effort to run or promote. End users look for sites with long-term potential — which may even mean putting effort into running the site or promoting it.

Selling a Domain Name – Top 5 Ways to Sell Domains

Now you know the kind of domains which sell and who buys them, however, the bigger question is where to sell them. Let’s talk about various ways –

1. Domain Forums. Domain forums are the most popular way to sell domains. Places like DNForum (one of the biggest and most influential), SitePoint, WickedFire and NamePros (mostly newbies hangout here) are popular to sell domains. However, the people who hangout on these sites are mostly resellers and only a small proportion are end-users.

2. Online Auctions. There are lot of online auction sites like sedo.com where you can sell domains and you can even auction domains on forums like DNForum.com.

eBay also has a domain auction section, however, it is usually the newbies which make up the bulk of audience there and it is turnkey sites and cheap domains which sell best there. There have been a lot of reports of scams on eBay — therefore, I don’t recommend selling on eBay.

3. Domain Brokers. These are the people and companies who take a percentage cut — usually 15-20% of the final value — for selling your domain.

If you have a good domain which you hope to sell for bigger bucks and are ready to pay to brokerage, it is usually a good idea to involve brokers. They usually have lot of contacts and experience in selling domains. Think of them like real-estate agents except they focus on virtual real-estate.

4. Live Auctions. This is a newer trend where companies like Moniker.com are conducting live auctions for domains at various industry events. This is where a lot of end users and big guys hang out and where the big-buck deals take place.

Obviously, these companies are choosy about the domains that they include in the auction. However, you should never hesitate to submit your names for auction — you never know it may sell. Newsletter Subscribers will get regular updates about upcoming auctions and submission deadlines.

5. Everyone You Know. Tell everyone you already know — including your old customers and your friends — that you have a domain for sale. There is a chance that they themselves or someone they know may be interested in your domain. I have sold a whole lot of domains this way.

This was something which I never used to tell earlier, however, when I told it to some of my friends who had the same clients as me, I found that it didn’t make much of difference to my success rate. I found that success rate with this tactic depended on lot of factors which I regularly talk in the newsletter.

Selling a Domain Name – Final Word

I hope you found this guide useful. If you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to contact me by email (lord [at] lordbrar.com), AIM (lordbrar) or MSN (lord [at] lordbrar.com). You can also check some more tips on How to Sell a Domain Name.

6 Ways Not to Go Broke Developing Domains — Lessons That I Have Learnt the Hard Way.

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lord brar11 6 Ways Not to Go Broke Developing Domains — Lessons That I Have Learnt the Hard Way.

Author: Lord Brar

11 Apr

clip image001 6 Ways Not to Go Broke Developing Domains — Lessons That I Have Learnt the Hard Way.

Ever since I made my Domaining Strategy post, I have been getting a lot of comments and questions from you all. First of all, thanks a lot for your comments and messages — that is exactly what keeps me motivated to write here.

Most of the questions which you have asked will be covered in upcoming posts about traffic, revenue, outsourcing, hosting etc. In this post, I am going to answer two important questions -

1. How to minimize your development costs?
2. How to Scale-Up this strategy?

This post will be one of the most important — if not the most — posts in the series as it describes the mindset you need to succeed in the game. These points are essentially derived from my own experience developing domains over the last 9 years — so yes, they are street-tested.

Let’s get started, shall we?

Tip #1 – Know Your Niches

This is perhaps the most important tip I can ever give you — Focus on niches you already have an interest in. This will make your life a lot easier, fun and profitable. To quote Diorex from WickedFire -

I dont think that unmarried college age guys are going to be rockstars at promoting a menopause product or even a baby shower list. Look to your life experiences for things you naturally know a little bit about. Sure you can learn, but why set yourself up for a longer more difficult road.

.

I’d also quote Hugh MacLeod from his HughTrain Post –

clip image002 6 Ways Not to Go Broke Developing Domains — Lessons That I Have Learnt the Hard Way.

Even though the niche you are interested in may not be as profitable as pay-day loans or credit-cards but it would be easier for you to know what people really want and dominate your niche. This would translate into much higher overall profits and you’d have fun doing what you love.

PS: I have some finance domains lying around which I just can’t get myself to research into and develop! If you have an interest in grabbing them cheap, give me a holler.

Tip #2 – Think Small. Seriously.

It is particularly important to remember that you cannot satisfy everyone at the same time. If you try to do that, you end up disappointing everyone.

So, don’t try to build general-purpose and “one size fits all” kind of sites. TO make such sites truly spectacular you’d need a lot of resources — which should not be your objective.

Let’s say that fitness is one of niches I operate in. To build a general fitness site covering topics for both men and women would be absolutely crazy on my part. If I focus on Men’s Health, that would be better and easier for me but it would be very broad subject and still require a LOT of resources to create good site in.

What I would do is that I’d split the niche into further niches — building abs, reducing fat, dieting, bulking up, upper-body exercises, stronger legs, sports training, cardio-exercises, aerobics etc. — and build separate sites for them. This would make it easier for me to build the site quickly, promote my sites more easily and get more targeted traffic.

Now, I am not saying that you cannot build sites on broader topics — I do it all the time. But, be prepared to put more resources and energy into them. I have a lot of broad-niche sites but I have even more sharp-niche sites.

Tip #3 – Use “Out-Of-Box” Solutions

Don’t re-invent the wheel. If there is some “out-of-box solution” available for what you want to do, use that — even if it means some lost functionality, you will be saving tons and tons of money and/or time that you would have to spend on programming and design.

Most of the times you will be able to find a free open-source solution, all you need to do is look hard enough.

For content management use WordPress or Joomla and use free or cheap templates to change the look. For forums you can use vBulletin or PhpBB. Photopost PHP or Coppermine get the job done for a photo gallery. vBulletin will also take care of your Social-Networking needs.

Use a site like HotScripts.com to find out the various available scripts. You could download and install the script on your server — most of the times Read-Me files are detailed enough.

If you are not comfortable doing it yourself, hire a freelancer — but read Tip #5 before you do. Also, don’t use any third party hosted services except widgets and analytics.

Basically, the whole objective here is to use the already existing free or cheap tools to build your website.

Tip #4 – Re-Invest into Your Domains.

Start milking revenue from your domains right away by using affiliate links, CPA links, Google AdSense et. al. Contrary to the popular belief, sites CAN make money from low but quality traffic.

To give example of one of my own sites, it got only 8 visitors from search engine and made $147 in affiliate commission.

So, optimize your site for revenue right from the start — even though you may get only small amount to traffic initially, but you don’t want to waste it.

Now, whatever money your site makes, re-invest at least 75% back into the domain. Promote the site, get professional content written, buy new software or get custom scripting done — but, reinvest the money to grow your site.

Remember – your site’s revenue is not your pay day but rather your pay day will be when your 25% becomes substantial or if you ever sell the site.

Tip #5 – Freelancers Will Screw You

Or at least 80% of them will produce crappy stuff or miss deadlines and you will lose money with them. But it not all gloom — you have to know and follow certain rules of thumb which I will be discussing in later posts. I will embed a link to the post here whenever I publish it.

Also, if you are subscribed to the newsletter, you will get a buzz as soon as I publish the post. So, if you are not already subscribed to the newsletter, it is a good time to subscribe now.

Tip #6 – Keep Close Financial Records

The idea is to keep a detailed record of how much you have invested in a domain and what sort of returns it is getting. I have found that keeping records will not only keep you updated of your current reality but will also keep you motivated to work harder.

With my own sites, I keep an excel file with weekly details of how much traffic did the site get and how much money did it make from various revenue channels. If both don’t increase consistently, I know I need to get moving to grow these figures.

Also, do it on a weekend and don’t spend too much time on keeping super-detailed stats tracking every figure under the sun — just a bird’s eye view of where your sites are going in terms of revenue and traffic. Your priority should be creating and promoting your sites.

Closing Thoughts

Now remember — these are just the rules-of-thumb and the list is no way exhaustive. Also, every situation is unique and you will learn the most by diving in and doing. So, start working, start making mistakes and start learning!

Stay tuned for other posts on the subject including – Stockdale Paradox, The “Big Fat Lie” Media Wants You to Believe, Building Websites, Choosing the Right Host, Traffic Secrets, Art of Recurring Profits and Revenue Maximization.

Shocking Truth About Domain Parking — And What To Do About It.

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Author: Lord Brar

28 Feb

clip image001 Shocking Truth About Domain Parking — And What To Do About It.

Last Updated – April 13, 2008.

Parking Pages are just about everywhere — after all, they are easy money. But is it really a good idea to use them?

How it all Started.

Parking Pages first started a way to make sure that the traffic to the domains was not wasted and you could make some money from the traffic by showing them advertisements. It was meant to be a quick-fix to make money from the traffic on the domain.

Even though parking pages started as a quick-fix but they have slowly turned into a big industry in itself — there are billions of dollars being made every year from parking pages. As a matter of fact, a lot ofdomainers make their money just from parking pages.

The Problem With Parking Pages.

There are a few issues with Parking Pages that one needs to consider when one decides to use them.

1. No Search Traffic. Search Engines are looking for sites which provide real content to their visitors — after all, it makes business sense for search engines to provide the best experience to their users. It is next to impossible to rank regular parking pages in search engines.

Every Single Day, Google serves hundreds of millions of queries — by not having your domain ranking for your target-keywords, you are missing a big piece of action.

2. No Repeat Traffic. Parking Pages attract mostly type-in traffic. To be fair, you can indeed expect some people to visit your parking page again and again by typing in your URL, but most would never visit your page again.

Even worse is the fact that you can’t setup things like newsletters and member-registration, which will allow you to stay in touch with people who opt-in and attract regular visitors to your site.

3. Little Customization. When you are using parking pages, you have little control over the looks and layout of your parking pages. Not only that, you do not have freedom to add any other features to your site.

Why Parking Pages are Good.

I am not trying to say that Parking Pages are that bad. A lot of people make a decent amount of money with parking pages — including us on some of our domains. The best part about Domain Parking is that it is easy — all you need to do is to change the name-servers and you are done.

There are some excellent parking companies like Fabulous.com which go the extra mile to help you squeeze the most profit from your parking page.

But, don’t forget that by using parking pages on your domains…

You Are Leaving Money On the Table.

You Can Get Lots More Traffic. By having your site listed in search engines and having other sites to link to you, you increase your traffic — and hence revenue — exponentially. By using a parking page you are missing out on a huge amount of traffic that you could get by having a real site.

Multiple Revenue Streams. When you are using a parking page, your only source of revenue is pay-per-click advertisements. Essentially, if your visitors do not click on your advertisements, you do not make any money.

However, with a custom site, you make money not just from PPC advertisements but also from affiliate programs, cpa programs, ecommerce, sponsored reviews, subscription revenue and sales of text-links. As a matter of fact, I have some sites which make hundreds of dollars every single month from just the sales of text links and virtually zilch from Pay-Per-Click Advertisements.

Better Revenue Optimization. You don’t have any control over the optimization of revenue from your parking pages except setting-up the right keywords. With your own site, you have complete control over the revenue optimization and control of the placement of various elements that will make you money.

Capture Contact Information. One sure-shot way to attract repeat visitors to your sites is to capture their contact — either via newsletter sign-up or via a registration system. We use Aweber to capture contact on our sites and the response rates are totally amazing.

Needless to say, it is not possible to do this on parking pages.

Build Relationships, Sell More. When you are using Parking Pages, you have absolutely no contact with your advertisers. As a matter of fact, you have absolutely no idea about who is advertising on your domain. When you are directly selling advertisements on your own site, you get a change to build a relationship with the advertiser.

What this means is that you get a change to get to know the advertiser and upsell and cross-sell them. Which means much higher revenue and a potential for repeat business.

I could go on even more about why it is a better idea to develop your domain rather than throw a parking page but I hope that you get the idea.

Get Your Facts Right

Whenever I talk about this issue with most domainers, they reply that it takes a lot of effort to develop a domain name. That is just NOT TRUE until you are building the next Yahoo or Google.

I myself have developed hundreds of my own domains with simple strategies that you can copy too.

The Strategy

I am going to reveal the strategies that we use at our company to maximize the revenues from our domain in various posts on this blog during this week. Stay Tuned!

Follow-Up Post – How I Really Make Money From Domain Names.

PS: If you have not signed-up for the newsletter yet, it is about time you do. You will get more juicy details as a subscriber than you would as a reader of the blog. Subscription is free, click the link below.

Domains web for all around web

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www.domaining.com
www.dnkitchen.com
thelazydomainer.com
www.namepros.com
www.dnforum.com

and many more.
just try to visit them and study as much as you can for your future..

study…study…study…stud..

How to Choose a Host Without Getting Ripped-Off — 6 Practical “Rules of Thumb” to Remember.

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Author: Lord Brar

17 Apr

clip image001 How to Choose a Host Without Getting Ripped Off — 6 Practical “Rules of Thumb” to Remember.

One of the most critical components component of your success on the internet is your web-host. If your web-host keeps giving you troubles, you will not be able to concentrate on developing, promoting and monetizing your websites. Also, if your website is down, you will not be able to show any ads and that would translate into zero revenue for you.

Sure — you can go with the top-of-shelf hosts which provide 100% uptime but they cost an arm and leg. Since our objective is to keep our costs minimum, we are going to use cheap shared-hosts. However, a LOT of these cheap hosts often resort of tactics — which I call “Dirty Games” — to squeeze every bit of profit from their customers.

Read this post to find out how most of these hosts try to rip-off their customers and “Rules of Thumb’ for identifying and avoiding such hosts. And yes, I will have host recommendations from my personal experience with some companies. Let’s get down to business, shall we?

The Dirty Games

With the advent of cut-throat competition in the hosting market, a lot of hosts have taken to making false and misleading statements to lure those new to the industry and then use “dirty-tacts” to squeeze every bit of profit out of them. Here are Five Worst Dirty-Tactics.

#1 – Long Lock-In Periods – See those ultra-cheap $3 or $4 a month prices? Most of the times they are valid only if you prepay for a year or two. What this means is that you are going to be stuck with this host for next year or two.

Yes, what this means is that it doesn’t matter how bad the quality of service after the 30 days trial period, you are neither getting a refund nor you have an exit strategy. And let me tell you from my own personal experience, even the poster-boys of the industry go bad.

A few years ago I used to have a website hosted with Site5. At that time they used to be a rock-solid host and everyone used to swear by their quality of service. And then within a few months the quality of service turned into one of the worst in the industry.

Perhaps they were victims of their own success and grew much faster than they could manage. They are still in business but I don’t hear much about them these days. However, the point is not that. The point is that people who had prepaid them for two years had to stick with them and suffer through the bad quality of service.

Some hosts use tactics like introducing setup fees to motivate people to pay for longer period. If a host has a setup fee — avoid them. Back in 1998-99, setting up an account used to be a manual thing. However, today, when most of the stuff is automated, charging a setup fees is just a scheme to get you to pay for a longer contract.

#2 – Unreasonable Restrictions – A lot of these hosts put unreasonable restrictions on their users. These may include a restriction on number of domains, daily bandwidth limit, maximum file size limit, database size limit, not being able to use certain popular scripts etc.

One very popular host doesn’t allow its customers to use FTP Software but rather forces them to use an online interface — what a pain in ass if you have to upload hundreds of files — like when you are installing wordpress.

The very same host also has a file size limit of a few kb and a database size of just 10 MB — even though they are giving their customers hundreds of GBs of diskspace and thousands of GBs of bandwidth. Try filling up those spaces in a few lifetimes if you can.

Another host claims to give 3000 GB of bandwidth a month — however they have a daily cap of 10 GB. This means that no matter what, you cannot use more than 300 GB a month of bandwidth.

And there are so many other hosts which do these type of things.

Now mind you, we want to host all of our domains on just one account — using addon domains facility which I will explain it at later in post. If you end up with a host with such crazy restrictions, you are basically in big trouble.

#3 – Super-Sneaky Contracts – Let’s not even get started on the fine-print they have in their contacts. Basically what it usually says is that if you site starts to get popular, we will kick you out unless you upgrade to our more-expensive plan.

Want to know another super-sneaky clause most of these cheapo hosts have? Even though you are given a 30 day money-back period, but, if you ask for the money back, you have to pay setup costs which are usually about $30. Pretty high considering annual fees of most of these hosts is like 80 or 90 bucks!

#4 – Low Quality Infrastructure. One of the reasons why these hosts are able to offer services at such low prices and still be in business is because they do ruthless cost-cutting.

Usually this cost cutting involves using low-quality server infrastructure and using low-quality networks. This usually translates in low-reliability and quality of services being delivered.

Another department which suffers is customer-service. Since highly skilled technical staff costs money, so they are out of question. These hosts usually outsource their support to third-world countries and hire bare-minimum skilled staff. Result – lower quality of support for their customers.

#5 – Hidden Costs – What most people don’t realize when they are paying for the super-cheap hosting package is even though that they are getting a package with “more than you can ever use” bandwidth and space, the power-features missing.

God forbid, if your site ever becomes famous — which it will if you keep following my strategies — you are in for a shock!

I have seen some hosts charging $15 per GB of bandwidth over usage (yeah right!), $10 a month for SSL Certificate (needed for eCommerce) and $8 a month for ever add-on domain.

Now you have to remember that for these hosts, it is simply a numbers game. If you get dissatisfied and move on, it would hardly make a dent to their figure of hundreds of thousands of customers.

However, for you, it will mean a lot of wasted time, effort and money. Let’s see how to find the right host.

The “Rules of Thumb”

Am I saying that all cheap hosts are bad and should be avoided? Absolutely Not. I have used them for a long time before moving to VPSes. However, I do have a big problem with those super-cheap hosts who will go any extent to lure new customers and keep them locked in — by hook or my crook.

Here are some things you should remember when choosing a web-host. They will save you a lot of hassles and headaches in long run.

Rule#1 – No Lock-In. I would strongly recommend against paying anything more than a month in advance and, if you have to, a maximum of three months.

Sure, you may pay a bit higher price by paying monthly than you’d if you pay yearly. However, think of it as your “host-reliability” insurance — in case their services start to deteriorate, you will have an option of moving to another host.

Rule #2 – Know the Restrictions. It is an excellent idea to clear-up any special restrictions that the web host may have before you sign-up with them. Nasty surprises are particularly bad if they affect you monetarily.

And when you ask them about this, be specific in your questions. Ask them the database size limit, file-size limit, if they have any cap-on daily bandwidth usage and any particular script they disallow.

Do remember that nearly every host disallows extremely server intensive scripts like chat-scripts on shared infrastructure. You should be concerned only if they disallow popular scripts like vBulletin, PhotoPost and other which you may use.

Rule #3 – Know Thy Contract. Read the terms of service and acceptable use policy carefully before you sign-up with the webhost. Don’t just skim through it considering it to be regular stuff — more than often it is not and it directly affects you.

Rule #4 – Clarify Prices. Make sure that you always clarify the pricing of various add-ons before you hit the sign-up button. Here also you have to be specific unless you love getting vague responses.

Ask them if they will charge a setup fee if you terminate within first 15 days, cost of excess bandwidth and space, cost of upgrading an account and if there are any additional administration and support charges you should be aware of.

Rule #5 – Contact Support. Always contact the webhost’s support department via eMail and, if they provide it, by phone. Try to assess how professional and supportive they are when you ask questions I recommend above.

Rule #6 – Take my Recommendation. I have recommended a host below who I had happily used for over two-years! I am sure you will be glad that you took my suggestion.

The Host I Recommend

I Recommend HostGator – Click this link and then use the coupon Jury to get the first month for just 1 cent.

I had used over 8 hosts before I settled for HostGator and used them happily for over two years before I had to move on to PowerVPS due to increased requirements. Even today I hear rave reviews about them just so frequently even though they have become one of the largest hosts out there.

The package I recommend is the Baby Plan at $9.95 a month plan. Now if you host 20 sites on this account, it turns out to be less than 50 cents a month! Click this link and then use the coupon Jury to get the first month for just 1 cent.

Even though they offer insanely high space and bandwidth, they don’t have the crazy restrictions like which I have mentioned above. And furthermore, they are a company with pockets deep enough to back these claimed quotes in case some customers ever reach the levels.

They also offer unlimited add-on domains and on-click install for all popular software. What this means is that you can have as many domains as you want on your account.

And with a click of a button, you can install software like WordPress, Joomla, PhpBB and Coppermine among others on your site. Yes, this means that you can setup a site without having any technical skills.

To Signup with HostGator, follow this link and then use the coupon Jury, you will get your first month for just 1 cent. clip image002 How to Choose a Host Without Getting Ripped Off — 6 Practical “Rules of Thumb” to Remember.

Remember — a good host means that you will be able to concentrate on developing, promoting and monetizing your websites. And yes, I know from my personal experience that HostGator is one of them.