Case in point: 13 months, 3 main sales, with much money spent and sometimes wasted in services, and a bunch of my portfolio pretty much sitting there doing nothing, I FINALLY found a whale of a domain.
For those who don't know much about how domains work, they are registered yearly and either expire if the registration isn't paid, or unexpectedly drop due to misuse of the name. Big backordering companies see everything that drops expectedly in the major extensions, so unless you want to go into auctions and pay what a name is worth to get it, you have to get other extensions or unexpected drops.
I thought I had a pretty good name that was related to tsunamis, simply because it had been getting a lot of traffic around the time the tsunami hit Asia (and I was, at least for a few days, making a few bucks a day sending people to charities). The traffic died down, from 10 visitors an hour to now 10 visitors a day. I don't care though since the name cost me $7, so I made the money back in a couple days. That was an example of getting an unexpected drop. At the point of it getting 250 visitors a day, it was worth probably $3,000 or so.
It seems though that the better names drop in the non-major extensions, and those even sit around for longer. One of them I had gotten, Poker.md, had bid up to $2,000 at one point, though I held out for more because with the hotness of poker and poker domains right now, it's realistically worth twice that. I had picked up another few that have gotten interest and are worth several hundred, if not a couple thousand, and one that even sold for a decent amount within a week of getting it (K.md for $475, minus $200 total expense netting me $275 in 2 weeks time).
However, all the crap I have in my portfolio now seems meaningless except for my most recent grab, Host.sh. It's so mesmeric that I've felt the need to check it out now and then. I know, you're thinking "Host.sh.....oooook". The quality of the name is not what made this pickup great. The name gets about 2,500 visits a day! I was salivating over the tsunami domain's 250 a day and this is 10 times that!
Now I'm rushing to see the best way to capitalize on it...I put a reseller hosting site on there that got absolutely no action, and have switched parked pages a few times but still am not getting 10% click through, which is merely average for my names and is what I want. 10% click through at....say, $0.15 per click on average (not that high, especially if it's a hosting parked page), gets me 250x0.15 = $37.50 a day x 365 = $13687.50/yr (before taxes of course :/ ). I REALLY wish the hosting site would pan out, because say if I had 0.2% of the visits be customers, that's 5 customers a day, making $10-$20 per customer per year, and that would add up really quick (especially when year 2 comes around and people renew). But it was just getting nothing...a week with no sales. Still, I'm just amazed I found a name with that much traffic that sat there...I know it was available for less than a week, but it was sitting there when I looked up "host" at the right time. $90 for a cash cow, probably a $30,000 sell at least if I sold it...yay!
<P ID="signature"><center>| | <a href=http://www.crooky.us>Crooky’s Music | <a href=http://www.drprison.com>Dr. Prison</a> |</center></P>
For those who don't know much about how domains work, they are registered yearly and either expire if the registration isn't paid, or unexpectedly drop due to misuse of the name. Big backordering companies see everything that drops expectedly in the major extensions, so unless you want to go into auctions and pay what a name is worth to get it, you have to get other extensions or unexpected drops.
I thought I had a pretty good name that was related to tsunamis, simply because it had been getting a lot of traffic around the time the tsunami hit Asia (and I was, at least for a few days, making a few bucks a day sending people to charities). The traffic died down, from 10 visitors an hour to now 10 visitors a day. I don't care though since the name cost me $7, so I made the money back in a couple days. That was an example of getting an unexpected drop. At the point of it getting 250 visitors a day, it was worth probably $3,000 or so.
It seems though that the better names drop in the non-major extensions, and those even sit around for longer. One of them I had gotten, Poker.md, had bid up to $2,000 at one point, though I held out for more because with the hotness of poker and poker domains right now, it's realistically worth twice that. I had picked up another few that have gotten interest and are worth several hundred, if not a couple thousand, and one that even sold for a decent amount within a week of getting it (K.md for $475, minus $200 total expense netting me $275 in 2 weeks time).
However, all the crap I have in my portfolio now seems meaningless except for my most recent grab, Host.sh. It's so mesmeric that I've felt the need to check it out now and then. I know, you're thinking "Host.sh.....oooook". The quality of the name is not what made this pickup great. The name gets about 2,500 visits a day! I was salivating over the tsunami domain's 250 a day and this is 10 times that!
Now I'm rushing to see the best way to capitalize on it...I put a reseller hosting site on there that got absolutely no action, and have switched parked pages a few times but still am not getting 10% click through, which is merely average for my names and is what I want. 10% click through at....say, $0.15 per click on average (not that high, especially if it's a hosting parked page), gets me 250x0.15 = $37.50 a day x 365 = $13687.50/yr (before taxes of course :/ ). I REALLY wish the hosting site would pan out, because say if I had 0.2% of the visits be customers, that's 5 customers a day, making $10-$20 per customer per year, and that would add up really quick (especially when year 2 comes around and people renew). But it was just getting nothing...a week with no sales. Still, I'm just amazed I found a name with that much traffic that sat there...I know it was available for less than a week, but it was sitting there when I looked up "host" at the right time. $90 for a cash cow, probably a $30,000 sell at least if I sold it...yay!
<P ID="signature"><center>| | <a href=http://www.crooky.us>Crooky’s Music | <a href=http://www.drprison.com>Dr. Prison</a> |</center></P>