If your a Domainer, im curious of your approach to buying. Do you. 1. Try and stick to domains where if you have a hard time selling them you know you can always develop them? and through this approach keep your portfolio quite tight and not too big so that your not out of pocket. or 2. Do you have no intentions of developing the domains that you buy and only purchase to strictly sell them on, either flipping or patiently waiting for a few months/years. Personally im thinking that the first one is a sensible way to go about it, unless of course your minted and have major funds to play with, but generally i think that if you know that you can develop into a site then you can bring in some revenue, it may even lead to building a great money maker of a site that had not first been considered. It hasn't taken me long to realise that so many could, and from what i see, so many people do come into domaining and make some bad choices or invest in a few hundred domains then end up seriously out of pocket, maybe even annoyed with themselves for spending so much, and end up selling the lot at a loss just to offload a badly made choice. What are your own thoughts?
Thing with buying up domains is its very easy to go barmy with it isn't it, because the most common TLD's are affordable, at reg fee, theres that danger of grabbing what seems good at the time. I guess almost everyone is guilty of buying a few from time to time then afterwards wondering what for.
Almost always option 1. Maybe 10% of my domains are solely for the purpose of reselling (and earning through Sedo domain parking), but the rest are all candidates for developing at some point.
At first i thought yeah grab a bunch of domains, build a portfolio, keep them strictly for selling on, but i think that would give me a nervous feeling, a year can come around quickly with those renewal fees, so im thinking like yourself and mostly i will stick to domains where i can have a backup plan for them. If i know how i will develop a site then i think i will feel more at ease with purchasing the domains and stop myself from building a collection that i cant afford.
domaining is difficult, so you have to make sure you know what you're doing or you'll end up losing your shirt. My approach is to wait until i know a domain will be profitable, then jump on it.
I agree, i do tons of research and it still gives me that feeling of how easily a lot of money can be lost in domaining, from reading threads on various forums i often see the frustration of people who have got into domaining, but went about things too fast or didn't have a backup plan or tried to imitate the actions of a veteran domainer and end up feeling bitter when it doesn't go as hoped. To me domaining seems a bit like the stock market, you can literally get rich but you could also ruin yourself.
If I was buying an expired domain with traffic I would host it for free with godaddy or bravenet (or any other free hosting service). Add affilaite links of what the site was used for, or a nice article and some adsense links. If the mini site does well, I will keep it, if not I sell it or dump it (depending on the name). If I was to buy a "new" name I would park it, then sell it before I needed to register it again. Another good way to make some easy money with domains is.... I keep a list of good names I want to buy, when I get about 20-25 names, I go to godaddy and buy some cheap plan to get all my .coms for $1.99. Then I wait for ebay to have a featured special (like featured plus for only $19.95). I then list all 25 names in one big auction, people go crazy over it. I will double or triple my money in a very short time.
I do the 2nd option. I look for domains that have potential in regards to reselling them but am getting a lot more picky about what names I do purchase. I also look for names that have potential to be sold to endusers so they must have development potential in them as well.
I think its a sensible way if your being more strict, as you are, if your selective and doing a ton of research, plus targetting the end users i see it could bring a healthy profit. From what ive read, i think some people going into domaining feel like they wont get taken seriously if they cant talk of their 500 strong portfolio, but i think most are much better off keeping it tight and concentrating on a manageable number of domains, maybe a niche where they really know their stuff, and keeping track of whats being sold properly and what their looking at buying.
I went on a $30 domain spree a few days ago... I am so ashamed =( Haha jk =) Maybe I can develop them.