I Used to Be a Dotcom Millionaire, Well at Least On Paper!

When I first started out online back in the late 90’s I got caught up in the big Domain Goldrush that was going on online. The big news back then was when some guy sold Business.com for millions of dollars and next thing you knew… domain speculators were buying up every domain name they could create, and I was one of them. At one point in early 2000 I owned over 3000 domain names. Yep… over 3000! I know that sounds crazy, and thinking back it probably was.

Actually the first 2 domains I ever registered were MakingMoneyOnline.com and MakeMoneyOnline.com. Then about a week after I registered them, some guy offered me $1000 for MakingMoneyOnline.com… but I turned him down. For the next week this guy kept bugging me about buying the domain, actually even calling me on my home phone leaving me messages. His final offer was for $35,000, which you can see by this site… I ended up not taking. In hindsight I probably should have taken it and used the money to finance my other domains, but oh well… at least I still have it now. Of course I made sure my wife was on board with me not taking the money… and she was

As for the rest of my domain collection… for a year or so everything was awesome… domains were easy to flip for a HEFTY PROFIT. I was selling several domains a week, many for between $1000 – $2000 each, and some for even more… which was a nice little profit. I believe the best place to sell domains back then was Afternic.com, which is still in business today, but with different owners.

One of the most popular parts of the site was their Domain Appraisal section, where I spent several hours each day. It was a free service where once you registered a domain name you could post it there and then other people would appraise your name for you. In all honesty… it was an absolute joke, as most of the people doing the appraisals were other domain owners, and everybody would give each other overinflated appraisals as they wanted you to do the same for their domains. I cannot tell you how many domains I owned back then, where people appraised them at $100K each. I remember one day I added up the averages of all my domain’s appraised values, and on paper I was worth about 8 million dollars. You can imagine how excited I was at the time… but unfortunately those millions never became a reality.

As I mentioned above… everything was awesome for about a year or so. People were spending crazy amounts of money on domain names to create all these startup businesses ventures with no real business plans, and the venture capitalist kept forking out the cash. At the time I was doing pretty well with my little domain reselling business.

Well as most of you know, those Free-Spending Days came to a sudden halt with the much publicized Dotcom Bust, and next thing you knew it was hard to get $100 for a premium domain name. Well those new darker times went on for quite some time and in the next few years my domain collection dwindled down significantly. Some I sold, and many I ended up letting expire as I did not want to keep paying the renewal fees. To be honest, a large percentage of the domains I originally registered were not really that great, but back then I just registered everything that popped in my head. Out of the original 3000 or so domains that I owned, after selling some and letting others expire… I ended up keeping a little over 400 domain names, and today I am down to just under 300.

So how is the domain reselling business doing in general nowadays? As for me, I have not really been trying to do much reselling lately. I have done an occasional flip here and there, but nothing much to speak of. As from my post last week you can see that I tried to test and see if I could sell a complete website via a post on Making Money Online Dot Com, but have not had much luck with that so far. I am actually thinking of adding a “Domains for Sale” section to our site and try and shrink my collection to a more reasonable amount, but we will see.

As for domain reselling around the world… it seems to be doing great. I am a HUGE fan of the website DNJournal.com, as they always have good articles about the industry, as well as great interviews with top domain resellers. But the main reason I check them out each week is they list many of the top domain name sales from the previous week, plus they keep a running total of the biggest sales for the entire year. Checkout some of the domains that sold last week and what they sold for:

Brazil.com – $500,000

Payment.com – $250,000

ChinaTours.com – $200,000

Payments.com – $150,000

Grafikkarte.de (“graphic card” in German) – $73,828

BookHotels.com – $70,500

iPal.com – $59,000

CouponNetwork.com – $59,000

LMK.com – $58,500

DomainAppraisal.com – $52,000

And if you think those were some crazy prices, checkout the top 10 sales so far for 2009

Toys.com – $5,100,000

Candy.com – $3,000,000

Fly.com – $1,760,000

Auction.com – $1,700,000

Webcam.com – $1,020,000

Server.com – $770,000

Brazil.com – $500,000

Talk.com – $500,000

Top.com – $464,750

Body.com – $400,000

So as you can see, even with this bad economy… there are still people and businesses spending BIG MONEY on premium domain names. Unfortunately, it is a little late to try and get into the game unless you know what you are doing and have a lot of money. But it is not impossible.

One option would be is if you could snag (register) yourself a great domain name that relates to a new industry that is just starting to develop. That might be worth a lot of money to you. One of my good buddies who I have done some domain reselling with over the years (who actually bought MakeMoneyOnline.com from me years back) registered the domain MyBlog.com. He registered it back when blogging just started becoming known. Well he ended up selling that domain a year or so later for $400,000. Now that was a pretty good return on his investment. So there is definitely possibilities out there, you just need to stay on top of the next new and greatest thing.

How to Choose a Domain Name

Are thinking about putting up your first website? Well the first thing (and one of the most important things) is getting a domain name. Not just any domain name, but a domain name that is perfect for your particular business.

A domain name is what you type-in to take you to a particular website that follows the http:// or the www in your browser address bar. The domain name for our website is “makingmoneyonline.com”. In my opinion it is perfect for this particular niche blog. As you will see it fits in all the requirements for choosing a great domain name below. The only negative thing is, it might be a little too long, but there is really no way to get around that.

One of the main things in choosing a domain name is you want register one that is memorable, as you don’t want people to have to look it up each time to find you. If they have to search through their giant list of bookmarks to find your website, it could cause you to lose a lot of repeat visitors, and it most definitely will hurt you with word-of-mouth advertising.

Below is a list of the things that I believe are important in choosing a good domain name:

Always Try and Get a .com
Domain names are available with all sorts of extensions, not just .com’s. You can register domains with; .net, org, info, .biz, etc… the list is quite large and it is much easier to find available domains in those other extensions. Some people will tell you that the extension is not that important, but I would tend to disagree. Sure there are many businesses out there that are successful using other extensions, but I am pretty sure if the dotcom version was available when they first registered their domain, they would have chosen it first. There is an exception with the extension .org, as it was created to be used for nonprofit websites, even though it is not always used in that way.

People just associate domain names with .com’s, just like they associate Google for searching the web. In the United State especially .com would be considered the Beverly Hills zip code of virtual real estate, so if you can, always try and get a domain with a .com extension.

Register a Domain that is Meaningful and Easy-to-Remember
Make sure that the domain you choose is memorable. You don’t want people to have to lookup your web address each time they want to visit your site. If you already have a business name the first thing you should check is if it is available. So if your business is named “Big Crazy Tattoos”, you should first do a search to see if “BigCrazyTattoos.com” is available. If that is taken, you might want to try something like “BigCrazyTattoosOnline.com” or something similar.

Some search engine experts say that you should register your domain with hyphens in it, for example “Big-Crazy-Tattoos.com”. They say you can get better search engine results with the hyphens. That might be true (I am not positive it is), but I don’t think the positives outweigh the negatives when it comes to hyphens. Any time you verbally tell someone the name of your site, you have to tell them to make sure that they put the hyphens between each word. Now seriously, how many times do you think someone is going to remember to do that? Plus, any time you mention the domain in audio books, commercials, teleseminars, etc… you have to tell them not to forget the hyphens. To me, it is just not worth the extra hassle.

Now, if you don’t have a business name yet, picking out a name gets much more fun, as you can name your business after your domain name if you like. I could literally write pages and pages of different ways to picking a good domain name, but I don’t have the time or space here. Probably the most important thing here is to not rush out and grab the first domain name that is available, unless it is PERFECT for your business. Play around with different keywords that relate to your business and see what you come up with. A cool website that has software for helping you come up with unique domain names is called NameBoy.com. Years ago when it first was created, I spent hours and hours searching for domains on that site. I personally would not register domains on that site, as they are a little expensive, but there is not charge to use their search functions.

Make Sure the Domain Name is Spelled Correctly
This is really important, as you can lose a ton of potential traffic if you do not spell your domain correctly. I know a couple guys who advertise on one of our other sites, and when they started their company, they went online to see if their two-word business name was available, and it wasn’t. But they REALLY liked the name, so they thought it would be cute to change the spelling of both the words, so the started their business under that name and registered the matching domain.

Now if you actually look at the two words of their business and sound them out, it sounds correct. But if they told you the name of their company, you would have NO IDEA how to spell it. I just did a search on Google for their website with the correct dictionary spelling of the words in their business and searched through the first 10 pages of results and they were nowhere to be found. I did find 2 companies with the same company name however, and they spelled their business correctly and they were both on the first page of my search. Now I am not positive, but I am sure there is a good chance that they are losing some business to their competitors just because they chose to spell their name that way. So, make sure not to get cute with your spelling.

Where Should You Register Your Domain Name?
There are lots and lots of different places to register domain names and they all have their good points and bad. We actually have our domains registered at a few different registrars and there are things that I like about each. But if I were starting out today, I would probably registrar my domains at Godaddy.com, as they are one of the least expensive places to register domains, and they offer some good free addons. But when you register a domain with them you need to make sure not to choose all the other services that they try to sell you during the registration process. All you really need is your domain registered, nothing else.

So registering a great domain name is the first thing you need to do to get your business online. In a future post I will talk about buying domains that someone already owns and some different ways to approach the owner to get a good deal.