Domaining MBA Monday: End Of The Year Domaining Tips

Domaining MBA Monday

Hello, happy Monday, and welcome to the last Domaining MBA Monday of 2013! This has been the most successful series I have ever run on my blog and I would like to thank all of you for the great feedback and comments throughout the year. Now that we’re at the end of the year I thought this would be the perfect time to share three end of the year tips to help you start 2013 organized and ready for another exciting year of Domain Investing.

Even if you just take one of these tips to heart it could have a major impact on your business next year. Ready? Let’s get started:

Renew your domains now – don’t manage your renewals in realtime. Instead take this time at the beginning of the year to renew everything that you know you want to keep for the year. I recommend renewing names through at least June of the year even if you plan to sell them this year. Anything that you plan to sell that expires after this you can try to sell in the first half of the year and potentially save some renewal fees. That being said if you have a big portfolio there are those names that you know you will keep this year unless you get a stellar offer, renew these now so you don’t even have to think about these, until that offer you’ve been looking for comes in. The idea here is simple, start the year knowing what your expenses will be and try to take as much of your profits from 2012 and put them into 2013 renewals so that you don’t have to worry about renewals. I finished this yesterday and don’t have a single dime to pay until August of 2013 for domain renewals, trust me, it’s a good feeling.
  1. Organize all your domains in a spreadsheet – I organize all of my domains in one giant spreadsheet that allows me to clearly put a plan in place for each domain. Every domain should have a purpose, do you plan to actively sell it? Wait for offers? Develop? Go through your whole portfolio with a fine-toothed comb. What you’ll find is that you’ll come across some domains where you go, “This is junk, I’m not going to sell this or develop it” you can then let these drop or try to sell them on somewhere like DNForum for $20 which is always better than dropping. I also like to go a step further since this spreadsheet goes to my internal sales team, I specify what domains they should be focusing on selling in each month. I also now load these into Salesforce since I am now using this platform to manage all of our domain sales.
  2. Create your 2013 forecast – This is where I find so many new Domainers fall short. They look at the year as a whole and say, “This year I’m going to sell more domains” or “I’ll make more money monetizing domains this year” and that’s where they stop. Sorry but any good business owner will tell you that forecasting is critical. Whether you’re running a domain investing business or a hardware store, you need to forecast. Without forecasting you have no firm goals, and goals with real numbers are so important to running a business. Break your goals down by month and category. How much do you plan to make? How much do you plan to spend? Set these goals and then each month you can push to hit your goals.

I will be sending Excel templates for the spreadsheets in #2 and #3 to all of my newsletter subscribers later today. If you have not yet subscribed to my newsletter do so now and you’ll have these spreadsheets in your inbox ready for 2013! Not subscribed? Subscribe now!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton