3 Ways I’m Fine-Tuning My Domain Portfolio In 2014

It’s a new year and that means looking back on the previous year and seeing what worked, what didn’t, and most importantly, what has to change. Last year was a great year and it’s easy to look at a good year and say, “well I exceeded my goals so no changes needed!” The problem with that is that you might miss-out on new opportunities.

Exceeding a goal is great. Knowing why you exceeded it is even better. Here’s an example, let’s suppose you want to make $5,000 one month selling domain names, and you plan to do it by selling 10 $500 domains. If you do that, great, if instead you sell one name for $3,500 and one name for $1,500 you can learn from this experience. What were those names? How did you find the buyer or how did they find you?

My point is, just hitting your goals isn’t going to help you improve your business, learning why you hit or exceed them will. The same is true for your portfolio as a whole. Just because you sell more names than you expected one year doesn’t mean you can’t figure-out why some things didn’t sell and why others sold so well.

I’ve been making my own domain name strategy (and it’s evolution) public  since 2007 so I thought now would be as good a time as any to share some of the ways I’ve been fine-tuning my own portfolio.

  1. Focus on one and two-word .COMs – this is where we made the most money in sales last year and this is without a doubt where we see the most liquidity and the best sales. In 2014 I expect close to 75% of our purchases will be one and two-word .COMs. Back in 2008 I think my portfolio was around 60% .US, oops, learned that lesson!
  2. Less domains, higher-value names – this has been a multi-year process and it’s still going. At one point I had around 1,400 names, then down to 1,000 and by the end of 2014 I would like to have around 500. I’ve found that I get much better liquidity and ROI on domains I buy for more money (i.e. $1,000+) than names I buy for under $50.
  3. Let the “I’ll develop this someday” names go – there was a time when I had over 200 running websites. That time has come to an end and now my full time focus is on Fashion Metric. My domain business makes its money selling domain names and I no longer buy names that I’d like to develop, that’s just not what we do. I am not going to build some big multi-site mega network nor will I develop many of the names I thought would be fun to develop. Sure it could be fun but I’ve moved on and my business has too. As I’ve said to many a Domainer, decide what you business does to make money and stay laser-focused on that, trying to do too many things tends to mean you do nothing well.

So now you know three ways that I am fine-tuning my portfolio this year, what are you doing?

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton