Hello, happy Monday, and welcome to Domaining MBA Monday here on MorganLinton.com! Today I wanted to talk about something I’ve seen happen over and over again to new Domainers. Tell me if you can identify with this. You’re up late at night and an idea pops into your head, you just thought of an entire series of domains you can buy and flip for a huge profit. So you start hand-registering domains left and right, typically these domains looks something like [CityName]Keyword.com, [StateName]Keyword.com, [Keyword]Online.com, etc..
For this example let’s suppose that you had an idea that financial planners would want a geo-targeted domain to represent their business. You head over to your registrar and low and behold MinnesotaFinancialPlanner.com is available! You jump for joy and begin madly registering more domains. Before you know it you own SanFranciscoFinancialPlanner.com, DallasFinancialPlanner.com, the list goes on.
Soon you own maybe 30 [CityName]FinancialPlanner.com domains. Your logic is simple – you only paid $300 for 30 names, sell just one of them for a few hundreds bucks and you’re profitable. It’s a no-brainer right? Wrong.
Here’s the problem, you bought in bulk before proving your assumption. You start reaching out to financial planners in different cities, after a month of emails and phone calls you have no buyers. That doesn’t phase you, you’re sure someone will want them, so you wait. Now a year goes by and it’s time to decide if you’re going to renew all 30, so you do, now you’re in for $600.
Another year goes by and maybe you sell a few to other Domainers for $50 – $100/each so you’ve recovered maybe $200. Another year rolls by and this time you renew the 26 you have left. As time goes by you keep renewing, keep hanging on, but deep down inside you know you were wrong, you did not prove your assumption and now you’re stuck with a set of domains that you can’t sell for a profit but keep renewing because you’re sure your big break is just around the corner.
Do you see the problem here?
Now I’m not saying that buying domains in bulk like this is a bad investment, heck, sometimes it’s a great investment and in my example above you could very easily find that you can sell DallasFinancialPlanner.com for $2,500 and boom, you’re profitable and you buy even further in.
My point is, you just don’t know. What you start with is an assumption, it’s always better to prove your assumptions before buying in bulk in something you think has incredibly potential. Otherwise you might just end-up with a whole batch of names that you renew year after year hoping that some day you’ll prove your assumption right. In the end, you usually end-up wasting hundreds or even thousands of dollars on domains that you don’t sell and keep renewing year after year.
If this sounds like you, let this post be your wake-up call. Before you buy in bulk, prove your assumptions. It might sound simple but emotion easily takes control of so many domain buying decisions. Get emotion out of it, focus on data and only buy once you are certain you are buying domains you can sell.
