What about my awesome microsoftsearch.net domain?

I absolutely disagree with you George.

1. There has never been a more profitable time to buy a grand name and flip it for a multiple. There is a greased machine of buyers like you and me within instant reach for a noob who's risking his $500 or $1000 to find a buyer on an option before he's even put down his dough.

Why? Because you and I are not wasting our time at the bottom, but working mostly the middle. Years ago, before PPC changed everything and increased the value of almost every name, there was no such structure or opportunity.

In a hot market, shit names become okay names, and that's what we're in now.

2. Yes, the MOST money is not to be made in flipping to me, but I thought I made that pretty clear when noting that people like me are happy to pay upfront $300 to get more money over time.

Thing is, not everybody has that interest or business plan. Most people here, not in the domain biz, would be thrilled to make a three to five x multiple in a week or two, no?

3. You're right about the bot pitches. See my post above (posted before you posted). You have to customize your pitch.

4. You say: "the returns on investment are approaching "normal" returns of other businesses" Huh? You're kidding right?

I sat down recently and check about 25% of the names I've bought in the last year or two. I suspect that a $500k investment has turned into $7 or $8 million, and I don't mean by DK's standards ;)

George, I know it's hard for you to appreciate my sincerity given our history, but I really believe that there is money to be made in this game that dwarfs other forms of work common to people around here.

I am good at what I do, granted, and so are you, but I think that there are very motivated people here who are very speculative and hungry for knowledge who could learn very quickly and make really good money.

Believe me, I ain't selling the snake oil. I really believe it.

I have a friend who's been piling his day job money into domains that I grab but don't work for me, and while I don't really like the responsibility of that, this guy's my new best friend. His wife even called me one day to say I helped pay for the baby's bedroom reno.

There are risks, but under the model above, the risks are minimal. Most people have a grand to lose. If they don't they shouldn't get it. But then I don't have to say that as it's GFY :1orglaugh

How can you get ripped by escrow.com ?

I also want to state categorically, I ain't interested in investing anyone's money in domains. I've already has some people message me, and I ain't interested.

My only selfish interest here is in buying more names.

:pimp

seems like a good post, time to read it all !

Dombuyer, you dont have to answer this, but I am curious, why dont you like DomainKing? Or what has turned you off about him?

If you're still hanging around, dombuyer, put up a few notes about .nets

WOW. :Oh crap

... but maybe I just read it wrong.

Which PPC sponsor do you guys use? or recommend?

stop wasting our bandwidth

How can you get ripped off by escrow.com?

DomBuyer: I know you're reputable, and we're at the mutual respect stage now (it helps to have common enemies, hehe ;) ). I just don't think it's as easy, even for the bottom-feeders, once they factor in their time.

I agree with you that most of the top guys aren't spending as much effort on the sub-$1,000 names at the moment, and that's probably for a good reason (I've been focusing more on the $10K++ names myself, as you'll see when I post my new "baby" next week ;) ). It's soooo much work going through those names at the very bottom, that you have to value your time fairly low to go for them (unless you have it very automated, say like NameAdmin/15x/Franky or even BuyDomains on domain drops).

Of every 100 newbies who tries the above, probably 98 will get nowhere.....but maybe a couple will find success. Revisit this thread in a year, and we can see. There are some smart folks here on GFY, and some raw talent that is undercapitalized too. Of every 100 ICQs you got, how many are now on your ignore list? :) hehe

That's pretty much true for any method of making money. I could show any number of my friends EXACTLY what I do daily to make money, not one of them would do a thing with the knowledge.

I've never met him, so I don't really know him, and all of us in the biz know what that means. I'm sure he's quite a nice guy and lots of people really love the guy.

He is definitely a trailblazer and loved and hated in equal parts. I admire his balls for having invested so heavily before anyone else was in the room, but some years ago I spent lots of energy ridiculing his ego and megalomania when such things mattered to me. Now I don't bother and much of what he preached has now sunk in without me bothering to care about his personality defects.

Rick is Rick. There's something about him, despite having made his mark and lots of cash, that needs to constantly remind the world that the domain world revolves around him, when in fact, it doesn't. This busines is actually very decentralized, with lots of people all over the world who might never meet, doing very well.

When I was thrown off his board, there were just a few other nuts and refugees. Now, it's like the Fortune 500. George can share a chuckle with me on this.

It used to be like the Wild West, with all the blood fests and battles that you'd expect from the Wild West. Today, it's much more mature, as George noted, and battles are rare.

My battling days are over. I have a large family, lots of real-world relationships, filled with problems, tragedy and all the ache of modern life.

Fake drama works, but eventually it wears thin.

very nice guide, bookmarked :thumbsup

Brisk: For PPCs, there are several to go with:

1. DomainSponsor -- good for general traffic

2. Fabulous -- good for casinos and adult

3. Others that are "invite only", e.g. Hitfarm, where you need higher traffic to get in (email for info if you're big)

4. Others like Sedo.com, Afternic.com, DomainHop.com, Moniker, NameWinner, Goldkey.com and others are starting to do it too (a sign the industry is getting saturated).

I wrote a long thread about this some years ago. Let me see if I can dig it up.

You are truly one of the few good guys in the domain biz, and I like your mentality, and your honesty - You say it like it is!

Another thing while I'm in ass-smooching mode:

GeorgeK and I have had legendary battles, and many differences over the years, but since he's new to this board and you guys might not know him, George probably knows about ten times more about domains than I ever will. He's really, really smart. So pick his brain via icq and leave me alone..heh..

lol Well, if you're a hot gal (or have a hot sister), you can ICQ me.....otherwise, DomBuyer's your man! :1orglaugh

You do tons with a search page like kitty.com do you asign a gross value to click in your head when it is a non- commercial term like that? 500 type-ins a day is worth x?

This very generous thread comes from a man who has made TONS OF MONEY in the domain business mind you...

I concur this is the most valuable thread any of you will prolly read in a lifetime.

Thank the man... =)

I eagerly await this thread dying out ;)

This is the one area I won't talk about as it's very competitive and the walls have ears.

The one thing I will say is that everything is situational: Depends on your business plan, your deal with advertisers, the diversity of your portfolio and traffic.

Again, there is no template formula for valuing a name. In the case of kitty.com, we knew in advance that however the ppc page was displayed, whether targeted or not, the traffic was a bargain either way, and we always have the asset, which could be a terrific brand.

Actually, now that I think about it, the seller of kitty allowed us to pretest, because I remember how screetchy she was about email hijacking...lol

So, what I said above is wrong: we pretested and were happy with it. Now I remember that we offered her $20k on our second offer, and settled just north of that, so she did very well.

I showed you some of my domains. And Ihave some otehrs. I was going to sell the stuff off but it occurs to me that where can i get this type of return and I do not need the money. Is buying with a 2 year payback on actual income still possible? People have said 3 years is more common now. This is different then the start of thread in that i would be looking at a known commodity.

Dom - George, good posts from both of you :)

There is always a gem to be found in any thread.

Domain names are real estate - pure and simple.

Btw, what are the risks using Escrow.com?

I don't buy anything more than two years rev these days. Too risky. More often than not it's a year... :2 cents:

Yes, good stuff.

great thread.... thnx DomBuyer :thumbsup

quick question....

37754 searches for "people relationship dating"

is that domain good? i picked it up a few months ago... :winkwink:

peoplerelationshipdating.com haven't done anything with it yet..

good post man, you just gave me a few ideas

1. Dombuyer
2. Mickey Mouse
3. Slavik
4. George Foreman
5. AVM
6. Dombuyer
7. NetTuner
8. Chris Chena
9. Vertical Axis
10. Dombuyer
7371. Pornstar2pac


that's a nice list

This brings up something I should have anticipated:

(pardon me here: half drunk on a Sauternes here @ Dombuyer central)

Just because there are searches on an expression without the .com doesn't necessarily mean it will convert into type-ins.

In fact, a three word nonsensical expression like the one above will most certainly not give you any type-ins.

You have to have some critical thinking at play to wonder aloud if anyone will type something like that into their browser.

Nothing to lose @ $6.99, but try and imagine the days when we had to put up a $100 on our hunches.

:helpme

i see.... now when overture shows you the number of searches a set of words like that get... does it include in different order into that phrase?

ex: people relationship dating , relationship dating people....etc

The terms those 37754 people had been searching for could have been all the above, or even "Dating people in relationships" or "are people in relationships dating ?"
So the more words/combinations in the domain the more uncertain you can rely on those numbers :2 cents:

Nonsense. You introduced me to the game, but 1% of my brain is enough for me to find out how things work. What you did is igniting the flame, and explaining the ratio between ovt w/ ext and actual type-in traffic, and I thank you for that. Don't take more credit than you deserve though.

Thanks for your emails, I'll look into it. Your 'IP address' can be found in any email you send.

I would be interested in swimming down stream from you. In other words 2 years does not scare me.

icq 166708909

Overture is an aggregate of what people will type into the major search engines.

Because many searches are stream-of-consciousness:

eg: "relationship dating people"

You have to be able to separate off those from actual type in phrases:

Most likely someone will type-in:

"relationships.com"

"datingpeople.com"

"dating"

...that sort of thing.

Don't fall into the very comon trap of thinking that a random search slug like "relationship dating people" will be typed in whole hog as is.

See the thing is that people know that search engines will take that three word phrase and spit out something they want.

But they also know intuitively that no one builds a site at:

"RelationshipDatingPeople.com"

So you have to be clear about the difference.

I know you asked DomBuyer but I can answer it as well.

Use the overture tool and type in all keywords + the .com extension, in your case peoplerelationshipdating.com. Without even checking, I can assure you it will get 0 results in that tool, and also 0 type ins in general.

You have to use common sense. Poeple are not typeing in random bullshit phrases like "people relationship dating" in their browsers.

Type in domains are names that are made of 1, two, or in rare cases three popular words and they sound also good and make sense, f.e nastybabes.com, hotsluts.com, asiandating.com, nudecelesbs.com, hotstuff.com, mp3downloads.com, airlinetickets.com etc. :)

ok, DomBuyer answered at the same time, I though he already left this thread and went talking to the seaside prostitutes :upsidedow

Dunno if anyone remembers this episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" where Larry picks up a hooker only because he wants to use the car pool lane to get to the Dodger game.

It's become my alibi on the 405.

http://digitaljohnny.cementhorizon.c...hers-thumb.jpg

man that episode is the shit. hahaha. :thumbsup

very nice post by the way. lol.

When you have the high bid for a phrase does your ad come up only if they type that phrase alone or as long as the phrase is in their search query?

Sticking with the earlier example suppose I have the high bid for "lick boobs". Does that mean that I only get an ad impression if they type in only the 2 words lick boobs or would I also get ad impressions if someone typed in chicks lick boobs or lick boobs all day long? (This is assuming they didn't put quotes around the entire phrase)
Am I correct in thinking that lick large boobs would not trigger my ad and I would only show up in the regular search results at the mercy of the algorithms and under pages with the term lick large boobs? (This is assuming lick boobs are my page's optimized keywords)

That is too funny.

Great thread Dombuyer, bookmarked.

ahh.... thank you for clearing that up for me... awsome thread :thumbsup

Great post ! great !

Excellent post, the more people in the game the better!

Excellent thread, have already learned much. Thanks Dombuyer :thumbsup

when I give this a shot i'll be in touch with you DomBuyer!

One question I have is, why not buy the domain and just develop it instead of selling? Developing would make more money in the long run while selling it would be one check....

If you're so inclined, it's absolutely better to develop.

I have a very short attention span, and I'm prone to taking a two hour lunch and ending up in another country three days later....lol

....so I don't have the interest in developing. But if you do, and you're patient, you're bound to make more money.

But in that case, you might as well pay $6.99 and brand a name instead of spending real money on a type-in domains. :2 cents: