Advice to the new domainer

I just wrote this at Digital Point forums in reply to a post "Domainers... do they make money?"

This is a lightly edited version of my reply. It seemed too good to leave as a reply that will soon be buried in history so I've copied it here.

Domaining isn't one business, it's several different businesses. Some domainers buy domains to use for the revenue they generate while held, some buy domains to sell on reasonably quickly as stock in hand, and some buy to hold onto for some future payout.

New Kids on the Block

When I first started acquiring domain names back in 2005 I was approached by someone who'd been in the game a lot longer than me & one of the things he said was that over the years he'd seen a lot of people come into the game and drop out. He advised me that New Zealand domains are hard to market and I listened. I've never really tried actively marketing my portfolio, sure I occasionally get approached by people interested in my domain names, but generally I try covering my costs with advertising and the occasional sale helps fill in the deficit.

How to change ownership of .NZ domains

There are three main "players" in a domain name. The registrant (the nominal owner), the registrar who sells the owner the domain name and the hosting service that provides web and mail services for it. When you buy a domain name, the owner definitely changes, and depending on the deal you strike, the other two players may or may not change.

Profiting From The Coming Recession

I won't say it was a first, but I received a very thought provoking unsolicited commercial email today. Not normal spam, but somehow my email address had got on a legitimate company's marketing list.

To an extent nearly everyone in an Internet business is dependent on advertising for our respective businesses' income. It doesn't matter if that revenue is from CPC/CPA marketing, building websites to advertise businesses, selling domains or on-line journalism it's advertisers who are paying the bill. Since this recession started my parking CPC advertising revenue is off by 30% and I've heard others mention similar percentages.

Negotiate not haggle

A few days back I received a simple query through NameDrive on one of my parked generic domains. "Are you interested in selling this domain name? If so can you please contact me" with an isp email address. That's not a lot of information & email is fairly inscrutable so I didn't have a clue why this person might me interested in the domain in question, and I knew I'd be negotiating blind.