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.

Surviving the recession

I pretty much dropped out of domaining during the worst of last year's recession and am only just starting to get back into it. For a while I thought I'd have to ditch a considerable percentage of the portfolio, but I just managed to keep it together and came out with the portfolio largely unscathed. Parking still doesn't pay very well and I still don't see myself back in domaining in the conventional way. I'm moved from investing into developing and am currently developing out many of my domain names into small sites.

How and when to buy generic domain names

When and how should you buy an existing generic domain name for your business?

In Branding on the Internet I discussed what you should call your web site, the short answer is it should match your business name, the longer answer is in that article. Part of the branding article was about using additional “Generic” or product related domain names for extra qualified leads to your web-site, hopefully leading to more business.
My advice, then, as now was:

“You know your business and how well a sale does for you. If your average sale netts you $1,000 profit, then an extra domain name only needs to bring in one more sale every few years to pay for itself. If your average sale netts you $10 profit, then that extra domain name needs to bring in 4 or 5 extra sales a year to pay for itself. Stop and think what your potential customers will be looking for and try to find the right domain name(s) for them to find then register as many money making names as your budget allows.”

That article assumed you would be registering previously unregistered domain names, but what if the generic name you want is owned by someone else? Many people give up at this point, but it may well be that you can still acquire it.

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.

Beware of free DNS services

Businesses come in all shapes and forms. Many small businesses are sole traders, often working on a shoestring budget. When businesses of this size first create a web presence it is often done on free services like Geocities or Blogspot. Sometimes this is because they are trying to minimize costs, and sometimes it is because they wandered into a web presence by accident. Although I am an IT professional, and have my own cheap hosting, this blog started as a very personal diary that I later split into three, distributing the back articles; one of the child blogs is decidedly business related. Once a blog or mini-site becomes part of a business' identity it really needs to be under the business' branding and this usually means having its own domain name to build recognition of the business, avoid confusion with the other sites on the free host, and present a more professional image.

Late Renewals and Drop Catchers

It's no secret that most of my domains have come from drop catchers. Most of the currently active .nz domain collectors have also picked a fair proportion of their domains up through drop catchers.

One of the on-going frustrations of drop catching is going to the effort of doing the due diligence on an expired name and not getting it. Sometimes this is because someone else decides it is worth more than I do , sometimes it's because another drop catcher gets the domain, and sometimes it's because the domain owner decides to renew the domain just before it drops.