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Domainer Resources – New Page

I lieu of a lengthy post today I’ve assembled links that you may find useful if you want to learn more about domaining. Please check it out and be sure to suggest some of the many things I’m sure to have missed.

Domaining Resources

I hope you had a great Thanksgiving!

November 24th, 2006 | Category: Finance, Investing, Etc., Misc. Investing, Non-Finance, The Net | One comment

Tithing: Thinking At The Margins – Part IV

This is Part IV of the six-part series where we discuss real estate, investments, retirement, and insurance. Please remember that my only goal is to help you think through your view of paying a full tithe.

Here are some scenarios with the questions that each raises.

You own a home.

    • Do you pay tithing on:
        • The full value of the home when you sell it?
        • The equity you have at the time of the sale?
        • The equity in excess of the amount by which you had paid down the principal with post-tithing money?
        • Your net profit? (i.e. your equity after paying closing costs and realtor fees)
        • Only cash that you keep out to pay for something else?
    • What if the cash you take out of equity is less than the amount by which you already paid down the mortgage with post-tithing money?
    • What if you roll all the equity over into your new house
    • Does your answer to any of the above change if you buy and sell real estate for income?
    • What if you’ve passed through periods of high inflation and the dollar has lost much of its buying power, does that factor into your tithing calculations in any way?

Stocks go up and down in value, so do you pay tithing:

    • At each change in the market?
    • When you receive dividends?
    • Does your answer to the above question change if you reinvest your dividends rather than taking them as cash?
    • Only when you sell your stock?
    • When you sell your stock, do you calculate your basis (what you paid for the stock) so you’re only paying tithing on the profit and not on what you paid for the stock with post-tithing money?

You have money in a bank account earning interest, but the inflation rate is very high, so you’re actually losing purchasing power. Do you owe tithing despite the quantifiable loss?

You pay into retirement accounts and later cash out. Do you owe tithing:

    • As your accounts increase in value?
    • Only on the money when you withdraw it?
    • Only on the net increase (you calculate the amount you paid in with post-tithing money) when you withdraw the money?

You pay into Social Security and later receive benefits. Do you owe tithing:

    • On everything you receive from Social Security, even though you had always paid tithing on your gross income?
    • On some amount that’s determined by how much you paid in? The dollar amount you receive is probably greater than what you paid in due to inflation and cost of living increases, so do you owe on the absolute dollar amount or the difference?
    • On nothing because you paid tithing on your gross income?
    • On nothing because the money you receive has less purchasing power than the amount that you paid in, despite the fact that the actual numbers are higher?

You receive an insurance check for something that was damaged. Do you pay tithing on:

    • The full amount of the check?
    • Nothing if the check is the same amount as the damages you incurred (and had to pay for)? That is, the insurance restored your item to its prior condition.
    • Nothing if the check is less than the premiums you’ve paid into the policy?
    • The amount of the check less any expenses such as lawyer’s fees, health care lien, etc.?
    • The amount of the check less the amount received for pain and suffering because it’s an attempt to compensate you for lost time with your family, etc. and not really an “increase”?

Continue on to read the other parts in the series:

November 22nd, 2006 | Category: Misc. Investing, Personal Finance | 458 comments

Talk To Other People About Finance

Inspired by The Weight Of Money’s Start Conversations About Money and the conclusion of Ask Uncle Bill’s Don’t Read This By Suze, I started just leaving comments on their posts and instead decided to expand my thoughts into a full post.

The Weight Of Money has it right when they say that we need to start more “non-threatening, non-comparative” conversations with those around us. A critical component of that kind of discussion is not preaching or assuming an air of superiority, even if you do happen to be an expert. (I don’t happen to be an expert, so this is easy for me!) Nobody likes being made to feel stupid, and that will be counterproductive to being able to learn from those you talk to.

For a couple of years now, even before I started ThoughtfulConsideration.com, I have been asking my family, friends and coworkers about their finances. Usually the lead in is something like, “Dollar amounts are none of my business, but what percentage of your gross salary are you saving for retirement?”

There are so many questions to ask that it’s hard to think of them all, but here are some I could come up with off the top of my head:

  • In terms of percentages, where is your retirement? Real estate/Roth IRAs/Traditional IRAs/etc.?
  • How do you make big financial decisions? Little decisions?
  • Who handles the finances in your house?
  • How do you pay for cars? Cash/loan/lease/etc.?
  • Is financial independence one of your goals, and if so, what does it mean to you?
  • What goal(s) do you need to reach before you can retire? How did you establish those?
  • If you have a 401k program at work, does your employer offer a match? If so, are you contributing enough to receive their maximum match?
  • What do you do with your tax refunds or work bonuses?
  • What would you do differently if you were given the chance?
  • What insights have you gained about any aspect of personal finances, money management, or investing?
  • Where did you learn to manage finances? Whose example do you follow?
  • What good decisions have you seen other people make? What bad decisions?

It’s fun to hear what other people think about money and investing. Opinions and approaches run the full gamut of possibilities, and the experiences of other people are very valuable in thinking through our own decisions. Instead of trying to think of what I’ll say next, I try to ask questions and let the other person do most (or all) of the talking.

There are quite a few interesting things I’ve learned from these conversations:

  • Our family’s Adult Allowance program — which my wife and I really enjoy — was modeled after our friends’ example
  • Some people have a spouse who loves to spend and that will probably prevent them from ever accumulating any significant amount of wealth
  • Some people are counting on one asset (investment property, a small business they run, etc.) as a very large component of their retirement, for better or worse
  • In some cases, people are in tremendous financial holes because of their own poor choices
  • Some people value paying off debt (even mortgages) over maximizing net returns
  • Many people have quite a bit of money sitting in accounts that don’t pay much because they don’t know about the higher interest earning alternatives (this was us before we started paying attention!)
  • Some people have decided that they prefer to pre-pay their bills rather than keep the money in a savings account
  • Regardless of how much I kick myself for not focusing on saving and budgeting sooner, we’re doing quite well now (managing our finances, that is, not necessarily in terms of net worth) compared to a lot of the people I talk to
  • Everyone has different priorities — This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, but the extent to which priorities vary continually amazes me!
  • Most people don’t know as much as they probably should about personal finances
  • Most people don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about their personal finances

Here’s the Question Of The Day:
What insights have you gained as a result of talking to other people?

November 21st, 2006 | Category: Budgets/Saving, Education, Finance, Investing, Etc., Net Worth, Personal Finance, Retirement | 40 comments

Investing In Domains – One Noob’s Experience (Part 2)

You’ll want to read Investing In Domains – One Noob’s Experience (Part 1) if you haven’t already to provide context for this post.

Parking The Domains

There are quite a few parking services and they all have their own approach. Here’s a list of some that I’ve come across in alphabetical order (none of these are affiliate links — these are exclusively for your benefit and I make no money from referring you to them):

Each service has strengths and weaknesses, and I’ve only used two, so I’m not in a position to comment on any but Sedo.com and GoDaddy.com (more on my progress in a minute). When you’re looking at the various parking services, watch the details:

  • What’s the cost structure? Is there a monthly fee? What is your percentage of the ad revenue?
  • What’s the minimum payout amount?
  • How do they pay you (e.g., PayPal, check, etc.)?
  • How much do you have to do before the domains are getting views and clicks?
  • How customizable are the options? If you’re not converting views into clicks, how much can you customize the page?
  • How close to real time is the reporting?
  • Do you have to own a minimum number of names before the company wants your business?
  • Are you locking yourself in for a set period of time?
  • Do they handle search engine submissions for you?
  • Do the key words that you choose (if you get to choose them) have to be relevant to your domain name? Usually you’ll want them to be, but sometimes you might not.
  • Are they sticklers about trademarked (or close-to trademarked) domain names?
  • Will they reject domains (or accounts with domains) targeting specific advertisements such as adult, gambling, etc.?
  • What’s the arrangement for selling your domains? Do they assume you want to sell and broker the deal, or do you retain veto power?
  • What do other people say about the company?

Here are my stats after roughly three weeks:

  • Sedo.com
    • 51 domains
    • 233 total page views
    • 12 clicks
    • $0.45 earned
  • GoDaddy.com’s Cash Parking
    • 61 domains
    • 149 total page views
    • 16 clicks
    • $1.84 earned

Sedo.com

What I liked:

  • From what I can tell, the stats are almost instantaneous. For the first few days I enjoyed that because I was checking in (way too often).
  • The reporting was clear and fairly straight forward.
  • No monthly fee.
  • Ads are supposed to show up in different languages based on where the visitor is coming from (or perhaps the language setting on their PC, I’m not sure).
  • No minimum number of domains.

What I disliked:

  • They didn’t always have key words that fit my vision for the domain names.
  • The ad pages their system generated weren’t very compelling in my humble opinion.
  • How quickly the site timed out. I had to keep retyping my username and password more than I wanted.
  • For a couple of days my stats were showing double and I started to get excited. Then they dropped suddenly, and they sent me an e-mail explaining that there had been a glitch in the reporting system. Argh!
  • Customer service was via e-mail only (as far as I could tell) and their turn around was usually a 2-3 days.

GoDaddy.com

What I liked:

  • Easy setup. In fact, there was no setup. You paste in the domain names, and you’re off and running.
  • No minimum number of domains.
  • Customer service was great.

What I disliked:

  • Monthly fee plus a percentage of the ad revenue.
  • Reports were not real time. The site indicates that the information could be up to 48 hours behind what was happening at that moment.
  • Reports were not as extensive as I’d have liked, though they were adequate.
  • No customization. I had to trust that they were doing a good job of matching relevant advertising to my domain names.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, I’m going to have to retool my strategy because I’m not on pace to break even by the end of the year. My approach is slowly evolving into more of a “develop some of the sites” strategy, though I’d originally planned to simply park them. Minimally, I’d like to break even and if possible, I’d like to turn a profit. The profit potential is greater with developed sites, but so is the effort. I’m definitely not looking to pour more money into new domains without a better strategy . . .

As I promised, here are a few more resources – please suggest others (or ways to improve my strategy!):

November 20th, 2006 | Category: Finance, Investing, Etc., Misc. Investing, Non-Finance, The Net | 18 comments

Investing In Domains – One Noob’s Experience (Part 1)

After reading several posts on investing in domains, I decided to give it a try. My experience thus far has been time consuming, expensive, and not terribly rewarding. Admittedly I’m a complete newbie, so the fact that I haven’t done well in my first month can be easily attributed to not having enough experience. Hopefully you’ll find this post helpful.

I know very little about investing in domains, so please be sure to share some of your insights in the comments.

What’s In A Name?

The first step was reading as much as I could stand on “domaining” over the course of a couple of weeks. I poked around in a lot of places and read whatever I could find on the subject including John Chow’s Making Money With Domain Names and a year-old — but still useful — Masters Of Their Domains at CNNMoney.com. (Links to more articles at the bottom of this post)

Like any investment, it’s important to have a strategy (or exit strategy). My research turned up three:

  1. Flip It. Buy it to turn it around quickly and sell it. Some people will engage in name “squatting” (buying a name that’s related to an existing company or organization) which often falls into this category.
  2. Park It. After buying a list of domain names, employ the services of a domain parking service to earn money from your virtual assets. This strategy relies pretty heavily on mistyped domain names. The domain parking services vary in how much help they give you, the way ads are setup and displayed, and your percentage of the ad revenue. Virtually all the parking services will indicate somewhere on the webpage that the domain is for sale. They may even help negotiate a sale — for a fee, of course.
  3. Develop It. Like ThoughtfulConsideration.com, you can build a blog, online store, or any other type of webpage. This requires more time than the other strategies, so it’s more the quality approach (vs. quantity, like the other two exit strategies).

I decided to focus primarily on the second option, though at this point I’m thinking about using the third option on some of them (more on that in a minute).

Depending on your exit strategy, you’ll look for different types of domain names. Flipping and developing names means that you’re probably looking for high-quality, short, memorable names. It’s safe to say that almost all of these are already claimed so you can’t simply zip over to GoDaddy.com to register them.

The CNN article describes “direct navigation” which is the phenomenon where people, instead of Googling for information on a subject, will simply type the word(s) into their browser. You can develop or park that kind of domain name

If you’re going to park your domains, you might purchase a domain name composed of popular terms (e.g., www.eatingdisorders.com) when they’re not already in use by an organization. Otherwise there’s a good chance you’ll look for misspellings of existing, high-traffic domains. Here are some of the misspelling tricks people use – these examples use www.novell.com:

  • Extra letters: www.novelll.com — an easy mistake to make
  • Easy mistypes: www.movell.com — “m” is right next to “n” on the keyboard
  • Alternative spellings: www.novale.com — maybe someone heard the name wrong or is just bad at spelling
  • Leave out the “.”: wwwnovell.com — people may forget the period
  • Different TLD: www.novell.org — sometimes these are used for nefarious/deceitful purposes

There are tools, both free and not free, for generating misspellings on an entered domain name. Since I wasn’t going to start with a huge volume, I did this manually. I spent quiet a bit of time coming up with 500-600 names that seemed like they might be worth picking up.

Alternatively, there are sites like JustDropped.com that list all the domains that have recently become available. Some names are much better than others, but I picked up several ideas from them.

After (or while) coming up with the list of domains that you’d like to buy, you’ll need to determine if they’re available. Because I didn’t know any better, I had several IE windows open to GoDaddy.com with a different lookup going in each one. This was time consuming and frustrating because IE automatically pops up whenever there’s something to report, kind of like a dog who’s anxious to please you but in the process excitedly pees on your leg.

If I were to do this again, I’d use http://www.domaintools.com/bulk-check/ which lets you copy and paste a list of domain names and checks them for you all at once. That would have saved me quite a bit of time and effort!

Where To Buy

Armed with a long list of the valuable domain names that have somehow gone unnoticed (or someone would have bought them already), you must determine where you’ll buy/register the domain names. There are lots of places, but I had previously used GoDaddy.com and they had been helpful with other domain name purchases in the past. When you’re buying more than 2-3 domains, the sales rep you talk to will want you to send them an e-mail with all the domain names, sans “www.”.

GoDaddy.com either owns or partners with DomainsByProxy.com which offers a nice service. When you register a domain name, you’re required to list your contact information. For many reasons, that might not be something you want to do. DomainsByProxy.com will have their contact information listed in place of yours, and if anyone ever contacts them about one of your domains, they’ll forward the e-mail on to you.

GoDaddy.com will give you DomainsByProxy.com’s service for FREE when you buy several domains at the same time (I think it was seven domains). Here’s the trick: that service is only free for the years you buy up front, not on renewals. For example, if you register seven domains for one year, you’ll save $69.65 (7 domains * $9.95). After that, you’ll pay to renew the domains but you’ll also pay the $69.95 annually for the DomainsByProxy.com service, if you don’t cancel it. On the other hand, if you know you want the domains for, say five years, pay for them all up front because you’ll save $348.25 (7 domains * 5 years * $9.95).

I ended up buying roughly 50 one day, then another 60 a week or so later. Initially I thought I’d start small to minimize my losses if things didn’t really take off, but then I worried that I hadn’t done a good job picking my names

Some people will try out the domain names for 4-5 days to see what kind of traffic they’ll get. If the traffic isn’t good these people will cancel their registration on the names that aren’t doing well. I knew about this approach going in, but it seemed a little unethical. In retrospect, it may just be part of the game and I might try it next time, especially while I’m still so new at this.

Being the first person to register a domain isn’t the only way to get them. Many, especially the good ones, are only going to be available on the secondary market. Other investors, who know a good deal when they see it, pick up domain names to park a flip. Determining the value of a domain name is a tough thing to do because the value depends on many factors. Despite its difficulty, accurately appraising domain names — or at least being able to see a given name’s intrinsic or potential value — is a critical talent for succeeding in domaining.

Continue on to read Investing In Domains – One Noob’s Experience (Part 2).

November 19th, 2006 | Category: Finance, Investing, Etc., Misc. Investing, Non-Finance, The Net | 151 comments
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