Newbie Domaining

Well, after being inspired by Nadia @DomainSushi this past week, regarding her recent post commemorating her lessons learned after two years into newbie domaining, I looked at the calendar and realized that this week marks six months for me, and that I should do the same. Not sure if anyone will read this, since it’s pretty much my first attempt at a blog post of any sorts. Anyway, I feel like I have learned a lot in a short amount of time and that I should share some of that information, as that’s how I got it in the first place.

newbie domaining

For me, it started one night in February, when I realized that I had turned into a complete zombie, by coming home after work every night and playing crazy X-Box games that my kids had got for Christmas. I decided I needed to do something more productive with my time and I instead went on-line to do some surfing. While I had heard of GoDaddy, I never bothered to visit the site to see what they were all about. Once I did, like most folks that have helped make GoDaddy so successful, I jumped in head first without even knowing the least bit about anything I was doing, and had never even heard of the word domaining. Would I jump into a lake if I couldn’t swim? Probably not, but the allure of making money clouded my judgement.

By 2:00 AM, I hand registered my first 25 names, at full price of course, and probably came close to that amount the next night too. By the third evening, however, it dawned on me that I should probably do some research and see what else was out there, and at first I was a little overwhelmed. However, as cream rises to the top, I was quick to find DNForum, which lead me to all kinds of information, and still does. By the end of that week, I had created a Twitter account and started following the people I read about, and followed who they followed. By the end of the month or so, two weeks in, I had accounts with SEDO, Afternic, NameJet, Flippa, Bodis, and others and had created about 50 different bookmarks of various blogs and lists (Rick, Frank, Morgan, Elliot, Shane, Bill, Ron, Michael Cyger, etc.). I joined DNCollege and learned how to create and monetize WordPress websites, although that is still a learning process.

Having been in business for many years, I learned many lessons that are applicable to this business too. One of the most important is to learn from others before you. There is never a need to recreate the wheel, but you need to know the wheel as a baseline before you can move forward. Therefore, shortly after joining DNForum, I posted this thread, “What is the Most Important Lesson You Have Learned Domaining?” within which a lot of great advice was posted. There’s no question, that learning the lessons within that thread as early as I did, saved me a lot of time, money and grief, and allowed me to begin the path of newbie domaining, without believing the hype, without accidentally registering names with typos like I did on the first night and without hand registering crappy names that you can’t give away, and without discounts codes, mind you.

Another early lesson learned the hard way is that there are a lot of scammers and predators out there, looking to take advantage of anybody, especially some newbie domaining. Less than a week after purchasing my first names, I got sucked into this appraisal scam and learned several valuable lessons again. Besides learning to do my homework and never get taken again, I also learned a newbie domaining lesson about patience and respect for other people’s time, when I overreacted to a seasoned domainer after not hearing back from them in less than a 24-hour period for advice about this scam, not that he even owed me a response at all. Of course he did respond and iI felt like a real ass for being such an impatient idiot.

The next lesson I learned is for to anybody out there developing websites, especially WordPress sites. As WordPress becomes more popular, it also attracts potential hackers. Make sure to do your homework on security and keep your plug-ins and themes constantly updated. If you haven’t already, add a backup system to your website immediately that e-mails you your back-up database and information. After having created a dozen websites that were actually generating some revenue, I woke up one morning to find all of them down, each of them having been hacked identically. I couldn’t even get into the admin panel and truly felt violated. Luckily, GoDaddy does daily backups that you have access to for 30-days, which allowed me to get back up and running in no time, but big lessons learned anyway!

Other important things you need to make sure you know is 1) the difference between broad, exact and phrase when using Keyword Google search; 2) if you’re selling domains, it is okay to have them posted in multiple platforms (i.e. GoDaddy, SEDO, Afternic, etc.) and use the popular forums too; and 3) combing Namejet dropping names is a great idea, as the lists posted by most out there either sometimes miss goodies or sometimes hold gems back.

I’ve learned that while this business has it’s ups and downs, all businesses do and that will always be the case, just look at history. However, as I have learned in previous business ventures, whether things are up or down, there are always opportunities to capitalize on the situation. Like Nadia @DomainSushi expressed, be sure to set yourself some goals, so you know where you are going and can figure out how to get there!

Six months in, I’ve spent way more than I have made, although I have already had four domain names sales, which I’m told is a tremendous start and I have several websites generating revenue, including one that has already made me several hundred dollars over the summer. I’m starting to establish a decent portfolio of names and I’m already getting a lot of traffic to my domain website, VinsDomains.com, as a result of first page Google rankings for a number of keyword strings like “entertainment domain names for sale”, “health related domain names for sale”, “charity domain names for sale” and many others. Not bad for a newbie, although I owe everything to all of the people mentioned herein and numerous others who have put and continue to put good information out there! You know who you are and so do I. I really appreciate all that you do for folks like myself, and someday I’ll prove it by helping you out somehow. I look forward to that and to my next Newbie Domaining post in another six months. Thanks for reading.