I’m amazed at how few domain name registrars spend any money advertising to the domain name community. With many of the readers of domain name blogs and members of domain name forums having hundreds, even thousands, of domains, I just can’t understand why most of them don’t spend more advertising to this highly targeted group. On many of the domaining blogs, it’s between $25 and $300 per month to have a banner ad on  a website which gets anywhere from a few thousand to tens of thousands of visitors per month. As I said when opening this article, this is extremely targeted traffic, and in most cases, you could recoup the full month’s advertising by having but a couple domainers transfer their domains to your registrar — if that (don’t forget about the value derived from keeping current customers). Advertising on domain name forums tends to be a whole lot more expensive, however their traffic is also much higher. The price of eyeballs is ridiculously cheap in this industry. A #1 placement on Google for many domaining related keywords will set you back $XX per click. I’d much rather have a full month of advertising on a popular domain name blog or forum than a few clicks on Google, which I highly doubt are any more targeted than the visitors to a domain name blog or forum.

So, what gives? The profits per name aren’t very high at most registrars, however the audience they’d be advertising to in this case have hundreds, even thousands of domains — I can’t see how this wouldn’t be profitable. With more and more domainers getting into domain name development, you also have the possibility of upselling them on hosting or domain name development packages. Why wouldn’t registrars form partnerships with sites like Whypark, SiteGraduate, AEIOU, etc – they could help their domainer customers get the domains they want developed at a reasonable price and at the same time, make what would probably be a very large amount of additional income through affiliate commissions.

Most of the domain name parking and domain name development companies get it — you can find their ads on many of the top domaining sites. Domain Capital gets it, Hitfarm gets it, most of the domain name conferences get it. But where are the domain name registrars? I’ll give credit to Godaddy here — they clearly get it. Moniker and Fabulous get it too — they take part in domaining conferences which does get them exposure to many top domainers, however I think they could both do more. Rebel.com? I’ve sure seen a lot of their ads lately, along with LogicBoxes. For the most part however, I’m largely unimpressed and don’t think most of the ICANN accredited registrars are doing anything near what they should be doing if they want to gain a very sizable portion of domain name registrations (those of domainers).

If we look at registries, the situation is much the same — how many of them advertise their extensions to domainers? The .me extension is an excellent example of how a registry can be successfully promoted. At least early on, .mobi was a good example of this as well. People aren’t going to buy something if they don’t even know it exists… I’m amazed all the smart people working for so many of these companies spend so little of their advertising budget  targeting people responsible for a large portion of their revenue. More than just domain registrations, this costs them non-domainer sales as well. When a non-domainer friend of mine wants to put up a website (hosting = mega-profits for web hosts/registrars), who am I going to recommend? Am I going to recommend the company I’ve never heard of or someone who I know will do a good job?

I’m not a big fan of making predictions on where the market is going based on positive sales results for a day or two, however the LLLL.com market has been chugging along rather well in this New Year.

The minimum wholesale was $2.00 in October, I feel confident suggesting it’s approximately $6.00 today, however I’ll be sure to post some results confirming those findings later this month. Even if we tack on a premium (which we should) to account for renewal, we’re still looking at a real appreciation of about 40% since October at the very low end, meaning anyone who bought in during October or November 2008 is sitting on a nice profit at present.

Quality LLLL.com sales continue to impress — TTBC.com selling for $6800 earlier this week, HIBE.com $4000, NOIL.com fetching $3805, MAFA.com $3105, AJRA.com $3000, and DULE.com $3000.

I’ve always been a fan of quality triple premium LLLL.coms (as well as lower letter quality, but overall, higher quality LLLL.coms), and we saw LMKT.com fetch $1500 this week. I know a few members on the domain name forums have had quite a bit of success in this market and it continues to impress. Considering how cheap many of the names in the triple premium segment are to purchase in a reseller environment, it does seem like a good place to invest for anyone willing to proactively approach endusers. Even the weakest of LLLL.coms are rarely fetching under $10 anymore unless they’re near expiry — something that was unthinkable for many meer months ago when thought they’d be available for handreg– some were speculating that as little as 3 months ago, so the market’s rebound certainly is welcomed.

What does 2009 hold for LLLL.coms and domains in general? Who knows. What I do know is that if you have no intention of holding your domains long term, now is the time to put a game plan together. There’s no reason not to cash in on the optimism many will have with a new administration in the White House. I’m guessing we’ll see the large majority of the domaining market improve at least temporarily.

Disclaimer: That was intended to be political — I don’t even live in the USA.

What I am suggesting though is that if the mainstream media continues to “worship” Obama, we might very well see more domainers willing to open their wallets a bit more, paying more for, and buying more domains. An increase in demand coupled with an always shrinking supply is never a bad thing

As I’ve said on many occasions, I really do see the LLLL.com market as several very distinct markets, my opinion on the market being explained here and here. It’s irrational to compare some LLLL.com segments to others, much as it’s irrational to compare stronger dictionary words to weaker dictionary words. Would any domainer worth their salt ask a question like “How is the dictionary domain market doing at present?” What sense does a question like that make? If obscure dictionary words have decreased in value, does that necessarily mean category killers have or will?

There exists at least some correlation in most of the domaining segments — if you really want to find a correlation, you can probably find one. Are quad premium LLLL.coms sales positively correlated with lower end LLLL.com sales — that is, does an increase in one tend to bring about and increase in the other and vice-versa? The domaining sector as a whole had a pretty terrible year in 2008 — hard to say in many cases what is correlated and what was merely the result of poor performance in the domaining sector. Seeing as most domains (and stocks) are selling for less today than they were a year ago, does that mean they’re all positively correlated? Of course not. The LLLL.com market is a relatively new market, there really isn’t a whole lot of data to go on, and the recession the USA has been in for the past year represents more than half the time the LLLL.com market has had significant interest from speculators.

Because of the diversity of the LLLL.com market, analyzing the entire market’s performance as a whole is difficult — the minimum wholesale and the minimum wholesale of any LLLL.com segment just doesn’t pain a complete picture, nor does the median, and even percentiles which I like to use still have their flaws (eg. more lwo end LLLL.com sales one month, more enduser sales one month,…). In many ways, it’s a very difficult market to follow, and that probably helps explain why there exist so many differing opoinions on where the market is heading.

I would argue that there exists at least some correlation between the weakest of LLLL.coms and LLLL.coms at least up to the quad premium level — we can see that both throughout the rises and falls, the markets tend to behave in quite a similar fashion. It’s difficult in many cases to make out what is the result of a positive correlation between the 2 markets and what is the result of the huge amount of speculative hype which built up from the time of the LLLL.com buyout in November 2007 leading up top the peak in most LLLL.com segments in February 2008. As I’ve mentioned a few times now, higher quality pronounceable LLLL.coms were continuing to rise in value well into March, and many of these segments have performed much better than low end LLLL.coms over the past few months. I don’t see a lot in common between the low end LLLL.coms and the pronounceable/rare LLLL.coms which have been registered in most cases for 5+ years. These domains have a much longer history of being desired and had value even before the LLLL.com buyout came about.

In no way am I saying that a sudden influx of available for handreg LLLL.coms wouldn’t affect the value of higher quality LLLL.coms — that I certainly could see happening in the unlikely event that LLLL.coms became readily available for regfee. What I am saying though is that I just don’t see how much of a correlation exists between the 2 very different weak LLLL.com and highest quality LLLL.com markets other than that. Low end LLLL.coms have a renewal premium which must be factored into every purchase and is something that is constantly eating away at their value. As/If LLLL.com prices can rise substantially over the current levels, I think the low end LLLL.coms will do just fine. At an $8 minimum wholesale (on a newly registered LLLL.com), in example, renewal accounts for a full 100% of the domain’s value. At $16, renewal accounts for 50%, at $32, 25%, etc — not hard to see that if LLLL.com prices are able to once again get above $30 or so, renewal will most likely become a non-factor.

It’s always hard to say what will happen short term — most often, predicting what will happen short term is nothing more than an educated guess. As I’ve said on many occasions, I do think the LLLL.com market has good long term fundamentals. Back around March 2008, I predicted that we’d see LLLL.coms fall in price as we neared renewal time and that they’d likely begin to recovered in January 2009 — prices most certainly did fall substantially (much more than I expected) between March and November 2008, and what we’ve seen so far has been a small or large recovery, depending on if you’re looking at it from the perspective of how much lower prices remain under what they were at in February 2008 or based on the ROI one would have received had they bought LLLL.coms in October 2008 and sold them now in January 2009. The minimum wholesale I reported in November 2008 was up a full 100% from what I reported in October 2008 — even accounting for what would need to be added to sales results to properly compensate for the renewal premium (approx 67 cents per month), we’d still be looking at prices being up at the minimum wholesale by about 50% over the course of one month — certainly not such a small number.

I’m not a big fan of looking at where prices are today and comparing them to where they have been in the past. We can’t change the past, however we can plan on how we’re going to make a profit tomorrow. If you buy 100 shares of a stock at $100, 10,000 shares of the stock at $1 (both $10,000 spent at the minimum and at the peak), and the stock bounces back to $10, you’ve spent $20,000 and have shares valued at $101,000 — or a profit of of $81,000. The price doesn’t ever have to go back to that $55 minimum wholesale I reported in February of 2008 for LLLL domainers to make a profit — it just has to go up in real terms (after the renewal premium has been factored in).

“You don’t get rich digging for gold… You get rich selling the shovels”. Isn’t that a great quote which could be applied, almost without exception, to the new domain name extensions we’ve seen over the past few years? Someone is getting very rich off of them — it just isn’t domainers. I haven’t went over new domain name extensions here — the basic idea is to be careful about how much you invest in new domain name extensions without proper monetization plans.

I’m going to discuss a problem speculative behavior in this post, one I refer to as domainer availability heuristic. So what exactly is the domainer availability heuristic in English you ask? The availability heuristic is a relatively simple concept that revolves around people believing that the likelihood of a certain event happening are different than they actually are because they can easily recall many examples of said event happening. When does this happen in the domain world? For starters, and the primary reason I started by discussing new domain name extensions in this post is because we see this very often with new domain name extensions.

Take Flowers.mobi in example — it really set the stage for .mobi, despite the fact it really shouldn’t have had anything to do with what future .mobis sold for. How could 1, 2, 3 or high sales possibly justify thousands of other domains selling for comparable prices?

What I’ve been seeing more and more lately is domainers applying this availability heuriistic mentality which exists in speculative extensions to even good extensions, such as .com. As an example, there was a huge rush on Namepros to register “pizza domains” when it was reported that pizza.com had sold on Sedo for $2.6MM — that sale fell through, but not before many domainers spent a small fortune on pizza domains… Similarly, there’s been a thread about Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and other developments in the UAE lately and a bunch of domainers registering domains related to that, and then there are the domainers who see a sale like YP.com for $3.85MM and think that this somehow makes other LL.coms more valuable.

A single sale means nothing. It doesn’t matter if it’s .mobi, .asia, .cc, LL.com, LLL.com, generic.com, etc… Every domain is unique — it’s bloody hard to even get much more than a ballpark figure on a domain in many domain segments because prices can just vary that much from one sale to the next. When you look at a site such as Namebio or DN Journal, how do you go about sorting through all the sales which were made to other domainers versus the sales which were made to endusers? On some sales, domainers overpaid — should that therefore be treated as the norm rather than the exception? Similarly (although not as frequently lately), sometimes domainers got a good deal — nobody would think LLL.coms in example are worth $500 or less just because iReit happened to have mistakenly sold a few for that.

So what am I saying? All I’m trying to say is that we should be cautious about how we interpolate and extrapolate sales results. Applying the results from a limited number of sales to make some kind of generalization about an extension or a market segment as a whole will often prove to be incorrect., as is looking at a sale and trying to justify how and why it came about happening. In uncertain times like we’re living in today, I prefer to focus on domains which I believe I’ll be able to properly monetize, other than when I’m getting a “very good deal”, something I haven’t unfortunately gotten a whole lot of lately…

Another thing to remember is that with prices having gone down as much as they have over the past year, one really does need to be careful about using sales from earlier this year to make judgements about where the market is today. Prices in many market segments have crashed 50%+ since August alone, so the amount of sales data which is still relevant to domains on the market today is relatively limited and is one of the reasons I’m being very careful about what I do buy, making sure it actually is a good deal. As Donald Trump once said, “Sometimes the best investments are the ones you don’t make”. Now’s a great time to be a lowballer — you really have nothing to lose if you go around offering people prices a fraction of the going rate and plan on reselling them once having taken possession. It might not be easy to find domains at a substantial discount to their reseller value but at the same time, it’s not really a good time to be speculatively investing large amounts of money with the sole intent of flipping the domains to other domainers anyway.

The minimum wholesale is a concept that comes up quite a bit when we talk about short domains, but how relevant is it really to the large majority of short domains?

It’s important to consider how many LLL.coms and LLLL.coms would actually qualify as “minimum wholesale” in quality. There never does seem to be a consensus on what exactly a minimum wholesale domain is. I’ve always assumed the minimum wholesale to mean the price the lowest quality example of a short domain segment would fetch (doesn’t seem anyone other than us short domain investors use the concept of minimum wholesale). Quality itself is a term which is hard to define… We can break up the 26 letters into premiums and non-premiums, break up the premiums into weaker premiums (F,G,H) and stronger premiums (A,B,C,D,E,I,L,M,N,O,P,R,S,T), we can break up non-premiums into semi-premium letters (J,K,U,V,W,Y) and bad letters (Q,X,Z), but that doesn’t really tell the whole story… Surely a domain such as QQQ.com would not be considered a domain of minimum wholesale quality, despite have 3 occurrences of the weakest letter. How about XYZ.com — 2 bad letters and the weakest semi-premium (Y). Would that be a lower quality LLL.com? Hardly.

If we take bad/semi-premium letters (J,K,Q,U,V,W,X,Y,Z), there are only 9^3 = 729 domains with 3 lower quality letters. Obviously triple repeats of the same low quality letter wouldn’t qualify as low quality nor would double repeats, so what we’re actually looking at is 9*8*7 = 504 LLL.coms with 3 low quality letters and of those, still some will have significant meaning and many would argue that U/W shouldn’t be lumped in with other lower quality letters (their quality largely depends what letters they’re found with), so we’re likely looking at about 450 or so domains which would truly be “the worst of the worst” — these are the domains we’re thinking of when we refer to the minimum wholesale. These domains don’t come up for sale all that often — with 450 domains out of 17,576 truly qualifying as minimum wholesale, only 1 in 39 LLL.coms could be expected to fetch the minimum rate. With reported LLL.com sales in a month usually being below 39, it’s not surprising to see that “on average” we don’t see a minimum wholesale quality LLL.com sold. Even if one does sell (eg. QXZ.com $4595 Sedo 11/21/2008), sales happen so infrequently that we really make much of a judgement from seeing them.

One thing I’ve observed in the LLLL.com market which does appear to hold true as well is that the worst of the worst LLL.coms often sell for more than slightly better ones (single premiums). I don’t speak languages other than French and English myself, however I’ve heard from domainers who do that in certain countries (eg. China, Germany), some of the letters English-speaking domainers see as bad letters are premium letters.

In the LLLL.com space, anti-premium (devoid of premium letter) LLLL.coms actually sell at a significant premium to the average single premium or double premium LLLL.com. In the LLL.com space, I haven’t seen a great deal of anti-premium sales, however they also often sell at a premium to single premium LLL.coms — perhaps because of what I talked about earlier about variations in what’s considered premium in other languages.

It’s interesting that so much fuss is raised on what the minimum wholesale is in categories such as LLL.coms and LLLL.coms despite the fact that the large majority of investors don’t have minimum wholesale quality LLLL.coms. Like I posted the other day when speaking of LLLL.coms (75% of which were registered by the end of 2005) and what I’ve posted here about minimum wholesale quality LLL.coms, most will sell at a premium, even a significant premium, to the minimum wholesale.

You wouldn’t judge how strong the LLL.com market was based on a triple repeat or enduser sale or how strong the LLLL.com market is based on what a strong pronounceable, enduser sale, or quadruple repeat — similarly, you can’t tell much about the market by looking at a bottom of the barrel LLL.com or LLLL.com knowing that much like enduser sales and the highest quality examples of each category, they are the exception rather than the rule.

I’m not a big fan of the term “minimum wholesale” myself to be honest — few people seem to understand the markets sufficiently to understand that just because a short domain has bad letters doesn’t necessarily make it of low value and just because a domain is made up of premium letters doesn’t necessarily make it more valuable. I just shake my head when I see domainers pay huge premiums for ugly all-premium short domains — being devoid of bad letters does not mean you have a better domain. Like my XYZ.com or QQQ.com examples above (most wouldn’t be so obvious as being of higher quality) go to show, you really can’t judge a short domain by the letters it initially presents you with. While it’s true that “on average” an all-premium short domain is worth more than a short domain with non-premium letters, iy’s incorrect to assume that’s true in every case. It’s unfortunate we have a lot of domainers who either don’t know or don’t care and perpetuate this false belief by overpaying on premium garbage and staying away or bidding low on domains which are much more promising.

As discussed in previous posts on time management in the domain name industry, time is money. Sometimes, the best strategy is to sell domains in bulk to cut down on the opportunity cost of your time. If you could make more money spending your time elsewhere, then you should do what it takes to get these domains sold as quickly as possible and this most likely means selling the domains in bulk. If you’ve lost confidence in a domain market or want to reinvest your domain profits elsewhere, selling your domains in bulk might once again come across as an attractive option. There are good reasons to buy domains in bulk and equally good reasons to sell domains in bulk — I’ll discuss both in this post.

For the most part, domains don’t sell well in bulk and short domains are no exception to this, as this eBay auction which inspired this post will show.

The strategy in buying bulk aftermarket domains often makes sense — you can probably negotiate a better price, you may feel that lower quality domains might yield a higher return on investment over an extended period of time, etc. Selling domains in bulk might also make sense if you believe the market is about to fall, if you have so many domains that you couldn’t possibly sell them individually or if the average domain is of so little value that the opportunity cost of your time would make selling them individually less profitable than selling the domains in bulk. So there are reasons why it might be both wise to sell in bulk and to buy in bulk.

Why do I have a problem with this particular domain sale then? I just can’t figure out who their target market is. Before I go on, if you’re the seller of these domains, in no way was this post made to ridicule you, merely to learn from what is often a mistake to sell domains of significantly different quality in bulk lots.

Most of the domainers buying lower quality domains do so because they can’t afford higher quality ones (within their respective market segments) or if they’re buying in bulk, for one of the reasons I mentioned above (such as believing it may yield a higher return on investment long term). If we take the LLLL.com market as an example, many people buying the buyout domains are generally doing so because they can’t afford to invest in quad premiums or higher quality pronounceables. There are very few people who’ve invested $XX,XXX+ into domains below triple premium quality.

A good pronounceable LLLL.com can easily set you back $2000-$5000 in a reseller environment — many domainers don’t have a great deal more than that invested in short domains as a whole, so the thought of investing their entire short domain budget in a single domain seems irrational (and probably is if you’re not planning on developing it).

That’s what I just don’t get about these bulk lots with domains of different quality — who are they trying to sell to? Many domainers are interested in either buyout LLLL.coms or higher quality LLLL.coms — one or the other, not both. Similarly, we see many domainers who buy domains which generate revenue but stay away from domains which don’t — they really are entirely different markets and it doesn’t make sense to mix domains from one of these markets with domains from another. Would you put STOCKS.com for sale with the rest of your 6 letter .coms? Why would you put a name for sale like GQQG.com with 75 other LLLL.coms when that single domain is worth 1/3 the ending price for the entire lot? The seller clearly recognized that the domain had far more value than the average LLLL.com in the lot — we can see that the domain, it’s 2005 registration date, and expiration date are bolded and written in a larger font size. Why not sell that domain individually?

This goes back to what I was saying earlier — people who want domains of a certain type often aren’t interested in domains of a different type. In this case, it’s highly unlikely that many of the bidders were interested in both a rare LLLL.com and bulk, lower quality LLLL.coms. Rare domains are somewhat like old domains in that they cater to a small niche of domainers, however they hold very strong prices among those domainers. Having a title such as “76 LLLL.com Domain Name Package 2,3,4 L Clearance Sale” is not the kind of title that would suggest to a rare domain or even higher quality domain investor that higher quality or rare LLLL.coms are to be found in this lot — when I read that title, the first thing that comes to mind is “I got a whole lot of LLLL.coms that will be expiring soon and I’m not interested in renewing them so someone might get a deal”. That’s fine and a deal someone got, however this is not the right image to project with higher quality domains nor should higher quality domains be sold in a lot which projects that image.

I’m going to have to start paying more attention to eBay myself when deals like this are being had. The triple premiums shouldn’t have been auctioned with the lower quality LLLL.coms either. I can understand why it was done in this case — many of the domains are within days from expiration, so good on the seller for at least being able to recover some of his investment, however if you’re not interested in renewing your domains, you really shouldn’t be waiting until the very last minute like this until the point that you’re forced to take whatever offer you receive.

Who doesn’t have a favorite domain quote? This post looks at some of the domain industry’s finest — covered are everyone from the Domain King to Yun Ye, Rick Latona, and Kevin Ham. The domain name industry is constantly evolving however I present here some timeless, classic domain quotes that will be as true 10 years from now as they are today.

Posted below are a few of my favorite quotes. Not all of them are by people who would identify themselves as being domainers, however all are applicable to domaining. Feel free to post any others you like.

1. “Domains have and will continue to go up in value faster than any other commodity ever known to man” — Rick Schwartz

2. “I believe that pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered.” — Rick Latona

3. “What is the value of a click if I sell a $20 million plane?” — Rick Schwartz

4. “There is no email without a domain name” — Yun Ye

5. “The sales I most regret are the ones I don’t make.” — David Gertler (randomo on Namepros/DNF)

6. “Don’t buy a name you aren’t willing to own if you aren’t able to sell it.” — Rick Latona

7. “If you control all the domains, then you control the Internet.” — Kevin Ham

8. “If you have the money, purchase the best domain name you can get your hands on.  But remember the golden rule: a domain name is only worth what you can do with it. We’ve turned down $5,000,000 for PalmSprings.com and didn’t think twice about it because we’ve monetized it so well.  However, in someone else’s hands, PalmSprings.com could have been parked or less developed and worth nowhere near as much. If you have the talent and vision to develop a generic mega-domain, please give people like us a call.” — David Castello

9. “Smile! In a few short years you will realize that these are the good old days!” — Marc Brittan (npcomplete on domain forums)

10. If the internet was Invented in Japan , How Would you feel about typing in Japanese characters to access ” Namepros.com “  日本語.com on a daily basis” — thegenius1 on IDNForums.com

11. “The roots of the domain names should not be owned, it is a public domain resource and it should be managed very carefully for the people of the world. There is a lot of management that has to be done for the domain names and it has to be done carefully. As you know I am not in favor of creating just top-level domain left, right and center. I think the Internet can happily survive for the next ten years without the need of a new top-level domain. I think most of the time people are doing this not because they think it will help the society but because they can own a whole lot of Internet real estate. For instance I don’t think that the .info domain has really helped as very much, people still feel they should get a .com and it only adds to the confusion if different companies have the .com, .biz and so on. And there isn’t very clear definition what each domain is for.” — Sir Tim Berners-Lee (Father of the Web)

12. “The Internet is the future of mobile and carriers need to be more selective about the technologies they choose if they want to succeed” — Arun Sarin (ex-CEO, Vodafone)

13. “Everybody wants traffic..  Everybody..  Whether they say it or not..  whether they know it or not..  nobody wakes up in the morning, says “I want to start a website that nobody will visit”.  Nothing happens on the Internet without traffic.  Generic keyword style domain names get a primer-level of organic type in traffic for nothing more than the keyword weight or gravity of the name itself.  Those are the “catchy”, “brandable” and “cool-sounding” names which constitute the 5-10% of all names registered which are worth anything at all..  Those are the names you want.” — Frank Schilling

14. “Before you speak, listen. Before you write, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you invest, investigate. Before you criticize, wait. Before you pray, forgive. Before you quit, try. Before you retire, save. Before you die, give. — Arthur Ward

15. “Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you’re generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make.” — Donald Trump

16. “The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.” — Rupert Murdoch

Are you a night owl or a morning person? Why not optimize your domain business to take advantage of when you’re at your highs and lows. If Friday’s are usually tough, why not try and get more work done on Thursday’s? The first step towards achieving your domain goals is to first determine what your domain goals are and then to set out a plan of how you’ll go about achievng them. Don’t shoot for the stars just yet — you certainly don’t want to crash and burn before you’ve even started! The domain business is no get rich quick scheme, however by working hard and keeping at it, you can most likely be successful in the domain business, just like others have done before you.

Effective time management starts by identifying when you’re most productive and assigning those tasks which require the most attention to when you’re functioning at your peak. Over the past year or so, I’ve come to realize that I do my best blogging between 2:00-6:00am, so I now try and get my blogging done each day during that time period. For quite some time, I tried blogging at the end of the day after I had completed everything I needed to complete — it just didn’t work for me and the end result was that I never got around to blogging and even when I did get around to blogging, the quality just wasn’t there. Now, the first thing I do when I get up is start working on the next day’s blog post (I have a very abnormal sleep schedule). Go through your day over the next few days and make a note of when you’re the most productive versus the least productive. It’s important that this be done over a few days to ensure that it wasn’t merely a particular task resulting in you being less productive — hormone levels fluctuate throughout the day, stress levels may rise and fall with certain tasks, etc. Try and plan your day so that when you’re functioning at your best, tasks which require optimal functioning are being handled and when you’re burnt out and ready to call it a day, all that’s left is stuff which isn’t going to stress you out anymore. Don’t bounce around from task to task during the day — pick a task (ideally prioritized as described above) and stick with it until complete.
Goal Setting

Organization and Prioritization may start with a to do list, with determining where you’re wasting time and correcting that, and with better organizing yourself so you can work smarter, however it absolutely does not end there. What better way to keep yourself on track than to set both short term and long term goals of where you want to be? When I say short term and long term goals, I’m not only referring to tasks which you’d like done, rather, where you see yourself being as a whole. Perhaps you fancy yourself making 5 figures online this year — perhaps you fancy yourself making 5 figures a month, or even 5 figures a day, it’s not the goal that matters so much as how you’re going to go about reaching your goal. As an example, my current goal with this blog is to grow traffic by at least 10% per month. I have traffic logging software on my server so that I can see exactly how much traffic is growing. Taking the amount of traffic received so far in the month and multiplying that by the 30, then dividing the result by the number of days which have so far elapsed in the month gives me a very reasonable way to estimate whether I’m on pace to meet my goal or not. If I’m not on pace to meet my goal, I might consider writing more blog posts, trying to write better blog posts, try to better match my blog posts to what my site visitors are looking for, or focus on promoting my blog more. This need not be limited to financial, domaining, and webmastering goals — you can and should set goals for everything you’d like to accomplish within a set period of time.

Personally, I have terrible memory and if I don’t write things down, I soon forget about them. It’s not uncommon for me to read an email and if I don’t make a personal note to get back to that person,  I forget to get back to them entirely (whoops!). Prioritize your goals based on what you want to achieve within each period of time. Optimism is great but try not to be too unrealistic. Make sure your goals are detailed — if you want to make $10,000 more next year, write it down as that, not as “make more money in 2009″. Try to make your goals not too overwhelming. I’m sure we’d all love to be billionaires, however let’s focus on getting first million or becoming a full time domainer, webmaster, internet entrepreneur first.
Smart Goals

Be SMART about the goals you set and make sure they’re Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Avoid subjective goals along the lines of “I will write higher quality blog posts in 2009″ — how do you measure a higher quality blog post? Who decides if it’s higher quality — the readers, you, your Alexa rank? “I will write 1 blog post each day in 2009″, on the other hand, is a very specific goal — a goal of consistently writing a blog post each and every day in 2009, on good days and on bad days, when I feel like writing and when I don’t feel like writing. It might sound like an easy goal but it’s really not and would make a great and challenging goal for most bloggers. It’s a measurable goal — the number here is one, as in one blog post per day. Attainable? Certainly. Anyone who puts their mind to it should be capable of writing 1 blog post per day. Relevant? Yes, I think readers and will be very happy if you’re able to maintain this goal and your blog posts don’t suffer a severe degradation in quality as a result. Time-bound — One blog post every 24 hours, 365 blog posts on the year. Pretty simple and straightforward goal. Make a list of your goals and see if they’re SMART. If not, modify them so that they are. The more specific, clear, and difficult (so long as it’s not overwhelming and is attainable) your goals are, the more likely you’ll be to follow through on them.

Now that you’ve identified your goals, how are you going to go about achieving them? Sometimes the easiest way to go about thinking how you’ll be able to achieve your goals is to start by looking at the end goal and work your way back from there. For example, suppose your goal in 2009 is to develop a domain without any help from others. Ask yourself how you’re going to go about developing a domain without any help from others. What will you need to know to develop your own domain? HTML? CSS? PHP? AJAX? What you’ll need to know will depend on how you plan on developing your domain. Make a list of what skills you’ll need and set these as individual goals along the way to your end goal of developing your own domain (eg. Jan-Mar for learning HTML, Apr-June for learning CSS, and so on).

I hope you found these time management tips useful. There are a lot of tips here, perhaps more than you’re comfortable implementing. Please don’t make the same mistake many to do list writers make in spending more time managing their to do lists than completing the tasks written on them.

Success in the domain business starts by realizing what you’re weaknesses are and making them your strengths. If you have a problem with procrastination or what some would call internet addiction, seek out help if necessary. Nothing should get in the way of your domain business and the only limit to what you can achieve is what you limit yourself to believing is possible. Are you too much of a perfectionist? You might be able to make more money by developing domains quicker — a little less quality, a whole lot more quantity. Read on for more time management tips on how to take your domain business to the next level.

I used to struggle with time management myself (perhaps why I have so many tips to share). Something else I should point out and something I’ve struggled with in the past myself is internet addiction. Internet addiction is still ridiculed by some as not being a real addiction, however believe me, it is, and can be just as devastating as most other addictions and it’s a real shame far too many people don’t take it seriously. If you think internet addiction is getting in the way of living your life to the fullest extent,  go see a therapist or talk to someone about it. Internet addiction is sufficiently widespread that some psychologists want to see it included in the DSM-V, the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Playing online games, gambling, and interacting on forums or social networks can be perfectly healthy, however some people clearly do spend so much time on them that it is detrimentally affecting their lives.

Once you’ve planned out what you’re going to do today — that’s what you need to do and what you’d like to do time permitting, why not make a to do list for tomorrow? You can always add or make modifications to what needs to be done and planning in advance might encourage you to not procrastinate so much. If I know I’m going out with friends or family tomorrow night, I’ll want to make sure I get everything I need to get done that day before then — that might mean doing some of tomorrow’s tasks today if at all possible.
Work Smarter AND Harder

As the example at the start of this article showed, wasting even 5 minutes per hour can result in an enormous amount of wasted time over the span of a year — roughly 250 hours. You might not feel like you’re wasting time but you might still be operating less efficiently than you’re capable of. Wasting one minute each hour compounds to wasting approximately 50 hours every year — Similarly, saving but one minute every hour would compound to saving 50 hours every year. If you could increase productivity by 10% (completing in 54 minutes what currently takes you 60), you could take 4 weeks vacation in the summer and still end up getting more work done than you are at present. How does that sound? It sure sounds good to me. That’s the real perk of working for yourself — if you work hard and work smart, you’re well rewarded for it. There’s no boss here putting a salary cap on what you can earn. Want to earn more? Start working harder and smarter.
The 80-20 Rule

Could you finish 80% of the work associated with perfectly completing a task in 20% of the time? Sometimes being a perfectionist just isn’t worth it. As an example, it might take a student a couple hours to write a paper good enough for a B grade, yet 10 hours for the A grade. Thinking about this rationally, the college student shouldn’t try for an A grade unless he values 8 hours of his time as being less than the value of the difference in the grades. Even if the student isn’t aware of the math or economics behind determining opportunity cost, he’s probably rationalizing something similar in his head — eg. “This paper is worth 10%, this one is worth 30%, I should spend more time on the paper worth 30% because it’s worth a larger portion of my final grade.” Examples in real life aren’t always so simplistic, however it is usually much the same — it’s important that we not only prioritize what’s most important from what’s not but also that we determine how much time is worth spending on each task.
Time Management Log

Keep track of how long it takes you to complete each task with a time management log. Why not ask some of your friends or other people working from home how long it takes them to complete those same tasks to better help you determine if you’re spending too much time completing them? How much time are you spending doing things other than your work? It’s probably hard to even have a ballpark figure until you sit down and write it all down for a few days. The result may shock you. If you ever wished you had more time, writing a time management log and analyzing where time is being wasted may be just what you need. Where are you spending the most time? Could you cut down on the time spent doing that? Is it obvious that you’re wasting time doing anything throughout the day (yes, that was a rhetorical question)? One of the best ways I find to be more productive is not to ask yourself how you can be more productive but rather to ask yourself how you can be less productive — it’s kind of fun too! Make a list of things which would result in you being less productive and through this reverse brainstorming, I’m sure you’ll come up with plenty of things you’re currently doing which are detrimentally affecting your productivity. Reverse brainstorming need not be limited to use in improving time management either — whenever you have a problem you’d like to solve, one of the easiest ways to solve it is often to think of ways to cause that problem. I’ve found that instant messaging and telephones just don’t work for me — I’d rather receive emails and respond to people by email whenever possible. That’s not to say I won’t ever use the telephone or instant messaging — they’re certainly more efficient in certain situations and might be what other people are more comfortable using, however for me they largely result in an inefficient use of time, so I avoid them as best I can.

Everyone wants to get rich and domain investors would like to think domains will get them there, however every domain investor needs to start somewhere and build from there. Some people say time is money — are you throwing money away by not effectively utilizing your time? Making money online is particularly hazardous in some ways — it’s easy to quit buying and selling domains and go read domain blogs, SEO blogs, etc instead. As long as you’re learning practical skills, there’s nothing wrong with reading domain blogs or SEO blogs, however you’ll have a hard time convincing me that music video you’re watching is helping you domain business. How can you earn more value from your time? How can you go about running your domain business more efficiently?

Change your perspective. If you think you can’t do something, you’re probably right, it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy holding you back from actually achieving what you initially set out to achieve. Go big or go home has no place here — we all need to start somewhere and there’s nothing wrong with starting small. You need to earn that first dollar before you can earn a second. Nobody makes $1000 before they make $100. Why are people afraid to start small? Why are people afraid to grow? Why are people afraid that achieving what they’ve set out to achieve might take some time? I like setting goals — not impossible to achieve goals but goals which may be difficult to achieve within a certain time frame. It’s all too easy to procrastinate if you don’t set them.

I’ve started prioritizing how I go about completing my days starting by completing what needs to be done, such as blog posts, checking to see if there are any domains at the drops or on auction that I’m interested in, seeing if any offers have been made on my domains, followed by what I would like to get done, such as replying to emails, other messages, and time permitting, a bit of time to interact with other domainers on Namepros. We shouldn’t all have the same priorities — your priorities might first involve getting your kids up for school, heading to work, picking your kids up from school, making supper, doing any work you weren’t able to complete at work, and lastly, checking if you’ve received any offers on your domains, checking if you’d be interested in any domains coming up for sale or dropping soon, and, time permitting, interacting with other domainers on Namepros, a different domain name forum, by telephone, email, instant messenger, etc. We’ll all have different priorities — we all live different lives. It’s important we all get completed what’s most important for us before we move on to the less important tasks.

I know a lot of people both online and offline who don’t get a great deal done — certainly a lot less than they’re capable of getting done anyway. Many are very intelligent people, perhaps too intelligent and too creative for their own good. It’s great to have lots of ideas, however if you never do make anything of them, of what value are they to anyone? No value. If you don’t take that idea and turn it into something which provides value, you’re generating no value. Who will ever know about your great idea unless you decide to share it with the world?

I’ve been spending more time lately focusing on delivering some value rather than focusing on delivering maximum value per post. If I can deliver 50% or more of the value in a blog post that takes me 1 hour to write that a more researched and elaborated blog post on the same topic which takes me 10 hours to write would provide, doesn’t it just make economic sense to write the 1 hour blog post? If we think of the 2 blog posts as a utilitarian using the example above, one providing 50 units of value, the other providing 100 units of value, would it not make sense to write 10 posts providing 50 units of value rather than 1 post providing 100 units if both could be accomplished within the same time frame? That’s starting to be more my thinking lately and no, I’m not saying quantity is better than quality, it merely was in this particular example. While quantity may not be better than quality at the extreme, a slight degradation in quality which allows you to produce more quantity might very well be worth it.

As an example, it’s much easier to make $100/month from a website than $1000/month, and much easier still to make $1000/month from a website than $10,000/month. For most people, having 10 websites making $1000/month is a much more realistic goal than having a website which makes $10,000/month — only an authority website will be able to make that kind of money and many such sites already exist in most market segments and would be very difficult to replicate. These sites were usually started years ago, have a very dedicated following of readers, and have writers who really are experts on the topics they write about. At the $1000/month level on the other hand, all we really need to do is a reasonable amount of promotion, have a decent idea in place and target our site to a market which both has the potential to drive a large amount of traffic and has the potential to attract advertisers with deep pockets. A website related to loans, credit cards, lawyers, insurance, and other high PPC keywords can easily make $1000/month with a well thought out development and promotion plan — some domains in these segments make $1000+/month undeveloped. Building a small network of connected sites on similar topics will encourage some of your regular readers to visit your other websites on similar topics.

Suppose your main website receives 1000 uniques per day and you can make $1000/month off those 30,000 uniques received throughout the month and suppose you made 10 other websites on similar topics, each capturing only 10% of the main audience of the main site — you’ve now likely near-doubled your income from $1000/month to $2000/month. Simplified? Yes, and there certainly are benefits (such as attracting higher quality advertisers) and trade-offs associated with this approach which I’ll cover another day, however I do believe in many instances the trade-off between quality and quantity is one worth taking. It really does depend on the situation — an authority website isn’t going to want to publish something which appears to be of comparable quality to an outsourced copywriter and an outsourced copywriter really shouldn’t spend his days doing  considerable research for an article he’s being paid $0.02/word to write.