By: RH
What are your domain/development plans for the new year ?
As 2012 comes to a close its time to look back on what worked and what didn't. This time of year is rightfully dominated by holiday and family responsibilities, but when you have a little alone time it is good to look at your portfolio and see what needs pruning.
Every year there are fads in the domain business,things that work for a little period of time and usually get a lot of hype. Whether it be a buyout on some category of names like LLLL.com or if a certain niche generates a lot of sales such as the ikeyword.com domains. You need to look and see what names in your portfolio are still relevant from a speculative standpoint and what names may be on the down trend.
I can say a few years ago I took a spec on some L-L-L.com and was able to sell some for a nice roi, I held onto some others that I probably could have flipped but held onto instead. I did let a few of those drop early this year as it seemed that the interest in those names became close to nil. Of course right after I let them drop there were back to back weeks of four figure L-L-L.com sales.
Besides looking at your domain portfolio you should look to any developed websites and review their performance. Do you have time to maintain them and improve them ? Are they making money after hosting and reg fees ?
The industry will be changing big time with the addition of the new tld program and now is the time to think about what kind of domainer/developer you want to be moving forward.
Personally I have spent a lot of time this year reading all the sites selling on Flippa. I think about the time spent on certain domain investing activities and compare that to how much time it would require to build out sites selling in the $3,000 to $5,000 range on Flippa. I think I would like to spend more time on developing stuff and less time on what I consider the unproductive energy I spend on domaining. I need to spend less time searching and more time developing.
Leave a comment and say whether you plan on more names or less names moving forward ? Do you want to get more into development ?
Less domains…Higher quality
This year I’d like to fully develop at least one website with regular content and membership ability, on one of my better domains.
I’d also like to take better advantage of the rise of smartphones and tablets, and make all my domains/webpages more mobile friendly.