Rob and Ed speak with Marc Phillips who’s been buying Australian domain names since the early 90’s!
Marc has owned Accommodation.com.au(,) Bets.com.au(,) SportBets.com.au(,) PhoneNumber.com.au and currently owns Cream.com.au(,) Cellars.com.au(,) Apprenticeship.com.au(,) Salaries.com.au to name a few…
In this show, Marc mentions he sold Bets.com.au for over $100,000!
Robert runs DBR.com.au
Ed runs OnlineImpact.com.au
Nice to hear you guys chatting about one of my favourite topics – Australian domains. 🙂 I notice you’ve done 20 of these before but sadly this is the first one I’ve heard. Tell me, have you had a solid session on Australian domain selling techniques? If so, I’d love to hear it – could you send me a link to it please?
Domain names are about quality. Best advice anyone can receive is buy quality names with a view to monetise or develop long term. To buy quality these days means spending at least 4-5 figures. But 5 figures invested today will mean 6 figures in the future.
If your names are good then buyers come to you. And good names are liquid so even if you do need to sell then ‘techniques’ are not really needed. You have a business asset that others want.
… Looking forward to this video.
Rudy just click the “Domainer Show” tab above. All the past episodes are there.
Lock your door and enjoy yourself this weekend.
Great episode again Rob and Ed.
I never knew renting domains was against auDA policies. Any chance you can provide more info on this Rob as I did have someone ask to rent one recently but knocked it back.
Some great history and entertaining as always!
… Moving on, another ‘tip’ or investment idea that has long been debunked is the idea of trying to guess the next big theme. This will mean 100 names registered (that need to be renewed) with only 1 name likely to become half relevant. This sort of thing worked in the late 90s but from 2000 onwards became nonviable.
‘If someone offers you something take it’ – completely disagree. If this was one’s approach why oh why would he or she invest in anything and pay all of those renewal fees.
When someone has approached you, they will almost always pay quite a bit, and expect to. The only reason you are low-balled is because they are seeking to anchor as far away from what they think the domain is worth as possible.
Serious business people commonly pay $30-60k for ordinary .com.au domains and 6 figures for good ones.
If you:
(1) Respond to the enquiry when it is anonymous and / or
(2) Engage in negotiation on price when the prospective buyer is not even within 80% of the value and / or
(3) Be agreeable or cooperative with an utter stranger who is trying to do a better deal for him than John Batman did with the Melbourne indigenous peoples…
…then why oh why are you even in business?
You have friends, you don’t need a friend. Don’t imagine you’ll ever have any piece of the action or future interaction with the buyer. This is fantasy land stuff and the exception rather than the rule.
Comment #1 (Comment #2 is above)
Cellars looks good! Thanks for sharing your thoughts Marc! Agree with the general sentiment that new TLDs are crap and a good way to approach e-commerce is “take an old industry ripe for disruption”, but:
Domain names with town/suburb + service or service + town/suburb are not a good investment strategy. Have heard of a few of 5 figure exceptions where a capital city is involved but apart from that the reg and renewal costs over time decimate and often outrun any gains from realisation.
The long tail argument does not wash at all. This is because overall traffic to the site matters much more in Google and other search algorithms than the precision of matching the long tail search query with a long tail URL.
For example, Loans (.com.au) will always outrank BalwynLoans (.com.au) and LoansBalwyn (.com.au) for those who are searching for “Balwyn loans” or “loans Balwyn”, even if a great site was developed on either of these. This is because Loans (.com.au) gets hundreds of thousands of visitors per month overall, and the weight of traffic outdoes the need for geo specific relevance.
In any event, if the site wanted to target those searching for “loans Balwyn” it could simply add it to the AdWords title, or create a separate page eg. /loans-balwyn and this would do the trick.