Domaining Success Handbook
Practical Tips and Ideas for Making Money with Domain Names.
By Lord Brar ‐ DomainingTips.com First Edition – Released on April 29, 2008
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 ‐ The Shocking Truth about Domain Parking Chapter 2 ‐ How I “Really” Make Money From Domain Names – You Can Too! Chapter 3 ‐ 6 Ways Not to Go Broke Developing Domains Chapter 4 ‐ Should You Fool Around With Your Domains Chapter 5 ‐ An Interview I did recently Epilogue ‐ The Unanswered Questions…
IMPORTANT NOTICE This book is a compilation of articles written by Lord Brar at DomainingTips.com and at various other websites. The copyright of all articles included in this document and the compilation is with Lord Brar. YOU DO NOT HAVE RIGHTS TO REPUBLISH THESE ARTICLES ON YOUR WEBSITE. You have full rights to redistribute, resell or bundle this document in its entirety with other products. However, you may not edit or alter this document in any form. For any clarification, email me at lord@lordbrar.com.
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The Shocking Truth about Domain Parking – Yes, You Are Leaving Money on Table by Parking Your Domains.
Parking Pages are just about everywhere — after all, they are easy money. But is it really a good idea to use them?
How it all started
Parking Pages first started a way to make sure that the traffic to the domains was not wasted and you could make some money from the traffic by showing them advertisements. It was just meant to be a quick‐fix to make money from the traffic on the domain till you can put something useful on them. Even though parking pages started as a quick‐fix but they have slowly turned into a big industry in itself — there are billions of dollars being made every year from parking pages. As a matter of fact, a lot of domainers make their money just from parking pages.
The Problem with Parking Pages
There are a few issues with Parking Pages that one needs to consider when one decides to use them. 1. No Search Traffic. Search Engines are looking for sites which provide real content to their visitors — after all, it makes business sense for search engines to provide the best experience to their users. It is next to impossible – if at all – to rank regular parking pages in search engines. Every Single Day, Google serves hundreds of millions of queries — by not having your domain ranking for your target‐keywords, you are missing a big piece of action. 2. No Repeat Traffic. Parking Pages attract mostly type‐in traffic. To be fair, you can indeed expect some people to visit your parking page again and again by typing in your URL, but most would never visit your page again. Even worse is the fact that you can’t setup things like newsletters and member‐ registration, which will allow you to stay in touch with people who opt‐in and attract regular visitors to your site. 3. Little Customization. When you are using parking pages, you have little control over the looks and layout of your parking pages. Not only that, you do not have freedom to add any other features to your site.
Why Parking Pages are Good
I am not trying to say that Parking Pages are that bad. A lot of people make a decent amount of money with parking pages — including us on some of our domains. The best part about Domain Parking is that it is easy — all you need to do is to change the name‐ servers and you are done. There are some excellent parking companies like Fabulous.com which go the extra mile to help you squeeze the most profit from your parking page. But, don’t forget that by using parking pages on your domains…
You Are Leaving Money On the Table.
You Can Get Lots More Traffic. By having your site listed in search engines and having other sites to link to you, you increase your traffic — and hence revenue — exponentially. By using a parking page you are missing out on a huge amount of traffic that you could get by having a real site. Multiple Revenue Streams. When you are using a parking page, your only source of revenue is pay‐per‐click advertisements. Essentially, if your visitors do not click on your advertisements, you do not make any money. However, with a custom site, you make money not just from PPC advertisements but also from affiliate programs, cpa programs, ecommerce, sponsored reviews, subscription revenue and sales of text‐links. As a matter of fact, I have some sites which make hundreds of dollars every single month from just the sales of text links and virtually zilch from Pay‐Per‐Click Advertisements. Better Revenue Optimization. You don’t have any control over the optimization of revenue from your parking pages except setting‐up the right keywords. With your own site, you have complete control over the revenue optimization and control of the placement of various elements that will make you money. Capture Contact Information. One sure‐shot way to attract repeat visitors to your sites is to capture their contact — either via newsletter sign‐up or via a registration system. We use Aweber to capture contact on our sites and the response rates are totally amazing. Needless to say, it is not possible to do this on parking pages. Build Relationships, Sell More. When you are using Parking Pages, you have absolutely no contact with your advertisers. As a matter of fact, you have absolutely no idea about
who is advertising on your domain. When you are directly selling advertisements on your own site, you get a change to build a relationship with the advertiser. What this means is that you get a change to get to know the advertiser and up‐sell and cross‐sell them. This means much higher revenue and a potential for repeat business. I could go on even more about why it is a better idea to develop your domain rather than throw a parking page but I hope that you get the idea.
Get Your Facts Right
Whenever I talk about this issue with most domainers, they reply that it takes a lot of effort to develop a domain name. That is just NOT TRUE until you are building the next Yahoo or Google. I have developed hundreds of my own domains with simple strategies that you can copy too. In this small booklet I will tell you the strategies that I use to develop domains and make money from them. Let’s get started, shall we?
How I “Really” Make Money From Domain Names – You Can Too! A Complete Step by Step Guide.
This is My True Story
There was a time when I was extremely frustrated with my domaining business. I was seeing people sell domains for hundreds of thousands of dollars and yet I had so many domains which no one was willing to pay even registration fee for, let aside thousands. What was worse was that I was not making much money in parking either. Whenever I saw the domain‐sales charts I would cringe. What was I doing wrong? Was there a fault in my investment strategy? I had to do something about it or simply get out of domaining business. It was a do‐or‐die situation for me. There is another thing — I hate failing. So, I sat‐back to take a rational look at my domaining strategy and find out what if anything was wrong with it. And very soon I did.
What Was Wrong With My Strategy
Simple ‐ My domains were neither “premium” nor had lots of traffic. Most of the domains in my portfolio were — and still are — keyword rich, brandable and had excellent development potential. Most old‐school domainers look for easy money and investments where they don’t have to put too much effort — and development is not one of them. My major problem was that I was selling a wrong thing to wrong people.
But there were two other BIG problems — 1) Premium and Traffic Domains cost lot more than I could spend and 2) I had a lot of money invested in portfolio of keyword‐rich domains. Very soon I was about to discover something that would change my fortunes.
Finding the Solution
When I analyzed some of the domains which I had sold till now, I discovered that the keyword domains which had some sort of content on them were super‐ easy to sell. Not only this, whenever the domain had traffic and revenue, it was able to fetch much‐higher prices, which meant more profit for me. To show you some of my domain sales which I had analyzed – There was this dating discussion forum I had started and I had spent $160 for a vBulletin License, $120 for 1000 paid posts by forum‐posters and a few hours on building links to this site. (Note – Be sure to check out the EasyLinkBuilding.com’s link building tool.) As a result, within a two and half months, the site was getting a few hundred visitors a day and made some revenue from adsense clicks and a few sales from various dating affiliate programs. I put up this dating discussion site for sale at an auction site and sold it for $1500 in a few hours. That was a profit of roughly $1200 on a site which took less than 10 minutes a day to run. Also, some time ago I had purchased a content database of 1000 riddles for $20 and paid a coder $50 to code a simple script to read from this database and display on the site. I put it up on a riddles related domain of mine, posted links to it at some social networking sites and spent about 10 bucks for a 100 directory manual submission service. I ended up selling this particular site for $750 after five months. My total investment was $80 and the time spent uploading the database and script on my servers. Another was a small‐business marketing related site where I had posted 27 blog posts which I had paid freelance writers $10 per post for. My cost was $270 and a few hours of link‐building and sold it for $1300.
More interesting was this web‐design related blog which I had purchased from someone for $700. I spent a few hours and wrote a kick‐ass article which I was able to get on the front page of digg. Then I posted some re‐ printable and PLR articles and paid another 120 bucks to freelance writers to write 12 articles for it. The site started getting loads of traffic and started making $200 ‐ $300 from affiliate revenue, $70 or so in Adsense revenue and $150 from text‐ link sales every single month. After 5 Months, I sold it for $4250. I not only made a huge profit by selling it but also kept all the money it made from affiliate programs, adsense and text‐link sales. My Net Profit from this site was roughly $5700. And yes, there was this celebrity photo‐gallery site which I had put up on a babes domain which I had. I had spent $100 to have a freelancer in Eastern Europe to upload about 13,000 pictures of female celebrities. Then I had my people do some link‐building for this website. Within a few months, this site was getting some solid traffic and I ended up selling it for $650. That was a pretty decent profit for no work. All this was more than enough to prove to me that there was a potential to make money — and a LOT of it — by doing something that others were not doing. And the fact that I had keyword‐rich and brandable domains was a huge advantage for me when it came to ranking in search engines. All I had to do was to rinse and repeat – and I am about to tell you how you too can repeat my formula for making money from domain names. Now keep in mind that I am not promising you overnight riches or success with effort. Yes, you will have to put in a bit of effort – but the way to scale it up is to outsource most of your work to countries with cheap labor. However, finding quality freelancers and making them work for you is a bit of a challenge. If you are interested in buying a special report which I have written on the topic, please send me an email at lord@lordbrar.com for payment details. Let’s get started with the method, shall we?
Step by Step Method
Step 1 – Find a Niche. The very first thing that you need to do is to find a niche you will be developing the site in. You need to make sure that the niche has certain demand — which means that you will get some traffic — and you have a way that you can make money from it. You also need to know the methods that you can use to identify these profitable niches. Also, my personal recommendation to you is to choose a niche that you are interested in. To quote what Diorex had written on a forum – I don’t think that unmarried college age guys are going to be rockstars at promoting a menopause product or even a baby shower list. Look to your life experiences for things you naturally know a little bit about. Sure you can learn, but why set yourself up for a longer more difficult road. That’s it – simple and concise. Choose a niche you are interested in and that will make it easy for you to make a lot of money. I will repeat this advice again in the article “6 Ways Not to Go Broke Developing Domains” later in the book. Step 2 – Register a Domain. Once you have your niche, you need to register the domain name which you will run the site on. The domain should be brandable and keyword rich to help with SEO. You need to know how to come‐up with domain names, research expired domains and even purchase from the after‐market. Step 3 – Create a Site. The very first thing you need to do is to setup the site on your web‐host – be sure to read “How to Choose a Host Without Getting Ripped‐Off — 6 Practical "Rules of Thumb" to Remember” on domainingtips.com. And yes, I have webhost recommendations on my website. If you want to create a content site then you need a content management system like WordPress or Joomla. You could also setup a Photo Gallery or a Discussion Forum. You could also hire a freelancer to code a script for you but you can usually find an out‐of‐box open‐source script to do the job.
Step 4 – Publish Some Content. Once you have the site up, it is time to start posting some quality content. Remember, it is the content which attracts people to your site, makes it viral in nature and gets you the rank in search engines. You can create the content yourself or hire freelancers to create it for you. You also have an option of using content with reprint rights. Getting great content is much easier and cheaper than you can imagine. Step 5 – Create Revenue Streams. You don’t want to waste your traffic by not commercializing it. Put up affiliate links, CPA links, contextual advertisements, text links and products for sale on your site. Contrary to the popular belief, you don’t need thousands of visitors to make money. What you need is “quality traffic”. For example, I have a site which got 8 visitors a few weeks ago and it made me $147 in affiliate revenue. I also have another site in more popular niche which gets a few thousand visitors a day and makes only a few bucks. I usually commercialize my site before I even start promoting it at all. After you have a pagerank, you can also start selling text‐links on the site. Link Building Tool on EasyLinkBuilding.com makes it super‐easy for you to get higher page rank and get some quality traffic to your website. Step 6 – Promote the Site. When your site is up and running and has some content that people can use, you need to get the word out about your website. You can promote on the Internet by doing Search Engine Optimization and Link Building, Social Marketing, Paid Advertising, Viral Marketing, Internet Public Relations and what I like to call Twisted Marketing. SEO is the cheapest and easiest way to get traffic to your site and keyword domains are a big help. If you have Link Building Tool on EasyLinkBuilding.com it will be very easy for you to get quality back‐links which are absolutely a must to rank high and get traffic from search engines. Being on Digg’s homepage can easily get you 20,000 – 30,000 unique visitors in a day. Getting a top‐blog to link to you is another very effective strategy. When
LifeHacker.com linked to one of my sites, I got like 17,000 Uniques in a day and made a nice change. Step 7 – Let it Ferment. While the results of paid and viral marketing are instantly visible but search engine optimization takes some time to show results. For most of my sites, I just optimize the site, build some links to it and forget about it. If the niche is not super‐competitive, search engines start sending a fair bit of traffic pretty soon and without much effort from my side. Step 8 – Sell the Site. Once you have a site which has some good content and, hopefully, gets some traffic and makes some revenue, you may want to sell the site. Some of the options that you have if you want to sell your site are domain forums, auction sites, domain brokers or through private sales.
The Devil is in Details
As an entrepreneur, you have to remember that your profits are your revenues minus the cost. Profit = Revenue – Cost Your objective is to maximize your profits and to do that you need to increase your revenues and reduce your cost. The challenge is how you can reduce the cost of creating the site, creating content and promoting the site while maximizing the revenues, traffic and cost you can sell it for. In the rest of this book, we shall discuss some ideas and strategies that you can use to maximize your profits.
Feel free to send me your comments via email to lord@lordbrar.com. And if you have any questions about this strategy or domaining in general, feel free to Ask Lord Brar. Here is one comment which the famous Elliot from ElliotsBlog.com had written about this article – Some solid advice on DomainingTips.com on how to turn average domain names into valuable revenue‐producing domain names. People often complain that they were too late in the game to get the “good names,” but this proves there is no such thing as being late in the domain industry. The successful entrepreneur will learn how he can make his domain names profitable rather than lamenting about what could have been had he only known about domain names years earlier. Timing is important, but it isn’t everything. There is no easy money in the domain industry, but the article gives a step‐by‐step guide to one way to make money – even if you started today. If you want longevity in the industry, you need to find a niche that works for you, and there is some good advice in the article. Great sage advice. Some people expect to buy domain names and have the cash register start ringing, which isn’t the case.
6 Ways Not to Go Broke Developing Domains – Lessons That I Have Learnt the Hard Way.
When I posted the above article on my blog, it was viewed by thousands of people. No, it was not featured on Digg and all the traffic which I got on the post was high‐quality referral and word of mouth traffic. Right after I made the post, I literally got bombed with comments and questions. To answer one question which was asked – if there is anything that that should be kept in mind before one plunges into domain development – I posted this article on my blog. This article describes the mindset you need to succeed in the game – and hence, I consider this one of the most important articles in the whole series about domain development. These points are essentially derived from my own experience developing domains over the last 9 years — so yes, they are street‐tested. Let’s get started, shall we?
Tip #1 ‐ Know Your Niches
This is perhaps the most important tip I can ever give you — Focus on niches you already have an interest in. This will make your life a lot easier, fun and profitable. To quote Diorex from WickedFire ‐ I don’t think that unmarried college age guys are going to be rock stars at promoting a menopause product or even a baby shower list. Look to your life experiences for things you naturally know a little bit about. Sure you can learn, but why set yourself up for a longer more difficult road. . I’d also quote Hugh MacLeod from his HughTrain Post –
Even though the niche you are interested in may not be as profitable as pay‐day loans or credit‐cards but it would be easier for you to know what people really want and dominate your niche. This would translate into much higher overall profits and you’d have fun doing what you love.
Tip #2 ‐ Think Small – Seriously!
It is particularly important to remember that you cannot satisfy everyone at the same time. If you try to do that, you end up disappointing everyone. So, don’t try to build general‐purpose and “one size fits all” kind of sites. TO make such sites truly spectacular you’d need a lot of resources — which should not be your objective. Let’s say that fitness is one of niches I operate in. To build a general fitness site covering topics for both men and women would be absolutely crazy on my part. If I focus on Men’s Health, that would be better and easier for me but it would be very broad subject and still require a LOT of resources to create good site in. What I would do is that I’d split the niche into further niches — building abs, reducing fat, dieting, bulking up, upper‐body exercises, stronger legs, sports training, cardio‐ exercises, aerobics etc. — and build separate sites for them. This would make it easier for me to build the site quickly, promote my sites more easily and get more targeted traffic. Now, I am not saying that you cannot build sites on broader topics — I do it all the time. But, be prepared to put more resources and energy into them. I have a lot of broad‐ niche sites but I have even more sharp‐niche sites.
Tip #3 ‐ Use “Out‐Of‐Box” Solutions
Don’t re‐invent the wheel. If there is some “out‐of‐box solution” available for what you want to do, use that — even if it means some lost functionality, you will be saving tons and tons of money and/or time that you would have to spend on programming and design. Most of the times you will be able to find a free open‐source solution, all you need to do is look hard enough. For content management use WordPress or Joomla and use free or cheap templates to change the look. For forums you can use vBulletin or PhpBB. Photopost PHP or Coppermine get the job done for a photo gallery. vBulletin will also take care of your Social‐Networking needs. Use a site like HotScripts.com to find out the various available scripts. You could download and install the script on your server — most of the times Read‐Me files are detailed enough. If you are not comfortable doing it yourself, hire a freelancer — but read Tip #5 before you do. Also, don’t use any third party hosted services except widgets and analytics. Basically, the whole objective here is to use the already existing free or cheap tools to build your website.
Tip #4 ‐ Re‐Invest into Your Domains.
Start milking revenue from your domains right away by using affiliate links, CPA links, Google AdSense et. al. Contrary to the popular belief, sites CAN make money from low but quality traffic. To give example of one of my own sites, it got only 8 visitors from search engine and made $147 in affiliate commission. So, optimize your site for revenue right from the start — even though you may get only small amount to traffic initially, but you don’t want to waste it. Now, whatever money your site makes, re‐invest at least 75% back into the domain. Promote the site, get professional content written, and buy new software or get custom scripting done— but, reinvest the money to grow your site. Remember ‐ your site’s revenue is not your pay day but rather your pay day will be when your 25% becomes substantial or if you ever sell the site.
Tip #5 ‐ Freelancers Will Screw You
Or at least 80% of them will produce crappy stuff or miss deadlines and you will lose money with them. But it not all gloom — you have to know and follow certain rules of thumb. Here are a few things which I have learnt the hard way – Tip #1 — Always Talk on Phone Sure this isn’t going to save you from bad freelancers but it will put a more personal touch in the whole transaction. Not only will it make the other person trust you more and take you more seriously but you can also get to know a LOT about them from their talk. If you don’t know what I am talking about, I’d strongly recommend that you read BLINK by Malcolm Gladwell to understand what thin‐slicing is all about. Tip #2 — Never Talk Business on Phone And neither should be talking about their girlfriends or how that girl at bar punched the geeky guy you are talking to last night. What I mean here is that you should NOT finalize specifications over phone. Discuss the project, features and specification. However, right after you do that, send the freelancer an email reiterating the main points that you discussed over the phone. This will give you a written record, just in case things go bad. Tip #3 — Pay by a Way you can Chargeback Credit Cards and Service Escrow are good idea. PayPal, Wire Transfers and Checks are NOT. I have been burnt a lot by PayPal because you can’t dispute services – but it is really convenient for small transactions. So, you should use PayPal only if you can afford to lose the money you are transferring using it. If you hire via some freelancer sites like rentacoder.com, they have an internal escrow system — use that. The whole idea is to have a third party which you can involve if thing go downhill. Tip #4 — Pay as You Go Try to work out milestone based payments. And NEVER EVER pay 100% upfront — I mean NEVER. If you can’t have milestones based payment, pay something like 30‐50% advance and 50% on project completion. If someone is not willing to have this arrangement — with only exception of escrow — move on! Tip #5 — Look Out for Promises
Here are two things that separate Serious Coders from Amateurs — 1. Serious Coders will always ask about the deadline. 2. They will never over‐promise. I will sometimes throw in some flukes just to see how the coder responds to it. If a person seems to be too eager to do “anything” to get your money, it’s better you find some other coder. Bonus Tip — Conduct a Background Search of the freelancer. Here are some tips on Employee Background Check.
Tip #6 ‐ Keep Close Financial Records
The idea is to keep a detailed record of how much you have invested in a domain and what sort of returns it is getting. I have found that keeping records will not only keep you updated of your current reality but will also keep you motivated to work harder. With my own sites, I keep an excel file with weekly details of how much traffic did the site get and how much money did it make from various revenue channels. If both don’t increase consistently, I know I need to get moving to grow these figures. Also, do it on a weekend and don’t spend too much time on keeping super‐detailed stats tracking every figure under the sun — just a bird’s eye view of where your sites are going in terms of revenue and traffic. Your priority should be creating and promoting your sites.
Closing Thoughts
Now remember — these are just the rules‐of‐thumb and the list is no way exhaustive. Also, every situation is unique and you will learn the most by diving in and doing. So, start working, start making mistakes and start learning! Reader Comments – Well written and a subject I’m very interested in as the current landscape of domain monetization seems to be heading more and more towards development. I look forward to the rest of the series ‐ Bill from AvailableDomainNames.com.
Thanks for sharing all that very simple but very useful advice which most of the time gets overlooked. Did like the advice about the free scripts, there’s usually a script to handle almost anything out there and I’ve always offered it to web design customers with the idea that some scripts have
been in development for such a long time that you’d have a hard time trying to create something better by yourself, as you say ‘don’t re‐invent the wheel’. That also goes for some of the paid scripts too, you have to price up how long it’d take you to develop and ask yourself honestly whether you could do a better job ‐ Aaron from TN2Networks.
This is the article I looking for from the beginning. Thanks for this nice article and you are bringing me out of my cloud. ‐ Ervin Ter.
Should You Fool Around With Your Domains
After I published the above articles and started Ask Lord Brar, I got a question from a reader asking if he should “Fool Around” with his domains. The response had some “Must Read” mindset information to succeed in domain flipping and domain development. So, should you “fool around” with your domains? The answer is a Resounding Yes! There is no reason to be scared of screw‐ups. Remember the old saying — “Life is a Lesson You’ll Learn When You are Through“. That is more than true when it comes to domaining or, for that matter, any other business in this world. I am a proud graduate of the University of Hard‐Knocks and I can tell you that the best way to learn something is to go head‐on and experiment. To quote my friend Jon — Being too Careful is Just Plain Gay. Remember — I may be telling a lot of stuff but do you think I want more competition in my best markets by disclosing those ideas here. I discovered what works by hard‐work and hit and trial. You can discover those ideas too if you stop worrying about the results and start experimenting. I know you are scared because you think that the name you have may lose its value if you develop it. However, if the name has type‐in traffic, it is not going to go anywhere just because you have put up a site. It will only grow because now you will also get search‐engine traffic. And in case you don’t do well with the site, you always have an option of switching it back to the parking services — but I am sure you wouldn’t as development always beats parking in terms of traffic and revenue. What I will recommend to you right now is that you choose a web host, setup a blog, write some articles, setup adsense, add affiliate links, build some links and let it ferment for some months. Mind you — SEO is not instant and takes some time to show results. Patience, my friend, is a virtue. In summary — Yes, “fool around” with your domains. It doesn’t matter if it is your first one or one thousandth. You will learn something new every time you try out something . If you don’t try out things because of the fear of breaking things, you will be losing out to those who are out there and discovering what works before anyone else does. Yes, you can minimize your risk by reading how others do it but that comes with a disclaimer — reading too much can result in “paralysis by analysis” and you don’t ever want that. Whenever you see an idea that you think can work, try it yourself and see if it actually works.
Reader Comments – I agree 100%! Get off your butt and get to work! I started about 1 year ago but it took me 6 months to figure out that there’s almost no way to make it with 1 site. My 2nd site started, and I changed it 3 times. My 3rd site came up 4 months later and is kicking butt. Now I have 9 affiliate sites with sites on 200+ sites. Learn something from every site, and get to work!!! ‐‐ Desty from DestyOnline.com
The only way to learn is just doing it. Practice is the key. – fgmunoz from SEOSoul.com
An Interview I did Recently
Sometime ago I was approached by a blog called Profitapolis.com to do an interview with them. I had spent some time answering the questions and I think some of the answers may be useful for you too. I am reprinting here the questions – and the answers which I gave to them – that I feel would be of some use to you. Tell us briefly about your background before you started making money online. When I bought my first domain and made my first site, I was in ninth grade. So talking of background before I started making money online, I spent most of my time chasing girls and playing basketball, tennis and squash. However, I come from a pretty decent family background and my dad was a Colonel in the Indian Army. I am glad that I had the support of my family – both financially and emotionally – when I was starting up and that was a major help. What particular sites, forums, blogs or individuals played a role early on in getting you into the domaining business? I’d have to say that a lot of it was due to the help I personally got from other people who I happen to knew in real life or had met online and then kept in touch via ICQ. A lot of message boards which I used to visit back in the day that don’t exist anymore or are nearly dead – no point in mentioning them. At one stage of my life, I had a very successful online entrepreneur as my mentor. I would rather not mention his name as we didn’t part on a good note and still aren’t. However, discussing and debating ideas with him was a major part of my learning. In last few years I have been active on DNForum.com, WickedFire.com and SitePoint. I also read a few blogs, books and magazines regularly. However, I believe more in doing and learning. That is how I have learnt most of what I know now. Tell us about some of the failures you had to experience before you finally started seeing some success I don’t call them failures but rather experiences. I have a lot of experiences which I learnt from and moved on with a determination to never repeat the same mistakes. Remember – you should learn from the failures but it is important to not keep regretting them. You can’t do anything about the things which have happened. To quote from one of my favorite movies The Thomas Crown Affair – “regret is a waste of time and so is gloating”.
What is the most important lesson you have learned with regards to running an internet business? If I have to choose one lessons then I’d say that the only way you will discover what works and really makes money is to experiment. Starting a website is remarkably cheap as compared to an offline venture – so, if you have an idea, execute it. Don’t wait for someone else to come and tell you in a step‐by‐step way to make money. It will never happen because people who “really” make money are too busy doing that rather than preaching about it. If someone is spending time to tell you how to do it then he or she always has a hidden motive behind it and a plan to profit from it. Don’t ever expect a free lunch. Do you re‐invest some of your earnings into things like stocks or mutual funds? Yes, I actively invest in stocks and mutual funds. India story is a really big opportunity and there is no way I am going to miss out profiting from it! To quote an investment banker friend of mine from UK – “If you are young, living in India and still can’t get rich then you are either dumb or extremely lazy“. Name up to three quality books that you would recommend to a newbie starting out. 1. “Beware the Naked Man Who Offers You His Shirt” by Harvery Mackay. 2. “Good to Great” by Jim Collins. 3. “Losing my Virginity” by Richard Branson. Bonus Recommendation – “Intelligent Investor” by Benjamin Graham as it will help you understand the basic concepts of investment and speculation. What would you say is one of the biggest mistakes a newbie can make as an aspiring domainer? I’d say that there are two fatal mistakes that a newbie can make; (1) Registering Thousands of Domains. Don’t try to do this till you know what sort of stuff people are looking for and renewals are expensive. (2) Thinking that domains are easy money. You will spend a lot of time, money and effort in reading, researching and developing domains. Be Prepared. Lastly, anything else you would like to say? Shout outs to anyone? Be willing to put in hard work into your online venture and have patience. Overnight Success is a “Big Fat Lie” the media wants you to believe. And, what’s that old saying? Yes, “Rome Was Not Built in a Day”.
The Unanswered Questions…
This guide was never meant to be a complete domaining how‐to guide – it would take just too much time for me to write it and I am not an author or a guru. I am a domainer and make my money buying, developing and selling domains! I make far more by actually doing what I do rather than preaching about it. The blog and the newsletter I maintain are something that I do in my spare time. However, I get a lot of domaining questions because of my blog and me being a moderator at DNForum and WickedFire and, no matter how much I want to, it is just not possible for me to reply to all of them. So, if you send me a message and I don’t reply – no hard feeling please! If you have a domaining question, feel free to ask me – Ask Lord Brar. Also, be sure to join the Free Newsletter on my website – when you join I will send you a free report “8 Things You Must Know About Making Money from Domain Names”. Also, we have recently launched a Link Building Tool that lets you quickly search hundreds of links, analyze them and rank them according to the quality and ease of getting links ‐‐ just with the click of a button! It is an absolutely “must have” tool if you are serious about flipping. And, if you send me an email at lord@lordbrar.com – I will give you a discount coupon worth $20 of saving on this tool. Finally, you are going to need a webhost to host your websites. I have written an in‐depth article on my website describing things that you must remember before you spend even a cent on hosting. Here’s the link ‐‐ How to Choose a Host Without Getting Ripped‐Off — 6 Practical "Rules of Thumb" to Remember. Be sure to read it. All the best and if you have any questions do not hesitate to contact me. I will try my best to help you and reply to you. =)
Lord Brar
lord@lordbrar.com