1999 - the tech bubble is in full swing and I missed it all as I was in my third year at uni without a penny to spare…
Fast forward to 2007 (soon to be 2008) and, according to some, we are in another bubble which is now called Web 2.0.
At least I won’t miss out this time!
I found this funny, certainly worth a couple of minutes of your time to have a look:
After attending a seminar in April 2007, I decided to get into the domaining business i.e. to start buying and selling domain names for profit.
There is a fortune to be made from this particular investment class because of the nature of domain names. I suppose you could compare them to licence plates on cars. Each one is unique.
However, if you were to invest in a car licence plate, it’s likely that you would be limited to buyers in the country in which you reside. Not so with domain names - a good dot com can be used the world over and so anybody from any country is a potential buyer.
Bearing this in mind, I decided to jump in at the deep end and buy a collector’s item - a three letter dot com domain name. The plan is to buy now in the hope that the value will rise considerably over time.
LLL.coms are rare and so they are expensive.
As of the 1st of December 2007, the minimum price you should expect to pay to get one is $6,000. And that’s for a LLL.com containing poor quality letters.
If you can find a 3 letter dot com for less than $6k, snap it up because you will probably find that you can flip it fairly easily for a profit.
I bought one back in June of this year for what seemed like a ridiculously large price of $5,800.
At that time the minimum wholesale price for an LLL.com was $4,400. Fast forward 6 months and the minimum price has increased by over 30% to $6,000 so even if I overpaid when I bought my little dot com gem, it is worth more than I paid for it already.
Whether prices will continue to increase is a matter for debate but one fact remains - no-one is making any more three letter dot com domains so the supply is drying up. If the demand remains then surely these collector’s items are a good investment?
My strategy was simple: buy the domain on a credit card then transfer the balance to a 0% interest card. Natwest were only too happy to give me 13 months interest free so I will simply be paying a little each month to service the debt and will assess my position when the interest-free period is coming to a close.
£3,000+ on a domain name - am I mad? We will have to see. In the meantime I am toying with the idea of getting some more 
Recommended Reading: http://www.DomainProfitGuide.com
The Weekend Super Deal has just opened and this week David Allen is offering resale rights to 12 quality products.
Don’t miss out on this one, these products would make excellent stand-alone or bonus offerings but you have to get in there quickly because this deal is removed on Sunday:
http://www.WeekendSuperDeal.co.uk
Domain Name Speculation
Back in August I wrote a short blog post about domain speculation, in particular 4 lettered dot com domains.
You can read that particular post here:
LLLL.com Domain Name Availability Decreasing Quickly
I wish I’d followed up on that particular post as they have now all been registered.
If you did read my blog post, I hope that you took the opportunity to register a few of these types of domains when you had the chance because it just got a lot harder to get hold of them.
As of last week every 4 letter dot com is now taken, all 456,976 of them.
This means that if you want one now, you have to buy it in the aftermarket - you can’t just pop over to GoDaddy and register one.
Over the past couple of months the number of available so-called LLLL.coms has diminished rapidly as domainers across the globe have added a few to their portfolios.
It’s all complete speculation, of course.
LLLL.coms have sold out but there is no guarantee that they will ever be worth a significant amount of money.
However, I have been able to make a little profit out of this sell-out event.
In fact, a domain I won at auction a couple of weeks ago for $70 was snapped up for $200 within 20 minutes of me listing it.
And I’ve got another 18 to sell!
Could be an interesting couple of months!
Lazy Lay Profit System aka “The Coffee Break Millionaire”
After I mentioned this system last week I decided to give a test.
I’ve got the manual now and have studied the exact system I need to use. It’s all remarkably simple to follow and so I am putting some seed capital aside and following the plan for 30 days.
When I am finished, I will publish the exact results for everybody to see. Hopefully I will be well in profit and will have a new “cash cow” to milk.
The plan is to start with £200 and risk 5% per betting opportunity.
(The system says 10% but I am extra cautious.)
If/when the £200 doubles I will remove £200 and play with the winnings.
Last night was a mixed night - two races, one win one loss but the second horse lost by a mile - it was never actually in the race really.
So, fingers crossed that this one works and I can make some money!
Sunday Times Biz Opps Ads
Call me sad but I have a large collection of the “Business to Business” pages from the Sunday Times going back about 2 years.
It all stems from first discovering Tim Lowe’s method of selling biz opps - I wanted to keep track on which adverts constantly appear in the paper.
My reasoning is that if they are appearing week after week, they must be working. They would then be the ones to model an advertisement on if I ever decided to sell through a small classified ad and website combination.
It’s very interesting looking back from the first ads I have to the ones featured this Sunday just gone.
Looking at the adverts from July 31st 2005 I can see two particular opps which have stood the test of time:
(1) Vince Stanzione’s Spread Betting Opp and
(2) the “NHBusiness” newsletter
Both are still advertising in the paper - Vince’s advert is almost exactly the same now as it was in mid 2005.
Unfortunately, over the two years I have been watching these adverts, I have seen a lot of people appear for only one week and then disappear forever.
One particular week I saw no less that twelve people advertising exactly the same opporunity on the same page of the Times.
No doubt that was a great week for the Times but a terrible week for everybody advertising those particular DVDs!
I’ve never took the plunge with an advert in either the Times or the Mail on Sunday but I did have a go at advertising in the Exchange and Mart.
You can read about that unprofitable experience here:
Advertising Offline to Drive Traffic to a Website
Unsubscribe Comments
If you run a newsletter through a service like Aweber, as I do, it automatically questions somebody who unsubscribes from your list.
Basically it says “Please can you take a couple of seconds to let us know why you have unsubscribed“.
Many people don’t bother writing anything but there are some kind people who take the time to let me know why they decided to stop receiving these newsletters.
For example, here’s a great one from Thursday:
“Mainly because I cannot keep up with so many emails reaching my inbox, when I seem to be moving house frequently and can’t do justice to anything extra.
Thanks, Ben, and the other reason really is that I lost such a wedge of money to [name removed] and also [name removed], that I am disillusioned with practically everything which tells me I can make some money.
You’re a good man. You wanted my reasons. Sorry!
Regards
[name removed]“
I’m very grateful for his constructive comments and sorry to see him leave the list.
However, the second unsubscribe comment I got on Thursday was far less constructive. It simply said:
“rubbish”
Well, you can’t win them all!
Your Emails
I’ve got a fair few emails to reply to so please bear with me if you have written to me in the last week or so. I will try and catch up over the weekend.
A few people asked about the same things from last week so I will try to cover those topics here:
First of all, the RentaCoder person I used who did such a good job on my friend’s website goes by the username “abha” on the RentaCoder website.
He’s got a great rating and is apparently in the top 25 of coders worldwide as rated on RAC.
The other opportunity that people have been asking about is the “Information Entrepreneur’s Circle” from Streetwise.
I did write a little about my thoughts on this one on a blog post which you can read here:
The Information Entrepreneurs Circle from Streetwise Publications
If you have signed up for this one I would be very interested to hear your thoughts.
Finally…
Don’t forget to check out this Weekend’s Super Deal from David Allen.
He is offering a load of quality products with resalerights but only until Sunday so go and look now if you wantin on the deal!
After attending a seminar in April I decided to look into the domain name market as a source of profit.
One of the little “niches” in domaining is the LLLL.com market - where you trade in short dot com domain names containing only 4 letters.
An example of an LLLL.com is bebo.com, another is zxyq.com.
Within the LLLL.com niche are several different sub-niches such as the CVCV, VCVC etc
V meaning “vowel” and C meaning “consonent”.
bebo.com would be classed as a CVCV domain whilst avuv.com is a VCVC.
I mention the LLLL.com market today because if registrations of this type of domain continue at the same rate, we will soon see a complete “buyout” of every possible LLLL.com.
At present there are just 17,000 or so still available out of 456,976 - under 4%.
All of the best combinations of letters have been registered and we are now left with many domains that contain lots of “non-premium” letters such as z, y, q, x and so on.
So, why am I telling you all this?
Well, a lot of people believe that when all of the LLLL.coms are registered, the value of them will increase steadily simply because you will have to buy them in the open market rather from a registrar such as GoDaddy.
I’m not too sure that this will happen but I have built up quite a collection of them myself “just in case”.
If you fancy trying some domain investing and have a limited budget then it may be worth checking out the LLLL.com market.
You can grab your first for $8 and then hold, probably for at least a year, to see if there is any profit in it.
What I would suggest is that you have a good read on a forum such as:
And then, check out http://www.DomainProfitGuide.com for a step-by-step guide on making profit from domain names.
Let me know how you get on!
Got home today to find a mound of mail in the front porch. As per usual there were several biz opps sales letters in there.
The one that stuck out though was an offer I haven’t seen before from Streetwise which they have called “The Profit Portal”.
At £497 + VAT it isn’t cheap but these courses always seem to sell well and Streetwise are known for offering a robust guarantee…
I was reading through the sales letter and trying to work out what exactly it is all about.
For a change there isn’t a lift letter from John Harrison - just a “Reservation Certificate” (order form), the letter itself and an envelope (not pre-paid).
Seeing that there isn’t an introduction letter with this sales pack I am assuming that this is probably one of the first mailings that they have done for this one.
I have been monitoring Streetwise’s mailings and they do seem to test different aspects of the sales process so if this is a good seller I would expect to see further offers of this product but with a different, improved sales approach.
Anyway, I went off on a tangent there.
Reading through this offer, it seems to be about “domaining” and making money from virtual real estate.
Bob Ryan, the person who is offering this particular package, writes a good story. He asks:
“How Rich Would YOU be if Property was
FREE and Tenants were GUARANTEED?”
Immediately you find yourself imagining that this is another property investing course i.e. buying and selling bricks and mortar but it turns out that it isn’t.
He talks about an “Underground Elite” who use a secret method to make “Fast Cash and Lump Sum Pay-Outs”
What it turns out to be is an opportunity to learn how to setup a business buying and selling domain names and also “parking” these domains for a monthly income.
Parking means that you put up an advertising page on your site and earn money each time someone visits your site and clicks on an advert.
It’s nothing new or particularly secret but it’s true that it is a business that is largely run by a small number of investors. Probably because not many people understand exactly what domaining involves or how it works.
What seems to be overlooked by a lot of people is that some domain names have been sold for amazing amounts of money.
Take “dictionary.com” - this sold for $100million just a few days ago. Of course, there was a whole business behind it but it started with the purchase of one little domain name - and domain names are currently available for about $8 (4 pounds) a year.
You won’t get a domain name like “poker.com” by just visiting GoDaddy. All dictionary words with a dot com extention were registered some time ago. However, you can still find gems by doing some research, for example a domain name with three keywords. You will simply have to take the time to research what keywords are likely to attract visitors.
The package on offer here is some software that Bob Ryan has developed that will make “income-generating websites” for you at the push of a button.
That would probably be a “parking page” - which you can get for free at http://www.sedo.com
There may be more to it but there may not.
Seems like this could just be a “newbie” package to tell you how to buy a domain name and put up adverts on it. You get traffic from people typing in your domain name by mistake whilst looking for related information.
It’ll be very interesting to hear more about this one but I’m not going to bite.
The product I recommend on the subject of “domaining” is Paul Gunter’s Domain Profit Guide: http://www.DomainProfitGuide.com which is ever-so-slightly cheaper.
However, if you do buy the Profit Portal opportunity please do let me know what you think…