Making Your Domain Portfolio Recession-proof

September 25, 2022September 28, 2022 DNPlaybook 0 Comments Content, Domain Development, Selling Domains

One of the biggest liabilities a domain investor faces is renewing domains. It is mostly due to following the volume/quality balance model and relying on sales to maintain a healthy cashflow. This works well until sales slow down due to changes in the economic climate. Then when renewals come up, big decisions need to be made, drop or incur debt. The ideal time to prepare yourself for such a scenario is making smart decisions when times are good.

This article is prompted by what Elliot Silver wrote in his Domain Investing blog which in turn was prompted by what Rick Schwartz posted on Twitter. Links to both can be found below in this article.

Rick repeated his mantra, CASH IS KING! Excellent reminder we can easily forget when we get caught up in snatching up domains we think will sell or make for a good project. This is a business, however, and CASH IS ALWAYS KING. If we cannot turn domains into liquid assets, particularly when we need cash, this is a recipe for failure. Especially if we keep repeating the pattern and don’t learn from our mistakes.

Elliot applied that mantra to his own domain portfolio and listed some ways he is strengthening his sales prospects and minimizing costs. These ways include reducing his activity on domain auctions, making lower offers, reaching out to leads, lowering BIN (buy it now) prices and turning off auto-renew on certain domains.

One of the decisions you can make right now is to have a lead generation engine in place. So that when you get an offer or even just an inquiry for any of your domains, you can see who made those, save their contact info, and be able to reach out to them at any given time. This applies to whether the offer resulted in a closed deal or not. Even legitimate inquiries, some may call it tire-kicking, window shopping, etc., may eventually lead to a deal. So you don’t want to write them off, especially when it takes very little effort to reach out to them.

Another key strategy that is important to me is that of monetization. This takes many different forms and I hope to discuss those in another article. It is important to know whether your domains have traffic and what kind of traffic. If you don’t have a mechanism in place such as analytics then you flying blind. You can easily be surprised which domains in your portfolio get consistent quality traffic. By having a monetization engine for your domains you can generate sufficient revenue to cover renewal costs and maybe much more. It is helpful to slow down in registrations and spend more time analyzing and optimizing each domain. When you have too many new domains, this task is overwhelming. But this is a topic for another article.

Hope you find the above helpful. Also check out Rick’s post and Elliot’s article below for more great advice.

When people start buying things other people start buying

When people stop buying things other people stop buying

When people start selling things other people start selling

When nobody is buying & nobody is selling: As I've been saying: CASH IS KING!#Domains #DomainNames pic.twitter.com/vKSBJsMROE

— RickSchwartz.com 👑 The Domain King® 👑 Since 1995 (@DomainKing) September 23, 2022