My Domains &
how i choose them

While I don’t list my entire portfolio online, you can view some of my brandable domains on Domain Theory’s BrandBucket market page. I have most of my domains listed at EFTY.com, but only have about 30 visible on my EFTY marketplace page. 

If you have interest in any names that you see listed, please contact me directly.

I bought my first domain name in 1996, but I wasn’t hooked until about five years later. I don’t remember when I fell in love with domaining. I do remember one day realizing that I owned a few hundred. Much of my early days as a domain investor were spent buying names to grow my businesses (online business filing and book publishing) and I was buying names in specific niches. How domains were used 15 years ago and how you could profit from them are different than it is today. The extensions were limited, domain parking was lucrative, and search engines treated domains differently than they do today. So, what I buy now and how much I pay have changed, but my underlining approach hasn’t.

My approach to domain investing is pretty simple:

• I only buy names I can visualize being used as an actual site.
• I buy in niches I know. I don’t chase trends or fads.
• If I’m buying to develop, I look at the potential long term benefit to my business.
• It's always about quality, not quantity
• I try to think like the end user
• I don’t invest money that I need to pay my bills.
• I don’t buy into hype.
•  stick mostly to .COM, but will buy GTLDS when I see end users building businesses on them.
• With new GTLDs, I look for short keyword domains where the keyword itself as part of a longer domain in traditional TLDs.

I only invest in domains that I believe have appeal to an eventual end-user. If a domain’s potential use pops into my head relatively soon into my research, then I know it’s one I might be interested in. Here are a few examples from my portfolio:

BellaPress.com - “Bella” is Italian for “beautiful” and “press” is versitile, in that it could mean something to do with printing / publishing or like a coffee press. I immediately thought of a publishing company name or the name of a coffee shop. Just those two ideas were enough for it to pass my first step as to whether I buy a name.

ClientDeck.com - “Client” is obvious here and I interpreted “deck” as a slide-based presentation (not as wooden deck off of my kitchen), so I envisioned an app or software to help make such work more visually appealing, etc.

NewlySocial.com - What popped into my head when I saw this name had expired was site that taught social media newbies how to maximize and grow their profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. 

I must stress here that I'm not an investor in Chinese premium domains (FHTQ.com) or straight numerics (98989.com) as I don't have that knowledge base, so please don't interpret my first criteria as anything other than me looking for names that are in my wheelhouse. 

When I was in the online business filing space, I bought names associated with incorporating a business, filing a copyright, etc. When I was in the book publishing business I concentrated my domain name buying on names related to writing, editing, publishing, printing, distributing, and marketing books. This focus allowed me to get a great feel for available domains in my industry and made me a more disciplined and smarter buyer. Domaining is a vast ocean of possibilities and if you just dive in the middle of it, your chances of drowning are higher than if you take some time to understand the water around you.

Sticking to a niche I knew indirectly helped me as I started buying brandable names. Every morning, for years, I’ve been getting the pending delete lists from NameJet, Snapnames, Godaddy, ExpiredDomains.net, and others with publishing related keywords like “book”and “story”. Turns out there are tons of great brandables using those words and after looking at thousands of names everyday with certain keywords, I’ve become pretty good at spotting brandable names that were also publishing related. For example, I bought bookengine.com for $111 in 2013 and sold it in 2016 for $5,400. I originally bought that name because my publishing company was going to use that name for some software we developed (we ended up using another domain). In January 2016, I bought StoryCoach.com for $440 via an DropCatch auction. My publishing company worked with publishing and writing coaches for years and I knew StoryCoach.com was a solid buy. I sold it for $3,850 in November 2016. I use these examples because those names were right in my niche and at the same time helped expand into brandables.

I’m all for dabbling in other areas and I have found it much easier to do with the experience I gained buying names within the business niches I know best.

If you've made it this far, please note that this section (and the others) are coming soon.