Progress made with some investments

UpdateI am going to do an update on a little sideline project that covers a couple of points and posts that I have mentioned before.

Last June while having a  game of snooker with a good friend of mine Ian who runs his own joinery company, we talked about wanting to invest a bit of cash with each other into something different as a bit of fun and an experiment, a bit like those stock clubs you used to get which would give us a good reason if we ever needed it to meet up and chew the fat.

Investing in LLL.com domains

I suggested that we could buy an LLL.com as an investment which we did and still own, tucked away for a future investment, we paid $9k for it and I would expect it to be worth $10-$15k just now, so that is ticking along fine.

Get ahead of the game with your next domain

In July last year I read about led bulbs in the New Scientist, a future alternative to incandescent light bulbs which will be phased out, it also appears as of this week that energy efficient bulbs can give people migraine’s so that could be good news for the progress onto led lights. I sourced and bought the domain name ledbulbs.co.uk with my friend Ian for $1350, a wise and astute investment I had hoped and was added to our little project.

Even though we are some way of having led lights instead of traditional light bulbs, led bulbs are already in existence and are searched for so we get traffic and income from the domain just now as it ranks well.

Since October 23rd the domain ledbulbs.co.uk has earned us $700.45 so is on course to pay itself back in full well within 12 months which would be a great return and asset, it has also gone from doing $2-$7 per day to around $20 per day since the start of the year so it has been a gem and a success story for us, I still feel one day it may be leaseable rather than a sale.

Buy for 2 years income and repay yourself in one year

Ian had also asked about websites, however as part of our experiment I pointed out that running a site would all unfairly fall on myself as regards work and building one, I did suggest that I keep an eye out for a site that was zero maintenance and in September we bought a zero maintenance website for $7000. The website needed to do $9.58 per day to pay itself back within 24 months which Ian and I agreed was a fair price and something we were prepared to invest in. I made some basic tweaks which improved rankings and the site was soon showing us earnings of $20 a day at times.

4 months on and our target for Sept 19th to Jan 8th was at a very minimum $9.58 per day so we needed $1072.96 for the 112 days to be paid off in two years, if like my post title we wanted to be cleared in one year then the target would be $2145.92 in those 112 days.

Our total earned so far from that site is $1867.11 so close but not quite there, we have averaged at least $18 per day since November though so the slow start pulls the figures down and the last 2 days have each been over $30, I therefore feel pretty confident that we will have the $7000 invested cleared and all paid back by September this year which would mean that if we decided to then sell the site for two years income we would be able to make 100% profit and ask for $14,000. 

Overall

In summaryWe also have an LLL.net tucked away for some time in the future, overall a very rewarding experiment that I think we are both enjoying, our website is calendar based so has done really well at the start of the year, we earned over $800 in December from our project and in the first 7 days of January we have managed to earn $396 from Adsense.

I think for this year we would like to add another site which can add another $10-$20 per day to push us on a bit further with our daily income and re-invest the money we have made, with over $2600 sitting in our Adsense account it has been nice to be able to do something like this without taking the money or having to rely on it, good progress so far, I’ll report back again later in the year when we should be 100% repaid and earning pure profit with our assets.

About Scott Jones

Scott hails from the north east of Scotland and started earning online at the end of 2000 building websites for local businesses during which time he won an award from Lord Alan Sugar for Excellence in Enterprise. After having quite a bit of success with domaining Scott mainly runs educational evergreen websites which generate over 3 million visitors per month but is always on the lookout for a fresh thinking out of the box way to turn a buck. Follow on Twitter.

Comments

  1. Glad your investments are doing well for you :) Nice to see an update on how they’ve done.

  2. BTW - If you have a domain that is worth 10k, 20k, …where do you sell it, and how you get the money ?

    Thanks

    • Well I have not sold a domain for more than $15k so can’t speak from experience. DNForum is a good place, I would expect finding an end user and selling direct is the best way to get your price, SEDO also offer a good marketplace with their auctions.

      • Scott, I need your advice. I have a potential site I’m looking at buying.

        The last 3 months the traffic has really risen, 600+ visitors per day. AdSense has risen to over $200/month.

        The site will cost $2K. Is it worth the risk, considering the short period of time that it’s been at that level? The site itself is 3 years old

        • 10 months asking price for a short history does seem a fair price Justin, I would think you would need to satisfy yourself that the traffic would remain, why being 3 yrs old has it suddenly risen? as long as it wasn’t a campaign, links, adwords or seasonal traffic and you can see no reason for it to tail off it sounds on the face of it a pretty good deal so I would say access the stats and make sure the traffic looks natural.

        • Thanks for the advice. I accessed the Google Analytics. He did some link building over the year, and it appears that he’s now getting some good rankings. Over 90% of the traffic is from organic google search. I’ll keep building on the SEO work he’s done, hopefully it will just continue to grow.

    • I’ve also seen quite a few people selling domains and sites through digital point forums

  3. One thing I’m concerned, is how I will get the money for a domain. Paypal ? Western Union ? Meeting direct face 2 face with the buyer ?

  4. 1/9/2008 4:17:50 AM: Your access to Escrow.com has been denied.

    It seems that Escrow don’t work in my country.

  5. Thanks …I’ll bookmark this link :)

  6. You’ve obviously got a good eye for this sort of thing. I’m impressed with the LedBulbs earnings so far, I’m guessing it probably gets a fair bit of traffic searching for LED lights for their cars?

    • Your bang on the money there Carl, car leds and led bulbs in general offer immediate income and traffic even though the purchase was for future technology so couldn’t have worked out better.

  7. Very inspiring. I’m going back to digital point to check out the sites for sale!!!

  8. Really interesting post Scott.. on the back of this post I’ve been looking at tools for finding recently expired domains. Drophunt.com seems pretty good for finding very recently expired domains of any length, I’m thinking of trying to get a LLL/LLLL that way.

    Any tips on exactly what kind of domain to go for? Is it as common sense as going for the ones that make sense or having some kind of meaning?

  9. Hi Laurence, good letters for an LLL or LLLL seem to be A-B-C-D-E-F-G-I-L-M-N-O-P-R-S-T, I presume they would be the most used, for LLLL being pronounceable helps and CVCV is very beneficial (consonant vowel)

  10. Wow, very impressed with the LEDBulbs domain! Have you had any other successes like this? Reading about an up and coming technology/product and then nabbing a nice related domain on the cheap?

    • I have bought some future technology domains at the start of this year and in elongated negotiations over a nice .com that may take some time yet to try and secure before I can comment on it - will have to develop and rank them this year along with my furniture domains so I’ll comment at on them at some point when they start to do something.

      • What sorts of places do you look for future technologies? Seems like a daft question, but I’ve looked at New Scientist’s website and not really seen anything likely to be mainstream enough to be worth punting on. Maybe I’m too cautious :)

        • I think it was this article which in the mag went on to talk about LED’s as the alternative, that type of thing strikes me - a market as big as bulbs is a big market. Also when I read articles like this one I can see a lot of potential, big bucks.

  11. Investing in domains can be long term profitable for local domains, too. Maybe you just have to wait longer for some countries.

  12. It is so hard to pick up good domains. What research tool do you use? Or do you pick them out of the air?

    • I read and watch the TV and use anything for inspiration and check all sorts of domains, like TVs.co.uk, I also do like future technology as it is so competitive nowadays as you say, so aiming for domains that will become popular in the future can get you a better and cheaper way to aquire (potentially) premium domains, although you run the risk of them not taking off, so emerging technology magazines, articles and papers are worth their subscriptions.

  13. Sounds too good to be true to be completely honest.

    Good luck with all of them

    What about buying shares with someone like google?

    I have some spare $$ laying around which I don’t need and want to invest. So I was thinking of getting some google shares. What are your views?

  14. I think i’ll switch to implementing some adwords on my next projects. The sums of money you generate are great. I deal with affiliate marketing (sales and leads) rather than adwords but will definately implement it on my next site. Cheers for the indepth anaylsis - inspiring.

Trackbacks

  1. [...] are also little things you could do to make the most out of your money, besides investing them to domains or acquire some up coming websites, actually we could try seeking highest possible interest rate [...]

  2. [...] plans were always to develop and then possibly lease later on and as you can see from a recent post led bulbs is doing just fine and my plans to lease a domain and increase it’s value were in [...]

Speak Your Mind

*