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.

The next Uranium bull market

In my opinion there is an explosive and potential once in a lifetime opportunity coming up, which by my understanding is more a ‘when’ event and not an ‘if’ chance to make serious cash. None of this is investment advice and I do hold stocks and shares in this sector, so do your own research.

Uranium & Uranium miners
Over the last few years I have enjoyed researching and investing in stocks/shares, it’s been great fun going on journeys along with some small caps exploring for oil, platinum, copper, gold etc from my home office, ups and downs. One space however stands out from any other, the more research I do, the more exciting it gets. I believe if you have one to two years, some patience you can multiply your investment by a factor of 10 with little effort.Continue Reading

Twitter, a social way to earn your pay

Nobody can say I was early to the twitter party, then again I was very late to the domain one and that never stopped me looking at things and playing catchup in my own way. I reluctantly joined twitter very late and am not that social tbh, I wouldn’t follow me, put it that way.

Over the last 24 months one thing has become crystal clear though, the public and businesses in general have really adopted it as a way to interact and keep up to date, furthermore I have noticed quote a few good twitter accounts ranking organically in search engines, all this means one thing to me = money, I’m not sure I’m entirely up to speed on how this is all going to translate to cash but it will.Continue Reading

The short domain release and PC

This post has been a while in the making, around March last year I bought my initials SJ.co.uk for £x,xxx - at around the same time Nominet announced they were going to release previously held back short domain names like A.co.uk or AA.co.uk.

Reading the announcement it was clear before going to the general public there would be some sort of sunrise period where trademark holders could apply first, it was pretty much then I followed the scent and wanted one so started to read about registering a trademark.

Not long after registering my first trademark WS™ it was decided that only trademark holder who owned an active trademark pre a certain date likely to be 1996-2008 would get the chance to apply, this was a bit of a spanner in the works!

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Update

Little update on the last post I made about a few new buys as I had a couple of emails asking how they are panning out.

The catch for £40 free-animations.co.uk did £486 in Oct. 75,000 visitors

It’s fairly important to point out this wasn’t just catching an expired domain and parking it, I bought the old site and put it back together. It’s not the first time I have done this, quite a few years ago I bought the domain globalspine.net from a domainer after it had expired, I then used archive & google to track down the old owners who were in New Zealand and I think from memory paid them $2000 for a full copy of the old site and put it back together. Free Animations I could see used to have thousands of pages/files so was an obvious candidate and if I had not caught it for £40 I’d have been happy to spend a few hundred trying to buy it.

Nine Planets has been rocking and has hit £240 in a single day, should be an interesting 12 months with this titan. Leaving it to get some numbers & data on it before deciding for sure the way forward.

I bought Protect.co.uk last month - which could really work well for a variety of angles, children’s safety, alarms, insurance so I think has a lot of value but not an obvious product generic, still cost a few thousand though! A cheap addition was Ski Insurance for a few hundred.

.org.uk domains are really beginning to rise in value and selling for mid £x,xxx, simple economics with supply & demand and with some of the best .co.uk unlikely to get developed or ever sold people are turning to the next best thing which is .org.uk and offers the exact same ability to rank, now would be a good time to buy a category killer and I secured furniture.org.uk which I will come back to in another post, also managed to get something done with SJ.co.uk in the meantime.

On the website front I bought CeramicsToday.com which I found was dead & de-listed from Google, contacted the owner and bought the domain and then negotiated a copy of most of the content, lots of dead pages still and a bit messy but now back in google and traffic at around 700/day, I can see that ending up around 1-2k a day traffic wise. Across all my sites for the last month the traffic stands at 2,787,605 which kind of blew my mind when I added it up.

Link building

Found a company doing a novel new trick, well new to me anyway.

They scanned my authority website for dead links
Then put up some content relative to my dead outbound links on their own site
Then email and ask if they can quote my site with link back to me (naturally I agree)
When I confirm it’s ok they tell me about the dead link saying they know how hard it is to run large important sites and monitor everything and offer their (new) page as an alternative link.

I can see that working for them.

An acquisition or two

I have been busy looking at existing sites & traffic so taken a break from domain research.

Life Insurance Quotes continues to age and is now taking leads, this site is moving forward to the point it’s probably earning just into 4 figures a month, also picked up a couple of other insurance quotes names like travelinsurancequotes.co.uk as that type of traffic seems to convert better and be more valuable than any other. A lovely little set.

Picked up a few expired domains, one in particular last week came good free-animations.co.uk which cost £40 - I tracked down the old owner and offered him a token amount for the old website - he was happy for me to have it so put it back together and it’s doing 2000 visitors and £10 in Adsense per day with no other work done to it.

The big move recently was buying a site I spotted a couple of years ago - NinePlanets.org which is a guide to the solar system with dedicated pages to the moon, Neptune and even a kids astronomy area.

I approached the owner who built it over the last decade but he didn’t want to give any stats and wanted $100,000, so I left it, but it nagged away at me because I knew it was a monster with potential, the owner had a little adsense at the top and right hand side but I knew it’s CTR would be horrendous, I left it a year and approached him again in March 2010 but again the owner wanted $100,000 and wanted me to buy it for the love of it and not income. This time I managed to get some analytics stats, it did 5.5 million visitors in the previous 12 months, this is a site that bombs in the summer but makes up for it outwith that. Now I knew it averaged around 15,000 visitors per day.

The good thing about having a diverse selection of sites is that I already have some science & study related sites so I could do my own numbers, averaging a 1% CTR on page impressions I worked out the site could earn £17k a year, at 2% CTR on page impressions I guestimated around £32000 a year. That was enough to go ahead in my book, even though it’s the most money I have ever spent on buying a site and I was buying it kind of blind it still seemed too good value when everything was weighed up. A final purchase price of just under the $100,000 was agreed and Escrow completed last week.

It’s been fun watching the numbers rolling in, early indications show the site can do £150 a day in Adsense during the week and even with the summer blip I reckon without improvements it could do £40-£50,000 a year so pay itself back in 12-16 months without getting into affiliate product sales, subs and direct advertiser deals, not bad at all. I have also found out the site used to have twice as much traffic a few years ago so really does have potential to improve.

So two acquisitions that could not be further apart in price but I love the thrill of the chase and working on a great deal, it gives me a buzz at £40 or into tens of thousands, I’m certainly in acquisition mode just now - working on tools to find undervalued or forgotten about sites and buying them, the same as I did with domains for a period of time, both areas still offer huge opportunity for profit every single day.

Starting to really have fun this year

Starting to really have fun this year, doing tests, trials and punts and really enjoying dabbling in all sorts.

Pretty much all the proceeds from the sale of tvs.co.uk have been re-invested in my businesses. Looking up travel names using the Google keyword tool for inspiration ‘turkey holidays’ stood out as a good name, this seems to be compounded by recent news that UK folks are seeking different destinations like Turkey & Egypt instead of the normal Spanish breaks. turkeyholidays.co.uk was owned by a couple but the email on their one page website bounced, I love it when that happens! seriously I do, it’s like a challenge and while I have no skills when it comes to design or coding the one thing I am good at is research and I am persistent.

Snail mail failed, email failed, the same address was used by a glass company who’s email failed, I did manage to find a planning application by the couple in Nov ’09 which used a different home address so used it and was successful in getting an email back from them, managed to buy the domain for £3k. It also came with the old hosting account and email account which had 5 attempts to buy it from the different people before the old email address filled up and started bouncing. The perseverance paid off in the end.

Picked up Yacht.co.uk for £1750 which would strike me as being worth 10x that, nice name.

Bought a few websites, some on a multiple like Optillusions.com which is an older site showing optical illusions - bought for £12k, it earned £740 in July, this one freaked out my son (and me) a bit :)

Also bought a small site which ranks no.1 in Google for tropical fish, the tropical fish centre was an older lead, it can often pay to leave money on the table. I offered the previous owner £1500 a couple of years ago and moved up to £3500 but the actual amount didn’t seem to be the stumbling point, more the fact it was a decade’s work and sentimental value so I left the offer on the table and a year or so later he finally came back to me and was ready to sell for £4000. Seemed like an ok sort of number, not overly a bargain but I was sure I could get my money back within 2 to 3 years so bought it blind as there was no income. It’s earning around £7 per day so looks like under 2 years it’ll be paid back and is making amazon sales which could help further.

LifeInsuranceQuotes.co.uk is in development along with quite a few other insurance names in a joint venture, it was sitting on page 2 and not in use as the company primarily worked offline, a real bargain waiting to be picked up.

There are a lot of other things I am doing which I can’t go into unfortunately but just from the above over the last month or so it’s clear there are still a lot of bargains & good deals for domain names and established websites, although it should be noted none of the above were listed for sale anywhere so you really have to do the research and send emails & letters which can be boring but the pay off is fun!

Bye bye TVs

It’s been an interesting year so far for me, not overly eventful before last week, but nice growth income wise and some new sites and names purchased along the way. A geography site for $10k is another seasonal site that does poorly during the summer hols but good addition overall with healthy stats.

My strategy hasn’t really changed much along the way, buy some good names, lease some, develop some, keep some and buy older established and neglected websites. A month ago I had a phone call from Sedo to discuss putting the domain TVs.co.uk into their retail auction. Some of you will remember I bought TVs.co.uk for £1000 back in Dec ’07.

I had some fun with the name and had it at no.2 in Google for a while and then managed to get the name banned altogether for a bit which was careless due to not double checking everything that was going on, quite funny now thinking back but a little unsettling when one of your best domains get banned, then got it back in and into the top 10-20 in Google again, made a few TV sales but it’s never really been developed properly, short attention span, impatience and lack of skills to blame really.

Later on Sedo themselves valued the name at around £22,000 so when they spoke on the phone they wanted the name entered in the retail auction with a £25k reserve which I declined, a little later I was advised they would accept TVs & PCs at a £49k reserve each so I decided no harm and to my surprise TVs.co.uk sold last Thursday for £51,000 - the domain has been paid for and transferred so job done and a nice pot to re-invest in earning sites.

Apart from that I picked up QuadBikes.co.uk domain for £2500 after months of negotiation, oh and GadgetInsurance.com was listed for sale for just a couple of hundred dollars when I typed it into my browser so after getting re-assurance I wasn’t going mad that was snapped up and is in development with a friend.

I’m still working on a few things which are going incredibly slowly but would make great posts if/when they ever come off, I hate waiting.

Ownership of an LL.co.uk

Comedy timing it seems, after chasing a domain for 3 years I finally managed to secure and purchase SJ.co.uk

They don’t get any shorter or rarer than that in the UK domain space (at present) only 25 LL.co.uk domains (letter letter) are in existence as they were registered before Nominet started operation, one’s like BT.co.uk VW.co.uk & HP.co.uk date back to pre Aug 1996.

This week Nominet announced they are looking into releasing 2 letter and single letter domains - so interesting times ahead for sure which should create quite a bizz and lot’s of interest at some point.

I had been chasing SJ.co.uk  since 2007,  the domain was not in use as the company had changed name some time ago, in 2007 I offered £1000 and every year I went back and asked again, and again, and again. Finally this year I saw the old Ltd company the name was registered under was dissolved so informed them, they updated the domain and told me they were open to serious offers. There were a few other interested parties with one of them swearing profusely when told the company was asking around £10k for it,  I managed to buy it for high £x,xxx. A very short, memorable and valuable domain which is perhaps too vanity driven being my initials so one I probably won’t sell.

Domaining

While I would never have set my stall out as a domainer I do thoroughly enjoy the research, tracking down of owners, negotiating and buying domains at what I perceive as good value, it’s just good fun. After buying up my geo’s in June - Sept I pretty much kept myself busy and didn’t do anything on the domain front.

Enhancement.co.uk was bought late last year & will be a project for this year, it’s a cracking domain I paid £1350 for, I have a database of cosmetic surgery clinics in the UK so will be developing the site out, some days this earns £10 with just a few clicks but lead gen will probably be the future.

Bling.co.uk was a punt bought a couple of weeks ago, I thought it may get type in traffic and the previous owner didn’t have it resolved at all, on doing some research it’s clear that bling.com owned by an American domainer benefited greatly from the release of Bing.com Microsoft’s search engineContinue Reading