If the internet is like a shopping mall it’s a big mall! … looking forward and trying to predict the future I can draw a few conclusions:

- Some shops I think will work will not, even with lots of effort & investment
- Some shops I think will fail, will survive and even prosper
- Some shops I just don’t understand

If I agree with the above three sentiments then perhaps I’m safer just buying the shops!

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Phew, lot’s of emails and lot’s talking back and forth with business owners has taken a small step forward today with my second lease now signed and sealed.

I have a small furniture domain that I found for sale last year, I emailed the seller and he said he was open to offers, thankfully my first offer of £450 for it was accepted right away and it was added to the portfolio.

There are quite a few companies that specialise in specific types and styles of furniture and this domain was a type of wood, I sent out around 25 emails for this one to the top ranking sites and those using Adwords and had 2 interested companies within 2 days, this domain isn’t ranking yet so perhaps a bit early but I though worth trying.

As I am learning and speaking to people the details of the contract evolve so that everyone is happy, so the main changes I had to make and agree to were

• A 3 year lease on the domain name
• First refusal at renewal so they knew another company wouldn’t take it
• Maximum 50% increase in the lease fee at renewal

Those are pretty acceptable terms and I was happy to write them in, the lease fee I decided upon was £75 per month. That means for a domain that cost £450 I will get £900 in the first year and £2700 over 3 years while still owning it.

Why £75? I would usually intend to get the cost price of the domain back within the first 12 months, so started at a price I could negotiate down from if needed.

What’s next?
A bit early as most of my domains are not ranking, I had one agree to £250 per month on another furniture domain that was ranking top 10 but it’s lost it for now so put that on the back burner and I have another someone is considering for £100 per month. Just yesterday I did manage to buy

• ashfurniture
• redwoodfurniture
• cherryfurniture

All for £300+VAT and all .co.uk domains so they would be good candidates for this type of deal, on the whole I have found many quite responsive to the leasing option, I still got asked if I would sell and to give a price but sticking to my guns I prefer not to sell assets that I find too difficult to value, I’d rather lease for 3 years and see where the world is then and in the meantime build an income that is stable and create a business that is profitable and rich in assets.

Domain lease income : £575 per month

Khalid asked a question in the comments last week that I would like to cover today.

Can you please post how you actively find clients for your domains and what you say in your e-mails to them?

Firstly, to date I only have the one lease, it’s a big one at $1000 per month but I need to work hard to build on that and show it wasn’t a fluke. Finding clients is certainly hard, I have sent lots of emails and contacted lots of people with little response so it can be a bit disheartening, I am quite stubborn though and don’t mind persevering, the main ways I have used are just the obvious one’s

1/ The top 30 or so ranking websites if they are a business, just because they have an organic listing does not mean they would not be interested in another so always worth approaching them, especially if your domain ranks.

2/ Adwords – I contact the Adwords advertisers, they already see the value in the keyword and spend money on it so should be more responsive.

3/ Look for and purchase magazines dedicated to the niche, you can then find more potential clients who perhaps are stuck with print advertising and may not even have a website or email address.

For sending emails it really varies, if the domain does not rank then something short like this:

Good morning, I own {domain name} and am looking to lease the domain out which could be used as a second storefront for your business.

The domain is a prime generic term, lease would be £75 per month based on 2 years with an option to renew for a further year at the same price.

If you are interested or have any questions please get in touch

Regards
Scott Jones
Lease A Domain

If the domain ranks then I would bring in some recent stats for the last 30 days and include how much based on that traffic would have cost them and also mention the main keywords, so for example

Good morning, I own {website} which is {description}, I am however looking to lease the domain out, website can be included.

I am sure someone in the industry like yourself would be able to monetise this site and perhaps use it for their own sales & stock or you could charge for listings or use the traffic for your own related ventures, the site is almost 5 years old and ranks top 10 in Google UK for things like ‘main keyword’ and generates traffic from keywords like:

xxxxxx
xxxxxx
xxxxxx

Some basic stats on the site are:
Last months stats from Google Analytics

4459 visits
25,982 Page Views
5.83 Pages per visit

So if you don’t want to start a brand new site, suffer the sandbox and deliberate over SEO here is a chance to walk right into an old established website with traffic.

Lease would be for 2 years with an option to renew for a further year at the same monthly price.

Lease would be £xxx per month, taking the last months stats that works out at under £0.0xp per visitor for very targeted traffic with full control over the site.

If you are interested please get in touch.

Regards
Scott Jones
Lease A Domain

It’s been a tough sweat trying to convince people but I believe in what I am trying to achieve so will stick at it.

Also, how do you value how much a domain is worth per month? You recently spoke about Fuel Cell Boilers, what if you owned a domain relating to that, once it was ranked in the SERPs how would you value it because it is a new technology?

Future technology would not be the types of domains I would try and lease, certainly buy for the future but for leasing you really need to look at what is popular now so that potential clients can lease and expect to get a return, after all potential clients should be in a position to better monetise any traffic with actual product sales rather than you earning a few cents per click with Adsense.

For valuations again it depends on whether the domain ranks, if it does you may make money from Adsense/aff sales just now, if I was making £300 per month from a site I would look to lease it for £450 ish, I would prefer a stable income and one that is better than it performs just now. If it’s just a domain with little/no traffic so far I have been trying to get my purchase price back within 12 months.

I am pretty close to leasing out a small furniture domain that does not rank, it cost me £450 to buy it and the lease is for £75 per month which is £900 per year meaning after 6 months the domain has paid for itself and is generating some income. I also use Adwords data, if you generating traffic you can look up what advertisers pay per click and show value that way.

Finally, with regards to SEO, don’t domain ranks automatically drop when you change the content of the site completely? So you have a landing page for “BedroomFurniture.com” that sites 1st in Google then its leased and the lessee has a crap site with no SEO…how do you ensure your domain doesn’t lose its position because the lessee isn’t actually doing anything wrong?

Not in my opinion, the backlinks plus domain name plus age should keep a site there but if it’s weak then yes a complete change could harm the ranking a bit but I would expect it to recover, either way you are not selling a ranking, you are leasing a domain. You can make no guarantees as to the traffic or any present organic listing for which you have no control, I would always offer advice at the start/changeover anyway but once the lease comes into effect you have to step back.

Today I am going to outline the main parts to consider in a domain lease agreement, this is not intended as legal advice, if you were to lease a domain you should get a professional opinion. Furthermore the lease agreement I have used is aimed at UK domains so if it were another extension you would have to replace Nominet and their domain dispute resolution service with the equivalent.

Frontpage
Full name and address for the ‘lessor’ who owns the domain and the ‘lessee’ who wishes to lease the domain.

Subject of the matter
Detail the name of the domain

Term
Detail the length of the lease usually in months stating when it would commence and expire.

Rental
Detail the amount of the monthly payments and cover whether that would include VAT, the fact that payment is due one month in advance and the day each calendar month the payment should be made. Also note that if a payment is missed or not completed without prior consent the lessee is deemed as giving notice to cancel the lease. (more…)

I have had a few private questions regarding UK domain names so wanted to document the main points in a post to cover the absolute basics.

Buying existing UK domains
Pushing or transferring a UK domain name to your registrar does not give you ownership, while the address can be updated for free if you want to change the Registrant (owner) name then you have to complete transfer forms and pay £10+VAT for Nominet to process this. Make sure both parties are aware and agree to complete this process.

Expiring Domains
Domains that are not renewed for whatever reason get their status changed to SUSPENDED.
Suspended UK domains usually drop 92 or 99 days after the renewal date, to easily and quickly check drop dates you can use this tool.

Finding Expiring Domains
For the beginner you need drop lists, Dale over at Droppings send out his lists for £50 per month. If you sign up to Dale’s service you get an email each week or so with each days droppings in a text file to check through, around 500 UK domains each day expire so there is usually something in there for everyone.

Catching
If you have targeted a list of domains that should be dropping soon you need to work out how to catch the domains, on the day domains drop if they are good generic words or already booked in peoples catching software then you stand virtually zero chance of manually trying to wait, check and register the domain when it drops. A good generic domain will be caught milliseconds after it is released by Nominet.

By far the most popular drop catching service from what I have seen is carried out by Caught. Pricing for domain backorders is £15.87 for bulk customers looking to register 10+ names per month and £30 per name for one off catches on a no win no fee basis.

The big thing here is that Caught will only take one request per domain, so once it’s booked by one person nobody else can book it there.

Quick quick post today - I recently upgrading an email forwarder to a pop3 box on one of my main domains but forgot to add it to my receive list in my email client (I used to already send from that email), when I worked it out this morning it had 1287 emails in it of which at least 250 were not spam..oooooops!

Bad bad start to a day.. numpty! If there is a fine line between greatness and stupidity then I feel I’m certainly walking on the wrong side of the road today

Anyway - back on topic, as with anything that appears in the news with all this talk of the economy in turmoil and recessions I just get fed more and more ideas for domains, must try and switch off but I can’t, couple of weeks ago I decided to check on economics to see what was there and it was not in use so I purchased it from the previous owner for £1750.

Would make a good site for business jobs, books, news, rates and all things that probably pay well.

If any of you wanted to come up with an idea for that domain/site and quote for putting it together please do get in touch - probably have a budget of up to around $2000 for the right content & idea, would have to be aimed at the UK audience. Or if you know of someone who may be interested in developing the domain get in touch, open to ideas on it. I feel it’s too nice a domain to leave on the shelf doing nothing. I better get back to answering some emails

Found a new domain appraisal service last week, I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was a scam, actually quite a good angle, I noticed a post on Acorn about Whythink offer free appraisals, always interesting to get someone else’s objective opinion - if it is that.

I decided to send in some domains through their form and after a few days received the following email

Dear Scott,

tvs.co.uk £3000
homemortgage.co.uk £800
belief.co.uk £500
genes.co.uk £350

Please let me know if you need assistance selling these domains,

Regards
Whythink

I think the last line gives it away there, not exactly the type of prices I was expecting considering they had seemingly appraised paperback.co.uk at £2500, it would look like they possibly undervalue some domain appraisals with a hope to buying them cheaply which would be quite a good if not immoral idea, either that or it’s all legit but I would seriously doubt it because at those prices I would feel robbed

Still, something to be aware of just in case it is not the innocent view of one company.

2 domains that I bought recently are going through this week and will be reported by Sedo and you never know I may scrape onto the DNJournal chart for all the wrong reasons

Home Mortgage - homemortgage.co.uk £6100 ($12145)

Genes - Genes.co.uk £5900 ($11746)
Genes was actually sold for $6000 in the middle of last year so a nice 100% profit for the previous owner on that one but it’s one I was after for a while.

My poor wife, when I said to her I was buying not one but 2 domains for around 6000 each her response was..tell me that’s in dollars..tell me that’s dollars

I love website ideas that let users create content and interact with each other, all the while they create free content and improve your site in a fashion that lets you stay hands off. Starting a site like this is slow and painful but once they get natural momentum they can really take off, you don’t even have to have an in depth knowledge of the subject.

That’s the thing, I don’t have any tattoos, I only speak one language and I can’t draw but I have 2500 tattoo designs, thousands of user submitted images and do online sales of translations in many languages. You can make plenty from utilising other people’s talents and connecting people together (more…)

As a test I decided to use Sedo’s featured listing to see whether it helped offers or sales, it’s quite apparent they are not a broker in the sense that they would seek out a buyer for premium domains however they are the only real shop window so worth a test I felt.

I don’t have a great deal of domains for sale, most are for development in one form or another but chose TVs.co.uk which Sedo had previously appraised at £22,000 for this test, 2 weeks ago I paid the €39 for a featured listing.

When you order a Featured Listing for €39 your domain listing will rotate between the Sedo homepage and featured listings page for 30 days. Thirteen randomly selected Featured Listing domains are displayed on the Sedo homepage each hour while the remaining domains are displayed on the Featured Listings page.

Half way through my 30 day listing and the stats are as follows:
893 visits to the sale page
2 bids on the domain

I have to say both bids were for $100, so unless it’s a really crappy domain, which I don’t believe then it would suggest this premium is likely a waste of money, Sedo upgraded the domain to a ‘Top Domain’ which probably accounts for the larger amount of page views on the sale page.

What strikes me is why on earth would people low ball to the extent that they do on Sedo when making offers, I have had it numerous times on domains, offers like $50/$100 on domains clearly worth 4 figures, it’s not like most people using such a specific service as a domain marketplace would be blind to the value of their domains, maybe sending emails to owners but on a domain marketplace? If you can’t make a serious opening offer then your unlikely to get a serious counter bid.