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.

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. Great return on your investment then!!

    I’m sure you’ll be telling us about some new domains you’ve bought with the profits soon!

    After you’ve treated yourself of course 🙂

  2. Hi Scot, Its good the hear from you I was wondering what you cooking up, because you were quiet for a while. These acquisitions and sales are very encouraging. I will wait to see what the new owner does with TVs.

  3. Wow - that is an amazing return!! Very well done. Love reading stories like this. I am still finding domains very difficult to purchase due to completely over the top pricing for the ones I am interested in. You seem to have it perfected though!

  4. Hi Scott, I have a geography site too, which just about trickles along during holidays and weekends, but does really well during the week in school/uni term times.

    I also own a similar bike domain, pitbikes.co.uk (kind of mini offroad/racing bikes) that I still haven’t got around to deciding what to do with yet. It’s a nice one to keep though as the sport of pitbiking is getting more popular I think. I have thought of just selling pit bikes, or reselling them for someone else, but I’m more like you in that I can’t be arsed with too much faffing and customers etc - preffering to collect ad money with no fuss. 🙂

  5. Any plans to add a self-made-minds facebook fan page??

  6. Just had a look - there is a page up! But only 10 members 🙁

  7. Holy mother of pearl Scott that is an incredible return on the domains. Very well done indeed.

  8. Blimey! Brought for £1000 and sold for £51k ! That is seriously impressive and inspirational.

    Well done sir.

    Also cheers for still posting here on this blog. Always look forward to the Self Made Minds blog post updates.

  9. Wow great return on investment, got to be one of your better ones mate well done.

  10. Wow! £51k for a domain, wish my domains were worth that much. Who bought it? Was it a company or individual?

    Nice one on the profit. Nice to see a British guy making some money in IM!

  11. This just goes to show you that smart investments pay off. Glad to hear you’ve seen such great returns. I wish I could say the same about some of my investments lately.

  12. I’m surprised more people don’t buy up domains, build them up and then sell them. It’s a really good way to make good earnings on your investments.

  13. So what you going to treat yourself to Scott?

    • re-invested David, already spent £12k on a new site which did £20 yesterday and spent £3k on a domain and put out a few offers so will look to scale up a few things.

  14. That’s a great for the day, mine takes months to earn that amount - put it down to them being new. Have you put a time on this one when you hope to get back your investment?

    I do find some site but find that the owners are reluctant to sell. Do you get the same response even when you offer what you think is a good price?

  15. great returns indeed , still posting here on this blog Scott , its really inspiring

  16. I know how frustrating it can be to have a domain penalized and banned, had this happen to my number one website, that was making around 30 to 60 dollars a day, although it may not seem like much, but it helped me out tremendously, needless to say I learned a big lesson from the whole ordeal, and it really gave me a big wakeup call about putting all my eggs into one basket.

    If I had the money, I would love to buy some neglected domains myself!

    Till then,

    Jean

    • Can you say what happen, that cause the ban to happen? I have read about it and would hate it to happen to me.

      • Patrick, without going into too much detail, basically what happened, I was ranking on the first page on my own, but then I wanted to push it higher up in the rankings, so I hired someone from India to do some SEO work for me, but at the end of the day, whatever he did… it got my website banned 🙁 I’ve been recovering slowly though, hope to get back at the top again soon.

        Till then,

        Jean

        • I can imagine the kinds of things he did - having been on the wrong end of a nasty hack which caused a couple of my WordPress sites to act as spam relays.

        • @Dan, Sorry to hear you’ve had some bad experiences as well, in my opinion sometimes it’s a lesson learned that you gotta have that from time to time to always improve your own game so to speak, the worst part is the pain during the whole process, especially when your earnings go down as a result of it.

          Till then,

          Jean

        • @Jean
          You’re right that it was actually quite a useful lesson to learn at this stage. ‘Luckily’ I don’t earn much revenue from my sites so there wasn’t much of a financial penalty but it still took time to sort out. It’s definitely worth learning the lessons now rather than when I’m earning £100/day though ;o)

          My advice to others would be to keep WordPress (or any other server hosted software) up to date, to check for unexpected keywords directing traffic to your sites and to use the ‘fetch as googlebot’ option in Webmaaster tools if you notice any appreciable dip in traffic.

  17. This is amazing! Maybe I should have a look at the domain name game lol

  18. Union,

    It is never to late! Domains expire and are dropped every single day, it just requires a bit more patience and time nowadays.

  19. Wow, great return on your investment. Very inspiring. I’ve been dabbling in domaining and developing mini-sites but have not yet had success.

  20. Wow, excellent job with the TVs domain. That was a sweet domain to have picked up and prudent of you to have waited and refused the initial offers. You got a huge return on that one. Best of luck in your other projects!

  21. Wow, that is a great return on investment. 51,000 Quid is a considerable amount of cash and good for you in pulling this one off. There is definitely serious money to be made in internet real estate, that much is for certain!

    I feel it is important to build a as big as possible collection of URL’s, as they can only become more valuable as time progresses.

  22. Can’t wait for the next post. Looking forward to it as I am sure many are. I have finally found something to blog about that I felt was simple and enjoyable thanks to the help this site provides. Starting out small on my end, but with steady increases hopefully i can at least learn from it and make some money at the same time.
    Check out the side fellow readers/bloggers if you want, 6laughs.blogspot.com and please let me know if you have any suggestions on how I can improve it, especially Scott and Al.

  23. Very nice sale Scott. You do seem to have a knack of turning a nice profit on your names, but I suspect the knack is a lot of bloody hard work!

    Will be interesting to hear what you are working on these days

  24. Wow, excellent job with the TVs domain. That was a sweet domain to have picked up and prudent of you to have waited and refused the initial offers. You got a huge return on that one. Best of luck in your other projects!

  25. Hey Scott,
    Any news on re-investing the proceeds of Tvs?
    Would be interesting to see what you go for - passive income or big site needing writers and more development etc.

  26. What did you do to get banned in Google? That is a big no no for sure.

  27. Excellent result on the TV domain. Do you ever check back on sold domains to see what the new owners do with them? I assume that for someone to pay that price for a domain they must have some good ideas for developing it and taking it forward.

  28. Going from 1 to 51k in under 3 years… now thats one heck of a return!! Warren Buffett/Allan Sugar/Dragons Den watch out. I would think tvs.co.uk would be developed as a one stop shop for all tv sales i.e an affiliate a bit like quidco but for tvs only monster. This star could explode into something a bit more bigger… nevertheless excellent payback!

  29. I am surpised someone paid that much for such a domain.. I must sitting on a gold ine with my 3 letter dot com domains.

  30. Android tablet Fan says:

    I would love to have started earlier with my domain buying and I totally missed the whole .co thing. Still I like setting up blogs more.

  31. congratulations for a great pay day on the TV domain. It looks like selling domains is a growth industry.

  32. Nice patience on your part making the most of this rare domain. I’d love to find out what occurred to get your TV domain banned to begin with. Do you think it comes down to over-aggressive backlinking or lack of variety in anchor text?

  33. those are great returns. I am interested to see what you do with the new domains you acquired.

  34. It seem like they haven’t done much to TVs[dot]co[dot]uk since they bought it from you, it is still says under construction. It is funny because they spend so much on the domain name and not using it.

Leave a Reply