Advice

With the final days of 2007 upon us, now might be a good time to review your portfolios to ensure your domain names have ample time before expiring. Many of us ignore the renewal emails that start filling our inbox with 90 days to go, figuring we will renew them with a few days to spare. Instead of doing that, I am going to log in and make sure that all of my premium domain names have at least a year before expiring so I don’t run in to trouble.

One reason expired domain name auction services are in business is due to the fact that some people don’t renew their domain names. I presume many cases are accidental non-renewals, which can be due to a multitude of reasons. Perhaps you changed your email address over the past year. Maybe your spam filter is preventing the renewal emails from reaching your inbox. Whatever the case may be, you should manually check the expiration of your domain names now to avoid any surprises.

Heck, maybe you can even count the renewals as a business expense against your 2007 profits (consult with a tax expert or purchase the Domain Tax Guide to see).

Mike Berkens, owner of one of the most valuable private domain portfolios, touched on it in my interview with him, but he expounds on what he believes is the biggest threat to the domain industry on TheDomains.com blog. Mike feels that as an industry, we need to police ourselves or a governmental agency will step in and potentially impact more than just the trademark domain issue.

Here are a few suggestions that Mike makes in his post regarding what we can do:

1. Do NOT register, backorder, or participate in any auction containing these types of domains.
2. The drop services have to stop taking backorders for these obvious trademark infringing names.
3. Stop domain tasting.
4. Join the Internet Commerce Association (ICA)

Check out TheDomains.com to read more about this important subject.

It’s the time of year when I evaluate everything that happened during the past 12 months and set new goals for 2008. This is always a great time of year, because it allows me to briefly reflect on the positive things that have happened, and allows me to think about the things that could have been better. There is no point in sugar coating things, so deep personal reflection is essential in order to grow.

Although I think this reflection should be made internally, I will share a few of my goals for 2008, and if you would like to share yours as well, I welcome it.

Domain Investing
– Purchase 1-2 premium domain names with the goal of developing them in Q4 2008
– Trim down my portfolio, only keeping strong generic domain names and a few speculative names

Domain Development
– Successfully launch Lowell.com
– Create strong relationships with Lowell businesses and civic leaders
– Begin phase two of Lowell.com, including some social networking capabilities and newsletter
– Build several miniature websites using the hybrid development concept I discussed a couple of weeks ago

Blogging
– Continue to write 1-3 original blog posts per day to give advice to readers of my blog
– Teach people about the value of domain names using well-executed examples
– Forge advertising relationships with industry leading companies

While you are thinking about goals, it is important to think about more than what you would like to accomplish in 2008. You should also take some time to consider (or reconsider) your life goals. What do you want to accomplish in life? Where are you now compared to where you want to be? What can you do in 2008 to make it easier to achieve your life goals?

This will help you stay in track in business and in life.

Reading Sahar’s post this morning has me also wondering what people have in place as an “out strategy.” What if domain values suddenly dropped (due to a number of possible factors), and the value of undeveloped domain names suddenly plummeted? I can’t even imagine this happening on one and two word category killer .com domain names, but this is something to think about for people whose portfolios may be made up of decent, but not killer domain names.

As with any market crash, panicking will only make things worse. I would advise against rushed selling just because the perceived value has decreased. The domain market is always in somewhat of a state of flux because there is no completely accurate price guide.

Here are five recommendations I would make while you evaluate your portfolio (which is always a good thing at this time of year)
1. Cash in hand is very important – (you can’t pay your taxes with domain inventory)
2. Have a development plan for each name you own. If PPC advertising drops, you will be more protected
3. Trim down your portfolio ($8/year x # of names is expensive).
4. Drop names that realistically have no chance of making money unless someone random wants the name to start a business. A few names at $8/year is nothing major, but if you have 500 or 5,000 this is a huge sunk cost.
5. Make less speculative purchases. Just because Brittney’s sister is pregnant, doesn’t mean you need to try to guess the name of the baby and buy 100 .com names.

As an aside, if you are concerned about this and want to cash out of your one word category killer .com names, drop me a note 🙂