Self Made Minds

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.

[ http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~ah/f/6in8f51bnqj3knmekr3v5a7sc4/468/60#http%3A%2F%2Fselfmademinds.com%2F201011%2Fupdate%2F ]

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.

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.

[ http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~ah/f/6in8f51bnqj3knmekr3v5a7sc4/300/250?ca=1

Last year I travelled loads and did more conferences than I care to remember (I was out of the country for over 3 months in total). This year, I’ve been a lot more choosy about which which events I’ve attended based on the benefit (and enjoyment) I’d get from them.

So far I’ve done both Think Visibilities, Dom sure knows how to organise awesome events (Jason wrote a cool review about it here, I should do the same but I’ll outsource his instead). And in the summer my daughter and I went to the Existem AM Summer BBQ.

Out of these 3 events I didn’t attend a single complete session! The reason for this is I use events and conferences to network, form relationships and learn and share knowledge with like minded people (your learn a lot more from folk in the after hours than you ever will in a conference session).

So the reason for this post is that next event I’m off to (and likely my last one of the year), is Think Tank in Del Mar, San Diego. This is, and will be my third Think Tank, which I hope shows how important I feel it is. Cost of entry is high at $3,000 for 3 days but every attendee I’ve known has made that back and often many fold over.

I’ve chatted with Doctor David Klein (aka DK) who organises it and we both feel it would benefit from more than one Brit in attendance (I get lonely and home sick), so even tho it’s sold out (think it sold out in the first week it was announced) a few more folk from this side of the pond are welcome. DK has offered an amazing discount to compensate for the cost of having to travel across the pond (he’s asked me not to say how much it is publicly but it’s awesome).

This is an invitation only event so you will need to know me either on or offline as I’ll have to vouch for you. I’m gaining nothing out of promoting this other than hopefully having a fellow countryman to share an awesome experience with. Leave a comment below or drop me a message if interested and I’ll do the introductions.

I could explain what Think Tank is all about but if you’re serious about it I’m sure Google will do a better job

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!

[ http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~ah/f/6in8f51bnqj3knmekr3v5a7sc4/300/250?ca=1

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.