You Want to Make REAL Money With Your Domains? Sell a Product

Obviously there are many ways to make a living in domaining.  Some buy and sell names, some sell other people’s names, some people market for the domain companies, and others buy and develop,  selling other people’s services or goods.   All these can be very profitable and can even make you millions as proven by many domainers but if you want to make real money, sell something.

Sure you can make money being an affiliate and getting your cut but after your 10% guess who makes the other 90%, the person with the product.  An ebook is a product but it’s not even a real book.  Again, people have made millions on ebooks, maybe even more than some people have made on real books but there is more to be had by having a real business with real product.

The reason most domainers don’t sell produts are the barriers to entry.  You have to buy the product, market it, and ship it.  You usually have to have a brick and mortar locations staffed with people.  This is expensive and time consuming.  It is much easier to just take small pieces of the pie and not have to touch anything.  So why in the world would Rick Latona partner up in Vino.com and buy and sell watches?  He doesn’t like wine and watches that much.  He likes money.

The entire reason I got into domains was to find strong domain names that I could move my product through. I still buy tons of related domains but I did veer off track a bit over the years and have bought hundreds of non plant related domains.  What I’ve found is I make more money in one week with the domains I sell my product through than I do the entire year, maybe two years, with the domains I sell ads or affiliate products on.  You can look at money earned a lot of different ways.  I look at profit dollars generated. Money invested minus the costs.  Sure there are huge differences in amount of capital needed to fund the two different types of endeavors but when I have to pay the bills they don’t care how much I invested in each, they want me to pay them with money that I’ve earned.  I want to earn as many profit dollars as I can, regardless of investment.  You may say it’s easy to make a million dollars when you have a millions dollars.  Wrong.  It is EASIER but not EASY.

Another way to make money without have an actual product is selling a service.  Although not a product it still takes an investment, an investment in time.  Either yours or an employee’s.  I don’t like it as much as product because it’s not as easy to scale.  In most cases it’s easier to fill an order of a million of a product than a million services.

So here’s what I would suggest to get you started.  Pick ONE product, something you like, something you can buy at wholesale prices and think you could sell a few.  Put up your website or landing site and try and sell your wares.  Get used to setting up your credit card clearing and your layout.  Take orders and fill and get the feel of what it takes to manage one product.  Once you feel comfortable, add 10 more.  Ten in the same niche that you can sell on the same site.  As you get the hang of these and make a little money, you keep expanding.  This is certainly not something you do overnight and is not something you can do with 50 sites (unless the sites all lead back to one) but will take time, even years.  Often, what you end up selling will have nothing to do with what you started out selling.  As it evolves you find your niche. That product that people really want or something you came across one day and one thing led to another and boom….you’re in business X.  That story happens all too often.  The old, ” I didn’t plan on doing this” story.  So give it a try, sell something.  Your pocketbook may thank you (or your wife may kill me because you now have a closet full of T-shirts that say “Chicks Dig Long Tail Keywords” you couldn’t sell)