So my first year in brandable domaining ends, and I thought other newbies to brandables might be interested to see how I've got on...
I'm a long time domainer but a complete newbie to brandables. I thought this might give me an advantage on picking/selling domains compared to other brandable newbies.
My average purchase price of a brandable domain is around $20 (and rising!). I got very lucky in the early days, hand registering domains with GoDaddy coupon codes over 3 different accounts, unfortunately those days are gone and now I tend to drop catch or buy the majority of my domains from other domainers.
After I've purchased my brandable, in most cases I put up a landing page, this could be on my own website, Efty or more recently the new namesilo landing pages. I work very hard, spending 5+ hours a day (on top of a full time job) conducting outreach or attracting attention to my domains for sale. Very rarely do my domains sell all by themselves.
I've chosen to list my brandable domains solely with BrandBucket. I don't list with any other brandable marketplace. I submit all of my domains to BrandBucket immediately upon purchase. Having already put them on a landing page, this gives me a window of around 1 week-10 days to sell it before BrandBucket approves/denies my domain (in the early days this could have been as long as a month!). BB rejected names stay on whatever landing page I've built.
I also reach out to other domainers or people in the industry regularly. Sometimes, it's not what you know, it's who you know
. There are also a lot of really nice domainers out there and it's great to keep in contact. Through this contact I've sold a large portfolio of BB published names and another large portfolio of BB rejected names. I've also had small sales of both published and rejected names here at NP.
Answers to all of those little questions:
I already owned a sizable brandable domain portfolio from my usual day-to-day domaining and I've purchased 1,000+ brandables this year. Looking back I clearly had no idea what I was doing when I started buying names specifically to list on BrandBucket. I have (or will be) dropping at least 200 domains, as smart as I thought I was, I clearly wasn't!
I currently have 750+ names on BrandBucket (added a lot in the last few weeks).
I would have had 1,000+ names on BrandBucket had I not sold off some published names.
Almost 500 names were listed free via the voting system.
Over 500 names cost me under $4 (thanks GoDaddy and Domain.com!).
My acceptance rate at BrandBucket is dismal, I'm currently running at a 32% acceptance rate. As I've learned what BB wants/accepts this has improved. I was getting 1 in 10 accepted at first, now it's more like 1 in 10 gets rejected.
My one year bottom line is:
Revenue from BB @ $20,000
Revenue from end user sales made myself @ $14,000
Revenue from one off sale of BB published names @ $4,000
Revenue from various sales of BB published names @ $2,500
Revenue from one off sale of BB rejected names @ $8,000
Revenue from various sales of BB rejected names @ $500
$49,000
Poop! I didn't quite make that $50K. There is my motivation for this year!
Good luck to all other BBers too :D