I'm the owner of BitHub.com. Who wants to help to make a side-business out of it? :)
I could send you some bits
Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name
101–110 of 225 posts
Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name
#102While everyone in here seems to disagree, I believe that a good domain name can be worth a lot of money, if it comes with links and traffic. For example, purchasing a domain to market my audio app which has 100+ inbound links and 500+ unique visitors per day from various blogs for relevant keywords. If you convert 10% at $9.99, that traffic is worth roughly $15k monthly to you. But it might have been worth significan…
Can you really convert 10% of that sort of traffic though? I would have thought 1% would be ambitious. Quite prepared to be wrong though - I suppose if the relevant keywords are really strong then maybe it would perform higher.
Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name
#103I sort of did this the other day, I've got an idea, I think it's a good one, but it's inchoate. I got a domain name (.live because it was on sale! $6.99!) and spun up a $5/month VM on digital ocean, running Caddy server (https FTW!) to present a bare landing page with a little animated network eyecandy. The point is, it's so motivating! I feel like a real participant now! I'm on the Internet y'all!
Deploying to Heroku for free is ... well ... free.
And as you're opinion also seems to be: Domain names hardly matter (and won't be around forever).
Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name
#104You don't need to bid up the price of existing .com domain names. Even in 2020 there are plenty of perfectly good ones that nobody has claimed yet! All you need are two or three words that satisfy the following criteria: 1. The words, when spoken, should be easy to spell. 2. The words, when read, should be easy to pronounce in any English dialect. 3. The words, when concatenated, should not create any ambiguity (a la…
First couple I got were asmind.com and secondhomarus.com
Utter trash
Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name
#105My mind works exactly the opposite way. If I see a domain like BikeTours.com, I immediately assume that the business is built primarily on the domain name, and the quality of the product or service is inferior. Hence I don’t click it. But I assume the majority of internet users don’t think this way, so it can be a profitable strategy. Edit: Well, thinking about it, it’s not always true, but at the very least I check…
I agree with you that I'd prefer GoSojourn myself, and that BikeTours sounds spammy. Having now looked at both sites, they both look legit, and at first glance, roughly equivalent in presentation. At this point, I'd base my decision solely on prices, dates available, type of tour, customer service, etc. -- giving no weight to the domain name.
I can accept that buyers would pay more for BikeTours.com than for GoSojourn.com (and that the author would earn more money for brokering such a name), but is there any empirical evidence that customers prefer the simple descriptive name? And by how much? That's a critical question. If the BikeTours name costs $40,000 and GoSojourn costs $200, could the $39,800 difference be put to better use by GoSojourn such that it beats out BikeTours?
Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name
#106I sort of did this the other day, I've got an idea, I think it's a good one, but it's inchoate. I got a domain name (.live because it was on sale! $6.99!) and spun up a $5/month VM on digital ocean, running Caddy server (https FTW!) to present a bare landing page with a little animated network eyecandy. The point is, it's so motivating! I feel like a real participant now! I'm on the Internet y'all!
Deploying to Heroku for free is ... well ... free. And as you're opinion also seems to be: Domain names hardly matter (and won't be around forever).
s/you're/your/
Heroku is a sucker machine.
Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name
#107I sort of did this the other day, I've got an idea, I think it's a good one, but it's inchoate. I got a domain name (.live because it was on sale! $6.99!) and spun up a $5/month VM on digital ocean, running Caddy server (https FTW!) to present a bare landing page with a little animated network eyecandy. The point is, it's so motivating! I feel like a real participant now! I'm on the Internet y'all!
If you sign up for a free Cloudflare account you get HTTPS, and you can point it at a Github Pages page for FREEEEE :-)
Cheers! Thanks for the tip.
They also let you serve a static site over IPFS from your domain with a DNSlink record, also for free. :-)
Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name
#108I own a bunch of domains but don't really follow the expired market...however the example expired domains in the post seem really expensive for a side project. If I were looking to invest $5-$15k cash into marketing a random new side business and still needed an idea, it seems like it'd make more sense to follow the post's advice by watching the expired domains come through, then take the inspiration from, say, 'bake…
> domains in the post seem really expensive for a side project. It's probably worth considering that the domain is an asset you can resell. Plus, an auction should, in theory, limit your potential losses to amount you outbid the previous winner by, since they theoretically would buy it. The math is probably a little more complicated but you get the idea.
> It's probably worth considering that the domain is an asset you can resell
Yes this is true. Also, I've met one of the top domainers of all time who got in early and one of the things he told me was that valuations have gone up considerably, in good part, due to the interest by foreign entities who want the .com for its prestige and to be able to tap into the US market, and/or be the sole branded domain for their worldwide presence.
Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name
#109On the one hand it is harder and harder to find a decent dot com domain name, on the other hand I see some crazy prices that make absolutely no sense. Even if you choose to buy a name on the second market why pay these ridiculous prices? https://www.healthinsurance.com sold for over 8M bucks, is the difference between this name and something like https://insurancemavens.com (for sale @ $395) worth 8 million?
It depends on the marketing budget. If you're spending $100+ million / year on advertising, paying a few million dollars for a domain may make sense if you're plastering it all over other print and digital media.
You have to think of it in the context of how much money some companies spend. DigiCert sells a "Secure Site Wildcard" (non-EV) SSL certificate for $2k / year. If companies are willing to pay $2k / year for something that advertises their stupidity...
Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name
#110You don't need to bid up the price of existing .com domain names. Even in 2020 there are plenty of perfectly good ones that nobody has claimed yet! All you need are two or three words that satisfy the following criteria: 1. The words, when spoken, should be easy to spell. 2. The words, when read, should be easy to pronounce in any English dialect. 3. The words, when concatenated, should not create any ambiguity (a la…
so true, still thinking about what to do with fullstackjavascript.com