Here’s how to make money from domain investing without putting any of your money at stake.
There’s a steep learning curve to domain name investing. People that start investing without extensive research end up wasting a lot of money.
You can ask anyone in the industry who is well known, and they’ll tell you that a new domain investor sent them a list of domains to review but almost all of the domains were worthless.
These new investors spent thousands of dollars hand registering domains only to have a portfolio with little value.
What if I told you there was a way to hand register domains for free and make money if they sell?
That’s the cool concept behind a feature at Squadhelp, A company I featured in this week’s podcast.
Squadhelp has a curated premium marketplace where domain investors list domains for sale. These domains are submitted to companies looking to name themselves or a new product.
In addition to allowing investors to submit domains they own for inclusion, investors can also submit unregistered domains to the marketplace.
Squadhelp will review the domain. If the company thinks the domain is good, the person who submitted it can opt to have Squadhelp pay to register it. If the domain sells in the first year, the member gets 25% of the sales price. That commission drops slightly in years two and three.
Investors also have the option of registering the domain themselves when it is approved for the marketplace. This costs money but they get to keep a larger chunk when the domain sells. Even with this option, an investor has third-party validation that the domain might have value.
I suggest that all new domain investors who are hand registering domains try this. Before charging thousands of dollars to your credit card, try submitting unregistered domains you like to Squadhelp. It will cost you nothing upfront and you’ll learn a lot. You’ll learn which domains are more likely to sell and avoid costly mistakes. And if you’re good at it, you’ll also make some money.
Let the “front running” begin…
Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!
Only Squadhelp reviews the domains and they won’t frontrun them
OK, but they’re definitely running the risk of being falsely accused should any of these names happen to be coincidentally registered by unrelated parties.
It’s a risk. The turnaround time is fairly quick, though, so it’s unlikely it would happen.
Kudos for Squadhelp’s creativity. While I wish them well, they like so many before and currently, love claiming that they work with / contact / reach out to end user companies. Yet in some 20 years in this biz, I’ve yet to see anyone actually institute the very expensive, continuous marketing effort it would take to reach the millions of existing companies who either are looking for or who would be interested in buying one or more domains.
Advertising on Google, et. al, is fine as far as it goes. But this is still pull advertising instead of push advertising; it relies on companies themselves looking for a domain and not on any “outreach” effort/s.
Squadhelp and their tiny ilk aren’t even on the same planet as behemoth GoDaddy,
So when they claim, “These domains are submitted to companies looking to name themselves or a new product,” one needs to ask: How many companies are they submitting to? What is their submission process? How often do they so submit? What specific results are they willing to provide? How many individual companies have they submitted to to date?
And I’m not picking on Squadhelp; just pointing out this “we outreach to companies” that firms have been spewing almost since the dawn of the Internet.
Steve, I recommend taking a few minutes to visit their site and see what they do. They aren’t doing outreach to companies; companies are coming to them to run naming contests. These companies are looking for new names. People suggest names to them, including the names available to purchase through Squadhelp.
Thanks Andrew. Interesting. Visit I will. I do, however, stand by my industry point that most “domain selling” firms / platforms greatly exaggerate their end user / corporate outreach effort.