Domain Name Investment: How many domain names should we buy or register?

One of the questions that I wanted to know when I started investing in Domain Names is “How many domain names should we buy or register?”. I wanted to know whether I was investing way too much or too little. When I read some of the domainer’s stories, some of them had a good hundred or less and some even in the thousands. It was just questionable if it was a really good investment on their part…

… Some domainers focus on gTLD, some on ccTLD and some have mixed portfolio. And the general rule to answer this sort of question is could the domain names itself sustain their own registration fees.

Imagine having a portfolio of a mere 200 gTLDs which generally costs around $7 / year, it would already cost you $1,400 / year to renew (.INFO is an exception, it costs around $1+). While ccTLDs cost varies on different countries but are usually priced around $25 or over (PH Domain names costs $35 / year and could be lower if bulk registered).

– Could you keep track of your domain names? –

What I’ve noticed as well before is that domainers who owns a lot of domain names had to trim down their portfolio by removing trademarked names or low revenue names (can’t sustain themselves). The reason here is the drop of earnings with PPC which lead to a drop of revenues for domainers. Some have trimmed from thousands to a few hundreds, it’s just a question of whether it can profit.

What is also noticeable is that because domain name parking services are not that effective anymore ($0.02 / click), domainers are forced to develop their domain names. Owning hundreds or thousands of domain names could become a wasted if you can only develop one (or a few) at a time. At this time of lower PPC earnings, SEO is key to increase our earnings, Type-in traffic is slowly falling (browsers reliance on Search Engines) and parking is just not going to earn that much (unless you’re on certain categories that has high PPC like investments or banks).

So how many should we buy or register? As long as we can sustain it with our budgets and make money out of it or if we believe that one day it will sell or earn more than your renewal costs. Scaling investments (increasing or decreasing our domain name portfolio) here brings us down to the key which is to profit.