Think you can only make money in domain name investing if you got into the industry 5, 10 or 20 years ago?
Think again.
Today’s guest entered the industry about a year ago and earned enough profit in that time for a down payment on his lakefront home (where he spoke with me for this interview).
And he still owns 189 LLLL .com domain names.
But this is no “get-rich-quick scheme.” To the contrary, his first flip was $15 to $45. He then repeated that process more than 100 times as the market increased.
He’s a grinder who worked hard. Here’s his story.
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Watch the full video at:
https://domainsherpa.com/jeffrey-emerick-hustling/
Think you can’t get into domain name investing because you don’t have enough money to start? Think again. Today’s investor started a year ago with an investment budget of only $100. He recently used some of his profits as a down payment on a new house on a lake. Stay tuned to hear the whole story.
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Michael Cyger: Hey everyone. My name is Michael Cyger, and I’m the Publisher of DomainSherpa.com – the website where you come to learn how to become a successful domain name investor or entrepreneur directly from the experts. I bring on experts, people we call Sherpas, to teach you things through interviews, panel discussions, and tutorials. When you learn and advance your experience and skills and make sales, I hope you come back to do an interview like today’s guest is going to do.
I would like to welcome to the show, Jeffrey Emerick, a domain investor, specializing in LLLL.com domain names. Welcome, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey Emerick: Hi, how is it going?
Michael: Great. Well, everything except for my voice. So, Drew Rosener called it my sexy voice. I prefer to call it the voice that makes it really difficult for me to talk, so I apologize in advance.
Jeffrey: Oh, no, that is fine.
Michael: All right. So, we actually met, I think, last year when you came over the mountains from Eastern Washington to Seattle for DN Seattle Networking Event. That was the first time we met, right?
Jeffrey: Yeah. Well, I mean actually in Las Vegas at NamesCon.
Michael: NamesCon.
Jeffrey: I went to that when I did not really know what I was doing, and I actually learned quite a bit, and networking is pretty key there.
Michael: Definitely. So, you are a fellow Washingtonian.
Jeffrey: Yeah, I am just right over the mountain, on the Eastern side.
Michael: Awesome. One of these days, I am actually going to get over to Spokane, and then we will get together over there.
Jeffrey: Nice. Yeah, definitely. That would be great.
Michael: But you are going to NamesCon again in January.
Jeffrey: Oh yeah.
Michael: And so, I love your trademark. It is the hat. Is that called a Stetson?
Jeffrey: A fedora.
Michael: Fedora. That is what it is. So, your trademark fedora, so I am always going to be able to identify you in a crowd of people, and I hear they are going to have like over one thousand people this coming January, so it is going to be crazy.
Jeffrey: Oh yeah, it was a great turnout last time.
Michael: It was, and this year is going to be even better. Good to see you again. So, today, we are talking about LLLL.com domain names. And everybody that is watching this show, if they are not underneath a rock and they are not just getting into domain investing today, they have seen the rise of the LLLL.com domain names, the rise in pricing. How long ago did you start investing in domain names as a whole?
Jeffrey: Around October. I did not know what I was doing. I just bought a bunch of things that I thought sounded cool, because it was one of the things I wanted to kind of get into.
Michael: Oh, hold on one second, Jeffrey. We just had a little bit of a video issue. Just popped up, but you are beter now. It is still a little bit. I think it is better. So, October 2014, you started getting into domain name investing.
Jeffrey: Yeah.
Michael: So, that is only about a year. In that year, how much have you earned in profit as a result of domain name investing?
Jeffrey: As a whole, with everything, a little over 20K.
Michael: Over 20K. And with that 20K, some of which has been invested back into domain names I take it.
Jeffrey: Oh yeah. Yeah, definitely.
Michael: And then what has that 20K enabled you to do? Did you go and spend it on something big for yourself or something nice?
Jeffrey: Yeah, recently actually I pulled out enough to get a down payment on a house.
Michael: Is that the house where you are filming from today?
Jeffrey: Yeah, it is.
Michael: That is awesome. So, you made enough money in only 12 months to put down a down payment on the house that you are filming from today in Spokane.
Jeffrey: Yeah. And everybody kind of says all the good domains are taken and you have to have started back in the ’90s, so that was kind of discouraging at first, but you can kind of figure out strategies on how to do it. There is a blueprint out there that people like to use. It is by that short one-word .COM, but you kind of need a budget to get into there.
Michael: You do.
Jeffrey: And so, I was trying to figure out something that I could flip to give me that budget, so I could start buying one-word .COMs or even three-letter .COMs because those are a great guarantee.
Michael: So, when you started investing a year ago, we chatted in the pre-interview that you watched a couple of shows on Domain Sherpa and tried to follow the strategies of others. What happened?
Jeffrey: Well, I learned that you have got to do a lot of like SEO stuff and you have got to learn how to do WordPress, and I am just not really good at all that stuff, and so I put a lot of time and effort into that and it just was not very fruitful at all. I already have a separate business. Domaining is something I am learning to do, and so I just really did not have the time to put into AdSense and AdWords, and all these things that you have to learn in order to get people to come and click, and so it just did not work out for me.
Michael: Yeah, it seems like there is definitely two schools of thought. If you are an entrepreneur and you are developing out assets and like you know how to develop assets, then that is one way to go, but most people that are investors, watching this show, are just investors. They know a good deal when they see it if they have built up that gut instinct for a good price and they know they can sell it for a profit. So, you tried your hand in developing, but you realized that investing and flipping is the way you wanted to go.
Jeffrey: Right. Yeah. Mainly liquidity. I kind of discovered liquidity. I kind of learned about it, and I feel like it is not enough to understand liquidity. You have to experience it.
Michael: Yeah.
Jeffrey: Because you kind of get this confidence when you have this portfolio of domains that you can sell today if you need to. That is unlike all the other stuff that I was buying.
Michael: So, what kind of stuff were you buying before? Give me a couple of examples.
Jeffrey: I was buying a bunch of bitcoin domains because I actually had done okay with bitcoin and I thought that if I bought bitcoin domains, it would be the next big things, and it just did not work out. And then I bought cord bank domains after seeing one of your interviews. It had like a 90-dollar cost-per-click, and same thing. If people are not going to come, you cannot get people to come or (Unclear 6:24.9), then it is really hard to do that.
Michael: So, they are not getting type-in traffic. Nobody is approaching you to buy these domain names.
Jeffrey: Right. Yeah, I mean I would make some small amoutn of profit, but like for all the effort that I had to put into it, it was just not worth it.
Michael: Yeah, and you are hand registering these domain names.
Jeffrey: Oh yeah.
Michael: And so, they did not have any value and you held on to them for a certain amount of time, but nobody came. Did you go to discussion forums and try and promote them for sale?
Jeffrey: Yeah. As they get closer to expiring, I would promote them to sell them quick, but I promoted them by going to YouTube that were similar to the videos that I was talking about. Things that I had heard and posting comments. And you would get people, but if you stop, the people stop coming. No clicks. So, I just did not really have all the time for that.
Michael: Yeah. So, you came up with your own investment strategy after trying a couple of things, and that is what we do on Domain Sherpa. We tell stories of people who have been successful, and that might lend itself to an opportunity for you to get into or it might trigger an idea in you to go to do the same thing in a different area, or in your case, you may try a couple of things and they just do not work and you are like now I know what not to do.
Jeffrey: Right. Yeah.
Michael: How did you decide what to do for investing in domain names?
Jeffrey: Well, there were a couple things that I did. This may sound weird, but I did an Ebay search, which was like a desert wasteland, but I figured if I did a search for the stuff that had sold – you can go to advanced options and then click in sold, and then put in your search, and it is only going to give you stuff that has sold. So, that is kind of like oh, well, obviously that sells. And I saw lots of four letters in there and I was like okay. And then I had heard Andrew Rosener talk about scarcity and four letters, and so I kind of just was like maybe this is it. It was like the next thing I was going to try, and it worked out.
Michael: So, you had this hypothesis. Maybe it is four letters. And this was a year ago, when four letters were selling for how much?
Jeffrey: Oh, gosh. It was about 20 dollars. I actually picked up my second one for $15.50.
Michael: So, about 20 dollars. You picked up your second one for 15 dollars, but you saw them selling on Ebay.
Jeffrey: Yeah.
Michael: And you put that together with something you heard on Domain Sherpa from Andrew Rosener, a long time, regular Sherpa, saying scarcity is what drives up the value.
Jeffrey: Yeah, and they were talking about three letters and how they used to go for just a couple thousand dollars and what they are going for now is tens of thousands, and I was like well, if that is going up in value, how can the thing next to it not go up in value too.
Michael: Yeah.
Jeffrey: I mean they were only 20 dollars.
Michael: So, how many did you buy before you tested this hypothesis of yours?
Jeffrey: Well, I kind of made a business plan, and so I was like okay, this is my budget, this is my strategy for selling, this is my exit strategy, and I also came up with a pivot strategy in case what I saw was going on change.
Michael: So, what was your budget? Do you remember?
Jeffrey: It was one hundred dollars.
Michael: One hundred dollars.
Jeffrey: I had already lost so many thousands in buying all these WordPress sites and SSL certificates, and the whole works with that, and so I really did not have much money to invest at that time. But the first one was like 23 dollars and the second one was 15. And I did not sell that first one right away because I had submitted it to Brand Bucket and, at that time, they take a couple weeks to kind of review it. And so, I was waiting for that to be reviewed, but the other one was just random letters that I knew they would not accept and I sold it for 45 dollars.
Michael: So, your strategy was that you were going to buy them for 15 dollars and then try and turn around and flip them.
Jeffrey: Yeah, I was trying to do for double. So, if I bought it for 20, sell it for 40. If I bought it for 15, I would sell it for 30, but that one as in an auction and it got bid up on Ebay.
Michael: So, you bought it on Ebay, and then you turned around and sold it on Ebay as well.
Jeffrey: Actually I had searched to see what was selling at NameBio and Ebay, and that is kind of when I had discovered it, but I had actually bought a lot of them on GoDaddy expired auctions.
Michael: Oh, okay. So, then you bought it on GoDaddy for 15 dollars. You turned around and listed it for auction at Ebay, which if somebody asked me one year ago, two years ago, today I would still say it is like a baren wasteland, where nothing happens.
Jeffrey: Well, there are a lot of beginner people trying to sell stuff on there, but you have also got the core people that know that liquid domains sell. And so, there is that little category on there that sells.
Michael: Yeah, so you sold it for 45 dollars. You made 30 dollars in the transaction, which a lot of people would say 30 bucks is not that great, but you are looking at it. You are saying that is two hundred percent more than what I paid for it.
Jeffrey: I was actually looking at it as I own two, because my strategy was to buy one thousand in the very, very end. And so, to start with one and to sell it to get two, I knew that I could go buy two more and maybe get four, and that is exactly what happened, is I bought just a couple for like 21 dollars and 22 dollars, and I sold them both for 45 again.
Michael: Wow.
Jeffrey: But I sold those ones for buy it now because I did not want to risk it not bringing in what I wanted. And then I turned around and I bought eight.
Michael: So, you really did set this budget at one hundred bucks, your strategy was to double your money, and then just one turned into two, two turned into four, four turned into eight.
Jeffrey: Right.
Michael: It just continued up the pyramid.
Jeffrey: Yeah, and I did notice right when I was getting to about eight, the price was kind of changing and more people were kind of getting interest. The price was not going up, but I think that more people were getting interest, and so I adjusted that and I made a little bit more in that category.
Michael: Yeah. So, interesting that you said when you started off, you set your budget. You set your strategy. You set your pivot strategy. What was going to be your pivot strategy in case all of this just fell apart like the first couple of times you tried investing?
Jeffrey: Well, I came up with this thing. I call it insta-recoup, because I learned with all my bitcoin domains and everything else. I bought a bunch of coupon domains. I learned that even when I was trying to sell them for less than I paid for, nobody wanted them. But with these four letters, I knew that I could at least get my investment back, and so it was like this pivot. It is like okay, if the market changes, then I am going to sell these for what I got them for. And at the very least, I maybe lost ten percent because I had already lost one hundred percent with my previous investment. And actually to this day, I have not lost one penny on selling a four-letter. Whether it is an auction or buy it now, the market always comes through.
Michael: That is pretty amazing. Just on the show that we taped, the review that we taped earlier today. I cannot remember if it was numerics or short acronyms that is increasing like two to three percent per day.
Jeffrey: Oh yeah. Yeah, there is a good chart for four letters on LLLLSales.com, and they just recently made a chart that tracks the minimum price for any letters at all, because they have got the Chinese letters and the premium letters and the pronouncable letters, and then you get those random ones that are just like VZXQ, and so it is kind of cool. It tracks that. And before, I had to track it myself and tell potential buyers, like oh, this is the going rate and show them statistics, like hey, look. These sold yesterday. But now I could just say, hey check out the chart.
Michael: That makes a lot easier for you.
Jeffrey: Yeah.
Michael: So, how many LLLL.com domains do you own today?
Jeffrey: Right now, currently, I own 189.
Michael: 189. So, one to two, two to four, four to eight. You kept going. You told me earlier you have made 20 thousand dollars profit in selling these, plus today you still own 189 of them.
Jeffrey: Right. Yeah, and at one time, I owned close to 250, but I had to consolidate to get the down payment on this house.
Michael: And so, that all started with one hundred dollars.
Jeffrey: Yeah. Actually I injected a little bit of money a little bit later, once the value was slowly rising, but once it went like this, I was like oh, I should double down.
Michael: Get more money in.
Jeffrey: So, yeah, I sold a little bit of bitcoin and plugged it in there later.
Michael: Got you. All right. Well, when I see you at NamesCon, I have got a crisp hundred-dollar bill that I want you to invest for me.
Jeffrey: Nice.
Michael: So, if you own 189 today, how many do you think you have sold in the past year?
Jeffrey: I have sold exactly 147.
Michael: 147 sold. Wow. Today, the Chinese premiums are going for a lot of course, and we will talk about what that is. Well, actually, let’s talk about that. So, how many of your 189 would you say are Chinese premium and what does Chinese premium mean to you?
Jeffrey: Yeah, we have a new term. We call it chip. Chinese premium.
Michael: Ah, chip.
Jeffrey: So, that is the new, little code. I regret it, but I did not get into that. I kind of had this strategy, where every time I would buy a domain, I would submit it to Brand Bucket and the other brandable sites, because Andrew Rosener and a lot of other people say if you can find a way to add value to your domain, it is a no-brainer. And so, Brand Bucket. They are the one who prices it, so when they say hey, we think that this domain is worth this much, I did not come up with that. They did. And so, it is like a third party apprasial. Lots of times I have said hey, this domain is for sale, and I rotate my inventory if it does not sell, and so while it is being rotated, if it is accepted on Brand Bucket, I will come back and say hey, this domain has been accepted on Brand Bucket and I will get a lot more for the domain.
Michael: All right, I am going to ask you more about those strategies, about how you get more and how you rotate. So, the chips, Chinese premium domains. From what I understand, it is anything without an A, E, I, O, U, and then a V.
Jeffrey: Right.
Michael: Do you know, in your portfolio, how many are Chinese premium or do you not even look at that? You just take whatever you can get at the floor value today.
Jeffrey: Yeah, I am holding on to one that I bought for 40 dollars, because at the time, there was not even a thing called Chinese premium.
Michael: Right.
Jeffrey: I mean it really just started happening. The first thing I had ever heard about it was in May, and I did not really even hear about it. I just heard people asking for them. People were like hey, do you have any. They would contact me and say hey, do you have any without the vowels and a V, and I would be like why.
Michael: Right.
Jeffrey: But once I started seeing people asking for it, I was like yeah, I have one of those. I am going to hold on to it, and they were like two hundred dollars and then three hundred and four hundred. And I wanted to sell at six, but I just was like oh. I held on to it, but I never got into it because by the time I noticed, they were six hundred dollars, and I actually thought that was crazy. And so, it was just so much. One domain: six hundred dollars. And at that time, six hundred dollars would get me at least five, six, seven, eight, or nine domains.
Michael: Right, that is a lot of domains. So, you are definitely going for volume.
Jeffrey: Right. So, my key was I really believe that if you could buy three letters for one thousand or two and they were at ten thousand, I really believed that, and still do, that four letters were going to make it to one thousand dollars each. And one thousand dollars times one thousand bucks is one million.
Michael: So, that is what you were going for. One million dollars.
Jeffrey: Right, exactly. And so, even though my real plan in the back of my head is keep getting more, keep getting more, keep getting more, because it is not about the price that I buy it at. It is how many I had, in my head.
Michael: So, you have got 189.
Jeffrey: Right.
Michael: But you have also got a house you are living in.
Jeffrey: Yes, that is the key, and I have always wanted a house on a lake and that was the kicker, so I made it happen.
Michael: Awesome. So, LLLL is just sort of the entry space, but inside the four-letter .COM area, there are the Chinese premium. There are the Western premiums. There are patterns like CVCV. I sold TOLO.com I think earlier this year through a broker to an end user. It was not Chinese. It was not floor value, but the CVs are hot. The ABBA. The BBAA. The repeating patterns.
Jeffrey: Right.
Michael: What are you seeing in terms of values of the four letters from your portfolio?
Jeffrey: So, the way that I kind of categorize them is in four different categories, and down here is like the bottom of the barrel, and I call that just random letters. And when I market those, I market them as acronyms and abbreviations, because you can really sell it like that pretty well. But also, that strategy did not really work out because if it is the bottom of the barrel, people do not really want that as much as stuff with more perceived value. And then right up from that is pronounceable. I noticed stuff with vowels in would bring in the most dollar amount on all the sales platforms, and so those are pronounceables, and that is the category that I chose because the Chinese premiums were six hundred dollars to kind of do that and everything else at that time was about 50 dollars to get a pronounceable one, and you could definitely sell it.
And then above that is what you call the premium letters, and I always have to have a little cheat sheet, but there is no J, no J, no Q, no U, no V, no W, X, Y, or Z. And I never remember that, but people have been looking for those for a long time, since 2007, and so those have been taken. So, if you find one of those, definitely grab it.
Michael: Yeah.
Jeffrey: And then, of course, at the highest pyramid right now is the chips, the Chinese premiums, and currently they are going anywhere from nine hundred dollars, up to 25 hundred if you have a good one. And you never know if you have a good one unless you understand the Chinese alphabet, because basically it is two letters put together make a sound, and then two sounds together make an actual name.
Michael: Yeah, exactly, and it took me forever to figure that out as well. So, random letters, pronounceable, premium letters, and then chips is what you are saying.
Jeffrey: Yeah.
Michael: But if I go to Brand Bucket and I look at your second rung, the pronounceable and it is just a made up word like GOZO.com, that could have a retail price of five thousand dollars because it is only four letters and it is pronounceable. That is higher than the floor value of the chips right now. Why would you say that the chips are higher if this one could be worth more?
Jeffrey: Right. Well, I think that every domainer or domain investor has to decide, or be hybrid, if you want to flip domains short-term or if you want to sit back and just get an email every once in a while that says your domain is sold, but that could take months or years and I like a little bit more action than that, but I am doing both. I am submitting it to Brand Bucket and I keep holding on to the best domains, and then I sell the ones that are kind of down here on the ranks. And then I see another one that pops up on the market and I actually place them in the order that I kind of value them.
Michael: Yeah. All right, that makes sense. So, let’s talk about Brand Bucket. I have got some domains listed on Brand Bucket. They are usual words or two words that are grouped together that I think would be a great company name. You are submitting four-letter .COMs to Brand Bucket.
Jeffrey: Right.
Michael: Are they always pronounceable or sometimes are they random letters?
Jeffrey: They are always pronounceable. Always.
Michael: Give me an example of one that is in your portfolio that is pronounceable.
Jeffrey: OVZU.
Michael: So, OVZU.com. Why would you even submit that to Brand Bucket?
Jeffrey: Because I have actually studied what they have listed already, and they tend to have patterns and 80 percent of what they have always has a good vowel in it on both ends if you submit four letters. And so, like I said, if Brand Bucket accepts it and they price it at seven thousand dollars, I would rather kind of sit on that and have that sell than flip it for 30 dollars profit or whatever.
Michael: Right, exactly, and I have done a show with Mike (Unclear 24:28.8) from Brand Bucket. They will reject a majority of the submissions to them. So, if you get it in, it is sort of like a badge of honor that you have been in Brand Bucket.
Jeffrey: Right. Yeah, I smile every time I get that email that says congratulations your domain has been accepted. And then, when it is rejected, you are like.
Michael: So, then, when it is accepted, I believe you have to pay a certain amount to get it into the system, right?
Jeffrey: Right. Yeah.
Michael: I cannot remember how much that was. Ten dollars.
Jeffrey: Yeah, it is ten dollars.
Michael: Per domain.
Jeffrey: And they make a logo for you. They tell people what industry it works for. They tell them what it sounds similar to or why it would be a great brand.
Michael: And once you have that sort of pedigree that Brand Bucket has accepted it and you have paid your extra ten dollars to them, so it is sort of an investment in the value of the domain name, what benefits do you find from having that when you go to sell it later?
Jeffrey: Well, basically, like I was saying, I have taken domains and tried to sell them and nobody really had interest. And then, once it got that approval, that badge of honor, and you kind of show it to everybody and people are like oh, it is on Brand Bucket. There is a really vibrant market, aftermarket for accepted brandables on Brand Bucket, and so basically it just adds value to it. There is a price. They know that you did not price it. And like I said, I talked to a lot of people that sell four letters on Brand Bucket.
Michael: Yeah, so that is amazing. So, you will actually go and list it for sale on a marketplace and say it is currently for sale at Brand Bucket, but you can make an offer on it.
Jeffrey: Right. And so, the trick with that is you have to give a little disclosure that says if you are going to keep this domain, you have to list it at Brand Bucket. And if you would like to sell it elsewhere, you have to keep it on Brand Bucket for the next 30 days. As long as you give that disclosure, then it is fine.
Michael: Got you. All right, so how do you find your reasonably priced LLLL domain names? It makes sense that a year ago you could pick them up for 15, 20 or 22 dollars per piece. Where did you find them a year ago?
Jeffrey: Oh, now, that is the secret sauce.
Michael: But it does not work anymore because it is today, or does it?
Jeffrey: Well, it kind of does. Everybody asks where is the place, and if there was just one place, it would not last very long. And so, I have a daily ritual, where I scan every single site and look for them. LLLLSales.com is a great place because they list on the right-hand column different marketplaces, but it is not perfect. They do not get it all. I have found some really good deals on Phoenix. And when I tell people that, they are like is that place still in existence. Like I said, there are different places, and you have to kind of keep up with the market, because when I very, very first started, Flippa was a great place to sell my four letters.
Everybody was all about it, but now I do not know what it is. I think maybe the search function is not as good for four letters as everything else, and so now every time I see a low sale, because LLLLSales will list all the previous sales that have happened. And every time I see a low one, I am like what and it says Flippa.
Michael: Flippa, huh.
Jeffrey: So, that is a good thing because you can go there and get good sales on there.
Michael: So, if I went over to your house and fired up your computer and started your browser, would it start up a tab for every single marketplace? Here is the Name Pro Sales. Here is Flippa. Here is eBay. Here is LLLLSales.com. Would I see everything that you do?
Jeffrey: Yeah, I basically just have those windows that are pinned and I just click on them and I just go left to right. And I always say do not get discouraged because I used to kind of get discouraged. I would be like oh, this is a bad one. Nobody wants it. And then I kind of had this ‘aha’ moment, where I do not always have money. I have got to sell my domains too in order to get that money to buy. So, I am always surprised if you just kind of hold out for it, I mean within one month you are going to sell these four letters. And for any industry that is pretty awesome.
Michael: Yeah, that is amazing. We were talking in the pre-interview that you found a honey hole over at eBay. So, you have already talked about eBay using the advanced search, which a lot of people do not know about, which I would recommend because I was looking up little mini bikes for my kids, and they have a ton of them, but they are all way overpriced. And the key is go into eBay. Sign in. Do an advanced search. Search for whatever you are looking for. Select completed auctions, and then look at what actually sold and what those actual prices are. And that is what you did that you described earlier.
But you had a different path earlier for buying domains. What did you do on EBay?
Jeffrey: So, it was actually on GoDaddy.
Michael: Oh, it was GoDaddy.
Jeffrey: So, it was on GoDaddy expired auctions, and this was right around the time. I mean we started at 20. We slowly rose up. We are at 50 to 60 dollars. And then bam, it was like 75 and I was like oh my gosh. And in that moment, I do not even know where it came to, but I was like when I list my domains on GoDaddy, you can pick seven days, but that is for an auction. But when you list it, you are trying to get maybe some traction or get a buy it now. You list it for 90 days.
And so, my thinking was 90 days ago, these people listened those domains. Maybe they do not even know that the price has gone up. So, I kid you not. I submitted 250, probably more than that, but a lot of offers for 50 dollars. I could not find them anywhere else. Everywhere I had to go, I had to spend 75. And I submitted. Everybody had a different price point, but yeah, I submitted. It was not the buy it now. It was the make an offer. And the key to it is I went over and I looked at all the ones that had no offers because my rationale there was if somebody has already submitted an offer, if they did reply, it was ten thousand dollars and the guy did not want it.
Michael: Right.
Jeffrey: So, every one that had a zero next to it, they had no received an offer yet, and there was like over 250 of them. And of that, there was like 42 that got accepted.
Michael: So, you made 250 offers at 50 dollars a piece, so you are saying I am going to commit 12,500 dollars if every single one of them says it, and you did not have 12,500 dollars. 42 of them came back and said yes. So, what is that? That is one thousand bucks.
Jeffrey: Yeah. A couple people came back to me days later and I was like oh, great, so it was really fun.
Michael: So, did you buy all of those 42 domains?
Jeffrey: Yeah, because if you do not, GoDaddy will ban your account.
Michael: But you did not have one thousand dollars to buy 42 domains. Did you?
Jeffrey: Yeah. Oh yeah.
Michael: You did.
Jeffrey: Yeah.
Michael: Wow, all right. So, that was a big win. You got 42 domains all at once, all at a 50-dollar price when you saw the price at 75-dollar market rate. Did you turn around and flip those? Turn that 42 into 84.
Jeffrey: Yeah, and the thing is too is when you get it off of GoDaddy, you make the payment and then, for whatever reason, it says payment pending. It says funds received. Authorizing payment. I think that they just hold it to make sure that you are not going to pull it back or something. So, you have to wait for that, and then on top of it, depending on where the domain is, it either gets transferred to you automatically or they send you a code to get it, and so that actually really benefitted me because in that week or so that I had to wait, the price jump up to one hundred dollars.
Michael: Wow.
Jeffrey: And so, I basically went out and I sold every one of those for 125 dollars, and later regretted it because it just kept going.
Michael: Yeah, but you doubled your money there in that week that it took to process all of them.
Jeffrey: Yeah. Yeah, some of them were quadruple my money. It was pretty cool.
Michael: Amazing. Have you found a honey hole opportunity like that since that one?
Jeffrey: I keep trying. I keep trying that strategy, and last time 13 were accepted, and then like this time four, and then I just gave the secret away to your audience, so probably never again.
Michael: But this will not air until December, so you can try it one more time, and then it is going to be a dead strategy anyways.
Jeffrey: Yeah, and one of the things that my mom always says is always ask because the worst you can get is a no, and so all the time. When I first started, if I liked a domain, I wanted to be the one to own it, and I would overpay for it and that worked out because the price went up, but I stopped doing that because I learn. I kind of kept track and I was like seven out of ten people say yeah, sure, why not, and so you can really find some good deals just by asking for it.
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Michael: Yeah. So, there are a lot of marketplaces to buy and sell LLLL.com domains. In terms of buying today, where are the good ones?
Jeffrey: Well, like I said.
Michael: Flippa.
Jeffrey: Flippa is a great find, and I mean it just depends on how active you are and how much you want to search. I kind have eBay in my background because I sell on there, and so sometimes you will just find a good buy it now and you do not have to mess around with that. And I think the number one way that I acquire names right now, because the market has changed, is every time you deal with anybody, whether buying or selling, just be nice. It goes so far. You meet eagles all the time, and that just does not work for people. And so, slowly I have built these relationships, where everybody is at this different level. Some people bought in 2007. Some people bought when I did. So, you kind of find those people that what they bought back here they kind of want to sell at these new prices.
And so, when you have a history with somebody, they are a lot more likely to say hey, yeah, I will sell you ten for 175 even though I know they are going for two hundred. And 25 dollars does not seem like a lot, but I try to flip at least ten per week. I try for 20, but have got to get ten per week.
Michael: Yeah. So, it is less about the marketplace and it is more about the opportunity. You know what the floor price is today, so you are always trying to buy a little bit under that so that you have room to flip them.
Jeffrey: Right. Yeah, totally. Like I was saying, you just start to build these relationships with buyers and sellers, and sometimes all these buyers become sellers and vice versa.
Michael: Yeah. So, let’s say that I go out and I grind like you. I am working the deals. I am trying to make connections. I have got a tab open for everything. Maybe I am doing it for numerics, because you have already got this process figured out for LLLL, so I am not going to step on your toes. What are the best marketplaces for selling them? Where do I get the best market rate for resale?
Jeffrey: Now, there is some trickiness to this. You have got to kind of pay attention to what is going on. Flippa, if you are not selling it. If you set a reserve, then you are going to get your price no matter what. And so, Flippa is pretty good because you could set your price. And the thing that I like about Flippa is they have Flippa escrow, and so there are no fees and that is big for me. No fees. And so, in the same category as no fees is you have got the forums. I really love the forums because you have got NamePros. You have got DNForum. You can get on there and you can sell it. It does not cost you anything to list it. I mean even on Flippa, you have got to pay that nine bucks or whatever.
Michael: Nine-dollar listing fee, yeah.
Jeffrey: And you can relist it as many times as you want on these forums because there are no limitations.
Michael: Yeah. So, on Flippa, you get the free escrow. So, let’s say you are selling something for 150 bucks. You pay nine bucks to list it, but you get a free escrow, so you are guaranteed to get the money before you transfer the domain, but you are always going to take nine dollars off the haircut, off the top.
Jeffrey: Right, exactly.
Michael: Where on the discussion forums, like NamePros, there are no transaction fees.
Jeffrey: Right, but you are dealing more with domainers, domain investors there. So, every marketing has its pluses and bonuses. It is just that I learned it on GoDaddy. Unless you are willing to set a reserve, you are gambling.
Michael: Yeah.
Jeffrey: And then, once it sells, they take that 20 percent. They are like thanks.
Michael: Right, and that 20 percent is a lot.
Jeffrey: It is really huge.
Michael: So, that is why on these lower-priced domains, where the floor is three hundred, you want to keep all the profit you can, so you are going to the discussion forums to sell.
Jeffrey: Yeah. Yeah, and eBay. The best two things that work for me. I do not like to gamble. I have done the auctions, but I do a reasonable price with a make an offer. So, they can buy it now and they can also make an offer, and I would say probably ten percent, even though they can make an offer, just buy it now.
Michael: Yeah. So, on NamePros, if I am going to buy a domain name from you, they do not have an escrow service that is built in, like Flippa does for free, and if I wanted to use Escrow.com, it would cost me at least 25 bucks or something, so that could cut into the transaction percentage pretty significantly. How do you make sure you are not getting taken at NamePros?
Jeffrey: Well, they have like a feedback. So, similar to basically eBay, you have a reputation, and so for every transaction you want to make sure and ask your buyer or seller hey, I left you feedback. Can you leave me good feedback? And then you start to build that up, and that is a trusted source.
Michael: Got you. So, somebody just PayPals you the money.
Jeffrey: Yeah. I mean that, or I accept bitcoin too.
Michael: Well, either way it is cash going out though.
Jeffrey: Right.
Michael: Like I can see your profile, but if I was buying from somebody that had a zero transaction history profile, I should be a little weary, right?
Jeffrey: Yeah, I have been had three times. I will not say the site exactly, but on the forums I have been had three times. I got my money back each time, but it just sucks because you are without it for three weeks. PayPal has this process, where they give the seller the benefit of the doubt, and every time it was low feedback or zero feedback. So, that system really does work.
Michael: So, if I am going to a discussion forum and I want to buy, I want to make sure I buy from somebody who has a transaction history. All positives. I can go in and I can look at your transaction history on your profile, and you want it to be all positive.
Jeffrey: Right. Yeah, definitely. And if there is a negative, there is a little comment section. You could scroll down. I mean there is always somebody has a disagreement. I mean if it says this guy did not give me the domain, then you do not want to deal with him, but it is usually not that big of a deal if they have one negative. But if they have a whole bunch of positives, then you can trust them.
Michael: And I have never bought a domain on a discussion forum, so I do not have any prior history. If I bought something from you, it is no skin off your back to sell it, right, because you are going to get the money first, or would you, as a seller, be weary of a buyer who has little profile or no profile?
Jeffrey: A buyer. Well, yeah, I mean there is a lot of leniency because just like anything, (Unclear 40:48.8) that domain or whatever you are selling until you get the money. And so, some people worry about digital (Unclear 40:56.1).
Michael: Hey Jeffrey, hold on one second. We are getting some video feedback again. It sort of came in and went out, and then I think it is coming back in. So, I will just restate my question. If I am buying your domain name and I have no profile, are you worried, as a seller, to sell me the domain name if I have zero history?
Jeffrey: No. I mean there is a lot more lenience to that because they are the buyer and you are going to get that money first from PayPal, and so yeah, there is a lot more leniency to that. But when you are selling the domain, in the other situation it is a lot different.
Michael: Yeah, and if I send you money via bitcoin, there is no way to get that money back, right?
Jeffrey: Yeah, for you.
Michael: For me.
Jeffrey: It is a guarantee it is in my account. The only way for you to get it back is if I send it to you.
Michael: Right, and I cannot even verify. Oh, I can track it that it went into your account.
Jeffrey: Yeah, you can track it, but again, I have never been able to convince somebody to use it until I show them, like hey, I have got good feedback. Here is my score. Things like that. People trust PayPal more, but I see more and more people are willing to deal with bitcoin. And you do not want to scare people away because some people do not understand it and they are like oh. That is like a last resort to me. They are like oh, I am not quite sure. That is a little out of my price range. I am like I always accept bitcoin, and they are like oh, because it they have it, they are going to want to spend it. And if they are in the opposite situation, sometimes I cannot quite close that deal and I will say hey, by the way, I accept bitcoin, and just last week this guy was like man, I will get back to you tomorrow. I am going to research it, and then he got back to me and he was like yeah, I really want to get into that, so let’s do it.
Michael: So, is the lesson learned that you never know what value the different payment options have to somebody. They could have gotten into bitcoin when it was ten dollars and now it is up at 290, so they feel like they have all this free money, so they are willing to pay you more via that free money in bitcoin, that appreciation in value than they would if it was cash.
Jeffrey: Right. Yeah, and I came from the bitcoin world into domaining, and so I kind of know that world. And yeah, there is this whole mentality. When the price of bitcoin is rising, like it is recently, your wallet is worth more and you are like oh gosh, I have got 50 to 100 dollars more than I did depending on how much you got. And so, if you reach out to those people, especially when you know the price is going up, they are going to be like yeah. But if you ask them when the price is going down, they are kind of like no, like yesterday it was worth more.
Michael: Yeah, so keep an eye on bitcoin. Keep an eye on other currencies if they are buying from other countries.
Jeffrey: And the big thing I do not want to forget is, with bitcoin, it kind of ties into PayPal, because they eat more of your profit when it is an international buyer, and I get a lot of international buyers. Not just Chinese buyers or whatever. Just in general, all over the world, I get a lot of buyers. In Canada, anywhere, they are going to take a higher percent on your transaction. And so, people in other countries deal with the U.S. a lot, and so they know, like oh, if I transact with bitcoin, I am going to have less fees, and so you will run into more people surprisingly outside of the U.S. that accept it and use it.
Michael: All right. So, how long do you typically hold your LLLL.com domain names for? It sounds like on one hand, you are flipping them as soon as you get them, but on the other hand, you are holding some that are especially in the Brand Bucket that have a value on them.
Jeffrey: Right. Well, let’s take WHAQ for example. Right. I submitted that to Brand Bucket. They priced it at 14 thousand dollars.
Michael: Wow, that is whack.
Jeffrey: Yes, it is whack. And so, once they say it is worth that, they see that perceived value in it. That is kind of like okay, I am going to hold on to that one, because I have a lot on there that are two thousand, three thousand, and four thousand. I have a whole bunch of those instead of 14-thousand-dollar ones. So, the higher priced they are, I tend to be like this is my baby. That sort of thing.
Michael: So, you will hold on to the ones that are higher priced.
Jeffrey: Right. Yeah. And so, my very, very beginning strategy was to buy the cheapest possible domain I could possibly get, and what I have learned from that is that does not always work because you are going to hold on to those ones longer. When you go after one that kind of just gets bid up a little bit, other people kind of see value in it, and those, for me, tend to sell quicker. Not like overpaying, but definitely trying to find a god deal, but spending a proper amount.
Michael: Yeah.
Jeffrey: All those ones you get a super good deal on a marketplace. Not a special deal. Those are always the random letters and they are not going to do as well.
Michael: Got you. And what is your general rule on whether to sell a domain name or not on the lower value ones?
Jeffrey: So, basically, I mean my strategy from the beginning was do not sell for less than 25 percent. So, whatever my initial investment was, I wanted to make 25 percent on it.
Michael: If you bought a domain name for 20 dollars, you wanted to at least sell it for 25 dollars.
Jeffrey: Right, and that does not sound like much, but that was the minimum. Whenever I set a reserve, that is what I set it at, and I rarely got just the reserve. You usually get around double then, but now I am pretty much stuck. Everybody has kind of figured it out, and so I am in that just sell everything for 25 ROI.
Michael: Wow, 25 ROI, so 25 times your initial investment.
Jeffrey: Right, yeah.
Michael: And do you anticipate it going even higher from there? Is it going to be 50? Is it going to be 100 times your initial investment? You will not sell them. Do you continue to see LLLLs rising?
Jeffrey: Yeah, I really do. Long-term I really do see. I cannot tell you how many. Now, I travel a lot and I see trucks on the road and I see four-letter businesses everywhere. Once you kind of get into something, it is like a car that you own. You see it everywhere.
Michael: Right.
Jeffrey: And so, I mean I do. I see these four letters everywhere and I see brands using them, but as far as the end user goes, I see people doing the CVCVs. That is the powerhouse. That is the gold standard, as I call it, as far as letter combinations go. And then, under that, you have CVVC and just the opposite of that, and so basically it is a lot of vowels and they are spread out between constants, and those are those are a winning combo.
Michael: Yeah, that makes sense. So, right before, we were talking about Brand Bucket the first time. You said that you rotate your inventory. What does that mean?
Jeffrey: Well, basically, as they get valued higher by Brand Bucket, or even if it does not get valued as high as I would have liked, there are just certain patterns that I have noticed, like anything that ends in a ZY is really, really popular. There is a lot of them out there, and if you look at the end of the four-letter pattern, the very, very last one, I call it like a joker. If you are playing cards, you get those jokers and they can play as anything. I have six letters that kind of are special if they are the last letter on a four-letter. And so, if it is a D, it acts as an ED. So, if you kind of have a pronounceable word with a D on the end, like Costd, and then there is ER, like Flickr. Just the R on the end stands for ER. And N is like ING. A Z is like an S, but it is plural.
I have a little list. So, D, R. XQ is CK on the end, and then X is really popular. I do not know if it stands for EX, but it seems to be really, really popular on the end.
Michael: Yeah, I know Andrew Rosener has talked about the X. He loves three letters that end in X because it is exchange or whatever. The Chinese love the X too.
Jeffrey: Yeah, it does do well on the beginning, but definitely on the end.
Michael: Yeah. Was there six or five jokers? You have the D, R, N, Z, Q, and X. Did I miss one? Oh, that is six.
Jeffrey: Yeah.
Michael: All right. So, are you selling most of your names via discussion forums? Then ten that you are flipping per week. Is that how they are typically being transacted?
Jeffrey: Well, I slowly am gaining what I would call private buyers. I do not know how long they have been into it, but they recognize a good investment when they see it. And these people I am selling to do not have that flipper mentality. They have that long-term investment mentality, and so they see the prices going up and so they are trying to get into it. Not to flip it real quick. They are trying to get into it. I make notes on each sell and I say okay, this guy. He is overpaying.
Michael: Yeah, he is paying better than the current market rate, probably because he or she thinks it is going to continue to rise and wants to get the deal done.
Jeffrey: Right, and I actually had this one guy. He was buying tons of them from me on eBay. Tons of them on the forums. I did not know it until later, but he actually ended up being some of the winners on my auctions on GoDaddy. So, that is why you want to be nice to people, is you get return customers.
Michael: Right. And of these private buyers that you have, can you tell how many of them are U.S-based buyers and how many are Chinese-based buyers?
Jeffrey: Like I said, I did not really get into the chips, so I maybe ten percent of the people coming towards me are Chinese, but I do not have what they want, so they leave. What was the question? Sorry.
Michael: So, you would say a very small fraction is Chinese buyers. The majority of the people that are buying your four-letter, just random letters are U.S. or English-speaking investors.
Jeffrey: Yeah, I kind of find it is all over the globe. It really is. Domaining is an international business, and so just because of maybe the money supply, I do deal with a lot of Americans, but I would say not even half.
Michael: Wow, but they are domain investors looking to buy four letters because they see the appreciation that is happening.
Jeffrey: Right. Yeah. I mean there are a lot of people on the forums. You will see them every day. They are doing the exact same thing I am doing. They are grinding and they will reach out to me and be like hey, can I buy this, and I never say yes because they want to buy it for 25 dollars. They want to buy it for what I want to buy it for.
Michael: Right, exactly. They want to do the same thing as you. That is not happening here.
Jeffrey: Right. So, everybody has a different wallet. You have got to remember that. And so, there are people with larger wallets and they are just eating these things up right now because they see the price going like this, and that is good for me because the sooner I could turn my inventory, the more money I can make. I am not like I have got to hold on to this because if I sell it, in the time that I can flip it, multiple times I will make a lot more.
Michael: Right. You told me that sometimes you post your LLLL.com domains for sale at odd hours of the day.
Jeffrey: Oh yeah.
Michael: Talk about that.
Jeffrey: You are digging into my toolbox now. Yeah, that is actually one of my big secrets, is I learned just randomly. I was going to get a glass of water in the middle of the night and I hit bump or whatever. I bumped my thing on the auction and I am just really surprised how many foreign buyers are on there, and you kind of forget that they are on when you are asleep. And so, yeah, all the time. My thing is if you post back to back to back to back, you seem desperate. You are like I need to sell these, but if you just post one per hour, you are going to get other people posting in between you, and then post an hour later. So, I just post all day long.
Michael: So, what you are saying is that posting throughout the day will surface your new for-sale thread in the recents, and then somebody who may be refresh the screen and see what is recent, but not necessarily on their homepage, may click through, take a look at it, and be interested. And it is by varying the times that you post you get their interest or bumping, which means that you just add a new post on that thread that says bump, which adds to the recent activity.
Jeffrey: Yeah, definitely.
Michael: Got you.
Jeffrey: I realized that if you have five for sale and you post them all right in that moment, there is two things that happen. One, you kind of look desperate, and two, the people that are going to see it are only going to do it in that timeframe. And so, we kind of live in this society, where people just kind of look at the nearest thing when they get online. They do not scroll three or four pages back.
Michael: I do not know how you wake up in the middle of the night, turn on your computer, have that light hit you in the eyes, post something for sale, and then go back to bed. As soon as I look at my computer screen, I am like wide awake now.
Jeffrey: Yeah, I kind of sleep random hours sometimes, but any time. If you are like oh, I cannot sleep, bump that stuff. And another thing too is even though I say bump it, I should clarify that when you kind of just hit the word bump, I like to use the phrase that generic efforts net generic results. So, if you can be appealing, if you can be clever and try to really add some spunk to your bump, then it is going to go a lot further than just bump.
Michael: But it will make it look desperate by saying bump. Add some value somehow.
Jeffrey: Try to add some value. Not everybody likes EstiBot, but you could say EstiBot. You could tell people about the offers you have gotten. You do not have to tell them exact, but I have gotten three offers. Just add some interest into what you have got going.
Michael: Yeah, that makes sense. So, you mentioned that you have dealt hundreds of these domains. You own 189 today. You keep track of your buyers and your sellers. You have got domains at Brand Bucket. You have got domain in NamePros. You are rotating inventory. I am thinking that is a lot to keep track of, especially because you have got so many domains that you are trying to time to work. How do you keep it all organized? What are a few of your tips for keeping your portfolio and your sales and your contacts organized?
Jeffrey: Yeah, the most obvious one is I do spreadsheets, and I have gotten better. All the functions that you could do with spreadsheets. You could keep track of so many different things.
Michael: So, you have got a row for each domain name.
Jeffrey: Right.
Michael: What kind of columns do you have? Like your purchase date and your purchase price.
Jeffrey: Right. Yeah, so my first row is the domain. The second row is the price. The third row is what I bought it for, and then it just goes over from there and I have like where I submitted it to, so I can keep track if I have submitted it to Brand Bucket or Brand (Unclear 56:53.8) or Namerific. It has a little spot for offers that I have gotten, so I will throw in offers. And then I keep track of all the .COMs. Keep track of everything. My goal when I look at it is for this thing to keep getting smaller and say positive profit, but I own all these domains.
Michael: Right.
Jeffrey: I have a one-hundred-dollar original investment, but I have got all these domains, so I just kind of keep track of it like that.
Michael: So, you want to see what your original investment was, and then how much you have made, and then how many domains that you still own after you subtract what you have invested from what you made.
Jeffrey: Right, and I also have a category for fees that are involved because I think a lot of people overlook that and I always account for the fees in there.
Michael: Yeah, nice, because you need to do that. Awesome.
Jeffrey: You cannot find out your actual profit without that.
Michael: Yeah. So, I remember the rise of the bitcoin. We would see it slowly increasing. People talked about it. People would say oh, this thing will never make sense. It will never work. It shot up. People were like oh my God, I am a billionaire on paper. Then the market fell out and it came back down, and everybody was like oh, I should have sold when it was so high. And it has slowly risen back up. It is about three hundred dollars now per bitcoin. Do you see that kind of volatility in the LLLL market?
Jeffrey: Well, that is the big, juicy question. That is what everybody wants to know. I definitely see, in the future, fluctuation. I think that it is really misguided to think that any market at all is just going to constantly go up, and I also think that it is misguided to think that it is going to die and go away, because I have heard that with bitcoin. It did kind of die, but recently, it was 450 today.
Michael: It is 450 today. I did not even check.
Jeffrey: Yeah.
Michael: Wow.
Jeffrey: It started this year. I bought a bunch this year. It was 73. It went down, all to 173.
Michael: That is how outdated my thoughts are. You just determined that I am a long-term investor, not a short-term investor because I do not track that stuff on a daily basis.
Jeffrey: Yeah, totally.
Michael: Yeah, 450. So, you are saying that we will see volatility in the LLLL, but you are bullish on it still.
Jeffrey: Yeah, I am very bullish on it because I see so many companies using it. I have actually personally never sold a four-letter on Brand Bucket, but I am in that four-letter community and I track every single four letter on Brand Bucket, so I can personally know when something sells. And I have a whole list of what sells, and those are end users.
Michael: Right.
Jeffrey: So, I am very bullish on it, but I just expect it to fluctuate. And now that there are charts that you can kind of keep track of the minimum, you can keep your thumb right on that pulse and if it starts to change, like I said, I do an instant recoup and just start selling for close to what I bought it for.
Michael: Yeah, that makes sense. So, you are a short-term investor and a long-term investor. You have got your names on Brand Bucket that have the higher valuations that you are hoping to sell to end users that want to rebrand their company or startup a company under that brand, and you are looking for the massive payouts, like WAHQ for 14 thousand. But then the stuff that you are grinding on, the short-term. You are buying low. You are selling for a multiple of what you bought it for, trying to turn ten domains per week. That is your short-term investing.
Jeffrey: Yeah, exactly. And as I get more on Brand Bucket and they accept it for a higher amount, I keep selling my lower amounts.
Michael: Yeah, so you are always trying to upgrade.
Jeffrey: Right. I usually get three to five hundred dollars for any four-letter that is accepted on Brand Bucket, depending on the price and stuff like that. And the other sites too. It is just Brand Bucket is the standard.
Michael: So, if somebody is watching your show right now, Jeffrey, they are thinking I missed the boat on the single-word generics back in the mid-’80s. I was there. I could have done it. I missed the boat on the three letters. I missed the boat on the three-number numerics. I missed Jeffrey’s four letters when he started one year ago. What can they do today? Past performance does not indicate future performance. When you gamble, when you make investments in domain names, when you speculate, you fully have the chance of losing all your money, but if somebody were investing today, where do you think that they should look to make low-level investments like you did when you started one year ago?
Jeffrey: I think that the key to it is to look for liquidity and, like I said, it is not enough to just understand it. You have really got to experience it because it gives you this confidence, like I know I can sell every single one of these.
Michael: Yeah. So, how do they look for liquidity?
Jeffrey: So, yeah, basically you have just got to search through what sells. That is the best indicator for me, is finding out what sells because that is going to tell you the trends in the market. Basically, I mean keep an eye out on the forums too. I mean there is a lot of talk about LLLL.nets, and I see those going for 80 to 100 dollars, and you could just hand register those this year. So, you have got the number category. I like to think of six numbers as like five letter. You are definitely going to find some goodies in there, but you have got to kind of know what you are doing. And what I mean by that is if you are going to go into the LLLLLs, right now what I notice is selling. You have to have to three repeating letters. If they are Chinese premium, it has to be QQQ or TTT, or something, and it does not even matter where it is at. If they see three repeating letters, those are a guaranteed sell right now.
So, it is kind of always changing. I never would have thought the four-letter .NETs were going to be a thing. I never would have thought that six numbers .COM or LLLLL were going to be a thing, but it is starting. I think that people think that the boat has left. It is just that boat. There are lots of boats coming.
Michael: There have been a lot of boats over the past 20 years that have come and went, yeah.
Jeffrey: Right.
Michael: So, you are saying look at the prior sales. Get on to NameBio. Search it by date with letters and numbers. Make sure you are following DNJournal. Get on to the forums to hear what the chatter is about. Even if it is wrong, you can check it yourself by going over and looking at recent sales. Look for stuff that is selling on a regular basis. Liquidity. And then look at repeating patterns because that seems to be hot right now.
Jeffrey: Oh yeah. Yeah, and letter combinations. CVC.
Michael: Yeah, letter combinations. What about letters and numbers together? Do you think that that is coming up too?
Jeffrey: Yeah, I have sold a few. It is just not as profitable. And if you are going to do it, my personal opinion is stick to three characters because that is where I have sold mine. I have had a couple four-letter or four-character sales, as they call it, and they could be. Mostly if the X or something is at the end, like 50X, those things are always going to do really well. But for some reason, if it is the other way around, it seems harder to sell.
Michael: Yeah, awesome. Well, next year, when you buy your vacation home over here in Seattle, selling these, I hope you come back on and we talk about what has changed in your strategy, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey: I would love to.
Michael: If you are watching this show and you have questions for Jeffrey, please post them in the comments below this video on Domain Sherpa and I will ask him to come back and answer as many as he can, as long as it is not too much from his secret stash of tactics and strategy. Jeffrey, if somebody wants to reach out to you individually to talk about sales or buys, or something like that, what is the best way for them to contact you?
Jeffrey: They can email me at Jeffrey@Domainzy.com
Michael: All right, so that is Jeffrey@Domainzy.com.
Jeffrey: Right.
Michael: Awesome.
Jeffrey: If they want to check out my four-letter portfolio on Brand Bucket, they can go to BrandBucket.com/Profile/4.
Michael: Just the number four.
Jeffrey: Yeah, I scooped that.
Michael: That is awesome. All right. Now, I will include a link to that in your profile as well, so people can get over there and take a look because they will want to take a look at the stuff that you have on Brand Bucket that are more brandable, and then they will look for you. And you are a frequent poster on NamePros.
Jeffrey: Yeah.
Michael: What is your profile on there?
Jeffrey: Domainzy.
Michael: All right, and I will link over to Domainzy on NamePros, so they can follow you and see. Maybe they will want to pick up some of the domains that you have been selling.
Jeffrey: Nice. Nice, sounds good.
Michael: If you watched this tutorial and you are thinking I know how to do something like what Jeffrey just talked about. I would love to be a Sherpa on Domain Sherpa. Well, go up to the top left-hand corner of the website. Click the link that says be interviewed on Domain Sherpa. It leads you to DomainSherpa.com/Be-Interviewed. Click it. Tell me about what you are thinking. Let’s have a chat.
I also encourage you. If you are watching the show right now and you have got some benefit out of the show, take just a moment to post a quick thank you to Jeffrey in the comments below, or you can use the Twitter button. Are you on Twitter?
Jeffrey: Yeah, a little bit.
Michael: A little bit. Not much.
Jeffrey: I have got so much going on.
Michael: Post a comment. Post a comment, or get over to NamePros and post a comment over there. I am going to be the first to say thank you.
Jeffrey Emerick, Domain Investor at Domainzy.com. Thanks for coming on the Domain Sherpa Show, sharing your path to success in domain investing, and thanks for helping others figure out their path to becoming a Domain Sherpa.
Jeffrey: Yeah, thanks for having me. I honestly could not have done it without listening to your show. There is just so much good advice, so it is a real honor for me to be on here.
Michael: Awesome. The honor was mine, and thanks for putting up with my voice today.
Jeffrey: Oh, I forgot about it even.
Michael: Awesome. Thanks again, Jeffrey. Thank you all for watching. We will see you next time.
Watch the full video at:
https://domainsherpa.com/jeffrey-emerick-hustling/