Weed and feed your domains

Spent most of Saturday doing yard work; facing a particularly persistent weed – not the dollar weed type – I wasn’t familiar with.

Would have loved to seek the assistance of Shane Cultra, who’s been in the plant and nursery business for decades, but unfortunately he’s made himself unavailable to me, stating I am a “know-it all.”

Not willing to give up, I went to Home Depot instead and got some weed and feed for St. Augustine grass and talked to the guys there.

The process is simple: cut the dry grass low, use a Scotts spreader at 4 1/2 setting, and alternate your path, covering the area nicely. Don’t forget to water well afterwards.

Speaking of weeding and feeding, that reminds me of an approach domain investors often forget, to trim down their domain portfolios at some point.

Eradicating the money wasters, and promote the money makers, is a nice strategy.

I’m sure Shane meant well in his latest “light-casting” of me, but he got several points across wrong, or with skewed or selective metrics, so for the record, my primary weeding happened about 10 years ago, when I sold or dropped dozens of LLN and LNN .com domains. I made a killing on forums and even eBay at the time, but I consider those “domain coins” not worth my focus these days.

After “feeding” my portfolio by spending about $65,000 on NameJet between 2008 and 2010, I focused on 2-word .com domains, brandables, aged domains, and strong .net and .org keywords.

Between 2011 and 2014 I spent another $10k on NameJet, focusing on strategic acquisitions, from private sales instead.

Three years ago, at a time that I needed some cash, I achieved about $25k in sales during the course of 2 months, at NameJet. I suppose that other notion that my domains aren’t liquid was another failing point of the domainIQ report.

But I’m not here to start a pissing match with Shane, whose portfolio is more strategically acquired than mine, over a shorter period of time – perhaps – and with domaining as a secondary focus. After all, if I had a successful horticulture business, going back more than 100 years, I’d work as hard as Shane does.

Weeding your domains before you further feed them is a great approach, and should be done once in a while. With the introduction of gTLDs, anyone who over-invested will pay the consequences sooner or later; I dropped 3 .SEXY domains and no other gTLDs that I invested in and in the process I dropped 5 .BIZ and 2-3 .US domains as well.

That makes me a smart investor, I suppose, but I will never profess that I know it all. Domaining, and life, is an ever-learning process, and interpersonal relationships do matter as well as completing marathons.