Building your own Domain Portfolio
What is a Domain Name?
Let’s start from the beginning. A domain name is a key part of your online address, and is what your visitors will use to find you online. For example, Griggworks’s domain name is griggworks.com. A domain name is unique to you; once you have registered it, nobody else can register the same one for as long as you continue to renew it. Your domain name is one of your most important business assets. It’s definitely worth the time to make sure it stays registered to you.
What is a Domain Name Portfolio?
A Domain Name portfolio is a portfolio of domain names you own. Think of it as your own piece of real estate in today’s tech-centric world.
Building a high-quality domain portfolio is something that can take just months or most likely years to achieve. Being in the digital space for the last 13 years I often have these big ideas of starting projects, I will do some research and find a suitable domain and simply buy it. This is how I have personally built my domain portfolio over the years.
Though part of the job for me, there are people who flip domain names as a source of income. They are constantly looking forward to what domains may become popular in the future and hedging through numbers by purchasing hundreds of domains. Firstly, I don’t have enough money to maintain hundreds of domains, and secondly it’s not really my thing to accumulate hundreds of domains just for the sake of it.
All of the domains in my portfolio have come from an idea and I had good intentions to build a website for it. Some have come to fruition, others are still a good idea, I just haven’t had time to execute on it.
Where to look for ideas on available domain names
People often ask me where to look for domain names for sale or how to come up with good ideas for domain names. If you’ve got some spare time (I mean a lot of time) on your hands, I suggest taking a good look at the 2 websites below.
Before you get started
Over the years I have purchased hundreds of domains for both myself and my clients. The first thing I recommend is choosing a domain registrar to store all your domains with. Having them registered with different registrars and trying to manage them becomes a nightmare real quick! Start with one and go from there.
Which registrar to purchase domain names?
To purchase a domain name, you will need to do so through what’s called a domain registrar. There are a handful of registrars that you can use, I personally use GoDaddy simply because I purchased a domain many years ago for a website project, then again for the second website project and so on.
Over the years I have had experience with a few of the registrars, funnily enough one of (if not) the biggest registrar Melbourne IT has been the most painful to deal with. That was probably 5 years ago now so a lot can change and it most likely has, but that one bad experience on the original Melbourne IT platform has lost me forever.
The 2 other domain registrars I have dealt with over the years are Netregistry and TPP Wholesale who are now both owned by Melbourne IT. Thankfully their systems are easy enough to use. I have since transferred all my domains from these registrars to my GoDaddy account to make it easier to manage.