2010 New Year’s Resolutions

It’s the time of year that people make their new years resolutions. I don’t generally make any personal resolutions, but I do think about things I would like to accomplish for my business, so I thought I would share a few of those with you.

  • Learn about affiliate marketing – Many of my sites have pretty decent traffic, but I haven’t monetized it well enough. I will learn what I can about affiliate marketing to generate leads and sales on sites where the monetization is currently weak. Instead of using simply Adsense or having a few direct advertising deals (aside from this blog), I will find affiliate partners to match the needs of site visitors.
  • Learn about Adwords – In some cases, this might go hand in hand with affiliate marketing, but I would primarily like to learn how to drive additional (inexpensive) traffic to my websites. This will primarily be useful on my fully developed website.
  • Get less attached to my domain names – On almost all domain names I acquire, I can see what type of website would make sense to build on it. I have enough websites to manage right now, and any more large projects wouldn’t be feasible. Once I launch CatSitter.com this month, that will be it for a while. The only reason I am launching that is because many DogWalker.com advertisers offer cat sitting services as well, and the platform I use is easy to convert.
  • Improve my geodomain names’ websites – Finalize a partnership opportunity on Burbank.com and figure out a way to make my other sites more automated. I will seek out local news “partnerships” where I can use RSS feeds instead of manually updating everything. I’ve been reluctant to seek out these working relationships, but I am fairly well established in the markets to set up a meeting. I will probably also convert these sites to WordPress.

The bottom line is that I want to grow my business rather than expand it. I have the assets I need to be successful and make money, and I need to work on them to make that happen.   I will continue to buy domain names more aggressively this year than for re-sale, but I will do my best to not buy for development purposes.

This will be the year of focus. I will stay focused on what I have and focus on how I can make these assets earn even more revenue.   I predict private domain sales will continue to be the main revenue driver of my business, but advertising revenue will continue to become a bigger piece of the pie.

If you’d like to share your new year’s resolutions, please do so. Here’s to a great new year.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

19 COMMENTS

  1. Today is my official first day as a domain investor. My goals for 2010 are challenging, but can also be life changing.

    – Start my health news review business in two weeks
    – Launch the domain investor network website later this month
    – Start my website TV advertisement business by the end of Jan.
    – Buy my first real-state property by the end of the spring.
    – Get all of my business ideas launched by the end of 2010 (I have it all outlined for deadlines)
    – Start to communicate with many successful domain investors
    – START TO WEAN MYSELF OFF DEPENDING ON WORKING A 9-5 JOB TO PAY FOR ALL OF MY COST OF LIVING.

  2. Best wishes in 2010. What you did with one of your sites – buying geo targeted traffic which could benefit small businesses without their own websites and selling ad placement has potential. I would like to experiment with that on some South Florida geos in 2010. Thus far I have depended on XSitePro2 and would like to launch my local city geo using WordPress in 2010. And of course like many domainers I need to continue to clean up the portfolio – eliminating lower quality regs which are unlikely to find buyers but in the aggregate become costly to carry. Portfolio and website monetization are obvious priorities. I believe social media marketing has tremendous potential in this industry and yet I’m not sure how many domainers utilize it effectively. I’m just getting my feet wet but will ramp up social media efforts in 2010.

  3. Here are mine resolutions:)

    1) Get my 2 year old twins “potty trained” because there diapers expense are cutting into my domain buying:)

    2) Move my “mother in law” across the world instead of 20 minutes away:) The less I see here the more I like her.

    3) Stay on my boat 2-3 days every month when my wife is going through PMS:)

    4) Watch more basketball games so I am up-to-date on my ProBasketball.tv site:) that I will never develop anyways:)

    5) Will still not join twitter and never will join twitter. Have better things to do like watching the “lakers” on the way to another NBA championship.

    6) Plan on developing nothing, I don’t need a job, don’t want to make my neighbors think that I am actually working:)

    7) Entering my 13 year in this industry, since 1998 and my 15 year plan is right on schedule, never develop a site while making XXX,XXX a year:) So far so good:) Thank god for ForclosedHomes.com:) and some spanish .com or I would actually have to work.

    8) Start Smoking:)

    9) Stop Exercising:)

    10) Get my 17th Mistress line up:) Won’t find one at a domain conference, that’s for sure:) Tiger only has 16!!!

    Happy New Year,

    Jim Holleran

  4. I wish you the best with these very promissing resolutions. I’m looking forward to seeing your progress via tweets. Feel free to check out my blog http://blog.drjudic.com to see if any of the information can help. My daily posts for the coming days are focussing on ways to help make New Years Resolutions more attainable. Happy New Year!!!

  5. re: looking into affiliate marketing …

    It’s interesting how at the “top” levels different studies or modalities tend to come together. For example, at the PhD level, chemistry, physics, and other sciences tend to blend together. They have to as you can’t have a successful project relying exclusively on one field only.

    It’s similar for online marketing. In my opinion if you’re doing it right; blogging, domaining, affiliate marketing, seo, social media, etc. come together in the best business models. It’s about maximizing revenue in the most efficient way, and sticking with one “trick” isn’t the way to go.

    Ironically, I’m a strategic marketer/SEO that expanded into affiliate marketing last year. I’m looking to learn domaining in 2010. That’s why I recently started to read your blog Elliot – it’s great!

  6. Best wishes to all for the new year and related resolutions. As for me, the most critical goal is to determine what I really want and where my heart is? Once this is done, the rest would be more clear and hopefully easier; probably the worst foe one can have is not being clear as to one’s objectives and having too many irons in the fire so to speak. Often, it seems like and may be correctly so, that each aspect of one’s life can improve and benefit from a bit more focus and attention…..but there’s only so much time and reserve one has to offer. So, if nothing else, I’d like to figure how much time and effort I need to allocate to various key areas of my life; i.e. work and profession as a physician, family life as a father and husband important, (side) business of domaining and always wanting to develop (or improve on) some key sites, and the social life of being part of the community at large.

  7. Good Luck with AdWords. They were charging me for more hits than my website was even receiving. When I sent an email to complain suddenly the hits they were charging me for matched exactly with the total number of hits I was receiving each day. Anyway, nice post. You may find mine interesting. I’d love to read your thoughts on it. http://jocelynstorm.com/blog/?p=430

  8. Hi Elliot,
    Found this good resource on AF marketing. The founder started doing it during Uni, now has a couple hundred websites. Great information once you sign up which is free, valuable information for the domainer regarding clickbank and other affiliate marketing stuff. They do try to get you to upgrade but the free info is sufficient. Most blog posts have a video for easy learning. http://www.affilorama.com/ Bad Domain name though, I always forget it.
    Not associated with them at all, don’t have to “approve this comment this comment Elliot.”
    Happy New Year.
    Rosco

  9. Elliot,

    After domaining since 1998, my opinion is that CCTLDs will be the blockbuster for 2010. I started http://www.genericcctlds.com to help domainers with country code domains. If I am wrong in 2010, I will eat my hat on video.

    Harness the power of your blog and list cctld domain names. My offer stands, I am wrong, I will eat my hat with hot sauce on it.

  10. Do what you love to do. I made this ‘resolution’ recently to only start developing something I have genuine interest in. It sounds simple but I’ve wasted to much time on unfinished projects.
    All the best for 2010 Elliot!

  11. Elliot, I really enjoyed reading your goals, especially the one about learning AdWords. Pay per click marketing is my full time career and I’m just getting started in domaining. I definitely see opportunities to leverage AdWords (as well as Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter) in the domaining world. In particular, these PPC platforms can drive additional inexpensive traffic as you identified but also I see PPC as a super way to accelerate testing. SEO traffic can take a bit of time for newer sites, but PPC is instantaneous. For that reason alone, PPC is a great when you’re building new sites and testing ways to optimize visitor value. Looking forward to reading your blog in 2010!

  12. Love it! Collaboration is key when it comes to building community.

    Speaking of building community, I encourage everyone who has and who will comment to think about how they can sync their goals with their community’s needs. When personal and professional development jives with a team or a neighbourhood or a city, well, great things can be accomplished.

    Check out an article about such an idea here: http://bit.ly/4CoDDT.

    – John

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