I thought a blog post to document my current developments was in order. Thus here it is.

Domain Investment has its pros and its cons. An obvious pro is the ability to make significant amounts of money. Unfortunately however the biggest downside I see, I relate to drought. I will explain (please note this analogy is not watertight).

Imagine a prosperous and growing country/economy. Food, water, and jobs are in abundance. If you get there early, before the boom then you can set yourself up for a very good life. This was the state of the domain industry in the mid nineties.
Fast-forward 10 years, drought has hit. There is no more water, and although jobs are currently secure, no water is a sure fire sign of a downturn to come. Crops cannot be grown, meaning less food, meaning more imports are needed, jobs are lost etc etc etc
If you have land, businesses, a private water supply etc, then you are fine. You can still make money. You can sell your assets to others who now NEED them, and you can make money. What you have is now in demand.

The relation is that contrary to what others say there are NO MORE good domains. Not only that, but given the growth of the Internet, people who have these assets are NOT selling. There are no longer any naive, unknowledgeable domain owners who will sell you their gold for a dollar.
Thus if you have water/a domain you can make a lot of money by holding and selling to the people/company that NEED your water/domain. After all they cannot get it anywhere else.

In simple terms if you own a good domain(s), then lucky you. If you do not, you may as well not waste your time….

So you have your great domain(s), and you are holding it whilst waiting for some large company which needs it. So what now? You develop!

A lot of people have said to me that development is great: it prevents your domain being taken in a WIPO case. This is categorically NOT a reason to develop. Maybe you are waiting to sell in the long term, but whilst you are holding, you should develop simply because a good domain deserves a good website to complement it.
Furthermore, develop a domain well and you can make some money, and have some fun too.

My position is that I got in late, but still ended up with some good domains. I worked my butt off, and am now sitting here and weighing up my options.
It is getting harder and harder for me to pick up good domains. If I want to get a good domain, then I have to buy it off a reseller. If I do that, I have to pay a premium. If I am going to do that I MUST have a development plan, and a good one at that! Thus I am not really buying; rather I am developing what I have and hoping that I can make money from running good websites rather than flipping domains.

So what am I doing?

Anfield.com
I am a fan of Liverpool Football Club, and Anfield is the name of their stadium. It thus makes the perfect domain on which to develop a fan site/news resource.

MMMM.com
Mmmm….. Food. I have developed this website into an interactive picture based recipe website. Users design and add their own recipes, and can then share them with one another. Yum!

PubJudge.com
This website again has been developed by me as a user influenced pub rating website. It covers the whole of the UK, and allows visitors to read, rate, and review each, every, and any pub in the UK

And then of course there is GUA.com

In the works I have:

Good.Causes.net
A Domain hack on which I intend to document the best Charities, and funds around: what they do, what they need, and how YOU can help.

Quests.net
I intend to develop this into a new genre of social media: an online game/competition. I don’t want to spoil the fun, but it will be good !

It does not stop there. I will gradually be developing all of my domains, I simply don’t have the time to develop them all well in a week

Finally although I spoke of development (above) from the point from view of a domain flipper looking to maximize profits, I am actually a passionate web designer too. Fun is more motivation to me than money, and I like to produce websites which can be used, and enjoyed by everyone!

Finally I do not freelance, unless you are prepared to pay a premium for the best, most original domain development you can find. My ideas, and development are unique, original, and exciting. I don’t want to dilute the web

Cheers