BuyDomains is hosting another installment of their free webinar series on Thursday, July 16th.

The topic of this webinar is “How You can Earn Money as a BuyDomains Referral Program Member”.

The BuyDomains Referral Program has gotten off to a terrific start.  Just recently, one of its members earned $1,700 for a referral that resulted in the sale of A6.com for $34,000. You can easily integrate the referral program on your website, blog, forum signature, Twitter account…etc. I am sure they will cover this and more at the webinar.

Those wishing to attend can easily register online. I’ll be there – will you?

When I was at AIG, one of the most frequent questions, aside from “what’s the projected ROI on that program?” was “can you scale the program?” If we could do a small test that was successful, it would only be great if we could scale up and have the same success on a greater level. It just wasn’t worth the time and effort doing a particular program if the potential revenue was limited.

I’ve asked the same question about my domain investments, and that is why I have chosen to focus on development. While domain sales is still fairly lucrative, I don’t think it is still considerably scalable to a degree where it will drive constant growing revenue at a multiple of what it is now. I still believe I can do what I do to generate revenue for the foreseeable future, but I don’t think it’s feasible to greatly scale this business model at this point in time.

With domain development, I believe I can scale. On Burbank.com, Lowell.com and Newburyport.com, I can either keep them as tourism-heavy websites with information about the city, or I can follow Shaun Pilfold’s model on Kelowna.com and become the source of information for my respective cities. Yes, it costs money to scale and I am not ready to make the financial and time commitment yet with my sites, but it is possible to scale in that manner.

Likewise, my mini site building strategy is also scalable. Perhaps it’s not easily scalable if I continue to build them on my own because of the time constraints, but there are great development companies that focus on mini site-type websites like AEIOU.com, WannaDevelop.com, and MiniSites.com that offer a variety of services. Building mini sites is scalable, and the more you build, the better the deals you can make with all of the mini site and development companies.

A couple of dollars a day per mini site doesn’t generate a lot of revenue if I were to look at each site individually, but if I have 100 mini sites that make $2.00 a day, that’s over $50k per year, with very little maintenance. Some websites will make less than $2.00 and some will make significantly more, but you get the picture. If you build websites on strong keyword domain names, you are generally going to drive revenue while adding value to your domain names.

The point of this is that you need to determine if what you are doing is scalable and sustainable. Experiment with different things like I am doing and make sure you can scale if it works.

I know what Ron’s numbers are telling him (and us), and I know that many domain investors at all levels are publicly and privately saying that there aren’t many buyers (on the investment side) out there right now. However, I think there are still plenty of buyers out there, but it just takes extra effort to find them these days, and your pricing has to be reasonable.

Here are a two suggestions on how to find buyers right now:

Contact some of the new owners of domain names that recently sold (listed on DNJournal) if you have similar domain names. Distinguish between end users who bought a name because it matched their corporate branding from those who were buying to enhance their company’s online presence, and from those who are investing in domain names. Each type of buyer has different needs, and you need to be able to tell what their needs are before you contact them, otherwise they will simply delete your email.

Follow along with what is selling at the auction houses – even the inexpensive purchases – and contact those buyers as well. Send them similar names that you own and price your names reasonably. Remember, if you are contacting them with names that you’d like to sell, you should name your price upfront. You might make less profit per domain name this way, but if you sell a small portfolio of names, you will increase your profits, despite a tighter profit margin.

I have been finding that there are less buyers in the $10-100k range right now unless you are giving really great prices on your domain names. However, it seems that people are still buying less expensive domain names, which can still be highly profitable. Buy smart and sell smart.

On a side note, I plan to discuss my experience with Snapnames outlined in my post, “Make a 1,000& Profit.” I am leaning towards keeping it in the newsletter, so sign up if you’re interested. (If you think the weekly/bi-weekly newsletter sucks, it’s easy to unsubscribe since I use Constant Contact). The results I have have been very strong, but I won’t write my summary until the funds have been wired.