It’s hard to believe the original Dominiche was released, Christmas time 2006!

Half a decade is a long time anyway you cut it. On the Internet, it’s an eternity!

I always wanted to reissue Dominiche for a number of reasons.

But not until I had made the ultimate sale. 

Taking my company public.

When we released Dominiche in 2006, the whole concept of buying and selling websites was ridiculously new. Even though the practice of buying and selling websites was happening in the background, the concept of selling or buying a website was a completely foreign concept.

The course was such a trailblazer. 

 I know so many people who used Dominiche as the inspiration for creating a whole new businesses online.

It was such a different world then. Traffic was cheap and easy. You had to be so sensitive about revealing information about your website because it was so easy for someone to simply rip it off. This was much cheaper than buying the website, and sadly, much quicker.

The sales process was convoluted. This was necessary to protect all of your hard work. Until somebody actually put a deposit in an escrow account you couldn’t safely reveal any sort of site statistics. I remember shaking my head at the number of people who were listing sites for sale on eBay and watching them  stolen before the sun rose the next morning.

Even though it was hard, the pioneers did extremely well. They not only recognised buying and selling a website was a sensible investment, they realised the website had value, not only in the cash it made but also things like it’s authority and the amount of traffic the site had.

To me, there are two dramatic changes in the last five years.

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The Difficulty Of Ripping Off.

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At the end of 2006, traffic was still easy and cheap. It was the world of the five cent click, uploading 40,000 keywords into Google to see which piece of mud you threw at the wall stuck.

Because traffic was so easy, it was very simple to rip off a website. Usually copy the sales page, steal the e-book and throw a bunch of cheap, fast traffic at it.

I remember when Frank Kern and I were teaching the Underachiever System we had the concept of the “sacrificial lamb” site. The moment we mentioned a site in anything we taught. You could be guaranteed someone would be ripping it off before I’d had my morning latte.

Sad but true.

And when it came to selling your website it was crucial you had a very serious non-disclosure agreement. You couldn’t reveal the topic of your website, let alone the traffic and stats of the site before somebody had paid you a deposit to show they were serious. You can imagine, this made sales infinitely more difficult than they are today!

 It made sales very complex, yet, buying and selling websites did happen and people were very successful in the early pioneering days.

Let’s fast forward to today.

Traffic is hard.

There, I said it. The dirty little secret of online business. Getting traffic to a website is hard, there’s no two ways about it.

If you want fast traffic then you have to be prepared to pay through the nose for it.

“Cheap Traffic” takes significant effort and most importantly time.

This is great news! Your average scumbag has a significant character flaw.

They’re lazy.

Even if they rip off your sales letter, replicate your sales video (when Dominiche was released, YouTube was about two months old!) and product. There’s no way for a rip-off artist to quickly and cheaply get the traffic they need.

You can’t underestimate the effect this small change has made to the buying and selling marketplace. 

The impact is being dramatic.

Because the danger of somebody ripping off your idea has reduced so significantly in the last five years, in 2011 and beyond you can be transparent about the site you want to sell.

You want my stats? 

Sure, go right ahead.

Want to know my niche?

Sure, go right ahead.

This transparency has allowed new marketplaces like Flippa to flourish. It’s hard to believe that Flippa is only a couple of years old.

Having a convenient and safe marketplace to look for sites has been crucial.

The other benefit of transparency is  your ability to tell a compelling story to increase the value of the sale of your website.

It’s an old maxim of sales, “The more you tell, the more you sell.”

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It’s not just about the money.

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In the 2006 version of Dominiche, I spent a lot of time explaining the concept of R.O.I.(Return On Investment).

To me, buying and selling websites was all about getting an excellent return on investment.

Little did I know, much smarter people than I had figured out there was more to a website and how much money it makes.

Back in 2006 I was pretty dismissive of SEO.

 Okay, I was outright hostile!

This hostility blinded me to an incredible opportunity. Smart students from Dominiche realised they could buy sites with wonderful authority (authority is measured by PR and is used by Google in its SEO ranking algorithm) for very little money!

They could buy websites with a PR of four, five, six and seven for a couple of hundred bucks.

They then used these sites to link to pages they wanted to appear on the front page of your favourite search engine.

The strategy was devastating.

This strategy is STILL devastating.

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Traffic Is Expensive.

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You’ve probably got this point by now, traffic is hard and expensive.

This is a wonderful opportunity! 

If you have a site with decent traffic in a certain niche -  thanks to the miracle that is Google adwords  - you can quantify how valuable the traffic is to somebody who is already in the niche and is already making a commercial success of the market.

You may not be able to unlock the conversion key of what to do with the traffic to your website. There are others in the market who already figured out how to make the traffic pay. You can make an extremely compelling argument, as to why they should buy the site when you compare the cost of how much they pay per click from Google.

It’s a total win–win situation.

Of course, the other side of the coin is cheap traffic (and I use that term very loosely!). It takes a lot of time to see a return on the effort you put in.

Smart students of Dominiche quickly realised buying your way into a market where somebody has already solved the traffic problem is a faster way to test the commerciality in a marketplace.

A crucial concept in Dominiche 2006 was the “margin of safety”. The marvellous strategy first taught to Warren Buffett by Benjamin Graham.

When people testing markets bought these websites with an inbuilt margin of safety, it was a no-brainer. 

There was only two outcomes.

Outcome 1, the market was a winner and off they went to the races.

Outcome 2, the market didn’t turn out. Because they bought with a margin of safety as I’d taught them. They resold the website and often made a small amount of money on the initial investment.

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One More Thing.

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If you’ve read my stuff for any amount of time now. You’ll know  I hate get rich quick stuff. It’s all bull.

In last year’s challenge we tested a new methodology to create a site and sell it on Flippa and make $100 or so.

It works like gangbusters. 

It STILL works like gangbusters!

This technique allowed somebody to start from absolute scratch and build up a bank they could use to acquire a larger site.

If somebody asked me the question, “What’s the quickest way to raise some cash?”, I tell them about this.

Let me be clear, this strategy is not a business. This is not a long-term solution! It’s a wonderful way to start.

Dominiche 2011 will be the most comprehensive buying and selling system ever released.

We will cover buying and selling strategies from just getting started to taking a company public. Both of which we’ve done in the past five years.

As we finalise development. I’d love you to follow along with our progress at the new Dominiche and page on Facebook.

http://www.facebook.com/DominicheTheArtOfBuyingAndSellingWebsites

Make sure you hit the Like button so you can stay updated through Facebook.

Dominiche 2011 has been five years in the making. I can’t wait to bring it to you.

Ed