Donna Mahony has made the big decision to leap into the world of blogging. For those of you that don’t know, Donna is the queen of the domain forums and has run domainboardroom.com for many, many years.

DomainBoardroom.com is a closed forum that is only accessible by applicants being approved by the entire community. It’s amazing to see competitors, domain owners and other industry professionals discussing domain topics and working together for the betterment of the industry.

I know that Donna has a huge amount of expertise in the domain industry and as she says on her very first blog…..she’s going to bring her own point of view to the articles that she writes. So get ready for some great reading!

I would like to wish Donna good luck and every success and would highly recommend that you place her blog on your watch list!

You can visit Donna’s Blog at not surprisingly donnasblog.com

For the 9th year DomainFest is returning to its roots by being held in Hollywood on the 31st March until the 2nd April at the Loews Hotel. This is great news for the industry and for Oversee.Net. For some strange reason a number of people in the industry have been voicing whether DomainFest would actually go ahead and some even suggested that it was the beginning of the end for Domain Sponsor! Those individuals must feel pretty silly now.

I have always liked going straight to the source and at no time during the last several months have I been told by anyone from Oversee that DomainFest was not going to happen. In fact, it has always been an emphatic YES! The challenge was to finalise the date and the great line-up of speakers and activities. So for all of the naysayers out there.....take some advice, if you have a question then go and ask the source.

I remember attending and speaking at the very first DomainFest and it was an incredible event that galvanised not only the domaining community but those outside of it. Oversee has consistently tried to bring new entrants into the domain industry by educating the wider media about the importance of domains to business. Whether it has been by personally inviting potential investors or having keynote A-list celebrities such as Kim Kardashian. The ultimate goal has always been so that domainers can realise greater returns on their assets through additional investment being poured into domains......I'm sure that Oversee wouldn’t mind helping in this process :-)

The innovative mindset is reflected in the conference agenda with three major streams of sessions with a focus on gTLDs, Domain monetisation and mobile traffic. There is also three sessions on domains as a business.

Although the sessions have always been outstanding I’ve found that it’s the people that conferences like DomainFest and TRAFFIC attract that make them special. They are gathering places for domainers to swap ideas, learn and most importantly do business.I think that going back to Hollywood is returning to the roots of what made DomainFest a great conference.

Being a bit of a film fanatic I've always enjoyed being near where the Academy Awards are held! With any luck one of the evening events may be similar to the "James Bond" one that was held many years ago. If you remember that event then like DomainFest you've been in the industry for quite some time.

I know that I will attending DomainFest and look forward to meeting up with as many of you as possible.

The first thing that I think about when I view my domains is not "where the next dollar will come from" but rather "Where the next dollar willl come from that sticks to my hands". In other words, show me the profit not just the revenue.

So let's take a look at the good old profit equation of revenue less expenses.

So where's the revenue going to come from in 2014 that will be past the dismal performance that many domainers experienced in 2013? Google will underpin much of the revenue as they have been doing for the last ten years of the industry but the real wins are going to come from direct advertisers and affiliates. We're seeing more and more traffic being won in our bidding system at ParkLogic by zero click solutions....which is always a good thing. If you don't have your domains in a program that has this to offer then give me a call as you're missing out on a bucket of revenue that's not dependent upon a single provider.

I'm not sure about you but I'm continuing to develop a number of websites.....just nudging them along bit by bit to get them to the point where they can then be a profit centre for me. If you aren't developing a website then once again you're potentially missing out on some good revenue.....but make sure that you develop something that you're interested in. I may have some great cosmetic domains but you know what? I have no interest in that industry other than when it relates to my wife and daughters.....then all husbands and dad's take an interest. :-)

Words of advice.......rainbows are pretty things but they are illusory. Likewise, if you plan on waiting for that ultimate huge sale then you may be waiting a LONG, LONG time. Price all your domains at what I would call fair rates and be prepared to sell them for those rates with NO seller's remorse. I work out my stock item domains from my high value you domains and I have a different strategy for each.....so get them into the marketplace and start selling. I'll have to do another blog on this concept.

On the expense side of your business most of them are locked in place. I'm sure that you can negotiate a better rate with your registrar but seriously, the margins for them with domainers are really slim. The biggest expense that is hidden is your time. The easiest thing in the world to do is keep a log of the amount of time that you spend on your domains (including checking stats) for a week and than multiply it by your hourly charge out rate to your business. That's a cost that you need to get down or technically your business may be unprofitable.....or you're earning $1 per hour.

Anyway.....I hope that this helps you out and provokes you into thinking about your domain business.

OK, I've seen this posted around the different forums that .club is going to make it really, really big but I personally believe that 1 million registrations by the end of the first years is a big stretch. What's crazy is that they could have said 200,000 and everyone would have thought that was a lot of domains. If they pass the 200,000 mark they will look like heroes but now they've set a bar so high that it's going to be tough to reach.

Don't get me wrong....I wish them all the best. I wear their polo shirt all the time....it's really comfortable. :-) The problem that I see with many of these new extensions is that many of them have had to get investors to "drink the kool-aid" and this has set them up to fail. I personally think that about 98% of them will go down and be snapped up by some of the more successful ones....by hey, it's a gamble and people with a lot of money seem to like doing it.

As for me, I'm going to stick with .com and some of the ccTLDs as I know for sure that they're not going to vanish in a hurry.