Sorry if this is a little bit of tough love but seriously…..it’s probably the best advice some of you could ever get.

I’m always amazed at the number of domain owners that get incredibly emotional about their domains and make economically irrational decisions. I hate to say this but domains are not your children, they don’t care if you sell them, you can monetise them anywhere and more than that they don’t care what price you sell them for.

Let’s unpack one level of thinking that is surprising……“I’m going to place all my domains with parking company X because the salesperson is my friend.”

For a start, my experience at ParkLogic has shown that no parking company wins more than 25% of the traffic at any point in time. This means that if you place ALL of your domains with a single company you are losing AT LEAST 75% of the time! This is a fact and one that has years and years of data behind it.

It’s great making friends with your account manager but I hate to burst the bubble, that person gets paid for the traffic that you bring them. The question you have to ask yourself is, “If I moved all my traffic away from them would they still want to hang out?” The last time I checked, I didn’t have to pay to have a friend so the answer should be yes.

Remember that business is business and you owe it to yourself and your family to do whatever you can to maximise your revenue.

I’m getting really tired of going into the various forums and seeing the complaints about PPC revenues declining. Many of the same people that complain keep on doing the same thing year after year with their domains and yet expect a different result. Einstein said that this was the definition of insanity.

My daughter just passed her driving license test the other day and is looking to buy a car. She found a great car but it was a little out of her price range so she came to Dad for help. I looked her in the eye and said, “Honey, you have six weeks to earn an extra $1,000 for your car. Put your creative thinking into action and stop coming to me for the money and start earning it yourself.” Literally within a few hours she’d solved the problem.

If you’re one of the complainers then get off your backside and make some creative sensible decisions about your domains. Don’t do the same thing as you’ve always done and the spend half your life on the forums whining about how the industry is going down…..it’s not going down but with an attitude like that it is for you.

It’s an interesting question but it’s one that I ask my kids all of the time. My daughter recently graduated from high school and has now enrolled in university….yes, I’m a VERY proud father. In discussions with her she kept on talking about what job would pay the most so that at the end of uni she would earn a packet! I kept on saying, “Sarah, do what you enjoy and the money will come.”

So the question I ask you is, “What’s your passion?”

One of the biggest challenges that I find that I face in the domain industry is that there are so many opportunities and great ideas that it’s easy to forget what you actually really like doing. Although earning money is an important part of life it’s only just a part not the whole.

I love the domain industry and domains but I don’t try and do everything with every one of the domains in my own portfolio. To be quite honest with you there are only a few of them that I actually get excited about…..and they are the once that I slowly develop. The rest of them I let ParkLogic take care of and I rarely spend any time worrying about them.

I had a conversation with a domain investor the other day who was really good at finding great traffic domains but really bad at managing them. He loved the sleuthing around and building systems for finding the gold in all of the dirt but hated actually managing them afterwards. To cut a long conversation short…..we now manage his portfolio and he goes and finds the domains. He loves it and his life has improved dramatically!

So across this weekend I encourage you to ask the question, “What’s your passion?” Once you have the answer, make decisions to follow it.

For the past week Melbourne has been it the grip of a heatwave that has been the biggest and most intense in about 100 years. The tennis players at the Australian Open have been collapsing and for the rest of us we really haven't had a good night sleep.....which tends to make us all a little grumpy. So when the cool change came and the temperature dropped by 20 degrees Celsius it was with a great relief that my head hit the pillow on Friday night.

The next morning was another matter altogether! I had one of those moments of panic that could only be fixed by me unobtrusively waking Roselyn. For all those husbands out there, unobtrusive and waking do not belong in the same sentence when it comes to wives. Lucky for me also had a good nice sleep, although cut a little short, so I began our conversation.

"Honey, when are we going to see Celtic women?"

For those of you who have been living under a bridge with a troll or have been trekking across Antarctica with a dog sled team, Celtic women is a group of Irish singers that have taken the world by storm for the past half decade. We'd booked tickets for the concert back in September but the tour was delayed to some later date, hence my question.

"I'm not really sure, sometime in Feb I think," my wonderfully coherent wife replied.

"Are you sure?"

"Not really but it's something like that."

If you've ever had a conversation in the morning with your partner that is something like the one I experienced then whatever you do nail down the facts because if you don't you'll regret it. Reaching across to the phone I dialed up the concert hall (yes it was late in the morning, nothing like a sleep in) and was told, "Lucky you called, it's tomorrow night."

More likely it was, lucky we had nothing else on tomorrow night, lucky the world hadn't ended and lucky we didn't stay home watching TV when we could've taken advantage of our hard earned money for tickets that we'd already purchased.

So what is the moral of this story. When you're gut tells you something then whatever you do listen to it or you may miss out! It's the same in domaining, if you don't keep tabs on all of those renewal dates, auction times, are my domains being monetised, are nameservers set correctly etc. then you're likely to lose assets, not earn revenue and miss great opportunities. If you're managing your domains by a spreadsheet I can almost guarantee that you're messing things up some how.....so whatever you do get someone to help you out so that they remind you that you're about to miss on a great concert if you don't make that phone call.

Have a great weekend!

OK....so the photo is a very much younger (and thinner) version of me but let's face it....you weren't looking at me, you were looking at the gorgeous girl to my right that said "yes". After being married for over 26 years I find that my eyes are on her as well, her dreams, her aspirations and really what makes her tick.....which brings me, believe it or not, to business.

Keeping your eye on what's important in family life is just as important for your domain business. In 2014 ask yourself "what's really important?". I see too many people going about their lives never asking this simple question. They've fallen in love with their domain names and believe that they are the experts at monetisation, set unrealistic valuations and spend hours doing what I would call "busy work". At the end of the day they jump on a forum, moan about the down turn in the industry, how sales are tanking and get jealous because it seems to be working for everyone else.

The facts are, if you keep on doing the same thing and expect a different result then you're insane. Make this year the year where you focus on what's really important in your domain business......and that's profit! I hate to be boring on this issue but profit equals revenue less expenses.....

Too many domain owners have focused their attention on increasing their revenue line but completely ignore their expenses. For example, when was the last time you built a cashflow for your business and put in their some hourly rate that you are charging your business for your time??? Most domainers value their time at $0....which is completely insane.

Let's unpack this.....let's imagine that you are earning $1,000 per month from domain parking. Ask yourself, two questions. How much time do you spend working out whether you have the best solution for getting the most from your traffic? How much time do you spend on working out if a domain should be renewed or now? If you aren't spending any time on either of these two questions then I can almost guarantee that you're losing money!

Here's the thing.....your time IS MONEY. It's often better to pay someone else to lose sleep managing your domains so that you can working on another project. The challenge is to let go of your babies (ie. domains) and place them in the care of another trusted party. You'll free up your time and if they are doing their job correctly you'll end up with more revenue and more importantly more PROFIT.

So this brings me back to what I was saying at the beginning......in 2014 focus on what's important......PROFIT. Like my wife, this is what I think about in my various business endeavours.....always PROFIT. Please, oh please.....don't value your time at $0.