“You have everything but one thing: madness. A man needs a little madness or else – he never dares cut the rope and be free.”

- Zorba the Greek

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

- Thomas Edison

Having a hard time with this domain name business? Or for that matter, with any other challenge you’re facing in life? Have you been working at it for a long time and starting to feel like you’re not going to get there?

Don’t give up, evolve. Learn from your mistakes.

Here are five pieces of advice that will almost guarantee success. It took me two years to learn how crucial these points are, so pay attention:

1. Sell. As a domainer, focus more on the sell side and develop selling strategies that work.
2. Buy Revenue-Earning Domains. Only buy domains with the proceeds of your sales, not on credit or with your savings. Use the money from your sales to buy revenue-earning domain names. Ask the seller for proof of earnings and analyze the stats and the domain carefully. Is the traffic steady or declining? What is the source of the traffic? Is it easy to monetize? Is the domain easy to remember, pronounceable, and descriptive? Consider all these points and make sure the domain name will be profitable for you within a reasonable period of time before you agree to buy.
3. Buy Underpriced Domains. Look for deals where the seller is either desperate or is undervaluing the domain name out of ignorance. If the industry standard is to pay one year to ten years revenue depending on the quality of the domain, try to find someone who’s selling for 10 months to 2 years revenue. Make lowball offers and bargain hard; you’ve got nothing to lose.
4. Monetize Your Traffic. If a domain name is getting traffic but no clicks, look for alternative ways to monetize it, such as changing parking services, altering the keywords, developing a website, or redirecting the traffic to an existing website or affiliate link.
5. Dump or Sell the Losers. If a domain name is getting no traffic, dump it. Sell it for whatever you can get, unless you are convinced it has re-sale potential, in which case, return to point # 1.

Remember the coyote in the old road runner cartoons? In every cartoon he’d try some new ACME device or trap to catch the road runner, and each time he’d fail abysmally. Like maybe he’d try a rocket-powered harpoon, but he’d point it the wrong way and shoot himself instead of the road runner. Whereupon he would ditch that idea and try something else.

Even as a kid I remember being frustrated and thinking, “Why not just try the harpoon again, but this time point it the right way?” By the time I was ten I could not watch the road runner cartoon anymore because I was so annoyed at the coyote’s inability to learn from his mistakes.

Maybe I was a weirdo kid and missed the point of the cartoon, I don’t know.

Look, I know this is a cliche, but the night is darkest just before th dawn. The moment when something is the most difficult is often the moment before a breakthrough. Don’t abandon your dream, just refine your strategies, learn, adapt.