Is Hand Reg Really Dead?!?

No hand regging is not dead. It's hard to attain consistent results. Anyone can hand reg and sell a domain name, it's not unique or special. It's about can I replicate this success on a consistent basis for the juice to be worth the squeeze?

A hand reg is generally not going to be a liquid domain name. Liquid domain names have a market just about any time of day, every day. I am writing this at 11:36 pm my time but I could get a hold of people from different parts of the world and drum up interest for a LL or LLL.com. A domain name registered an hour ago, not so much.

So hand registered domain names will probably result in a 0.5 to 1% sell through rate on a decent sized portfolio of hand registered domain names, provided the portfolio is names that make some sense or have successfully touched upon a new trend that's in vogue.

So most people starting out are hand registering 10 or 20 maybe 50 names. You might go years without ever selling one, so then the old adage of hand regs are dead starts up.

There are plenty of long time domainers who don't advertise it or tweet it out who still hand register domain names from time to time, that's balanced with liquid domain names, solid two word.coms and one word popular keywords in alt extensions.

They are not, and no one else should either, dependent on hand regs to attain financial success in domaining.

This is a lonely business, you can go years without a sale, you might have beginner's luck and sell 3 your first month. Domaining is a numbers game. Plenty of people you see posting sold this for $29,888 and this for $8,888 oh and then this for $10,000. Own thousands of domain names, they start each year with a renewal bill in the tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This is not an easy business, the person who shared 20 sales in 2023 did not share the 9,000 names that never sold or maybe never got a decent offer.

You want to have a lot of things going on in this business, hand reg some, play the auctions, see if you can find someone who will let you work to sell one of their better names for a commission. 10% or 15% of an ultra premium domain name is probably better for many than a 100% of their strictly hand regged portfolio.

You need to have a budget and be diversified. Always have a safety net, if you have $1,000 do not blow that all at once, because unlike other collectibles because that's what your really doing, you are collecting hand regs like someone collects baseball cards or coins, you have to renew again the next year. Once you bought the card or the coin you don't have to worry about any of that. So have a safety net. And if you know how to truly build a real, modern website, that's a big plus.