Seller Gets Into Domaining — $15M Bankaholic.com

Johns Wu has a fresh favorite past time — domaining.

Here’s an interesting story regarding Johns Wu, who founded the Bankaholic blog and sold it for regarding $15 million to Bankrate. He’s investing in high quality domain names — part of his “Grand Slam” strategy:

Thankfully, the cash from the Bankaholic sale has enabled me to become a player in the domaining space at a time when domain valuations have corrected as speculative capital has dried up and parking revenues have taken a nosedive.

My strategy is acquiring category killer exact match keyword names in high paying and high traffic niches—and yes, Google gives these domains much respect. I am always acquiring domains with the intention of one-day developing them. My online marketing experience has given me an extremely keen and accurate sense of valuations & development potential for domains… I constantly cold-email domain owners and make aggressive offers. 60% of the time I get no reply. 39% of the time I get an outrageous counter-offer. But the 1% of the time I succeed is worth the effort! All it takes is 1 solid domain to build a multi-million dollar web property.

Wu defines “Grand Slam” as category killer domain + SEO [Search Engine Optimization] traffic + monetization. I won’t bother to tell him that looks like a triple. But if he succeeds like he did with Bankaholic, he’ll turn it into a Grand Slam.

By the way, the site that did the interview has a nice domain name, too: MO.com.

(Hat tip Bruce Marler via Twitter).