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There
is much more involved than a
newcomer could ever imagine. I just
wrote a foreword for an
overseas friend's
upcoming book on domain investing
that includes this line: "Don't
be in a hurry to give your money
away. There will be countless
opportunities in this business
tomorrow too, so educate yourself
first...only
then
should you start investing in
domains."
It
is a process that can easily take a
year or two to reach a reasonable
level of competency and with the
business constantly changing
(including new gTLDs and new
markets like China redefining
what makes some domains
valuable almost overnight) you can't
afford to ever stop learning.
Almost
everyone in this business today
learned the ropes on their own
by reading every resource they could
find, looking for opportunities
to
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Education
image from Bigstock
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DNAcademy
Founder Michael Cyger |
There's
nothing wrong with continuing
to do it yourself but some
find the course too difficult
to navigate on their own or,
if they have the funds, would
be happy to speed up the
process by paying someone else
to teach them - if they were
qualified to do so. Industry
veteran and DomainSherpa.com
Founder Michael Cyger
just launched what may be
exactly what the latter group
is looking for at DNAcademy.com.
Cyger told me, "It's
an accelerated learning course
that I put together after
collecting 5+ years of
interviewing industry experts
on DomainSherpa. I've been
actively writing it for
years.
It "boils
down" all the important
aspects of domain name
investing into one organized
step-by-step course - without
having to watch hundreds of
hours of DomainSherpa content,
make sense of it all,
summarize the take-aways, and
put it all in order. This is not
a "get rich quick"
course, but a fundamentals
course to develop real
investors who base decisions
on data and process." |
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I
spent some time poking
around the DNAcademy site
and was very impressed with
what I saw - it is immediately
obvious that a lot of
thought and effort went into
creating this treasure trove
of text, graphics, video and
interactive elements, including
forums and groups that meet
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video
conferencing. When you log
into the Course
section you will find a huge
menu along the
right side of the page with
dozens of articles under the
various topic headings. For
example when I looked (the
list is continually being
upated) there were six
articles under Intro to
Domain Names, seven
under Keywords, 15
under Valuation Metrics,
11 under Valuation Tools
- and on and on - on any
topic you are likely to
think of. |
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DNAcademy
was attractive enough to convince
Frank Schilling's Uniregistry
to enroll several of their new
employees to get them quickly up to
speed. Some of Uniregistry's veteran
team members are also contributing
content for their own customized
course. The site also got a nice
endorsement from Australia's Financial
Review today.
With respect
to cost, DNAcademy offers two levels
of service, each covering 12 months
of access. The Basic level is
$349 and the Pro level
- that includes a private forum and
Q&A webinars among its upgrades
-
is $499. Special pricing for
teams is also available. The
amount of useful, well organized and
frequently updated information being
offered at those prices looks very
reasonable to me (it is on par with
the cost of a ticket to a single
domain conference).
Of course,
anyone can still take the DIY
path - there are many great free
resources on the web that allow you
to do that - but for those to
whom time "time is money"
I think DNAcademy will prove
to be a very welcome addition to the
domain industry landscape.
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