Utter Domain

My Best Domain Purchases in 2010

2010-12-21T12:45:00.000-08:00

Last year I did a post that got some good feedback - particularly through Twitter - regarding my best domain purchases for 2009. It's interesting to me to look back at my acquisitions, my plans, my execution and compare that with what I've acquired this year, so I'm going to continue the annual tradition by listing my best acquisitions of 2010. This list is even more scary to publish then last year as I've not been as active domaining or developing but I think I've been "active enough" to merit a list.

Here we go:

VideoGames.info - low 4 figure

This is a name I've had my eye on for over a year and finally bought it as a sort of birthday present to myself. For those that were paying attention to my post about .INFO, this here is the name that is getting a lot of my development attention

MarriageHelp.com - mid 4 figure

This is a name I was helping my father develop for his Christian Marriage Counseling information and services. We went ahead and purchased it outright this year and I'm excited about really digging in to monetization this year

OurAdventure.com - ???

I grabbed this at a GoDaddy drop auction. I think this has some great end user sale potential, and if nothing else I'll use it as a travelogue when I retire!

.US backorders and aftermarket acquisitions - 4 figures total
- Mugs
- Fur
- Jog
- Yosemite
- Blocks
- LaminateFlooring
- GolfShop
- HelpDeskSoftware
- FishingGear
- Dozens more...
These are names I largely picked up through the course of just a month or so of heavy drop auction action. I've added significantly to my .US portfolio this year as I'm now up to over 200 names.

.TV hand reg's
- DesktopComputers
- DesktopWallpaper
- CyberWeek
- StateParks
I'll be the first to admit I missed out on the great deals available when the .TV registry changed their premium pricing. I was *this* close to picking up some killer names but for one reason or another it didn't work out. I've got my eye on the .TV space though, so expect to see some nice .TV names in the list next year!

So here's your chance to vote!

And be sure to add your favorite purchases in the comments or just tweet me!

2011 will be the year of .INFO

2010-12-18T06:23:00.000-08:00

It's been awhile since I've posted a full blog entry, but 2011 has me really giddy for a lot of reasons and so I've decided to start posting again. The thing that has gotten me the most excited though has got to be the strong sales of .INFO in the last 6 months. The current trend is very strong. So much so I think we'll see our first (of many) 6 figure .INFO sales made public in 2011.

If you didn't check out the Afilias 2010 .INFO report that came out earlier this month, be sure to read the whole thing here, but the most important thing to gather from the report is that .INFO grew by nearly 30% and now makes up 44% of the entire "new TLD" market. For the same reason .COM is propelled higher as new extensions are released, I believe the .INFO extension will continue to grow into it's role as the "gold standard" among new TLDs. That doesn't mean I think .INFO will overtake .COM. I do expect that .INFO will start to compete more evenly with .NET over the next couple of years and that's a trend you can already see happening today. The great news though is that there are still lots of opportunities to be had in the .INFO space.

If you look through the reported sales history of .INFO over just the last 6 months, you see over a dozen 5 figure sales with the highest reported sale being Geld.info ("money" in german) going for right around $30,000. That's a long way from 6 figures but I think the solid base of 5 figure sales means that it's not unreasonable to have certain prime keywords start to push the 6 figure mark.

While I don't have any official info on the subject, there is also the issue of the .INFO Sunrise Reallocation which went through it's RFP process in early 2010 and may mean some very interesting auctions for names that were not picked over in that phase. There is also the outstanding 1 and 2 character .INFO release which, as far as I can tell, is making good progress as well. If we can get mid 5 figure .BIZ auctions for 1 character names, I could certainly see the possibility of one or more 6 figure .INFO's.

So here's the strategy: start picking up the highest quality .INFO's you can find, but keep the sales prices on the down-low so as not to suppress the trend in market prices. There is a huge disparity between end-user and reseller pricing with .INFO right now so there are tons of deals to be had. You look at a name like Shoes.info that sold just recently for low 4 figures and know that is a mid 5 figure name to the right buyer today. Imagine what that price could look like in 3 or 4 years.

And one more note: Don't think that because I am excited about .INFO that it's the only extension in my portfolio. I always promote diversification. There are domain investors who are 99% invested in .COM, and I'm not going to knock that strategy. It's just more exposure to a single extension than I care to take. Alternative extensions and ccTLDs may be speculative, but I see more upside to a prime keyword in a relevant TLD than I do equivalently priced low to mid tier .COM names. For example our FunnyVideos.TV site is now on page 2 of Yahoo and Bing for it's keywords with very little content and practically no marketing or link building. While that may not sound all that great, we are just below Cracked.com and competing against established players that have been around for years. Price paid for FunnyVideos.TV? Low 3 figures.

But wait, wasn't this post about .INFO? Why am I talking about .TV? Well, we are currently busy behind the scenes working on our largest development project yet and it's a category killer .INFO. Stay tuned in 2011!

DevHub Reviewed ... Again

2010-07-14T15:55:00.000-07:00

It was a year ago that I did my first review of DevHub - and came away impressed. I continued using the platform to develop a geo domain and some other product names. The more I used it, the more limitations and frustrations I found. The glitz and glamor of drag and drop site design very quickly fades and the underlying functionality of the tools you are provided starts to show some serious holes.

That's not to say I haven't had any success. In fact, I've gotten ranked for various keywords and in total my half dozen sites that weren't getting any significant traffic parked are now receiving an average of around 700 visitors a month or so the last few months. Most of that is to one site in particular - an adult toy, exact match .US domain (and largely due to Yahoo ranking it #2). And at various times, my other sites would pop up on the first page of a search engine and I'd get some nice traffic spikes. So there's traffic and it's gotten to be fairly consistent. So let's talk about the next step: revenue.

The revenue is horrible

My RPM (revenue per 1k page views) is just as bad as my worst performing parked domains. Someone else may have a different experience, but in my book, generating < $2 in revenue in a month where I had over 2k page views is just pathetic. Is it because the sites aren't optimized? Entirely possible, but honestly I don't know *how* to improve the performance because DevHub provides absolutely no metrics about where that revenue is coming from save their breakdown by CPA, CPM, CPC, etc. What I need to know is *which* products are working, which affiliate offers are producing and which ones aren't (one could argue none of them are working but I'll get to that in a second).

And then when they do break down on a daily basis where the revenue is coming from, a disturbing picture appears: the CPA is horrible! On many, many occasions, the CPA is a single penny. CPA! That means someone bought something, took an action... and my share is a whole freakin' penny. Even at a 50/50 split of Amazon CPA revenue, assuming Amazon is paying it's a mere 3-4% commission, it means that the product that was purchased had to have been worth less than a dollar! And that's assuming a very demanding 50/50 split. Honestly the split has to be a lot worse than that for those numbers to work out, but as they don't tell you the split, they don't tell you the products that were purchased, they don't tell you the ad unit that was clicked... You have no idea!

Now onto the review!

But this is a review of the newly redesigned DevHub, not a condemnation of their revenue sharing (okay, it's both!). The new look of DevHub is really fun, with lots of game design elements and "social networking" features. That is, if you define social networking features as tons of popup spam telling to you "share this on face book and twitter". The game design features are an interesting twist as you get points and coins as rewards for adding more content to your site and customizing it's layout using the same rather limited theming tools that were available before. There are least a half dozen things in the "marketplace" for you to purchase with your coins or you cold hard cash - things that were essentially available to you without having to spend your coins or cold hard cash before. This is a new feature and the marketplace just launched, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that the marketplace will eventually be flushed out. But if the marketplace is as ignored as the widgets were in the previous release, then I don't think the game concept is going to be anything but a nuisance. The good news is that you can apparently turn the game elements off, but the only setting I found to do this is in my account settings and when I tried to turn it off it said that data was required. I'm guessing in order to change the game elements, I have to also reset my password. Who knows.

In my original reviews, I identified a number of issues that bothered me regarding things like duplicate products being displayed (at varying prices), widgets not working at all, missing features (like creating my own directory site), etc. Surely, a year later and a whole new version being launched will mean that these basic problems will be addressed, right? Nope. Oh, the broken widgets aren't broken any more.. they are just gone. There are a few new features that have snuck in like the ability to include your twitter feed, but the "product selection" process is still just as broken as before. They now offer you the choice of which product feed you want to use - Amazon, Shopping.com or Pop Shops, but even inside those feeds you get duplicates. You still can't hide a product you don't want displayed either, so it becomes a frustrating game of "if I create 3 product feeds of 1 product each with just the right search keywords I'll be able to display the list of products I really want". And without dipping into your own google adsense or other ad provider accounts, you won't have any choice over the type, layout, etc of the ad unit you want to display.

To sum up

You might think I hate DevHub, but really, I don't. I do hate the closed nature of it - especially in regards to reporting, the poor revenue share, the risk of being delisted at any moment when Google finally gets sick of them, the lack of focus on making the product better and more useful (instead of the current focus on making it more "fun") and limited design options... but other than that, it's a fine platform! Really! If you want to just throw a site up and put a few monetization features on it, then it certainly works for that... I've spent less than an hour per site and those 6 hours or so of time have yielded a whopping $20 in revenue from various sources - mostly in the last 6 months. That's a yearly rate of maybe $50 - enough to cover the registration fees for those 6 domains.

Until DevHub gets serious about helping developers optimize and profit from their site, there's really no reason to invest heavily in the platform. Instead, invest in building your own solutions, buying off the shelf products and keeping 100% of the revenue for the extra effort. If nothing else, you'll sleep a lot better knowing you aren't at the whim of DevHub.

Is Google Getting Aggressive?

2010-06-29T17:59:00.001-07:00

While reading up on my tech news tonight, I ran across a story at the Financial Times about the iPhone 4's reception problems and how they might lead to a class action lawsuit. Another day, another class action lawsuit. No big deal. As I scrolled down through the story I caught sight of a rather large ad for Storage Containers:

I wasn't sure why the Financial Times was advertising Storage Containers, but nothing seemed particularly out of the ordinary.

And then it hit me. About two weeks ago I had been doing some research via Google for a domain name that was dropping: ShippingContainers.us

I had done a few searches for products and such in that space to see if it was worth a backorder (I ended up just hand registering it) and as any good researcher does, I looked at related keywords and one of those was... you guessed it - Storage Containers.

So apparently, Google, in its infinite wisdom decided to start using it's cookies to pull out my search history and to start showing me ads based on my previous searches rather than content on the page. No problem, right? Except it took a good two weeks before it pulled that particular trick out of the bag from when I had searched on that term and while I have the typical banner blindness that most internet users have developed, I can't recall ever having such blatant use of cookies to feed ads regardless of the page's content.

In yet another coincidence, the Federal Government released new guidance that essentially removes the Federal Ban on Persistent Cookies as well as providing additional guidance for use of sites like Facebook and Twitter. You can see the full details at Federal Computer Weekly. Why are the two related? Because just as the federal government was getting comfortable with putting their foot back in the water of using helpful technologies like persistent cookies, Google may very well be screwing it up in order to make a few more pennies per page (times billions of pages!)

So has anyone else noticed an increase in Google's use of search history/cookie data lately or was this just a fluke? Until tonight, I had always just considered this as technology that was an internet marketer's wet dream, but it seems that it may turn into reality sooner than I thought.

What's my problem?

2010-02-01T15:19:00.001-08:00

This month, Utter Domain officially turns one year old. Hundreds of hours spent writing posts, creating back links, promoting my site via Twitter and in general building the Utter Domain brand, but over the past year, with over 70 posts at fairly regular intervals, this site really has gained no traction.

Except for the traffic spikes associated with my feed readers (I love you guys!) and Domaining.com whenever I post a new entry, this site gets practically 0 traffic (not exactly 0, but close enough to 0 to not be significant). While this site has been quite interesting to work on, in terms of readership, it's not succeeded to my expectations. So, I need your help to figure out what I'm doing wrong!

Let's look at some of the issues:

1. Blogger. Okay, I get it. Blogger sucks. I've had numerous people comment that commenting is frustrating, the fact it's hosted by blogger isn't good for SEO, the template is horrible. It's essentially a done deal that this site is moving off blogger, so let's just not even bother with that.

2. Page Rank 1. WTF!? I'm sure this is partially related to blogger, templates and traffic patterns (all you domaining.com readers bounce like nobody's business), but I've got a nice post history, plenty of back links (over 120 according to Yahoo's site explorer). I really fail to see how this site is only Page Rank 1.

3. Lack of recognition. I have no problem accepting that I'm nobody (one of my favorite poems!). But brand recognition is important. Maybe my domain name is too generic. Maybe my content sucks. Maybe what I have to say doesn't match with the accepted standards (I invest in other extensions besides .com - gasp!). Maybe I don't do enough shameless self promotion about my successes. Whatever the reason, Utter Domain is not a recognized brand. Don't believe me? Check to see how many times you see my name or my blog appear on a Blog Roll.

4. Search engine rankings are pathetic. Sure, Blogger's SEO is pretty awful, page rank is a huge factor, too, but I've worked on creating relevant page titles, keyword intensive posts, deep linking, internal link building. I've used a lot of tricks, and the site only seems to get search traffic from the longest of long tail terms.

5. Lack of growth. It didn't bother me when I was posting 3 times a week and still struggling to reach a thousand visitors a month, but the fact that the situation hasn't changed in a year... well, that tells me something is fundamentally busted... I just don't know what it is.

6. Post frequency. While the frequency has tapered off some from it's high, I've chosen to post unique content at a regular, but not an extremely frequent, interval. I've averaged at least post a week, but in many cases that post count seems to be antithetical to traffic volume (ie. the more I post, the less traffic I get).

So tell me. Brutal honesty. What I have I screwed up? Is the brand salvageable? Is the content useless? Maybe it would be easier to just list the things I've done right!? :) Let me have it!

Upselling with Domain Names

2010-01-22T08:26:00.001-08:00

One thing I really want to do this year is bundle my domain names with additional products, services, hosting and more so that someone with no skills at webdesign or marketing can get up to speed really quickly on their new domain name. This adds value to the domain but it also means that I'm building a deeper connection to my customers. I've been looking around at products and services that I could bundle and figured I'd share some of my ideas.

Domain and Webhosting Reseller Programs

I'm planning to create a storefront that includes allowing my customers to register domains and sign up for hosting. I'm not going to create this from scratch myself, of course. I'll simply purchase a reseller plan like the one from GoDaddy or possibly use Directi's ResellerClub to manage the storefront, hosting and Credit Card processing for me.

Information Products

I'm not sure if you know what "Gravity" is when it refers to ClickBank, but it basically indicates how strong a seller a particular product is. The highest gravity product at ClickBank right now is right up domain alley - Niche Blueprint 2.0. It takes a lot of the guess work and grunt work out of building out an e-commerce site. Something I know from experience can be a time consuming and frustrating process.

Consulting

While this isn't the kind of service that every customer I sell a domain name to will require, there are many end users that I'll be contacting that already have a domain but they aren't making as much use of it as they should. This is really the core of my background and something I'm very good at. I'll be able to provide consulting services on a wide range of topics including SEO, website design, social networking and marketing (via Adwords, link building, etc.)

So have you upsold your domain customers with additional products and services? What seems to work best for you?

Development Plans for WirelessRouters Site

2010-01-22T06:39:00.001-08:00

As the sale of WirelessRouters.us wasn't successful, I've moved on to development. I've had my hands full with several projects, but the ideas and plans I've put together for this new e-commerce site has really gotten my development juices flowing, so I figured I'd share a bit about my development plans here.

Scope of Work

First of all, in order to run an e-commerce site, you've got to have, well, a site... with e-commerce built in. Now, that may sound really obvious, but it it's not a simple problem to solve for minisites. While there are minisite solutions from using SmartNames.com's "e-commerce" templates, to using DevHub to quickly build up affiliate and PPC links to products in your niche, these are not really e-commerce solutions. Building an Amazon A-store is about as close as one can get to a free store front, but even Amazon A-stores have limitations.

But there are tons of e-commerce solutions out there, they just are not practical for minisites. Often they cost $30 or more a month to operate. Yahoo's Store, Shopify, etc. all have monthly costs associated with them, and when you consider running even a handful of stores, this cost structure just doesn't scale.

There are open source alternatives such as the shopping cart built in to Drupal. While I really like Drupal (or WordPress, or other CMS), there is a large overhead associated with running a full CMS site, and when dealing with minisites, there's usually little that is gained from that complexity. Also, in regards to scaling up the solution, there are caveats and issues with operating multiple sites that can cause quite a bit administraton for upgrades, security issues, etc.

In short, I think the only solution I'm going to be happy with is one of my own making. My work load has now significantly increased, but by freeing myself to design the system for exactly my own purposes, I'll have a much more narrowly focused, but easier to maintain system. I've sacrificed startup speed in order to minimize maintenance costs and I'll hopefully realize future productivity gains when I reuse the system for future minisites. In the end I think it's the right choice. I'm calling my handy little content management system MiniSiteMS.

Selling Widgets vs Selling Information

But what about the content of the site? While the MiniSiteMS system will have product pages and affiliate links, my revenue model for most of my sites is not going to rely solely on selling hardware. Part of the reason for that is hardware has such slim margins. For example I found a wholesaler who would Blind Dropship Wireless Routers, but while I could mark up the price as much as needed, I was really only getting about 3-5% off the cost. By the time you take out my expenses of operating the site, handling customer service and not to mention credit card transaction fees, there's no profit motive there. While my sales (and the percentage made for each sale) through a channel like Ebay or Amazon may not be nearly as high, they scale well for minisite development. And while owning an exact match domain helps with SEO work, driving traffic to the site through Adwords or similar marketing efforts would eat up any money I would make through my affiliate sales. So... what to do??

Sell information, that's what. While article marketing and keyword optimized content, link backs and various SEO techniques can drive relatively cheap traffic to the site, it's really a rat's race that you'll never win. What I'm looking for is a product that I can create once and sell a thousand times. While AdSense clicks make a few pennies, I want to have a product that I can promote for a few pennies via AdWords, and when it sells, I walk away with 90+ percent of the sale price in profit. I want to have a product that others can sell via affiliate links. And so if you haven't guessed yet, one of the main products that will be at WirelessRouters.us will be information products. I already have ideas for at least 3 ebooks and the topic is broad enough to scale to even more.

In terms of scaling up information products across dozens or even hundreds of minisites, there are hundreds and thousands of information products already ready already via affiliate offers at places like ClickBank. Alternatively, you can outsource the creation of the ebook by hiring a ghost writer using sources like Elance.

With a goal of $1250 in profit in 3 months (now about 10 weeks for me), and with that schedule compressed even further with the upfront development time of building my own MiniSiteMS, I'll likely have to resort to paid advertising for the site, but that'll be a subject of another post!

The Race to $1250 - WirelessRouters.us

2010-01-07T13:37:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow I'll be starting a race between domain flipping and domain development to see which one will net me $1250 first. The domain in question: WirelessRouters.us.

Granted, the race is a little skewed towards flipping as the name is up for auction at Bido tomorrow with a Bido Price of $1250. Now, obviously a developed site will be much easier to flip, so if it doesn't sell tomorrow, then the race will be to see if my development, marketing and SEO skills, along with owning a great keyword domain, will result in not just a profitable minisite, but a full blown ecommerce site with a goal of earning $1250 in just it's first 90 days.

So let's set some ground rules:

The Rules of the Race

I would be happy with selling WirelessRouters.us at it's BidoPrice, but it's not really a "net gain" of $1250 as I have sunk costs in the name. That said, development must net $1250, not gross. However, I will not be counting my fixed hosting costs or my personal time against the gross. I think this is fair. Why? Because I think everyone would agree that a recurring revenue stream is better than a one time sale, but the sale is inherently "easier" from a labor perspective as well as capital outlay. But feel free to disagree in the comments.

I will not be marketing the name at $1250 once the site development begins, but I will still consider offers. They'll just need to take into consideration the work that's gone into the development. If a sale occurs at $1250 or greater prior to earning $1250 via development, then flipping "wins".

I will not use this blog to link directly to the site. Though honestly that would not be a major win for the site :)

There is essentially an inconsequential amount of type in/existing traffic so the development and marketing efforts will be entirely responsible for the success of the site.

Failure to reach the goal will result in public humiliation. Reaching the goal via either reselling or developing will hopefully get some much needed attention for the .US extension and product .US domains in particular.

Revenue from the site can be from "any means necessary", not just in sales. No, this isn't some trick to make development easier, but I want to be clear that I'll be counting all revenue sources as a part of the total earned from development.

I'd love to hear votes of encouragement, suggestions, etc... but if you think I'm doomed to failure, you can voice your opinion too. Direct the feedback to http://twitter.com/UtterDomain. Let the race begin!

My 5 Best Domain Purchases in 2009

2009-12-28T13:57:00.001-08:00

This is kind of a scary post to write, because I'm shamefully behind on developing my portfolio (look for a New Year's Resolution post about that soon!) and I'm sure many people will get a good chuckle out of my purchases and my lack of production with these sites. But this post is for me. To document my results for the year, my feelings at this point about what I've picked up and to hopefully start a discussion of what other people are most proud of picking up this year themselves. Without further ado, here's my top 5 list of names acquired either via "the aftermarket". I'll not plug my amazing hand registering skills here, but I may do a separate post on my best hand registered names of the year if you all are interested.

5. .IN Geo's - This is a difficult one to put on the list as it's not just one deal that I'm proud of, but the total number of high quality names I've been able to acquire at really great prices. To sum up - I've got 25 US State .in's (Colorado.in, Tennessee.in, NorthCarolina.in, etc.), all the Canadian province's (and most territories), about 60% of the US cities with over 100k population and a huge number of popular destinations like Gatlinburg, Williamsburg, Gettysburg, Hilton Head, etc. etc., about 50% of the major cities in Canada and the UK along with major destinations around the world. Over 600 names in total. My total cash outlay has been in the low five figures with over 100 of those domains acquired in the aftermarket. My favorite? Atlanta.in for less than $1k. Expect to see a lot out of our Vocav.com platform in the next year as we start to power up these sites.

4. SpaGetaway.com - This was my highest single domain purchase at the time I picked up via a GoDaddy drop auction. The search numbers aren't amazing, but it has huge development potential. Spa listings, booking services and travel accommodations means this domain will be a big earner in the years to come. Total price paid was $893.

3. BirthdayCards.info - This isn't so much a purchase as a drop catch, but as this was a recent capture, it's fresh in my mind as a great value for the money. The keyword phrase "Birthday Cards" has huge exact search volume, and the monetization options are really broad. Yes, it's a low dollar transaction in most cases, but there are subscription services, bulk orders and related services such as flowers and gifts that go perfectly with this domain. I'm really excited about building this name out. The best part? I picked this up using GoDaddy's backordering service with essential no competition. Total outlay was less than $30 for this great domain.

2. FunnyVideos.TV - Again, the most recent transactions come to mind as this was yet another new acquisition. This highly searched keyword phrase fits the extension perfectly and there's plentiful content in this category. The real question I have is monetization, but that will come with traffic. FunnyVideos.TV was purchased using my favorite auction site - Bido.com - for a whopping $111. Oh, and there are no premium renewals fees for this great keyword .TV domain.

1. TechCritics.com - This is my "Crush it" project that will be monopolizing my time in 2010. You may have heard me drop hints as to my new blog site via Twitter - well, this is it. It'll be launching very soon and I'm really excited about the possibilities of this name. The purchase agreement won't let me disclose the purchase price, but it was a fair price considering it's potential, but more than most "domain investors" would have paid. There will be more posts about TechCritics.com in the future, so stay tuned.

Honorable mention: VideoEffects.com - This is still my single most expensive single domain purchase (just under $3,000), but I knew the domain was not a name I was going to flip for big profits. I was buying it as an end user and so I see the value in this transaction as a long term investment. It may well be that this turns out to be my best purchase of the year, but it will take time to capitalize on it. VideoEffects.com was also purchased via GoDaddy's Drop Auctions.

So now, you get to decide. Which one my purchases was best?

I'd love to hear from you about your favorite purchases this year. You can post them in comments, blog about them or just tweet them to http://twitter.com/UtterDomain.

The 1K Rule - Keyword Domain Investing

2009-12-18T06:47:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, I posted up my Two Strikes, You're Out guidelines for domain investing. In those guidelines, I touched on Keywords, but now we are going to drill into what really makes a good keyword domain. And while you are free to draw the line as far as quality of the keywords you want to invest in anywhere you want, my rule of thumb is what I like to call the 1K Rule.

The 1K Rule is this: For an exact match .COM domain to be worth my time, the keywords must have at least 1000 exact searches per month and $1 Average CPC according to the Google Adwords Keyword tool. And by exact, I mean, changing the combobox for "Match Type" to exact. Now, this rule is more like a formula than an exact figure. So, a keyword that has, say, a CPC of $5, may interest me if it gets several hundred exact searches per month. Conversely, a keyword that only has an average CPC of 25 cents will need to have several thousand exact searches to grab my attention. The formula, as it were, would look something like this:

Number of Exact Searches X Average CPC >= $1,000

And the 1K Rule doesn't just apply to exact match .COM domains. When I look at, say, call to action names like "BuyMensWatches.com", I'll look at the keyword "Mens Watches" as well as exact searches on "Buy Mens Watches". If the exact phrase [Buy Mens Watches] doesn't reach my 1K limit, then I'll need to justify the purchase by looking at the searches on "Mens Watches". I tend to value brandables and alternative extensions at no more than 10% of the exact match and sometimes significantly less. So before I would register BuyMensWatches.com, the term "Mens Watches" would need at least 10,000 exact searches at an average CPC of $1 in order to interest me. In a similar fashion, exact match .TV and .info's generally don't interest me unless the keywords reach 50,000 exacts at $1 CPC. With .info, I may occasionally register a name with fewer exacts or lower CPC, but only because the cost of registration is so low.

One factor that I don't put much weight into is the number of pages found doing a Google Search on the term (either broad searches or with quotes). You'll often hear people promote their domains using something like "There are 100 million Google search results for the phrase Breakfast Sausages. So buy BreakfastSausages.com." Domain valuation services like Estibot also seem to put considerable weight on having lots of search results. But to me, I like knowing that there's less competition for a term as it makes it easier for me to rank. So if there are 20,000 exact global searches for "Nassua Flights", but less than 100,000 results in Google for "Nassau Flights", then I feel pretty good about my chances to rank "NassuaFlights.com".

Different extensions, different call to actions (for example, I favor "Buy" something, to "Get" something) and the relevance they have with the keyword (for example, I don't like product .TV's) all factor in to determining if the domain is a strong keyword domain. Exact searches matter most, and average CPC should be considered as well, but don't put too much weight into Google Search results for the term, as it can actually be a positive when you go to develop the domain.

I hope my 1K Rule helps you make better decisions about domain investing. If you think my numbers are way off or if you have any questions, feel free to fire me a tweet at http://twitter.com/UtterDomain

Alternate Extensions Strike Back

2009-12-05T06:27:00.000-08:00

After our poll results from earlier in the week showed that .net is favored a full 3rd of the time by domainers looking to develop keyword domains, I did some searching to find how well alternative extensions are doing in search results. Now, I don't know of a scientific way of doing this as the percentage of developed and ranked alternative extensions are a small fraction of the .com base, so the results are sure to be skewed. I decided to just check anecdotally looking at both common search phrases and "trending topics" to see how well the various alternative extensions were representin'. I only looked at first page rankings and did a random sampling of terms from various "top search query" sites. I also focused on Google but future posts will discuss rankings on other search engines.

Let's start with some good news:

Cyber Monday

CyberMonday.net is 3rd - really second as CyberMonday.com has the first two entries.

CyberMonday.fm is 5th below wikipedia and also below the news results. Nice result for a .fm!

Mortgage Calculator

MortgageCalculator.org is #2, but #3 mortgage-calc.com has two entries with the same meta data but two different pages. Impressive.

MortgageCalculator.net is next, right after news results? Pushing news results a bit much aren't we?

Science Fair Project

All-Science-Fair-Projects.com should get a special award for being #1 in ranking and in the number of dashes!

A couple of .org's ranking in 2nd and 3rd place and another in 6th - likely due to educational slant of the term?

ScienceFairProject.VirtualAve.net is 5th

Santa Claus

SantaClaus.net is 4th right after the "business listings" for Santa Slaus. Classic

NORADSanta.org is 5th for the official NORAD tracking site.

Now the bad apples:

Tiger Woods: none

Tom Brokaw Accident: zip

What does my name mean: zilch

Currency Converter: nada

Conclusions

Well, the first conclusion is, .org and .net are by far the most represented in search results of all the alternative extensions, but they are also the most likely alternative extensions to be developed.

Having names like BlackFriday.info and CyberMonday.fm show up on the first page of results for major keywords shows that it's possible to rank just about anything

Trending topics and news stories tended to favor .com

Similarly, keyword relevance in the domain name (even if it was a subdomain) seemed to play a large role, particularly for alternative extensions.

I found this exercise quite interesting and will be following up with more posts along these lines whether you like it or not, but I'd love to hear your feedback at @UtterDomain.

Two Strikes, You're Out

2009-12-03T09:53:00.001-08:00

I have a fairly basic thought process when it comes to domain names. It works like this: How many strikes does the name have against it? The guidelines below are what I use to determine the quality of a domain name. In most cases, failing any two of these criteria will immediately cause the name to go into the circular file (ie. the trash can).

Extension - if it's not .COM (or for those focused on a specific country, your desired country code extension), consider this your first strike. Very simple. If the extension is not one of the top 10 extensions then this is often strike two as well. The only thing that will save it is if the extension is is somehow relevant to the keywords. For example, I own a couple of .WS names. Not many. Everything else about the name must be incredibly strong, and the extension has to fit. A great example is my Themes.ws which is clearly for Web Site Themes.

KeyWords - There's nothing wrong with a brandable or call to action name. Okay, well, technically there is. If you are going brandable, it's a strike. If you've been paying attention then you know that going with a brandable or call to action type names means you should own the best extension, or else choose a different brand. This is not a post about how to find good keywords or how to determine how valuable or popular your keywords are, but the general rule of thumb is "Exact Match Searches" using Google's Adword Keyword Tool, and if that number is 0, then your keywords suck. But it's just a general rule :)

Dashes and Numbers - Again, there is plenty of opportunity for dashes and certain numbers (I like 101's for example), but they must be with strong keywords and use .COM. Are you following this so far? I personally include IDN's in this list as well, but others prefer them if they are the proper IDN characters. So be it.

Concept - If I can't immediately picture in my brain what I would build on the site, I don't want to own it. If the picture is clear to me, I should be able to make it clear to a potential buyer or, as a developer, to my audience.

Monetization - Many people only look at the CPC figures in Google's Keyword Tool. It's helpful, but it's not the only factor I use to determine if there's a way to monetize the domain. In fact, in many cases I've bought names specifically because the CPC figures were very low. Why? Because I had other plans to monetize the name that were more lucrative then pay per click ads. If the way to profit isn't clear from the outset, it doesn't mean I won't find an opportunity to monetize it down the road, but it's a big, big strike against it.

Length - Shorter is almost universally better. I'll only ignore this case if the keywords are incredibly popular. For example I own OuterBanksVacationRentals.us. That's a mouthful and a .US, but the keywords get as many as 100,000 exact searches over the summer months, so I forgive it it's great length.

I have a couple of rules that I also apply that are immediate disqualifiers, for example random misspellings, TM issues and general decency. For example Sharking.info was dropped this week and I had no interest in any of the varieties of Sharking topics (both with the fishing varieties and with the "de-pantsing" variety).

So let's look at some examples:

Free-Offers.info - This is a name that was just running through GoDaddy's Drop Auction site. The keywords, monetization and concept are all great, but the name suffers two strikes: It's not .com, and it has a dash. With .info, that's not always bad because .info is popular in Germany and Germany is famous for it's love of dashes, but I couldn't pull the trigger on this one. But rules are made to be broken. I recently picked up Paris-France.info when it dropped. Again, critical thinking is required when making purchases, but some names just scream out at you, and that's what happened with Paris-France.info.

GrapeJelly.TV - I just about reg'd this name for a fun project I was working on because the keywords are memorable (even though I was using it more as a brand), the concept in my head was there, the extension gave it one strike, and the monetization gave it the second. It was a fun concept, but the monetization was neither in selling or advertising grape jelly and no other scheme came to mind. If you know how you would develop and monetize GrapeJelly.TV, then by all means, register it!

LeatherBags101.com - Great Keywords, .com, Affiliate sales and advertisers would be simple enough to monetize, but its two strikes are the 101 and I just don't have a clear picture of how I would make an informational/101 type site about Leather Bags. Maybe that's a silly reason - maybe there's plenty of informational content that could be developed about leather bags, but I just didn't have the vision for it and that's enough of a reason not to plunk down $7 bucks for a registration.

These rules are my rules. I hope they are helpful but you have to find your rules and know how many strikes you are willing to live with in your domain portfolio. I'd love to hear your feedback at http://twitter.com/UtterDomain

Are Alternative Extensions Even an Alternative?

2009-11-30T18:07:00.000-08:00

I posted this poll up a little earlier as I have couple of names I'd like to develop where I own multiple extensions but I don't own the .com. For example, if you own the .net and the .org, which one do you develop? I know, many of these decisions depend on the name itself, but it doesn't hurt to ask:

http://twtpoll.com/3fwrlt

And while it's early yet, the results so far are kind of disheartening. How have we gotten, as an "industry" so hooked on one extension. I know the arguments - Google and other search engines rank them well, type-ins and marketing dollars, unfair registration fees and premium names held back for auctions, etc. And there are valiant efforts out there by really brilliant people going against this mold. Developing on crazy new extensions. They may just be ahead of their time.

But what will it take for them to be the norm? When will the insanity of registering complete jibberish just so that you can own an affordable .com end? Is there any hope that launching any new extensions or opening up any existing ccTLDs for global use will break the .com monopoly? I honestly think that until there's really choice, end users will always look at domaining as kind of goofy.

And one last thought: If there's ever a real alternative, will the domain industry be able to keep up? Will you be there when it starts? Has it already started?

Domainer of the Week Awards - Part 3

2009-11-20T12:56:00.001-08:00

Life. Don't talk to me about Life.
-Marvin

It's been a crazy week for me personally and a boring week in the domain world in general so you've just got 3 awards to tide you over 'til Turkey Day. Live with it.

The "There's absolutely nothing funny about it" Award

Goes to Francois Carrillo, the Frenchy bastard that does a helluva job running Domaining.com, for his newly launched BargainDomains.com. The problem is it's a perfect domain for a great service and that means that there's nothing I can say that will be all that terribly funny. Damn it. Better luck next time.

The "Welcome Back Kotter" Award

Goes to Juan Luis Pedro Philippo DeHuevos Epstein... aka Steve Morales, for finally getting his ass back to SimplyGeo.com. It's good to see him alive AND posting after his military service doing whatever the hell the Army Quartermasters Corps does.

The "Big Brass Balls" Award

Here's to you, Mr. Buyer of Whiskey.com guy, who not only took on the Castello brothers and won (well, if paying $185,000 for a domain name can be considered "winning") but now has the onerous task of actually building a competing service to Whisky.com. You've got a big hairy pair of brass ones, mister. Good luck to you.

I hope you enjoyed this abbreviated and overly sarcastic look at the week in Domaining. If you think I've gone too far or trying too hard, send your polite-ass tweets to http://twitter.com/UtterDomain. If you actually have a frickin' sense of humor, then you can check all the domain awards here.

Book Review: 4-Hour Work Week By Tim Ferriss

2009-11-15T07:24:00.000-08:00

Confession time.
I don't read "self help" books. I avoid "get rich quick" programs. And unfortunately I've never read 4-Hour Work Week until, well... this week. That may mean I'm in the vast minority as there are nearly a thousand reviews of the book on Amazon. That may mean that this little book review isn't useful to you at all since seemingly everyone else has read it. But as promised, I'm taking on book reviews and this seems like a book many in the domain industry are halfway expected to read, so it should be a good place to start. Why?

Making Money Online

Despite a significant amount of time spent on improving the quality of your life through various means, the crux of the "4-Hour Work Week" method is to automate the process of selling products online so that you can earn revenue from anywhere while essentially doing nothing. This is right up Domainer Alley. And this is really a very basic introduction to that process, with some specific advice for what kind of products to look for (high mark up for example), how to test your products to see if your product and your marketing works, how to reduce your workload by offshoring and "batching up" repetitive tasks and automating as much as possible, etc.
If you are looking for some guidance on starting an online business for fun and profit, there are a lot of good bits in this book to get you started and moving in the right direction.

Off Track

While I admire the author's "lateral thinking" (ie, thinking outside the box) ideas... and many of my best ideas have come from that mode of thinking... There are some mildly unethical, frequently deceptive and personally misguided ideas presented in this book. If you are a "follower" and follow this book to the letter, you may very well need the chapter about how to cope with depression caused by the 4-hour work week method :)
That isn't to say his at least some of his lifestyle choices don't sound like great ideas - the whole concept of mini-retirements for example is an interesting idea and one that I look forward to implementing in my own life adventures. But like Kurtz in the Heart of Darkness, his methods are (sometimes) unsound.

Useful Tips

And that's really a shame because there are some useful ideas presented here that, while I won't go in-depth, I'll mention as I found them to be applicable to what I'm doing and it also helped me prioritize my workload towards more profitable and automated monetization methods.

Services Suck. Pick/Develop a product that you can sell over and over. As a consultant, I know the problems with services first hand. But remember that there can be great results from great services, too. They are, though, by the very definition, labor-intensive.

Batch it up. If you spend all day following tweets and reading blogs, you will essentially end the day with very little accomplished. As domainers, it's important to stay up on latest trends, but batch up your time spent on these tasks and only allocate as much time as absolutely necessary to them so that you can spend the rest of your day focused on your tasks at hand

Automate it. Autoresponders. Automated order fulfillment. Automated phone systems. Automated. Automated. Automated. It's really one of my missions in life, even as a consultant, to make myself useless and that theme is discussed in detail in 4-Hour Work Week.

High margin products are the best. This may seem like a no-brainer but if you are choosing between multiple projects, this is definitely something to bear in mind. It doesn't mean that you can't do high-volumes of a low-margin product, but it's generally hard to do that well and do that with low upfront-capital versus selling fewer items at a higher markup.

These are really just the tip of the iceberg. The book is chuck full of suggestions and tips that you can apply to your situation. And because of that, I do recommend this book.

Throw the Rest Out

But like with many self help books, there are bits you'll just shake your head at. Don't let that upset you. Do your own lateral thinking and find what works for you. Don't let the "crowd" or this book tell you what's right for you. Filter. Adapt. Analyze. Prioritize. Focus. But if you are looking for advice, there are few books I've read, articles I've found or people I've met that have so many good ideas as what's found here.

If you have suggestions for the next book review (I'm thinking Crush It!) or have any feedback on this review, hit me up at http://twitter.com/UtterDomain

Domain Awards of the Week - Issue 2

2009-11-13T09:34:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the second edition of the Domain Awards of the Week right here on UtterDomain. In the fine tradition of... well, last week, we take a sophisticated and professional look at the weeks news and throw all that out and focus on the fluff. So let's dig in:

The "New Kid on the Block" Award

Goes to LuxuryNames.com for their newly announced auction powered by Snapnames that will run from November 18th to the 24th. They've released their domain line up, and it appears that they are taking the "if it's not .com it's okay with us as long as it has exact searches" approach to their catalog. I'm not sure it'll float in this market. My pick of the list is WeeklyPlanner.com with 12k exacts and a starting price under $1k.

Runner up on the New Kid on the Block category is Latonas.com which is gearing up for the 2010 domain auction season with a new auction platform, but in many ways they are really only New in Name Only. The new name does beg the question, "With so many Rick's involved over there in one way or another, why didn't they go with Ricks.com?"

The "Jail Bait" Award

Goes to the fresh young domaining faces that have started popping up all over the place like zits on the day before prom. Young whippersnappers like DotJake.com and TeenDomainer.com show real entrepreneurial spirit. Almost makes me long for those hellish days of Highschool again. I just have two words of advice that I'd like to pass on to you teeny-boppers: Stop registering all those MILF and Cougar domains, and Get off my lawn!

The "Pointless Blog Post of the Week" Award

Goes to the infamous Owen Frager for this lovely blurb as the entirety of his post:

Big News From NameMedia
Vips- standby for email alert.

He later updated the post to point to another post to say that there may be layoffs at NameMedia and other domain related companies. During a recession. Rumors of Layoffs. Big news.

Runner up in the Pointless Blog category goes to every other post Owen made. Just kidding Owen! We love you!

and finally...

The "We Really Get It" Award

Goes to the anonymous and secretive person who bought GolfShop.com. Why? I mean, GolfClubs.com gets lots more exact searches and is for sale for low 7 figures. Why pay 6 figures for GolfShop.com that only gets a measly 33k global exacts!? Because It's not all about exacts, is it? It's about brand, it's about creating a store front that can cover the entire range of products involved. It's about return on capital. You think the owner of GolfShop.com will really make that much less than GolfClubs.com could given equal development and marketing costs? And the owner of GolfShop.com didn't have to shell out 7 figures for the name. That's not to say that GolfClubs.com isn't a great name, mind you. It's just that I support those who make "unconventional" domain decisions, but smart business decisions. More power to them!

In case you blinked last week, you can see the past week's winners here. You can let me know what you think of the winners or the awards at http://twitter.com/UtterDomain

Good News and Bad News

2009-11-10T15:25:00.001-08:00

The bad news first - not a single bid on SpecialEffects.TV today at Bido. There was a reserve, so that might have caused people to hesitate with putting in a bid, but with 40k exacts and a relevant extension, I would have expected at least one bid. I hope the upcoming auctions on Friday prove that the issue was really that the .TV extension is dead in the reseller market for right now. We'll see if having a reserve price is an almost immediate "no sale" at Bido. If that's the case, then there will be issues as I'm tired of selling names at $28. There will always be exceptions obviously, but with having to pay per reserve, there needs to be a fairly high chance that there will still be some bidding on the name for it to be worthwhile.

That said, I still enjoy being a bidder on Bido - I've won two domains in two days that I'm very happy about. I won them without competition and I wanted to discuss why these names were overlooked by other Bido bidders and why I like them.

SonomaCountyWine.com

This was one I actually "accelerated" by bidding on it while it had no votes (or maybe only 1). My initial bid ended up winning. Why did I bid on it? Well, for one thing, it is one of those odd domains that has more Google results when you add quotes (4 million results when you add the quotes, 1 million without quotes). That in itself intrigued me. But I don't usually care about number of results. I care about ads, searches, brand and development potential and this has it all. Sonoma County is synonymous with "Wine Country" in California. This generic covers local Wineries, the Wines themselves, and Wine Tours. When you add all 3 keyword combinations, there are a significant number of searches I'll be going after with this name. The only real downside is that the exact searches are under 500, but that's really just the tip of the iceberg. A minisite is perfect for this though to see how well it ranks for various keywords and how much traffic it can generate.

SalsaBowls.com

Okay, you are probably wondering why I'm so happy about getting these names by now. Let's just say that I'm working on building up a nice stable of .com exact match domains. Particularly, I'm looking for around 1k exacts and with a clear product or market. And Salsa Bowls fits perfectly. The singular and plural combined total around 1.5k exact searches per month with a significant number of advertisers. While the product itself isn't necessary a high-priced item, customized team logos and more expensive materials like marble and ceramic can also raise the individual product price. The thing that really hooked me on this name is that Google only had 22k search results for the quoted term "Salsa Bowls" and the singular version was still under 90k. With only 22k search results, I can't imagine NOT ranking on the first page of the Google and Bing in very short order.

What's funny is that while Estibot apparently considers this a negative (as their valuation is very low), I am of the opinion that if there are advertisers and products and searches a plenty, having a low number of pages out there on the interwebs for my term is a positive thing. After some Googling of this idea, I ran across this interesting post on the very same topic that Elliot Silver put up over a year ago. I'm curious if his results have shown that he was right in his theory or not.

If you've had good results with this or have anecdotal evidence that having a larger number search results does matter, talk back at http://twitter.com/UtterDomain

Book Review: Sex.com by Kieren McCarthy

2009-11-08T15:49:00.000-08:00

Along with a number of new features I'm adding to the site redesign I'm working on for UtterDomain, I'm trying to fill some niches for the articles here. You may have caught my first "Domainer of the Week Awards" post on Friday, for example, which will hopefully become a staple of the site every Friday. One of the other new things I'm looking to cover is Book Reviews related to Domaining, Internet Marketing, Website Development, etc. What better book to start this review series on than one devoted to the most public domain dispute in the young history of the internet - the battle for Sex.com

While I may be fairly new to domain investing, I've been a hard-core Web addict since 1994 and have made my living doing web development since before the dotcom bubble even started. That means that I watched the fight over Sex.com unfold in bits and pieces as the lawsuits and the wild stories circulated the internets over the course of nearly a decade, but the story presented by Kieren McCarthy provides a whole new insight (for me anyway) into the characters, the plot twists, the stonewalling and the utter mischief that took place surrounding what is arguably the most desired domain name that will ever exist.

What may have come across as very dry non-fiction about trademarks, lawsuits, accounting tricks and let's face it, domain names (which are, after all, just words, right?) was incredibly entertaining for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that we are talking about Sex.com here. But really, the thing that really gripped me about the story was the battle between the two main characters. Gary Kremen - the original owner of Sex.com (and original man behind Match.com, etc.) and the thief who stole it, perpetual conman Stephen Cohen. Neither character escapes unscathed in this tell all book, and many of the actual events couldn't have been scripted any better if you tried.

For those who are unfamiliar with the details of the case, there is also a significant amount of time discussing the battle between Gary Kremen and Network Solutions (NSI), who maintained that they had no responsibility whatsoever right up to the point when the courts found that domain names are property and not just "like phone numbers" and NSI subsequently settled with Kremen. This is historic and historical stuff that, while not directly related to the ICANN dominated world we live in today, shows the roots of where those organizations and companies came from and how they do business. It's really eye an opening experience, even for someone like me who really thought they had some sort of clue beforehand :)

I can highly recommend this book to anyone dealing with the domain industry (and really, who doesn't deal with it?), as I couldn't put it down and I learned a lot about the industry I'm invested in. I also want to give a shout out to Adam Strong who sent me this signed copy as a prize giveaway during the Moniker auction chat last month at TRAFFIC New York. I enjoyed the book so much I didn't even mind that it was covered in Domain Name News stickers :)

I hope you enjoyed this review. I'm looking to do plenty more, so if you want to see me cover a specific book or if you have any suggestions or recommendations, please hit me up at http://Twitter.com/UtterDomain

Domain Awards of the Week - Issue 1

2009-11-06T14:05:00.000-08:00

I'm starting a new series here every Friday. We'll take a satirical look at the best and worst of the domain industry and make up completely pointless awards. The best part is that the winners will receive absolutely nothing. This is a great week to get started as there was plenty to talk about, starting with:

The "Me Too" Blog Award

goes to the entire domain blog community for their excellent and redundant coverage of the halveraz fiasco over at Snapnames. If you have a domain blog or twitter account and didn't blog or tweet about it, then you may be eligible for the "Comatose Domainer of the Week Award", but then you won't be conscious to read this anyway, so tough luck. The early bird gets the frickin' worm.

The "Yeah Right, We Know You Reg'ed It When You Were Drunk" Award

goes to none other than Rick Latona for his entertaining "Worst Expired Domain Ever".

The "But There are Starving Children in Africa" Award

goes to the jerk off who bought the Sudan for a whopping a $120,000. Oh wait, he bought Sudan.com. Nevermind. That's a steal!

The "Why Didn't I Think of That First" Award

goes to DomainSuperstar for their wonderful, marvellous, stupendous list of Top 100 Domain Blogs. Did I mention I'm number 68? What? It's updated daily and now I'm 72?? Thanks DomainSuperstar... you're a real shmuck.

And finally, in all seriousness...

The "Domainer That Even Domainers Don't Like" Award

goes to the asshole who registered and parked TeenGangRape.com. There's a special level in hell for you sir.. or ma'am. Even though you registered it in January, your ads were probably responsible for what happened in California... Well, at least all the readers of TechCrunch think so. Kudos to Sedo though for choosing "Cheap Airfare" as a related search term. Frickin' Genius.

Now, I'm off to see if there are any Fort Hood domains available. Let me know what you think of the Awards at http://Twitter.com/UtterDomain. Have a great weekend!

Putting Bido to the Test

2009-11-02T05:21:00.000-08:00

So, I've setup my Bido auctions using the new Bido Credit system. I used 5 credits to set reserves for each of the following domains that will all be auctioned on Friday, November 13 (lucky Friday the 13th!). If you've been following me on Twitter you'll notice some of these are recent hand reg's and some are drop catches. It may seem far fetched to put reserve prices on recent registrations, but these names have huge potential, with tens and even hundreds of thousands of searches (particularly impressive when looking at searches on the relevant "phrase") and/or high CPC figures. I wouldn't ever put these names up without a reserve, but when the minimum fee for Bido reserves cost $30 a pop, I didn't feel comfortable putting them on Bido... until now.

Because these have reserves on them, I feel more motivated to reach out to end users for these domains than I have with the last several of my Bido auctions. I'm not sure why that is, except that I know I won't get screwed over by a poor auction turn out. We'll see how those promotion efforts turn out. But anyway, here's the list.

SpecialEffects.TV - According to Google's adword tool, an estimated 301,000 searches include the phrase "Special Effects" each month. 40,000 exacts! Reserve is under $1k.
KissimmeeHotels.us - 110,000 exact searches on Kissimmee Hotels last month. The place to stay for all the Orlando attractions. Reserve is under $1k.
FauxFur.us - 450,000 searches for "Faux Fur" and it's related products each month. Reserve is under $500!
AdjustableRateMortgage.us - 27,000 searches using the "phrase" with a CPC of over $9! Reserve is under $500 on this one, too.
BuyCubicZirconia.com - 823,000 searches include the phrase "Cubic Zirconia" each month. This site can cover them all, from rings to necklaces, earrings to bracelets. This was going to have a reserve for the full $1k, but for this first trial run, the reserve is under $500!

Let me know what you think of the names and the reserves at http://twitter.com/UtterDomain.

Bido's latest feature - get free stuff!

2009-10-31T13:36:00.000-07:00

While I'm not sure how many spots are left, Bido is giving away free credits (more on these in a minute) to the first 100 people that tweet what the best deal was on Bido for October. If you want a free Bido Credit, post a Tweet in the following format:
<your bido nickname> says <the name that sold> for <the closing price> was the best deal @bido in October - followed by the link to the Auction.

So for example, my tweet would say:

theoretical says NassauFlights.com for $101 was the best deal @bido in October http://www.bido.com/Auction?name=nassauflights.com

For a full list of sales in October, click here.
That's it. Your bido account will get the free credit which you can use one of two ways:

- Accelerate your domain to auction. This means that you can submit a name to Bido and use your credit to bypass the process of having to wait for community votes. If your name is really good though, it doesn't hurt to wait a few days to see if you get enough votes the "natural" way - by letting Bido members vote on your name.
- You can use the credit to set a reserve price for your auction. This is new and it's huge. Each credit you spend on your auction gives you a cap of $1000 in reserve price. So if you spend your 1 free credit, you can set your reserve price at say $900. If you use 3 credits, you can set a reserve price of, say, $2500. Don't feel like you have to use the whole $1000, as you want to use a fair and attractive reserve in order to get bidders bidding. Also, there's a cap of 10 credits for a single auction, so for just 10 credits you can set whatever reserve you want.

Why is this important - you could set a reserve for Bido auctions before, right? Well, the key here is price and ease of use. For a few bucks you can now use Bido to list your high three and four figure domain names. If the name sells, you get your credits back! If the name doesn't reach your reserve, you still have the option to take the highest bid. The whole process is much cheaper than the fees that were imposed before, which was a minimum of $30 bucks or %3 of your reserve price, whichever was greater. That meant that it wasn't practical to list high mid to high figure names before and no one would ever consider listing five figure names because the price of failure was too high.

Now, bringing in a reasonable way to have fairly priced reserve auctions into Bido isn't a panacea. There are still issues. But it may very well solve the biggest issue, which is the lack of high quality names available on the platform. The saying "a rising tide lifts all boats" is quite appropriate. I'm excited about the change and I'm ready to start spending my credits. What names are you going to list? Talk back at http://twitter.com/UtterDomain

Focus on Acquisitions

2009-10-31T12:10:00.000-07:00

I know, a lot of people are saying "it's all about survival". Even more people are saying, "it only takes one name and focus". I'm not trying to tell you what to do, I'm just making it clear what my intentions are: The more people say that now is the time to drop your portfolios and focus on development, the longer and harder I'll focus on acquisitions.

You see, there are a lot of ways to succeed. You can put all your eggs in one or two baskets. You can bet the farm on a single $100k Geo domain name. You can spend your time writing domain news blog posts. You can also spend your time searching through drop lists, auction lists, domain forums and whois records looking for under utilized, undervalued domain names and picking them up while everyone else is just "surviving". I choose the later.

You can look at the drop in parking revenue the last couple years as the sign of things to come or as a sign of a buying opportunity. You can grab names from domainers who are focused on "what can I make from the type in traffic at $0.15 a click". You can be focused on buying names that end users will want, that you can see yourself developing, that have the potential to be truly great brands. You think a lot of people were typing in syfy.com before it became a television channel? Flip through your channel guide and look at how many ChannelName.TV channels there are now - there are several that I've found that don't even own the .TV domain name! Yet.

You can point to domain companies that have stopped acquiring, that have started selling names they wouldn't have let go of two years ago, that are folding up shop completely. You can point to the facebooks and the twitters and say "it only takes one good domain". I got into this business because I love the creative side of domaining, the branding and promotion of new and fresh ideas, the planning for what you could do with a domain name that was like a blank sheet of paper. Looking around at the quality of content that domainers and mom and pop shops were putting on their websites, I knew I could do better. I also saw where there was a huge potential of untapped end users who didn't know the proper way to brand and didn't yet understand the value of domains. That opportunity still exists.

I've not been perfect in my investments, but I'm not going to give up on finding new, undiscovered and undeveloped value just because everyone else has stopped buying or cut their acquisition budgets to a tiny fraction of what they were a year or two ago. I'm also not going to give up on development of my domain names either. Far from it. But right now, I'm focused. Focused on acquisitions. Focused on finding value. Focused on finding a way forward that works and that scales. Best of luck to us all.

New TRAFFIC "Appraiser" Contest for Rio.com

2009-10-16T13:13:00.000-07:00

Rick is running a new contest for chance to win a ticket to TRAFFIC South Beach in 2010 by guessing the sales price of Rio.com at the upcoming Rick Latona auction at TRAFFIC New York. I put a bid in for his last contest "Appraiser of the Year" and was only edged out by the fact that WaterPurifiers.com didn't close during the Live Auction (but sold at the event). So I think I have a pretty good nose for this stuff (though everyone has their opinion).

Anyway, my vote is in - $2.4 million dollars, approx. 8 times the reserve price. And the thing is, that'll be a very good deal for everyone if it sells for that price. Let's take a look at the numbers, shall we?

We've seen some low 7 figure sales this year including recent entries Ticket.com, as well as deals for Auction.com, Candy.com and Fly.com. But I think Rio.com will sell for more than all of those for a number of reasons.

1. It's an auction, and prices tend to build higher at auction, especially with the low reserve of just $300,000-$400,000 for Rio. Rick Latona's team has done an excellent job not only landing the name, but getting a really doorbuster type reserve. We saw the effect that had on the final sales price of Ad.com earlier this year, though that transaction has gotten held up for other reasons.

2. Rio is hot. Winning the 2016 Olympics is really just the feather in the cap. A $10 billion dollar feather mind you, but Brazil's make headlines constantly with their strong economy, abundant resources, travel, nightlife, sporting events like the 2014 World Cup and Rio is at the center of it all. Oh and don't forget Carnival!

3. It's short. Again, like ad.com, the value of a short name is significantly higher than the alternatives. Yes, the city is Rio de Janeiro, but A. Who wants to type that? and B. Who wants to brand on that?

4. Geo domains are big business, especially for tourist destinations. Forget about the death of the newspaper. Forget about small, local business advertising. Rio.com has the potential to generate $2.4 million in profit a year in just direct ad sales and travel reservations. Think I'm lying? The owner of MyrtleBeach.com did an interview at DnJournal.com stating that it Nets a million a year and that they wouldn't sell for 10 times that. That's Myrtle Beach! Rio, over the next 6-7 years leading up to the Olympics, could generate $15 million in profit very, very easily. That's why I say it'll be a great deal for the buyer at just $2.4 million.

5. The competition will be fierce. Seriously fierce. There are some huge players in this space with lots and lots of cash. $2.4 million is very high and assumes that you'll have multiple bidders going into 7 figures. I think we'll see it move past $2 million with just two bidders left standing, though and one won't be able to pull the trigger at $2.5. There's a logic and a method to my madness.

Let the games begin. Be sure to tell me that I'm crazy - http://Twitter.com/UtterDomain

The Problems with Bido

2009-10-15T10:34:00.001-07:00

Well, Sahar, you asked for it :) - over on the Conceptualist.com. Before I start though, I really do appreciate Bido, I have a tremendous amount of respect for the people behind it and I am thankful that they are so willing to listen to criticism to create a better product. Okay, here it goes:

Copyrights - or rather, the lack of concern there of by all parties. It degrades the experience when I see Bido pushing clear trademark violations - often times many per day! There should be a report abuse button or something in the voting because there are some really obvious issues (and some obvious typos too), that should be visible to anyone who would unknowingly bid on the name.

Garbage in/Garbage out - there needs to be tighter limits on how many names you can submit and the number of domains at auction per day. The broader they expand these, the worse the quality gets, the hard it is to stand out and the lower the average sales price is going to be. The only person that benefits are buyers, and with so many auctions and so few buyers, you end up getting buyers fatigue.

Not enough rewards in place for comments and votes - there are lots of ideas here, and you want to promote helpful comments and accurate votes so maybe base it on the final sales price of the name as a sort of weighted scale (if you vote for a name that doesn't sell at all for example, you get no reward from that vote). There are lots of possible rewards too, from increased weight on your votes if you are a good voter or acceleration credits, to more subtle benefits such as a more fairly ordered list of "experts" based on the quality feedback received for comments.

The transition from one domain a day has been rough - yes, there are benefits to going to multiple auctions but you've lost of lot of followers in the process. Things that still suffer include: lack of chat (too spread out and having to switch rooms constantly wasn't fun), lack of comments (it's hard to find comments for one thing as there are so many auctions), lack of quality and lack of focus.

I want more flexibility on reserve prices without having such stringent penalties in place. I'm the one who suffers if it doesn't sell. That's penalty enough I think. A fixed price for sending a domain to auction with a reserve or higher percentage charge for sales completed with a reserve are fine solutions, but the sliding scale thing is scary and I won't do it until it's less severe.

Affiliates - there's absolutely no benefit to me to promote your auctions, and therefore I'll promote other marketplaces where I have the potential to earn a reward for helping you market your domains.

Direct link to vote for submitted domains. I should be able to say "hey, this is a cool domain, vote on it", even if it's not my own domain. Right now that process is really difficult to do and so people resort to more backdoor means to get votes. Of course, if you limit the number of submissions, this wouldn't be as big of a deal, but it's so easy to get lost in the mix. Have you I mentioned you should limit submissions A LOT!?

Prioritized/featured domains for the day: Either include a voting mechanism, a paid for service or hand pick them but we need a way to promote the domains that are likely to do well but that get lost in the shuffle. The promotion should be significant, not just a star beside the name, but serious "these are the names of the day" kind of deal right there at the top of the front page.

There have been significant improvements to the communication and transfer of domains in the new peer to peer style, but it's crazy waiting weeks to get payment AFTER you've already pushed the name just because the buyer hasn't clicked that they've accepted it. I don't know if that means that peer to peer will never work, but it's really quite frustrating right now.

That's it. I hope this list helps. I focused on the negative because that's what you were looking for but I do like the platform and I do want to see it succeed. It just has a ways to go!

Sedo Bites the Hand That Feeds It

2009-10-05T09:51:00.000-07:00

I like Sedo. I have over a hundred domains parked there and quite a few more listed with them. Today I just closed an auction on one my names (Submit.cc) for $80. They do a tremendous job of moving names. But their latest decision seems quite greedy. They've announced that on October 21st they will be implementing a new "No minimum commission" offer, that is based on your domains meeting two criteria:

1. You must have your name parked with Sedo
2. It must be set at a fixed price

Otherwise if you sell your name through Sedo, you'll have a minimum commission fee of $50.

Let's take a look at this, shall we? First, Sedo has had this no minimum structure in place for parked domains for quite some time, but this "new" offer is more restrictive as now you must have a fixed price set for your names. Companies that try to hide more restrictions inside a "but it'll be better for you in the long run" disguise make me very cautious. But honestly, it's $50. When you look at what Rick Latona's newsletter has as their minimum commission ($200), then $50 doesn't seem so bad, right? Except Rick's newsletter caters to an entirely different market segment. It's rare to find a domain listed in their newsletter for under $800 for example (partly because of the high min. commission structure). Bido has not such minimum and their commission structure doesn't rely on parking, but they do have some caveats if you want to have a Reserve Price auction.

The thing is, Sedo has a huge segment of their sales that are for less than $500. For example, of today's closing auctions at Sedo, approx. 80% of auctions are all currently below $500. Now, I didn't check how many of those are parked with Sedo or how many are at a fixed price but that's a big chunk of their sales at risk of paying higher commissions.

I can tell you that this new policy will have a very significant impact on my own listings:

- Many of my names I've acquired for less than $500, but now I'll be very reluctant to sell them at less than $500 if they don't meet the above criteria.
- The advantage of parking with Sedo (where previously I would have no min. commission if they sold) goes away for many of my cheaper names unless I'm willing to set a fixed price, so I'll likely park them elsewhere. For example Submit.cc that sold for $80 today yielded $72 in proceeds but after October 21st would have yielded $30 as it did not have a fixed price.
- I personally don't like being strong armed into fixed prices for all my names. That's fine for certain names, but especially with, say .US domains, the price/offer prices fluctuate so much that coming up with a fixed price will be incredibly difficult. They also often sell for less than $500 which means that I'll be looking for other avenues to sell those names instead of Sedo.

I think this will cause prices to go up (to avoid paying a higher percentage to commission), will cause fewer sales and parking revenue for Sedo (though some of that may be recovered by increased "sales velocity") as domainers seek cheaper alternatives for the low end of the market and better parking revenue, and will lead to some upset customers who didn't get the memo about this new, more restrictive policy. All of these are negatives for Sedo.

But there's one positive for me - I'm looking forward to domainers putting price tags on names, as inevitably many of them will be priced below what they are worth (either because they relied on Estibot values or Sedo's own automated system). And in negotiations, having a "what they are willing to sell it for at a fixed price" gives the buyer an upper hand. Unfortunately though, there's going to be some upheaval because of this new policy and that means time spent on finding alternative solutions instead of marketing and developing my names.

Follow up on this topic via Twitter.