Is there a domainer out there who doesn’t wish he had more end user sales? The value of most domains is largely based on their probability of finding an end user and the expected payoff from that end user. Pay per click revenue is great and can certainly be used as a lower bound for the value of a domain making money (or even a good estimate of value for a domain that is unlikely to find an end user, such as typo domains), however pay per click revenue (and what a domainer will pay based on a domain’s monthly revenue) doesn’t tell us much about what an end user might be prepared to pay. It’s not easy (or even possible in some cases) to predict with accuracy what an end user might be prepared to pay for a domain.

Today while browsing Namepros, I came across a thread asking members where they drew the line when it came to end user domain sales. At one extreme, we have domainers sending out thousands of unsolicited, highly untargeted emails. These domainers harvest email addresses of end users or even other domainers and then bombard them with emails advertising that their domains are for sale or that they’re looking to purchase certain domains.

At the other extreme is the domainer who takes the time to carefully research the market and the companies which take part in it. This domainer then takes the time to send out personalized emails to a handful of companies whom he believes the domain would best fit.

Judging by the emails I’ve received in the past asking to both buy and sell domains, I’d imagine most domainers fall somewhere between those 2 extremes — one extreme which I’d certainly classify as spam, the other which despite being unsolicited I don’t think many people would regard as spam. 

One type of spam I never appreciate is an unannounced telephone call. I have nothing against someone wanting to discuss domains over the telephone, however if I’ve never spoken to you, at the very least have the decency to send me a courtesy email and obtain my permission before phoning me (I won’t pick up the phone otherwise). 

For whatever reason, many domainers seem to think the more emails they send or phone calls they make, the more responses they’ll get. Domainers might think end users are stupid — they’re not and don’t think for a second most people can’t tell the difference between a bulk email (which will most likely be perceived as spam, if not a scam) and a personalized email. Rather than looking at your 1000 domain portfolio and setting a timeline on when you’ll have end users contacted on all one thousand, why not pick out what you believe to be your 10 or 20 most promising and give them a genuine effort before moving on to more domains?

I find it hard to believe such a valuable resource is so underappreciated by the domain name community. Perhaps the Compete.com and Alexa stats are way off the mark — I can’t see how so few domainers would be taking advantage of it as a free resource and Alexa and Compete suggesting more people visit domain name blogs than DomainState doesn’t make any sense to me.

I do most of my posts over at Namepros, however I very frequently visit both DN Forum and DomainState to read up on what’s going on in the domain name community and what the thoughts of other domainers are on issues that matter to us all. I try and visit all 3 major domain forums at least weekly — many of the topics discussed on them vary, so reading only 1 or 2 domain forums means you’re missing out on topics discussed only elsewhere.

From what I’ve observed, most of the domainers on DomainState have been in the domain business longer than your average Namepros or DNF member — many of the domainers on DomainState (including its founders) were in fact among the first DNF members.

Having more talk about policies and issues pertinent to Internet governance,  discussions about the financial health of important players in the domain name business, and other topics a domain newbie may have trouble wrapping his head around, I can understand that DomainState may not be the most “newbie-friendly” domain forum out there. DomainState does have a “Getting Started” domain newbie section which would however certainly complement the domainer education to be had on Namepros and DN Forum. As a new domainer, why wouldn’t you make use of all available free resources? As much as domain name blogs are fun to read and informative, I have yet to come across one which compares to any of these 3 domain forums in terms of the knowledge available for a new domainer to make use of.

Domain forums can be a bit annoying, seeing as their massive amount of content can often make finding what you’re looking for difficult and time-consuming, however it’s well worth the effort.

DN Journal reported on a long time domainer having several domains stolen from him earlier this week, there was a huge theft earlier this year involving hundreds of domains including many premium .coms, and members on Namepros and DN Forum probably remember the large domain theft that occurred last year and involved many prominent domainers, among many other high profile domain name thefts which have occurred in recent years.

There are some ways domains are stolen that we don’t have much control over (eg. RegisterFly), however many other ways domains are stolen are completely preventable. Tech Crunch recently reported on confidential Twitter files being discovered and released to certain websites (including Tech Crunch). How did the cracker do it? Twitter was dumb enough to use “password” as their password, something which, by the way, any experienced cracker knows to try because it’s the most commonly used password in existence. A long, alpha-numeric password with a few symbols tossed in is nearly impossible to crack without computational resources far above the means of ordinary crackers.

Secret answers — here’s a place where many websites (including domain registrars) do their clientele a great disservice. Yes, we certainly need a way to recover our password in the event we forget it, however many websites suggest that people use secret questions such as “Where were you born” or “What was your mother’s maiden name”. Often, it’s not very difficult to find this information on the Internet and if it can’t be found, a little bit of social engineering is highly effective.

Email addresses — if you’re using a web based email provider, make sure they’re secure, trustworthy, and reliable. Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and other free web based email offerings I’m aware of have all had dangerous security flaws uncovered in the past which could have made compromising your email address much easier than it otherwise would have been. Many domain registrars make it very easy for domain thieves — enter your email address and we’ll email you a link to change your domain account’s password… While there’s no guarantee that any email address couldn’t be compromised at some time (eg. an “internal” job performed by an employee or a new security vulnerability discovered that people were not previously aware of), lessening the damage that a compromised email account will do is rather easy. For one thing, don’t choose a domain registrar who allows a very easy password recovery (eg. a domain registrar needing only access to the domain registrant’s email address to reset the password). Secondly, you may want to shop around for a secure domain name registrar and consider purchasing or utilizing additional domain security measures provided at the domain registrar you decide to go with. Having your domains always “locked” except when absolutely necessary that they be unlocked is a no-brainer.

Keyloggers are one of the biggest causes of domain name theft. Keyloggers are capable of recording the keystrokes entered on your keyboard, meaning that if you enter your password by making keystrokes, your password will be recorded and your domain account may be compromised. The easiest way around this would be to not enter keystrokes — something which many domain registrars have failed to make standard (eg. by “clicking” to enter your password instead of keying in letters and numbers). The best way of all however is what a friend of mine (Samir) suggested to me a few months back — enter your password in an encrypted file, preferably stored on removable media. Instead of entering your password, you copy your password and paste it into the password boxes. Something else I haven’t mentioned but which should be obvious — don’t use the same password for multiple websites. If this strategy of avoiding keyloggers seems like too much work for you, I would recommend looking into sandboxing. Sandboxing allows you to create what is essentially a virtual environment on your computer — an environment whose changes can be easily reversed. If you’re using a sandboxing application and you download a keylogger, the keylogger will be deleted automatically when you close the sandboxing application — due note that sandboxing will not protect you if you acquire the keylogger and then go on to login to websites prior to closing the sandboxing application. Sandboxing or not, it’s a good idea to have software on your computer to protect you from spyware, viruses, and other malware. For additional tips on protecting your domains, see my article on domain name security.

Last year, a prominent DN Forum member had his name registered as a .com domain by a domainer who, for reasons unknown to me, decided he wanted to once again cause a problem on DN Forum. Shortly after hearing about this, I decided that it was well worth spending $8 to secure my name in .com. I list my full name on forums I participate in, so it’s not uncommon for a few people each month to search my name on Google for example. Knowing how well exact match domains index in Google, I’d sure hate for the first result to be something along the lines of “Don’t sell anything to Reece. He’s a racist scammer who will reverse payment and then blog about it!”

For someone who doesn’t know me or doesn’t know me very well, something as simple as that might be enough to make them hesitant or even unwilling to do business with me. I do a thorough investigation (which does include Googling the person’s name) into a person’s background before doing large transactions with people I don’t know or whose credibility I cannot ascertain — seeing something along the lines of what I’ve italicized above wouldn’t break a deal but would certainly encourage me to do more digging before agreeing to anything.

There’s no guarantee that someone out there isn’t already planning on trying to destroy your reputation. It could have been as simple as an argument on a forum or an unhappy customer – there might not seem to be anything you did to deserve this (eg. if you’re involved in politics). It doesn’t really matter what the reason is, what matters is the damage that could be done. Most of us ordinary folk aren’t going to have to worry about a substantial amount of type-in traffic flowing to the .com, so settling for the .net, .info, etc likely wouldn’t be a problem. In the near future, I plan on creating a small minisite for my name just to get something indexed in Google before anything negative starts getting indexed in Google.

If someone is writing libelous statements about you online, there are many different ways you can go about getting them removed. Easiest would be to send them a Cease and Desist letter. If that doesn’t work, you can go after their web host and request that their hosting be terminated. Neither one of these are very good solutions — most of us aren’t going to legally go after someone living on the other side of the world and if their web host terminates their account, they can always create a new account at another web host. You can file a UDRP but even if you win, what’s stopping them from registering another domain with your name in it? Instead of ReeceBerg.com, they can register Reece-Berg.com or even Reece-Berg-Is-A-Scammer.com. One of the best ways to “clean” search engine results might very well be to do a little bowling — Google Bowling, that is.

We all know that certain things you do on your website can get your site penalized by search engines — some examples include paid links and too many links from bad neighbourhoods (eg. thousands of links in unrelated directories and/or websites). This is playing dirty but so are they — and this does work. Sure, they can just make another website once again ( just as they could in all the other examples), however this is one way that will pretty much always work, so long as the person bad mouthing you isn’t doing so on an authority website. Knowing that almost all search engine traffic comes from first page results, all we need to do is get them off the first page. An alternative strategy we could use would be to build websites (or use existing websites) and optimize pages on them for our name(s) [in the case this is also being done maliciously to businesses you own]. As an example, I could use this website to optimize a page for “Reece Berg” and because it’s has a fair bit of trust in Google’s eyes, I could probably get a page linked to on the homepage ranked well on Google fairly quickly. If you’re not up against much competition, you might even be able to knock results off the first page by posting on other blogs — as an example, DotWTF.com frequently leaves comments on my blog and if you Google “DotWTF.com”, you should see links to a couple posts on this blog where he’s left comments. Submitting articles to article directories, such as EzineArticles can also help push your name up to the top. It’s obviously more desirable that the top search results link to websites owned by you, however this is certainly preferable to having top search results maliciously attacking you.

Dominik Mueller has compiled a list of nearly 80 high quality articles related to domaining that have been featured over the years in publications such as the New York Times, USA Today, CNN Money, Wired, BusinessWeek, Business 2.0, Washington Post, etc. Dominik has indicated that he will be updating this list as he comes across more high quality publications covering the domain industry and you’re more than welcome to send him links to any articles missing that you think would be worthy.

For full details, please see: http://www.dmueller.com/domains-in-the-news/

Another silly thread on Namepros about the new domain name extensions: http://www.namepros.com/domain-name-discussion/597878-com-will-lose-ground-xxxx-travel.html#post3517585 .

Predicting the future is often a coin toss for even the sharpest domainers… Why do new domainers so often think they know the answer? And why is the answer always the exact opposite of what the large majority of more senior domainers are saying? And why do they think senior domainers are always out to get them, that they’re jealous that they “missed the boat”, etc?

This question goes a bit beyond what I linked to above, however it’s something I’ve been wondering about for a long time. Any new domainers want to explain this or do any more experienced domainers have insight into why this phenomenon repeats itself every time there is something new?

Press release available here: http://www.prweb.com/releases/domain/internet/prweb2662174.htm

.info deals can be viewed here: http://www.info.info/deals . You can even get a .info deals widget for Facebook or iGoogle.

Is it just me or do you not think this is pure genius? Seeing as Afilias, VeriSign, etc make money on every single domain registration for the registries they manage, would it not be in their best interest to encourage as many domain name registrations as possible by helping their customers obtain the best prices available at their favorite domain name registrars? It makes so much sense, you have to wonder why other registries aren’t doing it… Heck, why isn’t ICANN doing it — they’re making money off all our domains too!

I apologize for this post being a bit late — I was away yesterday and came back to negative comments regarding what I said about Domainers.org and cybersquatting.

Just to clarify my position:

1 - I was not paid for this post or any post ever made on this blog. Furthermore, I have no interest in ever accepting money for posts made on this blog — If I don’t support something, it won’t be posted on or at least not in a positive light. No amount of money will change that stance. If I decide I want to make money off this blog at some point, there are many ways to do so without selling out my credibility (eg. banner ads). I have ran this blog since November 2008 and my previous blog on 4 letter .coms at 4letternoob.wordpress.com and BQB.com before then, beginning in November 2007. I have not made 1 cent up to date off of anything other than domain purchases/sales and domain broker offers that came my way courtesy of this blog. Even the ads I put on this blog in the past were merely to support people in this industry I respect. I tried one affiliate ad for Parked.com for a week — didn’t get me any referrals and I haven’t bothered looking for a way to monetize this blog since.

 2 - Nothing I wrote in that post was my opinion or Francois’ opinion — I was quoting what someone said to him. If you still want to unsubscribe, go right ahead - less bandwidth for me to pay for. Like I said, I make nothing off of this blog so I couldn’t care less if being honest about what I think costs me some traffic.

3 - I agree with Jeff + Chef Patrick that posting a picture is best. I’m usually fairly sleep deprived, so posting a pic of me with purple bags under my eyes might make me look more like a junkie than a domainer.

4 - Kevin Ohashi, I don’t know what the hell your problem is. You come off as a real prick here and elsewhere I’ve read your posts.

I appreciate everyone taking time out of their day to comment on this post and others. Hopefully this cleared things up.

I received an email from Francois a couple days ago asking why I hadn’t yet gotten listed on Domainers.org.

I know some people like more privacy than others — Francois has made all information optional except an image. The image can be an avatar or a picture of you that is 48×48 pixels, although Francois’ site did a good job of reducing my larger image to 48×48 pixels. You can view my Domainers.org profile if you’d like to see what you’re getting — all the information you see there including the contact methods was strictly optional information that I chose to include. You can set up your Domainers.org profile from your Domaining.com account.

This service is completely free exposure — there’s no reason only 2% of Domaining.com subscribers should be using it. Francois told me he had someone tell him that the reason only 2% of members were listed was that 98% were cybersquatters that want to stay hidden. Care to help prove that wrong?  It’s the little things like this which will help set us apart. Like I said – it’s completely free and won’t take more than 2 minutes to fill out, so what do you have to lose?

Kevin Leto reported on DN Forum that IAC has acquired over 25 dating domains and websites for $57 Million in cash. Kevin reports in his post on DNF that People Media has 255,000 paying subscribers to it’s dating websites, so that explains the price. Looking over at the domain names, you can see there’s nothing special about them. It will be easier to build something great on a domain receiving loads of type-in traffic, however it can be done on ordinary domains just the same.

Larysa Mykhas, an associate of Brands-and-Jingles, tipped me off to a press release her company recently wrote about the .me domain name extension. Brands-and-Jingles is a domain name company which has successfully invested in .me domains. One notable sale I’m aware of that Brands-and-Jingles had earlier this year was LUV.me which they sold for 6200 EUR ($8600+ at the time of sale).

Even if you’re not a .me investor, the press release is well worth checking out. It’s very well put together — quality information presented aesthetically which is both comprehensive and easy to understand. Every domainer dealing in lesser known domain name extensions should take the time to put together something like this if they plan on targeting end users. Even if you’re dealing with an established domain name extension like .com, why not put together an information package for potential buyers? Another thing any domainer targeting end users should have is a website.

If you think that most end users will find you via whois, Namepros or DN Forum, you still have a lot to learn. When I had a contact link visible on this blog, I would get 1-2 end users and 4-5 domainers inquiring about purchasing LLLL.coms every month — even at times when I hadn’t made a mention in weeks that I was selling anything. I’ve had  people ask me to broker their short domains and partnership offers on website development projects. Almost every top SEO today recommends that most businesses have a corporate blog. You will not only increase traffic to your website by doing this but also establish yourself as a real person, someone people can trust, and someone who will do right by them.

There’s talk on Namepros today about how the Chrome OS encourages less type-in traffic — something which will no doubt continue in the future as both the Chrome OS becomes more popular (which should happen next year when the Google Operating System comes out) and more web browsers are designed with monetization in mind. Let’s face it — direct navigation doesn’t make anyone money except us and the search engines and the search engines would rather people go to them so they don’t have to share anything with us.

As it currently stands, search engines give a massive SEO boost for having the keyword in the domain. Plenty of research shows many visitors are hesitant about clicking links in “strange” extensions. Good domain names will always make for great domains to advertise - be it on television, magazine, online, etc. Good domains are more memorable and more trustworthy.

While I do agree that type-in traffic will likely decline over the next few years among current Internet users, suggesting that this will somehow affect the value of generic .coms (the suggestion a poster made on Namepros) is flawed. For one thing, more and more people are joining the Internet each day, meaning even if type-in traffic declines as a percentage, the amount of type-in traffic domains receive may actually go up. Second of all, generic .coms aren’t sold based on their revenue or type-in traffic. Sure, people might pay a bit less for a domain if it receives no type-in traffic, however most generic domains are sold based on potential, not based on a revenue multiple of what they make undeveloped.

The domains I see being most affected should we experience a large drop in type-in traffic in the future would be mediocre .com domains whose value lies in the revenue it derives from direct navigation traffic. Typo domains would be the biggest loser in my opinion, followed by long-tail domains which are great for development but would no longer be for domain parking.

ICANN is inviting comments on a proposal to introduce a paperless, electronically filed Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (eUDRP).

Comments on the eUDRP proposal can be viewed here. If you’d like to leave a comment of your own, send an email to eudrp(at)icann.org before August 12th, 2009. There’s a discussion thread on Domain State open to discuss this proposal with other domainers.

As several of the comments left have said, a completely paperless UDRP is disadvantageous to domain name owners (who could miss the email notification). I have to agree that domain name owners should at the very least be given an initial hard copy notification in addition to electronic notification.

I’m in full agreement with George Kirikos that older domain names should be granted a longer period of time to prepare a response. If a domain name was registered 10 or 15 years ago without it’s registration ever being contested, it’s probably because there is nothing legitimate to contest. I would also like to see more time given for responses when the domain name being contested is developed. I understand the whole concept of a domain name being developed is rather subjective, however someone who has created a business around a domain name often has a lot more to lose and should be given ample time to prepare the best defense possible. Twenty days is an unreasonably short period of time to prepare a response for a domain name one has owned for many years, especially considering the fact mentioned by Mr. Kirikos that complainants have an unlimited amount of time to prepare their complaints.

I would also like to see large fines imposed for reverse domain name hijacking. The time and legal costs for domain owners to successfully defend UDRPs greatly exceeds the cost associated with filing baseless UDRPs which as Mr. Kirikos has mentioned, some companies abuse as if they were “lottery tickets”. With some panelists clearly slanted towards trademark owners and the large discrepancy between the percentage of decisions won by the Complainant when there is a sole panelist in contrast to when there is a 3-person panel, a domain owner is almost forced to request a 3-person panel for a domain name he can not afford to lose due to a questionable UDRP decision.

Another thing that worries me about the eUDRP proposal is that emphasis appears to be placed on speeding up the process, rather than on simplifying it and ensuring all parties receive fair treatment. I hope ICANN will listen to advice on the shortcomings of the UDRP in addition to advice on how best to implement the eUDRP.

The past 17 months haven’t been kind to LLLL.com investors… We saw the minimum wholesale on LLLL.coms fall from $55 to roughly 50 cents and while other LLLL.com segments haven’t seen such steep declines, most have performed miserably since February 2008, with quad premium rares (AAAB/BAAA, triple letters, AABB, ABBA, ABAB), highly pronounceable and CVCV LLLL.coms being the only ones to have performed “okay” in light of the declines we’ve seen across all domain segments, these LLLL.com segments having performed similarly to LLL.coms (down about 50-60% for the most part; a few exceptions occuring with the highest quality pronounceable LLLL.coms [mostly CVCVs] which appear to be down about 15-25%). 

I’ve written a few posts recently about how the number of dropping LLLL.coms not being backordered or registered using drop catching software has been on the rise, and today to the shock of many LLLL.com investors, 25 LLLL.coms were available for hand registration this morning. Matt has been one of the most reliable sources for free lists of available LLLL.coms — both before and after the LLLL.com buyout occured, so if you’re looking for a few LLLL.coms to handreg, you might want to bookmark that url.

As a few domainers have been saying for awhile now, it remains to be seen what will result from the buyout failing. It wouldn’t surprise me to see many LLLL.com investors lose faith in the market… If February 2008 taught us anything, it’s that nothing kills prices like reduced expectations. I think we’ll see the highest quality prounounceable LLLL.coms be fairly immune to any negative repercussions from the LLLL.com buyout failing — these LLLL.coms have found a reasonable number of end users and enjoy similar status to LLL.coms as domainer tokens. They might very well decline, however I do think LLLL.coms of slightly higher quality than buyout LLLL.coms (eg. the lowest LLLL.com market segments for which their buyout holds) will be the most affected — quad premium LLLL.coms and weaker pronounceable LLLL.coms (most CVVC, VCCV and weaker VCVC). This could very well have an impact on the prices of pronounceable LLLL.nets which might now find themselves competing against pronounceable LLLL.coms.

All speculation at this point, however the LLLL.com buyout is appearing more likely to fail with every passing day. I would recommend anyone investing in this market at this point exercise caution. “Don’t invest more than you can afford to lose” is an understatement at this point. If you have reason to believe things will turn around X years down the road, go ahead and put a few bucks in LLLL.coms, however be aware of the holding costs — especially if investing in cheaper LLLL.coms. Like any domain name market segment, there exists the possibility to purchase an LLLL.com for under market value and resell it for more, however this is no longer the safe bet it once was.

Time for another GreatDomains auction.. I’m disappointed there aren’t more short domains this time around — it’s been a nice treat having large amounts of LLL.coms in the past few GreatDomains auctions, allowing LLL.com investors to better guage where the market was at. Anyway, here are my favorites that are up for auction:

Libel.com — reserve between $1000-$4999. If the domain gets a law firm even just 1 client, it’s paid for itself many times over. Need I say more?

Evidence.net — no reserve. I’m always a fan of no reserve domains and this one is no exception. Massive development potential (type “evidence” into Wordtracker for ideas).

eChannel.com — no reserve. Many potential end users, great domain for anything Internet TV related.

Beddings.com — no reserve. Obvious use which needs no explanation.

5B.com — reserve $5000-$9999. A nice 2 character .com that someone just might get a great deal. The lowest an NL.com has sold for this year was $8988 for 1J.com.

Other short domains being auctioned also include:

MBQ.net — no reserve

UVE.net — no reserve

MZW.com $1000-$4999

ZWM.com $1000-$4999

A couple nice ones for end user / development potential to be included in the auction are:

ExtraIncome.com $10,000-$24,999
Neptune.com — reserve $100,000-$249,999

If you’re interested in some tips and tools for domaining, keyword research, purchasing keyword domains, and purchasing expired domains, you should find this post useful. Before any veteran domainer spends 20 minutes reading it, I’ll tell you already that you probably know everything already written in this post — this post was written to help people new to domaining and/or domain development

There is no 100% guaranteed accurate way to measure domain traffic — even if you turn the domain into a one empty page website just so you can use a web analytics program such as AW Stats, there’s no guarantee the number of uniques it’s reporting is exactly the amount you actually received and even if hypothetically it was, there’s no guarantee that the domain will get the same amount of traffic in the future (eg. You don’t hear much about HDVD these days now that Blu-Ray has become the standard).  The same goes for domain parking stats — all the different analytics programs have their own strengths and weaknesses, however when Sedo tells you that your undeveloped LLLL.mobi is getting 100 uniques per day, chances are it’s 99-100% bot traffic.

A few domainer favorites (when you don’t own the domain) for estimating domain traffic include:

• Google Adwords: Keyword Tool
• Spyfu
• Wordtracker
• Keyword Discovery
• Alexa.com, Compete.com, Quantcast.com — these are much more valuable when looking at developed domains, however they can still help provide evidence that a domain does receive type-in traffic. A word of caution: Alexa.com is highly skewed towards technology/domain names/seo websites — if you’re going to use it, be aware that it serves no value unless you’re comparing similar websites and even then, it’s hard to say much unless the Alexa rank of one of the websites is much higher than the other. Compete.com only tracks USA traffic, so if your website’s traffic is largely international, Compete.com will be highly inaccurate. Compete.com has been within 200% of my actual traffic every month since I started this blog — not exactly stellar, however it’s much better than Alexa for comparing tech websites to websites targeting non-tech markets, so long as they have a similar percentage of traffic coming from the USA. Quantcast’s main limitation is that it struggles incredibly to predict traffic unless a website has been “quantified”. I don’t have a lot of experience with Quantcast, however it does appear to be a better metric than Alexa for comparing quantified websites.
• ** It’s always best to use more than one keyword research tool.With highly competitive terms where ranking high in the SERPs would be very valuable, it’s not uncommon for people to run automated scripts to intentionally drive up the reported search numbers – check what keyphrases the people ranking high in the SERPs for your desired keyphrases are targeting. I highly recommend downloading Aaron Wall’s Keyword Research Tool and SEO for Firefox (they’re both free for non-members on SeoBook.com). Last but not least, if the price sounds too good to be true, proceed with caution — this is especially true on domain name auction platforms which frequently report domain name traffic as being much higher than it actually is. With longer domains — call to action domains for example, it’s not uncommon for keyword research tools to mix up the order of the words. Search the call to action phrase on Google in quotes — eg. “This is my call to action domain”. If you buy domains because of their obvious applications – their end user potential and development potential (being completely realistic and honest with yourself here), you’ll probably find yourself making better purchases than if you buy domains solely because they receive XXXX visitors per month. Many domainers still don’t understand the difference between traffic and targeted traffic. If you plan on developing this domain, what can you expect per click (with adsense) or per action? Quoting Rick Schwartz here:  “What is the value of a click if I sell a $20 million plane?” That’s my favorite domaining quote right there — at the end of the day, it’s not about traffic – it’s about conversions.

Caution must always be used when using a keyword research tool to estimate domain traffic and you should always ask the domain owner for proof of traffic stats and revenue. Using an example of why this important with a domain of mine, let’s take a look at what Google Insights says about Epicatechin.com. As can be seen, epicatechin was a very popular topic for a very small period of time following a study by a professor at Harvard suggesting this antioxidant may be able to substantially reduce the likelihood of developing cancer, heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. Now if you researched the domain before and after the event marked on graph as “A”, you’d obtain very different results. I don’t support cybersquatting, however I’ll use Michael Jackson as a second example to illustrate how large of a difference there can be within a short period of time on certain search terms. Now it’s pretty obvious why the search volume for “Michael Jackson” went up, however it’s not always immediately obvious why a domain may be searched more or less at different points in time.

A few things to watch out for:

• Search terms that have received substantial media attention which hasn’t happened in the past and is unlikely to continue in the future. An example of something overhyped today and unlikely to be hyped as much in the future would be the “acai berry” for example. Higher antioxidant superfruits keep on being found every year or two and regardless of one’s opinion on whether the types of antioxidants these fruits contain are more beneficial than other fruits to human health or not, they do receive substantial media attention — the acai berry for example has even been mentioned on Oprah as a superfood.
• Search terms that are time-sensitive. An extreme example would be dates which don’t have significant meaning – “2007″ for example will get searched far more in the year 2007 than it will in 2008, 2009, etc. A date which does have significant meaning — 1776 for example, will be much more stable as the years go by. Time-sensitive need not only mean dates — technology domains are often very time-sensitive as well. Investing in technology domains requires knowledge beyond domaining and about the technology domain segment you’ll be investing in, so that you can make a reasonable estimate of how future proof the domain is. Much like with date domains, there are relatively safe technology domains and there are risky technology domains. A domain such as Laptops.com has a high probability of being meaningful 10 years from now. On the other hand, a domain such as PlasmaTV.com will most likely be far less valuable 10 years from now than it is today, as sales and type-in traffic get cannibalized by other display technologies such as LCD, LED, and OLED.  If you plan on building a website around a domain, do your best to make sure it’s future-proof. Blu-RayMovies.com might be a great domain today, however how stupid is it going to sound when people are no longer using Blu-Ray? Rumor has it that it’s successor is already in development. Something more generic such as GreatMovies.com on the other hand will make sense so long as movies are called movies — something which will most likely far outlast Blu-Ray. If on the other hand we had bought this domain for PPC revenue - “hypothetically speaking, seeing as it’s already a developed website and we know it’s definitely not a domain that would be sold based on a revenue multiple”, we’d be much better off with it than GreatMovies.com because Blu-RayMovies.com is much more descriptive of what a visitor is looking for — it’s clearly blu-ray movies, so we’d enjoy a very nice click-through rate on targeted advertising, whereas with GreatMovies.com, it’s hard to say what they’re looking for — VHS movies, DVDs movies, Blu-Ray movies, suggestions on what movies they should buy or rent this weekend, etc. 
• Fake traffic/revenue stats — everyone thinks it won’t happen to them, however it does happen and I’d hate to hear that someone it happened to was you. If the domain name (without extension) reports a very low number of searches, chances are it gets a very low or no type-in traffic unless it’s an expired domain – not always the case but it often is. The best method I’m aware of is one that’s been around forever — try before you buy. Get the seller to change the nameservers and give the domain a test drive yourself. Looking at the web analytics will also help you determine where the traffic is coming from — search engines, direct navigation, or link traffic. If the majority of the traffic is coming from search engines or links (probably not the case unless we’re talking about a recently expired domain or a website purchase), make sure everything is there haven’t been any blackhat techniques that might be employed which would substantially reduce your traffic. Search engine traffic is a nice bonus, however I wouldn’t buy a domain strictly based on that unless it was one hell of a deal — Google’s just too unpredictable and you could be only an algorithm update away from losing 50%, 75%, or more of your search engine traffic. Link traffic is great and usually long lasting so long as the links were mostly genuine votes for your domain and not paid for (or at the very least, links not paid for in a very obvious way such as under the “Sponsors” section of your website — sitewide links in particular are a big no-no and doing such is asking for a ban) or from link spamming. Lastly, try and find some sales comps and see how the domain you’ve been offered compares to domains which have sold in the past (easier said than done, especially for new domainers). For this reason, I would recommend NOT spending big money on aftermarket domains or splurging on a large number of cheaper domains. Take the time to learn about the business and afterwards, find yourself something that works for you and repeat it.

Note: Google Insights has been used above to make it visible how trends have developed over time. That is the only purpose I’ve suggested using Google Insights for in this post.

Namepros is hosting it’s 4th auction from a series of domain name auctions which will continue through July, August, and September.  Today’s auction is a general domain auction – any domain may be submitted to the auction with no restrictions on TLDs, prices, or domain quality. At the time of this post, the auction queue is still open, so you’re welcome to submit a few domains if you haven’t done so already. Please be aware that if you decide to place a reserve on your domain, it’s possible it won’t make the live auction. In order to sell as many domains as possible, Namepros gives precedence to domains which have met their reserve price in the event that time begins to run short and not all domains are able to be auctioned.  The last auction I attended was on July 2nd — the Namepros short domain live auction. The cutoff used that day when time started to run short was to auction off only domains which had received pre-bids for at least 40% of the domain’s reserve price.

Once again, today’s domain auction starts at 6 PM EST. If you need help figuring out what time the auction will be at in your timezone, please see: Time.gov.

Even if you’re not planning on buying any domains, you’re welcome to stop by pre-auction or post-auction and chat. After missing the last auction, I’ll try and make time to attend this one. Nothing has caught my eye so far, however people have been known to add domains to the queue right up to the very last moment, so be sure to check back again later on in the day if nothing interests you at present.

See Sahar’s blog for full details. A summary of updates follows below:

• Submit up to 100 domains for consideration (up from 10)
• You can comment on what the experts say
• Experts can vote on submitted domains
• Chat feature for each item and a Global channel chat for all to participate.
• Multiple auctions per day, prebid periods of up to 30 days (at your discretion), auctions still 1 hour long
• Reserve auctions now possible

Sahar says there’s more to come. Why not check out the new Bido?

Whether it’s a domain name, advertising, job listing, or a price quote on getting a job done, I usually skip over anything along the lines of “Make Offer”, “Salary commensurate with experience”, “Please send an email to email @ domain.com for a rate quote”. What could be more important than knowing the price?

When someone lists their domain as “Make Offer”, I usually think one of 3 things:

a) this domainer is too lazy to price his domains (which I can understand if you have thousands of domains but not for people trying to sell one).

b) this domainer doesn’t know what his domains are worth, so he’s going to let people make offers on his domains to get a better idea of what they’re worth (nothing wrong with that and certainly smarter than pulling an iREIT and selling LLL.coms for $500 because you don’t know better).

c) this domainer is targeting end users with his domains and doesn’t want to sell himself short.

Domain sale statistics show that domains with prices listed significantly outsell domains without prices listed. I can’t remember if it was Sedo or Afternic who said this — either way, the message was that domains with prices listed outsold domains without prices listed roughly 4 to 1. If someone has their domain listed as “Make Offer”, I have no way to know whether they want $100 or $100,000 — this might be a good idea with generic domains or domains you’re trying to sell to end users, however you’re not doing yourself any favors by not listing a price when you’re trying to sell your domains to other domainers. You can always (and should) price your domains higher than your sale price expectations to make room for negotiations, however leaving out a price entirely makes little sense unless you’re targeting end users — domainers aren’t going to pay you an end user price, so you might as well just list a price to increase the likelihood of a domainer buying your domain if that’s the market you’re targeting.

As Dave (Randomo) on Namepros once famously said: “The sales I most regret are the ones I don’t make.” If you don’t have a domain that’s screaming “Find me an end user”, you might want to reconsider listing it as Make Offer.

As for advertising and web development, I’m a busy guy — don’t waste my time. If you want a certain price for advertising or web development, list it. If you’re waiting around for the advertiser or web development equivalent of an end user, will you be able to likely draw in these companies to your site and/or services? Is it really that hard to do what Andrew over at Domain Name Wire has done, listing what advertisements in particular sections of the website at certain sizes will cost? How hard is it to give a typical range of prices paid for certain web development services? There’s certainly nothing wrong with having a few things asking that an email be sent for more information, however having everything asking to email for price quotes is a good way to lose a potential customer’s business — especially a small business owner who’s likely to think they can’t afford the services.

I’m not looking for a job, however another thing I can’t understand is the logic behind employers not listing any hint of what monetary compensation you can expect when applying for a job. Asking salary expectations during an interview might be a clever way to get a worker for cheap (and royally piss him off when he finds out that other new employees with less experience are making more than him because they asked for more), however I wonder how many workers worth their salt are going to even apply for a job that gives no indication of what monetary compensation a prospective employee can expect.

Most domainers are both worried and angry about the Uniform Rapid Suspension System and the dangers it poses to all domain owners. But it could still get a whole lot worse in the future… UDRP, ACPA, URS — it’s not hard to see who ICANN’s in bed with and I’ll give you a hint — it’s not domain owners. If you think for one second that your .coms are safe from the URS, think again. But even the URS in itself might only be a small win along the path to what trademark interests really want…

Read up on eminent domain law — if the government can justify stealing people’s private property to further corporate interests, surely they can find some way to justify stealing people’s domains (eg. Kentucky’s attempted theft of 141 gambling domains) or blocking people’s domains (eg. Minnesota’s failed attempt to get ISP’s to block access to gambling websites) for corporate interests.

They’ve failed to do so up until now, however will that continue to be the case in the future? In all fairness, blaming large corporations really is only half the story — cybersquatters certainly do share in part of the blame and I’m afraid extensions such as .co, .cm, and all these new extensions soon heading our way will give corporate interests exactly what they want – a reason to justify lobbying for more restricted domain ownership and registration regulation.

I read about the Domaining.com acquisition of DN Gator both over on Theo’s blog (creator of DN Gator) and on DN Forum and I really can’t understand what some people are all worked up about… Did you own a stake in the business? Did you pay to use the service? Did you contribute any money to the day to day operations of DN Gator?

I find it pretty incredible that Theo runs a free service for months and then gets people calling him a “sell-out”, implying that he’s a liar, etc because he makes a business decision to sell DN Gator to Francois from Domaining.com. Another thing I can’t understand is the hatred some domainers seem to have for Francois and Domaining.com.. What exactly has he done to you? He’s fixed everything most domainers were complaining about and he’s provided us all with a free service which you can choose to use or choose not to use.

Criticism is one thing, however going out and attacking someone’s character isn’t necessary or appreciated — especially after people such as Theo and Francois have been generous enough with their time and money to provide the domaining community with a service free of charge.

If you don’t shop around, you might not end up getting the best bang for your buck in a minisite developer. It’s tempting to go with one of the big name minisite developers, however you’d be surprised how much you can save by visiting domain, webmaster, and freelancer forums and websites. As an example, I was browsing through  the Namepros Developers for Hire section and noticed one minisite developer (username: www.DONT.net on Namepros) who was doing a surprisingly good job for $20-$35 per minisite, whereas others have charged $200+ for minisites of comparable quality.

The cheapest minisites would of course be made using a free service like Whypark and you writing your own content. Another option would be to hire a copywriter to create the content for your Whypark minisites — there are some pretty good copywriters out there for just 2-3 cents per word.

The .me extension marks it’s one year anniversary since the initial landrush on July 17th and I have to say, I think most domainer’s expectations on how long the love affair with .me would last have been exceeded. Beyond the attraction some find of .me domain hacks, there are a few other things I see different with this extension that many of the other domain name extensions which have come out over the past decade have failed to accomplish:

1) Affiliated with a big domain name registrar — Having the biggest domain name registrar on your team never hurts. Many of the new domain name extensions over the past decade (eg. travel, .biz, .mobi) have failed to gain ground outside the domainer community because they haven’t had any luck reaching out to the rest of the world. GoDaddy was visited by over 4 million people in the U.S. in June 2009 according to Compete.com. Knowing the small size of our industry, we can predict with certainty that at least 99% of Godaddy’s visitors are non-domainers, which is exactly the audience which needs to be reached if an extension is to go from pure domainer speculation to having demand outside the domainer community. 

2) They’re not trying to compete with .com — .me is going after it’s own little market, as is apparent with it’s marketing, and is something which stands a much higher probability of success than positioning yourself as being better than .com, as .cc has attempted to do.

3) They’ve used multiple venues to sell premium .me domains — GoDaddy could sell all their premium .me domains on GoDaddy Auctions and avoid paying any commission to Sedo, NameJet, T.R.A.F.F.I.C. or DOMAINfest,  however they’re not going to reach potential new buyers and raise awareness by auctioning the domains on their own domain auction platform.

I’m in no way affiliated with the seller — just thought I’d point out that there’s a huge no reserve .mobi firesale in case anyone wanted to pick up some cheap domains for development. For those who think LLL.mobi are going to make a comeback, there’s a 50x LLLmobi lot currently at $81 ($1.62 per). See: http://shop.ebay.com/merchant/welcometotheinternet_W0QQ_nkwZQQ_armrsZ1QQ_fromZQQ_ipgZ . So many .mobi investors have fought for so long with those who said the extension was going nowhere. I’ve been telling .mobi investors on Namepros for some time now that they ought to spend all that time developing them instead of arguing on Namepros about the merits of .mobi… I liked the extension early on – it caught my interest back in 2004, well before the .mobi groupies got interested when Rick Schwartz bought Flowers.mobi for $200k. A lot of the ideas which could have made the extension different flopped miserably — RFPs, witholding the premium .mobis, unenforced development and mobile compatibility requirements, etc. Anyway, that’s all in the past…

I know there are a few web developers bidding on these lots — .mobis are fine for minisites which would be getting most of their traffic from search engines (eg. no TLD confusion) and with these lots currently under $2.00 per .mobi and many of the .mobis expiring in 2010, it’s quite a bit cheaper than registering new domains. For minisites whose goal is to rank well in the SERPs, you might very well be better off with domains in a weaker extension but with stronger keywords.

I’ve been noticing more frequently lately that LLLL.coms are available for handreg — that is, some LLLL.coms are not receiving bids at expired domain auctions and are not being registered by those running automated scripts which normally would catch any LLLL.coms which slipped through the cracks within seconds…

This is a scary thought for LLLL.com investors.. If LLLL.coms are available for regfee with 12 full months until renewal, it’s hard to see why a comparable LLLL.com about to expire would have any value. There have been a few of us who have been saying for some time now that we were deeply worried about what may happen in the LLLL.com space should exactly this happen. As we saw in the months leading up to and shortly after the LLLL.com buyout, it wasn’t only buyout LLLL.coms that appreciated considerably in price, but almost all LLLL.coms. The higher quality LLLL.coms haven’t exactly performed great over the past year, however their performance has been much better than low end LLLL.coms which have lost approximately 98-100% of their value since February 2008. Can we expect higher quality LLLL.coms to be in trouble should buyout LLLL.coms become readily available for regfee?

There are a few reasons I wouldn’t discount the possibility of that happening. First of all, as mentioned above, higher quality LLLL.coms did rise in price considerably in the months leading up to and shortly after the LLLL.com buyout. Second of all, almost the entire LLLL.com market has been in a slump since February 2008, so there must be some correlation between the performance of bad LLLL.coms and that of higher quality LLLL.coms. One might also consider the psychology behind there being an LLLL.com buyout versus there not being an LLLL.com buyout. Psychology is very much a part of short domains — we saw this very clearly over the past year as domainers largely went from thinking LLL.coms could never fall in price, to some domainers thinking LLL.coms would continue to fall in price, and most domainers losing at least some of the confidence they had in the LLL.com market before they started to decrease in price.

The first reaction by most is always denial. When the first few LLL.com sales were below the minimum reported by 3Character.com, most domainers regarded these sales as an anomaly — suggesting the LLL.com market was declining was treasonous according to many domainers it seemed… But the LLL.com market did fall and continued to fall month after month until it stabilized in March around the $3000 minimum wholesale level and has fluctuated between $3000-$3500 in the months since.

I expect we’ll see the same denial in the LLLL.com market. LLLL.coms are sometimes available for handreg for hours — something that never would have been imagined at the peaks of the LLLL.com buyout, yet LLLL.com investors have largely ignored this fact. I’m not going to try and predict what the end result will be, however I will say that increasing availability of handreg LLLL.coms is worrisome.

We domainers like to distance ourselves from cybersquatters, however how on Earth would anyone see us in a different light when most of the big players in our industry are profiting from cybersquatting in one way or another?

I was just browsing Sedo this morning and see that ToyotaHybrid.com is at $20,000. Over on NameJet, chuckiecheeses.com (Chuck E Cheese’s) is proudly displayed on their homepage as a pre-release domain, with bidding already at $325 and pre-release backorder bids still being taken until July 4th. Nothing on the SnapNames homepage strikes me as TM-infringing, however I didn’t need to look far through their pre-release lists to find plenty of them. GoDaddy currently has Michael-Phelps.com and PresedentHillaryClinton.com listed on their GoDaddy Auctions homepage, I see Pool has JamieFoxx.net listed on their homepage, and DomainTools has a typo generator which has no doubt helped countless domainers in their cybersquatting efforts…

These are supposed to be leaders in our industry? Be sure to send them a thank you note for all they’ve done for the industry when the URS gets passed…

I’ve mentioned this a few times in the past, however the disparity between GoDaddy Auctions LLLL.com prices and LLLL.com prices elsewhere is rising. Looking at all the expiring LLLL.coms on GoDaddy, none of them with under 6 days to go haven’t received a bid of at least $10. Keep in mind that all of these LLLL.coms need to be renewed, so a $10 LLLL.com purchase on GoDaddy is essentially an $18 LLLL.com purchase. Compare this to other venues such as eBay or Namepros where an expiring LLLL.com of minimum wholesale quality is now expected to fetchapproximately $0.50 - $1.00 and a renewed LLLL.com approximately $6.00 - $8.00… I’m not sure why, however renewal fees do not seem to be fully valued when people purchase LLLL.coms. It really makes no sense to me why someone would pay $1 for LLLL.coms expiring tomorrow and often not be willing to pay $8 for an LLLL.com expiring one year from now — as of tomorrow, that $1 LLLL.com will have cost you at least $8.

The minimum wholesale LLLL.coms aren’t the only ones performing well on GoDaddy.. Quad premiums on GoDaddy have historically outperformed the market average and that certainly still appears to be the case, with only 1 quad premium LLLL.com on GoDaddy currently under $130 (and they’re all 1+ days from ending). OHBE.com is at $1505, MNAC.com is at $805, TTRD.com and NBHD.com are at $555 each, NBIF.com is at $505, IBPD.com is at $455, and FDRA.com is at $355.

I haven’t put any effort into evaluating these domains, however the prices are far above what LLLL.coms of comparable letter quality would normally go for.

Yesterday’s short domain auction on Namepros was a blast. Read on for the list of the sales…

3i.org $850
Veyu.com $600
3RV.com $225
7OH.com $210
Yarz.com $210
ZXZZ.com $136
Axak.com $100
nm.bz + vt.bz $91
ELPW.com / IWNU.com / UODP.com / PIBW.com / EFMU.com $88
hex.in $56
AUWF.com/ CUWM.com / OAVU.com / PFMU.com $50
PEHO.NET $50
FYBM.com & YCNB.com $40
R-PG.com $40
Pogic.com $40
FVP.info $38
Blery.com $35
3-5-0.com 3-4-0.com 7-1-0.com 8-5-4.com 8-5-9.com 7-9-2.com 8-2-9.com 9-2-4.com 9-6-4.com 2-8-4.com $20
7-8.org $17
HFNG.ORG VTSN.ORG ETVN.ORG TVAK.ORG WBML.ORG LAYP.ORG PLIP.ORG MDHR.NET AMNP.NET ANNL.NET $16

It was a pretty good sale for short domains — it being a specialized event exclusively for short domains brought out a lot of bidders who might not otherwise have came had it been a more general event. A total of $2912 worth of short domains were sold by me, Jennifer, and Rachel at the Namepros Live Auction yesterday in just 2.5 hours — not bad! Congrats to all the buyers and sellers and a big thanks to everyone who came out and participated

I was recently asked if I could write a post on IDN domains. I don’t know a whole lot about IDNs, so I thought it’d be better to write about what resources exist out there for IDNs. I’m not sure how many IDN investors visit this blog, however please feel free to leave links in the comments to any other good IDN resources you’re aware of. My spam filter is set up to require comments with multiple links to be manually approved, as well as the first comment from any visitor, so it may take a few hours to get comments approved.

1) IDN Forums — As far as I know, this is the largest English language forum dedicated exclusively to IDN domains.
2) IDN News– Excellent blog for IDN investors. Some posts would be difficult for domainers unacquainted with the IDN world to grasp.
3) IDN Tools– Website providing many tools to assist IDN domainers. Also, see: http://www.idntools.net/links.php
4) Wikipedia: Internationalized Domain Names– Provides a list of domain name extensions allowing the registration of IDNs.
5) ICANN: Internationalized Domain Names – Provides a timeline for many past (and current) events in IDN history, among many other important IDN-related matters.

I received an email from Francois this morning letting me know that he’s launched a first mockup of what will be a domainer yellow pages site at Domainers.org. As an example, you can see Francois’ profile here: http://www.domainers.org/search/?q=Francois+Carrillo. Any information you’d like to add to Domainers.org can be done from your Domaining.com account under the “edit account” setting. I look forward to seeing how Domainers.org progresses and having another valuable resource like Domaining.com has been in helping domainers stay better connected.

I’ve visited many domain name websites over the years, however I’ve never seen something as aesthetically pleasing as BrandBucket.com. Every domain of theirs has a logo created for it, along with the reasoning behind the domain. The thing I find most interesting about BrandBucket is that the large majority of the domains they sell are brandables. If you’ve ever tried selling 6 letter brandables on a domain forum, you’ve probably found there’s not usually many takers above $20 and rarely any above $100.. BrandBucket has clearly positioned themselves to sell domains to the much more lucrative end user market — one which has a whole lot more money than most domainers and doesn’t place values on short domains solely based on trivial factors, most of which have little impact in the real world.

BrandBucket also offers tools and suggestions to help visitors evaluate domains, no doubt building trust in their visitors that this is a company that cares about them and wants to help them find the domain that’s right for their business.

Okay, so you’re an IDN believer — good for you. But can someone explain to me why someone would register (nevermind bid!) on a domain like credìtcard.com? I speak French myself, so I can understand why some people see value in domains which use different character sets if they have meaning. If I had to assign a value to a domain such as the one I mentioned above, it’d honestly be a negative value — not only does the domain have no value, however it’s going to send one hell of a lot of typo traffic to creditcards.com and confuse the heck out of any saavy computer users who notices the difference but hasn’t a clue how to enter said character on a keyboard.

Am I wrong? You can go place a bid on Sedo if you think I am — it’s at 60 pounds with 3+ days to go. Two bidders… I really hope we don’t end up with a bidding war. I could understand this back in the days when Sedo didn’t announce such domains were IDNs and so a few domainers mistakenly took them for generics, however it has a big blue IDN button right by the listing and goes on to explain what you’re actually buying…

Jason Lavigne from Rebel.com let me know about a special their sister company Domainsatcost.ca is offering: $8.75 per .ca domain in celebration of Canada Day.

use the promo code : HAPPYBIRTHDAY

It’s a 48 hour special, so don’t wait around too long if you’ve been wanting to reg a few .ca domains

Website: http://www.domainsatcost.ca/

Small post today but it gets across a big message… You have to know when to sell and sometimes waiting isn’t the right thing to do. Take a look at this article on BBC News right back at the peak of the Dotcom Boom.

This article really is perfect as it was literally written exactly at the peak of the dotcom boom. From mid-2000 through early 2003, the NASDAQ continued to fall. Some of the domains sold in 2001-2003 (eg. Inbox.com for $2000) would very likely have sold for 100 times what they did had they sold in 1999-2000. I wasn’t around in 1997, however you can read up on it and see how tier 1 generics go from being under 10k to being million+ domains by 1999. And then 2001 happens, the bubble burst and people think the whole internet was just one big fad. The only thing that really proved to be a fad was VCs shelling out big bucks on companies which had a good domain name (eg. Pets.com) and not much else going for them.

I’ve always used Escrow.com for domain transactions involving escrow service and they always do a good job for me, so I never had much of a reason to try anyone else. One thing that’s always bothered me about Escrow.com is that they don’t accept Paypal for domain escrow transactions unless both the buyer and seller are in the USA. Why? I don’t know. If it’s because of the risk of people reversing payment through Paypal, I’d imagine the risk is equally high that someone could initiate a chargeback when paying with a credit card. You have a credit card authorization form signed and faxed, you’re a licensed and bonded escrow company, and you’ve been doing business for years and years — I’d think the chances of anyone successfully reversing payment would be pretty slim… Anyway, enough about Escrow.com.

I recently ended up with a buyer who wanted to make a domain name purchase through escrow using Paypal. Him being from Australia and me from Canada, it wasn’t going to happen at Escrow.com. So we chose to use EscrowDNS for a couple reasons.

1. They accepted Paypal and had no rules about where the buyer and seller had to reside.

2. They were open on weekends meaning we could speed up the escrow process by a couple days.

All of my emails were answered within 3 hours and in one case, EscrowDNS had contacted the seller just 5 minutes after I provided them with necessary information. I certainly wasn’t expecting that level of service on a $1600 transaction that was only going to net them ~$100. Not only are they open on weekends, however they truly are open 24/7 unlike the many companies who claim that but really don’t deliver it. With a 14 hour time difference between me and the buyer, it wasn’t all that easy for me and the buyer to communicate in a timely manner, however EscrowDNS did a great job of relaying what needed to be done and updating me on the current status of the transaction. So when I received an email from them yesterday announcing the latest EscrowDNS news, I thought it was about time I wrote a post about them.

EscrowDNS is offering “escrow fee free” transactions for the entire month of August, so the only fees you’ll pay are the actual payment fees and what if costs to disburse payment — might be worth marking that down on your calendar and giving them a try in August if you haven’t done so already. It’s nice having an escrow service run by domainers and made for domainers.

I can’t believe how many people are searching for free domain names. I was doing a bit of searching on Wordtracker today trying to find some topics to write about and couldn’t resist writing a post about free domain names… I did a Wordtracker search on “domain name” to see just what exactly people are interested in related to domain names and came up with a whopping 984 searches for free domain names. Scrolling down the list, there were 684 more searches for completely free domain registration, 504 more for absolutely free domain names, 492 more for free domain address, 350 more for free domain free registration no fees,… Totally free domain names, free domains no fees, free domain name without host and free website domain name added another 1161 free domain name searches. That doesn’t even include the people looking for cheap domain names, cheap domain registration, cheapest domain registration, cheap domains,… And then there’s pretty much all the domain name searches mentioned above with “domains” instead of “domain names”…

Since such a significant number of people seem to be looking for free domain names, let’s discuss a few ways to get free domain names in this post. The most commonly found free way to get a website online is through a subdomain (eg. domain.wordpress.com , domain.blogspot.com , etc). They might make a good choice if you’re only planning on putting up a personal blog (or website) and don’t want to worry about domain name and hosting costs. Subdomains are a bad choice if you plan to turn your website into a business at some point for a few reasons, not the least of which is getting visitors to come to your new website. Depending on who you create a subdomain with, it may or may not be possible to redirect traffic from your subdomain to your new domain name when the time comes to set yourself up on your own domain. If that’s not possible, all that link building will have gone to waste and even if you put a notice on your homepage that you’ve moved, many visitors may not notice that — especially if they’re search engine visitors or people who bookmarked their favorite pages. Your website is your brand — even if you’re not running your website, blog, etc with the goal of making a profit, you probably at the very least have a message you’d like to spread. Who do you think gets taken more seriously — the person writing on a subdomain or the person writing on a real domain name? The answer to that question really isn’t any different than the answer of who is taken more seriously between the person with a good domain and the person with a bad domain. Sure there are exceptions — people aren’t likely to stop visiting your website once you’ve established yourself because you switched to a seemingly less significant domain name, however if you have no reputation, don’t you want to build up as much trust as possible?

So we’ve looked at subdomains and why they may or may not be a fit for you. Let’s now look at free domain names — yes, there are free domain names out there. There’s one domain name extensions which always offers free domain names – Dot TK (www.dot.tk). Other than Dot TK, there are a couple others which appear to offer free domain names but are actually free subdomains on very short urls — FreeDomain.co.nr and CO.cc. Whether it’s a free domain name, a free subdomain, or even free web hosting, you can be sure there’s a catch — usually, it requires the display of third party advertisements on your website which subsidize the cost of offering free domain names, free subdomains, and free web hosting. First of all, you have no control over these third party advertisements, so they may very well be promoting services competing with yours. Second of all, the ads are usually downright fugly. I don’t know about you but I sure as heck wouldn’t put Adsense or something equally as ugly on a website I put hundreds of hours into. Third of all, these domain name extensions and subdomains are free for a reason — because nobody would be willing to pay for them. At the very least, get yourself a .info domain name when they have their $0.99 promo deals or wait for Register.com to offer free .com domain names like they do every once in awhile. If you’re that hard up for cash that you can’t afford to pay $1 for a real domain name, do yourself a favor and get a job. If you don’t have a credit card or don’t want to give out your credit card details online and that’s the reason for looking for a free domain name, open up a Paypal account and help someone out online for a few bucks. If you look at any domaining or webmastering forum, they all have a section where people offer cash for everything from forum posting, to social bookmarking, to directory submission, writing blog posts, etc — these are all things anyone can do. Free domain names aren’t worth it — like I said earlier in this article, they’re free for a reason. If you want a cheap domain name so you can try out some SEO experiments or keep your minisite costs down, just wait for a $0.99 .info special and buy all the cheap domain names you want.

I’m one of those domainers who usually tries to avoid giving people domain appraisals at all costs whenever possible. Let’s face it, domain appraisals are rarely accurate and even if they are accurate in a reseller environment, whose to say the person asking for an appraisal will be targeting resellers or what a potential end user may be willing to pay? Unless the domainer plans on selling his domain immediately upon receiving the domain appraisal, who’s to say it will even be accurate when the time comes to sell it (eg. any 2008 domain appraisals are probably 30%+ inflated today).

That said, this post is about why you should ask for domain appraisals. I’ve seen a few other experienced domainers do this as well and I’m sure they’re not asking for an appraisal because they need help pricing their domains.. Domain appraisals are 100% free advertising. Go on a domain forum and ask for an appraisal on your domain and most of the time you’ll get 100-200 domainers view your thread — that figure doesn’t include the many more who saw your domain in the appraisal section but didn’t open the thread. Ask for an appraisal on DN Forum, ask for an appraisal on Namepros, bump up the thread saying you aren’t happy with the answers you’ve received, disagree with one of the posters just so your appraisal thread gets bumped up to the top and he’ll hopefully argue with you bumping it up to the top again, etc. I’ve bought no small number of domains having never known the domain was even for sale until the domainer listed it up asking for an appraisal. Launching a new website? What better way to get a few readers from day 1 than to ask for an appraisal of the domain or for people to review your website? You might want to make your domain appraisal thread titled “domain dot com” rather than domain.com to avoid the possibility of search engines picking it up in the event you get appraisals below your expectations. If the domain appraisals you receive were above your expectations, be sure to link to that thread to show any interested domainers what other domainers thought the domain was worth.

edit: This has been amicably resolved.

Since all the domain name blogs seem to be talking about it, I thought I’d add my take on it as well. I have to say, I completely agree with Elliot about Domaining.com. So long as Domaining.com isn’t breaking any laws, Francois can do whatever he wants to do with his site — it’s his site. Francois has been kind enough to include me and many other bloggers on his RSS aggregator and I receive more traffic to my blog from Domaining.com than I even do from Google – thousands of visitors for free… Francois owns a business and when he’s offering a service to us bloggers for free, it’s understandable that he would ask that we not promote competitors. If we choose to, it’s our choice — just like he has the choice to no longer display our feed.

I was one of the people who also received a notice from Francois to remove the Namebee banner ad from my website and I did so. Domaining.com really has brought the domain industry closer together and alllowed many of us who can’t find time to attend domain conferences the opportunity to meet domainers who we likely wouldn’t otherwise have had the chance to meet. I’m very surprised by some of the comments circulating on some of the domain blogs.. You may not agree with the decision and that’s fine – you’re entitled to your opinion as well, however do you really need to bad mouth someone who has done so much for the domain industry?

I know a lot of domainers who tread very close to the cybersquatter line — they might be legally safe, however they continue to encourage the “All domainers are cybersquatters” mentality. With all the talk about the URS and how this could destroy domainers, I’m flabbergasted to see domainers literally cheering on .cm — many of whom are of course only interested because it will provide them with the best opportunity in a decade to cybersquat . First thought that comes to mind — Are you that stupid? Pardon my language but other words just don’t express my shock. Domainers like to complain about stuff like the UDRP but why do we have a UDRP in the first place? Because a whole lot of stupid domainers thought it’d be a brilliant idea to register McDonalds.com and hold them hostage for $10,000 and a Happy Meal.

Do you think ICANN and big corporations aren’t going to closely monitor registrations in the .cm extension? Will this Cameroonian extension not provide the evidence they need to show that domainers really are cybersquatters and that increased protection such as the URS need to be implemented? How much unnecessary stress and hardship has the UDRP and ACPA caused many domainers? How many panelists have become biased towards corporations because of how much blatant cybersquatting they’ve seen?

Squat all the domains you want but just know that some people like me have had it with trademark infringing scum and I’m going to personally do companies like McDonald’s a favor and alert them to these scumbags infringing on their mark(s). Why? Because I make my money honestly and I’m sick of being associated with these pathetic individuals who have no creative ideas of their own and hence decide to profit off those of others.

When it comes to buying domains, selling domains, developing your domains, or otherwise monetizing your domains, be careful of whom you seek advice from. As great of a resource as domain forums are, many domain name investors spread terrible advice about what domains are worth, how to go about selling a domain, where and who you should use to broker your domain, and how you should go about monetizing your domain. The 80-20 rule, when applied to the domain name world is the realization that 80% of the domain name investors out there don’t know what they’re talking about, whereas the other 20% are very helpful and well worth listening to most of the time if you’re new to the domain industry.

Let’s start first with domain appraisals — ask yourself if a person may have hidden motives behind giving you an appraisal on your domain or asking you to get an appraisal on your domain. In many cases, domain appraisals are asked for from the owner of a domain appraisal company — he’s not interested in your domain, he’s interested in your money! Worse still, these domain appraisals are rarely accurate, so you’re no closer to understanding what your domain is worth. When asking for domain appraisals, a couple rules to follow are to never pay for the domain appraisal and never take a single domain appraisal as anything more than one domain name investor’s opinion. Seek out multiple domain appraisals by asking for a domain appraisal on a popular forum such as Namepros or DN Forum. A popular way of mine to get a better idea of what my domains are worth is to pretend I’m interested in selling them — put the domains up for sale in the “Make Offer” section of domain forums and observe the offers you get. If you’re still unsure about whether you’re getting the most for your domain that you can on the domain aftermarket, consider placing the domain on auction at a popular domain auction venue such as Sedo, AfternicDLS, Godaddy Auctions, or even eBay. If you decide to use eBay for your domain auctions, be sure to make sure you read the information on my blog about selling domains on eBay and how to make sure you get as much for your domains on eBay as possible.

This is something most domainers already know but for any new domainers reading, please be careful when using sales comps. I was reading Namepros today and came across a post about someone who paid $2500 for an LLLL.com. Now as much as I like LLLL.coms, there really aren’t a whole lot out there that are worth this price.

If you look at DN Journal, you’ll see that each week there are a few LLLL.coms in the list. The thing you have to remember when browsing DN Journal is that they only list sales above $1000, so the LLLL.coms you see listed on DN Journal aren’t necessarily a good representation of what they would normally go for. More often than not, they tend to be what I would lump in the “extreme outlier” / end user category. With keyword domains, there are far more that are worth $1000+ and so it’s much easier to use a resource like DN Journal to get an idea of what a certain keyword domain may be worth — there are still end user sales here that are for more than domainers would be willing to pay, however by looking at several months of DN Journal weekly sales reports, you can get a pretty good idea of what a keyword domain is likely worth when considering the price it went for and applying other metrics. You can read all the DN Journal sales reports you want and not be any closer to understanding what your LLLL.com is actually worth because of that $1000 minimum which is in itself already an extreme outlier for the large majority of LLLL.coms.

Aside from pronounceable LLLL.coms, it’s a fairly safe bet to suggest you’re overpaying if you spend $2500 on an LLLL.com. In this particular case, it looks like the domainer might be somewhat of an end user himself — I’m not really sure what to make of it as he asked other domainers what they thought it was worth but then did go on to mention that the reason he bought it was that it was the closest thing to his forum username that he was able to buy.

Another area new domain investors are misled is with threads on domain forums (or on other domain name websites) promising them returns on their domain investments which are impossible to guarantee. What I’m talking about here are the domain investors who push domain name landrushes and domain name buyouts on other domain investors — while these occasionally work out (I made about $70,000 within about 4 months following the LLLL.com buyout), most domain investors lose money. As I always tell domain investors — do your own research. It’s your money, so don’t let anyone else tell you how to make your domain investments. It’s fine to read and even listen to domain advice, such as that which is provided on this blog, however be sure to then do your own research and make sure that any domain investments that you make are the right domain investments for you. There are many variables which could impact whether you should be investing in a certain domain name segment or another — for example, your need for liquidity. Certain domains are much more easy to liquidate than others. For the most part, it’s generally difficult to quickly liquidate for top dollar both very cheap domains and very expensive domains. The sweet spot is probably domains in the low $XXXX range from what I’ve seen — it’s a price which isn’t too high, so as to be affordable by most domain investors, yet it’s a price high enough that if you need some emergency cash, it’ll make a difference. Suppose in example you had 100 domains worth $10 — you’d now have to sell 100 domains to earn that same $1000 that you could have earned by selling a single $1000 domain. It’s not hard to see which domain investment is more liquid. Liquidity aside, we next need to consider how important these domain investments are to us. If you have a good (guaranteed) job, a nice stock portfolio, and no debt whatsoever, you’ll likely be less concerned about whether you lose a small domain investment than if you’re working a 9-5 deadend job for minimum wage, without benefits, and without any guarantees you’ll have a job tomorrow. While I haven’t surveyed domain investors, I would imagine most fall somewhere between those 2 extremes. I would imagine it’s obvious but I’ll say it anyway for any new domain investors (which are often referred to as “new domainers” in the domain business) reading — the more important your domain investments are to your financial well-being, the more conservative you should be with your domain investments. The converse isn’t necessarily true — many domain investors are well off but still don’t want to lose money on their domain investments, no matter how small.

So, what would we classify as a conservative domain investment and what would fall into the aggressive/high risk domain investment category? I would argue that no domains (and not really any stocks either) should be classed as conservative investments with how much uncertainty at present — if you really need the money to be there tomorrow, put it in your bank in preferably a high yield savings account or something else which is guaranteed. One step up from that would in my opinion be strong keyword which produce revenue. Many top domains have a lot of end user potential and the possibility to form a brand around, however if you need or think you may need money, you’ll want to go with not only a good domain but also a domain which is paying dividends - be it through domain parking, through the domain already having been developed, or through you buying the domain and developing it.

I blogged about this around 6 months ago on a different blog I had at the time, however it’s something I’ve seen too many newcomers asking about lately, so hopefully I can reach a few of them here through this post…

Why do domaining ebooks fail to deliver beyond the basics? In my opinion, it comes down to a few things:

1) Nobody is going to share their “best domaining secrets” for $29, 49.95, $99.97, etc.

2) The domain name industry is still relatively small. A good ebook would take months to write and a likely best case scenario would maybe be selling 1000 copies (and you’d likely have to spend serious money advertising to achieve that even). It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that no domainer who’s actually “making it” in the business is going to sit down and write one — there’s just no money in it.

3) Domainers are inherently lazy — and yes, this is true of me as well. I for the longest time have had trouble posting 1 (one) post on my blogs per week. Pathetic? Yes. A reality for most domainers? I’m afraid so. I’m getting better thankfully.

Do you really expect a lazy domainer to sit down and compile a 150-200 page ebook? I think not.
Don’t let anyone BS you — anything under 150 pages of Times New Roman size 12 isn’t going to even scratch the surface of what domaining is other than introduce you to the very basics. Matter of fact, a book of infinite size won’t turn you into a domain name expert. Why? Because much in the domaining world is about experience, not about reading. You can read all day about generics and what domains have gone for in the past — how do you apply what’s happened in the past to the rapidly changing recessionary economy of today? You can’t. You need to live it, breathe it, experience it. No ebook is going to do that for you.

It takes most domainers years to accurately grasp even a small segment of the domaining world — and that’s not because they didn’t have ebooks back when they started, it’s because there’s just that much which needs to be learnt.

Self proclaimed domain name experts will throw in some past sales, often a few big sales, pretending all their sales are like that. Look, just a few of the sales I completed this year through Escrow.com:

It means nothing. Without knowing what the domains in question were both bought and sold for, we have no way of even knowing whether the domainer is writing an ebook to “Share his knowledge” or writing an ebook to “Recoup what he’s lost domaining”. These might even be sales a friend of his made or Photoshopped sales with digits added.

If you want a good inspirational book, buy David Kesmodel’s The Domain Game and read about people that actually have made it in the domain world. Read the blogs on Domaining.com — all are 100% free content from real domainers who actually know what they’re talking about. Sign up on domain name forums (Namepros and DN Forum) if you haven’t done so already and ask any questions you have, visiting DNJournal.com, DN Sale Price, and Namebio.com to keep yourself up to date on domain prices.

A real domain name expert shares what secrets he wants to share because he wants to share them, not because there’s $19.95 in it for him if he does — think about that.

Even the strongest, most difficult to guess password can easily be compromised by keyloggers, viruses, worms, and other malicious software. It’s important to scan your computer frequently for infections. There’s no reason to not be using spyware and antivirus detection software daily. One common misconception is that OS X is immune to any security threats — there are keyloggers designed exclusively for OS X and the operating system being used has little detrimental effect on social engineering and/or other phishing/pharming scams – you’ve been forewarned!

Public Wifi networks, libraries, and cybercafés should be avoided at all costs when you plan on doing anything more than web browsing. I highly recommend against checking email or logging into any important accounts such as Digg, Facebook, or your domain name registrar from them. If absolutely necessary, change your password as soon as possible and when using a public computer, make sure that in addition to logging out of your email or registrar accounts that you delete browser cache, history, passwords, and close the browser afterwards.

If available, use an email address from your Internet Service Provider for your important domains and websites. If you’re using an ISP-based email and plan on switching ISPs or if you plan on switching to a new webmail address, be sure to update the email contact information on all your domains. Historically, there have been major security flaws in many free web-based email solutions including Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail. Should you decide to use a free web-based email, make sure you choose a strong 8+ character uppercase and lowercase alphanumeric password, preferably including symbols.

Make sure your email settings are set to “text only” and don’t open email attachments before scanning them for malware, regardless of the source. Without getting too technical, attachments, much like HTML emails, could be infected with keyloggers or other malware which could easily compromise the security of your email account. This must also be done before accepting files when using an instant messaging program such as AIM, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo! Messenger. Always remember – just because the email or attachment came from a trusted friend doesn’t mean it is malware-free. While likely not being done intentionally by your friend, your friend’s computer may have been compromised by someone else who is now using it to spread malware and has spoofed emails to make it appear as if they’re coming from your friend. While I strongly recommend against it whenever possible, should you decide to send or receive confidential information by email, make sure your emails are encrypted, providing digital signatures.

Should you require an email spam filter, opt to individually block out problem email addresses rather than using a more complete filtering solution – end user inquiries might otherwise end up in your junk folder. Whitelist (put on your safe list) the email addresses of your domain name registrars to avoid missing renewal notices and other important information.

DomainTools offers a Registrant Search service which allows anyone to purchase a list of domains associated with a certain name, address, or email address. After purchasing a list of domains associated with the compromised email address, it’s time to head to the registrars and click “Request Password”, which will unfortunately send the passwords to the compromised email account.

Using multiple email addresses with a different email address for each registrar will limit the damage a hacker can cause under most circumstances if he manages to compromise the password on one of your domain accounts. Don’t use the same password for your web-based email accounts that you use at domain name registrars. Use strong alphanumeric upper and lowercase passwords at each domain name registrar, each domain name forum, and each website you’re registered at. Buy an agenda to record your passwords in and save you from the temptation to significantly compromise your own domain name security by using the same password for multiple accounts for the sake of convenience.

Make it a habit of changing any important passwords at least monthly. To add an additional blanket of security, when given the option, opt for a different username than your email address at domain name registrars – this gives any would-be hackers an additional element they’ll need to determine prior to gaining access to your account. To make hacking your account considerably more difficult, consider listing a different email address in the whois than is associated with your registrar’s password recovery function (the email you used when signing up with the domain name registrar) and open up multiple accounts using different usernames and different passwords at the same registrar – this will significantly limit the damage which could be done in the event one of your passwords was compromised. If you use your own domains as nameservers, make sure they’re not about to expire. If the domains you’re using as nameservers expires, an opportunistic hacker could register them and use it to compromise the security of your other domain names.

By using email forwarding, you can forward all mail from the email listed in the domain’s whois to the email addresses you used while creating an account with your domain name registrars. Don’t let anyone know about this email addresses. The person hacking an account is often someone who knows the person he hacked — be careful what information you share with others. Don’t keep any personally identifying information saved in your email accounts. Information such as credit card numbers, passwords, secret answers to security questions, and contact information for domainers or reps should never be found in your email account or on your computer. Make it a habit of backing up your emails and storing them offline on removable storage media (such as a DVD-RW, CF/SD cards, USB drives, etc).

If your secret question is “What’s my dog’s name”, it’s really not a very good secret answer to give your dog’s actual name – many people probably know the answer and someone who doesn’t know you could easily run a search on the most common dog names and try to brute force his way into your account. A better solution is to use the secret question as a second password – how many hackers are going to guess your dog’s name is “6Fw8a42N9fsG38”? I’m guessing none, no matter how long they try. Keep all your domains “locked” and inquire with your registrars about any additional security measures (eg. additional verification measures, passwords, or security questions) which can be implemented on your most valuable domains. If your domains aren’t locked, they can be transferred away without your permission should you not deny transfer requests. If your registrar doesn’t offer additional security measures, transfer your valuable domains to a registrar which does (eg. Moniker Max Lock, Fabulous.com Executive Lock, Godaddy Protected Registration).

Keep on top of the news (especially the bad news) about your registrar. If things are heading south, you’ll want to get out of there asap. You should always have a contingency plan and money set aside in the event something does go wrong. Place all domains you intend to keep on auto-renew, however consider renewing them earlier if you can afford to. Renewing your best domains for an additional year is always a good idea and can protect you from possibly losing them in the event someone fraudulently obtains control of your domains, your auto-renew payment source doesn’t go through (eg. expired/stolen credit card, empty Paypal account), Acts of God resulting in your registrar being unable to process your payments, etc.

While looking up the whois, observe if it’s been updated recently (this could indicate a recent fraudulent transfer of ownership). Enter the information listed in the whois (such as name and email address) into Google and look for anything suspicious. Ask about the domain discretely with domainers who are “in the know”. Always remember that nothing is certain on the Internet and it’s always best to take more precautions than not enough. Google the domain name with and without extension. Enter additional keywords such as: namepros, dnforum, digital point, etc to get relevant search engine results for a particular domain name forum. Add in additional words such as: stolen, fraud, hijacked, hijacker, thief, missing, chargeback, paypal . Pretend one of your domains just got stolen – what would you do? Put yourself in that person’s shoes and try to outsmart any domain name thief by uncovering the truth. Example search engine queries include:

a) domain.com stolen namepros

b) domain.com missing dnforum

c) domain.com paypal chargeback

Make sure you don’t enter the search terms in quotations – this will produce only exact matches and in the case of a stolen domain, will result in you likely missing any information about it’s theft.

If a domain’s price seems “too good to be true”, proceed with caution. The biggest indicator of a domain name scam is often the price the domain is being sold for – the scammer wants to offload the domain as quickly as possible before the rightful owner reclaims it. Keep a watchful eye on newer domain name forum members selling expensive domains. View their profile and read some of their recent posts. A good way to avoid most domain scams is to only deal with domainers who have a good reputation. On domain name forums, this is easily determined by looking at their iTrader rating and observing comments from other domainers about previous transactions. Are the people who’ve been leaving comments new domainers (possibly fake duplicate accounts by the scammer) or experienced veterans? Phone the number listed in the whois for the domain and verify that the person answering the phone is currently in possession of the domain. If more than one person is listed in the domain’s whois, contact the other people listed – the person attempting to sell the domain could be an angry employee or part owner who isn’t authorized to sell the domain, something which brings me to another notable point worth discussing – Make sure you completely trust anyone listed in the whois as administrative, billing, or technical contact. Imagine a few worst case scenarios – the billing contact (who is in charge of paying renewal fees) forgets to renew your domain, the technical contact accidentally or maliciously changes all the nameservers on your domains bringing parking and website revenue crashing down to zero, and the administrative contact doesn’t feel he’s being properly compensated for his time and decides to sell a few of your valuable domains! For these and many more reasons, it’s best to have all contacts listed as you whenever possible.

Make it a habit of logging into your domain name accounts at least every 2-3 days and making sure nothing is missing. Use domain name monitoring software (eg. http://www.domaintools.com/monitor/ ) as an added security measure, however this is not a replacement for logging into your accounts regularly. If you discover any domains missing or with changes you didn’t authorize, phone your registrar immediately and provide them with any information they ask you to provide about the missing domain, such as when you were last aware of the domain being in your account and if you have any proof that you’re the legitimate owner. Your registrar will likely ask you to sign some forms including a liability waiver – truth be told, in most instances I’m aware of, blame falls 100% on the domain owner for not taking necessary security precautions discussed in this article. If you want your registrar’s help, you’ll need to sign the forms they ask you to sign. Many hackers will leave your whois info intact (especially if they’ve compromised the email address listed in the whois) – this makes it harder for a registrar to determine whether your domains have been compromised or not. Check domain name forums to make sure your stolen domain isn’t being put up for sale. If it is, alert moderators to the thread immediately.

If you can prove to your registrar that you’ve filed an ownership dispute, they may be willing to “freeze” your domains, preventing transfer or further modification of whois information pending the outcome of their investigation. If your domains get transferred to another registrar, it will be much more difficult to recover them. See my article on Sandboxing

for more tips on how to keep your domains safe.

Both keyword domain names and short domain names have value. Of course all domain names have intrinsic value because each and every domain name is unique. However, many domainers like to concentrate on their particular money making “niche”. Keyword domains and short domains are 2 of those niches. Let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of each:

Keyword Domain Names

PRO

• Strong SEO benefit if the domain owner decides to develop the site. Exact match .com domains enjoy the most SEO benefit.
• Potential for type in traffic (this is especially true if a domain is both a keyword domain name and is a short domain name).
• High likelihood of being seen as a trusted “authority” on the targeted keyword (i.e. “loans.com” would enjoy a higher degree of perceived authority for the keyword “loans” than would a non exact match keyword domain like “123-online-loan-finder.net”.

CON

• Potentially hard to brand when developing because a keyword domain is by default a generic term.

Short Domain Names

PRO

• Potentially very easy to remember.
• Potentially great for branding.
• Great for offline marketing (fits easily on business cards, marketing material, etc.)

CON

• An unnatural short domain can be hard to remember as opposed to even a long keyword domain that has easy to remember keywords.

Additional Considerations

What did I miss? Are there any other things that you would like to add to the mix for comparing keyword domain names and short domain names?

About the Author: This post was written by Joel Ohman. Joel runs the domain name tools site DomainSuperstar.com and has a goal of helping everyone consistently find awesome money making domain names!

Perhaps the biggest scam of them all is the scam new domainers pull on themselves when they decide to go out into the domaining world and start buying domains without the requisite knowledge and experience. We’re going to look at niche domaining and trendwatching in this article, two important concepts in modern domaining for those on a limited budget and those aspiring for enormous returns on their domain investments.

Successful trend watching or niche domaining requires skill, discipline, patience, and persistence. Ideally, choose a topic which interests you so all the work involved doesn’t feel like such a burden. That said, it’s important to make sure your niche has both a reasonably large audience (or the potential for a reasonably large audience) and is reasonably wealthy — this applies not only to niche domaining and trendwatching, but domaining in general, really. The wealthier potential end users and applications of products in this niche are, the more likely you are to turn a profit should it pan out.

For most trend watching domainers, it’s a good idea to find like-minded individuals whom you’ll be able to consult with and ensure you don’t register a bunch of silly domains. It’s great to envision a future full of interstellar spacecraft powered by antimatter and deuterium-tritium fusion if you’re working on a sci-fi movie — if you’re planning on turning a profit on your domains in this century, you’ll have to unfortunately look at technologies which are a bit closer to being realized today, such as wind power and hydrogen in the alternative energy segment.

Trend watching isn’t about looking into a crystal ball and trying to predict the future, rather, trend watching is about using what information is readily available in the present and observing how this readily available information could and is shaping the near future.

Many new domainers make the mistake of entering the trend watching field unprepared. Trend watching requires excellent information sources. Bookmark websites and subscribe to blogs, forums, magazines (preferably online magazines), scientific publications, organizations, and books pertinent to your niches. Make a habit of staying up to date on current events and keep a pen and paper handy wherever you go. Trends come and go like fashion — it’s important to keep up to date on what’s hot and what’s not, realizing when it’s a good time to accept an offer and when it’s a good idea to hold out for more.

Google Insights is a free tool that tracks search query data, giving you an upper hand on the competition and helping you better estimate trend popularity. Google Alerts allows you to receive email updates whenever there are new results for your chosen search terms. Technorati and Google Blog Search should help you rapidly discover blogs relevant to your niche and keep you informed on the latest news making waves through the blogosphere.

Look at the big picture, study trends occurring across industries and relate them to your chosen niches. When studying trends, try your best to remain impartial and realistic about future potential. Don’t underestimate any technical or technological barriers which need to be overcome prior to mass consumer adoption. I often find it beneficial to keep asking why something is important until a final answer is reached. Called “5 Whys”, it’s a popular problem solving technique developed by Sakichi Toyoda.  Another technique is to think of ways to cause the problem (eg. Pollution) you’re trying to solve (eg. What are good ways to pollute?). If you know the cause, you should have a good idea of how to solve the problem.

In competitive niches, it’s important to remember that time is never on your side. The best domains related to new technologies, discoveries, or buzz words are often registered within minutes of hitting the airwaves — it’s not uncommon at all for the domain to have been taken long before then in certain niches like technology and medicine. There simply is no time to procrastinate. Effective time management starts with prioritizing what’s most important. There’s likely no better way to keep yourself motivated than to assign yourself an hourly wage and observe how expensive procrastination is. Keep an up to date To-Do list of tasks which need to be completed with each task ordered by priority. Proper organization is a must.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket — not every trend will materialize. Others will take far longer to come about than you initially anticipated. By diversifying your holdings, you reduce your overall risk. While it’s important to have a broad perspective and observe trends occurring across industries, it’s also important to remain focused on your chosen niches. Choose niches small enough that you can invest the necessary time to become an expert in them.

“Focus on quality, not quantity”
While cornering a niche puts you in a much better position when it comes time to sell, having 20 domains in the same niche also multiplies your risk 20-fold should it not pan out. Consider that carefully before going on a buying binge. Newer domainers and trend watchers alike often get carried away registering far more domains than they should when they think they’ve found “the next big thing”. Resist the temptation and stick to strong .com, .net, and .org keywords only. As a general rule, I recommend staying away from registering multi-keyword terms in anything but .com. Ask yourself, “Would I buy this domain if I was a business in this niche?” If the answer is no, then you have no reason to register this domain.

Buying niche domains with the goal of reselling to other domainers is a very risky, albeit potentially profitable activity. Finding end users takes time, there are renewal fees associated with waiting for a trend to mature to the point where an end user might be interested, and there’s always the possibility a potential end user won’t be interested or a trend won’t pan out.

Purchasing niche domains which were previously registered but which haven’t been renewed is another option. Expired niche domains will often be backordered and this will drive up the cost of acquisition significantly. Should you choose to purchase niche domains at secondary domain name marketplaces or via backorder, it’s imperative that you stay up to date on domain name prices to avoid overpaying. If you’re putting in hours each day studying your chosen niches, you’ll likely attain expert status in those niches in no time. Share that information with others through a website or blog – place some advertising on your site and begin profiting from your knowledge months or even years before the end users come calling. Building websites out of your domains and getting them ranked in the SERPs is never a bad thing and will only add to their value when it comes time to sell. Authority sites in most niches were among the first to cover their niche (first-mover advantage).

Final Note: Niche domaining isn’t Fad Domaining (we’ll cover that another day). There’s lots of money to be made registering current event domains and what’s temporarily popular in “the now”, however niche domaining and trend watching are more about focusing on new industries and products which have the potential to achieve critical mass adoption. In certain fields (eg. health), existing products may have functional benefits which aren’t discovered until a later date – here, there exists the opportunity to purchase  these domains on the aftermarket before they really catch on. Aftermarket purchases increase the risks involved in niche domaining considerably – tread carefully should you go down this route.

A great thread was just started by Gene over at Namepros. The thread asks domainers to offer the one domain name tip they see as being the most important for the success of a domain name newcomer who planning on buying or registering domains.  If you could give but one domain name tip, what would it be?

Answers so far are exactly what I’d tell anyone starting out in the domain name world — .com is god and do your own research before investing. I happened to arrive at the thread after these 2 suggestions had been made and hence offered the tip that any domain name newcomer read and follow to a tee the above 2 tips (does that count?). Those really are the most important things in my opinion — most domain newbies get burned if they invest in any extension other than .com, as do most domain newbies investing in .com without first doing their own research. Now, just imagine how badly burned a domain newbie will get if they don’t do their own research and invest in a different extension! Ouch. I don’t even want to think about that… “Burned” is too gentle a word to describe what’s resulted from their domain name investments… Does financially destroyed get the point across? What’s really sad is exactly what one person left as a comment a few days ago — that most of the people that need to read this most aren’t ever going to see it. Isn’t it ironic that many of the people that need to do their research most (new domainers) are the ones who do the least of it! How many of us won’t at the very least run some metrics and/or ask about revenue and traffic before buying a domain? Some of these domain newbies are so excited to get into the domain name market, it’s as if common sense just went out the window. I’ve seen a few new domainers now needlessly waste $5000+ on new domains. If they would have run these domains by anyone who had been in the biz longer than a week, they most likely wouldn’t have received the green light to go ahead and register these domains… But did they do that? I wouldn’t be writing a post about them if they had done their research! I could blog about this everyday..

I tease the newbies sometimes but the truth is, I don’t like seeing anyone losing a pile of money they didn’t need to lose. Those domain name registrars and registries have enough money already — don’t give them more unless it’s for good reason! New domainers today are lucky there are so many resources out there to help them. New domainers can complain all they want about there being slim pickings today as compared to the past, but I think any domainers who’s been around a few years knows how easy these newcomers have it today — the domain forums literally serve all the domain name information a domain newbie could possibly want on a silver platter. And let’s not forget about the tens of thousands of members on these domain name forums offering advice, many of whom are happy to answer questions. So don’t feel sorry for yourself for coming late to the domain name game — as many domainers would say, you’re still early, and as I’d like to say, you’ve got it easier than anyone ever has. The market today is proven, the resources out there are practically endless, the amount of networking going on has never been higher, nor has been the ability to stay in contact using services like Twitter.

If you’re a new domainer, that link I posted at the start of this post is probably something you should come back to in a couple days — heck, I’m going to come back to it myself, just out of curiosity of what other domainers see as being most important.

No, not me! Just time for a rant about how many people I’ve seen desperately looking for domain name brokers lately… The sad fact is that if you’ve approached all the big players and none of them are interested in brokering your domains, it’s probably not because they don’t like you — they just don’t like your domains. Don’t take it personally, I know it’s hard to consider the fact that all those domains you painstakingly bought or registered just aren’t worth a domain name broker’s time — those domains which you thought were screaming end user were actually screaming “delete me or whatever you do, sure as hell don’t renew me!”

Okay, I’m sorry if I offended anyone with that but seriously, if nobody wants to broker your domains, have you ever thought of asking yourself why that may be? If you went to any broker (and probably even most domainers) with a domain that could quite literally sell itself, whose going to turn down free money? So you have a domain that can sell itself but you want to get someone who can get top dollar for it — okay, that makes sense now.

Some of the people looking for brokers on the domain forums are looking for domain name brokers to find end users for their new domain name registrations… There’s plenty of stories of domainers buying a domain for $10 and reselling it for $250 or $500 — do you have any idea what kind of chump change that leaves a domain name broker working on a 10% commission? Let’s do some math… Ten percent of $250 is $25. Someone explain to me why anyone would broker a $10 brand new domain name registration, work their ass off in the process of finding an end user for it, and then settle for $25 on that $250 sale. You better be giving that guy $240 of that $250 sale, seeing as you’d be lucky to even see your domain’s registration fee back were it not for him brokering that sale.

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If you’re an eBayer, you probably know that one pretty easy way to get more traffic to your website is to include your web address in all your eBay listings — of course you can do that for your domain name listings on eBay as well. And what about when using domain name forums? I tend to get anywhere from 5 to 10 uniques to this blog from the link in my sales thread signature — more when there are more than 1 domain listed in the sales threads. I put 88 LLLL.coms on eBay recently and have received 30 uniques so far from them (all are still 1-3 days from being over). If you were to start the eBay listings at $0.99 or less, it’s only costing you $0.15 per listing, so you could put 100 cheap domains on eBay for all of $15 — pretty easy to make a profit off the domains even if they don’t sell.

When you start to think about it, if I buy a cheap domain for a few bucks and I can get 5-10 targeted uniques from it, the domain may actually be cheaper than free. At least for me anyway — the alternative of buying targeted domain name visitors through Google at anywhere from $1-$10+  per isn’t all that desirable. I’m also pretty sure the visitors I’m pulling in using these methods are of much higher quality than I’d get on average via Google.

One thing you do have to remember is that the cheap domains while not necessarily having to be great domains need to be domains that people might be interested in — interested enough to at least come to the sale page and ideally end up clicking the link to your domain name blog or website.

You’ll rarely hear me call a purchase at an auction a good deal — they generally represent the current state of the market rather well, however I’m a bit surprised to see what a few CVCVs have sold for on NameJet lately.

I don’t like Network Solutions and I’ve largely stayed away from using NameJet myself because of the fact I don’t want to financially support  what Network Solutions stands for, however it sure is tempting to start using them when I see CVCVs selling for what I’ve seen them sell for lately…

TAXO.com sold on NameJet yesterday for $1650 — even if you’re not a fan of LLLL.coms or short domains, you can surely appreciate the development possibilities of this name, and to be frank, I’m a bit shocked to see this one sold for so much less than many of the other recent CVCV sales — 16 of the past 25 CVCV sales (without a Y or Q) since March have sold for more than TAXO. I wonder if this one had been put on auction around say, March-April if we would have seen different results. NameJet is by no means normally a cheap venue for CVCVs, with only 2 of the past 9 (going all the way back to February 17th) CVCVs of triple or quad premium quality selling for less than TAXO.

NameJet had one CVCV sale in April that would certainly qualify as being a “steal” — DIFE.com selling for $901 on April 15th. You have to go all the way back to 2006 to see a reported CVCV sale having sold for less. Since May of 2008, no other reported sales of quad premium CVCVs have been for under $1800, nevermind under $1000.

1. Leapfish/SwiftAppraisal.com/Estibot/Sedo/Afternic appraisals - Is anyone honestly stupid enough to believe an appraisal from anyone other than a fellow domainer? Scratch that.. Someone must be falling for it or those appraisal scammers and noobs quoting appraisals they’ve purchased would’ve gotten bored and stopped a long, long time ago. You can put noobs who ask for an appraisal and then curse you out when you tell them their domain is junk in this category as well. Thank God Leapfish is no more!

2. Premium - If you need to tell potential buyers that your domain is premium, it’s probably because it isn’t. Same can be said about noobs overusing the term ‘generic’. The only person you’re kidding here is yourself, and maybe some other noobs. There’s a sucker born every minute, right?

3. Rare - Cut the “every domain is unique” bull for a sec will ya? The only market segment where the use of the word has any acceptance is with short domains. A longer domain is more appropriately labeled ‘Premium’, but as I said in #2, it’s probably not premium if you need to tell other domainers that.

4. What a Steal! - If it was such a good deal, why didn’t you buy it? Couldn’t afford it or missed the auction? Okay, I’ll give you that. But how many times does a domainer call something a steal when he didn’t have the balls to put up his own money to buy it? Try growing a pair before calling it a steal.

5. Limited time offer - We all know you’re going to make up some BS excuse about why you’re still offering the domain for sale after this period of time has passed, so why even bother? Do you think I’m going to somehow be more interested in your domain if you make it a time-limited sale? If anything, I’m going to lowball you because you’re making it sound like you need the money.

6. End Users - Why don’t you stop talking about finding end users and actually start trying to find one? And if you’re selling a domain that has, and I quote, “so many potential end users,” I can only ask the question of why you’re selling the domain to another domainer rather than an end user.

7. Domain Development - The same can be said about domain name development as was said about end users.. Stop talking about it and start doing it. Actions speak louder than words.

8. He said / She said - Don’t you just love domainers who can’t think for themselves and repeat like a parrot everything a well-known domainer says? Kissing top domainer ass belongs here as well.

9. Anything about landrushes - I have nothing against new domain name extensions and you’re free to invest you’re money wherever you want to invest it… But do you really need to spam the domain forums to death about how this new extension you’ve invested in is going to overtake .com? Sheesh.. Pump and Dump at it’s finest right here folks! What’s really sad is that when you try to drive some reality into the equation, many of them just think you’re looking to poop and scoop or that you’re jealous for having “missed the boat”.  Pure speculation about “The Next Big Thing” belongs here as well.

With LLLL.coms and some other short domain name segments such as L-L-L.coms and LLLL.nets so much cheaper than they were in the past, knowing when a domain expires is more important than ever. When I look at a short domain, I always try to imagine it’s value to me if it were expiring tomorrow — how much would I be willing to pay for the domain if I had to immediately renew it? After that, I’ll look up when it expires and determine a price that I’m willing to pay for the domain largely based on that..

Now I completely understand not listing the expiration date if your domain is expiring tomorrow, next week, etc — it’s not going to add any value to your domain, as people are just going to pay what they see the domain being worth as I described above.

But what about when the domain is 6 months, 12 months, 18 months from expiration? If a short domain, say, an LLLL.com is worth $10 to you if were to expire tomorrow and it has 18 months until expiration, you should be willing to pay somewhere around $20-$22 for it, whereas if that domain does expire in the very near future, you should stick to your original assessment.  Seems like basic math, right? If it’s $8 per year to renew the domain and the seller of the domain has paid for the domain’s renewal in advance so that the domain has 18 months from expiration, then I should be willing to pay about 1.5 years of renewal ($12) premium on that price to compensate for those future savings. It might not be $12 for you — maybe you’re buying the domain to try and develop a website and plan on dropping it if it doesn’t work out, however one thing we can all agree on is that any cheap domain is going to be worth more if it has a long ways to go until expiration…

So with that in mind, why do so many sellers not list the expiry date on their short domains? Bottom line is that a seller can say all he wants about “check the WhoIs before buying”, however most of us  often don’t have time to do that — if I’m looking at a bunch of different domains from a bunch of different sellers, eg. like on eBay, am I really going to take the time to check each and every domain’s expiration date? So what do I do? I place my bids as if the domains were expiring tomorrow — if I win, there’s no way I’ll be unhappy with the outcome and if I lose, well that’s that. On a $10 domain, it being renewed 18 months in advance has essentially doubled the value of the domain — why would you settle for potentially losing 50% of what you could have made just because you chose not to list the expiration date? How many potential sales has this cost you? I know that when I see a couple cheap domains I consider relatively equal in quality, I’ll rarely go with the domain expiring soonest — there’s nothing wrong with buying a domain expiring soon so long as that is factored into the price you’re paying and with all else being equal, the domain closer to expiration is essentially a more expensive domain. Worse still are those who try to “guess” when their domain expires and are often horribly wrong. I recently saw an LLLL.com on eBay which the seller advertise as expiring in 2009 which actually expired in 2011 — oops! If you’re not prepared to put in the effort to get the expiration dates listed, at the very least don’t guess what you think they are.. If they expire sooner, you’ll potentially anger the buyer and if they expire later, you’ve likely caused yourself to achieve a lower sale on these domains than you would have even without listing the expiration date — at least some of the people browsing your domain sale will check and find out it’s real expiration date if no date is given in your domain listing.

I’ve been quite surprised by the number of domainers I’ve seen posting on domain name forums lately asking questions about what are there odds of getting caught or what’s going to happen to their domains if they get caught… I understand that some people value their privacy more than others and I have nothing against people who would prefer to protect their details from being publicly available, but I really can’t say the same for people too cheap to pay for private registration who provide inaccurate WhoIs information.  To think there are domainers out there who would jeopardize the very safety of their domains for all of a few dollars per year… But what are the chances of getting caught they say? I don’t know but why take that chance when you don’t need to? Beyond having your domain reported for having incorrect WhoIs information, how do you think a panelist is going to view your decision to provide false WhoIs information? I’m guessing that if there was even a hint of doubt in his mind that the complainant had a case that we’re now going to see the complainant win. When your domain is registered with incorrect data, it just kind of makes it look like you have something to hide… I can understand why many domainers who’ve been around awhile opt for private registration — certain types of domains (like LLL.coms for example) will literally get you spammed to death if you own a decent amount of them.

Most of the domainers I’ve seen asking questions about private registration likely don’t have $XXXX+ domains however, more like $100 domains or domains they just registered. I’m not sure why many of these new domainers are afraid of having their details exposed.. If anything, for someone just starting out it might be a benefit and may result in an enduser sale or two you wouldn’t have had otherwise — how is an enduser going to contact you and express their interest in a domain if your contact information isn’t available? Maybe there’s a few of them out there, however I’m not aware of many endusers who’d go to the lengths domainers would of getting around stuff like private registration if there was a domain they were interested in waiting on the other side. I don’t know what the rules are elsewhere, however here in Canada we have a recently implemented national Do-Not-Call list which one can opt to be part of. — If a telemarketer is dumb enough to disregard that and call you, it might very well be the most expensive phone call he’ll ever make, with fines of up to $15,000 per call.

This blog gets about 1/4 of it’s traffic from Google and was getting about another 1/4 from type-in traffic prior to this domain’s development. I don’t know how many readers out there are new to the domain name world, however I felt it was about time I wrote an introductory post about investing in domain names. If you’re new and would like to see more posts written like this one, please leave me a comment or send me an email. If you’d like to see any or more of a particular type  of domain name related post, I can probably work that in sometime in the future as well.

I often get asked by new domainers what they can do to start making money with domains. Now there’s a lot of things a domainer would need to learn in most domain name segments — how to value domain name traffic, what revenue multiple to use on different kinds of domains, how to go about getting finding good domains to register, how to track expiring and expired domains and where to buy or take part in domain name auctions on expired and aftermarket domains. Then, if you want to make money with your domains through other ways then selling them, you’ll need to learn how to park domain your domains and once you have a decent domain name portfolio,  you’ll need to find a good domain name parking company that’ll pay you a respectable revenue share on the money your domains earn through parking…

I wrote a introductory guide about 18 months ago on investing in domains –not nearly enough to make you into a domaining superstar, but the information is still accurate today, as it was back then and should at the very least give you a glimpse into some of the knowledge you’ll need to acquire if you want to be the best domain name investor you can be.

If you buy a domain like Sex936.com (which by the way is registered) and ask for an appraisal on a domain name forum, probably the first thing people are going to tell you is that letters and numbers don’t generally mix in keyword domains. Same goes for L33tspeak — some people think “it’s cool” to register domains with numbers replacing the letters.. The only person who will most likely find these types of domains “cool” is your domain name registrar — as far as they’re concerned, “it’s cool” that you’ve decided to register your domains with them! Exceptions apply with everything of course — a name like N00b.com would certainly be worth registering if available, but a term like that pretty much borders on being a word.

Some people choose to invest in foreign languages.. My advice: Proceed with caution unless you speak the language yourself. I speak French and find it quite funny some of the words domainers have registered thinking they meant something else. As a general rule with popular languages (not talking about Internationalized Domain Names here), if it’s supposedly a category killer term and it’s available in .com, it’s probably because it isn’t actually a category killer term. If we take French as an example, a verb may have many different tenses, so even if it does mean what you think it means, it isn’t the term commonly used, and hence is likely of little value. Think of it like synonyms in English — I could in a sentence say: “That’s good, great, excellent, incredible, fantastic, phenomenal, prodigious”… They can all mean more or less the same thing — that someone is happy or very happy with the outcome, or that someone is impressed or very impressed.. As a domainer however, one isn’t just concerned about what something means in a dictionary, — as a domainer, we’re concerned with what it means to your everyday person and more importantly, what they’d be most likely to use if given the choice, because they always have that choice when doing a search on a search engine like Google or when typing in a web address. Ultimately, we’re hoping they end up landing on our site.

You know, I started this post with the title “Becoming a Better Domain Name Investor”, however this has really morphed more into a post about what not to do if you want to be a good domain name investor — I guess it’s stuff you’ll have to learn just the same and if you learn it now before buying 50 or 100 worthless domains like most domain newbies do, then it was well worth reading. So on that note, I’ll add one more thing not do when first investing in domain names and that is: Don’t invest in speculative domain name extensions. Some experienced domainers have made a lot of money investing in extensions like .mobi and .tv and I’m sure in time we’ll hear about a few who had similar success in .tel, however these are not newbie-friendly domain name extensions. Avoid them at all costs until you get a much better understanding of how to invest in these markets. Similarly, be careful with ccTLDs. A lot of people (including me) like to turn domaning into some sort of statistical science, where one can analyze data, calculate probabilities, and attempt to predict outcomes. That’s all fine and dandy, but what we do have to remember are the circumstances under which those domains were sold. Most experienced domain name investors will tell you that final prices seen in domain name auctions are a much better proxy of the market than private sales, and they’re right. If someone comes along and offers $100M for Sex.com next year, that doesn’t mean similar adult domains are also going to see similar price rises (it doesn’t mean they won’t, it just doesn’t mean they will) — this may have been a highly motivated enduser who has a vision for this particular domain. The big problem with ccTLDs is that we don’t see a whole lot of sales in most of these extensions, so what ends up happening is that people start mixing private sales data together with auction data to arrive at conclusions of where the market is at, and that’s a dangerous path to go down. If we take a short domain name example, last year iREIT (a domain name company) sold several LLL.coms for under a grand when the going rate was about $7500 — this obviously doesn’t mean LLL.coms overnight fell by $6500, rather, it means that whoever priced out these domains either made a typing error, or was utterly clueless about how much these domains had appreciated over the past few years. This is basically why a private sale means nothing.. If iREIT would have accidentally put these domains on auction for $500 each, they would have all ended up with $7500+ prices, because that was what the worst of the worst were going for and someone would have been willing to pay it. Another thing to remember with ccTLDs is that even when there are big sales, in some of the more obscure ccTLDs, they may be few and far between. In dotcom, it’s pretty easy to think of one domain as being better than another, and so on.. If you can find enough sales data in a small window of time, you can get a pretty good idea of the value of that domain which has yet to be sold but whose quality you estimate is somewhere sandwiched in between.  In ccTLDs however, it might be years before you see similar names sell — even more popular ccTLDs like .ca don’t see a whole lot of reported sales outside the short domain name segments like CC.ca and LLL.ca.

Not having a lot of domain name sales data out there can be both a good thing and a bad thing. As a newcomer to the domain name industry, it’s most certainly a bad thing, however as you become more familiar with this extension, you may be able to profit from the fact that some people aren’t clued in to what domains are worth. If we take short domains as an example, it’s very easy to price cheaper LLLL.coms, up to the $500 or so range — I’ll be pretty much give or take 20% one hundred percent of the time. Why? Because I’ve observed thousands upon thousands of past sales for domains selling in this price range, so I have a fairly good “feel” for what a particular LLLL.com is worth. But as the price starts going higher and higher, there start being fewer and fewer sales. CVCV-type LLLL.coms which are greatly overrepresented in $1000+ LLLL.com sales make up but 2% of the LLLL.com market.. I’m working with 50 times less data than I am with the sub-$1000 group. This in itself explains why sales data is all over the place — how does a domainer clue himself in to what a domain is worth when there’s so little data out there. This is exacerbated by the fact that pronounceable LLLL.coms are already the most difficult ones to price.. If any segment should be having 50 times more sales data than another, it’s CVCVs, because there are so many more factors to consider in this particular segment than in other ones with many of them such as brandability and pronounceabilty being entirely subjective and opinions varying greatly from one English speaking domainer to the next.

While all the things I’ve mentioned above are important and it’s unlikely you’ll be a successful domain name investor unless you understand at the very least most of them, there’s one thing a domainer really can’t go without knowing, and that’s domain name sales comps. How would you go about appraising estimating the value of a domain otherwise? Like pretty much everything we do in life, we learn from experience and that means you’ll probably pay more for a few domains than you should have and sell a few domains for less than you could have gotten — was it just an expensive mistake will you learn something from this experience that you’ll remember while domaining in the future? If you aren’t already familiar with these 3 sites, you best familiarize yourself with them now: DN Journal, DN Sale Price, Namebio. The large majority of reported domain name sales can be found on one of those 3 sites. There’s not much that can be done about private sales — if you want to learn more about domain name sales in a certain market segment, try to become buddies with someone already investing and having success in the market segment you’re interested in and see what you can learn from him.

Perhaps the biggest mistake that newcomers to the domain name world make is trying to tackle everything too quickly. Things take time and there will still be money to be made on the Internet a month from now just as there is today — the only difference between whether you start investing on day 1 or whether you put in a solid month of research is that the person jumping in with both feet is probably going to lose a very significant portion of what he invested and worse, is likely to learn very little because he doesn’t even have an idea about what there is to learn out there. This is the kind of guy that when you give him a low appraisal on his domain, he thinks that you’re just saying that because you want to buy it… Try to do the guy a favor and that’s what you get! Bottom line is that all the information is out there, all you need to do is read, read, and then read some more. And as I said about jumping in with both feet, the same applies to domain name extensions — start with one, preferably .com as it’s the one where you’re most likely to see at least some of your money back even if you do screw up when investing. Find yourself a domain name niche, a way to make money, and repeat what works for you. I was talking with one newer domainer about this earlier today — even in a very small niche such as LLLL.coms, other short domains, or geo domains, you can most certainly make a living off of it if you know what you’re doing. The great thing about these smaller niches is that they’re so much easier to become an expert in than something broad like trying to understand the value of all .coms. If you go that route, all I can say is good luck, because you will need it! I talked earlier about how some people are having significant success even in extensions such as .mobi and .tv which many domainers have written off as failed extensions — there’s money pretty much anywhere in domaining if you’re at the top of the game.

Don’t fall into that circa 2007 trap that being a good domainer means you have to own 10,000 domains — whatever amount of domains you choose to invest in at the end of the day, just make sure you’re fully aware of the renewal fees that’ll accompany those domains each and every year. Like I said earlier in this post, this isn’t anywhere near enough information on domaining to make you a successful domainer, but it’s a start — hopefully you know more now than you did at the start of this post. If you found this long and boring, I’m afraid domaining probably isn’t for you, because you’re going to need to read 100 articles this size to really understand most of what is out there — every domainer is still learning and never stops. You can’t just put in a few hours your first month and stop — you’ll have to constantly keep up with sales results to make sure you aren’t paying too much or selling for too little. I’ve made a lot of money in the past buying domains from sellers who offer to sell their domains for too little. I’m not a lowballer — I don’t go around making cold calls or sending mass spam via email hoping to find a non-domainer I can score a quick buck off, however at the same time, I’m not going to offer to pay more for a domain than the person currently owning it is asking for it. Economically speaking, you must value a good as being worth more than the amount of money it cost, else you wouldn’t buy them. If you’d be willing to pay an 5 bucks for the good, would you give that consumer surplus of yours to the producer just because you would have been willing to buy it if his price were 5 dollars more? I wouldn’t either.

Do yourself a favor and enumerate some of the things I mentioned as being crucial to domain name investing (second paragraph) and make it your goal to understand at least one of them to a level where you could have a casual conversation with a seasoned domainer without him “dumbing down” every sentence to make it comprehensible. Within a couple months, you’ll know most of what you’ll need to know. Some things you do need to learn through experience, however you can learn a lot from the experiences reported by those who came before you. As I’ve said many times in this post, all the domain name information you could imagine is freely available. Nobody is going to hold your hand, however plenty of domainers are happy to help. Have a question? Namepros has over 3 million posts on domain names — make use of their advanced search function and key in words such as “parking”, “backorder”, “expired domains”, “traffic”, etc.. You can find pretty much any information related to domaining you want between Namepros, DN Journal, DN Sale Price, and Namebio.

Add this blog to that list if you plan on investing in short domains

I’m amazed at how few domain name registrars spend any money advertising to the domain name community. With many of the readers of domain name blogs and members of domain name forums having hundreds, even thousands, of domains, I just can’t understand why most of them don’t spend more advertising to this highly targeted group. On many of the domaining blogs, it’s between $25 and $300 per month to have a banner ad on  a website which gets anywhere from a few thousand to tens of thousands of visitors per month. As I said when opening this article, this is extremely targeted traffic, and in most cases, you could recoup the full month’s advertising by having but a couple domainers transfer their domains to your registrar — if that (don’t forget about the value derived from keeping current customers). Advertising on domain name forums tends to be a whole lot more expensive, however their traffic is also much higher. The price of eyeballs is ridiculously cheap in this industry. A #1 placement on Google for many domaining related keywords will set you back $XX per click. I’d much rather have a full month of advertising on a popular domain name blog or forum than a few clicks on Google, which I highly doubt are any more targeted than the visitors to a domain name blog or forum.

So, what gives? The profits per name aren’t very high at most registrars, however the audience they’d be advertising to in this case have hundreds, even thousands of domains — I can’t see how this wouldn’t be profitable. With more and more domainers getting into domain name development, you also have the possibility of upselling them on hosting or domain name development packages. Why wouldn’t registrars form partnerships with sites like Whypark, SiteGraduate, AEIOU, etc – they could help their domainer customers get the domains they want developed at a reasonable price and at the same time, make what would probably be a very large amount of additional income through affiliate commissions.

Most of the domain name parking and domain name development companies get it — you can find their ads on many of the top domaining sites. Domain Capital gets it, Hitfarm gets it, most of the domain name conferences get it. But where are the domain name registrars? I’ll give credit to Godaddy here — they clearly get it. Moniker and Fabulous get it too — they take part in domaining conferences which does get them exposure to many top domainers, however I think they could both do more. Rebel.com? I’ve sure seen a lot of their ads lately, along with LogicBoxes. For the most part however, I’m largely unimpressed and don’t think most of the ICANN accredited registrars are doing anything near what they should be doing if they want to gain a very sizable portion of domain name registrations (those of domainers).

If we look at registries, the situation is much the same — how many of them advertise their extensions to domainers? The .me extension is an excellent example of how a registry can be successfully promoted. At least early on, .mobi was a good example of this as well. People aren’t going to buy something if they don’t even know it exists… I’m amazed all the smart people working for so many of these companies spend so little of their advertising budget  targeting people responsible for a large portion of their revenue. More than just domain registrations, this costs them non-domainer sales as well. When a non-domainer friend of mine wants to put up a website (hosting = mega-profits for web hosts/registrars), who am I going to recommend? Am I going to recommend the company I’ve never heard of or someone who I know will do a good job?

“You don’t get rich digging for gold… You get rich selling the shovels”. Isn’t that a great quote which could be applied, almost without exception, to the new domain name extensions we’ve seen over the past few years? Someone is getting very rich off of them — it just isn’t domainers. I haven’t went over new domain name extensions here — the basic idea is to be careful about how much you invest in new domain name extensions without proper monetization plans.

I’m going to discuss a problem speculative behavior in this post, one I refer to as domainer availability heuristic. So what exactly is the domainer availability heuristic in English you ask? The availability heuristic is a relatively simple concept that revolves around people believing that the likelihood of a certain event happening are different than they actually are because they can easily recall many examples of said event happening. When does this happen in the domain world? For starters, and the primary reason I started by discussing new domain name extensions in this post is because we see this very often with new domain name extensions.

Take Flowers.mobi in example — it really set the stage for .mobi, despite the fact it really shouldn’t have had anything to do with what future .mobis sold for. How could 1, 2, 3 or high sales possibly justify thousands of other domains selling for comparable prices?

What I’ve been seeing more and more lately is domainers applying this availability heuriistic mentality which exists in speculative extensions to even good extensions, such as .com. As an example, there was a huge rush on Namepros to register “pizza domains” when it was reported that pizza.com had sold on Sedo for $2.6MM — that sale fell through, but not before many domainers spent a small fortune on pizza domains… Similarly, there’s been a thread about Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and other developments in the UAE lately and a bunch of domainers registering domains related to that, and then there are the domainers who see a sale like YP.com for $3.85MM and think that this somehow makes other LL.coms more valuable.

A single sale means nothing. It doesn’t matter if it’s .mobi, .asia, .cc, LL.com, LLL.com, generic.com, etc… Every domain is unique — it’s bloody hard to even get much more than a ballpark figure on a domain in many domain segments because prices can just vary that much from one sale to the next. When you look at a site such as Namebio or DN Journal, how do you go about sorting through all the sales which were made to other domainers versus the sales which were made to endusers? On some sales, domainers overpaid — should that therefore be treated as the norm rather than the exception? Similarly (although not as frequently lately), sometimes domainers got a good deal — nobody would think LLL.coms in example are worth $500 or less just because iReit happened to have mistakenly sold a few for that.

So what am I saying? All I’m trying to say is that we should be cautious about how we interpolate and extrapolate sales results. Applying the results from a limited number of sales to make some kind of generalization about an extension or a market segment as a whole will often prove to be incorrect., as is looking at a sale and trying to justify how and why it came about happening. In uncertain times like we’re living in today, I prefer to focus on domains which I believe I’ll be able to properly monetize, other than when I’m getting a “very good deal”, something I haven’t unfortunately gotten a whole lot of lately…

Another thing to remember is that with prices having gone down as much as they have over the past year, one really does need to be careful about using sales from earlier this year to make judgements about where the market is today. Prices in many market segments have crashed 50%+ since August alone, so the amount of sales data which is still relevant to domains on the market today is relatively limited and is one of the reasons I’m being very careful about what I do buy, making sure it actually is a good deal. As Donald Trump once said, “Sometimes the best investments are the ones you don’t make”. Now’s a great time to be a lowballer — you really have nothing to lose if you go around offering people prices a fraction of the going rate and plan on reselling them once having taken possession. It might not be easy to find domains at a substantial discount to their reseller value but at the same time, it’s not really a good time to be speculatively investing large amounts of money with the sole intent of flipping the domains to other domainers anyway.

The minimum wholesale is a concept that comes up quite a bit when we talk about short domains, but how relevant is it really to the large majority of short domains?

It’s important to consider how many LLL.coms and LLLL.coms would actually qualify as “minimum wholesale” in quality. There never does seem to be a consensus on what exactly a minimum wholesale domain is. I’ve always assumed the minimum wholesale to mean the price the lowest quality example of a short domain segment would fetch (doesn’t seem anyone other than us short domain investors use the concept of minimum wholesale). Quality itself is a term which is hard to define… We can break up the 26 letters into premiums and non-premiums, break up the premiums into weaker premiums (F,G,H) and stronger premiums (A,B,C,D,E,I,L,M,N,O,P,R,S,T), we can break up non-premiums into semi-premium letters (J,K,U,V,W,Y) and bad letters (Q,X,Z), but that doesn’t really tell the whole story… Surely a domain such as QQQ.com would not be considered a domain of minimum wholesale quality, despite have 3 occurrences of the weakest letter. How about XYZ.com — 2 bad letters and the weakest semi-premium (Y). Would that be a lower quality LLL.com? Hardly.

If we take bad/semi-premium letters (J,K,Q,U,V,W,X,Y,Z), there are only 9^3 = 729 domains with 3 lower quality letters. Obviously triple repeats of the same low quality letter wouldn’t qualify as low quality nor would double repeats, so what we’re actually looking at is 9*8*7 = 504 LLL.coms with 3 low quality letters and of those, still some will have significant meaning and many would argue that U/W shouldn’t be lumped in with other lower quality letters (their quality largely depends what letters they’re found with), so we’re likely looking at about 450 or so domains which would truly be “the worst of the worst” — these are the domains we’re thinking of when we refer to the minimum wholesale. These domains don’t come up for sale all that often — with 450 domains out of 17,576 truly qualifying as minimum wholesale, only 1 in 39 LLL.coms could be expected to fetch the minimum rate. With reported LLL.com sales in a month usually being below 39, it’s not surprising to see that “on average” we don’t see a minimum wholesale quality LLL.com sold. Even if one does sell (eg. QXZ.com $4595 Sedo 11/21/2008), sales happen so infrequently that we really make much of a judgement from seeing them.

One thing I’ve observed in the LLLL.com market which does appear to hold true as well is that the worst of the worst LLL.coms often sell for more than slightly better ones (single premiums). I don’t speak languages other than French and English myself, however I’ve heard from domainers who do that in certain countries (eg. China, Germany), some of the letters English-speaking domainers see as bad letters are premium letters.

In the LLLL.com space, anti-premium (devoid of premium letter) LLLL.coms actually sell at a significant premium to the average single premium or double premium LLLL.com. In the LLL.com space, I haven’t seen a great deal of anti-premium sales, however they also often sell at a premium to single premium LLL.coms — perhaps because of what I talked about earlier about variations in what’s considered premium in other languages.

It’s interesting that so much fuss is raised on what the minimum wholesale is in categories such as LLL.coms and LLLL.coms despite the fact that the large majority of investors don’t have minimum wholesale quality LLLL.coms. Like I posted the other day when speaking of LLLL.coms (75% of which were registered by the end of 2005) and what I’ve posted here about minimum wholesale quality LLL.coms, most will sell at a premium, even a significant premium, to the minimum wholesale.

You wouldn’t judge how strong the LLL.com market was based on a triple repeat or enduser sale or how strong the LLLL.com market is based on what a strong pronounceable, enduser sale, or quadruple repeat — similarly, you can’t tell much about the market by looking at a bottom of the barrel LLL.com or LLLL.com knowing that much like enduser sales and the highest quality examples of each category, they are the exception rather than the rule.

I’m not a big fan of the term “minimum wholesale” myself to be honest — few people seem to understand the markets sufficiently to understand that just because a short domain has bad letters doesn’t necessarily make it of low value and just because a domain is made up of premium letters doesn’t necessarily make it more valuable. I just shake my head when I see domainers pay huge premiums for ugly all-premium short domains — being devoid of bad letters does not mean you have a better domain. Like my XYZ.com or QQQ.com examples above (most wouldn’t be so obvious as being of higher quality) go to show, you really can’t judge a short domain by the letters it initially presents you with. While it’s true that “on average” an all-premium short domain is worth more than a short domain with non-premium letters, iy’s incorrect to assume that’s true in every case. It’s unfortunate we have a lot of domainers who either don’t know or don’t care and perpetuate this false belief by overpaying on premium garbage and staying away or bidding low on domains which are much more promising.

As discussed in previous posts on time management in the domain name industry, time is money. Sometimes, the best strategy is to sell domains in bulk to cut down on the opportunity cost of your time. If you could make more money spending your time elsewhere, then you should do what it takes to get these domains sold as quickly as possible and this most likely means selling the domains in bulk. If you’ve lost confidence in a domain market or want to reinvest your domain profits elsewhere, selling your domains in bulk might once again come across as an attractive option. There are good reasons to buy domains in bulk and equally good reasons to sell domains in bulk — I’ll discuss both in this post.

For the most part, domains don’t sell well in bulk and short domains are no exception to this, as this eBay auction which inspired this post will show.

The strategy in buying bulk aftermarket domains often makes sense — you can probably negotiate a better price, you may feel that lower quality domains might yield a higher return on investment over an extended period of time, etc. Selling domains in bulk might also make sense if you believe the market is about to fall, if you have so many domains that you couldn’t possibly sell them individually or if the average domain is of so little value that the opportunity cost of your time would make selling them individually less profitable than selling the domains in bulk. So there are reasons why it might be both wise to sell in bulk and to buy in bulk.

Why do I have a problem with this particular domain sale then? I just can’t figure out who their target market is. Before I go on, if you’re the seller of these domains, in no way was this post made to ridicule you, merely to learn from what is often a mistake to sell domains of significantly different quality in bulk lots.

Most of the domainers buying lower quality domains do so because they can’t afford higher quality ones (within their respective market segments) or if they’re buying in bulk, for one of the reasons I mentioned above (such as believing it may yield a higher return on investment long term). If we take the LLLL.com market as an example, many people buying the buyout domains are generally doing so because they can’t afford to invest in quad premiums or higher quality pronounceables. There are very few people who’ve invested $XX,XXX+ into domains below triple premium quality.

A good pronounceable LLLL.com can easily set you back $2000-$5000 in a reseller environment — many domainers don’t have a great deal more than that invested in short domains as a whole, so the thought of investing their entire short domain budget in a single domain seems irrational (and probably is if you’re not planning on developing it).

That’s what I just don’t get about these bulk lots with domains of different quality — who are they trying to sell to? Many domainers are interested in either buyout LLLL.coms or higher quality LLLL.coms — one or the other, not both. Similarly, we see many domainers who buy domains which generate revenue but stay away from domains which don’t — they really are entirely different markets and it doesn’t make sense to mix domains from one of these markets with domains from another. Would you put STOCKS.com for sale with the rest of your 6 letter .coms? Why would you put a name for sale like GQQG.com with 75 other LLLL.coms when that single domain is worth 1/3 the ending price for the entire lot? The seller clearly recognized that the domain had far more value than the average LLLL.com in the lot — we can see that the domain, it’s 2005 registration date, and expiration date are bolded and written in a larger font size. Why not sell that domain individually?

This goes back to what I was saying earlier — people who want domains of a certain type often aren’t interested in domains of a different type. In this case, it’s highly unlikely that many of the bidders were interested in both a rare LLLL.com and bulk, lower quality LLLL.coms. Rare domains are somewhat like old domains in that they cater to a small niche of domainers, however they hold very strong prices among those domainers. Having a title such as “76 LLLL.com Domain Name Package 2,3,4 L Clearance Sale” is not the kind of title that would suggest to a rare domain or even higher quality domain investor that higher quality or rare LLLL.coms are to be found in this lot — when I read that title, the first thing that comes to mind is “I got a whole lot of LLLL.coms that will be expiring soon and I’m not interested in renewing them so someone might get a deal”. That’s fine and a deal someone got, however this is not the right image to project with higher quality domains nor should higher quality domains be sold in a lot which projects that image.

I’m going to have to start paying more attention to eBay myself when deals like this are being had. The triple premiums shouldn’t have been auctioned with the lower quality LLLL.coms either. I can understand why it was done in this case — many of the domains are within days from expiration, so good on the seller for at least being able to recover some of his investment, however if you’re not interested in renewing your domains, you really shouldn’t be waiting until the very last minute like this until the point that you’re forced to take whatever offer you receive.

Who doesn’t have a favorite domain quote? This post looks at some of the domain industry’s finest — covered are everyone from the Domain King to Yun Ye, Rick Latona, and Kevin Ham. The domain name industry is constantly evolving however I present here some timeless, classic domain quotes that will be as true 10 years from now as they are today.

Posted below are a few of my favorite quotes. Not all of them are by people who would identify themselves as being domainers, however all are applicable to domaining. Feel free to post any others you like.

1. “Domains have and will continue to go up in value faster than any other commodity ever known to man” — Rick Schwartz

2. “I believe that pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered.” — Rick Latona

3. “What is the value of a click if I sell a $20 million plane?” — Rick Schwartz

4. “There is no email without a domain name” — Yun Ye

5. “The sales I most regret are the ones I don’t make.” — David Gertler (randomo on Namepros/DNF)

6. “Don’t buy a name you aren’t willing to own if you aren’t able to sell it.” — Rick Latona

7. “If you control all the domains, then you control the Internet.” — Kevin Ham

8. “If you have the money, purchase the best domain name you can get your hands on.  But remember the golden rule: a domain name is only worth what you can do with it. We’ve turned down $5,000,000 for PalmSprings.com and didn’t think twice about it because we’ve monetized it so well.  However, in someone else’s hands, PalmSprings.com could have been parked or less developed and worth nowhere near as much. If you have the talent and vision to develop a generic mega-domain, please give people like us a call.” — David Castello

9. “Smile! In a few short years you will realize that these are the good old days!” — Marc Brittan (npcomplete on domain forums)

10. If the internet was Invented in Japan , How Would you feel about typing in Japanese characters to access ” Namepros.com “  日本語.com on a daily basis” — thegenius1 on IDNForums.com

11. “The roots of the domain names should not be owned, it is a public domain resource and it should be managed very carefully for the people of the world. There is a lot of management that has to be done for the domain names and it has to be done carefully. As you know I am not in favor of creating just top-level domain left, right and center. I think the Internet can happily survive for the next ten years without the need of a new top-level domain. I think most of the time people are doing this not because they think it will help the society but because they can own a whole lot of Internet real estate. For instance I don’t think that the .info domain has really helped as very much, people still feel they should get a .com and it only adds to the confusion if different companies have the .com, .biz and so on. And there isn’t very clear definition what each domain is for.” — Sir Tim Berners-Lee (Father of the Web)

12. “The Internet is the future of mobile and carriers need to be more selective about the technologies they choose if they want to succeed” — Arun Sarin (ex-CEO, Vodafone)

13. “Everybody wants traffic..  Everybody..  Whether they say it or not..  whether they know it or not..  nobody wakes up in the morning, says “I want to start a website that nobody will visit”.  Nothing happens on the Internet without traffic.  Generic keyword style domain names get a primer-level of organic type in traffic for nothing more than the keyword weight or gravity of the name itself.  Those are the “catchy”, “brandable” and “cool-sounding” names which constitute the 5-10% of all names registered which are worth anything at all..  Those are the names you want.” — Frank Schilling

14. “Before you speak, listen. Before you write, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you invest, investigate. Before you criticize, wait. Before you pray, forgive. Before you quit, try. Before you retire, save. Before you die, give. — Arthur Ward

15. “Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you’re generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make.” — Donald Trump

16. “The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.” — Rupert Murdoch

Prices on short domains and for the most part domain names in general have fallen substantially from where they were in 2007 through early 2008. Have we reached the bottom? Some domain name investors say “Don’t try to catch a falling knife.” Other domain name investors quote the great Warren Buffett and suggest that domain name investors take advantage of the opportunity this recession has provided them with to “buy low and sell high”. While the domain name market at present certainly isn’t friendly to domain flippers, it might be a good time for the long term focused domain name investor to begin investing once again. Recessions are when fortunes are both made and lost — I’m sure we have and will see far more people lose a fortune than make a fortune, however the opportunity is there to pick up cheap domains which will not doubt sell for more in the future as economic conditions improve.

There’s a lot of doom and gloom out there and a lot of reasons to be pessimistic — nobody’s saying you should be happy if half your retirement savings have vanished over the past few months or if your domains have lost upwards of 90% of their value in some market segments.. But we have to make the best of it right? The great thing about recessions, like any other time, is that there’s always opportunity — perhaps moreso for the careful domainer. It’s important to not get carried away in the buying you do and it’s important that you’re able to hold until the market recovers should conditions worsen. It’s not a domain flipper’s market, however it is a market perfectly capable of turning a large profit long term. Uncertainty and Unpredictability fuel Panic and Pessimism. As I’ve previously mentioned, people are not always rational. Word came out recently that the U.S. has “officially” been in a recession for a year now — for some reason the large majority of the general public didn’t receive that message and thought the economy was doing just fine up until about July (at least that’s the impression I get from my neighbours 90 miles to the South). September comes around, some big investment banks go broke, and “the sky is falling”.

Bad LLL.coms were going up in price earlier this year while good LLL.coms were going down in price — is something is wrong there? It’s not always easy to figure out what or if something is — in the example I just presented, there are many reasons one could explain away what happened earlier this year, ranging from greater demand from countries where weaker letters are considered to be premium letters, greater internet penetration increasing demand for LLL.com domains, LLL.coms continuing to be seen as “domainer tokens” with most simply wanting an LLL.com, not particularly caring about it’s quality, resulting in the bottom being driven upwards and the higher value LLL.coms coming down in price. Or of course one could work out that perhaps the lower end LLL.coms were behaving in an illogical manner with respect to a large percentage of the domaining market. As I said, it’s really hard to tell sometimes and a lot of domainers with plenty of years in the business got burnt bad in this case. LLLL.coms — Their rise to glory, their fall from grace…

What I’m trying to say here is that people are often both overly optimistic and overly pessimistic. When LLLL.coms were at their peak in February 2008, there were some people predicting LLLL.coms would soon hit $250-$300 per and that within a few years would be at $1000 per. Prices got so out of hand that at one point I even predicted the minimum might hit $100 per based on trends observed from the past — I did of course fortunately sell mine out for about $40 per believing any further appreciation on the current rate would be due to hype and overvaluing than due to “real value” at that time. Another example — LLL.coms had been going up month after month, year after year consistently for about 5 years heading into 2008. People begin to believe they can’t fall based on such a past — it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy with domainers buying LLL.coms, reselling to other domainers who take these same LLL.coms, add on a premium and resell it to other domainers who… Some LLL.coms have been sold 10 times within the past few years — I recently reported on this blog about one which has been sold 3 times since September. That’s not to say the LLL.com, LLLL.com, or any other of the many markets which have crashed don’t have proper investing fundamentals; surely some LLL.coms and LLLL.coms at least at one point in time represented good investments, it’s merely that they got carried away with hype which drove them up to levels which were unsustainable.

It’s almost impossible to predict when a Bubble is going to burst, however it always does pop at some point. Perhaps some of the people who believed LLLL.coms would reach $250 or $300 shortly didn’t really believe in the market — they merely believed others believed in the market enough to invest at this price point. The worst thing about Bubbles is that they often claim more victims than they would have if they would have popped sooner and that’s what makes them so destructive. There were many cases of domainers who despite having the same opportunity to buy LLLL.coms pre-buyout decided not to and decided to buy them at a later date for $30, $40, $50 per — LLLL.coms rose in price so quickly that in many cases people who did not see these domains as worthy investments seemingly overnight had a change of heart. People who didn’t see LLL.coms as worth $2000 were suddenly dropping $8000 on them. Suddenly a large portion of the people investing in the market are not investing in the market because they believe it has solid fundamentals and that these solid fundamentals can support these prices, rather, they’re investing in this market because they believe they can find someone willing to pay more for their domains — be they LLL.coms, be they LLLL.coms, be they new domain name extensions, or be they something else. A Bubble bursts when people cease being prepared to take more and those who didn’t really believe in the market (or at least didn’t believe in the market at that price point) begin taking their profits. The worst thing about Bubbles is that prices often come crashing down as fast and in many cases faster than prices were built up in the first place. If we look at LLL.coms in example, it took them many years before prices went from $200 (2003) to $3800 (July 2007), however between June 2008 and December 2008, the minimum wholesale on LLL.coms effectively lost a full $3800 off it’s June 2008 high.

It does work both ways however and that’s something to keep in mind — while prices have come crashing down and may continue to decline if the economy as a whole continues to worsen, it’s important to remember that not only can domains (or stocks) increase in price to unreasonable levels, however so too they may decrease in price to unreasonable levels — the domain name market in 2002 could be an example of this. Despite the recent setbacks, domain prices today are much higher now than they were in 2002. I’ve told the story on numerous occasions about how I didn’t see the value in short domains back in 2004 and how I used to see LLL.coms on eBay go for $400 and wonder who would ever pay $400 for a domain with 3 weaker letters which seemingly had no endusers — fast forward a few years and people like me are suddenly paying an extra digit for these same domains, even after the recent decline. The illiquid and speculative nature of the domain name market lends itself to both big booms and big busts. While I’m not sure what we’ve currently experienced should be qualified as having been a bust — more like prices being brought down to sustainable levels, it remains to be seen how much further the domain market will devalue. The fundamentals of domain name investing have radically changed between 2002 and 2008, there are many more ways to profit from domains today and it’s generally understood that direct navigation traffic has value, and that the entire Internet is not going to end up having one big fad (a surprisingly common belief back then) which failed to materialize.

So no, I don’t see another 2002 happening here. But I do see domains having declined a lot and in many cases, perhaps moreso than they should have. The pessimism and panic present in the domain market today will favor those bargain hunters who make the best of the market we find ourselves in today. Recessions are when fortunes are both made and lost. A wealth transfer from the weak domainers to the stronger ones — if you’re in a position to go about making purchases, by all means do not hesitate to do so. If you’re one of those aforementioned weaker domainers who’s already worried about whether you’ll be able to both keep your domains and put food on your family’s table, stop buying domains, focus on your family, and try to be in a better financial position when the next recession comes around so you can capitalize from it or at least not fall victim to it. Some people will have no choice but to sell their domains — people who need to take for their domains whatever they get offered because they badly need the money. New lending in the USA is down big time — people who might have qualified for loans in the past just aren’t qualifying anymore. Man would I love to be Rick Latona and own DigiPawn.com right around now — I bet he’s making a killing. It’s sounds harsh, maybe even unethical to be profiting from the misfortune of others, however that is life. If you don’t do it, someone else will. You’re doing them a favor — they need money and you’re giving it to them. Without you, their kids might starve, their house might get foreclosed,… Recessions are tough. People need to do whatever they can to survive. If the decision has to be made between your family and your domains, which will you choose? I know which one most domainers will choose and while it’s good for them that they have a conscience and put their family first, it’s also good for you if you have money in hand and are prepared to trade your money for their domains.

What do you think 2009 holds for the domain name world? Do you see domain name parking revenue continuing to decrease? What about domain name prices — can we expect another .com price hike from VeriSign? All those new domain name extensions soon coming out… We’ll no doubt hear much more about them in 2009. Reckon we’ll see a brand new flock of domain name investor who are seeing gold in these new domain name extensions? What will happen to existing domain name extensions resultant of this decision to open up the namespace? How will the recession impact domain name prices? How much longer is the recession going to last? As for cybersquatting, can we expect companies to come down harder on those domain name investors who choose to invest in domains which infringe on their registered marks? Read on to see what I predict the domain name world will see in 2009, as well as what other domain name investor think 2009 will bring to the domain name world.

A thread on Namepros about what the next few years hold for domaining got me thinking about how I see the next few years playing out. As I’ve said many times, I see development becoming more and more a part of day to day domaining and I do see PPC continuing to decline as CPA begins to rise. I see Call to Action domains becoming increasingly desirable, especially Call to Action domains receiving traffic — I expect we’ll see many of these convert very well under a CPA model. Over the next few years and largely thanks to increasingly lower PPC, I expect the idea that “all traffic is good traffic” to largely become a thing of the past with domainers increasingly focussed on targeted traffic which converts — this is what advertisers want and this is what advertisers are paying for hoping to get.

As has always been the case, good domains will continue to be worth good money. Having 100,000 domains is no longer going to be regarded as something one should be proud of, rather it’s going to increasingly be regarded as what it really is — a $1 Million/year liability. Domainers will continue to cut the fat out of their portfolios — domains which have little enduser potential, little development potential, and don’t make earn enough to justify their keep. The combination of higher registration and renewal fees, combined with lower RPM and a weak economy will hasten this process.

I expect to see many new domainers overjoyed by the possibility of investing in these new extensions — “A real gold rush, a new beginning for the Internet” they’ll say. We might hear a few success stories, however more often than not we’ll here of more domainers getting burnt. Webmasters are already licking their chops thankful that paying good money just to have a nice keyword domain for SEO will finally be a thing of the past. Strong .coms receiving sizable amounts of type-in traffic will of course continue to be prized by the people who can afford them. CNO + ccTLDs will remain the professional choice, .org will overtake .net and .web will be one of the few new extensions to achieve moderate success, becoming a cheap alternative to .net (which really is itself a cheap alternative to .com).

And lastly, I expect that a few years from now we’ll see plenty of newcomers to the domain world moaning about how if they would have started in 2008 they’d be so much ahead of where they are now and that it was so much easier to make money back then. People have been saying that one for the longest time, now haven’t they? If memory serves me correctly, there were according to many people no opportunities to make money domaining left in 2002 — it was all over, right? How many people want to go back to 2002 and reg a few more? If I’ve learn one thing in life, it’s that saying “never” is a word which pretty much always comes back to bite you in the $$$. It’s impossible to say with certainty what the future holds — all we can do is make our best guess and try to adjust what our next move is accordingly.

With credit card offers not coming as often in the mail, people will have to learn to live within their means and we’ll all benefit from that if people remember that moving forward. And as the WSJ says, I think it’s safe to say you’re likely not going to be paying more taxes in 2009 which is always a bonus

As I’ve mentioned a few times now, I really do see 2009 being a year where more domainers start shifting towards domain name development, looking for better methods of monetizing their domains, and cutting the fat out of their domain name portfolios. We’re going to see more companies aggressively protecting their marks, and likely more bad press about cybersquatters, especially as these new extensions from ICANN start to be rolled out. Cash is King. Domain flippers will be increasingly few in numbers, many converting to long term domain name investors. Good domains will continue to sell and I see stronger ccTLDs having a good year.

Scott from TrendDomaining.com sent me an email asking what I saw as some trends to watch for in 2009. So with that, I’ll post below what I do see happening. Be sure to check out Scott’s blog if you haven’t done so already — great information on there for niche domainers and those looking for trends to follow in 2009.  Scott’s working on a post which will cover what a diverse group of domainers see as trends to watch out for in 2009 which should provide us all with new insight into trends to watch out for in 2009. Elaborating on my prior post about 2009, I’ll cover some other subjects which I believe will gain popularity in 2009 — this time it’s not related to domaining or web development, rather, it’s about developments in the offline world which may create new opportunities for trendwatching domainers to pick up domains which may one day be worth considerably sums of money. As I’ve mentioned a few times here, be careful when buying into these kind of names — it can be fun, it can be a learning experience, and it can certainly be profitable, however it can be a very expensive lesson if you get carried away and start registering too many domains speculatively.

I see Cyberterrorism starting to be something governments around the world will start better planning for. I think we’ll see Cybercrime continue to increase and the barriers to entry continue to be lowered. We saw a lot of firsts in 2008 such as widespread availability of ready-made phishing and other malware kits, the outsourcing of certain parts of social engineering scams to native English speakers, the increasing presence of international hacking networks and criminal organizations in Cybercrime. Domains related to cybercrime present an opportunity for domainers in 2009 — properly developed, they may present both a financial opportunity and an opportunity to better help the general public protect themselves from people who would like to see harm done to them.

I’m a big fan of the health and technology niches and I expect we’ll continue to see major advances in technology (display technology, nanotechnology, MEMS, increasing popularity of software as a service and grid/utility computing, continued advanced in broadband and mobile Internet technology and increases in global internet penetration ), further research into the benefits of antioxidants (new antioxidants, new research on existing antioxidants, new superfruits) and continued advances in biotechnology (pharmacogenomics, gene therapy, cloning/stem cell research).

The great thing about niche domains and trendwatching is that it never ends — who remembers Joe the Plumber? New buzzwords and phrases are being coined all the time, new discoveries and scientific advances are constantly being made,… Barry from PredictiveDomaining.com had a great article recently about using Urban Dictionary to find new slangs. I expect we’ll see social media continue to evolve in 2009, Twitter and microblogging will continue to gain popularity, and Myspace will continue to lose out to Facebook.

I’ve said that a lot over the past year when talking about LLLL.coms and it really does hold true today — not just for LLLL.coms either. Whether we look at LLL.coms, LLLL.coms, or keyword domains, it’s clear that quality still sells reasonably well, low quality or mass quantity, not so well. That said, I think we can all admit that at least in the case of the LLLL.com market, prices are up noticeably since the lows of October 2008 — even on the lower quality LLLL.coms.

I’m developing some of my names at present, however if I were looking to invest I’d be paying close attention to the CVCV market. Quality CVCVs have certainly weathered the economic storm better than most domains, largely imho because of how depressed their values were and have been for years now.

As I’ve said many times, I always have seen a quality CVCVs as a better investment than a bad LLL.com — they often have more traffic, almost always have more acronyms, and are always more pronounceable.

If you’ve ever bought something expensive over the Internet, you’ve probably heard of Escrow.com. Escrow.com is but one of the numerous escrow services available which ensures that both the buyer and the seller are happy with the final outcome at the end of an online transaction. Because Escrow.com is currently the most popular escrow service, it will be the covered exclusively in this post — this doesn’t mean there aren’t other good escrow services out there, however Escrow.com is a safe bet for online purchases of almost any kind. Most escrow services operate in a relatively similar fashion, so once you understand how to use Escrow.com, you should have a pretty good idea of how to use other escrow services as well. Be careful of fake escrow companies and always remember that just because an escrow service is being used does not mean you should let your guard down. While using an escrow service significantly reduces the risk of you getting scammed, it does not eliminate the possibility for digital goods or counterfeit goods (unless you detect it during your inspection period and make this known to Escrow.com).

Beginning an escrow transaction involves first creating an escrow account — in this case, one at Escrow.com. Once that’s done, log into your Escrow.com account, indicating which type of escrow transaction you’d like to begin.  Follow the instructions carefully laid out on the screen for your escrow transaction. You’ll need to enter a name for the escrow  transaction, along with the total price to be paid. Before proceeding, discuss with the other party who will be responsible for the escrow fees. Regardless of whether you’re using Escrow.com or another online payment processor, labeling your escrow transaction as precisely as possible will help your prove your case in the event a dispute arises. Prior to agreeing to the Escrow.com transaction, be sure you’re comfortable with the Terms associated with the escrow transaction. If unsatisfied with the default Escrow.com contract, consider drafting up your own contract for use. This will of course need to be agreed upon by both parties.

Once you’ve agreed to the terms of the escrow transaction, an email from Escrow.com will be sent to the other party letting them know that an escrow transaction has been setup through Escrow.com. They’ll be asked to login to their Escrow.com account or create one at this time and agree to the terms of the Escrow.com transaction.

Once the terms of the escrow transaction have been agreed to by both parties, the buyer will be prompted to pay for the purchase. This is generally done by credit card, Paypal (requires both the buyer and seller to be from the United States) or wire transfer. The buyer can also choose to submit payment by check or money order drawn upon a U.S. bank, however this will result in an approximately 2 weeks delay – a 10 business day hold plus transit time.

Once payment is received by Escrow.com and confirmed “good funds”, Escrow.com will ask the seller to deliver the goods to the buyer. Depending on whether it is a tangible or intangible good, Escrow.com may require that you transfer the goods to Escrow.com who will then transfer it to the buyer. In the event of the sale of an intangible good (domain name, ebook, software, etc), make sure you’re transferring the goods to the address which matches exactly the Escrow.com account information listed for the buyer. Once you’ve transferred the goods to the buyer, login to your Escrow.com account and indicate that you’ve done this, following instructions given to confirm that this has been done.

Escrow.com will now start the Inspection Period, during which time the buyer will need to verify that he has complete control of the goods and possibly that they are genuine. Regardless of whether you’re using Escrow.com or another online payment processor, be sure to do your homework as you always should when buying and selling goods online to people you don’t know. Research the person you’ll be doing business with (eg. do a search to see what appears to be their real name, social network or forum username, email address, etc) and consider contacting both them and people they’ve done business with in the past if you’re able to find that information.

Before the end of the Inspection Period or once completely satisfied, the buyer must login to his Escrow.com account and either accept or reject the goods involved in the escrow transaction. Should the buyer do neither, Escrow.com will begin a second Inspection Period – at least that’s been my personal experience when this has happened to me, however there’s no documentation on the Escrow.com website about what happens under such a scenario. Provided you can prove the transfer of ownership has taken place, Escrow.com will eventually release the funds should the buyer remain unresponsive and your able to prove you delivered the goods.

With  domain transactions, some buyers have attempted to manipulate the fact that Escrow.com is not a true  escrow service by  modifying the whois information to make it look as if the  transfer never took place, despite having received the domains. Take a screenshot (Print Screen) of the whois immediately upon transfer of the domainss and keep all emails from the buyer, Escrow.com, and your registrar regarding the status of all domains involved in the  escrow transaction until it’s been completed and you’ve received payment. DomainTools offers a  History service which documents historical whois changes and may help you prove your case.

If the buyer rejected the goods during the Inspection Period, he’ll have to return them to the seller. As knowledgeable as the staff at Escrow.com are, nobody watches out more for you than yourself –make sure the Escrow.com staff are kept up to date on the status of things and ensure they don’t refund the buyer prior to you receiving your goods back.

Upon the buyer accepting the goods, Escrow.com will review the escrow transaction and send payment to the seller via the payment method chosen. You may phone Escrow.com at any time prior to the conclusion of any Escrow.com transaction should you change your mind and prefer to be paid via a different payment method.

Escrow.com allows both buyers and sellers to begin escrow transactions. Escrow transactions involving a large number of goods can be done through Escrow.com by faxing them a list of the goods to be included in the escrow transaction. Escrow.com does not cover goods which were fraudulently obtained and sold through their escrow service — if you choose to keep the goods once the Inspection period has ended, Escrow.com’s role in the escrow transaction has been completed.

Note: Fake escrow companies outnumber real ones. A seller might pretend he’s trying to safely conduct business, however he might be trying to scam you through a bogus escrow company. If for whatever reason you can’t use Escrow.com, do some research to make sure the seller is recommending a reliable escrow company. I’ve never heard of there being problems with Escrow.com however.

All domain names are registered with one domain name registrar or another. Which domain name registrar is the best fit for you? While domain name prices are an important factor to consider, what you paid for your domains won’t matter much if you lose them due to your registrar having inadequate security measures in place, theft at the company, or policies unfriendly to domain name investors written into their legal agreements. Are their services you’re going to need for your domains — are they included or optional extras? Are there additional security measures that can be taken for valuable domains? How cooperative will your registrar be in helping you get your domains back should the unimaginable happen? Does your domain name registrar have hidden fees? Read on for more advice on picking a good domain name registrar.

Make sure you’re aware of all services included with a domain name registration, renewal, or transfer at your chosen registrar. Some registrars offer free domain name forwarding, DNS control, shared hosting, 24/7 telephone customer support, among other freebies. While a registrar may appear cheaper, be sure it’s still cheaper after all the services you’ll both need and might need (eg. domain registration fees, domain renewal fees, domain push and transfer fees) are factored into the equation. With a monetization account, Fabulous has some of the lowest prices in the industry. Without it, Fabulous is much more expensive than most alternatives. Godaddy has very low prices for executive account holders and those who don’t mind asking other domainers all the time what the latest coupons are. It’s worth noting that Godaddy has hidden fees (eg: next paragraph was pretty much written off of Godaddy policies) and spams you to death with product offerings. Moniker’s prices are a bit higher than Godaddy, however they’re still very reasonable. Moniker charges for URL forwarding which I personally find ridiculous.

Hidden fees

Some registrars occasionally run promotions offering domain registrations below or near the registry wholesale price – selling domains at (or near) a loss requires them to make the money back somewhere else, usually from other products, hidden fees for spam, invalid whois, fees for customer support during ownership disputes, warehousing domains, and, almost always, more expensive domain name renewals (easily avoided by transferring the domains to a different registrar). That’s not to say more expensive registrars don’t have hidden fees — don’t agree to anything without both reading and understand it and ask all questions you have prior to choosing a domain name registrar.

Domain name security

Will you be needing additional security features or private domain name registration? Compare costs and features. We’ll look at 3 different registrars: Godaddy, Moniker, and Fabulous.

Godaddy Protected Registration: $24.99/year.

Moniker MaxLock: $34.99/year. Edit: Moniker recently introduced a Portfolio MaxLock option which costs around $200/year.

Fabulous.com Executive Lock: $0.00/year

“Fabulous is trying to offer this as another free value added service. If this manual transaction service is overused by wholesale account holders by processing high volumes of lower value domains, the service will have to become a paid feature in the future. Please take care to use this service appropriately for your special domains.”

Expiration Protection – Godaddy will renew any domains you purchase Protected Registration on for an additional year should they expire. This is a one time  feature and you’ll need to pay the renewal fee back should you wish to keep the domains. This may come in handy if your auto-renew  billing source fails or if you  forget to renew your domains. A common sense alternative for Moniker and Fabulous would be to renew your domains for additional years in advance, and this is something you should be doing anyway with valuable domains.

Nameserver Protection – Fabulous provides additional protection against nameserver changes as part of their free Executive lock. It’s unfortunate that Godaddy and Moniker do not offer  additional protection against nameserver changes as they do transfers of ownership with their premium security offerings. Hijacked nameservers can be extremely damaging to a company, having both financial and consumer trust-related consequences.

Private Registration – Many people purchase private domain name registration to increase the security of their domains. If a hacker can’t figure who owns the domain, it makes it much more difficult to compromise the account containing that domain. With the high level of security provided by the Fabulous Executive Lock and Moniker MaxLock, private registration isn’t really necessary unless you want to conceal your identity from the noobs sending you lowball offers on your generics each day. Private Registration currently costs $2 per domain at Moniker, is included free of charge with Godaddy’s Protected Registration or when you purchase or transfers 5 or more domains to Godaddy ($8.99/year for future years) and isn’t currently offered at Fabulous.com, however it appears there are plans to offer it in the near future.

User Experience — Customer support depends to a large extent on who your rep is, moreso than necessarily the company. Some companies have a reputation for having many incompetent reps,  Godaddy in example being a bad company to contact for support via email. That said, I’m quite happy with my Godaddy executive account rep — very knowledgeable and helpful. Godaddy, Moniker, and Fabulous all score high points for customer support. The domain name management interface is also something to carefully consider. My best advice would be to try them each out and find what works for you before transferring your domains over and finding yourself unhappy. Out of the three, I consider Fabulous as  having the best interface, followed by Godaddy, and then Moniker.

Transfer Protection – Even if you choose not to go with an Executive Lock on your domains, Fabulous still offers exceptional protection over the industry average. With up to five security questions requiring answer, Fabulous makes it very difficult for any would-be domain thief to make unauthorized transfers of ownership on your domains. By default, domains at Moniker are locked at both the registrar and registry level. Fabulous offers a registry level lock with their Executive Lock feature.  One of Moniker’s main attractions is that all transfers out are reviewed by Moniker employees, rather than being  a strictly automated process. Moniker has  a longstanding reputation for being one of the most dedicated and successful registrars when it comes to domain name security. Godaddy’s regular protection in the event of transfer requests is limited to sending an email to the  email address listed as belonging to the administrative contact. This is unfortunately insufficient in many cases, with many phishers obtaining access to domain name accounts by first compromising  the email address listed as the administrative contact and subsequently requesting the password. Godaddy’s protection for intra-registrar transfers is non-existent and Godaddy locks only at the registrar level, facilitating decisions which  may detrimentally affect domainers (eg. FamilyAlbum.com).

Government and Cybersquatter Protection – When incidents such as Kentucky happen, whose side is your registrar on? Moniker and Fabulous have time and time again put their customers first. I can’t say the same about Godaddy unfortunately.

RegistrarJudge.com is a free website which allows domainers to submit feedback about their experience with a domain name registrar. If you’re still unsure of who to go with, this is a great place to start. Choosing a safer registrar is an excellent start, however it’s no  reason to forget entirely about security measures you can take to help your registrar better protect you.

Think there’s something wrong with selling domain name parking accounts? At face value, it seems innocent enough. Ask yourself why people are buying these domain name parking accounts. Did they not qualify for a domain name parking account at that domain name parking company? If so, what right do you have to sell them your domain parking account so they can get in? In case you didn’t know, the most common reason people attempt to buy domain name parking accounts is so they can commit click fraud. Click fraud hurts everyone from domain name investors who will end up getting paid less per click, to advertisers who are getting zero return on their investment, and finally domain name parking companies which have to waste resources on combating a problem which has been magnified by the actions of some domain name investors. Don’t sell your domain name parking accounts.

Selling domain name parking accounts is against the Terms of Service of every domain name parking company. By doing this, you’re not only abusing the trust and breaking the rules of the domain name parking company (and their upstream provider), you’re also hurting all domainers in the process.

Most of the people who buy domain parking accounts are doing it to commit click fraud. Quite predictably, those engaging in click fraud will burn through a lot of domain name parking accounts fast — hence the reason some attempt to buy existing domain name parking accounts so they may continue to commit click fraud. Others will open new accounts using stolen or created identities, or simply switch to a different domain parking company and start committing click fraud once again.

Click fraud will never convert for advertisers. Most advertisers are paying for clicks expecting that a certain percentage of the clicks will convert into either a sale or a certain action being taken (eg. applying for a credit card). If an advertiser is unable to convert a sufficient number of clicks into the sales or actions, they’ll be left with no choice but to either lower their bids or cease purchasing paid clicks altogether (eg. moving to a Cost Per Action or other online or offline advertising platform).

While some domainers may have less devious reasons for wanting a domain name parking account, such as not having enough domains or enough quality domains to qualify for one with a particular domain parking company), it’s still against the parking company’s terms of service and you’re abusing the trust they placed in you by doing this.

Parking companies need to maintain high quality traffic. Selective parking companies are able to give their members “on average” more parking revenue because they’re selective about the domains and domainers they allow to park domains on their parking platforms. Lowering overall traffic quality by selling your domain parking account to someone whose domains didn’t meet the minimum quality requirements or chooses to engage in click fraud hurts everyone – domainers, advertisers, the domain parking company, their upstream provider, and YOU, because the domain parking account he bought off you was created in your name.