I started what’s become a great topic at namepros.com titled, Type-in Behavior Changing?. In my opinion, it’s a must read. If you are buying names for type-in income, you better read it. Pay particularly close attention to my posts (slobizman) and those of Seabass, a brilliant poster.

I’d summarize some of the postings and conclusions here, but I’ve got to keep my eye on the crazy stock market today, and I am in the middle of several domain sale escrows so I’ll ask that you just read the thread. You won’t miss anything that way anyway. Now, don’t stop reading early. It begins talking about the behavior of browsers, but moves on to more general discussions of the possible changing world of type-ins.

(I’ve also got to watch Hillary Clinton being interviewed on CNBC in 45 minutes, about her fears relating to the stock market. I sure hope to hell they have the guts to ask her about how back in her corrupt Arkansas days she turned $1,000 in Cattle futures into $100,000. Just dumb luck she says. Yeah right. LOL! Political payback. But I digress…)

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, ppc, parking, namepros

About a month ago, I published an article asking for Overture Keyword Selector Tool Alternatives. I received several sites like really liked. But someone just a few days ago told me about one that I didn’t yet know about. It’s called Keyword Dynamo SecretsToHighProfit.com.

Just pop in your keywords (and the initial captcha for the session) and you’ll get a very nice looking list with the following:

• Related searches that include your term
• Estimated number of times that term was searched on last month (Overture/Yahoo)
• Top Overture/Yahoo Advertiser Bids for each term
• Google Search Results
• KEI, R/S Ratio
• And much more..

In addition, you can export the list! Now that’s what I call service! And it’s all free.

On the page you’ll also see buttons for a Site Analyzer and PR Checker.

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, overture, keyword, search, keu, page rank, seo, search engine optimization

If you haven’t read it yet, read DNJournal’s article on the State of the Domain Industry. It’s a great article and a critical read for any domain investor.

The introduction of the article:

In our first State of the Industry survey of domain business experts a year ago, our panel predicted a phenomenal year in 2005. Their global forecast for the industry was right on the money as were many of their predictions regarding specific issues and events. Considering their track record we have been chomping at the bit to round up the channel’s best and brightest once again to get their insight into the events and trends of 2005 and more importantly, what they expect for the New Year ahead.

You will hear from a blue ribbon group of 20 experts that include key executives from the leading companies in the registration, PPC, aftermarket sales, drop catching and domain development sectors, as well as leading industry attorneys, trade show organizers and the people whose broad shoulders carry those mentioned above - domain name owners.

Technorati Tags: internet, domain, domain name

I’m very happy with the results my initial testing with the PPC parking service GoldKey.com, and over the last several weeks I’ve been in the process of moving my parked names from Afternic.com to GoldKey.com. I’m over half way done.

What’s so great about GoldKey? In a word, flexibility. Too often with other PPC services, my parked domain sites simply displayed a list of generic links for travel, fitness and so forth, generally producing no income. But GoldKey lets you supply not only keywords to help associate proper ad links, but create Google sitemaps, choose from hundreds of header banners, colors, search box positions, inclusion of “favorites” (extra, general links), link exchanges and more.

Take a look at one of my domain names, AboutFaith.com. With GoldKey I was able to create a beautiful page with a “religion-based” banner image and appropriate links. Notice that it also provides a “For Sale” link where I can insert my own custom sales text if I were to so choose. Check out GoldProfits.com for another example; this one has an image of money in green.

Now you need to see something really cool! Click on the Related Topics link below the main categories. Clicking on any of the letters will display the related topics that I’ve set up in my sitemap (which GoldKey creates for you with your supplied keywords). For example, click on B and then Buddhism, and you’ll get an entirely new page that reflects the keyword Buddhism and only the keyword Buddhism! Now that is impressive. You are allowed up to 512 sitemap keywords, so in essence your parked page can become a 512 page web site! If you didn’t know, Sitemap pages are a SEO technique where a layout of keyword-optimized HTML pages is provided for search engines. When these pages are indexed by search engines’ robots, the result is a higher probability that this domain will show up on search results pages and will therefore get more visitors. By design, visitors from search engines will be visiting the keyword optimized page (not the root of the domain) and will therefore see listings related to the keyword they were searching.

GoldKey pays at least 50% of the commissions it earns from Overture. They pay every month on the 15th for the previous calendar month’s earnings. From reading various posts on domain forums, it sounds like they are always prompt. Payments are made through Paypal, wire transfer or by check.

GoldKey really shines in the statistical reports it offers. I don’t think there is another site that offers as much detail. Page views, and detailed traffic numbers are real time; and the earnings accounting seems to lag by about one to three days, which is understandable. You can view visits and clicks for each or all domain names within various time periods. You can even see which keyword links visitors are clicking! And, an SEO report shows you what keywords where entered into which search engine to get to your page.

They also offer a Link Exchange program where other sites can request to exchange links with you, thereby increasing your page rank. You can link some of your own pages together, but be careful not to overdo it and appear as a link farm.

There are many more features that I can’t fit into what I’m trying to keep a short article and you can’t see until you sign up with an account.

GoldKey offers a referral program, which pays the referrer a commission equal to 10% of the referred client’s earnings. Nothing is subtracted from the referred client’s earnings, however, so there is no penalty whatsoever for someone signing up as a referral. Which brings me to my request: if you create your free account—and every one of you should sign up to at least test the service—I ask that you use this link (or any GoldKey link in this article) so you can be a referral of mine. It will not cost you nothing, and will not limit your own referrals someday, and the potential commissions will help me to maintain this web site. I’ll also make a deal with you: if you sign up as a referral, I’ll be glad to help you out with through email with any of your GoldKey questions. There is a learning curve as the documentation does not explain everything as it should and I’m sure I could be of assistance to you.

Technorati Tags: internet, domain, domain name, parking, PPC, goldkey, afternic, SEO, search, search engine

Unless I’m missing something, GoDaddy’s Domain Name Aftermarket (TDNAM.com) really screwed up a great thing they had going for domain buyers. Their Expired Name Auctions had always set a minimum bid of $10 for every expired name. It didn’t matter if the name was a premium name or a crap name. If it was a good name, the bidding naturally caused the price to be bid up to its free market value.

But GoDaddy has just changed the rules. They are now making a determination as to the value of the expiring domain names that they consider “High Traffic” names, and are setting a higher (often MUCH higher) minimum bid on those names. The minimum bids for High Traffic names begin at $20, and as of today, go up to $2,010. You can see the current listing here.

I checked their FAQs to learn about these High Traffic names. They say that these are names that are “parked on our name servers and have above average daily traffic” and are “Names identified as High Traffic are among the top 1% of all the expired domains that enter TDNAM on a daily basis.”

As for the pricing, they say “Our analysis on the traffic patterns of these domains suggest that the pay per click revenue potential is high. We’ve adjusted the minimum bid upward to reflect a percentage of the revenue potential. The minimum bid amount is based on the traffic patterns we expect over the next 12 months. Regardless of the minimum bid amount, we feel the pay per click potential per year exceeds the minimum bid.”

But, here’s the problem, illustrated in the FAQ that answers the question: “Can you provide specific traffic information?” The answer: “No. Our analysis is based on actual traffic today and expected traffic in the future. Our analysis model predicts future traffic based on many factors. Even though we are confident with our analysis, we understand traffic and click-through rates can vary.”

A better solution would have been to go ahead and categorize these domains as High Traffic names, but share their traffic statistics. Then, let the bidding proceed naturally from $10 as before. This would have benefited both the buyer and GoDaddy.

The buyer would benefit because with stats in hand, he’d feel better about bidding on a name like ultrabbw.info, instead of trying to guess at the stats and starting the bidding at $1,100!

GoDaddy would have benefited because most all of these names would have received bids instead of having their auction expire with no bids what-so-ever becuase the opening bid was so high.

I’ve picked up 84 names from TDNAM in the past couple months. I very much like it and appreciate the ease at which I can sometimes pick up a name for $10. But, it isn’t all $10 bargains—good names almost always get bid up to their free-market value; the last name I bought was $755. There was no need for GoDaddy to restructure the Expired Names Auctions in a way that artificially set the opening bid. I sure hope that sites like SnapNames.com and Pool.com don’t follow suit.

It just doesn’t feel like an Expired Domain auction to me any more. It feels more like I’m dealing with a name broker. And that’s a shame, because I really love my daily TDNAM hunts.

If I’m missing something, please correct me in a comment.

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, godaddy, tdnam, expired name, expired domain, auction, internet

A few weeks ago I picked up the deleted domain ShutUpHillary.com through SnapNames.com for the $60 fee. With her possible Senate reelection run, and her most definite plans to run for president in 2008, this was a good purchase. Rather than sitting around waiting for someone to purchase it from me, I thought about how I might make some money from it right now.

I’m experienced in creating and selling CafePress.com products, and political items are their biggest sellers. So, it was a natural fit and I created the Shut Up Hillary store there. I’ve got just a few items up to get started. But, here’s the great thing I’m doing with this. Usually when you create a product on CafePress.com, others tend to imitate it and siphon off some of the sales. But, if one owns the trademark for the image or wording on the products, CafePress.com will shut copycats down as soon as they are notified by the trademark owner. There’s really no fighting it. So, I went out and filed for the trademark “Shut Up Hillary” in the proper class for selling these goods. No one else will be able to create Shut Up Hillary products.

The trademark filing fee was $270, but that’s nothing compared to what I can make on CafePress.com. I’ve done it before. And now, they’ve got a new affiliate program just coming out of beta, which will help to increase sales.

The domain name right now is simply pointing to my store (whose design I know I have to improve). I’m stuck with Register.com for 60 days since that’s who I had to continue using via this SnapNames sale. Register.com unbelievably will not let me redirect the domain to the store without them framing it and putting an add of their’s at the bottom of the page. Try clicking on ShutUpHillary.com and see for yourself. They charge $50 a year to redirect without the ad! I’m not paying them for that. I’ll wait until my 60 days are up and then move it to GoDaddy.com.

Just pointing the domain name to the CafePress.com page is good, but not the optimum. It’s not necessarily sending traffic to the domain name. I’m going to think about creating a site for the domain, with some Hillary content and with links to the store. I could write a blog in it, but the last time I did something political like that it burned me out (made me hate things about BOTH sides).

Anyway, I thought I’d share what I’m doing with CafePress.com since it is something you might be interested in doing with some of your domain names.

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, internet, hillary, hillary clinton, clinton, cafepress

How do you get traffic to domain names you have in inventory? Some get traffic naturally, based upon misspellings, popular word names, and previous site traffic. Sure, you can also get some traffic from search engines sending visitors to your parked domains as well. But, what if you have a brand-spanking new domain name that isn’t a misspelling and isn’t a simple popular word or phrase, and you want much more traffic?

The obvious advice is that you must build a web site for the domain name. But, that’s a lot of work, unless you are real web whiz and just love to spending time building sites rather than looking for more domain names. If only there was a way to whip up a real web site that has new content daily–without much work at all.

I’ve done just that. I spent the last week off and on (I’m a slow web designer) creating a very simple site that shows the latest news in the area of alternative energy, an area in which I own many names. Now that I have it set up, I don’t need to do anything at all. It updates itself with new news automatically!

And it’s not complex. Basically, I use one of the many RSS news aggregators (I use Carp) to grab the news feeds I’ve set up to request, filtered for the appropriate content, and display them on the page. There was a learning curve to incorporate the aggregator, but it wasn’t too bad given I have some technical expertise. In addition, to keep it simple, and to keep server resources down, it doesn’t use SQL.

You can see my first try at it at AltEnergyToday.com. I know it needs some “beautifying” and I’ll get to that shortly. I do have the Adsense ads up already and a quick and dirty pointer to the list of my Alternative Energy domain names on this site.

The real beauty of this site is that I can replicate it in an hour for any other subject matter. For example, I have a large number of domains in the Robotics area. Once I get the template how I really like it, I’m going to make a similar site for Robotics at a domain I just bought called RoboticsReport.com.

What’s all this cost? Nothing. While I paid for the commercial version of Carp, there is a free version that would have done the same thing (I didn’t end up using the premium features). As for hosting the site, I simply use an “Add-on” domains which are free at my favorite web hosting company, LivingDot.com (the absolute, without question, fastest support on the net today).

Now, I’ll just wait and see if the site gets popular and generates some Adsense revenue and visitors to Domain Rookie to see my domains. And then there is always the added benefit of increasing the value of my AltEnergyToday.com domain.

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, web site, internet, alternative energy, solar, solar energy, fuel cell, wind energy