Well, that was an interesting test. About ten days ago, I parked DomainRookie.com as a test. I wanted to see how the parked page would do at Sedo.com and if readers would miss it.

I was pleasantly surprised at the numbers. In the stats for the last seven days at Sedo, I received 4,154 uniques. I don’t think the name was optimized for the first 4-5 days, but now it is with “domain names” as the keyword. It’s received 19 clicks at 49 cent EPC.

I’ve received many emails from people who had to look up my email address on my Whois records to find me. They want the site back for the commentary and the resource page. Thanks for your support!

I’m going to continue with commentary here and, in fact, improve the site over time, as I see it’s desired and it’s getting the hits. I know can put in more effort to monetize it. I’ve really not done much at all to make money from it

However, I’m also going to put it up for sale at a pretty affordable price before I spend the time to beef it up I’ll take the first $5,000 (net to me after expenses) offer.

The site is hosted at my excellent web host, LivingDot.com, in an “add-on” account under my main account. I’m sure they would move the WordPress blog files and database to a new individual LivingDot.com account for free for someone opening up a new account there. It’s $11 a month and I see there is a 50% off coupon code on their home page right now. This company gives (you won’t believe it) five minute or less support response times. (I get no fee for recommending them)

So, if you’d like to run this blog, with all its room for growth, or use the domain for something else, let me know through the contact page on the site.

Note: This was a PR4 blog for a long time. It currently shows zero. It must have been the temporary parking that made it a PR0 for some reason, for the moment. I see I still have my Alexa rank of 174K

Technorati Tags: wordpress, domain, domain names, website for sale

It used to drive me nuts entering names or doing anything in my portfolio in Afternic. I could run to the bathroom while the screen was painting and when I got back I still had to wait. But, over the last few months, it’s been much, much faster. (And it’s quick at telling me my names might be too naughty for them, too!)

But, now the once quick-enough Sedo has taken the place of Afternic as the slow-as-molasses site. It’s truly frustrating sometimes. But, I sell just about all my domains there, so I guess I’m stuck with it. But I can still complain.

How’s your experience?

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, after, sedo

When you go to buy or sell a name, it’s important to know how much similar names have sold for. Good appraisals take these comps into consideration, but you can do this legwork yourself with two great websites that catalog domain sales data and put it all in an easily searchable database. The two sites are DNSalePrice.com and NameBio.com.

Both of them do pretty similar things, letting you select and sort on things like keyword, TLD, date and price. There are some differences, but the main functionality is pretty much the same. But, the little differences will steer you to one or the other as your primary program. For example, I prefer the interface of NameBio.com, the many extra options and the average price display for your selections. But, I found that both sites did not include some sales that the other sites included.
NameBio.com only receives sales feeds from verified sources like domain auction houses and brokers, not forums and unverified private sales, to insure accuracy. This is good to know, but a lot of business goes on privately and in forums, so you might still find the extra sales in DNSalePrice.com useful–just keep in mind some may or may not be accurate. I do know that several of my private sales showed up on DNSalePrice.com and the price was accurate. Regardless, it’s best to check both sites if you are doing serious research.

Here is an example of the differences, when looking up .cc sales for the last 6 months:

NameBio.com

RingTones.cc….5,000
Pool.cc….2,006
Flx.cc….1,000
Attorney.cc….1,000

DNSalePrices.com

Software.cc….12,500
Cash.cc….5,500
Fund.cc….4,000
Program….2,500
Lease.cc….2,500
Pool.cc….2,006
Ad.cc….1,750 (my purchase, accurate)
Bet.cc….1,500
Flex.cc….1,200
Attorney.cc….1,000 (my purchase, accurate)
Robotics.cc….1,000 (my purchase, accurate)
Tofu.cc….1,000 (my sale, accurate)

So, next time you think about spending $20-50 for a professional appraisal, try these sites first. They can provide valuable insight, providing you with negotiating ammo for whether you are buying or selling.

I’ve just accomplished something I have never done before I’ve taken my two month old site, TravelVoyeur.com, form a PR0 to a PR5. A few days ago it was a 0 and now it is a 5! How did I do it?

Well, the first thing I did was before I created the site, I read the incredible book, SEOBook. It’s not cheap, but it’s worth every penny. Then I designed the site with what I learned from it.

One of the most importnat things I learned was the ultimate unimportance of being included in the Yahoo Directory. Since it could take up to a year to get listed, I chose to pay they $299 for a review of my submission within seven days (still, no guarantee of inclusion). Simultaneously, I created a PRWEB.com press release that I guess Yahoo felt was good enough to include in Yahoo News (read it here).

A pick up of the news here and there (not a lot even) and the site is now a PR5. Being moved up higher in the search results now, my keyword-rich pages are being found by web surfers looking for information on particular destinations. What’s really funny is that I am on page 3 (as of today at least) for the very high search count term “voyeur”. It’s not exactly my target audience, but even voyeurs travel I suppose! Hell, maybe even more so.

Now that I am PR5 and getting hundreds of uniques per day, I’m looking for link partners of other high PR sites. I prefer travel-related sites, but I’ll look at other non-porn sites if the ranking is high enough. Please use my contact form here or at TravelVoyeur.com to get in touch.

Now, if I just had the time to fix the SEO of DomainRookie.com! I put this site together before reading SEOBook and it badly needs some SEO work.

First and last names are good domain name investments. Think about it, have you ever looked up your name to see if it was available? Of course, you have. But, the most popular names are taken. However, the ones past the top 1000 or lower rankings, particularly last names, are still valuable. While #1 ranked Smith is the name for about 2,500,000 million people, there are still about 5,000 Hambrick’s ranked 5,003, for example. That’s a lot of potential buyers for any of the major TLD’s.

So where do you find these lists? There are a lot of sites on the web that show the data, but at the core they mostly use the 1990 US Census Data found on this page. From this page you can enter the actual file of last, and both male and female first names. The lists are shown in ranking order, along with the frequency and ranking. In addition, you can search for a name to bring up the data for the name.

Numerous sites parse and display these data in various formats. Just search for them. One nice example is this page at Mongabay.com.

Let me know in the comments any other nice name sites.

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, census, genealogy

Have you checked out my new web site TravelVoyeur.com yet? It’s really a fun site with some great travel videos and slide shows. Check it out and let me know what you think. And if you have a travel -related site, let me know if you want to trade links. Or if you have ideas on who I can trade links with, or ideas on increasing traffic, let me know as well.

Here’s Mount Everest Climb 2004 an example of a typical blog entry on the Travel Voyeur site.

Mount Everest Climb 2004

Have you dreamed of climbing Mount Everest? Now you have chance to see what it’s like in an awesome, short video posted to Youtube by user rahulrathan. There are no credits so I cannot tell the names of those who have made the climb. But it is an incredible film of a May 12th - May 16th, 2004 climb by several men from Base Camp to through the Khumbu Icefall at Camp 2 at 21,300 ft (6500 m) to the summit at 29,028 (8848 m). Narration by one of the climbers along the way.

Britannica on Mount Everest:

Peak on the crest of the Himalayas, southern Asia. The highest point on Earth, with a summit at 29,035 ft (8,850 m), it lies on the border between Nepal and Tibet (China). Numerous attempts to climb Everest were made from 1921; the summit was finally reached by Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay of Nepal in 1953. In dispute is whether the English explorer George Mallory, whose body was discovered below Everest’s peak in 1999, had actually reached the peak earlier, in 1924, and was descending it when he died. The formerly accepted elevation of 29,028 ft (8,848 m), established in the early 1950s, was recalculated in the late 1990s.

For more information, see the Answers.com entry on Mount Everest.

I had this site written in Expression Engine instead of Wordpress for a change. Let me know if you have any questions about EE, not that I’m an expert yet.

If you’ve got a blog, you know I’d love it if you could mention TravelVoyeur.com!

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, travel, blog, everest, mountain climbing, Himalayas, Tibet, Nepal

I swore I would not do it again, but I did. I have a new site called TravelVoyeur.com. I actually put some effort into this one and farmed out the work. Instead of using WordPress, I instead had it set up on Expression Engine because 1) I wanted to check it out and 2) there are some integrated modules that EE has that could come in handy for this site — like a gallery, forum, wiki and other things.

I’m still testing it all out, but am live.

I think it’s an interesting idea. What do you think?

Technorati Tags: travel, domain, domain name, online video, video, photos

With 3,000 domains, I really have to stop thinking about developing them. It’s drives me crazy because there is no way I can do much of that, still hunt for names and have a life. But, I couldn’t help myself this week and did one anyway:

I thought it would take a few hours to get up and running on WordPress, but those ever-present technical problems popped up! Argghhh. I have no revenue generation on it yet; just want to get it going first.

No more websites!

Well, there is one I have to do, but that one is so damn good I’m paying someone to do the whole thing.

I recently purchased xsitepro (no affiliate link), a quick website designer. It’s created with SEO and Adsense in mind. After a short learning curve, I was able to put up my new site, BackupSchool.com. I think it turned out pretty well for something I just worked on off and on for the last couple weeks. It’s not pretty, but purposefully so. I don’t want it to look like I’m selling something. The content is original, and I’m now working through it to clean up the writing I quickly threw together. I’m very serious about this site and will be adding plenty more content and going more in-depth on the subject matter.

The lack of focus by most individual users on the subject of backup has bothered me for some time. I guess being the “neighborhood techie” has thrown me in just too many situations where I’ve seen people lose data and tell me they didn’t think they needed to back up. Hopefully, this site will help people to get a consistent backup going. These days, with cheap hard drives and image backup software, there is really no excuse not to have the capability to quickly restore 100% of your data.

Please check out the site. If you know of any blogs that might like to mention BackupSchool.com to their readers, it would be great if you could point it out to them.

Technorati Tags: backup, data backup, xsitepro, domain

I trying out developing some sites to see how it goes. Not sure it’s really worth my time, but it will be a good test. I built up the following sites on domains that I already owned:

AvianFluWorld.com
ImmortalityNow.com
AboutFaith.com

And, as you know I recently developed SexRobot.com, which so far today (1/2 day had 95 visitors already). By the way, just so you know, I’m not really into this sex doll stuff that’s on there; just creating content for the domain name. Some of them are pretty hot though. LOL!

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, bird flu, avian flu, immortality, religion, sex, sex robot, love doll, sex doll