Domain Magnate

With all the respect to Zesty for keeping and maintaining the 3 char domains price guide, which has been a valuable resource for domainers for many years, lately it has become quite outdated and some of the price figures in it have little to do with the reality on the market. Here are some examples:

1. LLL.com min price has gone quite below $4k despite the guide putting it at $4750. Recent sales on sedo: whz.com $4,050, aoq.com $3,499, xtq.COM €3,050. There are also quite a few low quality LLL.com’s available for sale on dnforum which can be easily purchased for around or below $4k.
2. Low quality LLL.biz, LLL.info, LLL.us have become almost worthless, having no liquidity, except for good, premium letters, or meaningful combos.
3. Min 3 Char prices (CCC.com) are also below the nominal value:  LLN.com and NLL.com have a $245 and $200 min prices in the guide respectfully, however many recent sales on Sedo and GoDaddy auctions fetch considerably below that:  0xi.com $160, ui0.com    $165, tq0.com    $135, 0qj.com    $115, aq0.com    $115, 0mx.com    $120,  1zg.com    $165
4. The biggest joke of all: N-N.com - despite their extreme rarity: only 100 are available are selling ofr roughly 3-4 times less than the guide’s value. There were no recent sales reported, however the latest one: 2-9.com for $617 on sedo from half a year ago is pretty close. Since recently this incredible deal was offered on DNF - with no interest at all:  4 decent N-N.com’s (with no zeros) plus an LLL.info for only $1950 - which comes down to below $500 per N-N.com compared to the $1700 minimum reseller price mentioned in 3char guide.
5. L-L.com - not many sales happened lately,  but a few months ago we’ve seen a few of them on Sedo auctions: q-i.com   $752, z-l.com $702 - despite the noted min reseller price of $2200 for L-L.com.

Hopefully we’ll soon see 3char price guide values changed to reflect the market and being updated based on the market data to be once again a great help to domainers.

The main question on everyone’s mind is of course what will happen with the short domains in the near future, especially LLL.com’s which are the domain resellers favorites: they are easy to appraise, rather liquid and hold good value. Two and half years ago at peak times we’ve seen the min prices for LLL.com reaching $8k and after that prices  started to plummet and have been falling ever since. While there are always opportunities for quick flips on auctions and forums, personally I wouldn’t advice people buying low quality LLL.com’s taking advantage of low prices as an investment - it’s hard to predict how the prices will change, they might as well keep falling and reach new lows.  However the good quality LLL.com’s - with no bad letters such as: Y,Z,X,Q or even without J,W,V may represent a good investments due to the good potential for end user interest and affordable prices below $10k.

Moral of the day: Do your own research, check the recent sales and demand vs supply on the forums and marketplaces; don’t rely solely on guides!

This happened with me yesterday. One of the not so nice sides of domaining. In short: a member blue777 was asking for cvcv.com domains to buy and I pmed him a list of my names, including hace.com which is a great cvcv.com domain with many meanings and over 100 million results in google, asking him to make his best offer and if I like it I might accept, so he offered $3,000 for hace.com and I accepted it. But a few hours later he replied withdrawing his offer.

It’s not the first time it happened to me, domainers face this kind of thing frequently. Usually however from “end users” or other newbie domainers. In most cases it’s ignored, sometimes people would post/complain about it, or leave a negative itrader. But the fact that it was an established member who’s been around DNF for years and had many itraders, as well as the fact that he felt he could retract his offer (even after it was accepted) as easily as he could make one made me post about this.

Have you encountered this kind of behavior, what’s your opinion on the matter? What should we do in such cases?

If you take a look at sedo auctions at any given time most of the auction listings only have one bid and the vast majority of them also end up with one single bid - the end user who made a bid and the seller decided to push it to auction.

When you push a domain with a high starting bid (high in relation to its reseller value) to auction one of the following is bound to happen, in this order of likelihood:

1. The domain will get no more bids and the initial bidder will win. However during the 7 days he had plenty of time to (a) find another domain; (b) reconsider his proposal and (c) also saw that no one else was interested in outbidding him - which only tells him that he is overpaying, and no one likes to pay more. The chances of the buyer not following through with the purchase are increasing significantly and we all know how high is the percentage of non paying buyers on Sedo.
2. The domain will receive one more bid from another interested buyer. Strangely enough many sedo auctions end with just two bids (not 3 or 4, but exactly 2) - with the first bidder not getting into a “bidding war”. However in that case the seller only gets an additional $50 for his domain - which usually is not worth the trouble of a 7 day auction.
3. The domain receives many additional bids and ends with a significantly higher price - this is very unlikely if the initial offer was higher than the market price already and is much more likely when the initial auction starting price (which also serves as the reserve in such auctions) is much lower than the market price.

Clearly the third case is the only one that justifies pushing a domain with a high initial offer to a sedo auction. However it’s only likely if there can be many potential end users for the domain, or if the initial price was low.

If the initial bid is higher than the market value don’t auction the domain, instead negotiate the max you can out the buyer and try to close the deal as quick as possible!

I started a thread yesterday on the DigitalPoint forums asking for 3 character domains to buy and 2 members already tried to scam me. Surprisingly the way they try to do it is extremely simple - they try to sell you a domain they don’t really own and accept payment through Western Union, Bank Wire, or MoneyBookers or even  paypal even though with paypal the transaction can be reversed. But I suppose they might be able to transfer the funds away before you do a chargeback in this case.

One of them is ShayGA. He pmed me offering to buy A66.com for $500. However a quick check reveals that it’s an active site and they are not likely to be interested in selling the domain. So I asked him to confirm that he owns the domain and he never replied. I dug a bit on him and found out that he only joined a couple days ago, but already had a lot of ’sales’ going on. Most of these threads end with the members accusing the topic starter of being a scammer. I guess there are people who actually buy into this, otherwise he wouldn’t be doing it.

Update: I was told by another fellow domainer that this guy is also trying to “sell” that domain on NamePros. Luckily on NP and DNF the mods and members  are alert and swift in banning scammers.

Another one was Venliven - a recently joined member, I guess he joined when he saw my thread because that is where he made his first and second posts. It took me about 5 seconds to realize this might be a scammer by the strange question “What is your payment method?” - naturally it’s going to be paypal. I decided to play it out and see if I can get his details to post them here.

So I replied to his pm asking what were the domains - he answered with www.wut.com and www.juk.com.  To get the final confirmation that it was a scammer I decided to lowball and offered $2k for each (the actual market price for these would be at least $5k  each) and told him that if he accepts to pm me his bank and western union details, as well as moneybookers and I’ll see what’s easier for me to pay with. Scammers register new usernames daily, but in case someone asks you to send money to these addresses you’ll know who you are dealing with:

Western Union:
Zaid Lutfi , United arab emirates

Western Union:
Steven Burken
UpHill Sight 3/2

MoneyBookers:
w.a.t.e.r@hotmail.co.uk

Bank Account in UK:
39032157

Afterwards I asked him to confirm that he actually owns the domains by adding something in the whois contacts - he started sending weird messages with all kinds of lame excuses. Many of them didn’t even make much sense: “Without my hosting on I don’t have a server” - huh?

There are so many scammers on DP it’s ridiculous. And the mods don’t usually ban them since they don’t  break any petty rules, while DP mods don’t get involved in business between members. However those scammers are very easy to recognize. More sophisticated are the scammers that actually steal or sell stolen domains. Sometimes even experienced domainers fall victim to such crimes in this popular thread at dnf.

This post is a result of my 4.5 years of experience focusing on SEO as the main source to drive traffic to my online businesses and the more recent discussions, readings and deliberations on the matter.

It’s said that the best way to predict the future is to look into the past. The history of SEO is a short one, but have been quite eventful and colorful.

In 1990’s SEO or search spam was in its infancy and all was rather simple - put all your keywords on the page and meta tags and submit your sites to search engines frequently and you’d rank well. Back then you had to go through pages of porn to find what you were looking for in the serps. Spamming the search engines was so easy that there was very little trust in them.

In the late 1990’s there came Google and introduced a new concept of pagerank algorithm and citation rankings - links mattered. The SEO’s, or search spammers (there really was no distinction between the two in the early years) turned to building lots of sites and interlinking them. Any spammy and low quality links did the trick and soon enough it became the norm.

In the early 2000’s Google realized that they had a serious problem with search spam (seo) and introduced a series of updates that made many of the wide spread seo (search spam) techniques obsolete and little effective.  The main objective by Google was to be able to show the most relevant results to users and that would have been hard  without them being able to decide what’s good and what’s not. So proper webmaster guidelines were introduced and webmasters were encouraged to optimize their sites for easier navigation of both visitors and bots.

In the mid 2000’s the search spam problem was still widespread and Google continues to change their algo in order to give more weight to old established and trusted sites, devalue low quality links and make it more difficult for new sites to rank well fast. They’ve also cracked down on various black hat spam networks, many of which used adsense and so large numbers of adsense accounts were banned. These changes helped Google get the upper hand and spamming the search became ineffective, so former spammers turned SEO’s and started to use more covert methods and soon many of those became a norm: directory submissions, article submissions, reciprocal links and a wide variety of similar ways.

Next in mid and late 2000’s  Google gradually shut down most of the top directories by lowering their pagerank and deindexing them. Blog comments were made little effective, forum signature links, reciprocal links and all the link exchange networks lost value. New methods emerged like link baits, Social Spam Bookmarks, all sorts of “linkwheels” which are based on having lots of unique and semi unique content hosted at various sites freely allowing it in order to give links. Link buying became the method of choice for those who can afford it, and despite what you might hear from Matt Cutts it still works and will do for a while, but eventually I believe Google will find a way to deal with it as well. (A tip on that: if you do buy links make sure it’s as covered as possible, not with “Sponsored Links”, “Advertisers”, or even blogrolls and related links, but rather inside text, looking naturally like a citation on a useful resource).

What SEO methods are still effective?

• Article submissions, distributions and all ways of putting your content everywhere with links back still works to a good extent
• Buying link, as previously mentioned has become widely spread and the top companies competing in highest paying niches, like gambling and finance spend hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly on buying links and spend lavishly at that.
• LinkBaits are the new trend, have content worth to link to and spread the word around to get the ball rolling. If abused Google may look down upon them, but as long as it’s all fun and useful it’ll get you the good links and with them the serps.
• Content - have good quality content plays a major part in the equation
• Sponsored reviews, sponsored blog posts and sponsored links contribute to SEO also
• .. many other methods as well.

What SEO methods will be effective in the next few years? As Google going more towards personalized search results and using users’ behavior patterns on site to better value their quality, as well as displaying more current and live results I believe most of the current SEO ways will become less effective. Companies will focus more on improving their sites, advertising and promoting their brands, constructing elaborate linkbait campaigns and heavily using adwords to buy targeted traffic (which naturally is what Google wants the most - people paying them for the traffic and not to the SEO’s to create spammy networks of content and links).  Authority in the eyes of Google will become a traded commodity and companies will still be buying their ways into the top of the serps, but much more carefully.

Will SEO as we know it today become obsolete in the next several years? Not likely, SEO companies will adapt, focus more on social media and quality as well as SEM and buying traffic. There would still be many new and low competitive niches to focus on to make a living for webmasters.

Quality content, good site navigation and naturally looking links will still do their trick. SEO the way I see it will become focused on more on the visitors and making them like and share your sites with friends. Links are still going to matter, but only the more natural looking ones and from trusted sites.

The death of SEO will merely lead to it reincarnation as being geared more towards the human visitors than the bots and focusing more on current trends and analyzing user behavior on your site.

Over the last 4 years I’ve been using freelancers, a lot. Hundreds of different projects with at least a few hundred different programmers, designers, writers, data entry guys etc.

It didn’t always go well - in fact the first few times I was charged large sums for not working scripts or crappy looking designs. But I’ve learned from my mistakes and now finding good, reliable and affordable programmers, designers, content writers and data entry people is pretty easy for me.I use scriptlance.com for most of my new projects, be it writing, seo, or development. Like all other freelancing sites scriptlance is full of time wasters and people looking for quick money without work. However if you stick to the guidelines below you’ll be able to avoid them easily and find the best people for you work.

Here is my fail proof method to getting any programming/design/writing/data entry work done:

1. Register an account at scriptlance.com
2. Post a new project with a reasonably detailed description and be sure to use the prepaid option to show you’re serious. Make bids open and viewable to let the bidders compete amongst themselves. No need to enter budget unless you have a strict range in mind. Also note that you won’t be able to delete the project details later, so if you want to share some sensitive data in the description you can either upload a file - files are deleted after the project is closed - or send it through the message board privately.
3. Give it at least 1-3 days to accumulate enough offers.
4. Check the members with the best reviews. Simply ignore people who have average rating below 9-9.5 out of 10, or if they are very new and have less than 5 reviews - you don’t want that kind of service.   Pay most attention to those members who have perfect 10/10 feedback with over 10 reviews or at least average 9.8. Also pay closer attention to the feedback comments, freelancers with more comments implying that the webmaster would hire them again usually provide the best quality work and service.
5. Pick some of bidders with top reviews, reply to them for more details. You can request examples of their previous similar work, a quick demo (if it doesn’t take more than ~15 min to make they’ll usually do it with no commitment from you), or more details on how they plan to complete the project.
6. Discuss the details through pmb with at least 2-3 bidders you’ve picked and once you’re clear on all the details and got the best price quote - pick your winner. Do not, under any circumstances, agree on paying part of the money upfront. Use scriptlance escrow to place the whole amount, or 50% of it in escrow and it will only be released when you’re satisfied with the project.
7. Be sure to agree on all details before choosing a winner - requesting additional features afterwards might be too late.

To sum it up:  pick freelancers with best reviews, who did related projects and discuss all details before closing. Good luck!

The Best LLLL.com You’ve seen so far! :: Click NOW :: Bulg.com, Afff.com, Bune.com

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eFav.com - $4950
_The_ Best name for a social bookmarking site! Could be developed into something like Faves.com or Fark.com, or even Del.icio.us or Digg.com. Or build a site like allmyfaves.com or SocialMarker.com to list and help users manage all the bookmarks from other sites.
Short and easy to remember - the perfect opportunity to launch your own social bookmarking site and capitalize on the hot trend, or sell it to the next big thing like twitter!
Buy this and I will also help you find an affordable and good quality developers to make an excellent custom site for the domain and even help promote it.
Ever wanted to have your own social bookmarking start up? This is your perfect opportunity!

Bulg.com - $4950
Popular short word for Bulgaria, comes with a professionally developed mini site that currently ranks #4 for ‘Bulg’ in google and many other queries in Google, MSN and Yahoo.
Bulgaria has a population of 7.6 Million people, is a member of the EU and NATO.
Bulgaria is one of the most popular turist locations in Europe for it’s enormous historical and cultural heritage stretching back from the beginning of written history (6-5 millenia ago), throughout the Greek and Roman times and the Middle ages and up to Modern times. The cheapest housing in EU and excellent climate for both winter skiing and summer beach activities.

Afff.com - $2950

AFFiliate Forum. There are now many affiliate forums, like wickedfire.com, or wealthyaffiliate.com and new ones are openned all the time. Many charge as much as $100 per month for membership and attract hundreds and thousands of members.
With Afff.com you could stand above all these - short and premium domain instinctively related to the industry. Instasnt brand recognition and trust.
You could also build an affiliate forums list or blog to profit from the highest referrer commissions in the industry. Wealthyaffiliate.com even pay $175 comission per each member you refer.
These could be extremely profitable, one such forum launched recently made $25k in the first 2 days only - read on here

also
Adult Friend Finder forum
AFFF Aqueous Film Forming Foam
AFFF Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival
AFFF Aqueous Fire Fighting Foam
AFFF AKR’s Free Form Framework

AARR.com and DDRR.com $4995 for the pair
Two super rare domains with many acronyms. There are only 34 names like these with 2 premium letters repeating.

Hace.com - $6950
over 200 Million results in google, multiple acronyms and meanings, and many developed sites on other extensions.
Also receives some type in traffic on sedo.
Dozens of potential end users you can market this to.

Bune.com - SOLD

Zwee.com -  SOLD

Top LLLL.com sales for your information (that are not words):
Riva.com $200,000 2008
iGen.com $100,100 2008
Dora.com $100,000 2006
uNet.com $100,000 2008
Xian.com $83,500 2008
moka.com $72,223 2007
vida.com $70,000 2008
fern.com $50,000 2008
loco.com $50,000 2006
bedo.com $45,000 2009
mygo.com $31,000 2006
cmdx.com $30,350 2008
kwik.com $30,000 2007
conn.com $29,500 2007
cobb.com $28,500 2007
sida.com $27,000 2006
jojo.com $25,500 2008
bing.com $25,375 2007
ozmo.com $25,000 2008
racy.com $25,000 2008
reos.com $25,000 2008
osco.com $24,500 2008
boya.com $22,500 2008
ebio.com $22,500 2008

- listed on multiple forums
- Post sold to claim a domain - payment expected within 24 hours.
- Winner to be determined by time stamp
- Payments accepted by paypal masspay from established members or wire/escrow - buyer pays all fees.

A new GoDaddy phishing scheme is spreading quickly now, I personally received 4 identical emails from them just an hour ago. Many other domainers reported receiving these, some 5-7 at a time. The email, which appears to come from support@godaddy.com but it points to: http://205.234.236.23/~ytrindic/ It’s a server in Pakistan mzwebhost.com

Domain Registration Confirmation

Dear Customer,

This notification is generated automatically as a service to you.

Because of unusual number of invalid login attempts on you account, we had to believe that, their might be some security problem on you account. So we have decided to put an extra verification process to ensure your identity and your account security.
Please click on sign in to domain servers to continue to the verification process and ensure your account security. It is all about your security. Thank you. and visit the customer service section.

please contact us within 1 days.

If you need to address this matter, or in any way need further assistance or technical support, call us any time at (480) 505-8877 or email us at support@godaddy.com. We appreciate your business!

Sincerely,
GoDaddy.com DomainAlert team

The emails also have the “regular” legal addition which makes them look rather authentic:

*Free hosting, photo album and blog services are ad-supported. Ad-supported Web sites contain
relevant online advertising on a small portion of the site, but DO NOT include obtrusive pop-up ads.
**Not applicable to premium domains, bulk domain purchases, discounted domain products, Sunrise/Landrush domain registrations, .ME domain registrations, discounted memberships or maintenance plans; additional disk space and bandwidth renewals, custom page layouts, custom headers, posters or gift cards. Discount reflected in your shopping cart – cannot be used in conjunction with any other offer or promotion.

Copyright © 2009 GoDaddy.com, Inc.. All rights reserved.

In general these emails look pretty good, much better than the regular scams, where after seeing the “dear sir/madam” you can figure it’s a scam right away. This email even had a smaller frame with a 10% off code and a few real links to GoDaddy.com

Take 10%** off your next order at GoDaddy.com.
Simply enter gdbb366 in your shopping cart or mention the offer code when you call (480) 505-8877.

The question remains however will these guys ever learn to spell and actually write in decent English? However many people don’t read email and just check the title, open it and click the link if it looks authentic.

Last, but not least - be sure to mouse over all links in email before clicking them!

I’m currently subscribed to 5 or 6 domaining newsletters and 4 of them send the emails [almost] periodically. They all go automatically to a special folder in my mailbox, called “newsletters”. Currently it has over 400 emails, accumulated in over a year.

While there is usually nothing interesting to buy for resellers, or domain flippers - if you’re looking for a good name for development, or investment it could be a good opportunity. Anyone can usually submit their domains to be published in the newsletter for a 10% fee in case of a sale an a 1-2 week exclusivity promise. If the domain doesn’t sell you pay nothing as a seller. The prices are almost always higher than what a domain would sell on the forums, or auctions, however sometimes bargains can slip through.

DomainsNewsletter.com by Kevin from BigTicketDomains.com wins the award for best prices and quality. There are names in varying price and quality ranges and with prices starting at only $50 even small time, beginning web developers can find good names to purchase. Even if you plan to find good names to try to resell to end users you may find them here. There are also frequent top quality generic domains for 5, and even 7 figures.
Kevin sent out 18 emails since I joined 4 months ago, or an average of about one email per week. However it’s not quite a weekly newsletter since there were 9 emails in March, none in February and only one in January this year.

DomainsForMedia.com newsletter by Eric Rice from DnCartoons.com is a close match by quality vs price as there are many good quality generics present for $xxx-$x,xxx ranges. The emails usually include larger lists of domains and note that offers will also be considered.
I’ve received 75 emails since joining in July 9, 2008, which is an average of about two emails per week.

The other two popular newsletters are by Evan Horowitz from HuntingMoon.com and Rock Latona from RickLatona.com.
Huntingmoon’s newsletter is notable because it lists the domains sold through the newsletter, along with prices, every month and also the pending delete domains, some with a drop catch service where to bid on them, such as SnapNames, or NameJet. Both these features are quite useful since it’s always interesting to see which domains actually sell and you have an opportunity to review some of the top expiring domains and pick some to bid on for free. The domains prices are usually in high $xxx to mid $x,xxx and vary significantly in quality, however resellers aren’t like to find bargains here, but end users can pick good names for development.
I’ve received 87 emails from Ivan since subscribing on October 11, 2008, which is an average of about an email every two days.

Rick Latona’s newsletter comes last in this review, but no the least. On the contrary it’s like the most popular one and has the highest number of subscribers. This newsletter usually includes a small section of text with Rick’s comments on latest event and links to his latest posts. The domains come in different forms, shapes and ranges. Lately also including names in other languages and tlds. Namely Spanish word domains which are usually priced at low-mid $xxx. Generally the quality varies, but there are frequently fairly priced domains almost in every email. This newsletter is supposed daily, however there are frequent brakes, probably because of Rick’s traveling. I’ve received 190 emails in little less than a year, making it about 4 emails per week on average.

And to add in conclusion: if you’re a domainer newsletters are a good place to try to sell your domains quickly, however it’s usually not the place to search for bargains.

Here is one the most elaborate bulk lowball offers I’ve received.
I want my 5 minutes spent on reading it (till i got to the $50 offer) back!
The offer was for the domain RockyHill.com and came from adams.jennifer@gmx.com - which appears to be another free email account.

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am contacting you on behalf of a small web development firm with which I work.

We have just recently instigated a development plan whereby we are slowly but surely building a large network of simple, information based websites.
The intention is to create a Wikipedia style encyclopaedia of information. The difference is however that rather than be located on one central domain, we intend to develop these sites on individual, keyword rich domains.
Our aim is to create a network such that if you want information on ‘Childrens Birthdays’ for example, then you can simply type in childrensbirthdays.com and find all the information you need.
At the moment search engines like Google provide an unnecessary middle man. We aim to make finding what you want even simpler than it already is!

We are contacting you with regards to the domain name RockyHill.com. Having completed a check of the whois database we obtained your details as being the owner/administrator of said domain name.
We are interested in purchasing this domain name from you as it is an ideal domain name for our development.

We would be prepared to offer you 50 USD for your domain name. If this is acceptable, please do let us know and we will provide information on how we may proceed.
We do not consider ourselves naive or unknowledgeable, and appreciate that some domains are being used for other things than websites: email for example, and again we appreciate that you may simply not want to sell your domain.
If this is the case we ask that you let us know such that we can pursue alternative domains.

Independent of your decision, I thank you for your time and wish you all the best.
Thanks

Jennifer

The “Dear Sir/Madam,” usually makes it all clear from the beginning, but in this one somehow it seemed like it might be a real offer. From the whois it appears that childrensbirthdays.com belongs to Rolnick, Danny from GB. But there is no way of knowing if this is the sender of the email, or they just picked a random good looking domain for an example.

All the US city domain owners have been emailed to so many times that I doubt there is any chance to buy a domain this way nowdays. The times when you could get a great bargain by emailing the owner are mainly gone and this is obviously an automated bulk email so it didn’t even deserve a reply, he can’t be seriously offering $50 for a top GEO domain like that.

After some checking I’ve found that apparently these guys emailed quite a few domainers. Some even say they only got a $10 offer, so I guess I should be happy