I’ve been getting these emails by the dozens lately. A new spam/scam type is out: partnership proposal emails. I’m still not sure what they want as they never seem to answer when you reply back, but here are some of the emails:

Hello,

I just came across your website - wcasinos.net and I want to ask if I can sponsor a text link on your website.

Please e-mail me back and I will send you additional information.

Best Regards,
Todd McGregor
Advertising Consultant
Business Development Department

If you do not respond to this email you will not receive any additional emails from us. To permanently delete yourself from our list, simply reply to this with a blank email and you will not receive any communication from us in the future.

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Update: I’ve installed a plugin to send notices about new posts to my twitter, so you can follow my profile to get the latest posts instantly!

I’ve been hearing about it a lot lately, so finally joined myself as well.

It seems pretty basic.. a little similar to my old site post simple, so I don’t get how it became so popular.

Looks like some people use it to send updates about new posts on a blog, which sounds like a good idea. I should find some wp plugin for that.

So anyone else using twitter, what do you think about it?

Now that I’ve found the designers and content writers, after a bit of testing the mini site building is proceeding at full force. Most sites are just 7-8 pages, but I’m also doing a few that will have a substantial amount of content, some 20-50 pages, articles, videos, news, flash and other elements.

Here are a couple finished mini-sites: Go Oslo, about the Norway capital with a few short articles and MyNamibia.com - about the Republic of Namibia in Africa.

Next step is to add links from some other sites, directories and social bookmarking services to get them all indexed and well places in google. It’s also good to avoid the nofollow links as they don’t contribute much value in google and are used by most social bookmarking and news sites, like digg, propeller, wikipedia etc.

The Bethel Park site I’ve posted about earlier is getting 75-85 uniques per day, but while the adsense clicks are rather high, the ctr is not so good. Probably the ads are too “blended in”, so I might change that one.

What do you think about the designs and content?

NyTimes has an interesting story on a guy who flipped a site for an awesome $173K, after buying it for $1800 and doing some changes. According to compete.com traffic estimates the site bird-cage.com only has 5-6k monthly visitors from US, so it’s strange that just 200 visits per day can provide such nice income. Besides the site only has 257 links in yahoo and doesn’t seem to have any decent google rankings for the top keywords.

So it really looks strange why would someone pay a healthy amount of money for a small site, without much traffic.

On the other hand it shows that development could bring nice profits and e-commerce sites are the money makers!

here is the article: (more…)

I’m reducing my .ca portfolio and selling some 3 letter and 3 number names at very attractive prices.

Having some of these in your portfolio is a must for any Canadian domainer. The LLL.ca were all registered last year and since then the prices have been growing steadily. Canadian domains can only be registered by Canadian residents.

gmx.ca was sold for 20,000 euros last week!

First person to post sold gets the name/s, payment expected within 24 hours.

019.ca
027.ca
028.ca (more…)

Justin Godfrey, known as Rockefeller on dnf, recently posted about his sale of 92 LLL.com’s for $598K:

I just finished up a deal where I sold 92 LLL .coms for just about 600k, probably could’ve got more since it was only 6.5k each, but it’s nice to see people are spending freely again!

I suppose the LLL.com’s were of lower quality so this sounds like a good deal. It’s indeed good to see that there is healthy demand for the names in such quantities. The buyers are out there and ready to invest and spend money on quality domains! It’s the lower quality domains that are “in recession”, good generics and 2-3 letter .com’s are always in demand.

Myself I don’t own any LLL.com and never have. I always thought they were overpriced and not a good investment. They can’t be developed, they are too expensive for most end users and during the last half a year it’s unclear if the prices are going up or rather dropped.

So I’d much rather buy geo or generic domains.

VQU.COM Sold for $6551 on Bido, just $51 above my estimation as posted in the sale comments

The letter quality isn’t good and only 123K results in google, but it has a decent acronym for “very quick update”, a phrase that could be branded into a hosting, or web services.

This is the forth bido sale of LLL.com domain, after:

2008-07-11 14:00:00 utq.com 20 6,001.00
2008-07-02 14:07:42 qvk.com 19 6,730.00
2008-06-20 14:03:46 ryy.com 10 7,124.00 (more…)

Villas.com Sold for 305k Euros on sedo, $480 USD in one the largest sales this year.

In other sales, yestarday’s 20K euro sale of gmx.ca was one of the highest for a Canadian domain. Gmx.com is a huge site with alexa 123, so they are most likely the buyers. More .ca sales:

Afternic:
adultdate.ca $1,000
airfaredeals.ca $500
teas.ca $650
naturalfoods.ca - $190.50

bad.ca is currently auctioned at sedo with $2,550 high bid

Few top .me auctions are ending soon: (more…)

The biggest problem of having a portfolio of over 3,000 domains is of course the renewals, but not only the decision what to renew and what to drop is tricky, but the most annoying part is the constant renewal emails.   Some registrars like to send multiple emails for each domain which creates huge amounts of emails in my inbox. I’m getting these on a weekly basis and usually tend to ignore.

Every month or so I login to my main registrar accounts and renew the domains which are to expire. Not a well organized process yet, but I don’t like to use auto-renewals and I usually renew the top domains for a couple years upfront.

There is software like dnzoom that helps automate this stuff, which is sensible for large portfolios, however giving all your registrar passwords to one site seems a little too much for me, besides it’s not really something you can’t manage manually.

Naturally sometimes I forget to renew good names and lose them..

How do you manage renewals?

Rick Shwartz, aka the domain king, recently announced his sale of Property.com to Foreclosure.com.

The sale is obviously marked as one of the highest in the domain industry, however the price wasn’t made public.. for all we know it could $500k.. or $1M, or $5M. Or $10M, as many domainers would expect.

Dnjournal has the full cover

All Other blogs reported the news: (more…)