Domain Magnate

Best deal you’ll find this year! In light of the recent SOPA controversy many registrars are now offering discounts for domain transfers. Ok, to be fair there is no controversy – SOPA is bad, very bad, for the whole Internet, except GoDaddy, who helped write it and are now paying the price as customers are leaving.  SOPA threatens the freedom of the Internet and if passed will allow copyright holders to have sites taken down by a quick order of a judge, without any representation or court.  More bad news is that it’s likely to pass due to wide spread support in the Congress.

There is some good news however. Many registrars are trying to capitalize on the wave of hate towards GoDaddy that this has sprung and provide large discounts for domain transfers:

Name.com $6.65 –  code ‘NODADDY’

NameCheap $6.99 + $0.18 –  code ‘SOPASucks’

DynaDot $6.99 – code ‘TEAMDYNADOT’

Note that these are mostly for .com transfers and expire on Dec 31, so hurry up!

Name.com also have more information on SOPA and their position on it

Wishing everyone a happy and extra prosperous 2011. May your parking revenue quadruple and genuine end user request emails fill in your inbox!

I posted a quick update of what I’ve been up to lately over here.

What is 2011 going to bring to domainers? As usual some good news and some bad news, I’m not holding my expectations high as I’m mostly planning to focus on trying to generate more revenue out of my sites and getting some new and long planned projects up. I still have about two dozen exact match domains from the ones I bought this year waiting for development.

On a different note, during the last 4-5 months I’ve experimented a bit with black hat seo techniques – I’ve done this before in 2006-2007 but after the Google algo updates somewhere around 2007-2008 those techniques became ineffective. So seeing a few people I know having good success with it recently I decided to try it once again.

After quite a bit of research, reading up the latest info on a few secret private seo forums, and doing extensive competitive research, I invested in all the latest software and joined the top services (like dripfeedblasts.com, scrapebox.com and others) however the results were quite disappointing. Don’t get me wrong it still works, but after prolonged testing I came to the conclusion that the good old white (grey?!) methods of link building, like article submissions, still give more bang for the buck.

I’ve learned a few new tricks in SEO this year, found a few good new services I’m happily using now and discovered the fact that there is still a lot to learn and test. And that is what I’m planning to do next year, along with selling off a larger part of my domain portfolio to reinvest the money into profit generating assets.

So what’s your plan for 2011?

NameCheap Coupon SAVEBIG – $4.99 .com’s – Valid Today Only!

$4.99 for transfers of .com, .net, .org domains and $5.99 for new registrations.

http://www.namecheap.com/sep10promo/transfers-for-4.99.asp

Valid on October 5, 2010 only, use the code SAVEBIG before check out

ipo-installment4.com a domain registered only on Sept 24, 2010  – less than a week ago,  was reported sold on Sedo for $100k .. WTF?

There are discussions on this on DNF and NP. The domain is merely a week old. IPO.com was sold for $500K as observed on the recent dnjournal weekly sales report, so some suggested in might a mistake, being part of the ipo.com sales plan in installments.

However Estibot appraises it at $103k, so no worries, buyer got a good deal

Wishing an easy and efficient  fast and gemar chatimah tovah to all my fellow Jewish domainers (and yes there are quite a few ) on this Yom Kippur eve.

For everyone else wondering what is this about feel free to read up here.

NamePros.com has been down for the Whole Day today!

Anyone has a scoop on what’s going on? Is it a DOS attack, a server move, or did they forget to pay the hosting bill?

Update: NP is back up and running at full force! Was down for around 2 full days, which is a record by all means. Several unfortunate incidents happened among NP addicts, but the death toll is still unknown.

.co domains are the undoubtedly biggest story of 2010, while many people are skeptical about them, the auctions are already fetching prices high enough to shame any cctld.

Ironically NameCheap.com appears to have the lowest prices for .co domains. The (double) irony is in the fact that despite having the word “cheap” in its name NameCheap prices are higher than in most other registrars, however it’s a very popular registrar among web masters and newbie domainers due to the ease of use and simple interface.

Here are the prices:

• NameCheap.com  $22.98/yr
• Dynadot.com $27.99
• Name.com $28
• GoDaddy $29.99
• MyDomain.com $29.99

4 rounds of auctions have been carried out by the registry and over half a million .co domains are now registered. For more info and discussions on the .co domains check out the appropriate threads on DNForum, NamePros and NetBuilders.

It’s been 1.5 months since the registrations opened for .co and here are some of the highest sales so far:

autoglass.co $53,000
duiattorney.co $44,500
duilawyer.co $43,000
taobao.co     $31,500
vehicles.co     $18,500
boulder.co $17,000
sites.co $15,500
dentists.co $12,500
apply.co $12,000
shipping.co     $11,000
caribbean.co     $10,610
betting.co $10,100

I personally just registered 3 .co’s – only for a test to see if they get any type in traffic. I might register more later however. How many did you grab and what are you planning to do with them?

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

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.

Update: the keyword was announced and it’s sulumits retsambew

Net Builders will be announcing the new contest keyword today, some 9 hours from now. 10 pm GMT on March 15.

The contest would be simply about ranking in Google for that keyword 3 months from now. The person to rank the first there will get $1,000, second $500 and third $250.

As SEO contest usually are it should be an interesting experience and may show everyone some new tricks to rank better in Google. Even if you don’t know much about SEO, it’s one to watch – SEO skills and knowledge are essential nowdays for any web project to succeed. Sulumits retsambew was chosen to be the keyword people will need to rank for in order to win it.

Answers.travel Sold for $3.3 million – it was first reported 2 months ago, but recently sprung a more heated discussion in sight of the depressing economy and the ridiculous amount for an unpopular extension.

Naturally this is the biggest (and possibly the only) .travel sale to date. Despite the shocker it appears to be true as was reported by credible sources: businesswire, reuters.

Different explanations were proposed, from a ‘fake sale’ to ‘money laundering’, tax evasion et. But I can add that I’ve seen enough stranger things happen in domaining over the last few years to know that anything is possible. However don’t get your hopes up, good domains are still good and bad is going to remain bad..