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

Here are further details as promised for attendants of my SEO workshop today at Gvahim, TelAviv.

These are the links to online tools mentioned in the presentation.

Keyword research tools: G keyword tool, G insights, WordTracker; G analytics

Advanced keyword research: SemRush.com, KeywordSpy.com, MarketSamurai.com

Backlink Checker tools: BacklinkWatch.com, OpenSiteExplorer.org

More Link Tools: Majesticseo.com, Ahrefs.com, Alexa

Bonus Site tools* (weren’t included in the workshop): Push2check.com, SpyOnWeb.com

SEO Browser extensions for chrome: SEO Site Tools, SEOQuake

Sitting kills linkbait example

Social Media and Reputation Management tools: Klout.com, Trackur.com; Google.com/alerts, SocialMention.com

- sellers were very eager to sell their sites quick and asked for quick offers
- sellers provided only partial and outdated stats data
- all looked like very good deals

Many of the deals were quite enticing and the stats and data seemed realistic enough, so I dug deeper and as expected they were all scams, but following a very interesting pattern.

The scammers tried to “sell” sites that were previously listed for sale on flippa, so they used the screenshots and data posted by the actual owners on flippa at the time of the auction. Some of these were still active, some ended unsold. After an auction ends on flippa the screenshots are no longer visible. It’s also fairly easy to make similar, “updated”, fake screenshots having the original.

This is not a “grey” type of scam where site owners would slightly exaggerate their stats, round it up, or even show fake screenshots. The scammers didn’t own any sites and those who fell victim and sent them the cash through paypal quickly to buy it never got anything in return.

How can you spot a scam like that?

1. First and foremost a quick google search for the site will show if there was a flippa auction or if it was for sale anywhere else before so that the scammer could gather the data from there.
2. Request the scammer to prove ownership by inserting some unique text in the site  code – this is the easiest way to prove he actually owns the site.
3. Further background checks on the seller, his forum/email/messenger ids will frequently reveal any previous misdoings.

Stay safe, don’t rush and do proper due diligence before any purchase!

• Always use Proper English.
  A fairly simple thing to do that many beginning writers don’t pay much attention to. If a writer I’m planning to hire uses stuff like “u, ur, coz, im”  it doesn’t matter how good his reviews are, or who recommended him, there is just no way he’s getting the job. Even if it was through an  IM conversation. I wouldn’t want any of that in my articles and I definitely expect a writer to be professional enough to use perfect English in his messages.
• Adhere to Timelines
  It’s widely known that freelancer projects are rarely completed on time, so if you want to differentiate yourself from the other writers be reliable! if you say you’ll deliver within a week, but complete the work in 3 weeks instead we won’t be working again. Plan ahead, if you know it’ll take you 3 weeks to complete say so upfront. Delivering on time or before is a great way to make sure you’ll get more projects.
• Quality, not Quantity
  It’s a very competitive market! Probably hundreds of thousands of English writers around from all over the world. But while others are lowering their prices to get more clients do the opposite – raise yours and improve the quality. Market yourself to the higher end clients who pay more per article and deliver higher quality content for it.
• Know Your Niches
  Don’t write about everything under the sun, pick certain niches, areas to focus on. Study them, publish articles in popular publications on them and be an expert. Nothing gives you more credibility in the eyes of the client than having your  articles published in large publications. Doesn’t have to the NY Times though, a wikipedia page, or a big article in any established site is no less credible to convince a client.
• Give the Clients What They Want
  More professional writers always ask for more info on what the client expects. Does the review need to be positive, balanced, recommending? Should the style be more personal or general and heavy on facts? Should be there be sub headings?
• Always Spell check
  Always go through the article after it’s complete to fix any grammar mistakes and strive to have perfect grammar in all your writing. Don’t deliver half done work.
• Research
  Make sure you know what you’re writing about, do your research, cross reference several sources, get your information from a credible source. Don’t take up heavy articles on complicated niches you don’t know much about unless you plan to spend the time to research it.
• Get Published!
  Most writers, even the more experienced and professional ones never seem to know where their articles are. A potential client will always want to see your work and it looks much better and more credible if it’s published on a popular site on the topic, than if you just copy paste the article. Anyone can set up ezinearticles profile and add a few articles – get your articles published on more credible sources, like Associated Content, Helium, eHow, Wikipedia etc.
• Have a Portfolio to Show
  Set up a simple portfolio site. Google your previous articles, or get the links from the clients to add to your portfolio. Most clients wouldn’t mind and will even appreciate a link to their page from your portfolio site. And this would be a great testimony to your professionalism for all future clients, seeing your articles live on popular sites in the niche.

Got more tips? Post them below in the comments.

Looking forward to meeting some old friends and making new ones, and checking up on the latest developments in the affiliate scene. I’m not really  into the gambling niche, which is the main theme of the conference, but focusing more on forex lately. Especially with our latest acquisition of one of the top affiliate sites in the area. So looking forward to talking to affiliate managers for the main forex broker companies and other forex webmasters.

Domain newsletters aren’t for domainers! In fact I doubt domainers even buy domains through newsletters at all. For high quality, generic domains prices are usually through the roof, higher than on dnforum and higher than on auctions. For average, or mid quality domains prices are also usually in the end user levels, much higher than what any domain reseller would consider paying. Only affordable domains are.. well, the kind of domains I wouldn’t take for free.

Sure you can find some bargains or decent deals if you spend a lot of time looking through the emails, and in fact I even bought a couple domains, but the vast majority of domains in newsletters are priced for end users, which is really strange – end users don’t subscribe to domain newsletters! They usually email you when they want your domain, or look it up on sedo and make you an offer.

Newsletters must have terrible selling rates, much lower than auctions and other venues, its not uncommon to receive the same names in the email over and over again, with ever falling prices. In fact I’ve submitted some of my domains to newsletters on many occasions – those were good domains and I priced them fairly, but nothing ever sold. Newsletter owners would tell you they have extremely high selling rates to get you to subscribe and send them good names to sell. Obviously there is no way to check that, but one thing is certain – newsletters are extremely profitable for those who run them: not much is needed there, just send a newsletter with a bunch of domains and prices you’re given by domain owners every few days – and if a domain sells you get 10%. 10% is the norm in the industry for brokering: investigating, searching for all potential buyers, end users, finding an actual buyer, negotiating a price, closing the deal; newsletter owners get the same % for just sending one email.. Some domain newsletter owners only list their own names, while others only broker domains submitted to them. But everyone would usually accept good domains to broker to their subscribers and why wouldn’t they? It’s easy money if it sells.

Still feel like subscribing to some newsletters? Here are the most popular ones:

• TobyClements.com – formerly Rick Latona’s newsletter which was hugely popular and sold tons of domains weekly. Recently changed it’s format and relaunched under a different name by Toby Clements. Some of the highest quality domains, one the recent emails featured Cars.net! 18 emails received in the last 30 days, so that’s about 4 emails per week.
• DomainsNewsletter.com – managed by Kevin from bigticketdomains.com. It’s a mix of different domains, even some sites. Most are well overpriced, however there are also some decent names at somewhat fair prices. received 26 emails in the last 2 months – average of 3 emails per week. Also on that matter – there was a big discussion about Kevin Leto on dnforum, with some complaints from people who did business with him. Not quite sure what it’s all about or how it got resolved, but it seems serious if it spanned over 16 pages. I usually avoid long heated threads as they lack substance.
• DomainsForMedia.com and DnCartoons.com – managed by Eric Rice, opposite to other newsletters it frequently features domains asking for offers. Recently it’s not very often and promoting the domain madness auctions. Features many high quality domains and some at decent prices. Only 1 email this month so far, but 4 emails in April and 10 emails in February this year.
• Domainate.com by Sharon Hayes and Steve Jones. Offering many domains at $127, $99 and sometimes even $60. Not the top quality names as in the other newsletters, but many good keyword combinations. I purchased a couple great domains from here before, but even though I buy a lot of keyword domains on the forums, I wasn’t able to find anything else suitable here lately. I have a feeling the quality has gone down, or perhaps it’s only because of the change in adword search numbers a few month ago when google moved to the new keyword tool. You can see some of their domains here. It’s very convenient that they include the cpc and search count values, as well as age, I wish all domain sellers did this! 4 emails in the last 30 days. Emails aren’t on a regular patterns, but usually every week or two.
• HuntingMoon.com by Evan Horowitz is another domain newsletter, but it’s somewhat inactive lately. In fact the last one was 2.5 months ago and there were only two emails in 2010, but in 2009 the newsletters was very active with several emails per week and featuring many top quality names.
• DifferentInvestments.com by Justin Godfrey, known in dnforum as Rockefeller. The newsletter used to be active and had many good names for sale in 2009 and 2010 and but I haven’t received any emails from Justin for over half a year now.
• Dnjournal Newsletter is a newsletter by the respected DNJournal publication by Ron Jackson. There are no domains for sale here, just updates on the recent articles, editorials and sales. Highly recommended as it features top quality interviews and domaining news.

Other newsletters which I haven’t yet subscribed to, but they seem rather popular as well:  MediaOptions.com, LuxuryNames.com, DomainAgency.com, MorganLinton.com

If you want more information on domain newsletters there are also some other posts (possibly outdated) on domain newsletters at Elliot’s, Nametalent and DomainNameNews.

That’s about it. I’m sure there are others, if you have one with over 500 subscribers let me know I’ll list it too.

For those unfamiliar with what I’m talking about here: xrumer is a popular piece of software that creates forum profiles and posts and can also post to pretty much any comment form and pass by most conventional verification and spam prevention systems. It’s so powerful that it can create millions of profiles with your links in them.

Since it’s expensive and running it on your own is quite resource intensive and requires quite a bit of calibration and lots of time collecting and cleaning the databases, there are many services that do that for you. Like dripfeedblasts.com – which creates 1k profiles per day (or 30k profiles per month) for $99 per month – this is also the service I used for my testing. It’s biggest benefit is that it’s very easy to use – you just add your signature and homepage links and schedule them to run on a day to day basis.

Scrapebox is a much cheaper and easier to use software that mostly sends comments to blogs and can also handle huge volumes of millions of comments. It also has some great tools to check serps quickly, find out various information about your competition and to find some high PR on topic blog posts – which might in fact be the most useful feature. If you do it right – mostly manually and on topic – blog comments can still be useful, but in massive amount and low quality these links do little good.

Out of about 35 of my new sites I tried these methods on many have received various penalties and dropped out serps, others retained good positions, but mainly due to having other different links of better quality. Some still dance around jumping up and down in the rankings twice a week..

Overall if done in moderation these links too can have a positive effect on the serps, but the efforts outway the benefits and same or better results can be achieved with other low cost and more mainstream methods.

Many people still report different results and argue that these links can form a great seo weight basis for your link feeder sites or for all your hosted content and web 2.0 pages, however I have my doubts about how much “link juice” is actually acquired and pass on there. What are your results?

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?

However, they really need to do something to increase the quality of domains there and attract some premium domains. Strangely enough there are some decent  buyers there, but no real sellers with quality domains at fair prices. An unusual gap for the industry that should get filled naturally.

A few good LLLL.com names are coming up for auctions there flob.com and  ebog.com, but the reserves seem rather high so I don’t expect them to sell.

I think bido could benefit from introducing hidden reserves and reserve auctions that start from the min price like on sedo, not the reserve price.

More recently, after researching a but into some different options for backup I got a 1TB external drive and set up some software for backups on it. I also use a few flash drives and some online backup services.

What do you use for backup?