Brand Marketing

NCAA College Basketball March Madness: $1,000 in Prizes on Brackets.com

Domain investor launches March Madness bracket selection challenge with $1,000 on the line.

Brackets.com is giving away $1,000 in cash prizes during the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament, which begins on Thursday, March 18th. You can print out an official bracket and enter to win $250 – with no entry fee.   The person who has the most points will win $250, the second place finisher will win $150, and the third place finisher will win $100.

Entrants who aren’t good at making college basketball picks can still win. Brackets.com is offering $500 to the person who refers the most valid users.   In addition, to help build awareness, Brackets.com is offering prizes for inbound links from different websites. Higher pagerank websites are worth more points, and the leading referrer will win $250, the second place finisher will win $150, and the third place finisher will win $100.

Full contest details are available on Brackets.com. The tournament begins tomorrow, so sign up today.

Brackets.com is a recently launched venture from 260.com, a domain investment company founded by Tony Peppler.

Pasta ‘N More Direct Marketers Understand Domain Names

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Since my background is in the direct marketing business, I pay attention to infomercials and other marketing efforts specifically to analyze the execution. Some of these commercials (maybe most) are cheesy, but everything from dialog, domains, actors, and product placement has a purpose. The domain name is also important, and in many cases, it’s used for testing purposes.

I saw a commercial today for the “Pasta ‘N More” pasta maker, which seems to be a plastic container used to help cook various types of pasta. The product was being offered by one of the top direct marketers – Telebrands. This product isn’t something of interest to me, but the domain name they used was FreePastaNMore.com.

The url seemed a bit confusing and certainly didn’t pass the radio test, which was surprising to me because most call to action direct marketing efforts (especially radio and tv) do their best to make their phone numbers and urls easy to remember.

I decided to check to see if they registered the potential typos, and it looks like they did.   Here are some of their domain names for this product:

  • FreePastaNMore.com
  • FreePastaAndMore.com
  • PastaAndMore.com
  • PastaNMore.com
  • PastandMore.com

It’s good to see marketers protect their brand, as many companies neglect to do so and are forced to pay for this traffic on a continual basis, rather than the one time registration fee.

Vegas.com Backed by County for .Vegas gTLD While City Backs Other Entity

Vegas.comAccording to an article in the Las Vegas Review Journal, the operators of the famous Vegas.com website won a key endorsement from Nevada’s Clark County board of commissioners to run the .Vegas gTLD if and when ICANN approves the introduction of these domain name.

The county vote was unanimous, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that Vegas.com’s operators will actually be able to manage the .Vegas suffix. The city of Las Vegas previously endorsed Dot Vegas, Inc., another organization that would like to run the .Vegas gTLD. I personally find it a bit odd that another entity won considering the strength of the Vegas.com brand outside of Las Vegas… but what do I know.

Of course, the big winner in this will be ICANN. I presume both entities are going to have to pay ICANN a LOT of money to apply for the gTLD, and then ICANN can decide whether Clark County or the City of Las Vegas has the greater right to select an organization to manage the registry. This is another big issue that ICANN will need to sort through before they make their decision.

With millions of dollars at stake, all of the minor issues will certainly become major. Since the Clark County commissioners have been told the .Vegas gTLD “eventually could generate millions of dollars in fees for the county,” they probably won’t take a rejection lightly and litigation could follow. I guess it’s a good thing that ICANN is charging so much for applications – the legal fees could become enormous (imagine if the State of New York wants a .NewYork while New York City wants .NYC).

No matter whether Vegas.com gets awarded the .Vegas suffix or not (if/when ICANN approves their introduction), they will still be the winners when people type in things like hotels.Vegas.com and vacation.Vegas.com

iCharge Should Buy iCharge.com

TechCrunch ran an article today about a European company called iCharge which accepts credit card payments through an attachable smartphone accessory. The article compared it to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s company, Square, which I previously wrote about.

I am not going to analyze the company’s product or services since that isn’t my forte and I haven’t tried it out, but I would suggest they buy an important domain name for this international company. At the moment, iCharge uses iCharge.net for its Internet presence. This might not be a problem with for some companies, but inevitably, people will type in iCharge.com, which happens to be for sale via Sedo for $10,000 EUR (not an affiliate link).

When publishers such as TechCrunch refer to the company as iCharge, people will generally assume the will be found on the .com. This is especially true for multi-national companies that operate in many different markets. As a company that will rely on trust since it’s dealing with payment processing, iCharge should not give another company the opportunity to swoop in and buy iCharge.com. If that happens, they will have no control over that generic domain name.

In my opinion, the price for iCharge.com is fair, especially considering the .net company is positioning itself to become a big player in the field. Now would be the best time to buy the domain name, before the company increases its value.

K-Swiss Gets Domain Names

KSwiss LogoK-Swiss is an American shoe company especially known for its sneakers. The company is based out of California and was founded in 1966 by two Swiss brothers who became interested in tennis after moving to the US, where they first produced leather tennis shoes.

Times have changed, and the innovative company has several lines of shoes and athletic wear as well. I was researching some domain names the other day, and I noticed the company is quite smart in terms of their domain acquisitions.   A quick look at the reverse IP of the primary K-Swiss domain name reveals that they own the following generic domain names:

  • SneakersDirect.com
  • TennisApparel.com
  • TennisClothes.com
  • TenniShoes.com
  • TennisShoes.com
  • TrainingShoes.com

To take this a step further, if you visit any of the above domain names, they all forward to the company’s primary KSwiss.com website. That said, you can see that K-Swiss isn’t making a SEO play by owning important keyword domain names. Right now, they are taking advantage of the highly targeted type in traffic that comes to these domain names (heck, even the typo in the group).

I wonder what domain values would be like these days if most big companies had the same understanding about domain names and direct navigation traffic.

Rick Latona: Inside WeBuyWatches.com and New Consumer Division

When Rick Latona and I were chatting about business development a couple of months ago, he mentioned that his company was going to launch a watch website with a similar model to companies like Cash 4 Gold and others. Customers would visit WeBuyWatches.com and they would send their watches to Latona’s company in exchange for cash. It would be a quick transaction to allow consumers to trade their luxury watches for money.

I read an article on Fusible.com this morning (a site that provides good insight into what domain investors and others are doing with top domain names), and I followed up my conversation with Rick regarding his newest venture.

You’ve recently launched two consumer sites with Vino.com and WeBuyWatches.com. Are these long term plays, or are you looking to build these two business and sell them in the shorter term?   What else is in the pipeline?

They are definitely long-term plays. I’ve been an internet guy a lot longer than I’ve been a domain guy. In a lot of ways, I’m just getting back to my roots.

My business partner Ryan Steel and I have a lot of experience creating and working with revenue generating sites for other people and this is a focused effort to put everything we know into one high-quality site at a time.

Is WeBuyWatches.com solely a Rick Latona, LLC venture?

Many members of our team have a piece of the action but there are no third-party companies that are involved. For instance, Escrow.com isn’t involved. They are only on the whois record because the domain was purchased on payments over just a few months. The record will update soon.

Do you find that people are apprehensive about sending a high value watch through the mail to a company they don’t know? Does having a name like WeBuyWatches.com give you added credibility in the marketplace?

Some are apprehensive but we are getting through a lot of the objections. Honestly, I don’t think the name has much to do with it. This really isn’t a domain play. It’s basic internet marketing. After that its all about negotiating deals and helping the customers. This is a business in and of itself, just like Vino.com.

Our new consumer division has nothing to do with domains other than all of the sites will have one. If we don’t want to be in the business we won’t build the sites.

I know you closed AEIOU late last year, but would your company help build a business like this for other domain investors?

No. Honestly, there is too much that has to go into building internet businesses. These are full-time gigs with their own staff and expense structures. We are incubating our own properties and simply don’t have the time and resources to do them for others.

How has your experience as a pawn shop owner helped you with this site?

Heh. Tremendously! Without going into details I’ll just say that there’s a certain art to dealing with hard goods and customers in this sort of environment. It’s not something that can be mastered in less than a few years.

Can domain owners who invest in domains part time do something like this, and what would you advise someone who wanted to build a business like this?

There are different types of domainers. I was never the type to build a portfolio of names that generated healthy PPC returns. I fall in the category of domainers that buy and sell for a living. As far as I’m concerned, what I do is buy things to sell at a profit. I really don’t care if it is a domain or a Rolex. If you are a domainer and think like me than I don’t see why you couldn’t do something similar. Just find a niche other than watches because I don’t intend to leave much room. 🙂

How important is the domain name in this venture when compared to other things like SEO, marketing, customer service…etc?

It’s not important at all. We bought WeBuyWatches.com because we though the domain would make a good brand. To us, it is worth more than watches.com which would sound like a retail site. It’s all about SEO, marketing and customer service.

What else would you like people to know about the start-up and/or Rick Latona, LLC as it relates to consumer websites?

You ain’t seen nothing yet. Vino and WBW are a result of 3 months effort. Wait until we are fully rolling.

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