The Orange County Register ran an article today asking local business owners what keeps them up at night. Many local business owners were asked, and Orange County-based Escrow.com CEO Brandon Abbey has something positive that is keeping him up – his company’s continued growth.

Buoyed at least partially by solid domain transactions, Escrow.com has experienced growth despite general malaise in the economy. Here’s what Brandon had to say about what keeps him up at night:

“Our business growth has been on a very good run the past three years,” said Brandon Abbey, president of Escrow.com, which protects online transactions. “With success comes added responsibility and expectations.”

While other local CEOs and business owners are worried about providing health care benefits to employees, the economy, downward sales trends, and other problems, it’s great to hear about Escrow.com’s solid growth in the face of a deteriorated economy. The company has built a trusted business, and it has become the partner to many of the most successful domain investors and companies.

Rick Schwartz posted the TRAFFIC Award nominees for the “Best Domain Blog,” and I was honored to be among those nominated. A sincere thank you to whoever nominated me. Awards don’t mean all that much in the whole scheme of the business, but it is nice to know someone took the time to nominate me because writing a blog is a big commitment.

I read just about all of the nominated blogs at least once in a while, and many of them daily. I want to share what I like about each of the nominated blogs, and I welcome your positive thoughts about each.

It takes a lot of time and effort to consistently post interesting material, and I appreciate the fact that there are many great sources of information available right now.

TheDomains.com – Mike consistently posts analysis that can’t be beat. He has been involved in the domain industry since the beginning days, and his experience allows him to post commentary on a wide variety of issues. He is a hawk when it comes to protecting the rights of domain owners and investors, and there is a great deal of interesting dialog on almost every article.

DNJournal.com – Ron is one of the few people who have a weekly post that I can’t miss. Ron’s weekly sales report and archive is like the bible for the domain industry. Ron attends every industry conference, and his pre and post conference write ups give great insight into the conferences and the atmosphere. His monthly spotlight articles on domain investors are in-depth, thoughtful, and always interesting to read.

DomainNameWire.com –

A couple of days ago, Domain Holdings published a report about its ability to monetize “wildcard traffic.” Someone asked me if I knew anything about wild card traffic, and I want to share some insight about it and why it might be beneficial that Domain Power is “is now accepting wildcard traffic, which includes leased subdomains, 404 and Under Construction pages.”

Wild card traffic is essentially error traffic to a website that doesn’t land on a content page but would otherwise be sent to a web browser error page and possibly monetized by the user’s Internet Service Provider. If the traffic is not monetized by the ISP or shown an error page and a link to the correct url, the visitor will likely end up on a dead page with no content or information.

For instance, if you visit www.elliotsblog.com, you will make it to my blog. However, if you visit ww.elliotsblog.com or anythingelse.elliotsblog.com where there is no subdomain, you’ll get an error page or dead page, depending on your ISP and your browser settings. Many people will eventually see their error, but they will possibly be redirected elsewhere if the visitor’s ISP monetizes the error page.

Using the example I mentioned above, with this new monetization offer from Domain Power, if someone visits ww.elliotsblog.com, rather than getting a generic 404 page, Domain Power would serve up ads on that page. Additionally, Under Construction pages would also be another type of page the company could monetize for domain owners. They could monetize pages that may have been dead, and apparently the company’s test went well as evidenced by the press release.

I read two domain industry interviews yesterday, and I think you should check them out when you have an opportunity today.

Ron Jackson wrote an interesting article about Bob Olea, a domain investor and commercial airline pilot. I’ve known Bob for several years, have done business with him, and have considerable respect for him and his opinions. Bob recently started his own brokerage, DomainSalesPlus.com,  which is now integrated with Frank Schilling’s Internet Traffic platform.

Also, yesterday, Ray Hackney posted an interview with Brad Mugford  at HybridDomainer.com. Brad, who primarily uses the handle DataCube.com on forums and blogs, has been a successful domain seller. Brad’s focus is on end user sales, and he’s done pretty well in that area during the last few years.

It’s interesting to read interviews to learn about how people got their start in the domain industry. These two articles are well worth a read.

Is there anyone in the domain industry you’d like to know more about?