General Domain Information

In 2008, I was browsing through some names owned by Buy Domains and I saw a domain name that was related to the Holocaust. It wasn’t exactly an obvious Holocaust domain name, but when the term was Googled, the relationship was more than clear. I informed Pete Lamson (GM of Buy Domains at the time) about the domain name, and the company dropped it.

It was unfortunate that they dropped it, but I am sure they wanted nothing to do with this domain name once they realized its meaning. The unfortunate aspect was that it went to auction at Snapnames, and it had a number of bidders. After a few days, I came out on top and owned the domain name.

For a while, I just killed the DNS since I didn’t want to send the traffic to a Holocaust awareness website without their permission. I forgot about the domain name until a couple of days ago when I got a renewal notice. I did a bit of research on other domain names, and I saw that the Simon  Wiesenthal  Center owns Holocaust.com.

I reached out the the Whois contact and she mentioned that someone was kind enough to donate Holocaust.com to their Center. I then offered to give them the domain name I own for free, and they are happy to take it. I am very happy that this domain name will get a permanent home with an organization like the Wiesenthal Center.

If you have domain names that are hurtful or hateful, consider donating them to a non-profit group. Whether you ask for a tax write-off or not, I am sure they will appreciate your generosity.

Is it really Saturday already?   It feels a bit like the movie Groundhog Day with the past few days off.   Anyhow, here are some of my random, rambling, somewhat coherent (hopefully) thoughts this Saturday morning following the New Year’s festivities.

(Ironically enough, I accidentally hit post late Friday night when I wrote this instead of for first thing Saturday morning)

• Have you ever seen an active company looking to sell its brand domain name? I hadn’t until I did a Whois search for InternetReit.com. There was a small graphic at the top of the page that said, “InternetReit.com is for sale. The owner of the domain you are researching has it listed for sale for $29484.” I know Internet Reit, Inc uses IReit.com for its website, but I wonder why they’d be willing to let this generic brand name go for under $30,000.

• I was just checking my stats this morning to see how much traffic my blog received last year. Well over a quarter of a million visits according to Google Analytics. That’s a big increase from the year prior and a very cool number to see. Thank you for visiting!

• I haven’t had the chance to do this update yet, but I figured I would remind you while I am thinking about it. Don’t forget to change your copyright notices on your websites to 2010 from 2009.

• I’d like to welcome some of my new advertisers and thank them for their support. IDNTools.com and Above.com are new advertisers to my blog, and DomainTools has increased its presence. Of course, I would like to thank my current roster of advertisers for continuing to advertise on my blog.

It’s the time of year that people make their new years resolutions. I don’t generally make any personal resolutions, but I do think about things I would like to accomplish for my business, so I thought I would share a few of those with you.

• Learn about affiliate marketing – Many of my sites have pretty decent traffic, but I haven’t monetized it well enough. I will learn what I can about affiliate marketing to generate leads and sales on sites where the monetization is currently weak. Instead of using simply Adsense or having a few direct advertising deals (aside from this blog), I will find affiliate partners to match the needs of site visitors.

• Learn about Adwords – In some cases, this might go hand in hand with affiliate marketing, but I would primarily like to learn how to drive additional (inexpensive) traffic to my websites. This will primarily be useful on my fully developed website.

• Get less attached to my domain names – On almost all domain names I acquire, I can see what type of website would make sense to build on it. I have enough websites to manage right now, and any more large projects wouldn’t be feasible. Once I launch CatSitter.com this month, that will be it for a while. The only reason I am launching that is because many DogWalker.com advertisers offer cat sitting services as well, and the platform I use is easy to convert.

• Improve my geodomain names’ websites – Finalize a partnership opportunity on Burbank.com and figure out a way to make my other sites more automated. I will seek out local news “partnerships” where I can use RSS feeds instead of manually updating everything. I’ve been reluctant to seek out these working relationships, but I am fairly well established in the markets to set up a meeting. I will probably also convert these sites to WordPress.

The bottom line is that I want to grow my business rather than expand it. I have the assets I need to be successful and make money, and I need to work on them to make that happen.   I will continue to buy domain names more aggressively this year than for re-sale, but I will do my best to not buy for development purposes.

This will be the year of focus. I will stay focused on what I have and focus on how I can make these assets earn even more revenue.   I predict private domain sales will continue to be the main revenue driver of my business, but advertising revenue will continue to become a bigger piece of the pie.

If you’d like to share your new year’s resolutions, please do so. Here’s to a great new year.