After A Big Sale – How Do You Reinvest?

Elliot Silver
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12

Subscribe to Elliot's BlogAfter learning about Rick’s pending big sale, I am wondering what other domain investors do with the proceeds from a very large sale.   Personally, I almost always reinvest as much as I can in better domain names for development or for resale.   I would think that once you’ve sold a 7 or 8 figure domain name, you are less inclined to reinvest in lower value domain names. So I’d like to pose a question to those of you who completed large domain sales or anticipate closing on one:
When you sell a high value domain name, how do you reinvest that money?

  • Do you buy other domain names?
  • Do you invest in real estate?
  • Do you provide seed capital for incubating companies?
  • Do you invest in the stock market?
  • Do you live off of your revenue in the French Riviera?
  • Do you make it rain at the Spearmint Rhino?

HUGE Domain Deal in the Works

Elliot Silver
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9

Subscribe to Elliot's BlogWhen you see that a HUGE domain deal is going to take place in the near future, who is the first person you think of that made the deal?   If you guessed Rick Schwartz, you would be correct.
Lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice, unless there’s a reason for it.   While some people have said that Rick Schwartz is “lucky,” I would strongly disagree.   Rick saw the potential in domain names many years ago, scoffed at selling most over the past few years, and has recently cashed in, while retaining some of his best names. Not only did Schwartz recently work out huge deals for iReport.com and Property.com (and RoomDividers.com last week), another deal is in the works that in Rick’s terms, “will blow the doors off the industry at the darkest time…..AGAIN!”
While the domain name in discussion hasn’t been publicly revealed yet, the deal is going to make headlines for Schwartz again – and for his friend Kevin who had a hand in the Property.com deal as well. While I won’t publicly congratulate Rick for this until the deal is done, I will say that from this and my own personal experience, it appears more end users are beginning to understand why they should own category defining generic domain names, and many are paying big bucks to get them.

Wishing My Best to New Orleans

Elliot Silver
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As the storm reports continue to worsen, I want to take a few moments to send my best wishes to my friends at NewOrleans.com, FatTuesday.com, and other non-domain friends who live in the New Orleans area.   I love New Orleans as much as I love New York, and I had one of the most fun weekends in my life in New Orleans a few months ago. New Orleans residents are some of the friendliest people I’ve met, and I hope they stay safe over the next few days.
Here’s hoping the storm isn’t as bad as predicted, and as they say down there, laissez les bon temps rouler.

Thank You to Rick Latona & Co.

Elliot Silver
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12

I am floored and touched by something Rick Latona and his employees did for me and Karen. Shortly after I proposed to Karen, I thought about buying KarenSilver.com for her. Unfortunately, I saw that the name had been registered for a while, and there was a website on the site. Sadly, I didn’t even try to buy the name. I settled with a name that wasn’t as good, but I figured it was better than nothing.
Out of the blue last night, I received an email from David Clements (President of Rick Latona Auctions, LLC) letting me know that the folks at the Rick Latona family of companies acquired KarenSilver.com as a wedding gift. This is an incredible gift, and Karen and I are very appreciative. This is something that Karen will have for a long time, and as her career grows, this gift will have even more meaning.
To Ryan Steel, David Clements, Toby Clements, and especially Rick Latona, thank you very much for doing this for us!

Mannix Marketing Ranks in Top 30 SEO Companies

Elliot Silver
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2

Congratulations to Sara and Mark Mannix whose Mannix Marketing, Inc. ranks in the Top 30 Organic Optimization Companies, as ranked by TopSEOs.com. In addition to marketing and SEO services the company provides its customers, Mannix Marketing also owns and operates three of the most informational and best optimized geographic domains/websites; Albany.com, Saratoga.com, and LakeGeorge.com.
Sara and Mark have generously shared their knowledge with the entire Associated Cities community, giving other geodomain owners invaluable advice and ideas.

What Comes First, SEO or Site Development?

Elliot Silver
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14

This might be a dilemma faced by other domain owners/developers, but I always seem to have an issue with my search engine optimization once my websites are developed. When I consult with friends who do SEO, most give some very good tips, but it can be quite an exasperating amount of work – especially after a site is launched. So, my question is, how do you prioritize your SEO while developing your website?
Much like you can’t expect your web designer to be a master coder/programmer and visa versa, you can’t expect your web developer to be a master of SEO. As a result, there may be some major issues related to the SEO that would require huge back-end changes, which is something a domain owner/developer doesn’t want to hear after a site is launched. When major issues come up, there is a whole lot of redesign that might need to be done, costing a great sum of money. That said, how do you overcome these issues?
Take TropicalBirds.com for example. The site averaged less than 1 visit per day before launch. A couple weeks after launching, it was receiving over 100 uniques per day, with the majority of the traffic coming from Google. People were finding the site via searches for tropical birds and other long tail keywords – just as I anticipated. In fact, only the home page is indexed in Yahoo – and the site has been live for close to 2 months! The RPC is very low, but it was a neat topic and the site is making more money than before.
For some reason (probably natural occurrence), after a month and a half, the site dropped from #4 to #20 for the term “tropical birds” in Google. Traffic has been down, and I can’t really figure things out. I have in links from bird breeders, although I do have dupe content on the bird breeder and bird veterinarian pages. I started a forum, although I am currently blocking the Googlebot from seeing it because there isn’t a ton of content, and the free forum software would probably be considered duplicate content.
Anyway, long story short. The site has been launched after a considerable amount of time and effort. I want to help grow the site, but I don’t know how to tackle it via SEO. I know that in links are important, but those are very difficult to gather. In general terms, how does one go about building a good looking, informational, structurally sound website that also utilizes great SEO techniques? How much can someone expect to spend to on improving the SEO for a completed site like TropicalBirds.com?

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