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Mixergy Interviews Brandon Abbey of Escrow.com

Elliot Silver
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My high value domain purchases and sales that aren’t completed in private are finalized using Escrow.com. In January, the company announced that it had completed over $1 BILLION in transactions, and I would imagine a large percentage of those transactions have been domain names.

I just watched a Mixergy interview with Escrow.com CEO Brandon Abbey, and I think you’ll enjoy it. I couldn’t embed the interview below for some reason, so I highly recommend checking it out when you have a chance (it’s fairly long).

I also recommend checking out Mixergy for a wide range of executive interviews from a wide variety of people and companies.

Guest Post: How Domain Investors Can Benefit From Free Screen Sharing

Elliot Silver
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I want to share a guest post with you, written by Lawrence Gentilello, an Internet entrepreneur who founded the startup, Screenleap. I believe Screenleap may be beneficial to domain investors, and I asked Lawrence to write a guest post to share how it can be helpful. You can read more about ScreenLeap  in an article posted on TechCrunch last month.

Since registering my first domain name in 1999, I’ve had an appreciation for creating value through the use of premium domain names. I’ve enjoyed watching the industry evolve, and have bought and sold several domain names. So when I co-founded a new screen sharing service called Screenleap, one of the first things I started using it for was to help me manage what I was doing with my names more efficiently. I’ve found Screenleap to be very useful in this regard, so I wanted to share with Elliot’s readers how it can make them more effective domainers as well.

Screenleap is free screen sharing product that simplifies the process of sharing what’s happening on your computer screen with others. Our product allows you to view someone’s screen from any device with a browser, including smartphones and tablets, without having to install anything. The person sharing the screen does need to have Java though, which is already the case on most computers. Most of our users are able to share their screen in less than 20 seconds.

Below are the top four ways I’ve found it helpful in the context of domain investing:

Read More

Sisters Working in the Domain Industry

Elliot Silver
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Forker sistersThe domain industry is relatively small with considerable overlap between companies and individuals. Many people have worked for different companies in the domain space, and there are strong relationships that have been forged over the years. I want to share a story about one relationship that I think you’ll enjoy reading about.

If you’ve ever been to a domain conference before, you’ll notice the team from NameMedia is very close. One reason for that is because Christina Forker, Customer Service Manager/Business Services Manager at Afternic, and Danielle Romeo, Business Development Associate at NameMedia, are former high school classmates that stayed in touch with each other.

After graduating from college, Christina worked for a payroll company for several months and wasn’t interested in pursuing a career in that field. Danielle told her about an opening for a Customer Service Representative position at NameMedia, and Christina was intrigued by the idea of an online domain marketplace to buy and sell online real estate. Christina applied for the position and was hired by the company.

At DomainFest last year, I was introduced to Christina, and she and I spent some time discussing how I could work with her to have some of my domain names listed for sale at Afternic. We also had a friendly conversation about the town of Newburyport, since she lives there and I owned Newburyport.com. It was a fruitful discussion, and I continue to work with Christina when it comes to Afternic sales listings.

A couple of months after DomainFest, my wife and I flew out to Denver on our way to a ski trip in Breckendridge (awesome skiing there fyi). We made a quick stop at the Name.com offices, where I met Marketing Coordinator, Ashley Forker. After speaking for a little while, Ashley mentioned something about her sister working for NameMedia, and I connected the dots.

I asked about how Ashley found her job in the domain industry since NameMedia and Name.com don’t have a formal relationship (aside from being partners on Afternic’s DLS). According to Ashley, “I had recently graduated college and was again trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life when my sister offered me a gig working for her doing compliance (eye opening experience, there really are some foul domain names out there!!!).”

After working there for a couple of months, Ashley emailed Andrew Hyde of Boulder.ME to ask about job opportunities in the Internet/tech space, and he passed her resume on to Paul Carter, VP of Operations at Name.com. They called Ashley in for an interview, and after “15 minutes in a room with Bill Mushkin, I was sold on Name.com being the right place for me and the rest is history 🙂”

As you can imagine, the Forker sisters are able to use each other as resources since they operate in different areas of the domain industry. According to Christina, since the industry is so small, “it is so awesome to have my sister as a part of it, to bounce ideas off of, to talk in what everyone thinks is code at dinner parties mentioning SLD’s TLD’s ccTLD’s, gTLD’s, DNS, ETC. It is also great that we both work on seemingly opposite sides of the industry, her working for a registrar and myself in the aftermarket but are still involved in each other’s worlds. She is an immediate resource for all of my registrar-esque questions and the Name.com team is so helpful as well.”

It’s been great to get to know Ashley and Christina over the last year, and when you do get to know them, you’ll know why Ashley and Christina are valued by their companies and clients.

BankAds.com Launches “Managed Solution for Banking and Credit Card Domains”

Elliot Silver
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I received an email from Sean Sullivan, announcing his company’s launch of BankAds.com, a managed solution for banking and credit card domain names. According to Sullivan, while the industry standard offering is a 70/30 or 60/40 revenue split, BankAds.com revenue share is “well above it.”

I want to share the details of this with you because it looks like it could benefit owners of these types of domain names (I don’t have any, and I have not had the opportunity to personally test it out).

From the looks of it, domain owners don’t have to do much to get their sites launched aside from changing the DNS, which is the same as parking. The gist of these landing pages is to compare credit cards or banking solutions and allow visitors to easily apply for the card/bank account.

The company has two dozen designs, and I am told they do a considerable amount of split testing to keep and tweak the designs with the highest CTR and RPM. In my opinion, the designs are pretty sleek.  There are also widgets available for already developed websites.

From my perspective, one thing to keep in mind is that it’s important for these domain names to receive type-in traffic to be effective (or plan on doing marketing to drive traffic). Since it doesn’t appear that these websites have unique, one-of-a-kind content, they presumably won’t rank well in search engines, especially for competitive credit card and banking terms. Without the search traffic, you’re left with type-in traffic or traffic that is acquired by other means.

Sullivan mentioned something that appears to be unique to this program:

“One other feature is that is exclusive to our solution is that should any domain that is monetized with BankAds get hit with a C&D or UDRP notice our in house counsel will defend the domain owner free of charge. Our attorney has successfully defended a number of major domain owners. We honestly don’t anticipate UDRP being an issue at all, as we’re not going to take on TM domains within our solution.  But we all well know, there are companies and individuals out there who will try to take domains unjustly.  So having a great attorney ready to defend a domain when necessary is something that I’m sure will give peace of mind to some of our clients. “

You can have a look at some of the websites that are currently using BankAds.com for monetization:

  • BestCreditCardForMiles.com
  • GasCreditCards.co
  • BestCreditCardForBadCredit.com
  • GoldCard.com

Again, I have not tried out BankAds.com and was not paid or compensated in any way to post this. If you try it out, please think about posting your results here to let others know about your experience.

Why Your News May Not Get Posted

Elliot Silver
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I am sent a lot of press releases, news tips, and other information that people would like to see published on my blog. I do my best to post information and news that is of interest to me and my business, and if that’s the case, I assume it will be of interest to others.

With so many submissions, there is no way I could or would post everything I receive. If you’ve sent me something in the past (or you plan to send me something) and I didn’t post it, here are a few reasons for that:

  • Your news won’t benefit or interest many people in the domain name industry
  • The press release or email you sent wasn’t clear about what is new or being offered
  • The release is far too promotional and isn’t news
  • I was out of town or away when you sent the information to me, and by the time I returned, it wasn’t relevant
  • I saw that someone else already posted it on a different blog or website and that person shares the same opinion as me
A few months ago, I wrote another article giving some tips on how to get your press release published. I think that’s a good place to start if you have some news you’d like to share with other domain investors.

Can You Help Me Find a Buyer?

Elliot Silver
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I receive quite a few emails asking something along the lines of, “can you help me find a buyer for my domain name?” I don’t broker domain names, so I generally try to get people to think about how they can find a buyer on their own. This is one of those things that if you can do it successfully once, you can replicate it. I want to share some advice on how you can try and find a buyer for domain names you want to sell.

My first piece of advice is to take the keywords from your domain name and plug them in to Google. See what companies advertise for those keywords and see what companies rank organically. Try to find a contact on the website to pitch the domain name or use the contact form. If there is no contact form or if finding the “right” person to contact is difficult, do a Whois search for the company domain name and contact the Whois contact. Many times, that person is either the contact or will forward your email to the appropriate person.

My next piece of advice is to evaluate how the  domain name can be used and by what type of company. Think about what type of companies may be interested in buying the domain name, and visit the websites of the obvious buyers (or do a Google search to find companies in those industries).  One tip with respect to this is that if you have to come up with some convoluted or tangential reason a company would want to use a domain name, you’ll probably have a tough time selling the domain name. In my experience, some companies are open to buying domain names but don’t want to hear an idea for a marketing strategy that is possible with certain domain names.

My third piece of advice is to use a domain name lead generation website like Lead Refs or Estibot to contact buyers. Be 100% sure you haven’t contacted the same person/company already. I am sure it’s annoying to receive multiple emails from the same person about a domain name, especially if the name is not of interest. I would likely remove obvious domain investors from those leads since your hit rate will likely be lower and it will annoy people who may label you as a spammer.

If your domain name is superior, you may want to have a domain broker at a company like Afternic,  Sedo,  Aftermarket.com, or Domain Holdings do outbound lead generation on your behalf. Mind you, they will likely only do this if the domain name is valuable and the price is reasonable since they only get paid for this if they close a deal.

If the domain name doesn’t have obvious commercial appeal, selling it via outbound sales channels may not be possible or will be very difficult. For brandable names, it’s more likely that you’ll close a more favorable deal when a buyer comes to you. I recommend listing them on various aftermarket websites and making sure there’s a “for sale” notice on the landing page.

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