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Consider Adding Simply Hired’s Jobamatic on Your Website

Elliot Silver
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14

These days, it seems that a lot of people are out of work and looking for jobs, no matter where you live or in what the profession. On my geodomain names, I have been using Simply Hired’s Jobamatic platform for quite some time, and it is earning a couple hundred dollars a month in incremental revenue.

Take a look at http://jobs.lowell.com for example. There are job listings all over the Greater Lowell area, and I earn revenue when someone clicks on a job listing, and I earn even more revenue when someone posts a job listing (which doesn’t happen as much as I wish).

As you can see, the landing page integrates well within my website. My developer used the CSS and design from my site and plugged it into the back end of Jobamatic, so it fits nearly seamlessly. The one thing I couldn’t do is have a rotating banner on the Job board because it wouldn’t let me install an ad rotator, but that’s not such a big deal to me. I was also able to create a subdomain (jobs) and use a CNAME record so the url looks like you’re still on Lowell.com, when in fact, you’re on the Jobamatic site.

On the homepage of Lowell.com, I also added a widget that shows several job listings in the area, and when people click on those, I get paid, too. I think this is key with the economy in the tank because people are looking for work, and I am giving them work opportunities – it’s a win/win situation.

Because of the benefit to site visitors and financial benefit, I am looking at integrating Jobamatic into my non-geodomain names as well. For example, I am going to do it on DogWalker.com pretty soon, since there seem to be a lot of people looking for dog walking jobs.

If you haven’t checked out Jobamatic, you might want to do it, especially with the economy in the crapper.

This is not a paid post (I don’t do paid posts) nor is there any affiliate link.

HomeownersInsurance.com Bought for a Reported $570,000 (All Cash)

Elliot Silver
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4

I just received a press release from HomeInsurance.com announcing that the company has acquired HomeownersInsurance.com for over half a million dollars.

According to the press release:

“HomeInsurance.com has purchased the domain name  HomeownersInsurance.com for a reported  $570,000  in an all-cash deal. As America’s number one online home insurance shopping agency, executives at  HomeInsurance.com project this purchase will grow their online home insurance shopping visitors to 100,000 consumers each month.“

Prior to the acquisition, HomeownersInsurance.com had been owned for quite some time by Homeowners Insurance Online Services, S. A., a Costa Rican company.

In my opinion, this is a smart acquisition for the company. According to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, the term “homeowners insurance” gets 33,100 exact match local searches a month, while the primary keyword “home insurance” is only a bit higher at 40,500.

By having two different websites ranking well in Google for these two terms, they should drive considerably more traffic to the site.

One thing I really like about this purchase is that it shows that a company that knows its market can make projections on how a similar (but different) domain name will do once it’s indexed and well-ranked in search engines. It can then use those projections to model how long it would take to break even on a domain acquisition and can determine an acceptable price to pay.

It may seem silly, but I don’t think a lot of companies look at domain names in this way. Acquiring a great domain name like this is one way a company can reinvest in its business and increase its reach.

Sending Traffic to a Parked Page is Against Terms Of Service

Elliot Silver
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25

One of the primary reasons pay per click advertising payouts are down is because of click fraud. This happens when a website or domain owner either clicks on the pay per click links on his website or parked page, hires someone to click on the links, or someone else clicks on pay per click links in order to make the advertiser pay for this traffic.

When a domain owner has pay per click advertising on his or her site using Google’s Adsense or a domain parking provider, it can be tempting to click on some of the ads or ask friends to click on them to generate revenue. Some may justify this to themselves somehow, but any way you slice it, clicking on PPC links on your own website – or encouraging others to do it for you – isn’t legit.

Domain parking companies have the difficult task of determining what is a legitimate click and what may be click fraud. For this reason, most parking companies don’t permit people to send traffic to parked domain names.  In fact, it’s a violation of the Terms of Service for most (if not all) domain parking companies to send traffic to a parked domain name.

Here are a few examples:

Parked.com TOS states that traffic can only come from “type in (direct navigation) traffic and  existing search engine results/expired traffic.”….    “All other types of traffic including bought traffic, traffic driven by PPC campaigns, traffic directed from hyperlinks are not permitted.”

Domain Sponsor TOS: “Publishers may not generate traffic to their website or our links by any of the following methods: listings on newsgroups, bulk e-mailing, icq postings, IM messages, chatroom/irc postings, iframes, zero pixel frames, hitbots, clickbots, spiders, cgi-scripts, JavaScript, DNS hacking, spoofing or pharming, cache poisoning, any toolbar or downloading of any computer software application (“Downloadable App”), altering an End User’s host file to point another domain to a Publisher’s domain, PTC Programs, click farms, via cellphone messages, online viral media, other online incentives, media advertising of any type, any promotion of a domain, including, but not exclusively, communications or press release with a media outlet or organization capable of public communications with the intention to create an interest or drive traffic in a domain, or any other similar method.”

NameDrive TOS: “Traffic promotional methods not allowed include, but are not limited to:    Blog sites / forums, TGP Gallerys, bought traffic (PTR/PTC),    Arbitrage traffic driven by PPC campaigns (Adwords etc.), traffic directed from hyperlinks etc. are not permitted.”

One other reason why it’s not legit for domain investors to send traffic to a parked page is because it can inflate a domain name’s traffic numbers illegitimately. Click fraud aside, if I encourage you to visit one of my parked domain names, and I later sell the domain name while providing traffic figures, would you be pissed if you were the buyer?

If I purchased a domain name believing that it received thousands of visits a month, but it turns out that was only due to the fact that the previous owner was illegitimately sending traffic to the parked page, I would be pissed and would probably take legal action.

No matter how you look at it, intentionally sending traffic to a parked page isn’t good for the domain industry and gives everyone a bad name.

Create a List of Keyword Domain Names in Excel

Elliot Silver
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15

I’ve often searched for available keyword domain names in bulk using a keyword list and Microsoft Excel. I appended .com on to the end of the keyword string and then pasted it into a bulk domain checker at a domain registrar like Name.com.

Here’s how to turn a list of keywords into a list of domain names:

1) Paste keyword list into Excel workbook Column A
2) In Column B enter .com and copy it all the way down to the last row where you have something in Column A
3) In Column C, enter this function: =concatenate(A1,B1)
4) Copy cell C1 and paste all the way down to the last cell where you have keyword and .com
5) This may or may not be necessary depending on where you take the list, but since column C is still filled with functions, Copy all the cells in Column C and Paste Special as “Values”
6) Copy list in Column C and paste it in the Bulk domain checker

Why I Am Not Worried About Domain Name Seizures

Elliot Silver
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25

There have been a surprising number of mainstream articles regarding the United States’ Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a division of the Department of Homeland Security. Apparently, ICE seized the domain names of alleged file sharing websites without any type of notice to them. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I received so many “did you see this” emails/phone calls from friends who aren’t in the business.

I will preface this by saying that I don’t like the idea of the government acting as judge and juror, while not seeming to give the website and/or domain name owners the opportunity to defend their actions. It’s scary that the government can simply take over some websites at it’s whim without the owner’s chance to defend his or her actions..

However, if the companies that own the websites are or were doing something illegal while violating the rights of people in the US (whom ICE is responsible to protect), this seizure is not such a huge deal as some might make it out to be. I think John Berryhill’s comment on Mike Berkens’ blog sums it up pretty well, comparing the seizure to that of a drug smuggler whose boat was used to smuggle drugs illegally.

Eventually, these website operates should have their day in court, but taking away their platform is a way to temporarily stop them from doing what the government believes is an illegal act (although it seems pretty simple to move to another domain name).  I don’t know where to draw the line when it comes to seizures such as this, but if a company happens to be brazenly  flouting  the law, I am not opposed to government intervention. If these website operators are in the right, then they will certainly have their day in court.

Some people seem to be making a big leap by fearing their domain names could potentially be put at risk. Sure, if you are doing something the US government finds  blatantly  illegal, then perhaps yours could be at risk. If someone is arrested for smoking weed in a public park, or firing a gun in the air in that park, it doesn’t mean you are being put at risk of arrest if you go for a jog in the park. If people were being rounded up for having a picnic in the park, that would be a different story.

Who Makes Money from WikiLeaks?

Elliot Silver
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14

WikiLeaks.org is a website that publishes leaked (usually confidential) documents and memos from governments and companies. These documents are often embarrassing  to those behind the documents, and the website receives a lot of interest shortly before and after it releases documents. It’s been in the news quite a bit lately, and is almost always referred to as “WikiLeaks” without the domain extension.

I don’t know much about the organization behind WikiLeaks.org, so I can’t say how (or if) they generate revenue, but it looks like at least one company makes some money as a result of WikiLeaks, and the company is based in the United States.

A company called Wikia,  Inc. from San Francisco owns the “typo” WikiLeaks.com, and the domain name is not developed. However, there are pay per click (PPC) links on the landing page, which appears to be monetized by its registrar, US-based Godaddy. You can see the “Sponsored Links” on the left hand side of the page.

At its peak, Compete.com reported that WikiLeaks.com received over 230,000 visits in July of 2010. It also appears to be close to the 100,000 visit mark last month, and will almost certainly increase as WikiLeaks.org release new confidential documents.

Of course, this traffic pales in comparison to the actual WikiLeaks.org website, but the traffic is still substantial. I wonder how much Godaddy is earning from this typo traffic.

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