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Additional Hong Kong Domains for Sale

Elliot Silver
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13

Over the last month or so, I’ve sold two Hong Kong geographic domain names, WanChai.com and KwunTong.com, and I still have a few other domain names remaining. Instead of creating individual posts for each, I am going to save time by listing them for sale here.

Judging by the 2 emails and DNForum private message I received in the week after selling WanChai.com in which the writers told me they wish they bought it first, you should probably be quick if you would like to purchase one or more of the names below. If all three are of interest, I would consider an offer for the three domain names. Post “sold” in the comment section of the blog if you’re interested.

HK

YuenLong.com – Price: $6,500 US Dollars

References:

  • Go2YL.com – “Yuen Long has quite a lot to offer.” “The district is renowned for its rich cultural heritage and abundance of antiquities and monuments. Many traditional ceremonies and rituals are still observed by the people in Yuen Long, in spite of the coming of modernity of Yuen Long. Examples are Tin Hau Festival, Tai P’ing Ch’ing Ch’iao and basin meal.”
  • CNNgo.com – Why We Love Yuen Long “Dirt biking, strawberry picking and traditional basin meals are just some of the reasons why the rest of Hong Kong loses to Yuen Long“
  • Wikipedia – “It had a population of 449,070 in 2001“

Hong Kong

TaiPo.com – Price: $5,500 US Dollars

References:

  • Sam’s Exotic Photos of Tai Po – “Tai Po used to be a modest village town with historical relics and charming scenery. Now, it has been transformed into a thriving and prosperous new town. It is a marvel that the tranquility of its traditional villages have been preserved and coexist in harmony with the high-rise buildings of the bustling new town.“
  • Tai Po Football Club (Wikipedia) – “On 6 June 2009, Tai Po won 4:2 against TSW Pegasus, in front of 4,042 fans at the Hong Kong Stadium, to lift the Hong Kong FA Cup, marking the first time a district team has won the trophy.”
  • Wikipedia – “It had a population of 310,879 in 2001.“

Tsuen Wan, Hong Kong

TsuenWan.com – Price: $7,000 US Dollars

References:

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Photo credits:

Bobbleheads.com Products Featured on Today Show & Other Media Promotion

Elliot Silver
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5

I was catching up with Warren Royal last night, and he mentioned some of the good things happening with his company’s Bobbleheads.com website and business. Shortly after NBC’s set re-designs, Warren noticed that some of his company’s bobbleheads were showing up on the “Meet the Press” set, and a segment on the “Today Show” with David Gregory showed the John F. Kennedy bobblehead (2:48-50 in the video above).

In addition to this neat but somewhat passive promotion, lightning rod talk show host Glenn Beck is   auctioning off 3 of his company’s Founding Father bobbleheads, autographed by him, in a charity auction. The current bid is $1,100 and the auction doesn’t end until May 24th.

Finally, Fox 5 New York has also provided Bobbleheads.com with some free publicity. The New York Fox affiliate is actively promoting a bobblehead of its primary weather anchor, Mike Woods, in a television commercial. While the Bobbleheads.com company isn’t listed, the “bobbleheads” brand is being passively promoted.

In response to how NBC came across his company to purchase the bobbleheads for its television sets, Warren commented, “this is a good example of how having the key category domain is great – the NBC buyer just went to Bobbleheads.com to find what they were looking for, and found our products.”

Warren is right on the money with this. While some people argue that a strong brand is better than a generic domain name, in my opinion a generic domain name generally has a similar level of brand recognition by default without the ongoing marketing cost. Congrats to Warren again on the good news.

Tech Problem with Snapnames

Elliot Silver
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3

I use Snapnames quite a bit, and one of the most useful searches for me is a list of 500 .com domain names (no numbers or hyphens) that are in auction or available soon within the next three days. I perform this search using the Advanced Search button while using Firefox.

For the last couple of weeks, whenever I have entered this special advanced search, Snapnames results return to me with the default Advanced Search options. Instead of seeing what I want, I get a list of all names, in order of the most bids. This makes it more burdensome for me to search, and lately I haven’t been scanning the partial search list as usual since the functionality isn’t working for me and it takes too much time to look through the full list.

Instead, I have simply been using FreshDrop.net to analyze domain names I want to buy, based on my preselected criteria. Unfortunately, this isn’t adequate, as there have been plenty of times I’ve purchased names that don’t meet the criteria. I can’t say whether Snapnames is leaving money on the table since I am not one of their biggest buyers, but it’s annoying to me and I hope the fix it.

BTW, while we are talking about Snapnames technical issues… I wish they would permit me to bid in their live auctions from my Mac rather than only having a PC-based solution. (I am not downloading Bootcamp and adding more programs to my machine just to bid in a few Snapnames auctions).

Is anyone else facing the same issues?

TheDomains.com & ElliotsBlog.com Separated by 7 Websites in Alexa

Elliot Silver
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I generally don’t pay much attention to Alexa rankings. I write articles of interest based on what I am doing and what I see in the domain industry, and I figure people will visit if they want. I know Alexa tends to be skewed towards Internet and tech focused websites, so as much as some people use it as a means of gauging traffic, I don’t pay much attention to it.

Yesterday evening I checked out the Alexa ranking for my website and was pretty surprised to see it below 25,000. I’ve seen an uptick in traffic, but the last time I checked it was in the 30s. I wanted to check a few other domain blogs that I read to see if they’re also seeing a “better” Alexa ranking, and I was very surprised when I checked the Alexa ranking of Mike Berkens’ Blog.

Out of millions of websites tracked by Alexa, Mike’s blog (23,128) and my blog (23,121) were separated by a grand total of 7 websites. I cross checked the Compete score, and we are separated by around 200 websites. This seems pretty minuscule in the whole scheme of things, and it’s always fun to be in the good company of Mike (and Judi).

Saturday Afternoon Updates

Elliot Silver
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6

Here are a few updates on this nice Saturday afternoon.

  • I was a bit surprised to see Dating.com sell for $1,750,000 because I thought I saw that the reserve price was much higher. I was wrong, and it’s good to see this sale. I am looking forward to learning who the buyer was. I have a couple of guesses but will keep them to myself. Congrats to Moniker/Snapnames for the big sale, which comes on the heels of their $5.5 million sale of Slots.com.
  • If you get an offer from someone over email or via marketplace, do as much due diligence as you can. The most obvious things to search for are the person’s name, company name (from email or signature), and IP address. If those yield nothing significant, search for the domain name’s term in Google, the USPTO, and see who owns other extensions. Knowing the potential buyer is a critical step in any negotiation.
  • I was looking over my financials from 2007 and 2008 to compare them to how things are stacking up this year (2009 was a bad year so I am going to forget it ever happened 🙂 ).   Although I have fewer sales this year, my revenue is better than 2007 year to date and a little less than 2008 which was my best year. Over the past couple of years, I focused on selling less names but focusing on much better names. The result is less time selling and more time to focus on other things.
  • Just a quick update on DogWalker.com.   It’s now in month 5 of existence and the site is drawing over 4,000 unique visitors monthly. This comes on the heels of reducing my ad spend on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, so it’s great to see the traffic levels remaining the same despite the costs decreasing significantly (attributed to good SERP rankings).   Right now, the site is up to 193 dog walkers, with just about all paying $49 a year on a Paypal subscription. Not too shabby for a domain name that had been unused by the previous owner for almost 12 years and only saw about 5 visits a day before launch. That’s close to $10,000 in annual revenue (even though it hasn’t been live for a full year).
  • CatSitter.com has grown much more slowly, but that could be due to the fact that I didn’t advertise it as much. Interestingly, CatSitter.com was parked for a number of years before I bought it, and I am having trouble with SEO for the site. I wouldn’t formulate an opinion based on one instance, but since both sites were built in exactly the same way at around the same time, it’s interesting to note that the non-parked domain is performing much better in SERP results despite having significantly more competition.   Both sites were built on WordPress.
  • I am looking to sell HorseStable.com.   I haven’t reached out to end user buyers for it yet, but I think it would either be useful as a directory of horse stables or an online store to sell horse stable supplies.   Let me know if it’s of interest. Also, in light of my two sales of Hong Kong domain names in the last month, I have a few more to sell. Let me know if you’d like to see the names before I put them on the market next week (the second domain still has my company listed as owner, but it’s in escrow and being transferred to Godaddy).
  • One tip to get some free traffic to your websites: post listings on various Craigslist city websites and encourage people to visit your site for relevant information. I am doing this with DogWalker.com, and it probably receives 25 visits/day from these listings.   Compared to paying Google up to $2/click, this is saving significant costs.

Local NBC News Anchor Buys Presidential Barack “Hottie” Obama Domain Name

Elliot Silver
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10

You’ve all probably heard the news from Buffalo, New York by now. President Barack Obama visited a famous wing joint in Buffalo yesterday, and he was greeted by a 45 year old woman who loudly proclaimed, “you’re a hottie with a smokin’ little body!” Kinda funny, kinda inappropriate, but what the heck. You may only get to meet the president once after all.

NewYorkMag.com reported that shortly after this made the news, Buffalo news anchor Scott Levin (from NBC affiliate WGRZ) thought he could cash in on this news event and decided to buy HottieWithASmokinLittleBody.com in the hopes that someone would be interested in buying it from him.

It’s pretty interesting to see a local news anchor registering domain names related to a   news event in the hopes of cashing in on it. If Levin really thinks someone would want to buy it, he shouldn’t leave the standard Godaddy parking page up. It’s also interesting to see people who aren’t in this business buying domain names with the hopes of flipping them for easy cash.

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