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Oversee Announces DomainFest Prague

Elliot Silver
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Domain FestDomainFest Global is set become a fully “global” conference. For a couple of weeks now, I have heard rumors that Oversee was thinking about – or planning to have a DomainFest conference in Prague, Czech Republic, and this information has just been confirmed by the company. DomainFest will be held in Prague for two days, from October 6 – 7, 2010 at the Intercontinental Hotel.

I have been planning to attend the Traffic conferences in Vancouver in June and Hong Kong in November, and I may add this one to the list. Prague is a city that I’ve wanted to visit for quite some time, and now I should be able to make a “business case” to attend.

Full details can be read in the Oversee press release:

DomainSponsor ®, the domain monetization business unit of Oversee.net ® and organizer of the DOMAINfest ® series of conferences, said today that it will expand the highly regarded franchise into Europe with a conference in Prague, Czech Republic.

The two-day event will be held Wednesday and Thursday, October 6 and 7, 2010 at the landmark Hotel Intercontinental located in the heart of one of Europe’s most beautiful cities. Building on the success of last month’s event in Santa Monica, California, the October meeting will continue DOMAINfest’s focus on increasing the value of Internet real estate and will offer a rich setting for extensive networking involving topics relevant not only to domain investors from Europe, but also from around the world.

Subject-matter experts will be invited to facilitate the networking sessions on Wednesday, October 6th.   The first day will also include a Moniker ® Premium Domain Name Auction powered by SnapNames LiveTM technology.   Day 2 will be focused on social activities in and around Prague designed to provide the kind of shared experiences that can contribute to the building of long-term relationships between DOMAINfest Europe attendees.   Conference details, including the agenda and speakers, will be released in June, 2010.

“DOMAINfest Europe is an excellent opportunity for European publishers, online marketers, and domain-related service providers to meet and discuss ways to increase the value of domain names, which we like to refer to as Internet real estate, ” said Peter Celeste, Senior Vice President of Oversee.net and General Manger, Monetization Services. “The DomainSponsor team looks forward to becoming more engaged with the European domain investor community, and this forum is the perfect venue to exchange ideas and build relationships.   As with all DOMAINfest events, we will be offering affordable registration rates to encourage maximum participation from a wide range of talented professionals from both inside and outside our industry.”

In January, 2010, DomainSponsor hosted a highly successful DOMAINfest Global ® conference in Santa Monica, California that attracted more than 600 professionals from a variety of internet-related industries.   The conference included a variety of sessions over a three day period, including a keynote fireside chat with Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com. This recent DOMAINfest conference also featured a first-ever PITCHfest contest, structured networking sessions, and moderated general sessions with experts from the world of investment, advertising, and marketing. Videos of each session, including the keynote fireside chat, can be viewed at http://www.domainfest.com.

In November 2009, DomainSponsor announced the establishment of its European head office in Frankfurt, Germany with Joerg Schnermann as General Manager.

Johns Wu, Founder of Bankaholic, Interviewed on MO.com

Elliot Silver
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Johns Wu is most famous for building a website on Bankaholic.com and eventually selling it to BankRate for a reported $15,000,000. Wu is a well-known Internet entrepreneur, and he is knowledgeable about generic domain names. This afternoon, I read an interview with Johns Wu on MO.com, with considerable focus on domain names. In fact, there was one very interesting answer about an upcoming project:

“I’ve been working on getting a GRAND SLAM in the works. My idea of a grand slam is: category killer domain + SEO [Search Engine Optimization] traffic + monetization. In the next couple years, I’m hoping to build a web property in the same league as Hotels.com and Wine.com. I’ve been in talks with domainers who own valuable portfolios, so hopefully this will happen sooner rather than later ;)”

The interview offers a great looking into the entrepreneurial mind of Wu, and I recommend that you head over to MO.com to read it.

MO.com is a website that interviews entrepreneurs from across all industries around the world. The website focuses on the habits and methods of entrepreneurs, learning what makes them tick. MO.com is becoming a great resource for entrepreneurs to learn from each other, share what works and what doesn’t, and connect with other entrepreneurs in a mutually beneficial way.

Brian Null, the founder of MO.com is familiar with the entrepreneurial mind because he is a successful Internet entrepreneur and domain investor. Brian has owned, operated, monetized, helped broker, or sold domain names like OfficeSupply.com, GolfCourses.com, Dance.com, Hockey.com, Saws.com, and RestaurantReviews.com.

Planning to Attend the GeoDomain Expo? Better Book Now

Elliot Silver
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Have you been thinking about attending this year’s GeoDomain Expo put on by Associated Cities and scheduled to be held in New Orleans from Wednesday, April 28 through Friday, April 30, 2010? Today would be a good day to sign up, as the price will increase by $200 beginning tomorrow. Book now to get the early bird rate of $795.

In addition to the price increase tomorrow, it’s also important to keep in mind that the conference is being held during a very popular weekend in New Orleans. This year’s GeoDomain Expo coincides with the 40th anniversary of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Hotel rooms are being reserved quickly and the rates continue to increase.

The GeoDomain Expo is the most focused domain conference, and it’s one of the best conferences to network. One of this year’s keynote speakers is Hotels.com co-founder David Litman. If you own or operate geodomain names, this is a conference you should certainly consider – and now’s the time to do it.

5 Customizable WordPress Themes

Elliot Silver
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When building out some of my websites, I generally look for an inexpensive website theme to use, and lately I’ve preferred to use WordPress, as it’s easy to update and add plugins. Sometimes I use the theme completely as is, and other times I hire a freelance programmer to make special customizations for me.

I’ve used ThemeForest.net several times, and the site always seems to have new and interesting themes to use – at relatively reasonable prices (between $15 – $35/each). Many of the themes offered have different color schemes and/or styles from which to choose, giving you more flexibility.

Below are my current 5 favorite customizable WordPress themes:

For those of you that care, those are affiliate codes although I do not know the designers.

Some Sunday Thoughts

Elliot Silver
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It’s another lazy(ish) Sunday, and here are some things I am thinking about today. Hope you have a great afternoon!

  • Does anyone know of a tool/script that I can use to analyze names at Snapnames and Namejet? Specifically, I would like to load a list of names (10,000 or more) into the tool, and it will spit out the GAKT exact matches, # of results in Google, # of advertisers in Google for that keyword, Average PPC for the term, and Ovt for the domain name as of the last update? I’d imagine it would require someone knowledgeable about programming and Google.
  • For those who don’t know (some people asked in a previous post) GAKT stands for Google Adwords: Keyword Tool, and it can be found in your Adwords account. I only use the exact match searches to get an idea about how many people are looking for those keywords. It’s not an indicator of type in traffic to me, but it does show how many people are looking for information about that topic every month.
  • I am very thankful that the earthquake in Chile and subsequent tsunami action seems to have relatively limited casualties. I have a friend who has been traveling to Chile and I heard from him today (he wasn’t there). Glad that he wasn’t impacted.
  • I hope this doesn’t come off as “jerky” but I want to give a quick tip when registering domain names. Any name could be developed into just about anything. When buying names, think about whether you will spend the time to develop it or whether someone else will realistically pay you for the rights to do it. I would much rather own one good name that I bought for $2,500 than 300 newly registered names. If you don’t end up selling them, you’re just going to double your carrying costs the next year.

Quick Tip to Buy Domains in Private

Elliot Silver
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22

This morning, I was looking through some drops on Snapnames for the next couple of days. I was researching one of the names I thought was worth bidding on, and I saw that it was an expired domain name rather than a private seller’s auction. After some further research (including a Whois History search), I saw that it was owned by a company whose name I’ve seen on a number of previous Whois searches, and the company owns thousands of domain names.

When companies begin dropping domain names from their portfolio, it usually means one of a couple of things. The first (and usually most likely) is that they didn’t think the name was valuable. For some reason, they decided that this particular domain name isn’t worth $8/year to renew. There are plenty of names I have dropped because I didn’t sell them and I didn’t want to throw good money after bad.

The second potential cause is that the company is facing financial troubles, and they need to lower their overhead. Not renewing domain names is a way to reduce overhead, although it’s probably not the smartest way to do so, as this would bring no revenue to the company. However, if a company is dropping thousands of domain names, it might not be worth searching through huge lists to find one or two worth keeping.

Since the name has at least 2 bidders now, I don’t think the first scenario is likely. With that said, I am going to reach out to the company in private and see if I can buy some of their domain names. If they are facing a cash crunch, perhaps we can work out a deal for other names I’ve looked at in the past. They could get the much needed liquidity, and I could get some strong names at good prices.

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