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Quick Tip to Buy Domains

Elliot Silver
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7

When you are trying to buy a domain name and your offer is turned down, I recommend giving the owner one last opportunity to consider your offer, and add a time constraint to it to make him consider it quickly. Oftentimes when a person rejects your offer, it’s a tactic to increase the amount of your offer. If you specify that you won’t increase your offer and that you will give him a few days, he might realize that’s the best offer he will get from you and potentially change his mind.

When I was negotiating to buy Burbank.com, negotiations came to a head after a couple of weeks. I really wanted the name and had to increase my offer a couple of times. Finally when the offer was rejected, I replied that my previous offer was final and that I would move forward with another significant purchase if the owner didn’t change his mind over the weekend (it was a Friday afternoon).

Several hours later, the deal was verbally confirmed and all parties seemed happy. I don’t know whether the former owner was using his reply as a negotiation tactic or if he just didn’t want to sell until he realized that my offer would be off the table. However, putting a time constraint on a reply can get you a final answer.

Just don’t use this method if you made a lowball offer, because you will probably just get a snark reply   🙂

Finishing Up AthensVacations.com

Elliot Silver
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14

Yesterday, I tried to live blog my development of AthensVacations.com, although with a few breaks and interruptions, it wasn’t as quick as I wanted it to be. I am going to be working on a few things on the site today as well, which I outlined below:

– Adsense ads on the site aren’t relevant to Athens or Vacations, so I made a few changes and added some content to beef it up. Adsense should automatically display ads based on what it thinks the site is about, so I am hoping this change works. Hopefully relevant ads will appear soon.

– I need to create the History page, which I will do at some point today. I use a variety of resources (such as Wikipedia) to get an idea about the history and create a custom page with unique content writing.

– I want to add another restaurant – maybe the Hard Rock Cafe since that’s a tourist spot, and many fans of the chain try to visit every Hard Rock around.

– I want to add a page about transportation and the airport because people presumably want to know how to get around the city and how to get to the city. I will link this page from a couple of pages already on the site, but I won’t add it to the top navigation, as I want to keep that clean and limit the number of links.

– Over the next few days, I will do some link building by responding to Yahoo Answers questions and by finding blogs that have information about Athens and Greek travel. The key is that I don’t want to be annoying and/or post irrelevant responses because people do that here all the time, and it’s frustrating.

There are also a few things I want to mention here because I am sure some of you are wondering:

If I was actually paying myself for doing this, the cost would be much more than if I bought a mini site. I realize that I could have paid a few hundred dollars or less, and someone else could have built the same or better mini site, and I could have been doing other things. However, I like doing this type of thing. It gives me a break from other things, so I don’t mind. If I had a corporate job and was sacrificing time from the kids I don’t have, it would have been a bad move, but I enjoy this and a lot of my domaining activities are automated – or they don’t take up much time.

This mini site may or may not pay off in terms of advertising revenue and earnings. It may or may not sell for my asking price down the road. It did give me a chance to show you how I go about building a mini site, and I really appreciate all of the comments received. These have been helpful to me, and I hope to others as well.

I will continue to build out mini sites. Individually, they might not make a lot of money each, but I am increasing the value of my holdings in this down economy, and when people are spending more for good, revenue generating domain names, these will be competitive.

WordPress Errors or Theme Errors?

Elliot Silver
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2

I was having a few problems on the back-end of my blog for a couple of weeks. I assumed it was because I recently updated my blog to WP 2.8, and although I was kicking myself for upgrading, there wasn’t much I could do. After a couple of weeks, I was faced with other random problems, and it began to get more than annoying.

After my designer was unable to access the admin panel of my blog, and I couldn’t even access it unless I was on my personal laptop, I began to worry. What if my laptop suddenly lost access, too, and I was blocked from my own blog. Fortunately, that didn’t happen, but I was lucky to have the help of Kevin Leto, who taught me a trick.

While I had assumed my problems stemmed from a faulty WordPress upgrade, Kevin wasn’t convinced. He had me go into the appearance section of the WordPress dashboard and select the default theme temporarily. Once I did so, all of the problems disappeared, allowing him to determine that the fault was in my current theme coding rather than WordPress.

Once Kevin isolated the problem, he was able to search through my files to find a really small error that was throwing off a lot of back-end functionality and he quickly rectified the error.

If you use WordPress and encounter problems and errors, switch it to the default theme and try to replicate your errors. If the errors disappear, the problem is in your theme – not in WordPress.

Follow Along as I Build a Mini Site

Elliot Silver
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29

This afternoon beginning at 12:00pm noon EDT, I am going to do a small experiment, simultaneously blogging here and Tweeting as I build a website on my domain name, AthensVacations.com. Yes, I listed AthensVacations.com for sale a couple of days ago and it hasn’t sold yet, but I am going to build a mini site because it can only enhance the value of the site. I am still willing to sell the domain name and website for now, but will take it off the market when it starts making good Adsense revenue 🙂

Just a few things to point out first. 1) I don’t know how long it will take because all of them take different amounts of time. 2) I am using a website template my designer created, which can be purchased by anyone on ThemeForest.net (called Bluelight). 3) The logo graphic was created ahead of time by my designer. 4) When it’s done, it will look similar to TobagoVacations.com – same structure. 5) If you have suggestions for the design, post them here or Tweet them @elliotsblog. 6) I will continue to update this with short updates that can be copied in to Twitter.

If you’re interested in following along with the progress – or if you just want to see how long it takes to build, you can check back here. I will time stamp it as I go…   See you in around 30 minutes!

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12:00pm – Creating an account in my LiquidWeb hosting panel so I can share changes as I update the website. I won’t change the domain’s DNS until I have the first page done.

12:03pm – Setting up the template by adding logo and removing previous art.

12:08pm – Changing some of the text on the home page as well as the meta description and title (for search engines)

12:20pm – Trying to come up with two great descriptive sentences about Athens for the home page. Feel free to assist! On TobagoVacations.com, I have “Imagine yourself sitting on a beautiful sandy beach, with the sun shining down on your face and a gentle breeze blowing through your hair. Enjoy a relaxing vacation in the tropical Caribbean island of Tobago. Your body and soul deserve it.”

12:28pm – Setting up the domain name in Google Analytics, which I will add to the template. It’s important that this code is added to each page or Google will record it as another website. Find/change works well.

12:35pm – Getting Adsense code for the site. I have many different size banners/boxes I need to get. I ordinarily wouldn’t put Adsense up right away on a fully developed website, but I am willing to do it on this mini site to monetize it. Down the road I may establish an affiliate relationship with IAN for hotels/travel.

12:46pm – Now a really fun part – searching iStockphoto.com for great photos of Athens. I am looking for 4 great shots of Athens and its attractions. I want people who visit and have different preferences to relate to at least one photo. When I change the DNS and post the first page, you can let me know if I can do better.

1:15pm – Found a few nice images of Athens. Once I resize and add to the home page, I will change the DNS and get set to upload the first page.

1:30pm – Uploaded the home page and css page (which has the code the site reads to know how things should look). About to change the DNS soon so the page resolves to the new site. Please don’t click the ads 🙂

1:40pm – Time for a little break. The DNS has turned over, and AthensVacations.com is now live. In the meantime, please let me know what you think of the home page (small paragraphs, photos, and Adsense placement for starters). I will begin adding content to the other pages when I return…. thanks in advance!

2:15pm – Going to search for hotels in Athens (using Hotels.com and Google) and set the page up like I did with the Tobago site. I will add 3 hotel descriptions that I write, links directly to the hotel websites, and hotel logos. For this, I want to have 1 luxury hotel, a small Athens-unique hotel, and a romantic hotel. This will give more variety and allow the site to cater to different types of visitors.

2:43pm – Apparently there was too many hits coming in or something like that and my blog went down for almost a half hour. It’s back though, and I am back to work 🙂

3:30pm – Working on writing a description for 3 hotels in Athens. I don’t really enjoy the copywriting part of this, but unique content is a key factor in getting ranked for longer tail keywords. Sure, I won’t be listed at the top of Google for “Athens hotels” searches, but if I can get listed for a phrase like “contemporary hotel in Athens” or something less competitive, I will be satisfied. I should have this page done very soon.

3:45pm – The Athens Hotel page is now finished. Next, I am going to work on a couple of the forms, privacy, and disclaimer pages. It’s important to remember that Google requires a privacy policy on sites that use Adsense.

4:05pm – Contact form is done and tested. If you use a template, be sure to change the subject so you can distinguish what site someone is referencing (if you have many mini sites). I also uploaded the disclaimer and privacy. An attorney provided me with the disclaimer, which I use on my other sites, and the privacy policy was created using the DMA privacy policy generator.

4:15pm – Time for a break to walk the dog and give her some attention – she’s been very good today!

6:55pm – I took a nap and played with the dog for the past couple of hours. I went out with a couple guys from NameMedia last night and I am still tired 🙂 I am going to start working again in an hour after dinner because I have a few more pages to build… Attractions, Restaurants, and History. There are also some important development things that I need to do when the content is built. See you in an hour.

8:33pm – Back to work and just searched for photos on iStockPhoto.com (cheap photos with few copyright restrictions). I am also searching for fun things to do in Athens that I would enjoy. Athens Activities page has been completed. I think it’s lacking right now, so I will probably come back to this page and expand.

9:00pm – Simultaneously watching the Pitchmen tribute to Billy Mays, following the Red Sox game and beginning the restaurants page. My struggle with the restaurant page is that I want/need to link to restaurant websites that are bi-lingual with an English site. I am targeting Americans and English speakers with the site, and I want to make sure they are able understand the site where I send them.

9:45pm – Just installed an .htaccess file which provides instructions to browsers (I think). In any case, I did a 301 redirect of AthensVacations.com to www.AthensVacations.com to avoid duplicate indexing. I also created a 404 error page redirect, so if you go to a non existent page, it goes to the home page.

9:55pm – Athens Restaurants page is now finished, but I will probably add another restaurant in a couple of weeks. I also may add a list of “notable restaurants” at the bottom of the page. I will come back to this shortly.

10:15pm – One thing which I will add now – but should be added at the end is a site map. I am going to build a site map at XML-Sitemaps.com, a free sitemap generator. I am going to need to re-do the sitemap once the site is finished. It’s quick and easy to do, and the search engines find it useful.

10:18pm – Speaking of search engines, I am now going to go into my Google Webmaster Tools account and add this website. I will need to add a meta tag so Google knows I own it. Once added and confirmed, I will add the sitemap location so Google can find it quicker and easier. Also, if the site wasn’t listed in Google when I did a search for the exact domain name, I would file a Reconsideration Request, letting Google know I just bought the domain name and developed it.

10:20pm – I am going to go spend some time with my wife and finish up the history page tomorrow. I am not 100% satisfied with the site yet, and I have a few more additions I plan to make, including videos, other activity options, an airport page, and a couple other additions. Stay tuned – and thank you for following this.

Bing vs. Google .com

Elliot Silver
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1

Want to see a side-by-side comparison of how your developed websites rank in Bing and Google? It’s as simple as visiting Bing-vs-Google.com. This new website shows the results from both search engines directly next to each other, allowing you to easily see how your sites rank and the description and title for each page. Sure, you can just go to Bing and Google independently, but why not search both at once?

From my point of view, the most interesting aspect of this is the domain name.   It would seem to be a risky endeavor to use both trademarks in a single domain name, especially because Microsoft is known to vigorously defend its marks. I don’t see any monetization of the website, so I don’t know about the legal issues.

The New York Times has an article in today’s paper, where they cite this website, so I am sure if it wasn’t on either company’s radar before, it is now. Ironically, the domain name without the dashes (BingvsGoogle.com) is also registered but is undeveloped. That page has the default Godaddy landing page, which is monetized with PPC links, potentially causing problems for that owner.

Reach Out to Auction “No Sales”

Elliot Silver
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3

One way that you might be able to score a good deal on a domain name is to search through lists of previous domain auctions, and reach out to domain owners whose name(s) did not sell. In the past three years, there have been a number of domain auctions that saw a large percentage of domain names go unsold either due to poor market conditions or the reserve prices set by domain owners.

Oftentimes, domain owners believe having their domain name listed in a domain auction is a surefire way to get it sold for big money. Many owners feel that they need to compensate for the commission rate that would be had if the domain name sold. Additionally, owners know that if they set their reserve prices too low, it could get stuck in a silent auction and possibly had for a song by someone willing to dig in and scour the thousands of names listed. As a result, many domain names listed at auction are overpriced.

When these domain names don’t sell, the owners return to the status quo and continue to hold on to their domain names. Many months after the auctions end without bids, the exclusivity period required by the auction houses end, and the domain owners are free to sell their names without the commission, leaving buyers with a ripe opportunity.

I haven’t done much of this yet, but you might consider scouring lists of domain auctions held a few years ago, and see if there are any unsold domain names that you might be interested in buying if the price is right. Do a historical Whois search to see if the owner is the same, and if so, drop him a note. With the economy in its current state and knowing the fact that the name was listed for sale in the past and didn’t change ownership, it might be a great time to buy some domain names.

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