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I Love Bing & Bing Loves Me

I love Bing. Not only do my developed generic domain names rank well in Bing, as I mentioned in a post last week, but today Bing has an image of my apartment building on its homepage, directly under the magnifying glass. The love must be mutual – thanks Bing!

Upper West Side skyline

Castello Brothers Are Opening Their Vault

David & Michael CastelloI had a chance to speak with David and Michael Castello last week about our industry, and we spoke at length about current trends, projections and their three year development plan for CCIN’s portfolio. This got us talking about some of their other names they haven’t developed. David mentioned that CCIN never bought a domain name they didn’t intend to develop, and I pressed them about when they thought they would develop ALL of their domain names.

After much back and forth (and some teasing about how David would be 105 before they’d be able to develop everything) I convinced them that it might be a good idea to sell some of their great names they wouldn’t have time to develop in the foreseeable future. They could put a few on the market, allowing a developer to buy them for a good price and build out a name. David especially liked the idea because he has seen many people turning to developing less quality domain names because they couldn’t buy better .com domain names.

Needless to say, I have convinced David and Michael to allow me to broker some of their domain names, and the first one I am selling for them is Caracas-Venezuela.com for $7,500. This is the exact keyword domain name of the capital city and main tourist destination for Venezuela. In comparison, Boise-Idaho.com, a much smaller market, sold for $65,000 just a couple of years ago. Caracas-Venezuela.com is 10 years old and is ripe to develop and monetize.

This is an exclusive listing on my blog, and the first person to post “sold” in the comment section will get a great domain name at an even better price.

Congrats to Adam, Angie & Blake Strong

Big congratulations go out to domainer Adam Strong and his wife Angie on the birth of their second son, Grant Nathaniel Strong. Grant is the second-born son of Adam and Angie and the new brother of Blake.   I am happy to hear the great news and wish the Strong family all the best!

Quick Tip to Buy Domains

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

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?

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.