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TRAFFIC Amsterdam Recap

Elliot Silver
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TRAFFIC AmsterdamWhen I first heard about the TRAFFIC ccTLD conference in Amsterdam, it was shortly after Rick Latona worked out an agreement with Rick Schwartz to operate the show. My first thought was that I needed to be there, but my second thought was that I am not a ccTLD investor, so it wouldn’t be smart to spend the money to attend. I am glad I went along with my first gut instinct because the conference turned out to be fantastic.

Prior to attending, I did research on the ccTLD market, read about issues concerning ownership of these types of domain names, signed up for ccTLDs.com (domain forum) and I learned about some of the big investors and companies in this space. Previously, I really knew nothing about the industry, so I stayed away, which was not the smartest move. I will be the first to admit that I am a US-centric domain investor, and this had partially prevented me from exploring other areas of growth in the domain space, including the ccTLD market.

One of my goals of the conference was to attend as many panels as possible. Unlike some conferences, all panels started on time, and all of them were relevant to the industry (and to a new investor). It was neat to learn about the upcoming .cm landrush, and as always, a panel with John Berryhill is enlightening and filled with humor. The development panel was also very interesting because it didn’t solely relate to ccTLDs. The great thing about the conference’s panels was that I was able to learn something from just about everyone, which is a bit unusual for me.

Networking is the primary reason I attend domain conferences, and this show was no exception. Rick Latona and company had several great events organized where attendees were able to meet and network. There were three standout networking sessions, all of which took place over dinner and/or drinks.

The first networking event I was able to attend was dinner and cocktails at the West India House, home to one of the first companies ever established. Drinks in the courtyard gave me the chance to meet with several people with whom I had been communicating for months and years in one case. My wife and I were able to learn about what others in the space are currently doing as well as get to know a few people on a more personal level. The music was low key, and the buffet dinner that followed was fantastic. We were able to walk around the house and eat in a variety of rooms and settings, which was neat.

The second dinner was arguably better, and the dynamic was unique to the show. We ate at one of the more famous restaurants in Amsterdam, Restaurant d’Vijff Vlieghen, a huge restaurant that is made up of many smaller themed rooms, each with a small restaurant feel. When we arrived at the restaurant, we were randomly assigned rooms for dinner (as well as handed champagne and kir royales. This was neat because we were located in a smallish room with about 15 people, and we were able to enjoy a great 5 course meal in a smaller setting.

The final networking event was fun and decadent, as we were bused to Parked.com CEO Sig Solares’ loft, a couple of miles from the conference hotel. We were treated to a sexy performance with good music, great drinks and a happy atmosphere. Everyone’s spirits were high, and it was great to be able to network and chat in a relaxed atmosphere. Incidentally, that party might have cost me a lot of money, because my wife and I decided that we can’t miss Domainer Mardi Gras next year.

There were some fun moments at the auction as well, despite the fact that I didn’t win Cams.cm or Vegas.cm as I had hoped. DiamondRings.com sold for close to $227,ooo US and a number of other great generic domain names sold for pretty large amounts. In total, the live auction did close to $600,000 US, and I believe the Extended Auction could bring the total over $1,000,000 US in sales, a very strong figure for a growing market.

I am so happy that I was able to attend the conference, and I found it to be one of the most well-run shows I’ve attended. In fact, I complimented Ray Neu about how smooth and seamless things were operating, and he said something to the effect of, “what do you expect, it’s a TRAFFIC show.” I know these shows don’t come together on their own, so it’s a big credit to Rick Latona and his team (as well as Howard and Barbara Neu) for working long hours before and during the show to make this such a success. They really made a great impression and I can’t wait until their next conference!

SoccerGoalies.com – Soccer Domain For Sale

Elliot Silver
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I don’t have time to do another mini site right now, so I am going to sell SoccerGoalies.com for just $750. Soccer goalies need special jerseys, padded pants, gloves, and sometimes special cleats, all of which are fairly expensive and can bring decent revenue once the site is developed. Soccer Goalies also have specialized soccer goalie camps and training programs which are also expensive.

My plan was to build a mini site with content about:

  • Soccer Goalie Equipment (with affiliate links)
  • Famous Goal Profiles (Jorge Campos, Sepp Maier, Gianluigi Buffon… dozens of them – searched quite often)
  • Soccer Goalie Camps
  • Soccer Goalie Drills
  • Soccer goalie video saves (penalty kicks, World Cup…etc)

First to post “sold” will get this name, registered at Moniker – registration date of 3/2000.

Tip to Find End Users on Google

Elliot Silver
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I learned   a great tip to find end users via Google from domain investor, Bob Olea. As discussed many times here and other places, the best way to sell a domain name for an optimal price is to sell it to an end user who can make the most of the domain name. They can generally justify the cost of a premium domain name, knowing the costs associated with their products and sales.

Oftentimes, when a company can’t get the primary generic domain name for their industry, they settle for and purchase other longer tail domain names.

Here’s the tip: Type into Google – inurl:keywords (for example inurl:flowers or inurl:”flower shop”).

The result is a list of all websites that have those keywords in their, subdomains, or sub folders (either anywhere in the url or the exact phrase). You can use this list of results to find companies who may wish to upgrade to your generic domain name.

Check it out and see if you can find an end user for your great domain names!

***UPDATE***

Ross at Ygrab let me know he posted this info + more yesterday. I saw it on a forum posted by a friend and thought he found it 🙂 So if you want to see more great tips, visit Ross’ Blog: http://ygrab.com/end-users/end-users-part-2-3-ways-to-find-end-users/

SEO Advice Requested

Elliot Silver
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I don’t generally ask for much from my blog readers other than feedback and commentary on blog posts I write about domain names, but I would like to ask a favor of readers who are SEO experts/professionals. Regarding ElliotsBlog.com, are there any things that I can and should be doing to improve my current search ranking that I am not doing right now? Are there obvious mistakes that I am making that should be corrected ASAP? I know that nobody is ever satisfied with their SERP rankings, and I am in the same boat, but I would like to fix it if possible.

Traffic is about as high as it’s ever been, and it seems that my daily traffic continues to produce higher highs every month. My blog’s page rank continues to be strong, and I have quite a bit of inlinks that reference popular articles. My blog’s Alexa ranking seems to be increasing every month as well. Much of my traffic comes from blog readers, domain news aggregators (Domaining.com, NameBee.com and Altop.com).

So what do I do to enhance my SEO right now? First thing is that I use the All in One SEO plugin to quickly use good SEO for my blog posts. I   limited the number of links in my blogroll, which had dozens and dozens of links last year. I also moved many outbound links to the Resources page with “no follow” commands. I sent notices to sites that had been copying my content, and almost all dupe content from scrapers has been removed. Finally, I write unique content on my blog daily.

There are two primary things that leave me a bit unsatisfied with my SEO:

1) Only 19% of my traffic is from search engines. This is compared to my developed websites which see anywhere from 50-90% of the traffic from search engines. These stats are for sites that get anywhere from 250 – 600 visits per day on average, so it’s not really an anomoly. I would like that number to be closer to 40%, which I think is reasonable considering that I have over 1,000 unique posts in 2+ years.

2) I had site links a few months ago when you searched Google for “Elliot Silver” and “Elliot’s Blog”, but I don’t have them any longer. One thing which may have impacted is that I changed the user name from Admin to “Elliot Silver” and when I did that, I saw that Google searches for “Elliot Silver” showed my blog #1 but the meta description ended up changing to my latest post rather than the standard meta description I now have. As a result, I changed the user name to “Elliot,” although I don’t know if that impacted the site links.

One other issue to note is that several months ago – maybe over a year ago in fact – I changed the url structure to eliminate the date. Many of my previous posts lost ranking and page rank in Google, but they should be forwarding to the correct page. In fact, I use Dean’s Permalinks Migration to help with that.

Because traffic is much higher this year over last year, and it is steady or growing, I haven’t worried too much about my SEO issues. However, I know there are a number of SEO professionals who read my blog for domaining tips, so I would like to ask for some feedback about how I can take advantage of additional search engine traffic.

THANKS!

Million Dollar Domain Auction on Horizon?

Elliot Silver
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Craig Harrison is selling a portfolio of 2,600 real estate domain names, many of which contain a city name + RealEstateListings.com.   The auction is scheduled to take place on Thursday in San Francisco and is being run by JP King Auction Company.I’ve seen quite a bit of paid press on the auction, and I also read an article this morning on a technology website geared towards real estate professionals.

In an article on Inman.com, WAV Group partner Victor Lund said,

Lund estimates that each of Harrison’s domain names could be worth anywhere from $100 to $5,000, depending on the demographics of the city name and the amount of traffic and advertising it gets today.

That’s a pretty wide range — it works out to between $260,000 and $13 million — but Lund said he’s willing to bet the entire package sells in the low- to mid-millions, depending on the buyer and whether the domains are sold in pieces or together.

Also quoted in the article is Brett Young, a real estate broker and software developer who said,

“This really is nothing more than a publicity stunt that falls short for anyone who has any knowledge about domains. I pity the person who sees this as a good investment.”

I would personally much rather spend the thousands of dollars (or even millions that was quoted by Lund) on one great quality generic domain name than on 2,600 lower quality domain names. In annual renewal fees alone, 2,600 domain names would cost close to $20,000 – and that’s at a discounted rate. This doesn’t include hosting, setting up, SEO-ing, and managing all of these websites, which would cost quite a bit of money up front.

What do you think will happen with this auction? They certainly have spent quite a bit of money promoting it considering all of the press releases and paid articles I read (including DNN). Because of the amount of press they have bought and generated for this auction, I am interested to see what will happen.

Negotiating to Sell a High Value Domain Name

Elliot Silver
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While I was away in Amsterdam, Rick Schwartz announced that the Candy.com deal is official and the deal has been signed, I wish Rick and the Melville Candy Company big congratulations on this industry moving deal. This isn’t the first major sale for Rick, who also sold iReport.com and Property.com.

One of the great things about Rick is his willingness to share insight into his domain sales, beginning with iReport.com and now with Candy.com via blog posts on Rick’s Blog. Although Rick is in a different position with his domain names than most of us,   both in terms of quality of his names and his financial status, we can still learn about domain negotiations from what he has posted.

Selling a domain name for a large sum of money isn’t easy, no matter what domain names you own. The buyer must be willing to pay the seller’s desired price, and the seller must be able to figure out how much the buyer can afford to pay for the domain name before naming his price (if he wants to maximize the sales price). The negotiation can be trying and time consuming depending on a number of factors, and some people might not have the experience necessary to turn a big deal into a huge deal.

I would like to share an idea for a new domain service – domain sales negotiations. The difference between selling a domain name for five figures, six figures, and seven figures is minimal and the negotiation is often the deciding factor. While most of us don’t have names as good as the quality of Rick’s, they don’t necessarily have to be in order to achieve a huge sale. If there was a negotiation service where we could seamlessly hand off a negotiation to an experienced negotiator, unbeknownst to the buyer, it could help us maximize our sales.

Someone with Rick’s experience could help reel in the big fish, as he is experienced, and he would be far enough away from the transaction to be able to turn down a significant offer, when the domain owner wouldn’t be able to do so. I think a domain negotiation service would be good for domain owners who lack the negotiation experience.

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