I had never had a parked domain name earn more than $15 in a single day – until yesterday! The domain name (parked at Fabulous) only received 4 unique visitors yesterday, but it earned a total of just about $20. It received six clicks to reach that sum, but WOW!
Does anyone else have any stories like this – where a name gets between $1-5/day and all of a sudden it gets $20 for no extraordinary reason?
Like an elephant in the room, the 4 letter domain craze can’t be ignored anymore. While most of the average names were worth anywhere from $10-40 for many years, the values seem to have risen to between $150-200+ within the past few weeks. Everyone seems to want to get their hands on these names, and although I don’t see a reason for the rise in value other than speculation. I’ve seen all the arguments about why they have considerable value and why people are buying them so rapidly:
The impetus came a few months ago when a domain investor decided to buy the remaining LLLL.com domain names that were available to register. When people saw that these names were no longer available for the registration fee, they began paying much more to acquire these names. The values rapidly rose, and now we are at price levels that I believe may be unjustified.
Although I own a few of these names and I have friends that own them as well, I think the hype is
When buying a keyword domain name, it is important to know how many people search daily for the keywords that make up the domain name. You might have the most targeted website for the keywords, rank number one in the search engines and have the best website design, but if nobody is searching for those keywords on a frequent basis, it will be difficult to earn a return on your investment.
Many people reference Google’s search results to cite how much information exists for certain keywords. While Google will show how many times the keyword is mentioned on the Internet, it fails to show how many people are actually searching for it. Using Google for this can be misleading, because there can be much more information about a topic than people searching for it.
The Overture search tool was a good indicator of the number of searches that were performed monthly but Yahoo has eliminated that tool. I’ve used Wordtracker and KeywordDiscovery before and both offer good indications of what keywords people search. If you own the domain name of these keywords, you have a strong search engine optimization advantage over everyone else. Once you upload relevant content and have someone optimize your site, you could see an increase in revenue.
The website for the TRAFFIC conference in Australia was officially launched a couple of days ago, so if you are thinking about attending, now might be a good time to make your travel plans. The conference runs from November 18-20, and it’s the first TRAFFIC conference not being held in the US. The Australian conference is being sponsored by Australia-based Fabulous.com, also a generous sponsor of this blog.
I haven’t decided if I can attend because my wedding and honeymoon are just before the conference, but I will make up my mind in the next few weeks. I think this would be a great opportunity to travel to Australia to meet some Aussie domain investors like like Ed and Chris.
One thing is for sure though – I am sure the Tim Tams taste much better over there than they do over here!
Several people have asked me if I am going to be in Las Vegas for TRAFFIC this week. Unfortunately, I can’t make this show as I will be in Lowell for a couple of days. The Lowell.com website is nearing completion, and I need to take some photos prior to the launch.
The site is coming along quite well, and the design/layout is nearly finalized. Likewise, the directory is almost completely built. Most of the difficult part has been finished, and we just need to work on the actual presentation of the data. I will write a more comprehensive post about building the database, but the upshot is that it was a pain in the neck to coordinate the data with the phpMyDirectory application. I guess it was more of a time consuming project than anything else, but I will cover that in a subsequent post.
I don’t believe I will be bidding at the TRAFFIC auction, but there are a couple of names I really like, so we shall see. Safe travels to those of you who are on your way to Vegas. Remember – the better gamble is on a good domain name than on a blackjack table (although I love blackjack!)
I was installing a couple of Apple updates yesterday, and my MacBook froze up on me, and I was unable to do type or use the mouse pad. Everything completely froze up, and I had to hold down the power button until my computer powered down. No big deal – right? I’ve had this issue happen a couple of times before on other computers, and the computer starts back up without fail…
Well… unfortunately for me, when my computer turned back on, I was prompted to reinstall my operating system. I panicked as I have a ton of information saved on my hard drive, and I infrequently back it up – maybe once every other week or so. I powered down my computer and tried again, but had the same problem. I immediately
