At today’s Snapnames Live Auction at Domainfest, Lonnie Borck was the winning bidder for Bookmarks.com, purchasing it for $310,000. This is a fantastic domain name, and it is a great purchase to incorporate with his netRocket.com website, a bookmark scheduling service.
Bookmarks.com is the category killer domain name for netRocket’s vertical, and it was a smart purchase. Not only will this help drive targeted traffic to netRocket, it is also a nice defensive purchase, as it prevents another upstart company from owning the category.
Bookmarks.com – Smart Strategic Purchase
Building a Website Using an eCommerce Affiliate
My great-grandfather, grandfather and father were and are in the home textiles business, and each built and owned his own retail store. While growing up, I visited many of the Manhattan showrooms of my father’s suppliers, and I attended many tradeshows at the Javitz Center, domestics buildings and gift buildings. I spent my summers in high school and college working in my father’s store, which is one reason he and I are so close.
Although many people speculated that I would end up taking over my father’s business, my entrepreneurial spirit led me to become a domain investor, where I found this neat little niche. I didn’t think I would follow in my father’s footsteps in the home textiles business, but this assumption may change due to a timely introduction.
A few weeks ago in my “5 With Mike Berkens” interview, I mentioned the success my friend Mike Berkens had with his affiliate development of LuxuryBedding.com. He built a relationship with Torrey Commerce, an ecommerce affiliate site that builds, maintains, and operates websites as an affiliate. Many of the brands offered on LuxuryBedding.com are brands in which I am familiar, due to my experience working with my father.
After speaking with Torrey Commerce and Mike, I am going to try an experiment. I recently registered a *nice* two-word domain name related to the home textiles business. I am going to use Torrey Commerce to build an affiliate site on my domain name. (I know what you are thinking – not impressive. Even if 100% of the traffic converts and buys product, 100% of 0 traffic will yield $0.00.)
Here’s where my experiment comes into play:
Instead of hoping or wishing that people type this domain name into their browsers when they haven’t before, I am going to do keyword research and build content around many of the pages. My goal is to build a hybrid site around the affiliate site, helping my site rank higher in the search engines. Torrey’s content management system will allow for easy insertion of text, and I will try to optimize the pages as best I can with unique content.
I will focus on the highest value luxury products, as the margin is the greatest. Incidentally, based on a bit of research I have already done, there aren’t many searches for many of the luxury brands, and there aren’t many developed sites either. While traffic will presumably be light, by focusing on the smaller niches, I hope to convert this traffic. I intend to use Google Adwords to buy niche keywords where the potential payoff is greatest.
I also plan to work with my father to build a blog on the site in phase two. My father is an expert in the home textiles business, and this would be another differentiating point to drive traffic. Additionally, I may work with my father to meet potential vendors for my website. Perhaps my father can open doors for some of his smaller suppliers, and he could receive a small percentage of ALL sales from these vendor across the Torrey network of websites and affiliates, similar to a brokering fee. This is well down the road, but there are many opportunities.
The cost for me is fairly minimal, as I am basically only paying for the domain name ($7.50) a unique logo ($150), and Adwords (TBD). Of course I plan to spend my own time building content for the landing pages, but I think the potential benefit will outweigh the risks. And, one of the best parts of this project is that it will allow me to work with my father again! I guess some people were right about me going into this business after all.
Domain Branding Mistake by TicketReserve.com
TicketReserve.com offers a unique service, allowing fans to purchase ticket options for future sporting events. For example, a fan could have purchased an option to buy a New England Patriots Super Bowl ticket at face value for around $300 at the beginning of the season, which is less than 10% of the current market price on StubHub. If the Patriots didn’t make it to the Super Bowl, the option would be worthless, and the person would have lost the cost of the option. TicketReserve.com counts CBS as an investor, and they have relationships with many professional sports teams in the NFL, NBA, NHL as well as college sports teams.
Recently, TicketReserve.com announced that they will be rebranding, and the company will be known as FirstDibz.com as of February 1st, 2008. From the January 7th press release,
“We needed a new identity, a fresh approach,” said Daniel Lotzof, TicketReserve.com president. “This ideally will allow fans to understand better what we’re offering. I think there was some confusion in the market, some areas where we weren’t received with a fully open mind. This also allows us to expand our focus a bit and also get into things like hotel accommodations for these events.“
I believe TicketReserve.com is making a critical domain branding mistake. While the spelling of “First Dibz” may seem unique, it is probable that customers and potential customers will think of “First Dibs,” and may consequently type-in FirstDibs.com, a domain name owned by another company since at least 2001 (according to the Whois history). I believe this will cause much more confusion to customers than the market confusion the company believes currently exists.
If the company is content with FirstDibz.com as a new brand, it is essential that they do what they can to purchase FirstDibs.com as well. Unfortunately, FirstDibs.com currently has privacy guard in place preventing easy access to contact the owner, however, with a few minutes of detective work, they should be able to get in touch with the owner relatively easily. Making an offer worthy of accepting, after they already began promoting their brand, will presumably be much more difficult than had they attempted to purchase the name prior to rebranding.
Hollywood… Here I Come!
It’s official. I just booked my trip to Hollywood for DomainFest. I will be headed out to California after my meeting on Tuesday and will be there until Thursday.
Hope to see you there!
Responding to a Domain Name Offer
Like nearly any piece of property or other asset, almost all domain names are technically for sale for the right price. There aren’t many domain owners who would pass up on a high seven figure cash offer for a domain name, with the exception of developed businesses or very few exceptional domain names. If you sincerely have the ability to pass up on a $5,000,000 for a domain name, I congratulate you, and you can probably stop reading this post and go back to your bottle of 1926 Macallan.
For those of you who have more of a Budweiser taste, please continue.
The problem I see is the way some UDRP proceedings have gone recently, where domain owners can potentially be penalized if they receive an offer and attempt to negotiate a better deal. It seems that some UDRP panels consider an owner’s contemplation of selling a domain name a sign of bad faith. This is dangerous for domain owners, and I know it causes many people to think twice whenever an offer or solicitation is received. Just about everything in this world has some sort of price, and simply because a person would consider selling a possession doesn’t mean that they owned the possession for the sole purpose of selling it.
That said, I think domain owners might be well suited to respond to certain domain email inquiries and offers with an agreement to waive the right to file a UDRP or lawsuit if anything about the domain name is discussed. The person making the inquiry or offer would have to waive his rights to any future legal action before ANY discussion about the name can take place. Any person who is interested in buying the name should be willing to sign, and if someone isn’t willing to sign, it probably means they have ulterior motives, or perhaps they are just kicking the tires.
I am not an attorney, so this isn’t a legal opinion, but the point of this post is to discuss the question of whether this type of agreement would protect domain owners and if it would be a legally binding agreement. Since most domain owners would be willing to sell names in their portfolio for a price (even though that price could be sky high), it might be something worth considering before future negotiations.
Glad I'm a Domain Investor
The US Dollar is weak and real estate values are dropping in most parts of the country. To make matters even worse, the stock market has been tanking of late. With the value of domain names continuing to rise, I am certainly glad to be a domain investor at this point.
Who knows how much farther real estate values will decline or how much more the market will slide, but a common sentiment among people I know is that if anyone needs to liquidate their generic names to generate cash, there are plenty of people willing to buy them at fair prices. The Internet continues to grow, people are growing their online presence, and as the economy struggles, more people will move online to make money.
