NameTrader.com

Domain hacks are becoming all the rage. Sedo recently sold the nice short E.co for $81,000.

In 4 weeks, there will be another big sale of a domain hack, only this time it will in fact be THE “domain” hack, Doma.in.

It will be listed in the live auction at T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Dublin on Wednesday August 25. Watch and see what the world’s best domain hack sells for!

Steve Domain Names, In the News, Limited Time Sales, My Happenings

Summer is heating up and so has the domain sales activity lately. We’re always hungry for more though, so we’ve gone and done something crazy – we’ve put over 1,000 domains into 3 different special sales at discount pricing! And somehow we’ve got a method to this madness, as these sales are each unique:

$99 Domains
The domains included in this sale are of all types, including high-search generics, brandables and aged domains, but at the bargain basement pricing of only $99 each. These are not bargain basement domains however, as they are marked down from $200-$800 wholesale and $1,500-$2,500 retail, both pricing levels that we do regularly make sales at!

Aged Domains (not including $99-priced ones)
These are all domains that have been registered continuously from 5 to 15 years without being dropped. Domain age has been shown by numerous studies to help a site’s ability to rank well in search engines.

2-Word Domains (not including aged or $99-priced ones)
This sale includes 550 domains each with only 2-words. Everyone likes short domains…they’re more elite and are easier to remember. Social media especially likes them a ton: MySpace, FaceBook, YouTube, FourSquare…the list goes on and on!

Altogether, there are over 1,000 domains in these sales, giving you plenty of options for your business! Also, if you are a domain investor, developer or business that finds interest in multiple domains in these sales, we offer discounts on bulk purchases.

Contact us if you see anything you like.

Steve Domain Names, Limited Time Sales

In Our Case, YES!

You know when you go to the grocery store and you see a 12-pack of soda for $5.99 (which is ridiculous) but hey…they have it ON SALE for $4.99 for a limited time! Or you could go to the store down the street and get it for $1.50 less every day.

Or you go look for a cool new TV to buy and see an awesome one at Store #1 for $1,999, marked down from $2,499! I mean it’s marked down, it HAS to be a good price, right? But then your friend with a CostCo membership takes you there and you see the same TV for an everyday price of $1,799. What the heck, Store #1? You LIED!

The point I’m getting at is I have occasionally had people question whether domains that we have in special sales are actually for “on sale” prices. They think perhaps we’re sugar-coating normal or even inflated prices with the Sale tag to make it appear like it’s a deal. Yesterday we had a domain sold that further reinforced the answer to that question: YES, they are in fact “on sale” prices.

The domain that was sold was for $1,497 via BuyDomains and definitely not the first time we’ve made 4-figure sales of domains through them. The thing is, we had this very domain listed in our latest Daily Domain Names batch for…get this, $75! That’s 95% less than what it sold for.

Furthermore, this domain was also contained in a special $99 domain sale recently which we’ve sold 9 domains from total now. So for those people it was still a 93.33% discount.

Last but not least, in my humble opinion, while it IS a superb name for sure, it was NOT the best domain on the list. The best domain on the list is still for sale on that list! Perhaps we’ll sell that one at it’s retail price of $2,497?

If you haven’t seen that $99 domain sale list, which is not posted publicly anywhere, contact me to receive it. Also, I do encourage you to go to Daily Domain Names and sign up for our newsletter to hear about our latest sales with legitimate “on sale” priced domains.

Steve Domain Names, Limited Time Sales, My Happenings

WeWantYourDomains.com is now live!

The site is really as simple as the name suggests – We Want Your Domains!

We’re providing an opportunity for you to get something for your unused and expiring domains with two distinct options:

- Liquidate your domains to us for cash, the best option if you’re in need of quick immediate cash for your domains.

- Give your unwanted expiring domains to us and receive cash upon resale, the best option if you’d like to maximize what you get for your expiring domains vs. dropping them or liquidating them since selling domains is what we’re good at.

Of course, if you’re looking to BUY domains instead, we encourage you to check out the awesome limited-time sales we post on DailyDomainNames.com (an excellent new batch of names was just posted today!) or contact us directly to receive our list of domains for sale.

Steve My Happenings domain liquidation, domain selling

My partner and I (Domainate.com) just launched the new domain sales blog DailyDomainNames.com! There, our goal is to provide quality domains under $1,000 apiece. They will be domains of our own as well as domains that other people submit to us that meet our strict quality standards and are priced to sell. If you buy domains on a regular basis, you will NOT want to miss out on it!

Here is the first day’s worth of domains for sale!

Steve Domain Names, Limited Time Sales, My Happenings

It’s good to know exactly what you’re talking about when you’re talking about it (duh)…sometimes when you don’t, you’ll find yourself spreading information that’s not quite true. I’m sure especially in this day and age of always on-the-go super busy people, this sort of thing happens all the time – people hear one sentence on the news while they’re in the middle of something, don’t hear the next sentence which gave the former one context, and next thing you know they’re spreading some juicy tidbit of news that’s largely incorrect!

In my case, at a live event a week and a half ago, I had many domain discussions with people in which I had quoted my own research on .org domains vs. .net domains, research based on Quantcast’s top 1 million sites list, more importantly before Alexa started coming out with a downloadable top 1 million rankings of their own. I’m a huge .org enthusiast so I was championing the popularity of .org. I hadn’t thought twice about what I said there – I found what I found to be true.

In preparing for posting about .org here on my blog, I went and looked at Alexa’s toplist to confirm my prior research…and I was shocked at what I saw – 43,050 sites on .org domains vs. 65,516 sites on .net domains! Oops – this interesting tidbit of info I had been telling people was a blanket statement of “there’s nearly twice as many .org’s as .net’s in the top 1 million sites on the net” without explaining that it was based on Quantcast’s toplist, which in turn is based on US data. But here again after seeing this, I started to wonder if my brain perhaps played tricks on me before, so to confirm I wasn’t perhaps completely looney and wasn’t seeing things in my initial research, I looked again at Quantcast’s toplist. Whew: 101,936 sites on .org domains vs. 57,873 sites on .net domains, and in fact the .org count was less than 100,000 before so it’s on the rise even!

So – what I was telling people was not completely misleading, but still, I should have been more careful about what I said! Given Quantcast researches US traffic and Alexa researches worldwide traffic, it’s only expected that they may show vastly different results, and in this case there was a difference that shows that while .org IS clearly more popular for US traffic, .net may still have the edge with international traffic. I should have known too – I do fairly regularly look at Alexa’s top 500 sites, usually to see bigger sites as they burst onto the scene, and I HAVE seen a pattern just in that sampling of more Asian-language sites on .net than on .org. It didn’t occur to me to research Alexa’s toplist when it became downloadable to see if that was consistent throughout their top 1 million, which it clearly is.

Moral of the story: Be careful! One misunderstanding in your research could have you on the wrong path, or worse yet could have you spewing misleading information to others as if it was fact! Thankfully I still was right in some context, but I’m sure some people have experienced being horribly wrong and taking a nice reputation hit from not being completely sure of what they were talking about in the first place. Especially now with social media being big and personal branding increasing a lot, the last thing you want to do is screw your trust with people by being wrong on something you’re supposed to be an expert on!

Steve Domain Names Domain Names, research, statistics, traffic

I’ve been slowly but sure becoming a free webinar junkie.  I can’t help but go to these things!  Most of them have not really been EXTREMELY informative, but it’s worth it for the price, even though “free” does still cost 1-2 hours of your time.  They’re certainly not for the extremely ADD people though – sometimes they’re hard to get through.

Tonight’s webinar is from Ryan Deiss – a name I’ve heard a lot but I still don’t really know who he is.  I have attended a previous webinar from Perry Belcher that Ryan Deiss did some cheerleading in, and for what it’s worth, that’s been the best webinar I’ve attended thus far.  Was it good enough to purchase the ensuing $1,000 info product?  Ehhh…not really – not that it wasn’t worth it to SOME people, but it was a social media webinar and honestly, I’ve figured out through common sense a lot of the tips and tricks to how to do well in social media.  I just happen to be anti-social!

Anyways, for those of you NOT doing anything tonight, the webinar is at 6 PM PST, or 4 AM in Zimbabwe, for all you Zimbabweans that frequent my site so often (if you don’t yet, you will – your hyperinflation problem is one for the ages!).  Finally, before I FORGET, here’s the link: http://www.YourFirst1000.com/theplan.html.  I’d love to go but I’ll be playing tennis – hopefully not twisting an angle or spasming my neck like 2 of the last 3 times playing – yikes!

Steve Internet Marketing free webinar, Internet Marketing, social media, webinar, Zimbabwe

Most of what I’ve learned in the world of domain names has come through my own experiences – and I mean mostly by trial-and-error.  New extension domain hype is certainly something I have not only witnessed time and time again, but have personally wasted a lot of money on in one particular occasion.  If you’re new to domain names, there’s one easy bit of advice you should know with buying or registering domain names: Stick with .com until you’ve got a better understanding of domain values.

Some of the advice I give is directly related to pitfalls I’ve experienced early on in my domaining career without having someone like my present self giving level-headed advice.  In the case of an overhyped new extension that lured ME in, it was .in.  Now, to my defense I WAS late with getting .in domains – a whopping 3 days late but that was enough to miss out on just about every .in domain of immediate value.  Keep in mind domain hacks weren’t all that uncommon back in early 2005, and that was one of my major focuses with getting .in domains at that point.  I could have easily dumped well over $2,000 on .in domains if I wasn’t careful – between the hype, the actual amount of domain registrations occurring (I think by the time I got to the extension, already over 100,000 domains had been registered) and the initial reaction I had to many names that were still available, the temptations were immense.

In the end, the damage done was about $800.  Only about 8 of the 40 or so domains I registered I still have to this day, and I haven’t sold a single one of them.  They ARE good domains worth keeping – MyName.in for domain hack opportunities (I liked it for name translations like MyName.In/Chinese), DownloadMusic.in (a very well searched term, but also domain hack friendly), Ninja.in (great 1-word domain that’s social media friendly in my opinion), but I just haven’t agreed in price with anyone on any of them as of yet.  Keep in mind – I still have what is by far the highest public sale of a .in domain, Poker.in for $60,000.  THAT domain I bought on the secondary market a few months after the .in extension release, and THAT of course ended up being a very smart play.  So it takes a lot for me to say my initial speculations in .in domains were off and that the extension was overhyped.

The extension I am most worried about newbies getting carried away with is .me.  Don’t get me wrong, it is cuter than the average extension by far and the domain hack possibilities are endless.  STILL, look at the lengths .tv has had to go through to get more widely accepted and see large sales, and that extension serves a viable purpose (TV related sites, advertisers on TV commercials, video related sites, etc.).  .me is primarily domain hack friendly and mildly social media friendly and that’s it.  Like .tv, it has very little behind it with the nation the extension represents.  .in on the other hand is similarly domain hack friendly and also represents the nation of a billion people which contains the largest English-speaking population in the world believe it or not.  .me was very smartly marketed by the registry and sites like GoDaddy, and it is mostly that marketing that resulted in the mass of .me domains that were registered and bought.  The prices some people are paying for .me domains that would under normal circumstances be questional domain registrations at best are obscene.  It’s as if their vision is back and is inserting a decimal in the price so they think $2000 is $20.00 – I have no idea how to explain it.

The POSITIVES I will say about the extension is that again it IS a pretty one, and also I have seen a lot of .me domains being DEVELOPED instead of parked – a lot more than I was expecting this soon after its release.  That coupled with the massive amount of registrations and a fair amount of nice sales of .me domains leads me to say there is still probably a good amount of .me names that are worth getting if the price is right.  However, I am seeing way too many people registering garbage .me domains or buying mediocre to at best decent .me domains for hundreds or even thousands of dollars.  I have a LOT of experience with country code extensions and I can tell you that they are MUCH harder to sell than extensions like .com and .org.  I once somewhat monopolized getting high quality single-word exotic country-code domains off of expiration – I would do hours of searching a day on the top keywords in various extensions and now and then hit paydirt.  However once even a couple others like me entered into the mix, it was no longer worth the time and effort – even with getting names that were undeniably worth thousands of dollars, the MARKET for them is considerably smaller – the extensions confuse Average Joe and despite the name being very short and nice looking, Average Joe loves his .com.

Bottom line, you should always heavily scrutinize any domain you may introduce into your portfolio.  In the case of new extensions, add an additional layer of scrutiny and especially limit how much you spend on such names.  Your wallet will thank you later.

Steve Domain Names, Tips and Tricks .in, .me, buying domains, ccTLDs, country code extensions, domain hype, Domain Names, new extensions, registering domains, Tips and Tricks

Over the last month or so, I had been mired in development of a new site (not domain related, I will post about it once it’s finished) and in looking at what all I was doing on THAT site, I realized “hey wait a minute, what about MY site?!”  It was about time for a facelift and ultimately I have transformed this into my portfolio AND my personal and domain blog!  I hope you like it and hope this is not only easier to navigate but is also more entertaining than my old site.

If you’re here looking for my domains for sale, I now finally have them organized by extension – hover over “Domain Names For Sale” at the top of the page and the list of extensions will show up in a drop down menu.

Everyone enjoy yourselves and have a nice day!

Steve My Happenings Site update