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TelefonareGratis(.)com is on Sedo Auction ending on 8/9/09 9:11 AM EST and is only at $140 at the moment

The term telefonare gratis is Italian for “free call” and is searched 2,400 times per month on Google with an average CPC of $4.47…ergo a lot of high valued traffic per month looking for telefonare gratis.  Buy the domain, put a quick little affiliate site on it with some SEO done to it and you’ll take a large chunk of that search traffic and probably more!  Note that these traffic #s are for Google…don’t forget Bing, where it’s been shown that exact term match in the domain makes a bigger difference than at Google.

This auction is ending soon so act quickly!

Steve Domain Names, Limited Time Sales auction, Domain Names, domains, sale

A bid of $60 received by July 22nd, 2009 9:00 PM EST on any one of the domains below listed on Sedo.com will start a 7-day auction for the domain with your $60 bid as the first bid. If the domain receives no other bids by the end of the auction, you’ve won it for $60! This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to get a high quality domain for pennies on the dollar, as we generally sell our domains for hundreds or even thousands of dollars apiece! In the list, we’ve included for each domain’s keywords the average cost per click in Google AdWords, the Google Adwords advertiser competition (scale of 0 to 1, 1 being full competition), last month’s U.S. search volume on Google, and the average global monthly search volume on Google to help you determine if a domain may be right for you.

Simply click on the domain you want in the list below to go to its Sedo.com listing where you can enter your $60 bid! If clicking the domain takes you to an auction page for the domain, that means someone has already bidded on it, BUT you can still enter a higher bid. If you have any questions, please contact us!

Steve Domain Names, Limited Time Sales auction, Domain Names, domains, sale, sales

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

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