SkyDomains

With the year ending, I wanted to end the year on a positive note. I am so happy that I have the opportunity to share this story with you.
I have this domain that seldom gets traffic. It is in an emerging technology category. A technology that might not see production till sometime in 2012. But here is the kicker, Every year since I have owned this domain, usually around Christmas or so, it gets a couple of clicks, usually less than 10 but it is always enough to pay its registration fee for the next year. Considering, I am prepared never the less to hold on to this domain, this added bonus is really exciting.

Last week it got 2 clicks, one for 6 bucks and another for $2.10
Do I hear somebody say “reg fee!” ?

The second story I have happened just last night. I have a client who 3 years ago wanted to advertise on one of my sites, I offered him a great deal but insisted he has to commit to 12 months for the magnitude of work I had to do. I offered to plug him on all my related sites. Here is the problem, he loved the deal but wanted to do month by month. I said ‘No’

A year later he comes back, I offered him a similar deal with 6 months commitment. He wanted to go month by month. I said NO.

About One month ago, he comes back and I answered him like ” Hello Bob, how can I help you this time?” He said the site looked so different that he thought it might have been sold to someone else. We went through the same motions again, and again: No deal.

Last night he wrote me and asked if I will consider selling the website  outright? I told him to make me an offer. His offer was somewhat low. Actually it was not the least offer I have ever received for that domain and it was more than 2 and half times shy of the most offer recieved for the same domain. I told him so and this time sent him a link to Sedo.

We both agreed the domain is a category killer for his product but he admitted he was not there yet. I just think it is great to receive an offer around this time of the year especially since offers have been far in between since the middle of the year.

Here is  wishing everyone a prosperous new year. I wish all my reader will commit this verse from the Bible to heart for the up coming year

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” – Jeremiah 29:11

Do not forget to check back on January 2nd for my BIG annoucement!

Over the Christmas holidays, I was able to accomplish a lot of things at once.  In between the present giving, taking pictures with my daughter on the bike and even taking the family and my mother inlaw out for lunch, I still managed to accomplish my set goals. Give most of my sites a logo face-lift and a major job on two sites.

I have this website that was created initially as a forum for overseas contractors. What I noticed is that as the economy worsened, traffic has improved considerably but sign-up, not so much. It did not take much to figure out that my visitors where not finding what they are looking for.  Some posts on the site will also clue you in that most of the people where coming to look for jobs and not talk about overseas contracts.

The sole purpose of 99% of my visitors was to get jobs overseas.

Over the Christmas Holiday, I re-branded the site to a full fledged job portal. I sent out a mass email to the forum members and as of this morning I already have some resumes uploaded.  I love the new logo and the new look of  OverseasContract Dot Com. I also think that I am providing a service some people really desire during these trying periods.

OverseasContract was originally created while I was serving with the Air Force as a civilian contractor after I had left the service. As a domainer I needed something to occupy my free time and I felt the Contractor community needed a forum. I answered to that call then and I hope I have fully answered to the demands this domain faces now.

I have a BIG announcement to make on the 2nd of January. No it is not a baby or anything personal.
I promise you, it will be worth your time to come back and read this blog on the 2nd. Do not be the last to know

Merry Christmas to everyone from my family to you. Hope  God reveals to you the true meaning of the season. May the upcoming year flourish for you beyond your wildest expectations.

Merry Christmas from the Aladi's

Zara, "The Rune" and I

Christmas is the season of giving so I am guessing it is also the season of recieving. Since for giving to be complete, someone has to recieve. When you run a not wholly commercial site and have a donation button, how do your clients respond? Let me bring the question home: when was the last time you made a donation online ?
I will speak for myself.  I have paid for a lots of software and web services in my time but I cannot remember making a donation to any site . This is in part by the fact that I seldom use free services (with the exemption of WordPress) because I believe that nothing is truly free and one they they will hold one to ransom. 

Anyway, this brings me to the pertinent questions of this post.

1. ) Do you have donation buttons in any of your site?
2. ) How is it working out for you ?
4. ) What is your average take per site a  year on donations?

I have a site that is frequented by a lot of pet lovers especially when they loose them. It ranks most times at # 1  or on the first page for its search term on Google.

I  had the site fee based and participation dropped drastically. It is currently free  with a donation button but I get nothing– Zilch! for donations.

I am not particularly bothered but if I can find the de-motivating factor about my not donating to websites, then I may be able to figure out how to motivate my clients to donate since they definitely enjoying the freebie— or is it really free?

What are your experiences?

The votes are in and a clear winner has emerged. The irony is that when I checked the back end of both domain accounts, I found out that I had installed the software a  year ago on both the winner and the first runner up. It must have been a tough decision to make alone at the time.

Here are the results

Petclassified.net = Honorable mention– No votes
PetClassififiedAds.com = 4 votes
and the winner is PetClassifieds.org with 7 votes

Once again, thanks to all those who participated.

And if you missed it, This is in response to a post from last week ” Which domain will you use?”

Just wanted to say a special “Thank you” to all those who responded to my question two days ago “Which domain will you use ?”
Everyone is still welcomed to vote their choice. I need more opinions. I will decide this weekend

The year was 2000 AD, the domain world was still experiencing its boom, sex.com was popular and like all new domainers, I was tempted to join the bandwagon. I really did not give it much of a thought when the question kept nagging on me, “what will you father say?” By father I mean my earthly father. I knew he would be embarrassed if he found out but I was convinced I will be able to sell the domain and many more before he did. At that time I was an ‘”on today off tomorrow ” Christian so the heavenly father was not exactly my biggest concern. I wanted money and I wanted it now.

This is how I regged my first adult domain and it was a .com. It was a simple domain, two cleverly put together words and to confirm that my choice wasn’t that bad, the .net was regged by someone else  within six months and had a full fledged site. I did not know what parking was then. I just wanted to sell.

Now fast forward a year or two years later, I was moonlighting as a bouncer at a night club. It was somewhat upscale (for the localty) so I had a lot of time to do some thinking. I did not have to break much fights.  Twice a month they had a strip show and yours truly was still the indoor bouncer. I kept asking myself, what will Jesus say if he actually came right now?  Will he think to come and look for you in the night club? I am not condemning night clubs nor am I bashing anyone that visits but I am just narrating a trail of thoughts that led to a very important decision.

I decided to quit bouncing and just make do with my Air force pay. This also gave me more time to focus on my domains. With this came another problem. What am I going to do with my adult names and how can I let go of my ne  priced  adult name? . At this time the .net was doing fine, some friends wanted to develop the .com I owned with me. This was when I decided to drop the domain cold turkey. I let it expire and did not renew it the same thing I did with the others. Since then I have been careful about the kind of names I register.

This may not be your story or yours may be similar. Domain is a business like any other.
Do you honor the lord  and acknowledge  him in your domain business ?.

Psalm 91: 14
Because he loves me,” says the LORD, “I will rescue him; I will protect him, for he acknowledges my name.

Lets assume  you sell your adult name, are you going to pay thite on it? More like paying taxes on proceeds from stolen property.

If it is not your time to pressure wash your portfolio, don’t worry, God still loves you. However if you have been  having a nagging feeling in your heart about your portfolio, maybe now is the time. Start next year with a clean portfolio. A porfolio  you will not be ashamed to show grandma.

As for God his position is clear, he does not like any form of sexual immorality which by my own interpretation includes Adult and pornographic material (if you do not interpret it this way it is alright) God speaks to us in his own way and at the right time. 

Romans 13:13  
“Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy”

1 Corinthians 6:12-13
12“Everything is permissible for me”—but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible for me”—but I will not be mastered by anything. 13“Food for the stomach and the stomach for food”—but God will destroy them both. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body”

( Also check out Mathew 15:19, Acts 15:29)

I personally do not have a problem with gambling domains, maybe because I don’t gamble save the occasional lottery ticket. I think I spend about $20 a year on the Lottery. I like to fantasize on what I would do. I am impressed to see how my desires have changed over the years from self centered and self serving to more compassion for my environment and mankind. I think gambling and drinking is the same. They should be consumed in moderation. So even though I do not own gambling domains, I have no problem with them.

PS:
While dates and events in this post may not be accurate and sequential to the T, I have however written a simple narrative of events as I remember them”

I am in a kind of dilemma. I have three  likely domain names for a pet classifieds website. The problem is that I have to set up one of them as a pet classifieds site. Since I do not have the .com for the most likely term searched, which of the following domains will  you use if you were me  and why?

Please note that the industry leader on pet classifieds in google is currently a dot US!

So here are my options:

Candidate 1.) PetClassified (Dot) net

Candidate 2.) PetClassifeds (Dot) org

Candidate 3.) PetClassifiedAds (Dot) com

The most searched term is “Pet Classifieds”

I already have the best possible classifieds software installed at the back end of one of them since a year ago but never activated it.  I will switch if the vote is overwhelmingly against my original pick.

Thanks for your time and opinions.

Since most people tend to read only the top lines, I will start by stating that I do not own any of these domains.
I was just wondering if this kind of domaining is of any benefit. And if not why do people keep doing it. If you are not aware by now, these domains are referencing the unfortunate incident that happened to President Bush in Iraq recently.
One other shocker is that the .net was registered before the .com .

Does this signify that :
a) One or all of them have no clue
b) One of them is so clued in  he is actually ahead of the game with a plan
c)  ———————————— Put yours here

ShoeThrower.org

Back to the main question I have , What are your views on this kind of names? Hot or Not?
I personally believe they are ebay domains, that is domains you can offload to another clueless while the news is still hot but these  particular domains might make for a different strategy since there is some culture behind the act itself.

What do you think?

Over the weekend, Frager factor posted a list of the first dot coms ever registered. I have seen this list before but somehow this time I looked at it from a new perspective. What does the end user do when they have infinite choices to pick a domain name?

Going through the list you will notice that human emotions play a vital role in domain choice. Even with large companies. It is often said that ” The sweetest word in the English language is a mans name”. If you want to make friends quickly, learn how to remember peoples names and more importantly pronounce it right.

What am I driving at ?, well going through early registrations, you will notice that most of this companies simply registered there company names, not generics, but their company name! One even registered a hyphenated.

I know this was 1985 and 1986 but I somehow wonder if this has bearing in the reason why we find it difficult to reach the real end users. Maybe they are looking for Noxtel.com when we are try to sell them Tel.com (don’t own any of these names by the way)

Earlier this year iReport sold for 750k. Granted, Rick is a consummate business man but maybe the success of that sale also lies in the fact that CNN was looking for their name, in this case “iReport’” which they have been using on their site prior to the sale.

Registering a bunch of company names is not the answer  because you could easily fall prey to trade mark infringement lawsuit. I am however just throwing this out there, maybe it has merit and maybe not. I was just thinking.

The first 50 .coms

Rank Create date Domain name
1. 15-Mar-1985 SYMBOLICS.COM
2. 24-Apr-1985 BBN.COM
3. 24-May-1985 THINK.COM
4. 11-Jul-1985 MCC.COM
5. 30-Sep-1985 DEC.COM
6. 07-Nov-1985 NORTHROP.COM
7. 09-Jan-1986 XEROX.COM
8. 17-Jan-1986 SRI.COM
9. 03-Mar-1986 HP.COM
10. 05-Mar-1986 BELLCORE.COM
11. 19-Mar-1986 IBM.COM
12. 19-Mar-1986 SUN.COM
13. 25-Mar-1986 INTEL.COM
14. 25-Mar-1986 TI.COM
15. 25-Apr-1986 ATT.COM
16. 08-May-1986 GMR.COM
17. 08-May-1986 TEK.COM
18. 10-Jul-1986 FMC.COM
19. 10-Jul-1986 UB.COM
20. 05-Aug-1986 BELL-ATL.COM
21. 05-Aug-1986 GE.COM
22. 05-Aug-1986 GREBYN.COM
23. 05-Aug-1986 ISC.COM
24. 05-Aug-1986 NSC.COM
25. 05-Aug-1986 STARGATE.COM
26. 02-Sep-1986 BOEING.COM
27. 18-Sep-1986 ITCORP.COM
28. 29-Sep-1986 SIEMENS.COM
29. 18-Oct-1986 PYRAMID.COM
30. 27-Oct-1986 ALPHACDC.COM
31. 27-Oct-1986 BDM.COM
32. 27-Oct-1986 FLUKE.COM
33. 27-Oct-1986 INMET.COM
34. 27-Oct-1986 KESMAI.COM
35. 27-Oct-1986 MENTOR.COM
36. 27-Oct-1986 NEC.COM
37. 27-Oct-1986 RAY.COM
38. 27-Oct-1986 ROSEMOUNT.COM
39. 27-Oct-1986 VORTEX.COM
40. 05-Nov-1986 ALCOA.COM
41. 05-Nov-1986 GTE.COM
42. 17-Nov-1986 ADOBE.COM
43. 17-Nov-1986 AMD.COM
44. 17-Nov-1986 DAS.COM
45. 17-Nov-1986 DATA-IO.COM
46. 17-Nov-1986 OCTOPUS.COM
47. 17-Nov-1986 PORTAL.COM
48. 17-Nov-1986 TELTONE.COM
49. 11-Dec-1986 3COM.COM
50. 11-Dec-1986 AMDAHL.COM