I leave today for a trip into the wilderness in the pacific northwest. I will be with other teens for 40 days. I will be backpacking, rock climbing, ice climbing, mountaineering, and becoming Wilderness First Responder certified. I will be back around mid August sometime and hope I can build on this blog and make it better. Sometimes it is good to get away from it all. I will have no contact with the outside world for 40 days no power no email no phones no bathrooms. I love doing this and it should be a great trip. Talk to everyone when I get out. If I dont return you can have all of my domains!!

Bing.com Logo

In the past few hours Microsoft launched their new search engine, Bing.com. 

Bing, according to Microsoft, is going to  deliver a more functional experience than existing search engines like Gooogle and Yahoo. When you search in Bing you not only get the normal results but also product reviews, flights, and videos.

A search on Bing.com for, say, flights to Hawaii, coughs up real-time pricing and availability information, and allows users to make a booking in real time. When you search “Nikon D40″ a high end DSLR the page returns product reviews from many website that rate the camera on many different aspects.

Microsoft said Bing will initially focus on four areas: making a purchase decision, trip planning, finding local businesses and researching health conditions.

After using Bing.com for a little while myself I really like it. It is fast, and it looks great. Microsoft said that they will be spending $100 Million on advertisement.  I have already seen Bing.com ads on google and other sites. I do not think that bing is going to be huge right away but I do see it gaining a lager market share for Microsoft.

For Domainers in regards to SEO there is not much info about how peoples sites are doing in bing. I will try and do more reasearch when I can find information. If you have not already take a look at Bing.com and tell me what you think.

Godaddy is by far the most well know domain registrar, and one of the reasons is their “aggressive” advertising campaigns. There are many people who do not like godaddy because of this or that reason people have millions of reasons, but that is not what this post is about.

I think that Godaddy does a good job bringing attention to the industry and without godaddy I believe that many people would not have websites online.

But, I wanted to do a test to see what people know about godaddy and the domain industry.

So I went around school and asked people what godaddy was and what a domain names was and then if the own any website.

I asked around 7 people who I know but am not best friends with and this is what I found.

Many people said, “Oh, Godaddy the one with the Commercials during the Superbowl or the Indy 500.

When I asked people what a domain was only 2 out of the 7 I asked knew what it was.

Almost everyone said they did not own a website but their parents did for their business.

I am going to redo this test at some point and film or record each persons response because I would like to make it more accurate.

What can my readers and I take from this, people know Godday and their eye catching advertisement must work. Should we all runs ads with scantily clad chicks, NO, advertisement does need to be catchy and the people need to remember what they saw.

What do you think of godaddy?

I handed this out the first SouthfloridaDomainers.com meeting. Everyone liked it so I thought I would share it. This is just a guide do what you feel will work best.

Quick Enduser Sales Tips

Methods of Contact

1. Email This is the number one option for small names and it requires the least amount of time

If the name is a small name that I think will not sell for much I will do this first because it takes the least amount of time. Make sure your email address is clean and professional. Keep the subject simple!

2. Call Great when trying to sell an name quickly, I like to call after hours and leave a voicemail telling them to be expecting an email, this way to read it

Sometimes after I email a person or before I will call to ask if they got my email or if I can send them an email. This way the are expecting an email and are going to read it.

3. Fax the best easiest way to know they read your letter you can now send fax from emails with sites like efax.com

Works better for mid rage domain sales, they read faxes that they get so you know your name will be looked at.

4. Snail Mail Send Signature Mail to make sure they read it this takes lots of time and effort.

I have not done any snail mail because of the cost and time do you think it is worth it?

This is going to be part of a series of post about what to do with you unused domain names. When I say unused domains I am talking about domains that are not developed into full sites, this includes sites that you are parking or selling to endusers. If anyone has any things that they do with their unused domains send me an email and I would be glad to mention it in a post.

Make Sure Your Domains Show Something!

The other day, it was 2 days ago I was looking through my Godaddy and Moniker accounts and I was looking for which sites I am going to work on next. While I was doing that, I realized that I have too many domains to work on right now and all of the domains just point to nothing. Many of them were even on godaddy parking pages earning them money!

I own many generic exact match keyword and product domains, but before the day before yesterday I was under the assumption that parking was dead and no one used direct navigation anymore. I thought that everyone in the world was like me and they just went to google for everything.  But I decided to try parking all of the domains for some strange reason and boy was I ever surprised.

Using the bulk change interfaces in both accounts I was able to change the nameservers in about 5 seconds to the parking nameservers at namedrive, it was the only place I had an account from a while ago and I am now looking around for a different parking provider. I have heard some great things about Parked.com and I think I will try them out. At namedrive I was able to move all of me names that I am not working on to a 1 page lander and enter custom keywords and headers. The sites look ok but that is not the important part of the story.

When I woke up the next morning my account had over 50 unique visits and some ok earnings close to $1. I guess that direct navigation is not dead and people do still type in.

$1 a day may not seem like a lot of money and I am not saying it is, but that’s around $30 a month. $30 pays for over 4 domains renewals or registration and then hosting every month. This is money I am doing almost nothing to get and it helps me pay for my domain portfolio.

If you have names that are just sitting idle, I would suggest you just move them over to a parking page to give them a try. I had no idea that theses names were getting any traffic and I was going to drop some of them soon. Now instead of me paying to renew my domains they are working to pay for themselves. I will talk more about this later.

And the best part is now I can list them all for sale. On namedrive I select to have a message show up on the site that says contact us this domain may be for sale. This way if endusers visit my sites they have an easy to contact me.

I am by no way saying parking is new or it is the best way to make money in the domain industry. This post is more of a reminder to domainers to think every once and a while and not to possibly just let a name and money go to waste.

I would love to hear what you have to say please leave your comments below.

Remember this is only Part I be sure to check back soon for Part 2  which will hit the RSS sometime soon!

I found this handy tool somewhere online when designing a few websites a while ago. What I love about colorcombos.com/ is that you can enter any website url in the upper right corner and then you can see exactly what colors they are using.

When I am building a site, I go to google and looks at others sites about the same topic and take what I like about their colors. 

There are many times where I go to a website and really like a color but I have no clue what it is. With the colorcombos.com/ html color grabber you can find out any color.

Do any of my readers have any other helpful tools to share?

Today I was sitting in the school library where we have a section with some computers and a printer when I overhear this boy, I shall call him Billy for now talking about Twitter. Now you may say twitter is popular and that’s not really a big deal, but the thing is that “Billy” is not the tech master like me. Billy is an freshman athlete who has seemingly basic computer knowledge.

He was talking to this “in” girl in his grade about twitter and trying to explain what it is. He was sort of right, he described it as facebook with only status updates. He was following espn and a few other sports teams. The girl then goes on to say it seems like everyone has a twitter now! She then logged on to the school system and signed her self up a twitter account. And both of them proceed to follow and reply to each other.

The point is that these 2 people joining twitter are not a big deal, but it is the fact that the younger and older generations are flocking to twitter and enjoying it. These 2 people are the last 2 people in the world who I though would ever join twitter.

I am starting to build accounts for all of my new websites because of the ultra targeted traffic it can drive and also thee increased user interaction. I strongly advise you if you are not on twitter to jump on quickly before you get left behind.

You can start by following me at @TeenDomainer,

And if you want ReTweet This Post

Wow it feels good to write again, I have been gone for so long. Its the end of the year again, school year that is and I had a ton of work. I took an AP exam on European history and have Jazz Band tryouts today. I have also been doing quite well on ebay lately, this last week was one of my best weeks ever, Could it mean the economy is picking back up?

I have also been trying to get a few more minisites off the ground and I have been playing around with a few different things I will explain more later.  I wanted to mention something about doing projects you like, because if you are so focused on a project you do not like it will be hard to stay focused that I why i try to pick lager projects that I want to do not only because they might earn money.

Last week we had the first ever South Florida Domainers Meeting in Boca Raton which is the city I live in. We had a decent turnout, but a great time. We talked late into the night and I learned alot. I hope anyone in the South Florida Area can make it to our next meeting which is TBD at a later date but in the meantime take a look at SouthFloridaDomainers.com

But for now its great to be back and I hope to be able to post more often.

Reece Burg over at LLLL.com is selling almsot 3000 4 letter domains. All of the names are at moniker and he can selll at whatever price he deems approiate. You can buy one or all of them there is no limit.  The full list is here  http://llll.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/reece9911.xls.

Take a look at the post here to read more about it here

I have made post about my view’s on LLLL.com’s in the past I think their price has hit rock bottom and it might be the time to buy. I do not like the non preminum domains but they are short and the ones with acronyms will always have value.

Email Reece at Reece(at)LLLL.COM

Most of you know by now that Parked.com has purchased WhyPark.com. I do not like to report on old news there are lots of bloggers who do a great job at domaining news I just don’t have time for it all. I just want to point out how smart of a move it was for Parked.com and what we as domainers and business minded people should take away from it.

Anyone who has been in the industry for more than a few months has witnesses the slow but steady away from domaining parking. When I first started domaining which was way back around 2004 there was not a huge amount of chatter about minisites. Now it seems that almost every post is about a new minisite service or development. Over the past few years parking revenue has declined greatly and Search engines and people are getting smarter and not visiting their pages or indexing them well.

I have an account at Whypark and plan on using it very soon. I have only heard great things about the site from everyone. I applaud Parked.com for going out and making a statement purchase that says We understand that people are moving away from parking and our service. We need to do something about it, Whypark has had great reviews and it makes perfect sense for them to incorporate them into their business. Parked.com gets an established site that they can build on to make the premier alternative to domain parking. Whypark users should see an increase in services which is a plus to them.

What can we learn from this?

When you notice a change, do not try and fight it. If you try and fight the change and do not adapt, you will end up being left behind. My advice is to embrace change as long as you believe it is the right change to make, don’t change because everyone is doing it. We all need to be proactive in our business and not just let things about us while we sit passively on the sidelines.

Have a great day and take a look at the traffic auction on Domaining.com today should be fun to watch.