If you sign up as a reseller, according to this press release, you can get domain registration years for $5.99 at Gossimer.com.  This is not an affiliate pitch.  I am not familiar with the company even though they are based in my home state, Florida.  Check it out and let me know what you think.

I found a new blog by a PPC marketing specialist, PPC Ian, who went to his first domain conference. I think it is valuable for people in any niche industry to understand how other similar-but-different business professionals see their industry. That’s why I advised domainers to learn more about the affiliate marketers in a recent post. We learn a little more about the forest whilst we’re working dilligently among the trees. (Sorry, are Americans allowed to say “whilst”?)

Ian’s summary of domainers is revealing:

There are two main schools of domainers. The first school are those that buy domains with the goal of selling them for a profit (this is the more traditional side of domaining). The second school are those that buy domains, develop them, and then enjoy passive income.

What is interesting is that he does not mention parking.  True that, Ian!  Here’s a link to the whole post:

PPC Ian writes about TRAFFIC.

Even though it only lasted two or three months, there were a lot of twists in the story of how my brother and I purchased Afternic.com in 2002.  It was a comedy of errors that in the end worked out great for everyone.

I had called Register.com to discuss a referral deal when they turned the discussion towards purchase.  Of course, I said, “how much?” and they said make an offer. They had announced they were shutting it down, so I said that means they must value it at about nothing. Right?  Somehow, we agreed on an amount around $400,000.

Only one problem: we didn’t have the money.  I had an MBA but no track record in business and in hindsight I was naive about how hard it is to raise investment quickly. The biggest bank in South Florida laughed at the idea of borrowing funds for a website, so that option was off the table. My rep there didn’t get it – she thought I wanted something like a home page. LOL. Friends and family were not interested.  I did raise $25,000 from two former classmates in my executive MBA program but one of them – the one who put in $20,000 – got cold feet and I refunded her investment about two months later.

I thought I was going to have to cancel the deal.  My brother and I discussed how it might go when we told them. Then, out of the blue, Register called. Said, very sorry, but after legal review, they could not sell us the user list – the database – because of the privacy agreements with their customers.  They were canceling, not us!

We agreed to leave the database and the software that ran the website out of the transaction.  It would become a domain name only transaction (plus some email marketing service for some emails to the old customer base). And they would drop the price about 75% to around $100K.

Deal! I was able to handle that with a home equity loan, which was easy to get back then.

Turns out even that refunded investment was a twist of good luck – we had needed just that much money for just that period of time to cover an earnest money deposit before my home equity line funds became available!

Michael and I thought we already had a better website on NameBuySell.com – I just had to rebrand it – so we didn’t value the technology that ran the old Afternic.

Register agreed to email the old user base up to 12 times for a fee each time. We used two emails and passed on the rest.

I finished up a software development contract developing the software for an embedded Linux USB module for aircraft for Gables Engineering in Coral Gables, FL about one week before we closed the transaction.  I became the first full-time employee of the New Afternic, working from a spare bedroom in my house in Plantation, FL.

I rushed to rebrand NameBuySell.com to Afternic.com in one week.  We came up with a promotion to sell all memberships for $1 to celebrate our becoming the New Afternic.

I was extremely nervous because none of my websites had ever had to handle as much traffic as Afternic.com would get.  Turns out one managed server running PHP/MySQL replaced several servers running Cold Fusion for Old Afternic.  And it worked great.

We owned the #1 site in the US for aftermarket domains according to Alexa.

I find it fascinating that domain investors circle in their conferences and online forums while affiliate marketers circle in their own conferences and forums.  Both groups are  essentially micro-industries doing almost the same thing – building and monetizing targeted traffic to independent websites.  I highly recommend to both groups: attend a conference in the other group.  You are sure to find opportunities to expand what you’re doing with a new set of tools and partners.

Affiliate marketers, here are the top domain conferences to check out:

T.R.A.F.F.I.C.

Domain Roundtable

Domainers, try searching for “affiliate marketing conferences.”  Honestly, I’ve never attended one – yet – but I do follow a couple affiliate marketing blogs.  One of them is ShoeMoney.

I wish I knew more about this group and their conferenes when I was promoting Afternic’s affiliate program.

Most people who know me (most of my friends on Facebook, for example) know me from my days at Afternic.com.  I was President, then GM, of Afternic.com from 2002-2007.  My brother and I purchased Afternic.com for a little over $100,000 in December of 2002, worked on it for about 5 years, and sold it to NameMedia in 2006 for a happy ending.  I worked for NameMedia for almost a year during the transition.

I often get asked to tell our story because in some ways it is dramatic and parallels the Internet industry stereotypically.  Afternic 1G was purchased by Register.com for $48 million in stock – obviously an “Internet bubble” transaction.  Then came the bust, when my brother and I stepped into the story, and then several years of steady growth from a lot of fun work with a great team.

(We used to call our Afternic the New Afternic but that would be confusing now so I’m calling it 2G, implying that NameMedia’s current version is 3G… naturally.)

Now I’ll start from the beginning.

In the middle of 2001, my brother Michael and I had developed a small domain name exchange called NameBuySell.com. (I’ve always liked the business listing site BizBuySell.com so we copied their name somewhat.) It was my third website, his first. I’m still not sure how he talked me into developing a third website when my first two were not making any money. We never thought NameBuySell.com would be more than a side business. We just needed a place to market our own names, most of which were acquired in the .us landrush. The popular sites were Afternic.com, GreatDomains.com, and Sedo.co.uk and they were generally having a lot of trouble coping with the dot bomb. We thought their decline presented a market condition suitable for growing our side business.

We worked nights and weekends developing the site.  Michael wrote most of the copy and designed the business rules.  I did the rest.

We operated NameBuySell.com for about three months, growing to 200 members and 20,000 listings.  Members seemed to like it and we were making constant improvements.  Then one of our members pointed out an announcement from Register.com: they were shutting down Afternic.com.

Having just finished my executive MBA about a year earlier I was full of motivation to make some win-win deals so I picked up the phone and called Register.com to talk about possibly referring their members to NameBuySell.com for some kind of referral fee.  I was thinking we might offer them 100% of the then $5 annual membership fee we received from all new signups.  Register.com steered the conversation to a complete acquisition.

I’ll reminisce about the acquisition negotiation in another post.  It was very unusual with some funny twists.

It is important to understand the risks in any business plan. I don’t write these to be a naysayer, rather to help us domainers be complete in our business planning.

Here are some risk questions that some might say are already answered pessimistically:

What if users learn to use the search bar rather than the address bar and type-in traffic declines?

What if Google becomes a natural monopoly and reduces payouts to parked domains?

What if Google “optimizes” its search results to exclude parked domains virtually cutting out search engine traffic?

What if Verisign substantially increases the costs of holding domains?

Domainers expect their domains to be valued more in the future as more people become educated about the value of quality domain names and as increasingly more commerce moves to the Internet making Internet properties more valuable. These assumptions contain general risks:

What if people don’t get “educated” in a reasonable time? Or get educated oppositely? What if examples like google, amazon, yahoo, ebay, youtube, and myspace inform the public that “quality” domain names don’t matter much?

What if commerce can move to the Internet without making keyword dot coms more valuable?

What if the possibly thousand or more new gTLDs expected in 2009-2010 cause users to get comfortable with using “any TLD” and thus reduce the premium of dot coms?

Got any more?

I have a script that processes the drop list at NameJet (both the pending delete and pre-release lists) everyday and sends me the following lists:

Dropping names with the most popular keywords (by number of indexes in Yahoo)

Dropping names with the most popular domain name (by number of indexes of the actual domain name in Yahoo)

Dropping names with the oldest registrations

Dropping names with the highest PRs

I’d like to get some feedback on the data so I’m offering a free beta test. If you would like to receive this list daily just send me a note with your email address.  I’m only accepting the first 10 requests.  The only thing I ask in return is to give me feedback.  Tell me if and when the list helps you pick up any valuable names in the drop.

You can email me at “roger” at this domain name.

Yesterday I was reminded of something Vint Cerf said in one of his talks in one of the ICANN Meetings I attended while at Afternic.  He pointed out how the Internet had changed our social life everywhere, even the simple routine of having dinner at home with your spouse.  In fact, he said at home is where he noticed the Internet’s impact the most. He said when he or his wife used to have a question about something during dinner conversation, they’d have to just table it.  However, with the Internet they could just google the answer right then and there.

I fixed my garbage disposal yesterday by googling “troubleshoot garbage disposal” and finding a page titled “Garbage Disposal Hums But Doesn’t Grind.”  It told me how to use a hex key to force the impellers to move and hopefully dislodge whatever was jamming it.  It worked and I saved money and felt more at peace with my environment at home (a Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance reference).

I cook sometimes just because it is so easy to find recipes, reviews of recipes, and even video demonstrations on how to cook. I doubt I would ever have dabbled in this area if the Internet didn’t make it so easy.

I think about Vint Cerf’s message when I notice how the Internet has improved our lives profoundly at home.

We watched David Cook win American Idol last night and I was impressed like everyone else about the number of votes. By my calculations from numbers mentioned, David C. received about 55M and David A. received 43M votes.  Cook received almost as many votes as Bush received in the last election (62M).  However, we have to keep in mind that Idol voters could vote multiple times and we can be sure that many voters did indeed vote many times.  It would be nice to know the uniques.

I was curious how the eBay drop-off industry was doing and I have some stuff I’d like to sell on eBay, which added to my motivation to research this sector. The first mover and still one of the largest players by number of stores is Quikdrop International Inc. Unfortunately and incredibly their website QuikDrop.com is a parked page, which by design is effectively advertising several of their competitors.

Note that their company name and domain name use the typo Quik. Congrats to the owner of the correct spelling of this otherwise generic domain.

Perfect counter example for a course on online best practices. Could you get any worse than this?

You gotta love GoDaddy’s marketing, too. This parked page is a “courtesy” of GoDaddy.com – QuikDrop is not even making any money advertising competitors on their site.

Let’s see how long before they fix it. Good luck, QuikDrop.