This afternoon Aaron sent me an email to tell me it was the 28th anniversary of the .COM so Domaining.com should receive a ton of traffic from his Symbolics.com site.

I did not shared his enthousiasm about referrals due to my huge experience on linkage…

People tend to think when they place an award into their website it will deliver us a lot of traffic (it’s rarely the case). For this reason many owners are reluctant to make the first step, thinking each new visitor will click our award and leave their site. To avoid this imaginary traffic leak most of them place our award at the bottom of their site like if it was a website counter.

So I thought it was time to educate site owners and show them the amount of clicks such awards generate. I went to my Google analytics and extracted all the traffic reveived from bloggers for the past 30 days. I only listed the ones who sent at least 1 visitor to Domaining.com within the past 30 days and for sure having published at least one post.

Here are the results:

Yes, the numbers are very low but I do not care, for me the most important is everyone made his best to promote our industry as much is possible.

For those who want to improve the exposure of our award know there is new award designs and news tickers available at:
http://www.domaining.com/affiliate-program/

Thanks for your support.

Thanks to DROPPING.com you can now find out who are the TOP drop catchers.

We have the data ranked by administrator email but for privacy reasons decided to not publish the chart.

Each one will analyze this data from his own point of view, you can at anytime check out at DROPPING.com: The latest top drop catchers graphic chart.

• I like .com, .fr
• I like short names
• I prefer domains with a decent appraisal
• I like closing domains with more than 1 bid

And you know what? I can specify all of my preferences here!

ClosingAuctions.com shows ALL of the closing auctions at Bido.com, CAX.com, Flippa.com, GoDaddy.com and Sedo.com with all the metrics, including a link to all the domain information (thanks DOFO.com). I can even setup email alerts so I do not forget to place a winning bid in the last hour!

 

Domaining.com has decided (thanks Francois) to start showing all of the closing auctions on his homepage.  In fact, you set how many closing domains you want to see listed based on your domain preferences.

So from now on, each time you browse the daily news in Domaining.com (probably several times a day), you can also see if potential names you like are closing.  This way you do not miss a good deal again.

But all is not perfect.  For years, I have asked Namejet.com and SnapNames.com to participate so domainers can also see their public closing auctions within the same place.

No chance! The excuse has always been that they do not have enough public auctions.

It’s terrible to stick to this position when they should want to provide the highest possible exposure to their customer’s domain auctions.

The result:  This week’s Mike Mann auction at SnapNames.com for DomainMarket.com had ZERO bids!!!
Our domains deserve it, or don’t we pay enough sales commission for that? Help yourself and God will help

Thanks for your support. I hope we could make things move forward for the domainers interest.

Time spend cannot be recovered.

Time saving has motivated most of my developments.

It was the case with DOFO.com where I wanted to save people time when getting domain information:

- I regrouped into the same site all the links that may provide usefull domain information.
- Then I used a short domain and coded URLs for fast access: http://dofo.com/domain.com
- I offered a framed navigation to can quickly switch between tools.

Today I am proud to announce a pair of improvements:

- Shortcut in your browser (install it) to can open DOFO for the webpage you are browsing.
- Switch to an horizontal frame layout (better for lower screen resolutions).

Try it and let me know if this is not really a time saver!

PS: Irremediable.com is for sale at CAX.
…

Everybody knows “domain flipping”. Basically, the term describes purchasing a domain name (or website) and quickly reselling (or “flipping”) it for profit.

This has both advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages:
- You can make much more than domain brokers who rarely get a sales commission over 20%. Here you have no other limit than your ability to successfully sell it for more than you purchased it for and earn the difference.

Disadvantages:
- You need to have a significant cash flow in order to purchase the domain to resell.
- It’s risky as you can never be sure you will be successful at reselling it.

For the seller, there are only advantages:
- Improve sale chances.
- Sell domains faster at the agreed price.
- Continue having full use of the domain.
- Make money either way! Earn the option fee even if the sale doesn’t happen.

And for you the flipper, all of the disadvantages mentioned above simply vanished. Yeah!

But wait… is there a way for the flipper to obligate the seller to respect the option deal?

No… this is why we have just created a new service at eCOP.com to secure optioning at 100%

…

PS: Special Thanks to Michael Norwood to stimulate me, to George Kirikos for his very valuable feedback, Michael Berkens for selling me the domain name optioning.com at a special price. And thanks to few domainers who had the patience to listen my service idea when it was still very confused: Teri Plummer, Dennis Sourvanos, Mike Curving…

.

Hi,

It’s Sunday and I am seeing on forums how most domainers still continue proposing direct sale deals for small transactions with all the risks…
So I have decided to explore a new route and offer the possibility to secure small domain sales at no charge!

Over the escrow fee cost is simple to remember: 1% of sale price.

If you think it’s a positive news then inform your peers the time of insecurity on small domain transactions is over.

Most of you probably noticed that lately the domainer aftermarket seems almost dead.

Recently, someone sent me a joke that in fact could be food for thought to try to improve this situation:

The summary is: When money circulates, there is no debt and everybody can make a living.

It’s the same with domains. If everyone holds his domains like they were lottery tickets and only sells when an end-user is ready to pay a fortune, then nothing ever happens.

Hold your few best names, but try to move the others for a reasonable profit, and everybody will benefit!

Thanks for reading.

PS: MotionLess.com is for sale at CAX.com for a reasonable price where another domainer can still make some profit.

This is why I am very pleased to remind that her Premium .ME auction is closing within 2 days at SEDO.

You can bid HERE!

Below I have appraised with Valuate.com all the .ME in this auction and I am showing the metrics.
The names are ranked by appraisal value, from the most valuable to the less.
I decided to not show the appraisal values (only metrics) to not perturb buyers, and let each one decide how much is the maximum he wants to bid.

…

You can also see that on ClosingAuctions.com and this time with appraisal values and bids!

…

 
FYI, I love catchy short .COM and English or French or Spanish dictionary .COM but I will not discard other options (except adult and domains infringing a trademark).
Please don’t ask me to choice one from your portfolio as I am too busy, just submit the most appealing name you are willing to swap.

 
I hope the domain I selected is enough interesting to get your attention!
Don’t be afraid to play: if I don’t select your name you would have at least won some free advertising.

 
Swapping transaction will be secured by SwapEscrow.com
(courtesy of Braden Pollock)

…

Hi,

I started this post few days ago but as I had the mind at the level of my shoes I did not found the courage to finish it. Today I received the email asking to renew my blog’s hosting, it’s when I noticed my last post was posted in August, in other words, my posts are costing me a hundred dollars!
It’s time to lower my cost per blog post, but unfortunately I will start with a bad story:

As Rick Schwartz uses to say, numbers don’t lie!

DONA.com has been launched 10 days ago, and after a good media coverage from the domain industry the numbers are here:

- 0 registrations.
- 0 transfers.

It may looks a joke but it’s real. I got a true slap!!!

Below you can find ranked by date few headlines (thanks for the coverage) from Domaining.com about the service so you can better understand if you miss the DONA promotion:

• Domaining’s Francois Launches New Domain Registrar That Includes FREE “UDRP Insurance”: DONA.com.
• DONA.com First Domain Registrar to Offer “UDRP Insurance”.
• DONA.com Becomes 1st Registrar to Offer UDRP Insurance & ICA Support With Share of Profits.
• Domain registrar offers UDRP insurance.

…

My initial idea was to launch a registration service allowing us to help finance the Internet Commerce Association (ICA).

I thought:

If domain owners are reluctant to donate money to help the association who defends domain owners rights maybe they can indirectly contribute by using a domain registration service where a significant part of the profit is reversed to ICA.

So I used my most valuable domain: DONA.com (DOmain NAmes) to launch this service.
As I don’t have enough resources, nor software, nor staff to be a registrar myself then I simply wrapped the popular ENOM reseller service under the catchy DONA name.

I wanted provide the best registration price so I started with a .COM registration price at $10.50 ($0.28 as gross margin).

The registration price was very attractive but not for the main audience targeted: domainers!

So it became critical to quickly find an extra to justify a higher registration price, it’s when the “UDRP insurance” concept was invented. But the problem was with a so small margin it was impossible to offer this extra, so the registration price was raised to $11.15 ($0.92 as gross margin).

But despite most people claimed having found the concept attractive the numbers don’t lie: DONA has been a failure!

The main causes are probably:

• Nobody like to change of registrar.
• Registration price is the #1 concern of domainers.
• Help ICA don’t motivate to spend a bit more on registation.
• All domains don’t deserve to be defended.
• Domain owners are only willing to “insure” their better names.
• Everybody think insurance is a lost of money, that UDRPs happens to others.

On my end I must assume:
As a reseller I will never be able to offer the low prices domainers expect because my ENOM reseller rates are already over what cheapest registrars are offering to domainers and/or registrars are constantly offering big discount coupon.

So should I totally abandon or try a different approach like offer the UDRP insurance as a standalone service domain owners can use for their best names without have to change of registrar?

After having contacted few domainers for their “real feedback” it’s clear they should only be willing to use such service for their best premium names and/or the ones at risk.
In other words, the names for which the rate to get get an UDRP is the highest, this means probably such service should charge annually $50+ per insured name to can cover UDRP refunds!!

So today my decision has been taken: The “UDRP insurance” service has been cancelled.
Rates have been raised at DONA to be in the average others registrars are asking to the public.

Maybe I opened the eyes of established registrars, and in the future they will propose something around the “UDRP insurance” or will help finance the ICA. If this should happen then my failed attempt will have not been a total waste of time.

The lesson is you can have a very great name (DONA.com), an innovative and original idea (UDRP insurance), good intentions (help finance ICA), a good promotion (bloggers coverage + ads), the first point is offer a service that can fit needs and make sense for the user or nothing happens. I am certainly too fast to implement my ideas!

In a more positive note I am already working on a new service that has absolutely no relationship with DONA but again with domains (I am persistent). I just hope it will have more success, even if according the numbers of DONA: It’s sure!!!
..