$7.49 using a coupon code plus $0.20 Icann fee = $7.69, Godaddy rounded it up to $7.70. 

I know I should be buying in sterling, being British, (old habits and all that), but for those who have hundreds or thousands of domains it would add up.

Still, better than paying $35 per domain per year as in the early days!

’til next time

Marcus

Go.ogle very helpfully accused me of invalid clicks, (someone else clicked, not me), so I lost my Adsense account and all the revenue to that point from the EeeLaptop.com site. 

I’ve parked it sporadically over the last few months and you can see the revenue screenshots here:

• EeeLaptop.com Revenue Image One
• EeeLaptop.com Revenue Image Two
• EeeLaptop.com Revenue Image Three
• EeeLaptop.com Revenue Image Four
• EeeLaptop.com Revenue Image Five

It’s currently on ebay.com (listing here)with a Buy It Now price of $200, based roughly on the parking figures, (should make around $10 per month), and a 2x revenue as, unless Asus make a major mess of marketing the machine which started the netbook revolution, it should still be popular in a couple years time.

I’m selling just the domain, as I just don’t have the time to update the blog.

Reg’d until end of July 2009 on GoDaddy.

’til next time

Marcus

Scott over at TrendDomaining.com has highlighted a couple from Name.com, which I personally find very timely.

My attention was drawn to another tool I rather like, which I spotted on one of the Facebook Domaining groups, apologies if someone has already blogged about it.  It’s name is Very Wise Name Generator and seems to be a great example of buying a four letter dot com and developing something useful on it.

Using it is simple; copy a paragraph or two, maybe more, from a news story, poem, article or anything else and paste it into the box, limit the number of maximum characters, choose a few words you don’t want it to use, (there are some already there for you), press the ‘Submit’ button and the tool will return a list of domains gleaned from the text you put in.

By default it will check availability and show unavailable domains in red, although you can select a ‘fast’ mode, which allows you to check the returned list yourself.

It’s another one of those addictive tools, but useful at the same time.

’til next time

Marcus

But I have never actually put the search term ‘domain names’ in until today.  Here’s what I saw:

It wasn’t what I expected to see.  This is the result for all regions and all years.  I left the news volume graph in at the bottom to show that, contrary to many other searches, more news stories hasn’t increased the number of searches, there aren’t even any real peaks.

So does this mean that the public at large are even less interested in domain names than they once were?

I was thinking of showing the graph for the UK and the US in isolation, but they’re almost exactly the same.

My thoughts about the falling graph instead of a rising one are that Godaddy and the other main registrars have done such a good job of promoting domain names to the public and where they can get them, that less people need to search using that term in Google, Godaddy in particular is perhaps becoming as synonymous with domains as Google is with search.

Just my incredibly humble opinion, but Google Trends normally, for me at least, gives a more global, mainstream view of interest in an industry.

’til next time.

Marcus

Naturally it’s the internet which has enabled women with kids to work from home, setting up a website to trade from, instead of the far less feasible bricks and mortar scenario.

So they need domains for those websites, which means even more businesses requiring decent, memorable domain names.  On the downside, it means more evangelizing by us domainers about the importance of a good domain for your business, something which - at least in this country - seems to be pretty much neglected, there are some horrible ones; Aaron Goldman of Good URL Bad URL, you’d need an anti-cringe device.

If the Mumpreneurs along with other businesses get the whole domain thing, the value of all our good’uns will surely increase with the extra demand.

’til next time

Marcus

I’m guessing you searched because you needed an alternative to Adsense, since they disabled your account for no reason.

Monetizing domains through development is a tricky business in the UK.  I’m currently trying out Adbrite on a couple of sites, although they’re certainly not targetted, (they all seem to be the same ads, whatever niche or keywords you enter into their system), you may stand a chance of earning from site vistors curiosity.

I’ve had to do this because like many others, my Adsense account was disabled for no apparent reason.  I’m a stickler for rules and stuck to theirs like glue, not even allowing my own family view the sites, let alone click on the ads.

Naturally my next port of call was YPN, but alas, no Brits allowed.  In some ways it’s a relief as even if I had been approved by Yahoo, I would still feel as though I was walking along a cliff edge waiting for the wind to blow the wrong way.  Those of you who do use adsense, never feel too safe, it can happen to anyone.

Cost per action affiliate links are all very well, but visitors have still got to go through the whole process before you earn anything.

YPN is just one example of why being a UK domainer has its disadvantages.

’til next time.

Marcus

One of the many attractive features of Wordpress is the ability to modify and customize themes and this week I’ve had the pleasure of encountering and playing with a wonderful, free theme which is very customizable called Mandigo by Tommmmmm of OneHertz.com.

This theme rocks; you don’t have to get stuck into all the template code to make big changes and create your own look and feel to whatever project you’re working on, you just select from the many option available and if you don’t get how to do something at first, there’s a very good ReadMe section accessible from the Wordpress admin area.  It also makes it easy to setup widgets and install code such as Google Analytics.

If you’re looking to develop a few domains yourself, Mandigo can help alleviate some of the tricky development aspects.

’til next time.

Marcus

I’ve been using StumbleUpon for well over a year and it’s a great way to find interesting web pages, just by clicking on the Stumble button, (especially in the evening, when you’re unwinding).  It can be quite addictive.

So what about using StumbleUpon to allow others to discover your domaining blog?

On Monday (21st July) I gave this blog’s homepage the ‘thumbs up’ and filled in the ‘You’ve discovered a new page’ form.  I tagged it with as many relevant tags as possible and tried to find a relevant category to put it in.  The closest I could find was ‘Internet’, there are loads of categories, domaining isn’t one of them.

On the same day I submitted the site, I got 250 visits from StumbleUpon in my referrers stats.  Apparently this is initial exposure given to all pages submitted to ‘get the ball rolling’.  Since then, I haven’t had any more traffic from them, this is either because all those visitors weren’t domainers and/or my content wasn’t good enough.  I prefer to think it’s the first reason.

My first impression is that while StumbleUpon can be used to gain a lot of viral targetted traffic in other niches, there probably aren’t enough domainers using the service to ‘thumbs up’ domaining related pages and therefore start the ’snowball effect’.

There’s no question that I’ll keep using StumbleUpon and I’ll keep you posted about my findings regarding domaining blogs, but I’m going to try it with developed domains in other niches in the future, as it has great potential to draw traffic to them.

’til next time

Marcus

I was preparing some late night snack and had the TV volume down quite low, so I didn’t hear all of it.  After some bizarre ad where a man swapped eating porridge for a 37K per year IT job, (74K in dollars), I noticed a familiar logo more commonly seen on my PC monitor.

The ad comprised of two American guys in an office discussing something to do with domains, when a blonde woman stopped, looked at them and rebuked them both by calling them perverts, I wish I had the volume up a little higher to hear everything.  No doubt our US friends have seen this one before.

The commercial was shown on a freeview TV channel called Dave, which seems to be growing in popularity, but is not really a mainstream, terrestrial channel like ITV, so I have no idea how many people would have seen it, but it was the first time I’ve seen domains promoted on TV here in the UK.

At first, I thought it may be an ad for the new .me tld, (marketing it on people’s vanity?), but only dot com was shown, which certainly isn’t a bad thing.

Is this a sign of things to come in the UK?

I’ll keep an eye on it.

’til next time

Marcus

If you own SportsCarHire.com, for example, how will the development of SportsCarHireUK.com affect the value of your closely related domain.  Your domain is better anyway; it will get more type-ins, it’s more generic, and has more chance of advertisers buying space on it from around the world and not just the UK.

Supposing a big company with plenty of money to throw at branding and getting good traffic to the SportsCarHireUK site bought that domain and developed an outstanding, well trafficked website on it, how much more do you think your domain, your piece of virtual land, would be worth?  Lots more!

For a start, you know who to approach to sell your piece of virtual land to, should you choose to.  If they’ve foolishly overlooked approaching you to buy it in the first place, you could gently educate them as to why it’s more valuable than their existing plot of land, reminding them that you are (probably) already benefiting from the extra type-ins and free advertising from passing trade.

There was a Fish and Chip shop in my hometown, it was at the bottom of a lane several yards from the main street.  It had built up a good reputation and being in the company of surrounding successful commercial properties, the land on which it was built was worth quite a lot.

Opposite the shop and hidden from view, was an abandoned chemical factory, a couple of acres at least, of now unused land that nobody really wanted because of its past, with buildings in a sorry state of disrepair.  Surrounding the factory were many houses, home to a lot of people.  Tesco saw the potential of this ideally situated, yet very problematic, (chemicals etc)  plot of land and after a few years of negotiation, finally got their way and built a supermarket on the site.

The value of all the surrounding homes and commercial premises rocketed, including that of the fish and chip shop.  Not long after Tesco had moved in, the land on which the fish and chip shop was situated was sold to developers for much more than it had previously been worth, simply because it neighbored the now well developed land where the factory had once stood.  The shop was demolished and now other properties will be built there instead, but Tesco could easily buy that land as well and expand on to it.

Your domain values can rocket too if they’re in the right neighborhood and you see the opportunities created by the development of neighboring domains.

’til next time

Marcus