Weekly Roundup

I’m going to introduce a weekly feature on my blog – every Sunday, I’ll select 10 of the best blog posts from the domainersphere and discuss them in more detail. Like my blog, rather than concentrating on news stories, I’m going to select blog posts that have good practical value and will help you succeed as a domainer.

In no particular order, here are the posts I found most informative this week:

1. How Do You Quantify Traffic East?
– The big event of the week was the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference. You can read about what happened at a lot of blogs and I’ve covered part of the live auction. What’s good about this post is that it gives some insight into how Sahar approaches the business and profits from conferences. It would be interesting to hear more about how the ROI of going to conferences changes over time. The first conference you go to surely has amazing ROI, but by the time you’ve hit your 10th or 20th conference – I’m wondering whether it still has the same value.

2. Don’t Sell LLLL.com’s On Sedo – Nothing I like better than practical tips. Michael’s advice seems spot on to me – which shows how inefficient domain markets really are.

3. Domain Parking’s Future – No More Longtail – Andrew discusses what he thinks is likely to happen to parking in the future – Google and Yahoo will cut out low traffic domains. I’d agree with him on this one – it certainly is a strong possibility. I’m not sure the situation will be as bad for domainers as Andrew makes out – there are likely to be CPA and other alternatives developed. While this may be a small market for Google and Yahoo!, for a smaller company, there is still enough money there to make developing a business worthwhile. But one thing is for sure – the domain parking gravy train is gradually slowing down.

4. The Rise of the GeoDomainer – Jamie hits a home run with this blog post, and this post gets chosen as the best post of the week. In it, he develops the most polished argument I’ve seen for buying and developing GeoDomains – and a whole lot more. A blog post definitely worth reading several times over.

5. Using Spreadsheets to Search For Available Domain Names – The third in a continuing video tutorial series about finding and profiting from available domain names. Mark provides a very strategic, practical approach to this.

6. Holiday Weekend Equals Good Time To Buy – If you are just burning through your feed reader quickly you may miss the gem of advice in this post. Jamie points out that while everyone is out enjoying themselves on the Memorial Day Weekend, you can pick up some good domain bargains. I’d add that this is not only true on this long weekend, but any time there is a holiday, particularly around Christmas and New Years. OK, now I’ve got to hide before my wife reads this – just kidding!

7. Forwarding Traffic To An End User To Sell A Domain Name – In this post, Elliot recommends forwarding your domain to that of a large company so that they can get an idea of how much traffic your domain generates and how valuable it is. While I’d agree with the comments that this is a very risky strategy to pursue, I really like this post as it is a very creative idea and generated a lot of interesting discussion.

8. Is (or more importantly “will”) Google Kill the Domain Channel – In this post, Julia discusses how she expect Google will take steps to reduce direct navigation. Being involved in SEO for a long time, I’ve seen Google methodically kill one vertical after the other, so certainly if they wanted to, I could see them doing this. Where I disagree with Julia is her recommendation to sell almost all of your domain names to develop one or a few prime ones. While I’m pro-development, I think this is somewhat of an extreme recommendation. You just can’t scale development the way you can scale domain ownership.

9. Comparing Values Between TLDs – For some reason, this is a topic that always excites me. In this post, Justin looks at some recent data and comes to some conclusions about the relative values of .com versus .net versus .org. He also concludes that .org’s are approaching the values of .net’s. While I think he’s overly optimistic about the relative values of these extensions, there is some very good analysis here.

10. The GeoView with Philip Corwin, Legal Council for the Internet Commerce Association – I find interviews with industry experts to be very insightful, and this interview contains a lot of gems.

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