Keyword Luv, Comment Luv & Top Commenters – Get Links as a Thank You

Get rewarded by commenting on The DomainHunter. Solid content and links lead to high search rankings. As a thank you I’ve installed several plugins designed to reward those who comment on this site by giving you your own site promotion and linking.
Basic Rules:

Low quality “great post” type comments will be ignored, add to the discussion and your comment will be approved. Simple as that, furthermore you will be getting as many as three links from this site.

1. Top Commenters Plugins (Site Wide Link)
2. Keyword Luv Link
3. Comment Luv Link

Everybody wins. I get solid content, you get quality links. This great trio of plugins was suggested by Brian Johnson of SEO Press Formula and the Internet Marketing Course Brian’s course shows you how to develop a revenue stream from that domain you just grabbed. I’ve used it and it works!

All the best,
Ted Sudol
TheDomainHunter.com

Domain Name Live Auctions – Selling Secrets Part 2

If you haven’t read part one of this series go there now to get the basics. Whether you are a new domain auction seller or an old hand at this I’m not going to have a “secret” on how you can sell MyUglyDomainName.com for a million dollars. When getting your name accepted for the live auctions there are two components that go into success. First your name has to be a quality name and secondly it has to be priced right.

To a large degree quality is in the eye of the beholder or in this case the eye of the auction selection committee. In general it should be one or two words, no mispellings, no trademarks and some commercial potential. But beyond that general guideline you won’t get too much more advice. I asked several auction domain houses what are they looking for in their selection process. I told them that I thought if they told me what they were looking for it would save me work submitting auctions they weren’t interested in and save them work in having to review and discard domain names they weren’t interested in. I never got a more definite answer from any of the auction houses. You also won’t get any advice on pricing – as they said to me they are not in the appraisal business (unless of course you are willing to pay for one).

The second component that goes into a successful auction submission is pricing your domain right. It seems a lot of domainers have inflated ideas on the value of the names in their portfolio. I’ve always found both free and paid appraisals to vary so widely in their valuation for the same name as to be practically useless as well as being a way for you to spend money quickly. One of the best guides that will give you a sense of what you can list them for is to look at the results from past auctions and see what similar names sold for. I’ve been getting reports of softness in the sales at recent auctions because of the economy. But I’m not suggesting that you give away your names just to make a sale. If its a good name stick to a reasonable price if your finances will allow.

Frank Shilling has a great blog post, “Domain Names New and Old – Everybody Sells” that discusses some of the issues of domain quality and selling domains for a reasonable amount that will put some profit in your pocket. I agree with his sentiments – I don’t believe you should give your names away. Remember there are alternative ways to make your domain names pay. When one of my names did not sell at a live auction I asked the auction house for a recommendation. The recommendation was to list the name for $9. I said why would I want to do that? The parking revenue I’m currently earning from the site per month is several times that amount. In many ways the domain auction is like a real estate agent. They are working for the seller and it is in their best interest to have your domain name priced low so they can get a sale easily. Always remember the money you get will be the price the domain sold for minus the commissions and fees. I submitted some names for the upcoming Sedo No Reserve auction. In this case no reserve means SEDO’s minimum bid of $60. When I started listing those names for $60 a reminder popped up telling me that if I sold my domain for $60, since SEDO’s minimum commission was $50.00, I would be getting $10.00.

Rick Schwartz Has a great series of blog post on selling at auctions too. Rick is President and Cofounder of T.R.A.F.F.I.C. which holds some of the most well attended and publicized auctions.

If you are not familiar with Frank Shilling or Rick Schwartz make sure you go to their blogs and read their insights on auctions. I’ve found it always pays to learn from the best (and some of the most successful) domainers in the industry.

If they are quality names and priced correctly they might be chosen by the auction selection committee. Congratulations you just passed your first hurdle to selling your domain name at an auction. In the next post

All the best,
Ted Sudol
TheDomainHunter

Website Monitoring Software – Get out of the Zero Dollar Zone Now

If you’ve been following these posts you know I’ve been recommending that it’s important to have an alternate plan for monitization. One method I’ve been suggesting is developing some of you sites into little automatic ATM machines that will deposit money in your account every day.

If you develop any of your web sites you’ll have to read my posts on hosts and hosting companies. But one of the things you will quickly realize is that if your site is not up because of some hosting company problem and your clients can’t get to your site you’re out of business and you’ve entered the ZERO DOLLAR ZONE. Even the best hosting company has some downtime.

1. It’s important to know whether your sites are up or not and you have entered the ZERO DOLLAR ZONE for several reasons besides the money.
2. The second negative effect is you are annoying your potential website vistor that’s trying to reach your site – you are showing them you are not really ready for primetime and you are sending them to your competitors.
3. The third reason, especially if your site is down for any length of time you are showing the search engines that you’ve worked so hard to impress convince to give you a higher rank and the money it brings is that your really aren’t all that trustworthy.

Once I started spending a lot of time putting up these web sites. I noticed that the web sites would sometimes be down once or twice a day. I started thinking if my sites go down once or twice a day while I’m on the web looking at the site what about all of the time that I’m not looking? How many times are my web visitors trying to get to my and my sites are down and I’m not even aware of it? Remember my web host is generally well regarded in the industry. What’s happening to your sites if you shopped for that low cost web host. Are your sites up all of the time or are there frequent times when your sites are inaccessible and you’re in the ZERO DOLLAR ZONE.

But how are you going to know? I searched for website monitoring and found a number of sites that will monitor your web sites. But they charge from $10-$12 a month for each web site! That would have been a heck of a lot of money if I wanted to monitor all of my web sites. That’s not a solution that will work for very many people

But I came across a piece of software you can run from your PC that will monitor all of your web sites, notify you with alarms if a site goes down. You can even set it to alarm you if there are changes in the web site from the last time the site was checked. What I like about it it is simple, you simply type in the domain names you want monitored, set the monitor interval, set the alarms and let it go. You can set it to sit quietly in your tray at the bottom of the screen until one of your sites goes down. If you have set it up for an audible alarm you will hear it – if not you will just see it flashing in the tray until you click it to see the details. It will even tell you if the site was down in the past so you can start forming a good idea about how reliable your host is even when you are not watching.

So how much will this peace of mind set you back? Less than $10- $9.97 to be exact. That’s for software that can monitor all your domains. It’s not a monthly fee either. I think this is one tool you can’t be without. Get it at Domain Monitoring Tool

It’s already proved it’s weight in gold to me. I have had a couple of issues with my current host that I’ve had for the past two years. We’ve always managed to work things out but I wanted a host where I didn’t have to work things out – my sites would just run, load fast, and there would be no downtime – or rather no ZERO DOLLAR EARNING TIME.

Going to different forums and doing some research I’ve found out some interesting things about hosts. One of the basic truths is they all go down at one time or another. What’s important is how quickly they go back up, how often are these service interruptions and are you inconvenienced or do your sites just pop right up.

Some other web masters were urging me to try another host they felt deserved consideration.
So far my little $10 alarm has shown that none of my sites on my existing host went down during the past few days. But during the same time sites on this new host went down twice yesterday and three times today.

One of the great things about knowing your site is down as soon as it happens is that you can call up the hosting company support and alert them and complain. I’ve found, especially with shared hosting companies, the loud squeaky wheel gets fixed quickest.

All the best,
Ted Sudol
The Domain Hunter

PS – One thing I forgot is that this is being marketed by one of my Internet partners in Germany. So when you click on the Paypal buy button it will come up with the German PayPal screen. Just enter your PayPal account information and the PayPal screen will change to the American version. The amount $9.97 is US dollars. And finally if you are thinking I don’t read German don’t worry – the software is in english.

PPS – A lot has been happening here at The Domain Hunter and I want you to share in my success. There’s going to be a very exciting announcement here on July 12th so make sure you check back often to make sure you don’t miss out.

Free Web Site

Hi,
A few weeks ago I told you about a new ebook that Brian Johnson was releasing called Revenue Domains Exposed. I purchased it and just wanted to give you and update. Brian’s method shows you how you can quickly monitize an expiring domain and earn much more than you would in parking.

I purchased several domains following the Revenue Domain model a few weeks ago and they are all producing income. Some of the sites became profitable within weeks. As I honed my experience and understanding of the Revenue Domain model my income from each site I was picking went up. I even applied his methods to domains that didn’t strictly follow the Revenue domain model but were domains I already had parked with a parking company. I just felt they should be earning more than the parking revenue they were making. I’m happy to say that within three days I exceeded three months parking revenue for the same domain.

But that’s not the reason for my post today. Brian is launching a new site netmarketingcourse.net. To help launch the site Brian is giving away absolutely free a domain name with an existing traffic producing web site. Read about it here at www.netmarketingcourse.net Besides a chance to win a free web site you are also going to be getting a lot of great information that will give your Internet marketing career a giant boost. Brian’s goal is to have 100 videos available on that site.

Server Upgrade complete

The web site was slowing down because of all of the use. To handle all of the resources we want to install here and all of the users we decided to bite the bullet and upgrade now. Sorry for the inconvenience but we are all set for the future. Thanks for visiting The Domain Hunter. You’ll find tips, tricks, techniques, and tools to help you profit from the domain name business.