I’m going to give out an award honoring your favorite account manager, account executive, or account representative at a domain industry company. Please post your nomination in the comment section below, and I’ll post a poll early next week where you can vote for your favorite, with the winner receiving $500 cash from me. I’ll offer all the details in the post next week with the poll.

The person you nominate can work for a domain registrar, domain monetization company, aftermarket sales company, domain financing company, or other domain industry focused company. The person can not be the owner of the company, but he or she has to be someone with whom you work on a regular basis and who represents the company at events and/or handles accounts of domain investors.

There are a number of great account people that work with domain investors, and I want to honor the best of the best. One nomination per person.

I just received a press release announcing that BankAds, a company I previously covered, “has signed an exclusive agreement to acquire CreditCards.net.” Yesterday, the company announced its acquisition of OnlineBanks.com, but I think CreditCards.net is far superior to this domain name.

BankAds co-founder Sean Sullivan stated, “the re-launched CreditCards.net property is going to be the cornerstone for our credit card advertising business within BankAds.” Terms of the CreditCards.net acquisition were not disclosed by either party.

BankAds will be operating in a very competitive space, and it will give potential clients an idea about how they can expect to perform with their own sites. Many of the major credit card issuers have high ranking websites, and even Google has a credit card portal. In addition, the well-funded CreditCards.com is a major competitor (organically and paid). It was reported that CreditCards.com was acquired by Bankrate for $145 million in 2010.

CreditCards.net has been owned by Acme Media, LLC, a New York City-based company operated by Keith Levenson. Acme Media owns and operates a number of domain names and websites including Rio.com, HomeImprovement.com, Vibrator.com, Devices.com, among many others. I have very high regard for Keith and his business.

Congratulations to Sean and Keith on the announcement.

BankAds press release is below: (more…)

I have some nice news to report this afternoon. Bari Meyerson, my former Account Executive at Moniker, has been hired by Enom as a Senior Business Development Manager.

I received an email from Bari today confirming the news, and it looks like she’s happy about the move. ”I’m very excited about joining the Demand Media ‘family.’ Demand Media has a solid foundation of providing quality services and together we have an excellent opportunity to grow the business.”

Having a trusted account manager at a domain registrar is reassuring to me, and I am excited that Bari moved to a company where I have an account and do business.  As a result of this hire, I plan to transfer a group of names over to Enom.

Congratulations to Bari and Enom on this smart hire.

News release from Enom is below:

Bari Meyerson who left her Sr. Account Manager position in December 2011 at Moniker, has accepted a new business development position with Seattle based registrar Enom.

In her new role, Bari will be responsible for growing/managing Enom’s existing domainer client base as well as targeting domain investors. In addition, Bari will be focused on identifying strategic opportunities around domain parking, premium names, and value-added services.

During Bari’s 5 years at Moniker, she managed a portfolio of their top 500 registrar clients and assisted in the domain sales of Scores.com, Poker.ca and Dating.com.

Chad Fisher helps build and promote web sites in a number of different verticals, everything from finding affordable housing to saving money on insurance. He works at Pyramid SEO and Words For Less, providing client service assistance to business owners. In addition, he works on projects involving electric vehicle charging stations and writes for Business Insider, Forbes and other publications.

With Google continuing to crack down on link building schemes targeted at manipulating rankings, building high quality white hat links is more important than ever. On April 24th, 2012 Google rolled out the Penguin update and if you want to believe Google the update was a rousing success, but the reality is probably closer to this.

Site owners, SEO professionals, domain developers, and web content professionals are worried about what types of links are now acceptable. Penguin has clearly cracked down on sites with over optimized links; trying to brute force your way to the top with anchor text is a game that just became a lot harder.

Penguin is Google’s code for the penalty box, and, if your site gets tagged (Penguined?), you will rank lower than before. Google can’t de-index hundreds of thousands of sites over night (even though they might like that) without a massive uproar, but Penguin allows them to control the subset of sites they want and handle them separately from the regular algorithm.

There is the primary Google algorithm, and now we have the Panda and Penguin parts of the algo (wouldn’t surprise me if these two got combined at some point). This is all quite confusing for SEO professionals: you can drop by any of the popular forums and blogs and find them endlessly debating what to do and how to fix your site. And if you want a really entertaining read, check out the new business of negative SEO.

How are ecommerce stores, business professionals, and your local brick and mortar shops supposed to market their site? Ranking well is still important and links are part of the game, so burying your head in the sand isn’t the correct choice.

What we do for our sites is guest blog posting. With guest posting, rather than the spam posted on low quality blog networks, humans actually write content that someone might actually want to read—crazy, right? Beyond the obvious link benefit, sites receive the benefit of brand recognition, access to a new audience, and referral traffic. If the content is good enough, the post may even be socialized and the benefits compounded.

The premise of guest posting is pretty straightforward: find high-traffic blogs related to your niche and coordinate with blog owners to provide them high-quality content in exchange for promoting your site. While guest blogging can be done by anyone, most companies out-source this activity to third-party service providers who specialize in guest posting.

Guest blog service providers are able to draw upon existing relationships with blog owners and operators to best match clients with blogs, providing a maximized return on investment. WordsforLess.com is one of those guest blog service providers and recently opened their doors for orders. WordsforLess.com will find the blogs, negotiate with the blog owner or operator, draft the unique content, and ensure that the article is posted appropriately. In addition, we can help manage content for your site and provide in depth pieces from writers with experience in your vertical.

For the life of me, I couldn’t recall the first domain name I ever registered. A few people have asked me over the years, and I had a vague idea, but I couldn’t recall it and didn’t have a record of it. I knew it was registered at Network Solutions sometime around the beginning of 2003, but I didn’t know much else.

Thanks to Christie Chute, Manager of Monetization and Aftermarket Sales at Web.com, I was able to find out the first domain name I ever registered.

The domain name I purchased on October 31, 2002 was Legal-Aids.com. It appears this name was dropped at some point, re-registered in 2005, and it seems to have expired within the last couple of days. It is not the type of domain name I would purchase today, but it was my starting point in the domain industry.

The next domain names I registered a few days later were SeekNewYorkCity.com, SeekBoston.com, SeekDC.com, and SeekPhilly.com.

I got a fairly late start compared to many of the people I admire who have successful businesses, but I spent a lot of time soaking in as much information as I could in order to learn what domain names sell for how much, and why. I think someone could start today and be very successful, but I don’t think this is a business in which someone can expect to become rich overnight.

I’ve registered some truly crappy domain names in my time, but I continued to learn from my mistakes and make better purchases.

What was the first domain name you purchased?