I don’t have time to do another mini site right now, so I am going to sell SoccerGoalies.com for just $750. Soccer goalies need special jerseys, padded pants, gloves, and sometimes special cleats, all of which are fairly expensive and can bring decent revenue once the site is developed. Soccer Goalies also have specialized soccer goalie camps and training programs which are also expensive.

My plan was to build a mini site with content about:

• Soccer Goalie Equipment (with affiliate links)
• Famous Goal Profiles (Jorge Campos, Sepp Maier, Gianluigi Buffon… dozens of them – searched quite often)
• Soccer Goalie Camps
• Soccer Goalie Drills
• Soccer goalie video saves (penalty kicks, World Cup…etc)

First to post “sold” will get this name, registered at Moniker – registration date of 3/2000.

I learned  a great tip to find end users via Google from domain investor, Bob Olea. As discussed many times here and other places, the best way to sell a domain name for an optimal price is to sell it to an end user who can make the most of the domain name. They can generally justify the cost of a premium domain name, knowing the costs associated with their products and sales.

Oftentimes, when a company can’t get the primary generic domain name for their industry, they settle for and purchase other longer tail domain names.

Here’s the tip: Type into Google – inurl:keywords (for example inurl:flowers or inurl:”flower shop”).

The result is a list of all websites that have those keywords in their, subdomains, or sub folders (either anywhere in the url or the exact phrase). You can use this list of results to find companies who may wish to upgrade to your generic domain name.

Check it out and see if you can find an end user for your great domain names!

***UPDATE***

Ross at Ygrab let me know he posted this info + more yesterday. I saw it on a forum posted by a friend and thought he found it So if you want to see more great tips, visit Ross’ Blog: http://ygrab.com/end-users/end-users-part-2-3-ways-to-find-end-users/

I don’t generally ask for much from my blog readers other than feedback and commentary on blog posts I write about domain names, but I would like to ask a favor of readers who are SEO experts/professionals. Regarding ElliotsBlog.com, are there any things that I can and should be doing to improve my current search ranking that I am not doing right now? Are there obvious mistakes that I am making that should be corrected ASAP? I know that nobody is ever satisfied with their SERP rankings, and I am in the same boat, but I would like to fix it if possible.

Traffic is about as high as it’s ever been, and it seems that my daily traffic continues to produce higher highs every month. My blog’s page rank continues to be strong, and I have quite a bit of inlinks that reference popular articles. My blog’s Alexa ranking seems to be increasing every month as well. Much of my traffic comes from blog readers, domain news aggregators (Domaining.com, NameBee.com and Altop.com).

So what do I do to enhance my SEO right now? First thing is that I use the All in One SEO plugin to quickly use good SEO for my blog posts. I  limited the number of links in my blogroll, which had dozens and dozens of links last year. I also moved many outbound links to the Resources page with “no follow” commands. I sent notices to sites that had been copying my content, and almost all dupe content from scrapers has been removed. Finally, I write unique content on my blog daily.

There are two primary things that leave me a bit unsatisfied with my SEO:

1) Only 19% of my traffic is from search engines. This is compared to my developed websites which see anywhere from 50-90% of the traffic from search engines. These stats are for sites that get anywhere from 250 – 600 visits per day on average, so it’s not really an anomoly. I would like that number to be closer to 40%, which I think is reasonable considering that I have over 1,000 unique posts in 2+ years.

2) I had site links a few months ago when you searched Google for “Elliot Silver” and “Elliot’s Blog”, but I don’t have them any longer. One thing which may have impacted is that I changed the user name from Admin to “Elliot Silver” and when I did that, I saw that Google searches for “Elliot Silver” showed my blog #1 but the meta description ended up changing to my latest post rather than the standard meta description I now have. As a result, I changed the user name to “Elliot,” although I don’t know if that impacted the site links.

One other issue to note is that several months ago – maybe over a year ago in fact – I changed the url structure to eliminate the date. Many of my previous posts lost ranking and page rank in Google, but they should be forwarding to the correct page. In fact, I use Dean’s Permalinks Migration to help with that.

Because traffic is much higher this year over last year, and it is steady or growing, I haven’t worried too much about my SEO issues. However, I know there are a number of SEO professionals who read my blog for domaining tips, so I would like to ask for some feedback about how I can take advantage of additional search engine traffic.

THANKS!

Craig Harrison is selling a portfolio of 2,600 real estate domain names, many of which contain a city name + RealEstateListings.com.  The auction is scheduled to take place on Thursday in San Francisco and is being run by JP King Auction Company.I’ve seen quite a bit of paid press on the auction, and I also read an article this morning on a technology website geared towards real estate professionals.

In an article on Inman.com, WAV Group partner Victor Lund said,

Lund estimates that each of Harrison’s domain names could be worth anywhere from $100 to $5,000, depending on the demographics of the city name and the amount of traffic and advertising it gets today.

That’s a pretty wide range — it works out to between $260,000 and $13 million — but Lund said he’s willing to bet the entire package sells in the low- to mid-millions, depending on the buyer and whether the domains are sold in pieces or together.

Also quoted in the article is Brett Young, a real estate broker and software developer who said,

“This really is nothing more than a publicity stunt that falls short for anyone who has any knowledge about domains. I pity the person who sees this as a good investment.”

I would personally much rather spend the thousands of dollars (or even millions that was quoted by Lund) on one great quality generic domain name than on 2,600 lower quality domain names. In annual renewal fees alone, 2,600 domain names would cost close to $20,000 – and that’s at a discounted rate. This doesn’t include hosting, setting up, SEO-ing, and managing all of these websites, which would cost quite a bit of money up front.

What do you think will happen with this auction? They certainly have spent quite a bit of money promoting it considering all of the press releases and paid articles I read (including DNN). Because of the amount of press they have bought and generated for this auction, I am interested to see what will happen.