Here are some quick thoughts on this nice Sunday. I hope you enjoy the last day of your weekend! Rest up for a successful week.

When you’re buying domain names, you should check to see if there’s a website developed on the domain name. I get annoyed when people email me asking if I would sell “the domain name Lowell.com” or another one of my developed websites. Clearly it’s not just a domain name and if I get annoyed as a domain investor, it’s probably going to annoy people who have businesses on their domain names.

I want to welcome LuxuryNames.com as a new header banner advertiser. Take a minute to sign up for their newsletter. The company owns great domain names such as PrivateAirplanes.com, HomeInsuranceRates.com, MicroLenders.com, and many other great names and you want to be subscribed when they offer names for sale.

I think it’s great that guys like Mike Berkens and Rick Schwartz write blog posts many times per week. These guys have sold incredible domain names for large sums of money, have deep portfolios with top domain names, and they could be sitting on the beach or playing golf all day. I don’t always agree with everything they say, but their posts make me think about this industry and my business, and I really appreciate their willingness to share with us.

When you develop a website, it can take a long time to start seeing results. As mentioned before, I’ve been blogging for over two years, and I am just starting to generate a decent amount of revenue. Likewise, Burbank.com has been launched for about a year, and traffic, revenue, and advertising inquiries are up quite a bit in the past few months. Developing a business on a domain name isn’t easy, but it’s a great way to increase the value and generate revenue over the long haul.

I just bought RedBelliedPiranha.com and RedBelliedPiranhas.com, and I am psyched to create a mini site for one with a forward of the other. As you can probably tell, I like building mini sites that have vivid pictures. I haven’t done much CTR testing with Adsense, so I don’t know if the theory about having an ugly site leading to more clicks is accurate with mini sites, but I enjoy searching for cool photos.

Speaking of mini site testing…. has anyone tested design layouts for increased revenue/click throughs? I’ve wondered if someone has tested layouts, images, content length…etc to find the “perfect” mini site. This is something that would be very interesting to me. The website would have to have enough traffic to make the results statistically significant – and it would probably have to be done using several mini sites over several months with a straight up A|B split. I would be happy to post results here for others to see if the test is legit and not just a sales pitch.

Red Bellied Piranha Photo Source:

When you have a developed website and are looking for ways to grow your traffic and rankings, redirecting (via 301 redirect) related, expired domain names is a good way to do it. On Lowell.com, I had a difficult time getting inbound links from the city websites and local organizations, as many of them work closely with the city of Lowell. I get frequent compliments and submitted press releases from many of them, so I know they like the site, but getting returned links has been a difficult task.

Needless to say, there are many small organizations and/or Festivals in the city. Some of the Festival organizers have websites that for whatever reason have been neglected. On occasion, they even let these domain names expire, which isn’t a surprise since these have generally not been updated in a while. Oftentimes, these websites have links from businesses, cultural organizations, and government websites in the area (not all .gov though). Most are links without anchor text, so the SEO value is very little, but that isn’t entirely the point.

Instead of letting someone else grab them and park them for the small amount of traffic they receive, I bought a couple and forwarded them to the correct event pages on my website, which contains information about the event history and dates. If/when people type these domain names-in or click on a link, they will get the information they looked to find. Most visitors probably won’t even notice the difference because they simply wanted to learn about the event, and that’s what I am doing. An example was a recent ethnic Festival, and I received about 20 visits from one website that had a link to the old site.

Ironically, the minor league hockey team operates on LowellDevilsHockey.com and LowellDevils.com dropped very recently. I was debating whether to buy it or not and opted against it. I informed all of the executives about the pending drop auction, and their marketing person told me they don’t need the domain name. I opted not to buy this one, as I didn’t want to have to deal with a professional sports organization asking why I own this name, while not understanding how I ended up with it.

The key is to pick and choose which names are worth buying and which could be infringing. Most of the Festivals have generic names, and if the Festival founders ever want the names back, I am more than happy to oblige. However, the hockey team name wasn’t close to being generic in my opinion and wasn’t worth any type of legal trouble. There’s a fine line between being helpful and being harmful, and I didn’t want to be perceived as being harmful.

If you operate websites, you can find expiring domain names that might help build awareness of your site and perhaps even add some SEO value. I want to give a tip of the hat to a friend who is a great SEO for this advice a while ago.