My wife and I live in New York City with our 2 year old dog, Lucy, and on occasion, we need to use the services of a dog walker. We are fortunate to live in a large apartment building because it’s easy to find a dog walker via word of mouth, since there are so many dog owners in the building.

However, there are many people who don’t necessarily have dog walker contacts, and they rely on sites like Craigslist to find dog walkers and companies who offer dog walking services in addition to other pet-related services. There are only a couple of websites that cater specifically to connecting dog owners and dog walkers.

With dog walkers earning up to $20 per dog for a 15 minute walk (sometimes even more), I believe there is a big reason why dog walkers should advertise, and with the launch of my latest targeted website, they have a place to advertise by city. With a whole lot of help of my from designer, Mike McAlister of Six One Five Design, I launched DogWalker.com, a domain name I recently acquired.

As with every website launch, there are still a few issues to fix. Some of the search functionality isn’t working as well as we’d like, and I need to get advertisers to fill the directory! This is the launch of my first automated directory, and I am eager to see if this will take off, since I have a few other names that would do well with this set up.

Here are a couple of pages you can visit to see how things will look:

• Houston Dog Walkers (landing page set up for SEO purposes)
• All Dogs Gym & Inn (dog walker listing)

I have a thousand DogWalker.com magnets, and I will be paying a graduate student to hand them out in a few parks in NYC on the next few weekends. I figure if dog owners are visiting the site, dog walkers will want to advertise. I also plan to email dog walkers to let them know about the new site and hopefully sign up some advertisers. Perhaps local pet stores will permit me to leave magnets at their register. The beauty is that the marketing of the site should remain fairly inexpensive.

When you have a moment, please have a look at the site and let me know if you find any glitches. Any suggestions/recommendations on improving search functionality and SEO would be appreciated. I am considering adding a autocomplete search feature to help direct visitors to the correct city listing pages.

Next up… DogTrainer.com

I saw this press release today and wanted to pass the information along to my readers.  Garry Chernoff owns one of the best portfolios of generic domain names (as you will see below), and he is a pioneer in the domain investment industry. I hope he will share the results from these development efforts.

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Penticton, B.C., Canada (PRWEB) November 19, 2009 — Canadian based NetIncome Ventures, an established domain investment and web development company founded and headed by serial entrepreneur Garry Chernoff has publicly launched dozens of shopping websites earlier this week just in time for the holiday shopping season. The e-commerce websites include HockeyJerseys.com, BabyMonitors.com, FaxMachines.com and dozens more of niche specific e-commerce shops featuring hundreds of thousands of products.

Garry’s vision for the websites into 2010 and beyond is to become leaders in their respective niches by featuring a complete product catalog where each and every visitor can research and purchase exactly what they are looking for in one place and for the most affordable prices around. NetIncome Ventures has already teamed up with leading retailers and includes products from Buy.com, Boscov’s, OnlineSports.com, Fans Edge, ShoppersChoice.com, The Shopping Channel, Overstock.com, NBC Universal Store, Autogeek.com and hundreds of other strategic partners and popular internet based discount stores.

NetIncome Ventures Inc currently owns thousands of targeted and category leading keyword domain names such as BridalShop.com, Beads.com, CellShop.com, MensWear.com, Replica.com, Runners.com, SportsGear.com, Veils.com, etc. and plans to develop and launch at least a few hundred more e-commerce shops by March of 2010. Mike Cohen of WannaDevelop.com and NYC based Logiko group have been coordinating all web development and marketing efforts for NetIncome Ventures newly launched shopping e-businesses.

“We have put in a lot of time and effort into these websites the past few month’s and with Garry Chernoff’s guidance and vision from day one we have been able to accomplish a truly great thing here with this week’s launch and mass deployment of dozens of category specific websites on targeted keyword domains that can now serve visitors from across the globe as a one stop shop featuring product catalogs of up-to 100,000 or even more relevant and unique items on each and every website.”

This morning, Domain Sponsor announced the details for PitchFest and LaunchFest, two new features of the DomainFest Global conference which will be held in January.

PITCHFest: Five hand-picked applicants will present a five minute summary of their business idea that will “enhance the value of parked or developed domain names by driving increased traffic and/or revenue.” Presenters will speak to a panel of judges, as well as the DomainFest audience. The winner will receive a trophy.

LAUNCHFest: Prior to the conference, applicants can choose one of ten domain names (owned by sister company Portfolio Brains, LLC), and five selected applicants will present a business plan to judges describing how they will build a business on that domain name. The judges will select a winner based on the following: creativity, viability, originality, and revenue potential.

The winner will have the opportunity to develop their business on the domain name “subject to a pre-determined lease arrangement.” Oversee.net will waive the first year of lease payments and the winner will have the right to lease the domain name for five years, after which the winner can buy it.

I like how PitchFest is structured. It’s a five minute pitch for five newly launched (I assume) companies, and hopefully there will be some innovative presenters. However, I think LaunchFest is a fantastic idea – for Oversee. Firstly, while Planners.com is a very good domain name that sold for $12,000 in 2004, I think the others are mostly average domain names and don’t see a home run in the list.  Below are the list of names they are allowing applicants to choose from, along with the purchase price:

• Planners.com    $125,000
• AdvertiseHere.com   $125,000
• StartABusiness.com  $75,000
• GoOut.com    $75,000
• RealEstateNetwork.com     $50,000
• BoostSales.com     $50,000
• SiteFinder.com     $25,000
• WebIncentives.com     $25,000
• AnythingForSale.com    $10,000
• DailyPicks.com    $10,000

Not only is Oversee.net going to get an annual lease deal (after the first year free), which will presumably generate more revenue than the parked name makes now, but they are going to have someone build these brands for them. If the brand fails and the site goes out of business, it will end up driving more revenue back to the parked page from the previous development (and Oversee wins). If the site is a success and the owner wants to buy it, Oversee will earn money on the lease and/or get their desired sales price in 5 years or less (and Oversee wins again).

If we were talking about out of the park home run names that wouldn’t be for sale under normal circumstances (like RealEstate.com or GiftBaskets.com), then it’s a great opportunity. However, I don’t think these names are that special. In the end, the winner is Oversee.net rather than the applicants, in my opinion. Perhaps a cash reward for development, scrapping the annual lease agreement, or adding better domain names from which to choose would make this a winning idea.

What do you think?