I believe other parking companies may allow you to use your own photographs on your landing pages, but I had never tried it out until a couple of days ago when I used a photo of my dog with a parked domain name.

I decided to park one of my dog-related domain names with Parked.com. I didn’t think the Dachshund they had on the “dog” template was cute, and I wanted to replace it with my a picture of my Puggle, Lucy. I took a photo my wife had taken and cut it down to the required dimensions. Because the file size was too large, I used a free jpg editor (found at a domain name I previously sold) to cut down the file size.

I then edited my domain name’s theme details, including the landing page image and the theme color. I uploaded the photo of my dog, and within seconds, she was the star of the landing page. It was simple to add Lucy’s photo to this domain name, and it would be simple to change images in any domain name you have parked with Parked.com.

I just received an email announcing the nominees for the 2009 TRAFFIC Awards. You must have your ballots in by email no later than 5PM Eastern Time on Friday. Votes cast after that time will not count. Winners will receive the awards at the New York TRAFFIC show in October. BTW, thank you to whoever nominated me for best domain news blog.

To vote, send an email to trafficawards@earthlink.net

And the nominees are…

SPONSOR OF THE YEAR
Parked
Hitfarm
DDC
Skenzo

DOMAINER OF THE YEAR
Mike Berkens
Lonnie Borck
David & Michael Castello
Alan Hack
Rick Latona
Jerry Nolte
Shaun Pilfold
Rick Schwartz (Declined)

BEST OVERALL DOMAIN SOLUTION
DevHub
Fabulous
Hyneedle
Netshops
Skenzo
Sedo

DOMAIN HALL OF FAME (VOTE FOR 2)
Mike Berkens
Michael & David Castello (counts as 1 vote)
Larry Fischer
Brian Gilbert
Rob Grant
Mike Mann
Howard Neu
Jerry Nolte
Shawn Stafford
Divyank Turakhia
Mike “Zappy” Zapolin

BEST NEW MONETIZING SOLUTION
Above.com (Trellian)
Devhub

THE “WE GET IT” AWARD
Bobbleheads.com
Candy.com
Steve Schaffer
Toys-R-Us

BEST DEVELOPER OF THE YEAR
Richard Douglas
Shaun Pilfold
Warren Royal
Vertive, Inc.
Nat Cohen

BEST DOMAIN NEWS BLOG
DNJournal (Ron Jackson)
TheDomains.com (Mike Berkens)
DomainersMagazine (Jerry Nolte)
ElliotsBlog.com (Elliot Silver)
WhizzbangsBlog.com (Michael Gilmour)
FragerFactor (Owen Frager)
RicksBlog.com (Rick Schwartz Declined)

Sean Stafford is at it again. Every few months, it seems that Sean is building something helpful to domainers, and I think his new service, ComWired.com can help domainers and domain developers.

The DNS service is billed as a way to split up a domain name’s traffic depending on where the traffic originates.  For example, if you have a parked domain name that receives traffic from the US, Mexico, Japan, China and Russia, you can choose where to send traffic from each country, depending on where you find that it can be monetized better.  This is a neat concept for domain investors, but it can similarly work for domain developers, too.

Portland.com is the online guide to Portland, Oregon. Being from New Hampshire, when I hear Portland.com, I immediately think of Portland, Maine. Knowing the brains behind Portland.com, I am sure they analyzed their traffic to know that its looking for information about Portland, Oregon rather than Maine, however, I am sure there is some traffic looking for information about Portland, Maine.

With help from ComWired.com, the owners can detect where the traffic is coming from, and if it’s coming from New England cities, hypothetically, they can send it to Portland.com/Maine, which would theoretically have a site all about the city in Maine. All other traffic can be sent to the main (ha ha) site where they would find information about Portland, Oregon. This could also be effective for country based geodomains.

I should add ComWired.com can only split up traffic by country at the moment, but they expect to be able to split it by city in a few short weeks.  For now, the service is free to use, although that will probably change in the future.

I was watching the World Baseball Classic yesterday and saw the Dominican Republic vs. Panama game in Puerto Rico.  Behind home plate, there was a url being advertised: GoPuertoRico.com.  Personally, I am not a huge fan of most call to action domain names, but I really don’t like this one, because the keyword phrase “Go Puerto Rico” doesn’t exactly make sense.

I decided to take a look at some similar sites, including PuertoRico.com and VisitPuertoRico.com. Both sites look professionally done, and I was intrigued by the “inquire about this domain name” link found on the second site.  The link took me to Most Wanted Domains, so I knew it was one of Mike’s great domain names. If you don’t know already, Mike has one of the nicest privately owned domain portfolios assembled.

After a bit more searching around the site, I saw that it is a custom-built Trafficz site.  I really like what they did for Mike, and it goes to show that if you have a great domain name that gets traffic, you might want to ask your parking provider to build a custom site.  Not only can you build something that’s more likely to be listed in search engines, you will also create a nice looking site that is compelling to click through for more information.

Thumbs up to Trafficz and to Mike on this one.

I know it’s a holiday weekend, but I think everyone needs to take a few minutes to read Ron Jackson’s interview of Rick Schwartz. In the domain space, Rick has been something like a soothsayer, and when he speaks, I listen. While we don’t all own the same quality domain names as Rick, the things he is saying does affect all domain investors.

If or when Google decides to pull the plug and PPC as we know it drastically changes, there is going to be a lot of tumult in the industry. While quickly and efficiently monetizing domain names will be difficult and domain values will be impacted, domain owners need to keep the following things in mind:

• Businesses who want to be online need a domain name
• Advertisers will still want to advertise on relevant domain names
• People will continue typing-in domain names looking for products or services
• Easy to remember and relevant domain names are the most desired
• Consumers typically have certain web browsing patterns, and many type in their keyword and .com as a starting point

The point is that while making easy money from domain names won’t be possible, there are still going to be plenty of opportunities in the domain space. Some people will have to sell more than they have in the past in order to maintain the same revenue levels, so some deals may be had.  I recommend buying domain names that would make sense to be developed. Just because a domain name did well parked, doesn’t mean that it would be good to develop.

I still believe the greatest ongoing revenue generating opportunity is selling advertising space directly to advertisers on developed websites. I believe websites are the newspapers of decades ago. Websites get the eyeballs that newspapers once received, and advertisers want to reach them. Motivated consumers are untapped leads that businesses would like to acquire.

I also believe that as companies continue to migrate their business online, more will get it, and more will want (or even need) the domain name that describes their business or industry. Generic and category defining domain names are rare, and they hold considerable value. Selling domain names to end users that get it will be the driving force behind the future growth of domain values.

Changing times call for changing strategies.  Those who adapt and adopt will survive, and those who sit back will not. Who knows when all of this will happen, but I think it’s important to be prepared for the worst. Read Rick’s interview and judge for yourself.