I know this probably sounds strange, but I am excited for the Fall. Don’t get me wrong, I like the warm summer months, but being from the north, I love the colder months more. It also seems like people are more focused on business in the Fall and Winter than during the Summer.

This Summer has moved at a relaxing pace, and I believe things will pick up in a couple of weeks.

One thing you might want to do to pick up the pace is to reconnect with people who have either made offers to you to purchase a domain name, or you can recontact people that you have previously emailed to buy domain names. I’ve received a couple of emails in the last two days from people I had contacted a while back, so perhaps that’s indicitive of people looking to get back to business.

I also find that a second follow-up email on a domain inquiry can help move things along. Keep in mind that there are still people out there who don’t check email every day, and your email may have been read along with a bunch of others. Every few months, I look through my sent inquiries and see if there’s anything I want to reconnect on, and I follow up with an email or phone call.

The third quarter is in full swing, and we will soon be in the holiday season and end of the year, where people may value extra cash over non-performing domain names. Plant the seed now and work to make your next deal your best deal of the year.

Hope you’re having a nice, long weekend if you’re in the US and if you’re not US-based, I hope your week gets off to a strong start. Here are a few updates and thoughts from me as the week begins.

- There was an interesting article on Econsultancy this morning.  According to the author, Ian Harris the CEO and founder of Search Laboratory, “Parked domains are generally low quality resources.” I tend to disagree with this, especially on generic domain names that people type-in to their browsers in lieu of using a search engine. If someone wants a personal loan and they end up on PersonalLoans.com, I would imagine these visitors are good prospects for the advertisers whose links they click.

- I was really surprised when Rick Schwartz announced I had 3 TRAFFIC Award nominations.  Thank you to whomever nominated me for the awards. I personally believe Juan Calle is deserving of the Domainer of the Year award for his big successes so far this year with the .CO Registry, not to mention his other Internet companies that operate on great domain names. He knows this business well, and it’s been fun learning about Juan and what he has done.

- It is an honor to be nominated in the Developer of the Year category with several friends. Keith’s primary website, Vibrator.com, has done extraordinarily well, and he’s on the road to success with Rio.com. I’ve mentioned Fred’s projects several times, and we’re obviously close with his company building out Burbank.com for my company. Rob Grant’s portfolio of real estate and Adirondacks-related domain names and websites is unmatchable. Rob Monster’s Epik platform is helping domain investors earn money with their underperforming domain names, and his Epik conference is going to help a whole lot of domain investors. Finally, Shaun’s Kelowna.com design was an inspiration for two of my geodomain names, not to mention his recently launched TorontoJobs.com website. There are a lot of successful developers working in the domain space these days, and it is cool even to be considered.

- I continue to receive emails and blog comments offering names for sale that need to be sold “urgently.” I assure you that this isn’t the right way to go about things, unless you either have great domain names or I know you well. If you are urgently trying to sell domain names, you should either hire a broker, post on forums (not spamming blogs), or seek out end users rather than domain investors.

- I heard a horrible story this weekend. A fraternity brother of mine (two years older than me) was fishing with his father on Lake Oswego in New York a couple of weeks ago. They weren’t wearing life jackets and their boat capsized a couple miles from shore. My fraternity brother was able to hang on to the boat until help arrived but his father couldn’t and drowned. They were both experienced boaters and fishermen. Makes you realize the importance of life jackets when you’re on the water.

As you know by now, Epik will be holding a live auction in conjunction with its Development Conference in less than two weeks. I saw a list with many of the domain names that will be auctioned by Moniker/Snapnames, and I wanted to share some of them with you. One of the neat things is that each domain name will come with an Epik-built site.

You can see more information about the auction on the Snapnames website once the final sales list is announced.

• WiFi.com
• Maid.com
• ETF.com
• Poster.com
• Slideshow.com
• Collision.com
• Haircare.com
• HardDrives.com
• EarMuffs.com
• Saws.com
• Spoons.com
• GolfSet.com
• BabyDecor.com

Visit the Epik Developers’ Conference website to get more details on the conference, auction, and bidding.

There was a nice article on the Huffington Post about Juan Calle and the .CO Registry. Aside from the mildly insulting comment that seems to equate domain parking with cybersquatting, it’s a pretty good article about the Registry and its marketing efforts, which have been led by Calle, Lori Anne Wardi, and their marketing team.

The article discusses how Calle and his company went up against a registry powerhouse to get the rights to administer the .CO Registry and came out on top. Additionally, the Registry’s efforts to combat cybersquatting are also mentioned in the article. You can read a bit about those efforts in a previously written article.

One thing the article only briefly mentions is Calle’s previous Internet success. One of Calle’s companies, Straat Investments, owns and operates websites like ParisHotels.com, MiamiHotels.com, LondonHotels.com, and many other great cityHotels.com domain names through its Federated Travel brand.

Congrats to Calle and his hard working team at the CO Registry. This has been a hell of a year for him, and in my opinion, he deserves the TRAFFIC Domainer of the Year award.

I bought ActingCoach.com several months ago hoping for a quick flip. I posted it for sale on forums, and I also received a few inquiries from end users (from the parking page), including one nice (profitable) offer. I passed on that offer hoping to receive more from another end user company, and when a better offer didn’t materialize, I decided to get back in touch with that acting coach to see if he was still interested.

As it sometimes goes, the acting coach who made the offer had opted to buy another name in the interim, and he wasn’t able to buy ActingCoach.com when I came back to offer it to him. Se la vie. In light of this, I decided I would develop it, although I wasn’t willing to spend the same amount of time (or money) it took to build my other directories.

In lieu of a full development project, I opted to work with WhyPark and the company’s new DomainApps offerings. I used the  directory option along with videos, Twitter feed, and article feed, and I incorporated it all with a customized template in similar fashion to DogWalker.com. You can either pay $200 for them to build a custom theme, or you can probably pay a bit less at a place like eLance and select a designer to build one for you (give the designer one of their templates to use the code for the WhyPark modules).

Because I had WhyPark customize the design for this project, the site was put together by Craig Rowe and his WhyPark development team, using the interface and tools they have for everyone to use. If you (or your designer) has any trouble setting it up, I would think Craig and his support team can help… it’s one of the nice things I’ve found about working with the company.

I also worked with Acroplex, LLC (better known by many as Acro) to create the site’s logo, which gives it more character. For a relatively small investment, a logo like this can make a world of difference. I also worked with a copywriter found on eLance to add custom articles, and the plan is to continue adding articles. It’s an inexpensive way to drive traffic to the website.

To market the new site, I intend to reach out to the same acting coaches and companies that opted to not buy the domain name. I will see if they’d like to be listed on the site for a small monthly fee. I know the market is smaller than DogWalker.com, but I paid less for the domain name than DogWalker.com. I also know the market is competitive, and acting classes are expensive.

One of the best things about this and working with WhyPark is that I can use this template on future directory development projects, which was what I first said when I learned about the new Apps. Having a good website is important, but being able to scale my business is more important. Additionally, unlike my WordPress-based websites, I am not responsible for data management, security updates, or plugin updates with my WhyPark site, which relieves me of a big burden.

WhyPark takes $1.00/month for every paying directory client.  I charge $5/month so that’s an 80/20 revenue share, but I have the ability to charge whatever I want.  Depending on sign ups, cancelation rate, and the competition, I will probably play around with the listing cost as the site gets more traffic.

For those who are interested and want to track the success of this site, here are its current SEO rankings (I’ve had a coming soon page up for a little over a month):

Acting Coach: #24 Google #10 Bing
Acting Coaches: #93 Google #113 Bing

I would not endeavor on a project like this if I owned a name like GreatActingCoach.com, ActingCoaching.com, or some other non-exact match domain name that would be difficult to rank in search engines. I chose ActingCoach.com because this is a profession that advertises online (competitively) and people are searching for acting coaches every day.

Disclaimer:

WhyPark is an advertiser on the RSS feed of my blog. The company did NOT ask me or pay me to post this article. I am NOT making any additional revenue if you or anyone signs up as a result of this program or builds websites using WhyPark. I am posting this disclaimer because it seems there are always going to be people who think there is nefarious intent with positive blog posts.