When I read this story, my jaw hit the floor…several times. This is an incredible story about a domainer named Kevin Ham. Ham is probably the most powerful dotcom mogul you have never heard of.

One of the amazing things about Ham is that he worked out a special deal with the government of Cameroon to register many common one-word domains. The catch is that Cameroon uses .cm as their extension and many people mistakingly type .cm instead of .com.

Another interesting tidbit:

Ham is a devout Christian, and he spends $31,000 to add Christianrock.com to his collection, which already includes God.com and Satan.com. When it’s all over, Ham strolls to the table near the exit and writes a check for $650,000. It’s a cheap afternoon.

Given Ham’s reach on the Web, his sites receive 30 million unique visitors a month. It’s unbelievable that so few people know about him.

Read the full article here…

Tell me what you think of this guy after you have fully read the article.

It has been a while since I have written a post about domain investing, otherwise known as domaining. Domaining is an interesting business and one which I have covered quite thoroughly in the past. A few months ago, my business partners and I sat down with a group of domain investing moguls, a company called DotVentures, who own a 50 million dollar collection of domains. They expect their domain collection to be worth over $1 billion within the next few years. DotVentures is also in the process of developing a proprietary way of turning undeveloped domains into profitable and traffic-driving minisites.

Several years ago, a Vancouver man by the name of Yun Ye, sold his large collection of domains to a Seattled-based investment company called Marchex for $164 million. Regularly, domains are being sold for tens of thousands of dollars.

Remember, everyone who originally registered these domains paid the regular registration fee of $7-10. Think about the return on investment if you register a domain for $7 and sell it for $7,000. Not only that, but how much effort did it take you to see that kind return? That is why the field of domaining is becoming more popular every day.

To anyone who is curious about this field of Internet specialization, there are many ways to learn how to get started in domaining. My favorite news source for domaining-related information is the Daily Domainer. They offer an excellent free newsletter that provides you with all of the latest news, rumors, and most recent mind-blowing domain sales.

Another great guide to learn how to get started in domain investing is called The Art of Domaining. The Art of Domaining is an ebook by a good friend of mine, Jason Drohn Jason has been involved in domaining for several years and has made a tidy five-figure in the process.

The Art of Domaining is a complete guide dedicated to professional domaining. Whether you are a beginner looking to learn about the industry or a domaining professional, this a great resource to learn how to grab a piece of the domaining pie.

For more information about domain investing, visit the Daily Domainer or read The Art of Domaining.

Please note: this is NOT a paid post and I receive no commission if you choose to buy The Art of Domaining.

It’s been a month now since I first installed the Democracy WordPress poll plugin. My first poll question was conceived after I met with a domain investing mogul, Matthew O’Brien of DotVentures.

To summarize the meeting, Mr. O’Brien of DotVentures is in the midst of developing a new alternative to parking domain pages. What is domain parking? You know when type in a web site address and you just see a page of links? That is domain parking. Domain parkers simply register domains to park the pages with contextual advertising links, and most often, have no intention of ever developing them. Parked domains containing contextual ads make millions of dollars every year. If they have a good domain, such as stockmarketquotes.com, for example, they will get a ton of natural traffic, and owning that domain would be very profitable.

Anyway, Mr. O’Brien is in the process of developing proprietary software which will create useful and unique mini web sites out of undeveloped domains. Additionally, these mini sites will utilize special search marketing software that will create more organic (search engine) traffic than most parked pages receive.

After meeting with DotVentures and learning about the future of domaining, I became convinced that domain parking was going the way of the dodo bird. For more information about the future of domaining, please read my meeting with a domain investing mogul.

My poll question was: “Is domain parking dead?” 90 people voted, total.

48 people (53% of all votes) voted they HOPE domain parking is dead.

12 people (13%) voted domain parking IS dead.

30 people (33%) voted they think domain parking is NOT dead.

According to DomainTools, there are over 86 million domains registered currently (of the main TLD’s, .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, and .us). A huge percentage of those domains are undeveloped and simply sitting there doing nothing. Imagine those domains were providing the web with useful content.

I came across an interesting article questioning the ethical implications of parked domains combined with contextual advertising. In the article, the author says:

To make money with contextual advertising you want your content to be bad. Yes, you want it to be bad. You do not want the user to like what you have on the webpage or find what they are looking for in hopes that after not finding it, they will either do another search in your embedded Google search box or they will click one of the contextual ads on the page in hopes of finding what they came there to find.

The defenders of this type of website say they are “just another way for users to search and find what they are looking for.” What a crock. If that page never existed, the user would have clicked to a relevant website in the first place.

Read more…

I understand the Internet is really just one big advertisement, but it is hard to argue that parked domains are doing anything more than just contributing to net-garbage. The same can be said about TV and commercials, however. Most TV is just garbage, but there is still plenty of useful and informational content. After you finish reading that article, tell me what you think about domain parking and if it is truly ethical.

All hail democracy! No, not the system of government. I am talking about the new AJAX WordPress plugin, Democracy.

Democracy is a sweet little plugin that lets you insert a poll into your blog. It is compiled in AJAX, so it looks delicious, is easy to work with, and performs miracles. You can test it out on the sidebar of my blog. I will be adding a new poll question every month.

My first poll question is: Is domain parking dead? Read my post on Our Meeting with a Domain Investing Mogul: Domain Parking Is Dead to learn more about why it seems like domain parking is going to soon be a thing of the past.

New technologies are emerging that are allowing unique, high-quality web sites to be created automatically based on a few keywords. We first heard about this concept with WhyPark, a new company which allows you to easily replace your traditional parked-domain pages with full content-driven minisites. WhyPark also allows you to use your own advertising code, which will increase your income compared to Sedo, which splits the ad revenue with you.

However, WhyPark is only at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to creating unique content sites for parked pages. Searchmarketing LLC, a company in my hometown of Scottsdale, Arizona is in the early stages of forever changing domain parking and web development as we know it.

For more information:

• Download the AJAX Polling Plugin “Democracy”
• Read more about my meeting with a domain investing mogul
• Learn more about WhyPark’s new content creation technology

Those of you who read this blog regularly know that I was recently contacted by a Phoenix, Arizona-based company called DotVentures. I wrote about DotVentures a while back because I saw their commercial on MSNBC and was interested in their innovative way of developing and selling domains.

Last Tuesday morning, I, along with my two business partners, Matt and Josh, met with the president of Dot Ventures, Matthew O’Brien. Mr. O’Brien also owns a search marketing company fittingly called Searchmarketing, LLC.

DotVentures is one of the first companies I have seen that treats domain investing as a business. My business partners and I currently own around 160 domains. We started a company to help sell our domains called Dot Com Moguls. Naturally, we were interested in meeting with DotVentures to find out how they could help us market and possibly develop our large collection of domains. DotVentures is conveniently located only a few miles from us, here in Scottsdale, Arizona.

DotVentures is unlike traditional domain brokering firms, in that their main purpose is NOT to simply broker the sales of domains. Instead, they help domain investors create value in their domains by developing them into microsites which produce sustainable income and build traffic over time. A few years down the road, they assist in brokering the sale of these domains for a huge ROI.

DotVentures currently owns thousands of domains in a portfolio worth an estimated 50 million dollars. They anticipate their portfolio will be worth over 1 billion dollars in a few years. This is testament to the incredible growth domain investing will see over the next few years.

Although they are still in early stages of development, their primary company objective is to allow individuals to invest in their portfolio of domains they own. After a client makes an initial investment, their search marketing company, Searchmarketing, LLC build an SEO-optimized website using patented technologies designed to generate traffic and produce monthly income. The client keeps all of the monthly income from the domains. After a few years of generating sustainable traffic to the domain, they help broker the sale and split the profit with the client 50/50.

Shortcomings of Traditional Domain Parking and Web Development

Mr. O’Brien has been in the web development business for over 15 years. He has had a great deal of experience and made several key observations about its shortcomings and how it could be improved upon.

According to Mr. O’Brien, despite having a profitable development company, it is difficult to achieve large-scale growth when you are employing other web designers. You can only hire so many people to work on so many projects. Also, completing web sites from scratch can be a very time consuming process. The limited scaleability of web development companies is the reason we have not seen the emergence of any leading, large-sized development studios.

The other shortfall with the current state of the web development industry is in the concept of search marketing. When you build a web site from scratch, it has no back-linking and no page ranking. Generating consistent traffic takes many months if not years. This is also true for domain parking. It is very difficult to get Google to display high page rankings for parked domains.

To help better understand this concept, think about this metaphor: One does not buy a physical retail location because of its numerical address – 123 Park Lane does not mean anything. One buys a physical retail spot because of the amount of traffic it or its surrounding area receives. As Donald Trump says, “Location, location, location!”

Having the best domain in the world means nothing if you do not have any page ranking or traffic. Building traffic and page ranking is a very time-consuming process.

Opportunity to Improve Domain Parking and Web Development

The future of web development is no longer going to be about registering a domain name and building a web site from scratch. It is going to become the process of taking a preexisting domain name that already receives traffic and then turning it into a prime location for a business. Selling highly-trafficked domains will resuilt in a much higher ROI for the investor than developing a web site from scratch.

Searchmarketing and DotVentures are unlike any other web development companies out there right now. Searchmarketing has built several patented technologies which generate page content and a useful web site automatically. Think about taking a collection of parked domains, and instantly attaching unique content and an attractive design. This is similar to WhyPark’s service, but Searchmarketing promises a far more interactivity built into these domains. For example, imagine having an instant social-networking web site built into a parked domain. Now, when you properly SEO-optimize these sites, you have the potential to get much higher page rankings and an increase in return visitors.

Many people agree this is the direction web development is going in – instead of parking domains or building sites from scratch, web sites will be developed into vertically-marketed portals which provide far more value to the web than a parked page or a static web site.

I have read of similar ideas from only one other person, a man by the name of Richard Rosenblatt. Mr. Rosenblatt helped broker the deal of MySpace to Newscorp several months ago. He now owns a company called Demand Media which is reportedly working on similar technologies. It will be interesting how Mr. O’Brien and Mr. Rosenblatt’s companies change the worlds of web development and domain parking over the next year.

An Exciting Time is Upon Us

Over the next year, I am sure you will hear about DotVentures and Searchmarketing if you have not already. Like I mentioned earlier, DotVentures is already running commercials on MSNBC. Now is the perfect time to get into the business of domain investing. Mr. O’Brien also talked about working with domainers who already own a large collection of domains, like us.

My web development business, infinFX, will be working with Searchmarketing, LLC over the next year to develop a handful of our 160+ domains into profitable microsites. We are also in talks to possibly license their patented technologies to help increase traffic and pagerankings for some of our existing web sites. We will keep you updated over the next few months as our relationship with DotVentures, LLC and Search Marketing, LLC pans out.

It seems like domain parking will soon be a thing of the past. That means we could see a major improvement to the quality of the Internet over the next few years.

What do you think? Is domain parking and traditional web development going in the same direction as the dodo bird? Cast your vote in the new poll (see the sidebar, to the right).

For more information, visit:

• Dot Ventures, LLC
• Search Marketing, LLC

Well, today, ironically enough, I received a phone call from Joel at DotVentures! He had read my blog and knew I was interested in their company. Joel proceeded to tell me a little about DotVentures, including about their $50 million inventory of domains and their plans to turn it into a billion dollar portfolio within a few years! As AnthonyC noted in my previous post, their company works kind of like a stock brokerage firm – you invest in domains they already own. Through this investment, they build an SEO-optimized website and proceed to split the advertising revenue with you 50/50.

This is an interesting business model. However, instead of investing directly in their domains, I am more interested in developing ours. Some of the domains in our collection receive a large amount of type-in traffic. We also own a premium collection of Internet marketing and iPhone-related domains. It is becoming clearer that the best way to make money in domain investing is to develop the domains into actual web sites, and then sell them after a few years. This way, your sites already have backlinks, are indexed by search engines, and most importantly, have a proven sustainable income stream.

Anyway, we are sitting down with the owners of DotVentures this Tuesday morning. It should be a very interesting meeting. These are people who have been in the domain investing business for 15 years. We are preparing a list of questions, and we will document the interview and let you how it goes. Let me know if there are any particular questions you would like us to ask these domain investing pro’s. We will definitely takes your questions into consideration.

Update – Joel at DotVentures has informed me that in fact, you do not split the monthly advertising revenue. The only profit split with DotVentures comes when the domain is sold after a few years. [See his comment below for reference.]

One domain investing company in particular, DotVentures, is located a few miles down the road from me in Phoenix, Arizona. Their web site, domaininvesting.com, is a great supreme domain name in-of-itself and sums up what they do to a tee. Given that they are so close physically and so closely related to my new venture, Dot Com Moguls, we thought it would be fitting to try to arrange an interview with the Director.

From their web site:

DotVentures, LLC is a privately held company headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. DotVentures facilitates successful investments in Internet domain names utilizing a proprietary process involving selection, monetization & support paired with a patent pending technology.

My business partner, Josh, is currently in the process of completing a research project for school on, you guessed it, domain investing. Josh hopes to set-up a sit down interview with DotVentures in the near future to get more information about their company and what they envision for the future of domain investing.

In the meantime, check out their web site, and let us know if there are any particular questions you would like us to ask them. We will certainly take your questions into consideration when and if Josh gets to sit down and interview them.

So…what questions would YOU ask a professional domain investing firm?

Domain investing is bigger than it ever has been. There are dozens of registrars and dozens of venues in which to sell your domain. There is even domain financing if you need it. Very soon, you will even be able to lease your domain, a service which promises to be more profitable than parking. So, you think you may have a hot domain…where do you sell it?

There are several major web sites which specialize in “brokering” domains. Today, we will explore some of the most popular and upcoming web venues for selling in the domain name aftermarket. Note, the aftermarket refers to domains that have already been purchased and are being sold for a premium price. What kind of premium prices? See my post about The High-Price of High-Profile Domains.

Sedo – One of the largest domain name resellers is a Massachusetts-based comany, Sedo.com. Sedo has over 300,000 members and 5 million domains in its database. They sell well over 1,500 domains per month.

Sedo offers parking for its domain customers and a marketplace for buyers to browse. Sedo recently began selectively auctioning domains. There auction works only when someone decides to “make an offer” for one of your domains, and only at this point will you be able to decide whether it goes to auction. This fact and having to share the ad revenue are very limiting factors of Sedo. Sedo’s parking services are free, but like I mentioned, you are sharing the revenue with Sedo. Listing your domain in their marketplace is also free, but they take 10% commission if a domain sells. One other limiting factor is that you are not allowed to sell your domains in other venues once you are listed with Sedo. I used to park my domains with Sedo until I discovered WhyPark’s superior service (more on that later).

GreatDomains – Great Domains is the “trusted marketplace for domain names.” They are owned by VeriSign and contain a huge portfolio of high and low priced domains. I have not had any experience with Great Domains, but their portfolio of domains being sold is impressive. Like Sedo, they charge a 10% commission fee upon sale.

SnapNames – SnapNames created one of the first commercially available technologies for “back-ordering” registered domain anames and snapping them up as they become available. Their technology, SnapBack, has been used by thousands of customers to secure hundreds of thousands of domain names. SnapNames offers 3-day auction services. They claim they are “the largest daily auction of investment grade domain names.” They specialize in expired and deleted domain names.

The Domain Name Aftermarket – All domains that expire under GoDaddy’s user account are reregistered by Daddy himself. GoDaddy runs TDNAM.com (The Domain Name Aftermarket) as an auction site for its domains and the domains of other resellers. TDNAM offer two price plans, Basic and Premium. The basic annual membership fee is only $4.99 per domain and there is a small (5-7%) comission you must pay upon sale. Premium memberships offer upgraded visibility for relatively low cost (less than Sedo’s). From what I have heard, TDNAM has been moderately succesful at selling its domains, although not as successful as Sedo, at least in the number of raw domains sold.

WhyPark.com – This is a new domain parking service, which I talked about in the article “Domain Name Parking Has Changed Forever.” I first heard about WhyPark from the Daily Domainer, a great source for domains news. WhyPark provides the unique service of automatically adding revelent content and articles to your parked pages. Not only that, but you use your own advertising network, such as Adsense or YPN. Now, you do not have to share the costs with Sedo. WhyPark also offers automatic Google Sitemap creation which helps your pages get indexed by Google, something that doesn’t happen with any other domain parking service.

There are many places to sell your domain, but there is never any guarantee you will sell for the price you want. Jason Drohn wrote an interesting article that talks about minimizing the risk of domain investing. Domain investing is very much a “digital lottery,” as Jason so kindly puts it. You are spending a small amount of money hoping for a huge return. Luckily, your chances of making money with domains is much greater than winning the lottery.

Obviously the best way to sell a domains is when a private individual who contacts you about it. If someone wants what you have, they will be willing to pay a premium for it, much more so than if it goes to auction. Many domain resellers buy domains on the aftermarket and then resell them for their own profit. In a future article, I will talk about how to find the right types of people to buy your domain.

Have any of you successfully sold domains at another venue? Please share your experiences as I am curious to learn other methods and places to sell domains.

Update: Kate from Sedo chimed in and let me know that Sedo DOES allow advertising your domains in multiple places. Thanks for the update, Kate!

Domain parking is the process of buying a domain name and then displaying revenue-generating advertisements on it. The hope is that people will type in your domain address and click on the links. The problem is that these “parked domans” are not indexed by search engines and they display no relevent content other than contextual ads. WhyPark, a new domain parking service, is determined to change this.

WhyPark allows you to easily automatically add high quality, contextually-relevent articles to parked pages using keywords you select. Traditional “parked pages” are now a thing of the past. Hundreds of useful articles will be displayed on your site, providing your visitors with content they will find useful and worth reading. All articles are automatically provided by WhyPark.

The best part is that WhyPark allows you to select the advertising network of your choice for each domain. Now, you do not have to split the advertising cut like you do with other domain parking services, such as Sedo or Fabulous. The articles encourage type-in and link traffic visitors to your domain and increase the time they spend at your site (and the chance that they will click on an ad).

Benefits of WhyPark:

• Keyword rich titles on every page
• Easy to follow index pages and automatically updated site maps
• High keyword density. Since the only articles that appear on your web site are related to the exact keywords you’ve chosen, the result is a themed, content-rich web site with high keyword density
• Layout and code optimized for search engines
• New content is added daily keeping search engines coming back for more
• Duplicate content is a thing of the past; rotating article introductions on every page are based on your keywords and every page is always unique
• Automated Google Sitemap creation
• Easily create new, custom pages for your website in seconds

Here are a few example web sites from our domain portfolio:
www.busymatch.com
www.easyessaywriter.com

Theoretically, WhyPark’s unique service should at least double your advertising profits because you are no longer sharing the ad revenue. Plus, having your site indexed by search engines will provide for more link-in traffic. The price is a one-time fee of $99 for up to 100 domains. This works out to, obviously, $1 per domian. That is an incredible value to have quality content for $1 per page. All you need to do to get set up is join WhyPark.com and change the nameservers over to WhyPark. They even provide the hosting.

Learn more about WhyPark.com…

So here I am, a few short months later, ready to get back into the world of blogging. However, this time my attempt at blogging will be much more focused. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Nate Whitehill and I am a 22-year old student and web entrepreneur. I created this blog to act as a resource for those thinking about starting or who already own their web-based business.

My day job and main business is a web marketing and e-commerce company, infinFX. However, recently, I have become very affixed in the field of domaining. Domaining is the act of buying and selling of high-profile domains. For example, vodka.com sold a few months ago for $3 million. It was purchased by Russian Standard Vodka.

Sounds crazy, huh? A simple web address selling for such a huge amount of money. This is not uncommon though. Having a good domain name not only adds credibility to your business, but it allows people to find you easier. When many people search for things on the ‘net, they simply type what they are looking for (in this case, vodka) and then .com.

That sale of Vodka.com was nothing compared to Sex.com, which sold last year for $12 million. This also pales in comparison to Gambling.com, which sold for $20 million. Here is a list of the top 10 domain sales of all time.

10. $3.3M – Wine.com
9. $3.5M – Shop.com
8. $5.0M – AsSeenOnTV.com
7. $5.0M – Korea.com
6. $5.5M – Casino.com
5. $6.0M – Diamond.com
4. $7.0M – Beer.com
3. $7.5M – Business.com
2. $12M – Sex.com
1. $20M – Gambling.com

Source: VIPClub.com

Kinda makes you want to start investing in domain names, huh? My domain brokering business, Dot Com Moguls, currently owns about 140 domains. We are selling a few right now, but I will post more on that later.