Recently, I saw that SnapNames was increasing their minimum fee on deleted names from $59 to $69.  I can understand this decision to keep up with NameJet.

Much to my surprise I logged on to SnapNames today and came across OrangeRoofing.com, a recently expired domain that was scheduled for a pre-release auction.  Unlike the usual $119 for Register.com pre-release names, this domain had a minimum offer of  $950!

A $950 expiring domain at SnapNames

And below is the Whois record.

I came across a recent article at Domain Name Wire that cited  a PCPro.co.uk article announcing that Google will rank .co as international domain if the content is globally targeted, as opposed to just ranking them for Colombia.

The article states:

While the .co domain is still assigned to Colombia at the moment, a Google spokesperson said that would soon change. “We will rank .co domains appropriately if the content is globally targeted. Webmasters will soon have the functionality to be able to specify this by using the geotargeting options in Google Webmaster Tools.”

I really don’t see this as a big deal nor an extra benefit  to buying .co domains as international targeting is common.  Here are a few other Google searches returning country code domains outside of the native country:

• “url shortener” returns bit.ly as the #1 ranking (Liberia)
• “despicable me movie” returns despicable.me as the #1 ranking (Montenegro)
• “justin” returns popular live video streaming site Justin.tv (Tuvalu)
• “matt” returns WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg’s blog (Trinidad and Tobago)
• “free internet radio” returns Last.fm (Federated States of Micronesia)

Now the real bonus would be if Google were to give .co domains the exact match bonus internationally as is done with .com, .net, and .org.  I don’t see that happening anytime soon though.

Being a work-at-home entrepreneur with a 2-year old running around doesn’t allow for much free time.  Usually that free time is spent outside, but with us approaching 100 degrees here in Texas, we are stuck inside many evenings.

Well this weekend, we had an expiring Amazon On Demand coupon and decided to rent Hot Tub Time Machine.  It was crude and certainly a movie to watch after the kids are asleep, but it was entertaining.  The premise is that four guys on a weekend retreat stumble across a Hot Tub Time Machine.  The time machine takes them back to 1986, when there were only 60 domain names registered and none were in the Top 10 Most Expensive Domains sold.

At one point, Rob Cordry’s character realizes he already knows the future and can change it.

Here’s the line from the trailer, skip to 1:55

Change time, change the future…
There’s money to be made here, man? We could invent iPods.
A Prius. Match.com. Short ribs.
We could combine Viagra with Twitter.
What?
Twitagra! Boom!
…and kick some past…

My first domain name was registered for me by a friend while I was in college in 1996 but a few years later abandoned the site and moved on.  Later when Penny and I got married in 1999, I bought a few more domain names related to my cattle software business but didn’t buy anything else that I didn’t think I “needed.”  If only I had a Hot Tub Time Machine.

The startup interview blog Mixergy recently had a clip from an interview with the group coupon service Groupon and how Groupon acquired the Groupon.com domain.

The U.S. based company started out operating on a subdomain but decided they wanted to purchase Groupon.com from the owner, a U.K.-based individual.   Their initial contact with the domain owner was unsuccessfully met with a “not interested.”  A few months later, they contacted the owner and were again told the owner did not want to sell.  Out of curiosity, they asked the owner of his intentions, which was to create a group coupon service – just as they had planned.  The U.S. based company offered to work with the domain owner on extending their Groupon concept to Europe, but were again met with a “not interested.”

The U.S. based company continued operating and eventually filed a trademark for “Groupon” – a trademark that was extended to England.

I’ll let the U.S. based company pick up from here…

We contact him and say, ‘Hey, you can launch that thing, but you can’t use the name Groupon because we have a trademark on it.’

So then, he decided he wanted to sell.

I think we bought it in May 2009 or something like that for maybe $250,000, which seemed like a lot at the time and now it seems cheap.

I’ll bet $250,000  does sound cheap to Groupon as they have received $173 million in funding according to CrunchBase.  However, unless I already had a business in place, I wouldn’t complain if I were the seller – well played.

There’s plenty more discussion on the startup community HackerNews here and here, including questioning the possible legal ticking time bomb of the trademark filing where Groupon declares:

to the best of his/her knowledge and belief no other person, firm, corporation, or association has the right to use the mark in commerce,

I’m a big fan of Domain Tools for researching domain name information including whois history, name server history, related names, and just about anything else you can imagine.  Often times, I’ll simply type out the full address whois.domaintools.com/example.com rather than actually going to the domain name and clicking a toolbar add-on.  I navigate directly because I don’t like popups from parking pages and don’t want to possibly alert the owner that I have visited their site.

Lately, I’ve found myself using Google Chrome as my main web browser because it’s just blazing fast.  However, I didn’t like how the location bar would fill in previous requests that I had to backspace over before entering the domain I wanted to research.

Well here’s an easy solution to quick Domain Tools lookups with Google Chrome

Step 1 – Go to Settings, find Default Search and click on ‘Manage’

Step 2 – Click the + sign to add a new search engine

Step 3 – Type “dt example.com” and hit enter – you will be taken directly to Domain Tools for the specified domain

Do you have more domain names than you do websites? If you answered “Yes” and are just leaving those extra domain names showing your registrar’s Coming Soon page full of ads, you are leaving money on the table.

I’ve found forwarding domains to be a great way of bringing additional visitors to my sites and it’s not uncommon for me to point a half dozen or more domain names to a single site.

In this post, I’ll use my online classified service I’ve created to help my fellow Texas Longhorn breeders economically market their cattle, The Longhorn Source.

A few types of domain names

Generic domains
Direct navigation is when a visitor navigates to a website directly through their browser bar as opposed to clicking a search result or link. For example, someone may either type LonghornCows.com (instinctively appending the .com) or simply type Longhorn Cows and the browser automatically turn that into a url.

Alternative domains
Many of our visitors hear about us through word-of-mouth or see an ad in a magazine, we need to make sure they can find our site by typing our domain name in the browser. If you sometimes refer to your site as “The” or “A”, it’s a good idea to obtain the appropriate alternatives. For example, TheLonghornSource.com redirects to our main site. You may also redirect your .net and .org if you have them.

Expired domains
These are domain names that have become available after the previous owner failed to pay the yearly renewal. The idea with expired domain names is that you may potentially receive the search ranking boost as well as clicks from visitors who are attempting to reach the previous site.

It’s worth noting that Google is not a big fan of website owners buying expired domain names to boost search rankings and therefore says to not expect search ranking credit for the links during the domain’s previous life. Also, depending on whether the name is generic in nature or potentially a trademark, it may create legal or ethical issues that you may not want to be associated with.

Tracking Domain Name Redirects with Google Analytics

As the old saying goes, “you can’t manage what you don’t measure”. Fortunately, measuring the effectiveness of domain name redirections is easy using Google Analytics and the Google Analytics URL Builder. This tool helps you create a special URL that includes tracking information. After creating your tracking URL, update the URL forwarding at your domain registrar to use this new URL instead of simply the domain name.

Google Analytics URL Builder Tool

Reaping the benefits of better information

After you’ve been redirecting your domain names with the new tracking URLS for a few days, log in to your Google Analytics account and from the left sidebar choose Traffic Sources > All Traffic Sources. Next in the main area of the screen, you will notice a dropdown box titled “Show:” with the value of Source Medium. Change this to Medium. Now you should see a Medium of “domains” – click this link. For quick access in the future, click the “Add to Dashboard” button in the toolbar area at the top of the page.

GA Report showing visits by domain name

Questions, comments, corrections? I welcome any and all feedback.

I was recently interviewed by Brian Null for a segment entitled “What’s Your MO?” on his new entrepreneurship blog at MO.com. Brian has a successful track record in entrepreneurship having sold OfficeSupply.com, GolfCourses.com, and Saws.com among others so I’m excited to see what he does with MO.com.

I really like Brian’s slogan “a casual hangout for the serious entrepreneur”. Much of who I am and how I run my businesses has been influenced by conversations with other entrepreneurs in a causal setting – usually in pastures and on back porches in my case. The nice thing about a casual environment is that it gives people the opportunity to focus on the conversation and networking rather than the day-to-day hustle of life.

Read the Interview or browse the MO.com entrepreneurship website