As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ve been considering renaming or rebranding F5 Domains. I have ended up deciding that this won’t strictly occur as planned. However, some things are changing.

On June 1, F5 Domains will cease holding any domains in a portfolio/for resale. We will strictly be a brokerage-only company. This is due to in particular, some large contracts we’ve agreed to recently for our brokerage work and realizing it’s what we’re best at.

F5 Domains will over the next 10 days commence a sell down of our portfolio. Following that, our remaining portfolio will be transferred to a to be announced company/division we’re launching on June 1 which will focus exclusively on portfolio sales. It will also be used as a marketplace for some of our higher quality brokered names.

A new website for F5 Domains and our new Domain Sales company will be launched and announced in the next few days.

I’ve heard a lot of people saying lately that parking is hopeless and that revenue is 5 cents a click on a lot of their domains etc. Here’s what you should do to maximise your revenue (well, it worked for us).

Keep good inventory and records
Set up a spreadsheet and keep a record of Domain, Reg Date, Exp Date, Registrar, Where Parked Now, and then a column for each parking company where you will put the average RPC for that domain. This will help you work out where you should be parking each domain.

Sign up everywhere
Sign up everywhere you can. Get yourself a membership with Fabulous, Parked, WhyPark, Bodis, SedoPro, DomainSponsor, TrafficZ, NameDrive, SmartName, BigJumbo/Skenzo. Then, get yourself an Above.com account to easily manage and view your statistics and link all your accounts to it.

Don’t set and forget
Don’t just add all your domains to one parking company, set the nameservers, and hope to do well. Cycle your domains through different parking companies every 30 days.

My recommendations to try first, in order; Fabulous, Parked, SedoPro, Bodis, then any others. Record all the figures in your spreadsheet, then go back through and set each domain to where it performed best. You can have this done automatically through Above.com, but I prefer to have manual control over this process and a full suite of information available to me.

Contact your account managers
Email your Fabulous, Parked, SedoPro etc account managers and ask what they can do to help you. Fabulous will optimise your domains if they’re performing poorly free of charge, Parked can make recommendations, SedoPro can also do these type of things. Also ask about your revenue share – most will match the revenue share you get elsewhere or even give you a better deal.

Be fair to your parking companies
Do not engage in arbitrage, click fraud, or dodgy practices to inflate your figures. It’s not worth your account, earnings, and reputation. Parking revenue is impacted by these activities on everyone, and I for one wish it did not exist as I would personally prefer my legitimate traffic be paid fairer and higher. Everyone can do their bit simply by being fair to the people helping you get paid!

Likewise, if you notice a problem with one of your own domains (weird traffic, strange CTR’s) contact your account manager and mention it. Better to get it fixed and resolved than lose your entire account and earnings.

Refer people

Referral links and programs with a lot of parking companies entitle you to 5-10% of your referred customers revenue for at least 12 months. Even if they earn $50 a month, that’s still $60 a year bonus in your pocket for no work at all.

Monitor and review
If your domain is still performing very poorly on an RPC basis but getting traffic, it’s time to develop. If revenues drop off, go back to your spreadsheet and find out who paid 2nd best and move the domain to them for 30 days and re-evaluate then.

It’s worth the effort!
We’re quickly moving to a spot where all of our domain renewal costs and expenses related to our inventory will be totally covered by parking revenue, so it’s basically becoming free to hold our portfolio. From what I can see so far, our parking revenue will be up around 450% by using these tactics.

Optimise your domains
Ask for help from your account manager for general guidance on how to do this on each platform. You can usually at the very least set keyworks. For Parked and Fabulous, you have massive customisation options to help yourself out. You usually only have to do this once or twice.

Register with Fabulous.com, try there first
You get free parking, DNS and EMail Management, Privacy and E-Lock for your High Value domains. The revenue for most domains is incredibly fair and overall the largest share of our domains will be remaining with Fabulous. Reporting is second to none and you get access to features to help sell your domains, we sell more domains through Fabulous’ tools than any other method other than end user contact. Contact your account manager, ask how they can help.

Your parking company will not mind
On an 80% revenue share, if you’re getting 2 cents a click on a subset of domains your parking company isn’t going to mind you moving all the domain in this category elsewhere – they’ll understand you need to maximise revenue and they probably will not care about their 0.3 cents a click they’ll no longer earn.

Your time is money
Yes, this will take more time. Set aside a day or two to work on your parking. Go through and optimise all your domains on every registrar account and work at it all in one hit. For something you only have to do once in most cases, the ongoing rewards are well worth it.

Good luck!

For those that haven’t seen, wines.us just sold at TRAFFIC for 2300 EUR. Luckily for us, we picked up Shiraz.us which was on auction at Bido recently.

Here’s some stats from EstiBot.com:

Hopefully we’ve grabbed a bigger gem than we expected. Never underestimate your domains!

You can see the inventory and conduct a transaction at:

DNForum: http://www.dnforum.com/f496/300-good-domains-fixed-prices-between-5-25-a-thread-417225.html

or

NamePros: http://www.namepros.com/domains-for-sale-fixed-price/653399-300-good-domains-fixed-prices-between.html

Cheers!

Michael

MichaelPursey.(ext) will be an auto morphing blog site with lots of homosexual content scraped from gay tubes

Not sure what the other one is going to be yet but you’re not gonna like it.

I don’t understand how this guy is still trading despite a long history of this type of behaviour and abuse via blog posts, emails, forum postings, etc. He seems to have no respect for others, and anyone who competes with him is immediately a target, as is anyone who refuses to conform and comply to his silly demands. The weirdest thing about all this, is it’s totally self-destructive and he just couldn’t care less. It’s about time domainers sent a clear message that Mike Cohen and his horrendous conduct and management through  his litany of sub-standard businesses (WannaDevelop, DomainMassDevelopment, Domain Stryker, NL Web Holdings, mike031 on forums) are not welcome in the industry and support companies who treat people with dignity and respect.

Here’s some suggestions for companies to use instead if you require these type of services and do not wish to be defamed, threatened, or abused: Minisites.com, ContentMiniSites.com

And here’s some reading material on Mike’s behaviour:

Our last blog post

Our first PDF statement

Our second PDF statement

Well, in this case the pool of water is the general public and .CO is the strange object. The first thing I have to note is they’ve done a really good job of promoting the extension. Every registrar I visit and all the auction websites, forums, live event websites, and so forth have an orange .co banner letting everyone know they’re available from “just $29.99” and are in pre-registration. So far, I’ve pre-registered one really nice keyword but I’m always hesitant with this kind of thing. I bought up about twenty really nice .MX domains when that extension became available, at a premium price of about $100-140 depending on when I got them. I got some brilliant English and Spanish keywords, such as names.mx and I’ve actually even sold a few for a $xxx profit. It’s certainly not yet a goldmine, but they weren’t terrible buys.

.CM flopped horrendously and was exceptional in terms of how mismanaged the whole process was. .CO seems a little different though, I don’t think this is going to be as big as a “typo haven” as .cm, and I think people are actually going to use it properly. The extension makes sense, has traditional roots in general English, and it’s already used in 2LD’s in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and several other countries (.co.uk, .co.nz, etc). I understand .co is the assigned extension for Colombia, and it’s previously had strong use locally, so it’s also going to have the potential for Spanish words to be registered and turned into local resources.

Overall though, this is an international domain with international appeal because of how well used the term “Co” is. The registry has done a very good job at marketing the extension and making it look somewhat premium, unlike .cm which looked nasty and slightly shady alongside it’s inflated prices. The pricing seems pretty fair at the current Pre-Registration levels considering the wide berth of names available. Sure, it’s going to have some typo potential too, but I believe that’s being corrected slowly by smarter browser design or people simply using Google or punching in a term like “apple” into the browser and OpenDNS fixing up the rest.

Will it be a goldmine? Well, I really don’t know. I’ll probably pick up a series of names in the pre-registration phase and see how it goes – but it’s got a much better shot than a lot of the extension releases we’ve had recently.

Our featured company for this blog post is GoDaddy.com  (.CO Registrations Available from $29.99):

The Ten Commandments

Here’s ten rules to remember, refer back to these before you register your names.

1. Do not register anything which is trademarked. If it is, it’s worth $regfee and you’re probably looking at either a potential lawsuit or UDRP claim. Unless you have some major, major reason why – stay away from trademarks.

2. Say your name out loud. Say it with any punctuation or numbers you put in there – ie. domain-example1.com will be “domain hyphen example one dot com”. If it’s unwieldy, not pronounceable, or you stumble over it, it’s probably worthless.

3. Stay away from exotic extensions until you know what you’re doing. Stick to .com and .net. Don’t worry about the rest until you find your footing.

4. If your domain has more than one word, would you say it out loud to someone? ie. “RadBikes.com”. “Hey man, I got a rad bike today”. Sometimes, words just do not go together! ie. ToastyBikes.com “Hey man, I got a Toasty Bike today!”

5. Does it have any meaning to anyone else? Type the words into google. Look at how many results it has. The example I used before of “Rad Bikes” has 23,000 results. “Toasty Bike” has 104. Which do you think will be easier to find an end user for?

6. Would you pay another domainer  $25 for it? If not, why are you paying $10 for it and why do you expect someone else will pay $x,xxx for it. It isn’t going to happen. You need to see value in your own domains first.

7. Ask a friend. Ask a housemate. “Hey, does (Keyword)(Adjective).com sound like a good domain name?”. Try and ask someone who is and someone who isn’t familiar with domain names. You’ll be surprised how many domainers have delusions of grandeur about their awful domains.

8. Who are you going to sell it to? There’s a 99% chance the mountain will not come to you, you have to go to the mountain. Parking the name, listing it for $5,000 and waiting – you have a good chance of turning 80 before selling it. If you can’t think of who will buy it (I don’t mean “An insurance company. It has insurance in it.”, I mean “ACME Insurance, it’s relevant to them because it’s BudgetInsurance and that’s what they do”) you probably should reconsider registering it.

9. Why isn’t it registered? There’s millions and millions of .com’s registered. Why isn’t this one? There’s a good chance if it’s a brilliant name someone’s already thought of it, bought it, and probably sold it! Question why it hasn’t been already – it’s probably because Dog-Suitcases.net isn’t that great a name.

10. Has it been dropped before? Look at its WHOIS results on DomainTools and you may see it’s been registered before but dropped. Question why. Why did someone else pay ~$10 for the name but then let it expire a year later?

11. Keep learning. Revise your strategy. I started out with 10 commandments, now there’s 11. Don’t be afraid to admit you made an error. Leave the domain, park it, list it for sale for $XX and read, read, read. Then try again.

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Can you think of anything else that should be on this list? Leave a comment!

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Our featured company for this blog post is Estibot.com – research and appraise domain names:

Research and Appraise Domain Names

WhyPark

The guys at WhyPark have set up an interesting method of monetizing your domains without parking, and without shelling out big money for mini site development. That being said, they also offer some paid services to increase the usefulness of their services and maximize your returns. Basically, their software creates mini sites for you without you having to do too much hard work like installation of packages, sorting out hosting, adsense, all that kind of thing. However, if you choose to you can still customize your pages and add in AdSense or any other service you choose.

You get a choice of about 18 templates on a free account, and if you upgrade to one of their more advanced packages you get access to about that amount again which are in my opinion a bit nicer and better on the eyes. The main drawback at the moment is that WhyPark hasn’t got enough templates at this stage, but they’re apparently adding them all the time. By default, you get WhyPark ad network text links and search results delivered to your mini site, however you can replace this with an external advertiser if you choose. You can also use your Commission Junction account etc, to add in relevant affiliate ads on each page.

I’m very impressed at the bulk add feature available. I punched in about 20 domain names I wanted to set up as a test, and about 18 of them came out without any further editing needed. It even set all the domains to be for sale at the correct prices, and then I just went through and double checked them all fixing up the 2 that it couldn’t find the right keywords for (they were fairly niche domains). If you want more control, you can do each site individually, then order additional services such as directory listings and custom manual content creation which is chargeable at very reasonable rates.

Here’s a few sites I’ve created so far as examples:

• TopClassDomains.com
• BuyPolicies.com
• FleaBaths.com
• EncryptionCertificate.com
• CompanyDelaware.com
• FindCashLoan.com
• PokerWorkshop.com

Pretty good results for something that I chucked in the bulk addition tool and then just added some banners to! Overall, WhyPark is certainly worth a look if you’re not getting the results you wanted through parking or can’t afford to shell out for full mini site creation. Even if you can, you should still look at their premium services – the work they do is impressive.

- Our featured company for this blog post is WhyPark:

WhyPark - Free mini site creation

It’s become apparent that most of our income and profits come from domain brokerage rather than our own portfolio sales, parking, or development. When we started, we expected pretty much the opposite – we thought we’d see strong portfolio sales, and higher developed site PPC revenue as well as solid parking results. Our initial research showed this, but it turned out to not be the case. We also found there was a strong demand for low price appraisals, so we offered $4.95 automated appraisals and $14.95 manual appraisals – this was discontinued after a few months due to the fact the demand wasn’t really there and the names we did get asked to appraise were generally of extremely poor quality.

Brokerage has taken off in a big way though – we’ve now got over 20,000 domains under management and they’re of excellent quality, far better than what we can afford to acquire. The benefit here is that we get to use our sales experience and active selling methods to market these domains and get very high strike rates. We honed these skills on our own portfolio, locking away many early end user sales before we realised we could make more money by having single word and ultra premium domains even if we didn’t own them. This allows people to get the sales they’ve been looking for as no risk as we have no upfront fees, we don’t have to outlay for our own portfolio, and we have extreme incentive to sell since it’s all commission based.

The main things we’ve seen are this: People aren’t hugely fond of our name. F5 Domains doesn’t really roll off the tongue (Our name is actually Refresh Domains Pty Ltd, but we trade as F5 Domains). We’re looking at changing this to something a bit easier to remember and say on the phone without being misheard. People want financing for larger names, so we’re teaming up with some people over coming weeks to offer reasonably priced domain financing.

And the big one: People want obscene amounts of money for crap domains. We regularly get people who fail to read the Sell To Us page of our website and send us Really-Bad-Domain-12.org and want fifty thousand euro’s, all cash. It’s getting to the point we’re we are looking at suspending our buying program and just referring everyone to Bido.com to sell their domains, so they can learn market prices but also have many people at their fingertips to sell their domains to.

Stay tuned, and we’ll let you know how we decide to progress next week!

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Our featured partner for this blog post is Bido.com – Buy and Sell Domains, 1 hour auctions starting from $28.

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I’m interested in speaking with other Australian domainers. We’re currently chatting to some people about an exciting event we’re collaborating on with others to be run here in Australia, and we’re interested in chatting with you to get others on board. Please drop me a line via the Contact Us page on our website.

Thanks,
Michael

Usually I wouldn’t resort to doing this, but I feel I’ve now exhausted all options. Mike Cohen from DomainStryker (and his litany of other business names: NL Web Holdings, WannaDevelop, DomainMassDevelopment, DomainStryker) has made exceptionally antagonistic comments on various websites, forums (including NamePros and dnforum), and has promised a smear and defamatory campaign against F5 Domains, including an extortion/blackmail attempt. We have now referred this matter to the police, however we feel it necessary to warn other about potential issues when dealing with this individual.

Our full statements on the matter are available on the front page of our website . Mike has made multiple false complaints, and when he didn’t get his way he resorting to attempting to blackmail F5 Domains and myself (Michael Purse) personally. He has registered several domains using my name, and has promised to launch websites on them for the sole purpose of defaming me. He has made threats against me in an attempt to discredit and destroy my business. Has has used extremely profane and vulgar language continuously since the beginning of the transaction which was supposed to take place between us (which was canceled due to his behaviour and abuse).

Full details are here: http://f5domains.com/cohenstatement.pdf and here: http://f5domains.com/cohenfollowup.pdf.

It is our recommendation that you proceed with caution when dealing with this individual as he has had previous dealing of a similar nature with several high profile and well-respected business and individuals in the domaining industry which have pretty much result in the exact same thing (threats, abuse, and an attempt to defame) including Rick Latona, Minisites.com, Acroplex.com. It seems we’re simply the new target of this very angry and unprofessional individual.

Thanks,

Michael Purse
F5Domains.com

We’ll be updating this blog regularly with company news and opinion, and other interesting tidbits as well as our recent noteworthy sales.

Thanks,
Michael