Domain Name Values and Web Traffic

Monte: Alrighty. Welcome back to the show. A big thanks to David for being available for us. It’s a 12-hour time difference over there; so, sometimes it’s not easy to coordinate folks in Australia to be on the show. So, it was really great to have him on board. Well, we have a couple winners to announce for the Google Adwords giveaway. Each participant who I’m going to announce will win a $100 Adwords coupon. What you need to do is email me at Monte@Moniker.com and we’ll email your promotional code tomorrow. So, the winners are Trisha, E. Strong, X. Scott, A Better Mall, Shane, and J.P. If you guys will just send me an email to my email address Monte@Moniker.com, we’ll get you out your promotional codes; and congratulations to you guys for listing the top 10 tips for driving traffic to your web site. I know that there is a lot of some chat in the lounge about getting some more domain-specific content on the show. Next week, on Wednesday, which is kind of an odd time because it’s between the holidays, we will start getting into more domain-related issues, the values of domain names, domain names for sale, how to promote domain names for sale, and so on. I believe I’m going to have Rick Schwartz on board for an interview next week. He’s known as the web father in many cases. He, along with Howard Neu, just put together the first domain-related convention up in Boyton Beach in October. It was very, very successful; and we were a proud sponsor of that event called T.R.A.F.F.I.C. We’re going to be getting really into ways to help keep the domain name sales and promotion business alive. As domainers and domain sales and escrow agents ourselves and as an ICANN accredited registrar, we definitely see values increasing this year from last year and we say it from last year from the year before that. As a matter of fact, they’re trending between 17% and 20% in values the appraisals that we are performing are showing an increase in domain value and part of the reason for that is the same reasons why we’re talking about search and traffic to your domain names because one of the key indicators to valuable domain names is the natural type-in traffic that a domain name gets. A company that’s going to turn around and buy advertise.com is going to be very happy that it gets thousands of unique visitors every month, and it does so for a couple reasons. One is because it’s an easy known brand, it’s an easy word to type in, it’s one that somebody’s always going to remember, and it says what it means. That makes a domain name very, very valuable from an appraisal standpoint and from a sales standpoint. A company in the advertising world is going to want to have that brand, because it describes exactly what they do. One might say that you could go with the Amazon approach, which Amazon has nothing to do with books. They’ve spent millions and millions and billions of dollars retraining themselves into the most successful online book store, but Barnes and Nobel turned around and bought books.com a couple years ago; and took a little bit, actually a lot of the natural type-in traffic away from Amazon by having that keyword, which described exactly what they do every day. So, we’re going to talk about a lot of those issues in the upcoming shows, because it is really important for those of you that own domain names and those of us that manage and own domain names, and help our clients find the best domain names for not only their business, but also the speculators and the resellers and those that basically make their money by buying, selling, investing in Intellectual and Virtual Property. We feel that that’s extremely valuable.