Monte chats with Heidi Richards from the Women's Ecommerce Assoc. & Ron Jackson from DNJournal
[Commercials]
Monte: Hey Folks, welcome to Domain Masters. This is Monte Cahn, your host, and coming up in a little bit we're going to do an interview with Heidi Richards, who's the CEO and Founder of The Women's ECommerce Association International™. This is an organization that she built with helping women to get onto the web and be successful business folks on the web and as we all know, lots of women use the web everyday but you don't hear too many about the industry leaders and the women running the business on the web and Heidi's going to talk to us a little bit about that. She's written about 8 books and was just named the top, named in the top 50 virtual women shaping the internet for 2005 by the International Virtual Women's Chamber of Commerce. Also, we're going to have Ron Jackson on, about 7:30, 7:45, to about banner week in domain sales – couple of domain names, well, one in particular, sold for $1.4 million, and talk about what's going on with some of the sales that are happening out on the web and with some of the identifiers for valuing for some of the domain names that are selling for a lot of money.
So, stay tuned. We're going to break away with a couple of commercials and we'll be back with Heidi Richards.
Monte: Hello, folks. Welcome back to the show. Again, this is Monte Cahn, your host. My first guest tonight is Heidi Richards, and as I mentioned before she founded the organization called Women's ECommerce Association International™. A couple of my folks happened to have the pleasure of meeting her at a conference here in town in Ft. Lauderdale. And she's written about 8 books, it looks like, and has been a very successful business woman on the and we're going to talk about what's going on with women on the web. Heidi, you on board?
Heidi: Yes, I am, Monte.
Monte: Hi, well, welcome to Domain Masters.
Heidi: Well, thank you for having me. I'm very excited.
Monte: Yeah, I understand you also, from time to time, do a radio show, or you're on a radio show every once, now and then?
Heidi: Well, we do what's called Wireside Chat, so invite women to participate, similar to teleconferences, but we but we do audio tape them and upload them to the site, so they then become perhaps a radio program. That's in the future [laughs].
Monte: Oh. Okay. Well, perhaps I'll put you in touch with the folks at WebMasterRadio.fm.
Heidi: Thank you.
Monte: They do a very good job of broadcasting these shows and you can have them all podcasted and archived and everything; it's good.
Heidi: Wonderful, thank you.
Monte: So, anyway, I read your bio and it looks very, very interesting. I'm glad I have you on as a guest tonight, and Mr. Pitts, my sales manager, had the pleasure of meeting you I guess a couple weeks ago at one the conferences here in town. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and how you founded this organization and your experience in business and kind of what you're mission is.
Heidi: Oh, geez; that's a lot of stuff. Well, I'll tell you what motivated me to start the organization. A few years ago I was attending a program "Minority and Women Business Enterprise Program" through Broward County and the keynote speaker was gentleman who had founded the African-American Association of Internet Entrepreneurs and I'm sitting there and I'm going, geez, why don't we have a woman's group like that. So I sat there, and I'm not listening to a word the man's saying, unfortunately, I'm sitting there writing the business plan for this. And that was in 1999.
Monte: Yeah.
Heidi: I didn't do anything about it, though. I want you to know. And it wasn't until 2002, when I had the pleasure of speaking in Egypt, and it was my very first speaking engagement outside the Unite States, and I was speaking about marketing – which is what most of my books are about – and I met some fabulous women and one of them was a woman from Portugal and we got to talking and we were talking about putting together a group of women, because there was about 50-60 women from all over the world: Istanbul, Turkey, Egypt, Cape Verde – just all over the world. And so, we wanted to stay connected but we were just kind of at the cusp of learning about the internet and we wanted to learn more. And so, we talked about doing this and nothing really happened and in 2003, I was in a Mastermind Group and it was my turn to speak and they said, well, you have talk about a challenge or problem or something or something you're starting and that's when I gave them the business plan. So that's pretty much how it started. That and I just love to learn about things and this is just, there's so much to learn, I'll never be bored.
Monte: Right, right. And there's no other, are there any other organizations like this that you know of, or . . .?
Heidi: there's a number of internet or virtual organizations out there for women, yes, there are. I will say this. Having done a lot of research on this in the last three years, at lot of them call themselves "International;" however, most of them are US-based, or they might be UK-based or they might be based in another country and the majority of their members will be from there and they may have a couple of members from here and there; where we have over 700 members representing 44 countries . . .
Monte: Oh, wow, that's great.
Heidi: It is. I'm very excited. My goal is obviously to be much larger than that, but it's not all about size. It's really about what we can offer the women, so I want to truly, first of all, what the term "International" to me means "International." It means, you know, having a presence everywhere. And so, different from the other groups, I think, we are really fulfilling the International part of our name.
Monte: Right, right. So, that's obviously part of the mission. What's the rest of the mission?
Heidi: Well, our mission is just really to help women do business on the Web, and we do that by promoting women personally and professionally, we want to provide them opportunities for development to learn about the Web, through networking, through some of the programs that we offer, we want to help them connect online, we want to teach them how to run e-businesses.
Monte: Right.
Heidi: And it can be educational and networking programs online or in person.
Monte: Right. Now this is interesting topic, you know, I don't know the exact stats, perhaps you can enlighten the audience a little bit but, more women use the Web than men.
Heidi: Well, I read an interesting article about a year ago that Internet Today and they had compiled their information from several resources, and unfortunately there's no real hard statistics about the internet worldwide; there's a lot of United States and Canada statistics (I guess they're more easily gathered) so, United States and Canada, a year ago more than 53% of the Internet users were women. That number has jumped significantly to over 60%. And I think one of the reasons is - and this is just a very personal opinion, so men out there, don't take this wrong – but I think men tend to delegate and women tend to investigate.
Monte: That's the truth. [laughs] There's no offense taken in that.
Heidi: And by that I mean, if you're a man who owns a website, or is looking for something and you have a person that you can delegate that responsibility to, rather than doing it yourself, ‘cause men are much smarter than women in a lot of ways. They know their time is more valuable. They know that they can pay someone to do research rather than doing it themselves. And I think women are finally learning this. I know that was the big struggle I had when I first started was, how much of this am I going to do myself and how much am I going to pay for? You know.
Monte: Right.
Heidi: And I've learned that you just, you can't do it all. First of all, there are people. . . for all the time that I have spent in developing this website (and I haven't done it alone, I've hired people – we can get into that as well); for what I've learned, probably the biggest lesson I've learned is that my time really is more valuable and people when people say, gosh, it takes $10,000 to develop a website, well, yes, if you consider the number of hours you spend a day, a week and a month, in doing the research and learning all of this, if I had it to do over, if I had the money, I would have hired someone to do the majority of the work.
Monte: Right, right.
Heidi: However, having said that, I'm very glad I didn't because now I have the knowledge that I can help other women and show them ways to cut their learning curve by either hiring somebody, I know what's good to do yourself now and I know what's good to hire out. And web design I think is really important. I think you have to hire people who know it.
Monte: Right, right. And web design, is, you know, the analogy of web design is kind of like, you know, an interior designer, you know, it's really specific to the individual user. . .
Heidi: Right.
Monte: . . . so as a company, it's also a very hard service to provide because everybody wants their own little look and feel. So although (this is an example) we provide web hosting and the foundation platform for web hosting and email and domain names and all that stuff and have chosen on purpose not to provide web design because its very labor intensive and its very specific to a user's needs and it can change constantly and its hard to provide that so its good that you're giving advise on that because in helping women get through those hurdles, you know, how to set this up, what's easy, what's the easy steps, you know, what you've learned from your experience.
Heidi: Thank you, Monte.
Monte: And so, you know, what I, you know, there are obviously a lot of powerful women running a lot of e-commerce businesses, but where do you see this going now from over the next couple of months to the next five years in terms of women really being leaders in e-commerce and running successful commerce sites?
Heidi: Well, you know, the leaders are out there. You know, for instance, if you look at eBay, for instance . . .
Monte: Right. . .
Heidi: . . . and Megan Whitman, you know, she went from (and you know, I'm a florist by trade; I've been a florist for 25 years) and Megan was the past President of FTD and so I knew her through the association of FTD, which is the service that send flowers worldwide, as a member of that association. So there are a lot of women who are really involved, and they may not be the front runners, you may not see their names or anything, but I do a lot of research. Every day I'm looking for women who either have some hand in the content of a website, the development of a website; anything to do with anything related to e-commerce. Whether it be the person who's developing the affiliate programs, or whatever it happens to be. And I'm very happily surprised to find that there are a lot of women do that. The women who started Zoomerang, there were two women, Dana Mead and Paula Rivers. And Zoomerang is an online survey tool and I was looking (because I do a program called "Wireside Chats" and we do three or four interviews a month) – and we've had a couple men on, so don't think that we don't allow men [laughs], we have men who are members, as a matter of fact; men know that women make most of the buying decisions so they want to network with women – and one of the things that I learned is I really, if I can find another woman to show other women how to do it, we're roll models for one another, so this is my real goal, to find the women who can give the information. Now, there are a lot of wonderful men out there who give great information – Jay Berkowitz was one of my early guests and he wrote the "10 Golden Rules For Online Marketing" . . .
Monte: Right, and he's also our marketing director.
Heidi: I love him.
Monte: Yeah.
Heidi: He is just a brilliant, brilliant young man. And so, because he's so brilliant, it didn't matter that he was a man [laughs], does that make any sense. I really knew that he had information that my members needed to know.
Monte: Right, right.
Heidi: And so, that's really, you know, its funny because you can't always have, if there's a woman out there who can give the same information I would probably opt for a woman but because I knew Jay personally and because I know the quality of the information that he gives, it was much more important to me because my members need to learn.
Monte: Yeah, well, that's great. So how are you finding your members?
Heidi: Well, interestingly now, I'm finding a lot through social networking sites. I belong to several like Rise and Meet Up and Max and Common and Lingdon – I could name dozens of them . Originally, I was just surfing the ‘net; I was reading, I read, I subscribe to 30+ magazines. A lot of them are Internet-related. I belong to E-Content, CIO, and then of course there's Fast Company, Entrepreneur and all of those magazines and when I read about a woman who's doing something online that's successful or has a website, I'll go to the website, I'll do a little research on her and then I'll give her a call or I'll email her ask her if I can first interview her or invite her to join the organization. And then I ask them to refer others to me. So, that's a very slow, labor intensive process but this way we get the kind of members that really can use what we have to offer.
Monte: Right. And not only that but you're looking for members who can also share successes and can teach, you know, you want to, like a good CEO, you want to hire people who are sometimes better than you in many things and manage that process. You probably want women who are extremely successful to be part of your organization so they can share their success stories and help other women learn.
Heidi: Oh, absolutely and I learned that lesson you just mentioned by, from a man, because he told me you hire, surround yourself and hire people who are smarter than you in areas that you don't know about and let them do the work. And that is so true, because you can't, none of us – and especially with the Internet – none of us can know everything.
Monte: Right.
Heidi: You know, some of the other things we do is a lot of SEO; I write lots of articles and I submit articles so, probably to 200 – 300 online places. And then we just recently started doing some Pay-Per-Click and we're testing that right now to see, we're testing it for two reasons: to give a report to our members to see if it might be beneficial; and to see what's working in Pay-Per-Click because we're an Association and it might be different than a retail or e-tail outlet. And right now it's very successful. We're finding our numbers have really gone up tremendously since we started doing it. And you know how everything is with marketing. It's a combination of things. There is no one – if there was one thing that worked, that's all we'd be doing. But I think it's a combination of all those things . . .
Monte: Right, right.
Heidi: . . . and more. I haven't done everything. There's a lot of other things I have planned.
Monte: Right. I mean, we find the same things. I mean, I'm one of the few, you know, CEOs that participate in the forums in our industry. Its amazing to me that other CEOs aren't in tune with their customers that way and we get a lot of business and a lot of them are in the chat room tonight and listening to the show as a result of that and its important that you get your business from being present listening to your customers and building your products and services around their needs and wants . . .
Heidi: Oh, yeah.
Monte: . . . so getting customers from the forums and submitting your articles and getting your names out in the public and all that stuff and your organization out in the public will definitely help you, that's for sure.
Heidi: Yes.
Monte: So, what are some of the plans or future plans for your organization and how do you see it grown and I guess getting back to my other question about having some of the top business leaders in your organization, who are some of the top business women that you have in the organization that we might know?
Heidi: Well, Michele Manasey is the Editor of E-Content Magazine. Colby Bloomberg has Bloomberg Marketing and she has participated in several books as a co-author and she started BlogHer; she's a, probably I would call her a Blog expert. Those are two women that come to mind. There are women Internationally that you would never have heard of – WomenForWomen.com is run by a lady named Shirley Caldwell out of the UK; and that's a very big organization in the UK and she's a Global Lifetime Member. Giselle Rufer is in Switzerland and she had a company called Delance and she makes custom watches for women, and she's really big. I mean, everybody over in Europe knows these two women.
Monte: Oh, cool.
Heidi: So, we have, you know, I really have done a lot of research. I go online every single day and I spend a good hour, and I don't just look for women in the United States, although if they find me, I'm thrilled because they have a great circle, you know that six degrees of separation. I say, who do you know in Japan, and I found a great woman who's on my board, Foo Lei Me, and she's an image consultant and I found her through another member who was in, I think it was Spain or Chile, I can't recall, and so, you know, I use the people that we have and these are women that you may not have heard of in America, the United States or Canada but they're very, very well-known in their own country. Daisy Wright has a career consulting company in Canada; she's on my board, and I found her just through another woman's association in Canada. And I contacted her, you know, I said I'm interested in what you're doing, I think you could help my members and would you be interested in writing some articles for our members and that's how it started. And then we got to know one another and I offered her a position on the Board because I didn't really have anybody in Canada. I had two other women in Canada who contacted me but they didn't have strong resumes and I felt it was important that these women have a large network. Now, not all of them do. You know, I want to also open up opportunities for women out there. But it's important if you're growing an organization that you grow it, the only way you can grow it exponentially is by using other people's resources.
Monte: Right, right.
Heidi: I mean, I don't know them. I mean, I know, probably, 5,000 people now [laughs] from my, just, maybe more; but it's still not enough.
Monte: Right, right. Well, you know, it's gonna happen though. As the word spreads, it's going to exponentially get bigger and you're going to have more interested in joining. So I assume that you're opening up chapters in various communities or in various countries so that they can grow this organization virally and domestically, you know, through their own networks as well, is that correct?
Heidi: Absolutely, absolutely. We have plans to start six chapters in the next year – plus. The next two chapters will be in New York and Spain; I already have my chapter leaders for those two organizations. We're talking to someone in Colorado who's on my board who wants to start a chapter. I have a woman in Brazil who's actually coming onboard, Caroline Caruso; she'll be on the Board somewhere around October 1st, and she wants to start a chapter in Brazil. And then, you know, others in the United States. And then Canada, of course, so you know, yeah, we have plans. And the thing is its teaching them how to do it so they don't have a lot of work involved. I don't want this to be a business for people where they have to spend all of their time . . .
Monte: Right, not a burden, you want it to be a benefit and . . .
Heidi: Right, right.
Monte: And what are the benefits of belonging to the organization, currently?
Heidi: Well, could I get back to your questions about the plans? Because I think that will kind of answer your question about the benefits, too.
Monte: Sure, sure.
Heidi: One of the things, well, we're working on a couple of things. One of the things is an affiliate program where members can refer other members and earn money or points or membership (higher levels of membership); we haven't exactly defined it 100%, but we're listening to our members we're serving to find out what they really want. And some want money, some want to be members at the Global Lifetime Level and they maybe can't afford the $247 fee, but they can refer 100 people and then earn it. Or however many people it would end up being. So that's one way. We're starting a blog very shortly as well as we're going to be offering blogs for free to our members. Now I know there's a lot of blogs out there for free, but this will [inaudible] free because to grow an organization you can't, some people can't afford it and I don't want to make it a hindrance that if you want to be a member, that you can't join because you can't afford it. So we offer a basic level membership, which is free, and then we have other levels which are very reasonable. We of course want to do a radio program at some point, we do the tele-seminars now, we have plans for webinars. We're doing a kind of interesting program right now, it's an e-book where you can be part of an anthology or a co-author in a book and we're inviting our members to participate by submitting chapters. Now, will everybody get in there – no, because we want it to be a quality book. It's going to be all about promoting your business online and offline. So that's the kind of articles we're looking for. And basic members can submit one article and if you're a higher level you might be able to submit three; and they will become chapters in the and we're looking for it to be a real content-richy book with at least 200 pages. I don't want it to be one of those e-books that's 30, 40 pages and these people call it a book. I think that's more like a booklet or a guide, an information guide. That's just my definition of a book.
Monte: Right.
Heidi: And the most exciting thing we're starting, and I'm working with a woman in Miami who's a software developer and a woman who's on my Board, Tina Cardie who owns a company called Easy Learning, they're both e-learning professionals and so we're working together to create a certification program for e-commerce and that's probably the most exciting, because I think that's what's going to give the organization the credibility and the leverage in the minds of other people. Because all major organizations who are of any value in the area of expertise that their members are in. I know I'm a master designer, I've taken just about all the courses in every organization to become certified in one area or another, so I know how important it is to me so I'm figuring its probably going to be important to a percentage of our members.
Monte: Right.
Heidi: So those are kind of, those would be what I would consider benefits and some of the other benefits would be, of course, the networking, all the e-learning . . .
Monte: Right. You know what you ought to plan on doing, I mean, you probably already have plans for this but of course your annual gatherings or however you will get together and then having a heck of a line up of important people on the Web to speak and you know, a lot of conferences do this, obviously, and have people come in to speak of their successes and learn about how they got started and each one of your members will learn from that, and will be able to network at those events, at those gatherings.
Heidi: And I'm glad you mentioned that, Monte, because we do have an annual congress coming up; it'll be our first World Congress and its actually taking place in the Azores June 7th through the 9th.
Monte: Oh, wow.
Heidi: And we've already got half of our speakers, we're still, we're out there still, we have a lot of calls for presentation out there. You know, some of them are not what we're looking for but you know, people submit things in hopes of, you know, maybe they'll get chosen but we have a certain learning that we want our members to do and it isn't all about e-commerce. You know, it has to do with networking, it has to do with having fun and the social part so we're going to be doing a cooking class, I have a world-renowned artist from Europe is going to be there teaching art on a hillside overlooking a volcano so we're going to have some really cool things in addition and I know all congresses have it so I don't think its unique.
Monte: Oh, yeah, a lot business is actually done a the social events versus at the main events, anyway. You know, you get to know people and build relationships and that's when you earn people's trust and get their business.
Heidi: Oh, yeah.
Monte: And so, when you put this on you'll have a lot of success stories that you'll hear about from your members because they met this person or they met that person and decided to start doing business with them.
Heidi: Yeah, and that's my, that's what I'm so excited about; I can hardly wait for June, because I think its just so exciting to know that these women are going to come together, many of them for the first time. And men, too. I have three or four men who submitted proposals that were quite good. A man named John Nyland, he's a career coach in the UK and he's just a brilliant man. And so of course I accepted his proposal. But there are, there are other men who've made proposals we're just kind of looking at and seeing if there are women who are able to offer the same thing. So I don't want to exclude men, no, we don't discriminate at all. [laughs]
Monte: Yeah, okay. Well, I'm sure you're not. Hey I had one of the chat room folks ask a pretty interesting question: Is there any kind of discrimination that you see, not only to women, but on the e-commerce side, that you think that's gender-based?
Heidi: Umm, I'm not sure what that means.
Monte: Well, you know, if the Internet's run primarily by men, do you find any issues with the user-friendliness of sites regarding e-commerce, that you know, maybe aren't friendly to women or from a gender-based perspective? I'm just curious is you have heard . . .
Heidi: Well, I really haven't but then again, I haven't come across sites like that. I'm really looking at sites that are focusing on women, so if I were to go to a site that wasn't focusing on women, that would be the choice of the site anyway, because maybe they're focusing on people in general, which is fine and you know, its all about niche marketing, obviously, so if a site that's owned by a man is not focusing on women in particular, but focusing on the, the . . . not focusing gender specifically, lets put it that way. I don't see anything wrong with that if he knows what his niche is and he's successful.
Monte: Right. Well, if 60% of the Internet users are women, you better focus your attention to women on the Web and get them to be your customers, that's for sure, because like you said, they're doing primarily the research, the buying, they're spending the most time on the Web as it is so you want to definitely attract them.
Heidi: Well, yeah, but I read an interesting article, someone wrote an editorial about Pink Magazine, and the woman who submitted the editorial was a little bit miffed about the fact that they chose "Pink." She said that's typecasting, that's gender-biased, and you're putting women back 50 years because if you think "pink" you're thinking women. Now, I have a totaling different perspective on that because I happen to know what the meanings of colors are, from a floral standpoint, so I'm not looking at . . .
Monte: What does "pink" mean?
Heidi: Well, pink is a very innocent, approachable color. For instance, if a woman is wearing pink, a man feels safe around her. They think she's maybe shy, demure, but sexy. Okay? So, so, and that's not, this is just generalities, by the way. I wrote an article about that.
Monte: That's interesting because I guess as a florist, you get a different perspective because there's different colors; roses, and I always wondered what the meanings were.
Heidi: And well, you know, you can go to my website, EdenFlorist.com and you can look at the meanings of the different colors but I will tell you this story with WECAI when we were choosing colors. First of all, we didn't want it to look like an American website, although we knew it was based in America. So we tried to not pick red, white and blue. We also, even though we're geared toward women, we tried not to pick pinks and purples, which is what a lot of women's sites have. So we picked the burgundies and the navies because they tend to have a higher perception of intellect. And that really want we wanted. We wanted to be a teaching, a knowledge-building site, so, you know, and I think there's been hundreds of studies done like this and I'm not the expert on this, I only know the little bit of research that we did when we were developing the site and I went to a lot of sites. And by the way, I did go to a lot of sites that were run by men and I liked the way they were very clean and very easy to maneuver and they didn't have a lot of fluff, which some of the women's sites and sites that are geared toward women I find, sometimes, to be a little confusing.
Monte: Right, right.
Heidi: Well, you know, I don't know that there's any gender bias. Let's put it that way. [laughs] I don't know that I even answered the question. [laughs]
Monte: Well, you know, I just thought that was an interesting comment, because colors do have meanings and so, you know, it was just an interesting side topic, that's all.
Heidi: Yeah.
Monte: Well, great, it sounds like an interesting . . . how do people learn more about the organization and how can they contact you?
Heidi: They can go to HYPERLINK "http://www.wecai.org" www.wecai.org and WECAI stands for Women's ECommerce Association International. They can contact me HYPERLINK "mailto:heidi@wecai.org" heidi@wecai.org. They can contact my partner who's also the web designer and the real brains behind the organization, Susanna Richards, who happens to be my youngest daughter and we went into partners when I realized she knew a heck of a lot more about the Internet than I did.
Monte: Oh, wow.
Heidi: You know, I'm the marketing . . .
Monte: The mother and daughter team.
Heidi: Yeah, it's wonderful. I'm the marketing expert but when it comes to anything Internet, if she can't do it, she can find out where and how. And it's just been, without her I never would have done WECAI, I have to be honest. Or at least we wouldn't be at the level we are now. Or I would have paid a lot more money, [laughs] lets put it that way. So, you can contact myself or Susanna, if you have Web/Internet based questions, she might be a better resource than I am. And that's HYPERLINK "mailto:Susanna@wecai.org" Susanna@wecai.org.
Monte: Great. Well, I know that we'll be in touch with you as well because I think we can help out your organization for the domain names and web hosting side of things and actually help you with your online advertising and all that kind of stuff, too, so I know Victor will be in touch with you about that as well.
Heidi: And you guys have been great. I really enjoyed meeting Victor. He's been very helpful, my members love him, so thank you very much for all you do; thanks for supporting us.
Monte: Oh, definitely and it was a pleasure having you on and I'd like to see a lot more women become leaders in e-commerce, myself. Matter of fact, just as a side note, one of the most dynamic women that I work with who owns her own business also is the owner of Monster Commerce and they just bought a domain name, from ShoppingCart.com, for $250,000.
Heidi: Wonderful.
Monte: And they're one of the leading e-commerce sites on the Web and that's Stephanie Lefler and they're also a sponsor on this network and do advertising and all kinds of stuff, so she's a really good businesswoman, too, so I like working with her as well.
Heidi: Wonderful. I think I'll give her a call and see if she'd like to be interviewed [laughs].
Monte: Yeah, as a matter of fact I'll actually refer her over to you; I think it's a good idea. She's based in St. Louis.
Heidi: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Monte, I appreciate it.
Monte: Thanks for being on the show and I look forward to working with you and speaking with you again.
Heidi: Okay, great, thanks a lot.
Monte: Okay. Okay, thank you. Okay, folks, stay tuned. We're just going to break for a quick commercial and be on with Ron Jackson and talk about a killer week for domain sales and talk about what's going on in the domain industry. Stay tuned.
[Commercials]
Monte: Hey, everybody, welcome back to the show and thanks to Heidi Richards; that was an interesting interview and a pretty wonderful organization she started and I know a lot more women should be taking more of a presence on the Web, especially having websites that do business in e-commerce, so I'm sure her organization will help out.
Ron Jackson is on board. You on, Ron?
Ron: I'm here.
Monte: Wow, what a week, huh?
Ron: Pretty amazing. You know I'm sitting here thinking October starts on Saturday and I'm still waiting for the summer slump to start that everyone is talking about.
Monte: [laughs] Yeah, yeah. I think we blew right through the summer slump, even with the hurricanes and everything.
Ron: It's really been amazing. One thing we pointed out in the sales column last night was that as recently as a year ago, having six figure sales was something of a rarity but now here we are in the middle of summer, or through the middle of summer, to this point in time we've had six consecutive weeks where we've had at least one and sometimes multiple six figure or higher sales reported each week. So, its really been phenomenal to see.
Monte: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I don't know if you listened to the show last week but I had a Andrew Miller on and Zappy from the Internet Real Estate Group, the guys that you focused on in your cover story for September.
Ron: Right.
Monte: And, the truth is that there's much larger transactions going on that are not reported as you know and we have that issue as well. We can't report the majority of the sales that we make, so this is a good trend and we're definitely seeing the values of domain names come out and shine.
Ron: Yep. Incidentally, I heard a lot of great feedback about your show last week. I happened to be out and I was waiting for it to get posted in your archive and meant to check that today. Is that up yet?
Monte: Yeah, yeah, it's up. I had them put that up right away because it was a really good show. It actually ran over about 18 – 20 minutes after it was supposed to because it was really good. We didn't get to cover all the stuff I wanted to but they're really two dynamic guys and definitely have bought and sold and developed some of the most successful websites and domain names in history. So it was really cool to have them on.
Ron: I can't wait to hear that. Soon as I get off tonight I'll probably hit your archive then and bring that up.
Monte: Yeah. Definitely. So, tell us a little bit about this 3-letter dot com sale; what you learned sort of speaking with the folks.
Ron: Well, that was the big one this week, of course. We're talking about VIP.com, which was bought by Leisure & Gaming, which is a British betting site operator and they had wanted that particular name because a couple of months ago they had bought a network of online betting sites that were already up and running called VIP Management Services and they had paid $42 million for that company so they really wanted the VIP name and went out there and put down a package that was worth the $1.4 million you mentioned earlier. That one was structured in a slightly different way. Generally, the sales that we report are straight cash deals. A lot of the really high end deals, as you know because you've put together a lot of these, they're multiple components. There can be cash and stocks, some delivered now, some later and that's exactly how this was set up. They put $600,000 down, the buyer already received that. They gave them a block of stock worth $400,000 now. What we don't know is whether or not is if the seller could take that stock and liquidate it at this point. Usually, so as not to throw . . .
Monte: ‘Cause they're publicly traded, right?
Ron: . . . the market, you know, there could be a timeframe where they'd have to hold it. And there'll be one more year where the rest of the stock is delivered, that's another $400,000, which would be one year from now, bringing the total package up to about $1.4; exactly how much that stocks going to be worth remains to be seen now.
Monte: Right, right. And they're a publicly traded company, right?
Ron: Yes, that's right.
Monte: Yeah, yeah. But that's still, there, you got a, of course, VIP is not only a three-letter domain name but something we're all common, it's a common term used for some very special treatments so its, you know, definitely a good name at a good price, that's for sure.
Ron: It is. It's a great name and I think, you know, as time goes on, this purchase and similar ones, you know, where it always opens people's eyes and stuns them a little bit but I think over time most of these purchases have proven to be very wise investments. One of the two highest cash buys this year was Property.com, that Rick Schwartz bought and Rick has already told me that he's only had that a few weeks and he's already had an offer for 25% more than he paid for it just a few weeks back.
Monte: Oh, wow.
Ron: So, you know, when he bought it there was some argument about, gee, was that a good buy or not a good buy, and that question got answered pretty quickly.
Monte: Right. And it was a great buy for him because he owns the other side of that domain name, the singular version, so when you cover yourself like that, it exponentially raises the value of both names, both individually and as a group, in my opinion.
Ron: That's right.
Monte: So, how about some of the other sales that came out over the last couple of weeks that are of note?
Ron: I think the thing that's really been impressive is not just the dollar amounts of the domains, which has been very high, everything in our top ten and even under the top ten. There are many, many five figured domains at least, but to me the more important thing and the more impressive thing is the breadth of the market. We're seeing so many different sectors and extensions that are breaking out. Country codes are doing extremely well. You know we've always seen good sales in .de and .co.uk and we did see that again this week, but we had another Swedish domain sms.se which is the Swedish extension that went for over $16,000 and we've had a lot of those this year – Swedish domains in the five figure range. And we're even seeing country codes over the last two weeks, I've seen them from Poland and Hungary like in the mid-four figure range. And the new extensions we're seeing a lot of growth. One of the biggest deals of the week was business.us. The exact price of that domain was under a non-disclosure agreement, but from talking to a number of people, my best guess is that fell right between about $50,000 and $75,000, which is very high for what we've seen from .us. And there's another major .us sale that will be announced. We'll be announcing it next week; it's already been paid for. I've been asked to not put the details out until the transfer's been made, but another great one right on the heels of business.us. Something that might surprise people when we talk about the new extensions, which are us, info and biz, is that .us has had the most high-dollar sales out of that group this year. .info has had the most quantity of sales, and if fact, they had a number of really nice ones again this week and CETO told us they had three more that were above $4,500, with NDA that they couldn't disclose, so, you know, things just seem to be popping at every level as long as it's a good strong term and in a decent extension, its proving to be a hot ticket on the market.
Monte: Yeah, definitely. As a matter of fact, we're launching a bunch of country codes this week to offer for new registrations. I know it took us a little while but we're seeing a huge interest in our customer base in wanting to cover themselves internationally and see how the market's growing and now finally they're making the step to at least cover themselves and even provide similar sites of what they have on the .com space onto their country code spaces. So this verifies once again what's going on in the aftermarket a little bit on the country code side and I think its going to continue to explode.
Ron: And with new registrations to come with .eu I asked you about this last time, are you going to be involved with that as well, aren't you?
Monte: Yeah, yeah. We're one of the approved registrars for that. We're going to be launching .eu and actually working on .travel and .jobs, as well, over the next couple of weeks we'll have those up as well. Those are very special, sponsored domains and not everybody will get to register those, too. But the .eu names you'll definitely be able to do business and a lot of people are excited about it.
Ron: When will someone be able to go on Moniker and put in a request or an actual registration for a .eu?
Monte: Within the next two weeks.
Ron: Wow.
Monte: Yeah.
Ron: Coming right up, then.
Monte: Yep, coming right up. So we'll be able to do that as well. From what I understand, you're going to be on a panel or two at the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. East Conference, as well, and that's coming up in mid-October. Give us a little insight on some of the panels that you're going to be participating on and you know, what you're going to be sharing with the audience.
Ron: I'll be on a couple. The conference runs from the 18th through the 22nd, I believe are the dates. And the first one that I'm going to be on is Thursday, at 2pm. That particular seminar is going to cover sales trend, some of which we're talking about right now we'll go a little bit more in-depth on that, what classes of domains have been going, we'll talk a lot about the various extensions, you know, .com as well as a lot of the alternates, what's happening with those. And the following day on Friday at 11am I'll be part of a seminar that CETO is doing and my particular role in that seminar will be to talk about a lot of the tools that are available to you to identify domains that have a very good chance to sell, to identify marketable domains, and there are about 10 tools that really anyone can access on the Internet at no charge and if you run a name through those various tools, you can get a much better idea of what you're chances are with it.
Monte: Right, right. It's kind of like our appraisal evaluators and domain names, as well, I guess.
Ron: Right, exactly. T.R.A.F.F.I.C.'s going to be really exciting because it was such a great show last year and this time around, I understand its going to be double the size of what we had last year and that's a little bit, kind of hard to imagine.
Monte: Yeah, there were 300 some odd people there [inaudible]
Ron: [inaudible] going on. This is going to be great.
Monte: Yeah, I'm actually on three panels there this year and we're going to be doing a live domain auction with a real live auctioneer so it'll be the first time in history that domain names will actually sell on the floor with a auctioneer and an open bidding forum with everyone in the room. It should be kind of exciting. I'm inviting SEDO and Afrinik to participate and submit some names for that and it should be a lot of fun.
Ron: That's great. I think you were going to do that Friday night?
Monte: It's going to be at Friday at 2:00 o'clock, I think.
Ron: Friday afternoon.
Monte: In the afternoon is when its slated for, so it should be a lot of fun.
Ron: I'm looking forward to that.
Monte: Yeah, definitely. What else? Are you seeing anything else trending any certain way? Obviously, the domain names are really kicking in terms of the sales. How about anything, oh, well, I guess you spoke to the folks at Business 2.0; there's going to be an interesting article about the [inaudible]
Ron: [inaudible] I mentioned that to you. With everything that we've seen in the domain market, the bit uptrend that we're almost two years into now, a lot of mainstream media are picking up on what's going on here. Business 2.0, most people are familiar with it. It's a slick, high tech, very high quality business magazine based in San Francisco and their editor, Paul Sloan, had called me a couple of weeks back and he had caught wind of this revival in the domain market and he told me he wanted to do just a little item, probably a sidebar, for an upcoming issue and he didn't really know anything at all about domains so we started so we started kicking it around and the more I told him about the industry, the more fascinated he got with what was going on and that an industry of this size had flown under the radar for so long.
Monte: Yeah.
Ron: So as I talked to him, I pointed him to some other people. I know you spoke with him for more than an hour one day and he's just like, you know, he's as excited about this story as anything he's done. It has now grown into something he intends it to be a major feature so he's coming down to T.R.A.F.F.I.C. to talk to more people, learn more bout the industry, you know I think this will be a great piece that will come out about the business, probably I would assume around December. They have quite a long lead time on major magazine stories like that.
Monte: Yeah, yeah. He said December switch is like the Holiday edition so its going to be great for the domain business to finally put us up on a little bit of a pedestal and verify that we're not all crazy. [laughs]
Ron: [laughs] I don't know about that. We've got a few crazy people, a least people think we are, but in the long run, again, when you look back they weren't so crazy.
Monte: Yeah, yeah, definitely. So yeah, it's great, and I got to spend an hour with him and really educated him about the, you know, how things got started and how we got started and he was really intrigued and I sent him to three or four more people as well and I know you sent him to a bunch of places, so, and I think he'll get a little shock, a good shock, from being at T.R.A.F.F.I.C. and being in the mix of 300 domainers and watch what's going on and with Google and Yahoo! and the domain sponsor and us and you know, all the companies that are going to be there, you know, focusing their attention on the domain industry for 3 – 4 days, it's going to be pretty enlightening for him.
Ron: And I think he'll do a good job. This industry is really difficult for a mainstream reporter to get a grip on. You know, they have a hard time understanding how it all works. But he seems to be so meticulous about getting it right and you know, I can see things were starting to click with him, like a light bulbs going off. He goes, oh, I see, I understand this, and then he just thought it was the most amazing thing he'd ever heard about.
Monte: Yeah, I learned today for the first time ‘cause he's been corresponding with me back and forth on email, that he's the Editor-at-Large and he writes articles, so that's why he's covering both sides on this one ‘cause he's really excited about it.
Ron: Right.
Monte: Definitely. Well, that's great, Ron, I really appreciate the update. And I guess we'll be talking to you in a few weeks also, just to get another update on sales and then position everything for the upcoming conference. Have you heard of the folks from the other domain conference for the gathering is going to be concurring over the next year as well?
Ron: Roundtable?
Monte: Yeah, the domain Roundtable?
Ron: Yeah. The last I spoke with Jo[inaudible] there they were planning to go again in May of 2006. I don't know if they set the exact dates yet, but I'm pretty sure it's going to be close to the dates that they ran last year. So I have heard nothing other than that. They had a successful conference so I'm sure they're still on a go for that.
Monte: Right, right. And there are some other upcoming conferences that aren't specifically for domain names but we're going to be featured as either talking or speaking or providing some kind of information and you know, Web Master World's coming up in November and we're going to AdTech and having a booth there and I'm on a couple of panels at some of those shows as well. So a lot of people are getting very interested in protecting online identities and the value of domain names and how one goes about, you know, praising them and son on and so forth. You know, I had two, getting back to the high profile sales, I had two escrow applications come in today into Moniker.com site – one for $500,000 and one for $700,000 for domains, so things are really going good.
Ron: There is a lot of cross pollination going on and I've especially noticed that this year, with a lot of guys who have large portfolios looking for ways too – they haven't done a lot of development for search engine optimization but they're looking for ways to do at least some minimal development, maybe do micro sites with their domains. I'm getting interested in that myself a lot because one of the PPC services this summer incorporated SEO into their program, and it worked for a short while but they produced too much duplicate content and a lot of those pages got delisted. But it was hot enough for a period of time, that it really opened my eyes to what search engine optimization, even on a minimally developed site can do for traffic for domains that had none at all before. So I'm maybe looking at doing some 5,6 page sites and there are some new tools out there, some software and some other things that really shave the time off where you can really knock off a decent looking site in a day now and get it up there and get it in the engines and maybe produce a little more money from it than a PPC page without having to put all the work into it that goes into a fully developed site where you're selling actual goods and services.
Monte: Oh, definitely. As a matter of fact, my guest next week is just one of those companies that you just mentioned, which basically owns about 28,000 domain names and they're actually right around the corner from us; I didn't even know it. It's called SWI Digital. They own 28,000 domain names in various segments, primarily legal, medical, you know, professional, professional segments. And they build every single one of the websites out, SEO it, you know, SEO build with content. Very deep sites, the average site has 10,000 pages, actually [laughs]. They're huge sites . . .
Ron: Wow.
Monte: And then what they do is their marketing strategy is that they go, you know, to lawyers and physicians and they sell the brand advertisement, you know, the banner advertisement for that particular domain name. So lets say its AlabamaAccidents.com. They would go to an Alabama accident attorney and have his banner float there and then they get the leads from the site and then they don't sell them the leads, its because they're paying for a monthly advertising place on there and they're doing very, very well and its updated, you know, on a weekly basis, with new content, all SEOed so you know, its working right and their sites are getting great ranking and the business model's phenomenal.
Ron: I have to hear that show. That's the sort of thing that I'm interested in learning more about.
Monte: Yeah. He started acquiring domain names back in 1996 just like me and has a great history and has some great quality domain names that are very geo-targeted and you know, people thought he was crazy as well and here he is, he's building out a hell of a model and he's getting a lot of interest and they're making great money and he's got a great operation and 67 people working for him and the people love him. He's got testimonials, like thousands of them around his office from his clients that they just love being part of his network. So he's going to be a great guest. I think its going to teach a lot of listeners a lot.
Ron: I like his model too where he is going to sell an ad directly. So many guys who own domains dabbled in things like affiliate programs have come away not really happy with that because you don't have, you don't really know if you're getting credited for all the traffic that you're sending to an affiliate and there are just like endless stories of people who feel they've been shortchanged, so what this guy's doing is putting them up, they're selling them, not having to worry about that.
Monte: Right, right.
Ron: And I like that idea a lot.
Monte: Yeah, so it's going to be a great show next week, so everybody who's listening, listen next week ‘cause its going to be a great show.
Well, Ron, I really appreciate the time that you took tonight and as always, you've been a pleasure and everybody that wants to get caught up on what's going on in the domain industry, go to dmjournal.com; it is the main rag in our business and a lot of domain name sales are being reported there and a lot of great featured articles for the people in our business.
Ron: Well, I appreciate you having me, as always, and we're looking forward to seeing you here in a couple weeks in Del Ray Beach.
Monte: Yeah, me, too. Alright, take care, Ron.
Ron: Thank you.
Monte: Alright, just a reminder. Again, if, please tune in next week, we're going to have a really great show next week with the SWI Digital guys, the founder and the CEO of that organization and I'm sure people will learn a lot from listening to him. He's a down to earth, tell-it-how-it-is kind of CEO and really built a hell of a business. And so it should be interesting.
And speaking of T.R.A.F.F.I.C. East and the conference, we'll be broadcasting live from that event, both on Wednesday and probably on another day that's yet to be determined but I'll certainly update everybody on the air and also on the forums, we'll let people know. We'll be doing a lot of onsite interviews. I'm going to have the studio brought over, a little portable studio brought over so we can cover a lot of the events and get a lot of interviews with the domainers at the show and so it should be really, really cool and it'll be the first time that I'll be doing that live at that event, and so I'm pretty excited about it.
So, join me next week on Domain Masters, and until then, have a great week and be the master of your domain. Take care.
[Commercials]
| Back to Index |