Monte talkswith Michael Mann & Eric Shannon

[Commercials]

Monte: Hello, everyone; this is Monte Cahn. Welcome to another week's broadcast of Domain Masters. I have a great show lined up tonight. Basically, a show dedicated to giving something back to the community. I've two great successful businessmen who were also very successful domainers in our industry. Michael Mann, who founded BuyDomains back in the days when I started my company, HitDomains and DomainSystems, and Michael sold BuyDomains to Highland Capital and started another organization called GrassRoots.org, which is a non-profit and which is basically dedicated to helping less fortunate folks get up and running on the Web and helping them with infrastructure. Moniker is donating domain names to the organization for anybody that's looking for identities and it's been very successful in helping the less fortunate folks get online and give something back.

And also I have Eric Shannon on after Michael. Eric is president of LatPro, which is an organization which is in the employment sector and he serves 150,000+ Hispanic and bi-lingual professionals in helping fill positions and helping with community as well. Eric also volunteers his time to the Wayne Hysinga's School of Business and helps folks get online in business.

Both have been very successful domainers and have great portfolios and we'll be back on with them.

Also, next week, just so everybody knows, we're going to be live at SES (Search Engine Strategies) in New York, broadcasting live, probably not from the show floor because it's the end of the conference but I think Wednesday night we're going to be setting up a gig at one of the bars or restaurants close by and having some interviews live right there at the show and so I'll be with the WebMasterRadio.fm folks, they have a booth, and we'll be broadcasting live from SES as well.

So, we're going to break for a couple of commercials and be online with Michael Mann, former founder and CEO of BuyDomains and now of GrassRoots.org. Stay tuned.

[Commercials]

Monte: Hey, folks, welcome back to the show. Welcome back to Domain Masters. My first guest is someone who helped create our domain market back in the old days, back when I started back in 1996. There was another guy in the Virginia/Maryland area that was doing some of the same things that I was and we communicated quite a few times back then and Mike Mann was responsible for starting BuyDomains, which was one of the largest secondary markets for domain names. He was responsible for helping accumulate about 450,000 – 500,000 domain names that his organization owned and recently sold his business off to a venture capital group and now its run by some other folks and Mike's been very active in the domain name business in various different ways. He has just participated partly with the group that just helped buy Software.com and one of the great things that Mike has done is he started GrassRoots.org, which is a charitable organization that's helping less fortunate folks get online and get connected on the Web and have infrastructure provided for them and Moniker is proud to be a sponsor of this organization and give domain names to those that need it as well. Mike's family has been very involved with charities and ironically, my cousin is married to a guy that his parents are best friends with Mike's parents and I didn't know it until a couple years' ago and so we have a connection other than that. Mike, are you on board?

Mike: Yes, sir. I appreciate the introduction and totally appreciate Moniker's support of GrassRoots.org; that's been very cool and a lot of other people in the domain industry have been helping us out in various ways.

Monte: Yeah, definitely. And, why don't you take us back in time a little bit because you're story's kind of interesting. Take us back to when you first discovered that domain names were something of value and bring us fast forward to BuyDomains and its maturity and then what's recently occurred with the transaction and now what you're doing.

Mike: Sure. Well, as far as domains, prior to BuyDomains.com, I owned a business called Internet Interstate and having been in the Internet business, we purchased or I purchased a bunch of domains, most of the people working in the business didn't feel like they didn't want to spend $70 on domains; they couldn't understand why you would pay $70 for a domain. So I owned some in my own personal collection on the side with one of my other partners; so we owned something like Menus.com was something I owned before I was in the domain business.

Monte: Wow.

Mike: Government.net I owned before I was in the domain business; Resume.net I owned before I was in the domain business; I gave away Washington.org to the Washington Convention and Visitors Association – they still have that; Realtors.org I gave away a long time ago to the National Association of Realtors – those were before the domain business. So, what happened is, I sold a couple . . . first I sold the company Internet Interstate and in 1998 I sold a couple of the domains cause people kept calling me and bothering me, saying they really wanted these domains; so I sold a couple of them for a good dollar amount at the time (it seemed like a good dollar amount); now they're worth a hundred times more but at the time it seemed like a lot of money. And at that point, I said, wow, this is great; the profit margin on this is huge. So, I just went all out and my friends created software around the idea of domain speculation . . .

Monte: And so, BuyDomains came into existence at that time.

Mike: Yeah, basically it was called . . . I'm sorry; it was called RareDomains at the time . . .

Monte: Right, right.

Mike: . . . and, yeah, we changed the name to BuyDomains and then just started hiring people around that concept of buying and selling domains. We also did other stuff like domain registration; we have a patent for technology called Name Find, which is a way to search for domains. There's a lot of people that use sort of a knock-off of that technology; actually, almost the entire domain industry uses knock-offs of that technology.

Monte: Right, right. So, so then BuyDomains, tell us a little bit about the transaction that recently occurred, because it was one of just a few transactions that occurred last year which involved, you know, portfolio sale of domain names that were owned by your organization and then you were, I guess, moving on to what you're doing now.

Mike: Sure. Well, I mean, our company grew significantly until it became a relevant target for, you know, people that buy and sell companies, essentially. And we decided to take one of the offers, so some really good people called Highland Venture Capital bought the company and it's been cool; I still own 10% of it, actually.

Monte: Oh, good. So your incentive for the organization is still intended to grow and do what it's doing.

Mike: Well, I . . . they pretty much do it on their own. They've been doing a fantastic job without me so it's been pretty cool to actually get the benefit of owning something without having to work there.

Monte: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. So, lets move into GrassRoots.org a little bit and then we can bounce back and forth to some of the valuable insights that you have on the domain name industry and perhaps we can teach some folks some of the tricks of the trade and some of the things you've learned over the years, cause that's the goal of the program is to help advance everybody's knowledge both on what's going on from an industry perspective and also from a domain perspective so that we all become better at what we do and we move a whole entire industry forward, so GrassRoots is one of those organizations that's actually helping, I believe, the Internet to grow, on the very basic levels and there's a lot of organizations that are involved, correct?

Mike: Yes, indeed. What happens is that we allow other 501(c)3 charities to join our group and once they join they can get access to a bunch of free services and information. Actually, a lot of the information you wouldn't even have to join to get access to but if they join, they can get, for example, a consulting from our in-house attorney that works for GrassRoots.org; they can get free website hosting from basically through a partnership we have with one of our partners we have called Tierra.net; they can get free Web development that we have teams of volunteers that help put together websites for charities; free web hosting, free email; we're about to add back-end control panels, where a lot of freeware, shareware and just technologies that have been donated to GrassRoots.org can be utilized by the charities. So, for example, if a charity was a member of GrassRoots.org, in the future they'll be able to log in, they'll be able to get their web hosting, their email, their contact management systems, their content management system they can get from their, the program that manages their statistics on their website they can get from there, programs to raise money for funding their organization, programs for contacting the congressmen. The point is we're going to add a very robust suite of tools that are accessible for free to thousands upon thousands of charities. It's a big project and it's going really well so far. It's going to be a good thing.

Monte: So, so, you know, a lot would never think about doing this. What . . . you get a lot of pleasure out of giving something and that's what I . . . it was intriguing when you and I had this . . . you and I had a conversation, I guess, what was it? I think it was when we got hit by Hurricane Wilma or something, you called me on my cell phone because you were . . . you were interested in working with us from this perspective and I jumped in right away, but you gave me an interesting perspective that, you know, what's the use of making a bunch of money if you can't give something back and this is a great mission for you.

Mike: Sure.

Monte: Give us some insight about where this came from, from your family life and what's been going on.

Mike: Uhm, well, I don't know. I guess it's just been . . . I guess it's just in my family culture to do something charitable and it's just a question of what you and what scale you do it in. I think most of the people out there do something whether it's volunteer at their church or, you know, give money to the United Way or give clothing to the Disabled Veterans; whatever the case is, people do things. So for me I like to try to, first of all, try to do a bigger scale and I have a better opportunity to do things because I've already done the successful business stuff. Then the question is what areas are the best areas for me to do charity and it just makes the most sense for me to do sort of Internet related stuff, network building; that's what I've been successful at doing. So I'm applying that to the charitable portion of my life. I'm trying to make most of my life the charitable portion of my life because I've already . . . you know, I already have a nice house and a nice car from my business stuff so really, what would motivate me to keep doing deals and keep trying to make money unless there was something to accomplish at the end?

Monte: Right; and give something back to others that don't have it.

Mike: Yep.

Monte: That's a really cool thing and its something that we all should think about, cause, you know, you don't want to just die with a bunch of money in your pocket and there's only so much that someone could spend, you know, Bill Gates and everybody else donates a bunch of money to charity and tries to help . . . plus is helps society.

Mike: Right. Right. I'm a thousandth as smart as Bill Gates and on millionth as rich as Bill Gates or one billionth as rich as Bill Gates, so I'm just basically trying to do what he does on a tiny scale and hopefully, if I'm good enough, I'll get to his scale one day, I don't know; but there's no point in not trying.

Monte: Yeah. Definitely. Definitely.

Mike: And I also (I told you, Monte) but for whoever else is listening I wrote this book, an e-book basically, a .PDF that explains my whole, you know, philosophy on, first of all, how to make money and second of all, sort of, not really how to give it away but what you should do once you get money.

Monte: Can you give us . . . give us some highlights about some of those topics that are covered. That's really what I want to jump into. For those that are listening, you know, what things have you learned from this particular business, from the domain business and being on the Web in general in terms of making money; and then, you know, what to do next what you've got it.

Mike: Sure. Do you mind if I give the URL just in case anybody wants to read it?

Monte: Sure. I'll post it in the chat room as well.

Mike: Yeah, that's cool too. If you just go to GrassRoots.org, then there's a link that says “Free E-book, download now” or you can just do GrassRoots.org\book and it's a .PDF download; it's about 80 pages of .PDF, I think. And, you know, its my own personal philosophy but essentially what it says in the beginning is take the pieces of this you like and apply it to your own business and take the charitable pieces that you and apply that to your own charitable stuff. Don't . . . we're not telling you and I'm not telling you to do anything in particular; do what you want to do but I think I have some ideas that you can pick from here.

Monte: Yeah, definitely. So, give us some highlights.

Mike: Uhm, well, one of the main points is being focused and spending a lot of focused hours on whatever your business plan, whatever your task is, to not get distracted by too many external forces. You need to spend a lot of hours, day after day, totally focused on one thing. And that's your one business, or one business idea. And the main point of that is to make money and to do sales, essentially; so essentially what you should be doing is endless hours of doing sales, if you want to own your own business and sales can include marketing, relationship building, and if you're fortunate it might include, you know, playing golf, for example – nothing that I do – but the point is, is that you can build your sales leads and your sales contacts in a lot of ways, not just cold calling and the most important thing to do really is to be training other people, to be hiring people underneath in good sales strategy, good contact management strategy. One of my big things is contact management, is identifying your target market, whether it's a zip code, whether its every widget manufacturer in the country, whoever your target market is and grabbing every single piece of data that is accessible on that person, having it in your contact manager and working according to the calendar and function of the contact manager. The contact manager will tell you exactly who to call, when to call them, it'll keep track of all your emails, it'll keep track of all your faxes, all your notes. You can interlink different contacts in order to create an awareness of a network of a sales and marketing network so you can essentially try to milk the whole network. You go from one person to the next to the next. Your contact manager will keep track of, again, every aspect of that.

Monte: Is there a particular contact manager that you recommend? We just actually, we've been on Goldmine for quite some time and just actually moved to ACT! this week . . .

Mike: Oh, really, why did you move?

Monte: That's a pretty good manager, is there something else that you recommend of those that are . . . .

Mike: Well, why did you switch is my main question.

Monte: Which one?

Mike: Why did you switch?

Monte: Uhm, well, cause . . . Goldmine isn't a great sales management tool; it's a good contact manager but ACT! is more geared towards, you know, selling and relationship building, in my opinion . . .

Mike: Right.

Monte: So, . . .

Mike: Well, the thing with me is that I haven't had to do sales for a few years but, I mean, I was into Goldmine and nowadays, I'm guess that SalesForce.com is probably the most relevant thing for any Internet related person.

Monte: Yeah, yeah. SalesForce. We looked at that too.

Mike: For some their prices are too high so I would say, everybody petition their prices, get the prices down and then use their service.

Monte: Yeah, we looked at SalesForce.com as well but you basically, from what I understand, you can't have a centralized connection; you can only access it through the Web.

Mike: Hmm, ah, yeah, maybe but the thing is it probably . . . I don't know that much about it but there's probably a way to manage it offline as well. The thing that's cool about SalesForce.com, which is also cool about the GrassRoots.org software control panel that we're building, is also cool about the other toolsets we interact with – they're all built with these modern technologies wherein it's really easy for third parties to add on applications to it. Like Goldmine, once you have Goldmine, you know, there's probably one or two add on applications or I don't know how many, maybe there's dozens, I have no idea but SalesForce.com has an open API, open standard and they purposely, their main focus is encouraging people to connect lots of other cool stuff to this and to build a community around their toolsets . . .

Monte: Right, right, right.

Mike: And that's the models that I would say, you know, software in general, if were to invest in software at all, it would have that profile.

Monte: You did; you invested in Software.com.

Mike: Well, exactly.

Monte: [laughs]

Mike: We started Software.com which will hopefully be a big thing. You know, it just started so its, you know, the business plan looks great from my perspective.

Monte: Well, tell us a little bit about that because that was a big huge sale that you know was a couple million dollars. What . . .

Mike: Well, it's all relative . . .

Monte: Yeah, I know, its all relative, but . . .

Mike: Actually, it was a little tiny sale relative to the value of the name.

Monte: Yeah, yeah. Definitely. I mean . . .

Mike: And really, we don't even care about the name at all. Like any of the new companies that I'm associated with, they might have fantastic names but none of those names are for sale.

Monte: Yeah.

Mike: Those are, those are names for corporations and that's kind of what I see as a better more current business model also is that domains are for businesses and for branding. The traffic thing is great but that game is played. That's practically an efficient market. It actually might be, you know, an inflated market. I'm not even sure, I haven't done the math on any of it recently but I would say that for everybody that's trying to capture the traffic dollars, that, you know, its done cause everybody's already bidding it up and they already know how to figure out the traffic data. It's not . . . you know, it's if you already do it well and make money, but as far as the future of domain names, the traffic thing is already optimized. All that's left is whatever names out of the 100 million that have been registered actually have tangible branding value, so that's the first thing. They have tangible branding value . . .

Monte: Right.

Mike: . . . secondly, that there's a person who enhances that brand and builds a corporate brand around it, so forget the idea of a domain name and traffic. It's building, you know, a sustainable corporation that's connected online with a good brand name, which happens to be their domain name.

Monte: Right. Now, when you said the traffic game is all played out, what exactly do you mean by that, there's people asking in the chat room.

Mike: There isn't a sufficient market. If you were to start today to try to compete with the people who buy traffic, Internet domain traffic for a living, you would be competing in a market that everybody's already bid up to its efficient . . . if you had to buy $100 worth of traffic today, you know, unless you had a strategic advantage, which if you were starting today you wouldn't have a strategic advantage, you would be buying $100 worth of traffic for $100, so you wouldn't get anywhere. There's not a lot of margin left there. However, if you bought a domain, you know, whatever it is, lets forget Software.com cause that's too expensive, but if you bought, you know, lets say, SoftwareServices.com or something like that, for $500, you know, that's really . . . its not so much about domains and domain traffic, it's a different business, its called building a business that's connected to the Internet.

Monte: Right, right. So, what you're saying is that it's better to get a domain name when you can build a business around in the background because the traffic game is a competitive marketplace and it's a hard place to go in and compete and get your ROI due to the inflated prices of domain names?

Mike: Yeah. I mean, you could do both. I mean, if you know how to make money doing traffic, that's great and that's cool; but, irrespective of that, there's, you know, 100 million domains that don't have any traffic and of those there's a few million of them that have tangible branding value that should be enhanced through, you know, corporations that are connected online, conducting best practices to make money . . .

Monte: Right, right.

Mike: . . . as opposed to just, you know, okay, I'm buying traffic. Like you, Monte, are an insider so for you, you can do whatever you want, you know; and it has a much higher chance of working than somebody who's starting today to do whatever.

Monte: Right, right. Well, I still . . . I . . . I agree and disagree a little bit but I feel the market is still very young in both sides. You know, I feel that we're in a land of opportunity, the very first innings in a baseball game, as Andrew Zappy would say, and domain names that seem expensive today will be cheap tomorrow and that, you know, infusion, I mean, investment into the online advertising world is continuing to increase not decrease and so . . .

Mike: Right. What I'm saying is their not . . . yeah, their not domains, their brands.

Monte: Right, right. They're brands but even the type in domains that aren't brands yet there's still a lot of room for growth there.

Mike: Oh, I don't doubt that; all I'm saying is whoever's buying and selling that stuff for a living knows what they're doing already, so its hard to like [inaudible] . . .

Monte: . . . [inaudible] yeah its [inaudible] hard to get into it unless you're willing to do what Highland did with you guys or if you're willing to do what MarchX did with UltimateSearch and just throw a huge casting net on the industry by buying a big portfolio and paying up for it and then making your money back by reducing your costs and monetizing and doing extra things to monetize so you turn your return on investment from a, you know, 7 – 10 year investment into a 5 year investment and then you can start making lots of money.

Mike: That's what Highland did?

Monte: Yep.

Mike: [laughs]

Monte: That's what I think they did.

Mike: Maybe.

Monte: [laughs] Well, how many domain names came with that portfolio?

Mike: Uhm, at the time, it was about 400,000.

Monte: Yeah, so, 400,000. 400,000 domain names and you know, they're monetizing in both traffic aggregation and also selling the domain names, so, you know . . .

Mike; Maybe they have bigger plans than none of us know about. [laughs]

Monte: Yeah, sure, I'm sure they have big plans, too. I'm sure the top notch domain names are going to be, you know, taken to future development, just like what MarchX is doing and others and you know, that's the way to play it out.

Mike: Well, first of all I don't know and if I did, I wouldn't be able to tell anybody.

Monte: Yeah, yeah. I know. [laughs]

Mike: But nobody tells me so I don't have to worry about telling anybody.

Monte: Right, right. Well, how can folks get involved with GrassRoots.org; I have a couple webmasters asking how they can get links up and help out.

Mike: Yeah, that would be awesome. Uhm, you know, we're going to launch a new site, first of all, so it'll be more intuitive but in the meantime, there are in fact sign up forms to become a volunteer. Certainly, if anyone wanted to donate money, you know the money all goes to good charity work. I don't take any of it. I put money into it. There's very few underpaid employees so the money isn't wasted anywhere but in any event, definitely to volunteer webmaster services would be awesome or whatever other service, whatever else one would want to do to participate, including if they're, you know, capable of writing content and that sort of thing. In any case, if you go to the site GrassRoots.org, there's a link that says “volunteer.” And, well this, yeah, this goes to our volunteer match account and we'll just read whatever you filled out. Basically it goes to Volunteer Match, which is a cool organization; they're managing the back end of the volunteer system for us; and then our people, Joe Gerseck, Jim Ward, Alain Nager, Ed Caiatano, one of those guys will call you or email you back and we have plenty of good work for you to work on. It's all for good charities that go through a screening process and its good stuff. And in general, you should keep an eye on it cause we have really big stuff planned and we have no intention of failing.

Monte: That's great. That's great. And I'm sure we'll be successful. You've got a lot of good people behind it and you're behind it and there's a lot of companies donating their time or donating their project, you know, their products and services and its basically being mentioned in every domain conference that I'm attending as well, that people were standing up and saying if you hadn't been involved, get involved with GrassRoots.org and we're spreading the word around.

Mike: Again, a lot of the domain traffic related people have been getting into it and we intend to reinforce that to talk and meet with a lot of people and work on, first of all, to explain our long term strategy and then see, you know, what regards these people with lots of resources want to participate. Even if you don't have any resources you can still, you know, our newsletter talks about small things you can do everyday to participate and so there's lots of good reasons for everybody to be giving back, whether it's through GrassRoots.org or through their church or whatever they want to do; there's lots of stuff to do . . . .

Monte: And, and, if somebody wants to put your link of GrassRoots.org on their website to help get people to the organization, how would one do that? Just go ahead and do the volunteer link?

Mike: Uhm, there's some other . . . there's some other email . . . there's some other, like, form they can fill out. Like if it's a contact form and just say, hey, I want to do this. There's also spots on the site where you can actually download the banners and place them on your site. There's contact forms. We're pretty good communicators so, you know, there's also, if you want to, you can send an email to HYPERLINK "mailto:mail1@grassroots.net" mail1@grassroots.net, but the contact form will work. There's different stuff on the site that kind of guides you and [inaudible] . . .

Monte: Mail1@grassroots . . . ?

Mike: . . . and in three weeks there'll be a really awesome new site that will be more intuitive.

Monte: Right. Did you say HYPERLINK "mailto:mail1@grassroots.net" mail1@grassroots.net? Or .org?

Mike: Yes, .net.

Monte: Oh, .net. Okay. HYPERLINK "mailto:Mail1@grassroots.net" Mail1@grassroots.net.

Mike: This is a temporary account. I wouldn't even do that. That one's not the best way. The best way to get it in the system properly, just fill out . . . there's a simple contact form that people read and respond to and if they don't, tell Monte and I'll get to them.

Monte: Okay, okay. [laughs] Great. Well, Mike, any last words of advice being someone that's been in the space and in our space so long that you can give any words to the wise that you haven't mentioned?

Mike: Yeah, I think really, the best bet if you want to know everything that I know, I've tried the last year to document it. It may or may not be that great, but it's all documented in my book, e-book, and you know, its free. Hopefully some of it is valuable information. I've tried to, you know, explain a lot of business, my own business theory and explain it out as best I could but its there and it's a work-in-progress. There'll be successive versions that are supposed to constantly, you know, explain out the best business practices.

Monte: Great. Great. Well, Mike, we really appreciate your time and hopefully, many more will join up and participate with GrassRoots.org and I look forward to keeping in touch with you and helping your organization out in every way that we can.

Mike: That's awesome. Thanks a lot, I appreciate it.

Monte: Okay, thank you very much.

Mike: Take care. Bye-bye.

Monte: Okay, you too. Alright, thanks to Michael Mann, one of the most, you know, one of the icons in our industry for sure. Helped start BuyDomains and sold a successful web hosting business to Verio and had a lot of great success, so hopefully that was a little bit helpful to folks and I do suggest everybody read his e-book; I haven't yet, but I will, for sure.

Stay tuned. We're going to break for a short commercial and be back on with Eric Shannon.

[Commercials]

Monte: Hello, everyone, welcome back to Domain Masters. Again, thanks to my first guest, Michael Mann, from GrassRoots.org. My second guest, who I'm proud to have as a very good Moniker customer as well, is Eric Shannon. Eric is President of Latpro.com. Latpro is one of the top niche boards and employment section and founding member of HYPERLINK "http://www.nicheboards.com" www.nicheboards.com. Latpro serves 150,000+ Hispanic and bilingual professionals a month by providing services to 90 of the Fortune 100 companies. Latpro's been featured in The Wall Street Journal, and also has both served as both valuable services for the state and local governments and Coast Guard and CIA. Eric, welcome to the show.

Eric: Thanks, Monte.

Monte: So, give us a little background on yourself, because I know that you've been . . . you're not as old in the domain business but you started playing, what, back in . . . what was the first year you started buying domain names?

Eric: Ah, well, ah, registering names for my business in 1997 but unfortunately I didn't have a clue and I didn't really register anything worthwhile. I got involved as a . . . in the domain side of the business, so I basically have been a developer for 8 years.

Monte: Right.

Eric: And just got involved in the past year in the domain industry and have been really pursuing what I consider my degree in domains intensively in the past 6 months, starting with the first TRAFFIC conference.

Monte: Great. I just had as my first guest, as you know, Michael Mann, who started BuyDomains and you're one of the examples of somebody who is new in the business and is becoming successful so that is my . . . that was one of my points was that, hey, it's not too early . . . or not too late to get in. It's a fast, emerging, growing market and I know that you've learned a lot from being at the TRAFFIC conferences and getting involved with the domain business and of course being involved with us, so, you know, what's you're take on the industry and give us a little bit of a background about how you got started, you know, in your own business.

Eric: Well, with Latpro, it's basically starting a service that didn't exist. At the time I was looking for a job, a position where I could use my Spanish language skills, travel to Latin American, so forth and that didn't exist so, you know, I just started the site and it never occurred to me to register any intuitive, generic, type in domains and only recently got involved in buying and registering generic names and got my start with Medicine.org, which you helped me purchase about 5 months ago and we're actively developing that now.

Monte: What is Medicine.org going to be?

Eric: Medicine.org is going to be a consumer healthcare information site. Sort of like a Craigslist for healthcare. Basically, user generated content. Very minimal or no commercial activity on the site. I've . . . its sort of a personal development project, personal interest. I've had a lot of health issues over the past couple of years and just developed the interest that way. But, I know, if you develop something valuable with . . . that turns into a high traffic site, your . . . you know, it has value and so someday, you know, I'm sure it will have commercial potential.

Monte: Right, right. And now give us a little bit of a background about Latpro and exactly what it does. What does it do for . . . what does it do on the Web and how does it serve business?

Eric: Well, we're like a Monster.com for the Hispanic and bilingual niche, so we're like an online classifieds in the employment sector and just focused on Spanish and bilingual. You know . . . I was thinking it might be interesting for your listeners to . . . for me to tell you some of the things that I've learned about domains as a developer and a business owner because it's a little different . . . you know I do some things that are different than the typical domainer and it might be interesting. Would you like hear . . . ?

Monte: Yeah, yeah. Definitely. That's one of the points of the show is to make sure at least there's a couple things that everybody gets to walk away from that they didn't know before, that can really help them advance their own business and help our business as a whole, because if everybody's more educated and working towards a common goal of becoming more successful on the Web, we all win. So, yeah, definitely.

Eric: Well, the truth is I love domains and I love talking about them, so that's really what I'm really passionate about now. One of the things that I wish I had . . . I've got . . . I'm developing Ten Commandments, Domain Commandments for business owners and . . .

Monte: Oh, that's great.

Eric: . . . the first thing that I wish I had learned 7 years ago was you can use domains to raise the barriers to entry in your niche by registering all the names new competitors might. Anything with a ring of legitimacy to it. So you can create like a moat around your business, where anybody that wants to play in that area, they have to call you. So, you know, I didn't register HispanicJobs.com, of all things and you know, now, I can't buy it because MarchX owns it and it's not for sale; so that's my first lesson, you know, register everything around you that you think you wouldn't want it to fall into a competitors hands.

Monte: Yep.

Eric: Number Two is to integrate domains into your marketing and traffic strategies. Build link directories in community websites and that stuff will pay off in spades over time. We did do that and that's one thing we've been pretty successful with. And I would say register large families of generics for this purpose using geography. I've been, you know, an experiment and test everything. I . . . I don't just register blindly and keep registering blindly; I'm always using Traffic Club to measure what's working and, you know, where the traffic's coming from.

Monte: Right.

Eric: The, as you know also, I think I experimented with . . . I was considering . . . I leased Latino.com for a few months' to try and decide whether to purchase and develop it and it had a very hefty price tag and one of the things I learned from that – we tested the name against a bunch of other names, brandable names, in Google Adwords for a attractiveness so, you know, I ran ads that had the same title, the same description but a different display URL in them, so I tested Latino.com against other domains until I found out that there were some $7 names and you know some $10,000 names which, actually outperformed Latino.

Monte: Right, right. So, you're able to determine that by doing AB testing or testing across certain keywords and bringing down those Google links into the Google Adwords into a particular site?

Eric: Exactly. Exactly. You know, all the traffic would go to the same place but the display URL changes so you know people are looking at Latino.com versus LatinoLink.com and LatinoWeb.com, etc. and I'm noticing that LatinoLink.com is getting a higher click through – a substantially higher click through – than Latino.com. So, you know, there . . .

Monte: And, why do you think that is because I have a take on that but I want to hear it from you since you've experienced it.

Eric: Well, I think it's different for every niche, every business, I think you need to test everything. You can't over generalize this but in the case of Latino I think it's too, it's a little bit too vague. People tend to, I think . . . it could also be that people are associating big generics like that with landing pages these days . . .

Monte: Yeah.

Eric: . . . and something like LatinoLink.com, very focused, possibly a business run by a passionate entrepreneur as opposed to something that's sort of adrift in space.

Monte: Right, something more broad in general. That's something that comes up over and over in today's shows and you know, in today's broadcasts that we do is that back in the old days, you know, when we sold Autos.com for over two million bucks, it was like the premier property of the auto industry; but today, more valuable or better converting name might be something like, you know, NewYorkAutos.com or you know, AutoSales, you know, in a more geographical sense because, you know, its hard to buy an auto at Autos.com; although it goes to Cars direct now but it's a CarsDirect competing site so they do something different with it now than what it was originally intended which was to be the bree[?] brand of their business. But as we all know, people were typing in longer words into the search engine and longer words into the URL line that are more descriptive in nature, even more geographical in nature, so they're getting more targeted and then your conversions go up a result of being more targeted, even in a PPC page.

Eric: I think also the power of the name is different in different mediums. For example, I wanted to own Latino.com because I believe that when my sales force is calling Fortune 100 Companies, it has a much stronger pull in that particular circumstance and I think that's going to be true about Medicine.org. When we call to do partnerships and we're calling from Medicine.org, that's a lot more powerful than MedicineLink or MyMedicine.org or something like that so you know, really I think it depends on the medium too.

Monte: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely. Alright, let's hear a couple of the other points.

Eric: Okay. One of the things that I highly recommend is registering – every time you come up with a new product or a new service, you register names for all . . . for everything you do. You know, a name that you . . . that costs you $7 today could cost you $7,000 just a couple years later so you know, the cost benefits really, really clear. And look five years into the future when deciding what to register and understand what your best alternative is to domains in terms of traffic. You know, this is where what I do is it's a little different from what . . . the thinking that I'm using is a little different from a domainer. For example, a $7 domain, a domainer might need 70 clicks or 70 visitors on a name in order to get 7 bucks back and consider it a break even, right?

Monte: Right, right.

Eric: Well, a developer only needs maybe 7 visitors. Let's say the cost per click on Google is $1; I only need 7 visitors to consider that a break even, so and furthermore, one thing that's really important in this analysis is look at the rise of the rate of increase in the CPC cost. 5 years from now, my break even cost on that same name might 1 visitor.

Monte: Right, right. That one visitor could make all you money back. For sure.

Eric: Exactly. And then the other thing I think a lot of domainers may not consider (which I've learned) is that .org, .info, .us, and dashes have a lot of value to businesses like mine in marketing. You put them in the display URL and you forward the traffic to whatever your business is and it allows your to get a much higher click through. Basically, the visitors, the searchers, really don't care whether its .com, .org, .us. There's a little bit of a preference but for example, right now we're running a webmaster contest at WebMasterContest.com and I'm testing that (the .com) against the .net, the .org, the .info, the .biz and the .us and the .ws; and the .ws is the only one that's significantly under performs to .com. So all those other . . . for anybody getting into the business, you know, a little late like me, there's tremendous value in the .org; .org especially but I would also say .info and .us. You know, I own HispanicJobs.us and that's . . . its one way for me to overcome the fact that I didn't register HispanicJobs.com to some degree.

Monte: Right, right. That's a very good point. So, you know, even though a lot of the .coms are gone it doesn't mean that the game's over because you have to go with another extension. It's was you do with it once you get it.

Eric: Another funny thing to think about is that when I bought Medicine.org – had you offered me Medicine.com and Medicine.org and I could only afford one of them – they were the same price but I could only afford one of them – I would have gone with Medicine.org; and that goes totally counter to, you know, the .com is king wisdom and if you talk to the Medicine.com owner, probably wouldn't sell it for even a million dollars; yet, I paid $85,000 for .org, so there's a lot of value out there. It really isn't too late.

Monte: Yeah, yeah. And that's a good point because .org, from its original intent which was supposed to be a non-profit, you know, for non-profit and organizations, really found its own niche and became very successful and by PIR, you know, which is the Public Interest Registry, the folks that took over the .org, by having them not really not restrict the use of the .org domain name, which is what they were originally going do and leave it open for profit and for non-profit organizations to register it, it did a very good thing for the .orgs value and you know, it stayed very competitive as a result.

Eric: For sure. You know, and another thing, one thing I wanted to mention another case where the .org, I believe, is . . . outweighs the .com is . . . vote.org . . . if I'm a little incoherent tonight its cause I didn't sleep at all last worrying about where this domain's going to go. I'm brokering this name for a family friend . . .

Monte: Go ahead and mention the name [inaudible] . . .

Eric: . . . You most, 99% of domainers would probably call me crazy but in my opinion this is the most important name in the history of the Internet.

Monte: Go ahead and mention the name, cause it is a great name.

Eric: It's Vote.org.

Monte: Yeah; V-O-T-E.org. It's a great name.

Eric: V-O-T-E. The reason I say its maybe the most important in the history of the Internet; if you consider English as the dominate language in the world, the U.S. is the only superpower dominant and number one economy and all the freedom and power that we represent is all regulated, all the religious, cultural, everything we do and benefit from here in the U.S. is all regulated by the vote.

Monte: Right, by voting. Right.

Eric: By voting. And it's another situation where .com - .com is not king here. .com is commercial and you know, people . . . if you want legitimacy and credibility, its .org in this particular case. And what I want to do is I want to see this name go to . . . I want to see it taken out of . . . make sure it never goes . . . is owned by a commercial operator or one of the political parties so I would like to see it go to FactCheck.org or the Smart Vote Project at Smart-Vote.org. But those organizations don't have the funding to accomplish that so I'm hoping somebody like . . . if anybody can get me in touch with Bill Gates or Warren Buffet or maybe Michael Mann, I don't know, I'm sure one of those guys, I'm sure there's somebody out there, some high-minded philanthropist out there that will see it the same way.

Monte: Yeah, definitely. Well, I'm sure if you can't sell it, I'm sure you can always donate it to GrassRoots.org [laughs].

Eric: Well, if I owned it, I probably would. But this individual has, I believe, said he has some substantial medical bills and he wouldn't be selling it otherwise. He had an accident some time ago and so it's . . . you know, he's not in a rush, I think everything's under control but you know, he's got personal reasons for wanting to sell . . . for needing to sell it.

Monte: Right, right. And it's a great name and you're right, it does have a lot of power, a lot of inherent power behind that name as we're a country dictated by how we vote and that's how we speak our opinion and speak our minds is by voting. So, you're correct.

Eric: Exactly. So, if you want to help me get in touch with Michael, I'd really like to discuss it with him.

Monte: Sure, I'll definitely do that. Definitely do that. What are some of the other things in your Ten Commandment list? I think what we've gone through 5 or 6 of them?

Eric: I think we're at . . . I think we made it all the way to 7; I haven't finished but I will post the whole list at InternetInc.com once it's complete. I'll post it tomorrow, in fact, even though it'll be a little incomplete.

Monte: Oh, okay, great. Great. I think that's a great idea, you know, everybody's coming up with ways to do their Top 10 or their most effective ways to be successful and Michael Mann just mentioned his e-book that he wrote, which is a great idea as well and so I think that would be . . . I think it'd be great. Everybody . . . a lot of people have some of the same things that they all say but there's always something different that one does that can help others and there's hundreds of different things and strategies and ways that we can all be successful so it's good to get them all out. Out of all these shows that we've done, you know, for a year and several months, there's always something new that comes up on one, on the show that somebody's doing that's made them successful that no one's done that, or that no one thought about, you know, so that's the important thing.

Eric: There sure is and maybe number eight would be listened to your show, listen to as many experts as you can through this show. Go to TRAFFIC and meet as many domainers as possible and, well, that's pretty common advice.

Monte: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And, you know, you're . . . like you said, your registering domain names since 1997 but not for yourself and not for your own business. You just started, basically, you know, a year or so ago, right? And you've been able to be successful at it by going after strategic names, paying up a little bit, but also testing a strategy, is basically what you're saying, testing against other domain names, knowing where to spend your money and how much to spend and then developing a strategy around it.

Eric: Well, honestly, to gauge my success, we'll need to talk again in a year, two years, three years because I'm not buying and selling so it's a long range strategy. I've got about 4,500 names, all of which are intended to be put into development, so you know, I'm not a seller and we'll . . . I'll get back to you on the success part [laughs] in a few years.

Monte: Except you are interested in selling Vote.org for your family.

Eric: It's not my family . . .

Monte: Is it friend or family?

Eric: It's not my family. I just feel strongly about it because I, you know, its just basically on principle. I just would hate to see Vote.org be commercialized.

Monte: Right, right. So, yeah, that's a good idea. Well, Eric, its been a real pleasure having you on. And any last words of advice that you'd like to give to anyone that's just starting or those that have been professional domainers for years and years and years that you've been able to, you know, share with others that's been successful that you haven't mentioned?

Eric: Well, I'd say don't believe anyone that says its too late. You know, you just have to . . . oh, you know what? Just look five years down the road. For example, think about the name . . . the people that you consider to be hugely successful now; think about them 5 or 10 years ago and what they thought about their portfolios and what everyone else thought about them. They thought they were sitting, a lot of them probably thought they were sitting on names that nobody really wanted at the time and you know, that's what I'm doing. I think I've got a lot of names that everybody, that most domainers would say, what are those for? Right? But, the bottom line, I guess maybe the one thing that really could explain why I own 4500 names that most domainers would not be interested in is that I'm a developer and I have friends who, for example, make millions a year in their Internet businesses and don't care whatsoever, don't care the slightest bit that about leak-over, about typos, you know, when you're making millions and your running a growing business, somebody's making a few thousand dollars from a typo or something on your, you know, on your back, so what? Development is . . . can be tremendously rewarding and it doesn't depend on . . . you don't have to have the sexiest name, you don't have to have the .com – its always good to have the .com – but there's a lot of ways to skin the cat.

Monte: Hey, if it wasn't just the .com world, the other extensions wouldn't exist, would they?

Eric: Well, that's right. I mean, I guess its all part of the beauty of the domain world is its intricacy, the complexity and the diversity, so yeah, that's really, I agree on that.

Monte: Great. Well, that's some good insight and it's something that's obviously worked to help make your own business successful and we wish you all the luck with Latpro and with your new venture and hopefully we'll get Vote.org sold for you too, and help you there too.

Eric: Well, thanks Monte; I love your show and I love your services. They're world-class. I use Moniker.com every day for probably 10 or 15 minutes, I'd say, and world-class service. Great job and . . .

Monte: Thank you very much; I appreciate that and hopefully we'll just keep hearing from people like you and keep improving everything and provide the highest level of support and security and hopefully take care of as many people as we can.

Well, thanks a lot for being on the show and we'll definitely catch up with you a year from now and see how you're doing.

Eric: Okay, my pleasure, Monte.

Monte: Okay, take care. Bye-bye.

Eric: You, too.

Monte: Well, folks, that wraps up another week of Domain Masters. I hope it was good for you and its nice to learn what other people are doing in their industry and in their business that could help you be successful in yours. Just a reminder, go to GrassRoots.org, make sure that you take a look at the e-book that Michael Mann spoke about and also if you want to get involved with the organization, its for a great cause, its for a charitable cause. Please go to the contact form and fill out your information. Also, if you have any interest in Vote.org, send me an email or send Eric an email. His email address is HYPERLINK "mailto:eshannon@latpro.com" eshannon@latpro.com; I'll put it up on the board, too, but that's HYPERLINK "mailto:eshannon@latpro.com" eshannon@latpro.com or email me at HYPERLINK "mailto:monte@moniker.com" monte@moniker.com. I'll forward things to him.

With that, as I mentioned, we'll be live from Search Engine Strategies conference in New York City next; we're excited to go to the conference and sure that its going to be action-packed and fun-filled event and I'll be there with the WebMasterRadio folks and so we'll be rockin' the show floor and getting some business and hopefully getting some great guests that will share some insight into what's going on with search engine strategy these days and search engine optimization. With that I will see you next week, live, from SES, on Domain Masters. Be the master of your domain. Take care, see you next week.

[Commercials]

Back to Index