Stephen Douglas of SuccessClick is Montes Guest Tonight
09/06/2006 - Monte Cahn
Stephen Douglas: Current Professions: Domain industry consultant for Bulkregister.com Past Professions: Director of Development for a college community portal including email provider service, domain name purchasing and management (6 years), twenty years experience as a Producer, director of live shows and events, published author, Mac IT Consultant, rock musician/songwriter, & surfer. Goals: Rocking the boat to dislodge despotic domain ideas. People who know him see him as: rabble-rouser and raconteur Domain Industry souls he admires in no particular order: Adam Dicker, Jay Westerdal, Sevan Derderian, Dan Warner, Ron James, Monte Cahn, Sig, Eric Rice, Kevin Leto, Ammar Kuba, Jude Augusta, and many more domainers making a difference in a fair and conscientious way.
[Commercials]
Monte: Hello, everyone. This is Monte Cahn, the host of Domain Masters. Hope everybody had a great week. Unfortunately, we were not able to broadcast live last week. It looks like people picked up some good things from our rerun last week, anyway. But if everybody watched the news, we had little Tropical Storm Ernesto give us a little scare and so I thought the studio would be closed, but they turned out to come back live and we already made plans to cover ourselves remotely, so I was out of the office.
In any case, we have a live show this week and I have a great guest lined up for us. Stephen Douglas, who basically is a domain industry consultant; he’s currently consulting for BulkRegister.com. If everybody hasn’t heard the news, BulkRegister just got bought by Enom and the DemandMedia Group. That’s not particularly the reason why we’re going to have Stephen but Stephen is a 6-year domainer, 20 years of experience as a producer/director of live shows and events. He owns a couple thousand names himself. He has some really good perspective on the industry and I think we can all pick up a few things from him today, so we’re going to have him on. And I also have the .Mobi guys in the office today for, well, a good half of the day, I guess. Glen and the crew came down; we talked about the .Mobi land rush. I hope you all are getting excited about that. We are. We just did a lowering of prices on our site, getting ready for the land rush. So if you go to Moniker.com, you can get your pre-registrations in and get all set up for getting as many pre-registrations done and for the land rush as you can, ‘cause .Mobi’s going to be hot. I’m convinced of it.
In any case, what we’re going to do is we’re going to take a commercial break, pay some bills, be back on with Stephen Douglas and we’ll see you in a couple minutes.
[Commercials]
Monte: Hello everyone. Monte Cahn. Welcome back to Domain Masters. My guest – my one and only guest – is Stephen Douglas. Stephen is currently a domain industry consultant for BulkRegister.com. But his past professions include the director of development for a college community portal, including email provider service, domain name purchasing and management for over 6 years; 20 years of experience as a producer/director of live shows and events, publisher, author, MAC IT consultant and a rock musician, song writer and surfer. Stephen, welcome to Domain Masters.
Stephen: Hi ya doin’ Monte?
Monte: How are you doing?
Stephen: I’m doing fine. Just kind of kicking back and checking out this fabulous way that NetFlix lets you rate the movies and then recognize the movies that you want afterwards. I’m just fascinated with the Internet and the way its going.
Monte: [laughs] Well, that’s great. Speaking of the Internet and how it’s going, why don’t you give us a little bit of a background on how you got started in the Internet and your first experience with domain names.
Stephen: Actually, uhm . . . I really got started back in 1991 or ’92 when some close friends of mine where just taking a look at the Internet while it was still UNIX based, and were forming some sort of advertising show or something where they could sell ads and then send out email coupons to people who wanted to buy email coupons and I kind of got mixed up in doing their shows and presentations and they . . . the name of their company was actually at the time Online America and like a short time within that time, I guess, another company with a similar sounding name came out, and that was that. But I eventually was using my experience as a show producer and I was also an author. I am looked at as the foremost expert in the world on red head history, believe it or not, and I have a book out . . .
Monte: [laughs] How did you become the foremost expert on red head history?
Stephen: I started a red head organization back in the early eighties and it got . . . Dear Abby did a story and an article on it and then from there tens of thousands of people, plus Good Morning America and The Today Show. I’ve been featured in Playboy Magazine, Cosmopolitan – I’ve done Playboy shoots with red heads; that was fun. And just got information . . . just at the right time, at the right place, and with the right idea, I just got, literally, tens of thousands of people responding – red heads and non-reds alike. And I gathered all the information that I learned from people that sent me information and people that I had talked to and the interviews that I had done. I’ve done thousands of newspaper and radio interviews and it was really an unbelievable life experience during that period. But I gained a lot of knowledge about the media and what they were looking for and how to talk to them and basically, if you’ve got something that’s going to make people scratch their head and go, huh? You know, you might . . .you might want to cover, you know, whatever you’re doing. But from there I’ve worked for Foot, Comb & Belding (the advertising agency) for a little bit and in between producing live events and shows, modeling events. I did a lot of corporate restaurant mini-skirt contests, like kind of thing, for a particular segment of a bar, you know, like Bobby McGees or Red Onions or those types of corporate restaurants that had the nightclub/restaurant combo thing. Got a lot of experience in working and setting those events up. And, uh, around, uh, I guess around 1995, 1996, you know, I got . . . I was using more and more of my uh, production and information experience promoting redheads online and I didn’t do it myself. Some people actually volunteered the server and the webmaster; I had no technical experience whatsoever. I was mainly a promoter. And, uhm, so, I, I went, man, this is unbelievable. I don’t have to spend $25,000 to make up 10,000 10-page color brochures. I can just put a couple tidbits of information and some nice redhead photos online and the next thing I know, people can visit this 24 hours a day, you know, all year long, every day, any time they want. It’s just, to me, the Internet was, like, an amazing opportunity to actually promote, in my eyes, just the ability to promote an idea, a service, a business, a product, whatever.
Monte: Right.
Stephen: And, then from there, I came up with an idea to start a kind of a college or portal community that provided really crazy email addresses for people; it was called Wild Email. And we went out and I spent months just looking for every slang term, every bizarre domain name that actually represented something that would cover a person’s personality, what they thought of themselves. I won’t give you any of the terms that we came up with as domain names, but, ah, anyway, we maybe purchased almost 2,000 domain names that way. So I kind of got the experience of the Network Solutions, I think it was, gee, two years minimum, $35 a year back in 1999, I think it was and then that changed right at the end of the year. And then another . . . a lot more registrars started coming out and then buying and testing each one of those during the course of that, buying these domain names for this portal and I . . .
Monte: What were some of the domain names you purchased for this particular portal that were interesting to you?
Stephen: Ah, well, I don’t know if we actually own them anymore. That business and my partners, we’ve kind of gone in different directions and I no longer manage the domain names as of about 2 years ago and I think a lot of them dropped. So maybe some of your listeners actually own them, right? But, we had badass.net, itsgoodtobeme.com, which was a phrase that came . . . I think it was a phrase that was really promoted a lot on the Austin Powers movie series. Uhm, let’s see, uh, hornswaggled, any kind of . . . you know, southernboy.com. Just all sorts of varieties of culture or tradition or hobbies, attitudes, interests. You know, we had skateboardpunk.com; whole bunch of different types of domains. It was a pretty good portfolio which I, sad to say, I have no idea of what the remnants of that portfolio actually look like at this point, because we’ve all gone in different directions. And, but, our biggest problem back then was we made the decision to do everything outsourced and this was before the overseas ability . . .
Monte: [inaudible] . . . of outsourcing in India and . . .
Stephen: Absolutely. This was before that had actually hit. This was in 1999, 2000, and we hired some American companies (who’s names I won’t mention) and who at the time were riding high right before the bubble burst, right? And they were charging some serious rates to have our portal built out. And we had a . . . this thing was just a wonderful idea and we spent a helluva lot a money and time and effort and had hall these domain names set up and we actually had a work website, so and so forth, but some of the hosting services that we hired forgot to put on their firewall, the router firewalls; we got hacked probably non-stop by Russian porn spammers, which was a very unfortunate situation. And it was just one nightmare after another. It got to the point where all I was doing was, you know, damage control, you know. And it was such a hard . . . email providing service is such a hard business. It’s probably one of the hardest of the Internet businesses that there is.
Monte: Right. Right.
Stephen: Unfortunately, we were spending all our time doing that. We could have gone off in a different direction as MySpace and some of these other, you know, community connection, you know, friend kind of connecting type of website that exits now. We had that business model back then in 1999 and were . . . we were focusing mainly on our email service, so, it was a bad choice to go in that direct. But, what it did do for me was it really taught me a lot of things about the Internet industry, which way it was going, who was doing what and the domain names themselves, no matter what you do, if you’ve got a portfolio that makes sense, you know, you’ve got some value, you know, bite your lip, you know, just hold onto it if can, unless (and some people do this where they don’t want to sell their domain names; other people just buy and sell real quickly) but I just learned that the value of domains was really the power of the Internet, and I think a lot of companies don’t actually understand . . . I would say 80% of the companies that are online today don’t really understand the whole process of how, you know, direct navigation or what I call browser searching, that way of actually marketing their, uh, products and services. They don’t understand how that works. So . . .
Monte: Right, right. Now, I did a presentation at SES back in the beginning of August on direct navigation and it looks like they are wanting to repeat that presentation or enhance that presentation for the Chicago SES conference in December. Give us a perspective on direct navigation from your perspective and what people don’t know that they should know about that.
Stephen: Uhm, I’m actually working (and have been working) on white paper about this for approximately 8 months now, 9 months, and every week it seems that a new idea or direction or something pops up that makes me not want to say, this thing is done, you know, and then make it available. But, in about 2 years ago (and I’ll go ahead and just throw this tip out to your listeners, cause it’s a wide open field and I don’t think anybody . . . I know there’s a lot of things people don’t want to say because its their secret, you know, there’s only so much that you can buy) but eventually, what I’m seeing right now and what’s going to happen (and I can pretty much still feel pretty confident in making a statement) is that any company that’s online selling their products or services is going to understand that browser searching or topic searching or what people normally (us in the business) know as direct navigation – I really don’t like that terminology, because it sounds like a nautical term and I don’t think the publics really going to relate to it that well. I think this industry, our industry, the domain industry, should be spending a lot of time and money and effort, everybody, I mean everybody who stands to gain something, should be promoting some, like, non-profit organization, that is out there talking to the public, saying, hey, you don’t have to go to any particular search engine, type in something that you’re looking for and get back a slew of God knows what, you know? Why not just type the domain name into your browser locator bar and add a .Com and if that doesn’t get you what you want, try a .Net, .Org, .Info, .Biz, .Us. If you’re in a particular country, use your country code extension. You know, literally promote that angle of it, you know, for, like, quick searches. Or people who, on the other hand, you can say the company or the person or the particular site you’re going to come to, is going to be specifically relevant to what you’re looking for and the company that owns that domain name may be the qualified company to sell you that product or to provide you that service because they were smart enough to actually own that domain space.
Monte: Right.
Stephen: So, uhm, if you take, let’s say, engineering; engineering or electronic products. There are literally ten hundreds of thousands of different domain names of particular products that are bought everyday. You go to FryeElectonics; I mean, look at their inventory. You can walk down one aisle and not recognize any of this, any stuff; if you’re not an electronics expert, you don’t know what it is you’re looking at. But they all have a name. Generically speaking, you know, you can go and break down a particular niche and own every single domain of a particular niche, of a particular type of a product that falls into a business or a profession and owning those particular domains, at some point in time, they may not pay off, you know, now; they probably get no traffic whatsoever. But I personally have sold domains, bulk amounts of domains, and made a thousand times profit on my registration fee; I didn’t charge a lot of money, but I bought fifty names of every variation of a particular niche (which I’m not going to mention – its not adult but it just happen to do with this particular company that was in the furniture business) and I bought fifty domains, turn around and sold them all for $100 a piece within several weeks to a company that wanted all those domains just to own them, so their competitor wouldn’t buy them.
Monte: Right. Right. Defensive registration or what I call “progressive registrations.”
Stephen: Progessive! That’s a good one . . .
Monte: Progressive registrations, right. So, it’s not even defensive, its progressive registration; so you’re owning something so your competitors don’t, not necessarily to protect your . . . not necessarily to protect your brand but to prevent other’s from registering, you know, things in your industry.
Stephen: Yes. Here’s the thing that a lot companies don’t actually understand that’s good for us domainers – but its not good for us unless we really get it out there and educate them – is that, you talk to any large corporation that has a good marketing department and advertising department. Everybody’s, you know, competing with their . . . you know, they compete with their competitors in their marketing and their advertising, doing television or radio or magazine or newspaper or the Internet. The one thing about the Internet is that when you are gaining traffic that is so pinpointed and relevant and what we call targeted, but it is to the point that I don’t even call it targeted, its like it’s a rifle shot, with a scope. When somebody takes a time to type in a domain name, right? into their browser and like, what I call browser searching, goes directly to that site, if you’re domain name is a generic term of what you’re selling, your competitors can’t even compete with that market. They’ll never be able to because it’s a one person spot. And it’s the only way; it’s the only way a company can actually control a segment of their marketing angle or their campaign that no other competitor can play the game with them. In other words, it’s like if Johnson & Johnson owns baby.com. Nobody in . . . that’s a competitor of Johnson & Johnson (there’s probably not many) but nobody can compete with them on that term. When somebody types in baby.com, its . . . its . . . that is their segment. Everybody that uses that marketing procedure to reach Johnson & Johnson, through Baby.com, that’s their market.
Monte: Yeah.
Stephen: They might see another advertisement, you know, you might open up another magazine and see 15 liquor ads in there, you know, or clothing . . . you can . . . you know, the women have Vogue or Cosmopolitan and they have their make-up ads and their clothing or whatever, and you could be advertising in Cosmopolitan Magazine a full page or a spread; and then two pages down, you’ve got, you know, 15 other ads coming along. But with the domain name, the company owns that. And here’s the better part that people don’t focus on a lot; maybe, I don’t know, maybe they are and I’m not listening, but no matter if a company [inaudible], lets say you own a domain name (I can’t mention one because I don’t know who would own it) but lets say it’s a single word natural, you know, it’s a perfect domain name, its worth a million dollars. And it defines a product perfectly and let’s just use Bank.com (I don’t actually know who owns that at the moment) but Bank.com. That may cost the company a million dollars to own or more - $3 million; $5 million to buy that domain. But they get all the benefits of not only the prestige of owing the domain . . . lets just start with that. But #2 they get the traffic that comes with that domain name. And #3, if they spent, you know, 20% of their advertising budget to buy that domain, guess what it cost next year? You know. If their going through Moniker, it’s 10 bucks or less, or whatever you’re charging. If you’re giving them a good deal, you give me a good deal; it’s a lot less than $10 of course. But I would say that is a damn good investment because 3 years down the line after you’ve done all your counting, blah, blah, blah, you’re making not only money on the asset of the growth of that domain and the value of that domain name and your . . . the promotion of that domain name within your company and your products and your services and then the growth of this industry on top it – not only are you getting the valuation going up, your appraisal is going up on this domain name, its only costing you 10 bucks a year to renew.
Monte: Right. Here’s a couple case studies that might interest everybody, that’s right on your subject, right where you’re talking about. The domain name Asthma.com, you know, a pharmaceutical company bought Asthma.com; Asthma is an $11 billion industry; 60% going to prescription drugs, so guess who the owner is. Glaxo-Smithkline. Glaxo-Smithkline owns the domain name; they control the content, the potential customer acquisition strategy for that particular domain name and their competitors will be forced to constantly spend money on search engines and portals to reach potential customers online because they own this name, Asthma.com.
Stephen: Forever. You are . . . [inaudible]
Monte: [inaudible] . . . a lot of people on the chat room are talking . . . are chatting back and forth about this particular subject. So, here’s another one: heart disease is a $68 billion per year industry. So physician in Texas owns the domain name TexasHeartSurgeon. He’s either a member, tells the potential patient everything they need to know. Dr. Ott, who owns the domain name, uhm, he doesn’t have to worry about his referrals because if they misspell the domain name, he also owns the misspellings of those particular names and he spent 8 bucks on the domain name, as well as HoustonHeartSurgeons and others and so he’s able to capture those particular traffic customers as well.
Stephen: He gets it.
Monte: Yeah. He gets it. The insurance industry; here’s another one. HealthInsurance.com. Purchased by a large health insurance company and it generates leads on that particular portal, so, for a particular insurance company. They got it, because they own the key domain name in their industry. Uhm, same with weight loss things, the Spanish word for Diet.com and so on and so forth. These are some of the case studies that I brought up in my presentation at the SES conference. But, that’s your point and uhm, you know, how much is it really worth. You know, you see a domain name for a million bucks, but when you’re a big corporation or somebody that’s going to be on the Web for many, many years, you get it, because in the long run you control and dominate that particular market segment.
Stephen: Exactly. That’s exactly right. And I . . . the most important thing is that its not that you and I understand this or other domainers understand, the important thing is how do we get mainline corporations, companies, businesses, of all sizes, to understand this. And in our respect, it may not be advantageous for domainers to just give this information away and then allow the companies to go buy these domains themselves, unless [inaudible] the domainer as a consultant to do it for them and then you got a job and your doing that. But, I mean, there’s actually people that do that and companies that hire domain consultants to come in and say, here’s our products, what should we be buying and how do we maintain our presence on the Web. But, the bottom line is, is that if you want to be on top of your game and you are a company that understands and recognizes the Internet as being an important, almost an integral part of your marketing campaign and your marketing department, then owning the keyword domain names of your products and services is an absolute must.
Monte: Definitely.
Stephen: And you better get on it now. And it doesn’t matter, if you’ve got a budget, an advertising budget, you better put a big chunk aside and start thinking about picking up some of the domains that are a part of your inventory, you know.
Monte: Yeah, for sure. Stephen, we’re going to take a quick commercial break and come back on but I definitely want to cover . .. talk a little bit about domain values and how to quickly spot expiring domain names and branding those names for resale and potential development and then kind of bringing the industry of domainers and the industry, uhm, uhm, you know, foundation companies together and what power that’s going to bring to the industry as well.
Stephen: Alright.
Monte: Okay. So stay tuned, we’re going to take a short commercial break and be back with Stephen Douglas.
[Commercials]
Monte: . . . Stephen Douglas, my guest. We just got done talking a lot about direct navigation and the power of basically monopolizing on a particular niche or brand so that you can uhm, make you that you, uhm, make sure that you do progressive registrations, that is registering domain names that’s in your industry or in your field to prevent your competitors from doing it but also so that you can monetize and better monetize those domain properties, either through resale monetization or through PPC or what have you. Uhm, Stephen, give us a little bit of an idea . . . first of all, what kind of roles do you play for BulkRegister right now as a consultant? What have you helped them as a company do and position themselves?
Stephen: Well, uh, I worked, uh, with Eric Rice. Eric Rice, actually, we talked back and forth. I was actually a BulkRegister user in 2001 and moving forward and throughout the time I complained, you know, I’m pretty much of a loudmouth, so I kind of say what’s on my mind and started talking to Eric Rice when he came out as general manager there and then I gave him some good ideas and we . . . I gave him a big proposal of different things. It was almost like a domainers wish list of how they wanted their back end to be. And of course, they’d had suggestions from other people, other clients and customers, too. But then I came on in the role of actually helping get these ideas for best managing large portfolios, bring in the domainer crowd, whereas BulkRegister was basically more of a business oriented registrar with a membership fee and so forth. And then the domain aftermarket helped them put, you know, their system together working with that portfolio. There’s a lot of things I can’t talk about that I did for them but basically it was bringing an idea of what domainers are looking for and how the value of domains, even from a registrars viewpoint, how they can be expressed and presented to the domainer industry and that’s how DropGuild.com was formed, which unfortunately, we’re not with that right now at the moment. The purchase by Enom, it kind of put a hold on a lot of different things and I don’t know if it’s coming back or not but . . .
Monte: Right.
Stephen: But, DropGuild . . .
Monte: Everything, I understand, is moving onto the Enom platform,uhm and off of their platform, obviously.
Stephen: Yeah, something like that. I don’t know a lot of details on that and I don’t think I’m really at libety to actually discuss it but I think that my efforts towards creating and building DropGuild, which actually any domainings that pass through and were not picked up on the SnapNames system and were just ready to just go into the system, well, we were able to show the traffic on those domains and then provide them to our members, so that they can see domain names that maybe people missed during the SnapNames . . . maybe didn’t have a clearcut . . . these weren’t obvious naturals but some of them had some sort of traffic that maybe needed to be built out. So it worked out pretty good. And I had to really build out a strange auctioning system that was kind of a 3-tiered kind of a thing, where either you were in the auction or you weren’t. I won’t waste your listeners’ time to describe that; it worked pretty well and I didn’t get any complaints and it operated for several months and I was kind of happy and it was going real well until . . . Boom!
Monte: So, let’s talk a little bit about that. How . . . what are some of your recommendations from your experience? And obviously, some of the technology that you’ve been working on, but you know, what’s the best way for domainers to quickly spot expiring names with value and branding and resale value for the future?
Stephen: One part of my duties there during the DropGuild build out was to actually go through the whole list of expiring domains and select the domains that weren’t being auctioned off on Snap; it didn’t . . . no one got any bids . . . there were no bids on Snap, so what I would do is actually select those domains and I’d do about 500 to 1,000 a day and you have to really quickly be able to understand what the domain that you’re looking at has to offer. Let’s say it gets no traffic whatsoever. Let’s say you have no . . . there’s no links to it, so on and so forth. Well, I . . . one of the first things I look for a domain, especially, if it’s got vowels in it is the size of the domain – 5, 6, 7, 8 and if you can get a 4 character, a four-letter domain name, with vowels in the middle, you know, could, you know, juke, whatever, you know, it doesn’t matter what the words are, if its able to be pronounced, you know, in other word, phonetically, if you can say that domain name, good chance that at some point in time, some company is going to create toy, you know, [laughs] or some sort of weird robot or system or something, so those are always good to look for, you know. If they don’t seem to make sense, they may be don’t have any ALEXA rating or page rankings or anything that you’re research is finding that says, yeah, there’s no overture searches on it or whatever but . . . you never know. I did that with a domain and I own Snurfs.com, and I came up with the name because I thought it was like a weird word for a sneezing toy bear, and it was like, I’ve had for six or seven years now and this domain name gets tons of traffic and people are typing it in because, little did I know, that snurfs actually has five different meanings to it.
Monte: That’s snurf – S-N-U-R-F?
Stephen: Correct. It has five different meanings or people are using it for a particular meaning. Like, SNURF is an acronym for a genome, you know, for genes, for scientific research, whatever. I’m not actually even sure what it stands for. I think its on my website. A snurf is also a term for a beginning equestrian jumper, the snurf division for people who are into horses and riding horses and doing the jumping competitions, the beginning division is called the Snurf Division. Some guy came out with a python based blog saying . . . he calls it a snurf, whatever. And the original term for surfing a snowboard was actually a snurf.
Monte: Yeah. It was just put up in the chat room – snurfer is an old school snowboard.
Stephen: Exactly. A snurfer is a . . . a snurf board or a snurf; a snurf was a snurfer or snurfing – I get a lot of traffic from people who are looking for snurf boards and stuff, snowboards and that type of thing, that crowd. But, it just was on whimsy and it was like no research, just popped into my head, boom, you know. And I also picked up an expiring domain of Klood (K-L-O-O-D) and for some reason that domain gets traffic; not a lot, but maybe 5 or 6 people a day. I don’t know what they’re looking for. I have absolutely no idea. I haven’t had time to really go look at it but I’ll see domains like that and I’ll say, you know what, why not? Why not? You know, $6.95, boom, we’ll see what happens [inaudible] get to it, we’ll see what we can do with it. That’s one way. That’s one way to really do it. It’s kind of a fun way of doing things. And its always interesting in your portfolio to have a few domains like that, so you can, you know, let’s say you were going to start your own website and you want it to be individual and stand out or maybe you come up with an idea for your own product. Well, look, you‘ve got the domain name already to go, you know?
Monte: Looks like klood is a nickname for a musician, ah, I’ve never heard of. If you just Googled klood, it looks like . . .
Stephen: You just did what I didn’t do. I just saw it expired, thought it was cool and bought it and haven’t gone back to it, so . . .
Monte: Frenchtown artist, Frenchtown Artist.
Stephen: [laughs]
Monte: So somebody’s looking it up.
Stephen: [laughs] Well, I mean, so I do get a little bit amount of traffic on it. But you know, those kinds of things I find really [inaudible] but that’s because my head . . . some people say, Steve, you’re just not thinking right. And I go, thank you very much. [inaudible]
Monte: So what are some of the best tools that people can use that . . . to pick up some of these names that, you know, pick these little diamonds up in the rough? What are your favorite tools? What do you use to do that? Or what do you recommend for folks?
Stephen: Uhm, I, uhm . . . like the system on your system, if you do a search for a particular domain name and its not available and then the suggestions, there’s several systems that actually provide that (I won’t mention any particular one) but most registrars (I know yours does) to where you’re searching for a domain, if you don’t find the one you want, there’s going to be a whole slew of suggestions beneath it, right?
Monte: Right. Yeah, alternate suggestions, alternate extensions; suggestions that might be available around it and also names that are available in the aftermarket, that you can get that are like those names.
Stephen: I couldn’t tell you how many great niche domains (I’m not going to discuss the niches that I focus on mainly; the people that know me well know who they are) but I don’t want to mention my two favorite niches because you guys, somebody would be out there going . . .
Monte: Oh, come on. You got give us a little bit of love here.
Stephen: No, no, no, no, no . . . I’ll give you one. Anything that has to do with medical devices – good thing to keep an eye out on. Like you said, the guy who’s a heart surgeon in Texas, you mentioned him. Good, smart thinking. Very smart thinking. Anyways, but, I like . . . I picked up some fabulous domains from using the systems that you have on your . . . on registrars as to making suggestions. Even .Coms have popped up that I never would have thought of. But I know for a fact that at some point in time, that domain name is going to be desired by somebody in the industry who is making or providing that particular service. At some point in time; in 2 years, 3 years, 1 year, 6 months, I don’t know. So to me it’s a good investment, you know. And, let’s see, other ways to do this? Uhm, if you really want to get down deep and look really closely at like the expiring domain market, I really like the website SnapCheck.com. I’m not really sure who . . . I’m not promoting anybody; you know what I’m saying. [inaudible] say this, but I bought some domains using that system, their system, to actually find some domains that were, that make me a little bit over a dollar or two a month. I look at a domain name and if its making a buck a month, bam!
Monte: Well, you’re doubling your money, right?
Stephen: Exactly.
Monte: That’s what people really need to look at is your return on investment and if you look at it as any other investment, you know, what would be a reasonable return on an investment anywhere. You know, whether its . . . you know, you’re buying real estate, if you’re investing in the stock market, I mean, people would be jumping up and down if they’re were making 5% to 7% on the stock market right now. If you double your money on a domain investment, you’re a big winner.
Stephen: [inaudible] Monte . . . Monte . . . isn’t it beautiful. I mean, just to understand that. And there’s so many of us out there who own thousands of domains, who make a dollar or more and there’s some guys that make, you know, huge amounts of money everyday, you know? I don’t own any domains like that myself but the domains that I’m buying, I call myself a futurist. So, I buy future trend domain names. And I look at my niche, I look at my trend and then I pick up anything that I can in that area. Because, if its not getting hits now, its going to be getting hits in 2009; you know, 2010. And I can afford the $18, $19, $20, $25 per domain it’s going to take me to get there, you know. It’s not a bad investment. I know somebody who, if I pay $25 renewing this domain for the next four years, I guarantee somebody’s going to buy from me for $100, you know. I don’t have any doubt about that, you know. So . . . that’s a comfortable thing, uhm, and a . . . the whole process of actually looking for a domain and then saying, you know, this is a domain that I’m going to hold onto, let alone maybe sell, then you can do that. If you can . . . like, I have a database I’ve created in FileMaker that’s a beautiful database; I’ve been honing it down, sort of, for 6 years, where it tracks every domain I have, where its parked, what its doing, uhm, what I paid for it, when it was purchased and then I have a whole slew of about 120 categories that the domains fall into . . . [inaudible]
Monte: Now . . . now, how many domains do you own in total?
Stephen: I own about 2,600 domains in total.
Monte: And what . . .
Stephen: [inaudible]
Monte: . . . and what kind of market segments do you focus in on? Or have you in the past?
Stephen: [inaudible]
Monte: Without revealing, you know, your secrets but . . .
Stephen: I focus mainly on technological and medical and sometimes I will go towards garden-household items, garden and household items and things like that . . .
Monte: Yeah . . .
Stephen: . . . [inaudible] . . .
Monte: . . . yeah, we just got a huge win. One of our clients, we helped them acquire HomeImprovement.com and it was . . .
Stephen: Oh, awesome . . .
Monte: . . . a big steal and it was a great pool for him. It’s probably a million dollar domain name and they picked it up for, you know, $150,000, $170,000; it was a great win.
Stephen: Now that’s something that they’re going to be smiling about for a long time.
Monte: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
Stephen: . . . smiling a long time on that. Let’s see, what else you got here? You know, another way of looking at a domain, especially in the expired domain areas is that if you look at a domain that is in a particular niche that you might think, even if I paid, you know, a hundred dollars for this domain in an auction, that I can get $250 for this domain by sending out three emails to some lower level companies that maybe bidding, you know, using this keyword phrase to bid on uhm, uh, ad words or Google ads or Yahoo! ads or whatever . . .
Monte: Right, right. Have them cover . . . have them cover their investment with a domain name.
Stephen: Exactly. And you know, it’s like, the other day, I uh, sold a particular domain name that I was going to let expire and I . . . but I hadn’t had the time to actually look at it and say does anybody even . . is there any keywords. The good way to find the value of a domain name is to just search it up, in quotes, on Google, or whatever search engine you’re using, break the domain name down, even if its three words, two-three words, whatever, break it down and search at it with quotes around it and see if someone’s actually bidding on those keywords of your domain name. And if they are, contact those people and say, the next time you bid on ad words, use this domain name as your URL. So, when someone’s typing in, uh, electronichairremover. . . . or electronic hair remover, and you own ElectronicHairRemover.com, well, when you’re bidding your ad words and your ad comes up in that search results and your little ad word ad there, and instead of having your forgettable company URL name, whatever, XYZElectronics, whatever (and I don’t know who they are, so don’t send me any mail, please!); so lets say, you know, you’ve got some unmemorable company domain name. Why not, when someone’s searching up “electronic hair remover” when they come to your ad word, they see ElectronicHairRemover.com. That’s an extra boost to your, uh, ad word advertising. You could bid lower on the ad words, come in #3, but just because the people look to the right and they see these particular ads, they may not go to #1, because #1 doesn’t have clearcut keyword phrase that just basically said exactly what the search core was on.
Monte: Right.
Stephen: Electronic Hair Remover.
Monte: Right, right.
Stephen: There’s different ways you can sell your domain name in that sense. So that’s a good way of actually looking for the value of a domain name. I’m sure a lot of us already do that. Uh, lets see; what’s another way. Just reaching out for a brand – Google it really quickly. Of course, everybody knows the length of a domain name . . . I just sold a domain name that was two words and eighteen characters long that I was going to let drop (getting back to that story) . . . that I was just going to let drop and I did one email to a company – sold it for $450. Just like that. They didn’t even question. They go, that’s exactly what we do, that’s exactly what we are; we want it. Boom!
Monte: Right, right.
Stephen: Cost me 7 dollars!
Monte: How many domain names . . . how many domain names do you sell a year? On average?
Stephen: Uhm . . . I’ve never really sold a big powerhouse domain name. I’ve never owned or sold . . . most of . . . the highest domain name that I ever sold was a little over $10,000. But I sell a lot of domains in the hundred to $3,000 range and I probably have sold maybe 400 domain names this year, so far. Last year, maybe, 800, more. It depends. When domains start to expire and I’m looking at them, I’ll try to bulk them together to somebody and say, hey, you know, would you like these domains and they’ll take a look at them. And if I just . . . for $20 a piece, I put 7 bucks into them, it’s a profit for me, I move them out and then I go and look for, you know, some other domains. And just in the last couple of years, I’ve been actually buying . . . spending a good amount of money myself to buy the particular domain names in my niche that I want. Uhm, I just bought (I’m not going to give you a price but) I bought DigitalMammagram.com – two words, long; it is . . . people will go, you know . . . if you went through the normal way of evaluating a domain name, you know, well, its two words, its – I don’t even know what the count of it is; I think its like 20 characters. I’m not even sure. But there’s only one problem – Digital Mammogram is the specific new technology for breast cancer screening. A digital mammogram. New technology, all the hospitals are going that way . . .
Monte: Right.
Stephen: . . . I picked it up for a really good price. Next year, I . . .
Monte: Did you pick it up in the aftermarket? Expired market? Or what?
Stephen: No, in the after . . . in the . . . I actually found it. Somebody owned this – a guy I know that I buy other domains from, and he just said, no big deal, I actually own the singular and plural of that domain name, but I’m almost . . . well, I’m confident because I paid a lot of money for it, but I’m confident that I’ll be able to triple that next year or the following year for that domain name to a company like Fuji or General Electric (which is the manufacturer of the domain name). I mean, to me, if I was General Electric and manufacturing digital mammograms I would definitely buy that domain name, you know. I would actually at some point say, I better bid on that before Fuji gets it, something like that. You know, kind of pit everybody against each other and say, well, who’s going to have the prestige of owning the domain name of the product you guys make? Manufacture? And these things cost $150,000, you know. Oh, that brings me back to one important point too, as far as your selling. Your . . . you’re . . . an argument that you sold a lot of domains to companies through . . . that didn’t get it. You’ll come across, I’m sure some of your domainers will relate to this, where you’ll be talking to some company that you have a generic keyword domain that they may be interested in and it would be important for them to own and for some reason, they’re asking, you know, what’s your page rank, uh, what’s your ALEXIS score, uhm, how many Overture hits does it get, how much traffic do you get every month on it, you know, those kind of questions?
Monte: Yeah.
Stephen: And, the domain name to them would definitely be worth several thousand dollars, at least, a minimum. And I know a couple of domain names that I have that I know for a fact would be valued at that or more but because the domain name itself is 10 – 20 -30 people a month typing it in, they say, well what are we going to do with that? Without realizing the fact that just somebody just pinpointed how hard is it to advertise and get 30 people to specifically come to their website with the intent of finding out information about the particular product or service that they need. So, when you’re getting 30 a month – lets say you buy that domain name for $2,000 and you’re getting 30 a month, that’s 3 . .. what is that, 12 X 30, I don’t know, 360, my math . . . well, I think that’s 360 visitors a year that are pinpointed and I’ll bet you no matter what advertising they’re getting, they don’t get as specific targeted traffic, 360 potential people coming to their site to buy systems that they sell, for them to close a deal is $100,000 in profits. . . .
Monte: Right, right, right. It’s a very targeted [inaudible] . . . opportunity . . .
Stephen: [inaudible] . . .Exactly.
Monte: Right.
Stephen: If the yield . . . if the domain name represents a product that has a high profit margin, the company shouldn’t be concerned whether or not its getting a thousand – I mean if they did, a thousand would be great but then the price of the domain would go up. But a domain name that’s getting ten, twenty, thirty, forty, uh, a hundred visitors a month on specifically their particular esoteric product, that when they install a system, they bill a customer a hundred thousand dollars and they don’t get it, your listeners should take that point and say, if you had three people out of those ten buy your product, would you see a profit? Would that $3,000 domain you bought then have earned it’s money back. And made you money? And it’s a good argument and a lot of us kind of don’t look at that because we’re also heavily focused on how much traffic does it really get. You know? And its not really the traffic; it’s the quality of the traffic and the actual premium of the product or service the domain name is representing. [inaudible] . . .
Monte: . . . LuxuryYachts.com, you know, things that are millions of dollars, you know. Just try typing in the domain name LuxuryYahts.com. They’re certainly not looking to . . . probably it is potential buyers of luxury yachts or not just somebody, you know, surfing around.
Stephen: Monte, they’re not looking for kayaks, okay. The point is, if luxury yachts, a lot of us aren’t doing that. I mean, there might be a lot of looky-loo kind of people saying I’d like to just look at some of these things because its fun to look at a luxury yacht, but the majority of people who will be typing in luxury yachts, if they have that knowledge or even searching even a broker, who’s looking for a client to find a luxury yacht – trust me, if you’re only getting a hundred or two hundred visitors on that domain name, and you sell to 5% of those visitors, if you paid $100,000 for that domain name, you got a great deal.
Monte: Right. And another good example or trend that we’ve all been talking about over the last couple years, that is, is that what’s happening in the search engines is more descriptive, longer keyword phrases that are more geo-targeted, that of course are narrowing down to higher conversions for advertisers. Well, the same is true for domain names. If you . . . you know, when we sold Autos.com for $2.2 million back in 1999, it was, you know, one of the best domain names in the market, for sure. But now, HobokenAutoSales or HobokenNewJerseyAutoSales might be more targeted and convert more clients and customers than Autos.com may because someone’s in Hoboken, New Jersey looking to buy cars. Or even to get down to more granular searches like, you know, Ford or Mustang sales or getting really granular in those areas – it won’t get as much traffic; it’s longer phrases. But the people that are taking the time the time to type it all in are looking to buy something. Or looking to, you know, are very targeted visitors.
Stephen: Absolutely.
Monte: So your conversion rates are higher.
Stephen: Absolutely. I mean, I can’t speak for MarchX but my opinion of what they’re doing and seeing what they’re doing is basically following along those lines, you know, a . . .
Monte: Absolutely. WE have their entire portfolio here and they’re going in a couple different, very targeted directions like that and even to the point where, you know, they own and have registered 70,000 zip codes.
Stephen: Right.
Monte: So, who remembers what zip code you’re in except the zip code you live in, really, but the way that they are launching this out is that you’re going to remember what zip code you want to go to.
Stephen: Absolutely. And if its just a simple where, this is my zip code and I want to know, uh, what is available, I mean, like the website CitySearch does that . . . operates on that same kind of concept, but think about how easy it would be to actually advertise, find advertisers, who literally all into a particular zip code and then sell to those advertisers because everybody in that zip code want to find a particular thing, a product or a service, in their area – a store, whatever. Man, how simple can it get? You know, type in your zip code dot com and boom, you’re right there.
Monte: Yeah.
Stephen: It’s just an amazing . . . there’s just so many facets to the domain industry. It’s just something that none of us . . . any of us that are involved in this business can, I don’t think can ever be bored. And always keep thinking and always keep moving forward. I think the most important thing for us as domainers to focus on now is to literally educate the world, I mean, including the public, the consumer and the businesses on the power that all of us know; that we all work towards and focus on ourselves but teach them the ability to, you know, find what they want by using a domain and the value of domains will, I mean, it’ll just go through the roof. It’ll be like a rock blast. You know. And that’s what excites me about this business is that, you know, its so untapped and so, I mean, and people say, you know, oh, we’ve run out of domain names and there’s no more .Coms and I got a couple of good cuss words to answer that. It’s just wide open. It’s just . . . there’s just so much out there, you know, and, uh, what is it? Necessity is the mother of invention? I think that’s the phrase.
Monte: Yeah.
Stephen: It’s just really exciting to me. I really love this business.
Monte: Well, Stephen, that’s a great note to end up on and you’ve definitely shared a lot of key points and tricks and tips and good little secrets that I think a lot of people really got out of this, and we really appreciate your time and your strategy’s definitely paying off, that’s for sure. Any last minute comments or advice for anybody that’s listening?
Stephen: Ahhhh, let’s see. Well, let’s see. Can I give my email address out if anybody wants to contact me?
Monte: Sure, I’ll put it in the chat room too.
Stephen: Okay. If you want to contact me for any more information or just talk and find out what’s in my mind, pick brains, looking for some good domains, either I’ll buy or sell, you can reach me at successclick@gmail.com.
Monte: Alright, great, Stephen.
Stephen: And, I love talking to you, Monte and good luck with everything and . . . [inaudible]
Monte: Will I see you at TRAFFIC in October?
Stephen: Uh, maybe not this year but next year. I have a whole bunch of things coming up that I’m focusing on right now but next year, I might be, so . . .
Monte: Okay, great. We’ll look forward to seeing you soon and also working with you in the near future.
Stephen: Alright. Thank you, Monte.
Monte: Thanks for being my guest on Domain Masters; I appreciate it.
Stephen: Alright. I love ya. Bye-bye.
Monte: Okay, great. Take care. Alright, well, again, special thanks to Stephen Douglas. Definitely someone who knows the domain industry. Had a lot of good success selling domain names, pays for his registrations, understands the value of return on investment, uh, without having to go crazy. Has some development strategies out as well and definitely is interested in talking to other folks in case you want to bang some ideas together or buy and sell domain names. So, I’ll post it up on the chat room at successclick@gmail.com and that’s Stephen Douglas.
With that I will end and close the show. Just some quick announcements coming up. The TRAFFIC conference that we keep talking about is the place where domainers are getting together in our industry. There’s a projected 700 to 1,000 domainers who are going to be attending this conference. It’s going to be at the Westin Diplomat Hotel, one of the most beautiful hotels in our state and probably in the country, right here in Hollywood, Florida. A lot of people call it Miami, Florida, but its really Hollywood, Florida. The conference is running from the 24th of October to the 27th. We’re going to be conducting the third live domain auction, with a live auctioneer, Joel Langbow, who did our first live auction. At the same time we’re going to be conducting a silent auction during the whole event and those names that don’t make the cut for the live auction will be available for sale on the silent auction. And those of you that are interested in learning more about the conference and possibly attending, you can go to TargetedTraffic.com, sign up; its an invite only conference, but if you let people know you listen to the show and you’re interested in attending, I’m sure, while there’s still space, you’ll be able to get onboard. With that, we’ll have another live show next week. I promise to have another valuable guest for everyone and we’ll learn something for the whole entire industry. With that I’ll let everybody go. Be the master of your domain, and have a great week. Take care. Bye.
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