Michael Jackson’s Death Bed with a genuine COA

Several items from Michael Jackson‘s estate are up for auction, among them and most controversally, the bed he died in.

Just like most anything you can purchase at an auction, Michael Jackson’s bed comes with a Certificate of Authenticity!

Major Bear Market Expected for Geo Domains

Starting next year unlimited numbers of new domain extensions are scheduled to be sold and some will be up and running. We always assumed major brands such as .sears .apple .microsoft .hp .godaddy .ibm and many others would want to own their own extension, not necessarily to sell domains but for their own product, use and branding.

Now I am hearing many reports about large U.S. and international cities including the cities of .tokyo .sydney .london .newyork .sandiego .la .vegas and others planning to also buy their very domain extension. At an initial cost of $185k it may seem high to you or me but to a large corporation or big city it is not too significant a cost.

Having heard about many major cities with plans to buy their own extensions it would seem logical the end-effect will be to greatly devalue the domainer or investor owned geo dot com’s, including mid-size city dot-coms. The smaller or mid-size cities may not want to invest now or be able to budget $185k but they will likely do so as the ICANN price drops (and I am sure the fee will decline rather quickly and dramatically within a few years).

At that time I believe you will also see many mid-size cities such as Palm Springs, Bethesda, Burbank and Scottsdale for example, getting their own extensions. It’s also possible they may not wait for lower costs and instead apply soon, agreeing to pay the 185k ICANN fee.

Think about this scenario; A visitor (or resident) in Scottsdale Arizona knows many cities now own their own domain so would he be more inclined to typein to a search box or the browser window “Scottsdale.com” or the word “Scottsdale” without an extension? In our opinion there is little doubt as time goes by the word Scottsdale will prevail as the most popular choice, relegating Scottsdale.com to 2nd tier status, which dot-com decline would be ongoing and the scottsdale.com down-trend be more pronounced as time goes by.

In our opinion, this news marks the beginning of a very significant and long term bear market (a likely permanent major drop in geo domain values), impacting mid to large city Geo domains in particular. I would expect a number of them to go on the auction block soon before they decline more in value.

Massive Dilution caused by New Domain Extensions

We have been saying for years (starting when the new extension plan was first announced a long time ago) the new domain-name extensions will bring about massive dilution in the name space and overall negativity to the value of the current major domain extensions.

In a few years the cost of buying your own extension could easily decline significantly belowr the current high cost of almost 200k, possibly all the way down to the 3 figure range where most individuals and small businesses could also afford to buy their own domain extension.

A huge benefit to owning your own domain name extension is only the extension could be typed-in (depending on how the DNS is setup) and the visitor would go right to that website based on the extension only. A few examples are by typing in Ebay you would not need to typein Ebay.com, or typein FreeMLSlisting and no need to typein FreeMLSlisting.com (and potentially zillions of others too).

Overstock.com is rebranding itself as O.CO

Found this on the Overstock.com website this morning. It’s also Super Bowl Sunday, so perhaps not just a coincidence since the .CO extension domain names will be strongly marketed in today’s Super Bowl commercials, making Overstock.com’s announcement real good timing in that regard.

“Shopping at Overstock.com internationally is about to get easier with the O.co domain. Since the company acquired the O.co domain name in July 2010, Overstock.com has been simpler to access by mobile Internet users. Now, to minimize confusion and hassle while translating the word “Overstock” into other languages, Overstock.com is rebranding internationally and will be known as O.co as of Jan. 2011. This guide will address any concerns you may have about Overstock.com’s new domain.

Q. Why will Overstock.com be known as O.co internationally?

A. In July 2010, .co domain names became available for general purchase, and Overstock.com acquired the O.co domain name in order to reinforce the “O” of the Overstock brand and capture customers’ attention with a short, memorable web address. The short .co domain will also solve translation issues and allow Overstock.com to create a universal logo, brand and web domain name that will be recognizable internationally…”

Click the Overtstock.com® woman on the couch picture below to visit the new O.co® website:

Will GoDaddy’s Super Bowl Ad be a Success?

Godaddy is spending a ton of money on their Super Bowl ad and other heavy .CO marketing but will it make the .CO extension (.CO is actually the South America Nation of Columbia country code) an Internet success?

In our opinion, it’s already apparent .CO will be a flop as far as long-term value goes, and actual use. There are very few .CO developed sites and it has a poor resale market, with rare sales (except for occasional sales of strong single word names).

With that said, .CO is already a big financial success as far as registry and registrars income is concerned, thanks to brilliant and costly marketing, defensive registrations and domainers who can’t get the .COM and think .CO is a good replacement for speculation purposes.

A big hope with .CO was the anticipation of .co getting substantial ‘typo’ or ‘spillover’ traffic intended for the .COM but I can tell you from good first-hand experience that is not happening now, and is also extremely unlikely to occur in the future.

Buy a domain name or order webhosting by clicking below:

A slightly modified version of this article was published today in Fortune Magazine & CNN Money

In 1994 Katie Couric Didn’t Know About Internet

Back in 1994 people like Katie Couric had a hard time understanding or explaining what the Internet was!

Why Does Bing Make it Difficult to Submit a Site?

If you own or run a website you realize the high value of getting your site listed well in the major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo!

Often you simply wait for the search engine to find your site which they normally will do from following links and other ways to find and index your website. That passive approach usually will be adequate in most cases but it’s not assured and sometimes your site may not get indexed as fast as desired.

However, it’s not necessary to wait since you can be more aggressive by submitting your site directly to the search engines yourself by using their Add URL feature.

The becoming popular Bing.com search engine and others require the verification code be read and typed in. Bing in particular seems to make it unusually difficult to submit your URL since they use a verification code you need to type in, which is far from easy to read.

Those verification codes are also known as Captcha Images which can be read by a human but not by a computer or an automated system since the characters have misc fonts and text styles, and be displayed in various font sizes.

The Bing.com Captcha Image appears to be much harder to read compared to other sites which also require a verification code be entered. In fact, the Bing captcha verification seems so difficult that it makes you wonder if perhaps Bing.com does not really want you to submit your website to their search engine!

Take a look yourself. Try submitting any website URL to Bing.com. Click the 1-11-11 image below to access the Add URL to Bing link:

Phone Calls can be an Affiliate Program Negative

For some odd reason the potential phone call which in all likelihood can end-up losing your affiliate referral revenue has rarely been talked about in the past. Not sure why since it’s believed to be a big negative.

I believe a good percentage of potential buyers will pick up the phone and call the sellers toll-free number for more information and when they do that your chance of getting credit for the sale becomes very low. That is especially true with higher priced products and services, where the prospective buyer is much more inclined to call before spending significant money.

He or she may be wondering if it’s a legitimate business and curious to see if a live person answers the phone. Your potential buyer may also be thinking they can get a better deal by calling, and there are other reasons they are likely to pick up the phone instead of using the online contact form or order form (which contains a cookie and tracking ID), such as a desire to authenticate the company, product or service, including frequently wanting to ask questions about the product or offer before ordering it.

When potential buyers call the sellers number, orders are often taken right away over the phone. Or a little later the buyer may be sent an email with an ordering link (not related to you as the publisher), so credit to you as the referral source can easily be lost, thus preventing you from getting credit for the sale.

As a side note, some years ago we believed we had far more referrals than our reports indicated. Therefore, we called seller ourselves and asked how they handled phone calls as far as credit to us as the referral source is concerned. We were told “don’t worry, we always ask how they got our number – so you get credited for the sale.”

Not surprisingly, that turned-out to be false since the next day we called the 800 number on the sellers website and said we wanted to place an order. We actually placed the phone order and at no time during the entire process did anyone ask how we got the number, so receiving credit was impossible.

In fact, the phone call issue is a major reason we have always been somewhat negative about joining affiliate programs. Unless someone can figure out a way to get around this negative issue we will stay negative on affiliate programs (at least regarding higher priced products). I see no good way to avoid this issue beyond getting your own assigned phone number but seriously doubt the product/service provider will agree to assign a special phone number to a new affiliate to better track the referrals.

Product Authentication

Negativity by Paying Domain Broker Upfront Money

Sometimes domain name and website owners may wish to hire a domain brokerage to sell their names or websites. I can give you some good advice (gained via my personal hands-on experience) about that, including a warning about paying any upfront fees to the broker.

Keep in mind, once the domain-broker has your money a good degree of the incentive to work hard and sell your domain or website may be lost since the broker already has his/her money, regardless of the name selling or not selling.

One more potential negative occurrence is the once friendly relationship you had with the broker may quicky go away if there are any business or personal issues involved. That can easily happen as a result of the broker already having your paid in advance monies so he may decline to issue a refund if you are later unhappy with his work and perfomance.

More information about why you should never even think about paying a fee in advance to a broker (which we published over a year ago) as part of a post about the category defining premium domain names LiveApp.com plus LiveApps.com both being available for purchase, located here: About Domain Broker and Live App domains for sale .

A good article about domain brokers was recently published in Elliotsblog.com in which Elliot lists domain name brokers. I know several of the same domainers/brokers and can suggest the following domain brokers, which Elliot listed in his post:

• BigTicketDomains.com – Kevin Leto
• DifferentInvestments.com – Justin Godfrey
• DomainBroker.com – Rob Sequin
• DomainsForMedia.com – Eric Rice
• MediaOptions.com – Andrew Roesner
• NameConnect.com – John Daly

By the way, Webtrading also offers a domain brokerage service (mosty for our own websites but the brokerage service can also be used to buy domains belonging to other parties), which you can learn more about by clicking-on the image below. In addition, any comments you may have about selling domains and websites, or regarding domain brokers will be appreciated.

Domain Name News & Domain Blog Aggregator

Keep up-to-date with the latest and best domaining news & blog headlines. DomainingRoulette.com is a 24X7 Real-Time Domain Name News Feed and Blog Aggregator, offering live late-breaking domain name news from the international domain and website community.

There is no membership requirement, no account required, no login, no need for personal information, no advertising and no spams.

By visiting DomainingRoulette.com you can quickly view and read the most current headlines and blog articles. As far as we know, DomainingRoulette.com is the only domain name blog and news aggregator without any advertising on its pages. That way the visitor experience is a good one and is unblurred by distracting or confusing marketing and advertising.

Domaining Bloggers are also wanted. Please Submit Your RSS Feed now…

How Erica Became Millioniare & Retired at age 26

For several years we had our web-hosting with Erica Douglass at her old hosting firm. We were one of her first hosting customers. After she sold the hosting business (for I believe over a million dollars) we moved on to a new webhost and later learned Erica started a consulting business at a new website erica.biz.

We normally do not promote other websites here but since we feel Erica has lots of knowledge on making online-money we are posting a few YouTube videos she has made about achieving online success.

Erica Douglass of erica.biz talks about how she became a millioniare and retired at age 26:

Exclusive consulting offer from Erica Douglass of erica.biz:

Erica Douglass picture:

Your Own Advertising Network & Keep All Income

Of course, we badly need good alternatives to Google® and Yahoo!® with the best and possibly the only viable option at this time being selling ad space yourself via your our own in-house Advertising Network. A major benefit from running your own advertising network is you keep 100% of the revenue.

Frank Schilling had a very nice Advertising Network of his own running on his domain names but I believe it was deactivated last year for some odd reason. I can only guess as to why.

We would like to install an ad network almost exactly the way Frank’s network worked on all our sites but having lots of difficulty getting it programmed after considerable time and effort.

The problem is the programmers we were trying to hire for the work were simply not capable of doing the job. Therefore, we would really appreciate finding out who the programmer was who programmed Frank’s old advertising network? We have spent considerable time in search of Frank’s Ad Network programmer, including a number of posts about it on Twitter and Facebook but no success. Does anyone know the programmers name or contact information?

P.S. As an interesting side note to demonstrate the major players are trying to improve their own domains and traffic (as small site developers and domain owners are too) we just noticed Fabulous.com (who is a major player with the PPC firms) is both surprisingly and mysteriously using a competitors platform and ad feed on a domain (I imagine far more names than just the one we stumbled on today).

Fabulous is using WhyPark.com (at least with the domain name we noticed today) which is owned by an arch-rival of Fabulous named Parked.com. Isn’t it interesting that Fabulous would use a competitors program instead of their own system!

FYI, the Fabulous.com domain name we are reporting on (which as of today’s date was on the WhyPark.com platform) is registered to FABULOUS.COM PTY LTD.

Any comments you have about website advertising and ad serving networks will be appreciated. Thank you.

Domain Inquiry Sounds Better vs Domain For Sale

There has been talk on the forum boards about the best way to place a notice on your website that your domain name is for sale. Fabulous.com does a good job combining PPC ads with a domain for sale announcement page and developed a type of hybrid between a parked page and a sales page. With that said, ‘This Domain Name is For Sale’ notice does a fairly good job of getting people to make offers, but there appears to be a better way.

That Fabulous page is a good approach but I would like it even more if the banner said “Domain Inquiry” since I believe “This Domain Name is For Sale” notice will detract from the the visitor experience and potential visits to your advertisers (at least to to a degree) since the page may have has less crediblity due to the site/domain being offered for sale. The words “Domain Inquiry” has a less obvious negative meaning to a web-surfer, imo.

Any reviews, comments or ideas you have about how to effectively and professionally sell Internet domain names or websites would be appreciated. Thank you.

Follow Me on Twitter can have Interesting Benefits

Unfortunately, I was a late-starter with twitter.com since I did not really start using it until earlier this year, and even more recently started doing more than occasional tweets.

In the past I did not fully realize the great power and potential of Twitter. Twitter is also an extremely interesting way to get some free publicity for your websites or web-pages, in addition to its main purpose which I think (but not positive) is simply talking about news events, or saying what you are doing today, or what you have done lately.

Some recently discovered hands-on marketing advice I can give you is that it’s probably best if you extracted some interesting and helpful content from your web site and posted it as a tweet, instead of simply announcing your site and posting a link to the URL.

More advice is that you post to your Facebook page a link to your Twitter account so people can start following you and also put up a graphical link to Twitter on any relevant websites you have access to, similar to the Follow-Me-on-Twitter image below.

One more thing is I ask you to please go to @webtrading or click-on the picture below to Follow-Me-on-Twitter now. Thank you!

Dallas Cowboys Alleged Domain Price Stupidity

Part of the problem with domain name disputes and domain complaints is the fact so many companies are unwilling to spend a fair amount of money buying already registered domains to protect their valuable brands.

A more or less perfect example is how the Dallas Cowboys representatives made a bid of only $275 (really $275 and not a misprint) for the great Cowboys.com domain name at an auction when other auction bids were in the general area of 200k or higher.

However, strangely the Cowboys allegedly grossly misunderstood the auction price level (in spite of the fact a series of auction bids had worked their way up to more than $200,000., while they were present in-person at the venue) but somehow were oddly thinking a bid of just $275 would buy that great domain. Isn’t that amazing! They say the truth is stranger than fiction. A story like that is so far fetched it could not be made-up!

There is a TV show about the World’s Dumbest and the Dallas Cowboys reps at the domain auction (who I heard it said at least one was a Cowboys attorney) should definitely be on that show based on the alleged auction bidding events.

The proposed world’s dumbest appearance would include the upper management where for just 275k (which should be insignificant to an assumed billion dollar plus business) they later cancelled their absurd $275 bid after being informed the bid should have been $275,000.

This incredible true story about some of the alleged dumbest people on the planet is very hard to believe but this did in fact happen a few years ago.

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