Archive for the ‘Domain Names’ Category

For the past 6 – 8 months, my team at Prime Visibility has been sleep deprived as we were working on building, developing and optimizing Sleep.com, a new online resource for EVERYTHING sleep-related!!

Sleep.com’s mission is to help people get a quality, restful night’s sleep by serving as a hub for consumers in need of timely and relevant sleep-related news, professional advice and information on the benefits of good sleep, sleep disorders, sleep behaviors and sleep products.

Obviously Sleep.com is the category-killer domain for ALL things sleep-related and has certainly helped us attract early advertisers and sponsors as well!!

Sleep.com features expert advice and content from Michael Breus, Ph.D., The Sleep Doctor ™, a Clinical Psychologist and a Diplomate of the American Board of Sleep Medicine. Sleep.com visitors can interact with Dr. Breus via regularly scheduled live chats on featured topics, including sleep apnea, snoring and more.

More notable site features, tools and offerings also include:

Content from Sleep.com is also available on the site’s social media channels: Facebook (Facebook.com/Sleepcom) and Twitter (@sleep_com).

There is a pretty cool sleep debt calculator which can calculate your sleep debt and illustrate how many nights and hours of sleep it will take to get you back on track.

Since we launched Sleep.com, we already gained a #2 ranking in Google for sleep products and a whole host of long tail keywords as well!!

With traffic and organic search rankings growing daily, we are no longer losing sleep with Sleep.com!!

@AndrewHazen

A fellow domaining buddy recently pointed me to a good read on Stock vs. Domain Names…

Domain name investments are ultra-high risk,. They have the potential of a very high return on investment for the right domains, if a buyer can be found, and the prospect of losing the entire value of the investment if one cannot. The latter scenario is by far the more common one as most people buying domain names to resell end up losing much or all of the money they invested.

The article also contains a table comparing and contrasting the major features of the stock and domain markets such as:

You can read the entire Stock vs. Domain Names article here

@AndrewHazen

Not sure if the choice of domain name for your website really matters?

IT DOES!!

Your domain name is like your street address. How will customers find you if they don’t know where to look — or worse, if they go to what they think is your address only to find your company is not there? Here are nine tips to choosing a domain name for your business:

1.  Make it a dot-com –  In the United States, most people typing in a domain name will type “.com” by default.   With over 94 million registered URLs, the “.com” extension is by far the most popular, with “.net”, “.org”, and ”.info” lagging far behind in popularity.

2.  Short and easy to spell — Shorter is better.  A short URL is easier to remember and less likely to be misspelled than a long one.

3.  Company names and brand names — Whenever possible, register your company name as your main URL.  It’s what people usually try first when looking for your business website. You might also consider registering your product/service names as additional URLs.   You should also register your company and brand names across all the social media sites (Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc.) using UserNameCheck.com

4.  Keywords and household words — Some companies register industry-specific terms, common words or short phrases that your customers or prospective customers may commonly type into a browser.  This can generate ‘type-in’ and ‘direct navigation’ traffic to your website.

5.  Personal names — Register your own first and last name as your domain name/URL if you are a consultant, writer, or other professional whose reputation in your field is critical to drawing customers.

6.  Be defensive with misspellings — Buy up common misspellings of your domain name.  That way, you don’t leave traffic on the table — and competitors won’t be able to buy the misspelled domains and siphon off traffic intended for your website.

7.  Protect your brand with other extensions and ‘negatives’— While the “.com” extension is the most popular, as a defensive measure consider also snapping up other extensions of your domain name.  Secure the .net, .info, .biz and similar extensions.  If you do business internationally, think about securing country extensions, also (such as .co.uk). You should also register domains likes www.YourCompanyNameSucks.com, www.YourCompanyNameComplaints.com, www.YourCompanyNameScams.com, etc.

8.  Don’t forget mobile — With mobile devices becoming more popular, big brands and savvy entrepreneurs are starting to register and develop their .mobi sites specifically for mobile users.  You may have no plans to build out a .mobi site today,   but as mobile usage continues to grow as rapidly as it today, you may be glad you have that domain in two or three years.

9. Avoid long hyphenated domain names/URLs — if you use a hyphenated domain name, you run the great risk of the domain name being miscommunicated offline…avoid them!

I hope everyone has signed up for my free Domain Alerts Newsletter. If not, please sign up now

I am also starting a Domain Deals Newsletter which offers domains for you to buy at great prices…if you’re interested, please sign up here

To your domaining success,
@AndrewHazen

Over the past week there has been a lot of positive chatter in the domaining industry and amongst domainers as the following premium domain names sales were recently reported:

AutoInsurance.org – $440,000

Driven.com – $225,000

Shield.com – $190,000

BlueJeans.com – $150,000

Mariage.com – $129,729 (Marriage in french)

HomeBasedBusiness.com – $100,000

Violet.com – $65,000

VisitHouston.com – $25,174

ElectronicSignature.com – $25,000

ElectronicSignatures.com – $25,000

StartABusiness.com – $20,000

NewCoupons.com – $20,000

UnderPar.com – $17,650

CreditCard.co – $17,000

Cheap.org – $15,000

PlasticSurgery.info $14,805

Obviously all these domain sales (and then some) is very positive and exciting as it further evidences that more and more end users are ‘getting it’

@AndrewHazen

According to ProductDomains.com, the following product domain names were recently via SEDO and Afternic:

Shield.com    $190,000
RedFlag.com     $9,790
GrowingLights.com     $8,000
FireproofFileCabinet.com     $6,800
ShavingCreams.com     $6,750
FloorSigns.com    $6,500
DocumentCameras.com     $6,000
PhotoCakes.com     $5,500
TempleArt.com     $4,500
RocketPack.com    $3,900
BodyFatCalipers.com     $3,500
silverPlates.com     $2,810
TeakFloor.com     $2,222
FireproofFilingCabinets.com     $1,639
ForksAndKnives.com    $1,200

If you would like the opportunity to buy premium domains at great prices, be sure to signup for our Domain Deals Newsletter

To Your Domaining Success,
@AndrewHazen

According to a blog I just read by Rick Latona, it appears as though Rick is out of the domain auctioning business….

Rick said in part “After many attempts we’ve officially decided not to do any more domain auctions on Latona’s. Sedo dominates the online domain auction space and they do it well.

I’m back to being a customer now, buying and selling through intermediaries and I’m fine with that. Frankly, it’s a lot less stressful.”

Best of luck to you Rick…..

You can read the post that I found here

To your domaining success,

@AndrewHazen

The following domain names were available as of the time of this post…

GeekCribs.com (like MTV cribs – the home of the geeks, I REALLY like this one!)
SunLampStore.com
AtlantaBagel.com
NewBabyCakes.com
CoolestBaby.com (baby talent agency or photo contest site)
OrderSwords.com (good eCommerce name)
SimplyMonitors.com (guess what we sell)
TrafficAddicts.com (portal for those obsessed with traffic reports)
CandyAve.com

Please let me know if you register any of these domains and what you’re doing with them as I like to track the success of these expired domains. Need a new logo for your new domain? Checkout LogoDesignContests.com and Bluehost for $6.95 web hosting

I hope everyone has signed up for free Domain Alerts from AllInternetIdeas.com. If not, please sign up now and feel free to forward this to your friends…

I am also starting an additional Domain Deals newsletter which offers domains for you to buy at great prices…if you’re interested, please sign up here

To your domaining success,
@AndrewHazen