LinkMoney.org

First off, this is about me, but I do NOT do any of the aforementioned things.

However I made a major snafu recently, late at night, that has changed my latest plan to become the next Kevin Rose. Hmm, wonder if he ever did?

Any way here’s what happened. I had this idea of setting up a social circle, you know friends helping friends, wink, wink. Sort of a you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Well this crashed into a not so happy ending, (pun intended.)

I was going to set up a site where registered mail list members could post their site or article url and then other members would hump it, oops, I mean help promote it with various social networking tools. I wanted a cool name, so during the night I got up thinking about it and said, something like “social.”… Easy to remember…. Hmmm…

Eureka! I got it. “sosso dot com”! It’s cute, rhymes sort of with social, easy to remember, and I could get it out as a Buzz word. You know what I mean?

Great! I had just read a Blog about how NAME dot com was the cheapest registrar and so I went there and bought it and a dozen other domains all in one day. Then I read another Blog about how great Hostgator was, and though I have sites on three other domain hosting companies already, I wanted to try out Hostgator.

So I said to myself, self, this is going to be HOT! He he he… Can’t afford a private server, not yet, so I purchased the high end shared account for 13 bucks a month, with the first month only costing a penny. Pretty good deal right?

So I set up sosso dot com as my primary account on Hostgator and then read the instructions on how to point the DNS on NAME dot com to my shiny new hard disks at Hostgator. Did that and saw the warning that this may take 24 to 48 hours to resolve. No problem. It isn’t like I don’t have anything to do in the meantime.

So I checked it the next day and the next day and it still had not resolved. What’s up with that? Forget it, I’m already into a dozen new projects, will fix it later. Well that was August 3, 4 & 5. Now this morning I said I’m going to find out what the Hell is wrong.

I checked sosso again and it was coming up on a GoDaddy parked domain website. Huh? This didn’t have anything to do with GD, or so I thought. I checked again with Hostgator tech support and they said it was NAME’s problem. Checked with NAME but had to wait two and a half hours because they don’t get out of bed until 9am mountain time, and they don’t offer 24/7 phone tech support.

Finally it turns out that I did not OWN sosso. I owned a domain named “sossol.” Naturally I got a little testy and said what do you mean, I registered sosso. So sorry, we only have sossol.

I finally figured out what happened. Remember when I said I did this during the night after I had woken up thinking about it? Take a look at where the “L” key is, right next to the “O” key. I did not purchase the right domain and it was ALL my fault! Turns out GD had registered that name years ago, and it was not even available.

So here’s my point boys and girls. Make absolutely SURE just what you are typing during domain registrations and hosting setups. If you screw up, it can’t be fixed. Now I just went through the procedure of taking sosso off my Hostgator account and setting up a different domain as my primary account. It is mostly done but has been a few hours and there is still a little more BS that I have to do to get the damned thing working.

So point number two is. I did this totally clean, honest! Other than being sleepy I should not have made such a stupid mistake. I wonder what people do that have a few beers before going through this procedure?

Oh well, I only lost about a half a month’s worth of my first penny right?

I’m Rich

There, I’ve said it. No apologies.

A year ago you would not have been able to force any level of computer programming down my craw. That is actually still the case. I HATE programming!

I was a Blogger Blogging Blog aficionado. I owned a full featured authority website in a certain field that had been active for many years, that was built by a professional company using Joomla! I had a strong user base and still do. That site led me to wanting to be able to have a more casual connection with my fans and users, so therefore I Blogged using Google’s Blogger.

I never thought about actually being able to make money off this thing called the Internet. Man, what a mistake. I will tell you that I am not one of those Eureka Kids that made a gazillion dollars, er, not yet anyway, but there is a steady stream now that I never dreamed would happen in my life time. It can only get better.

So I forced myself to learn how to install WordPress, purchase domains and hosting and build websites. You will recall that I wrote about this previously in another post: Make Money Create Blogs for your Neighbors

Well this is an update. I have built way over a hundred websites and with each one there are new challenges and new things to learn and accomplish. It seems to me that Matt at automattic probably knew what he was doing when he unleashed this fabulous free software to the world, but I could not see it at the time. Now I get it.

The old way of creating a website page by page in an editor, then uploading and debugging it are over. This Content Management System (CMS) that is open source, (as in Free,) is something that almost anyone that can dial a telephone is able to learn a little at a time. This is causing a world changing event that is progressing even as you read this.

I still figure that it takes about 40 hours to bring a site to it’s full value with all the little features and goodies that you would want, but it actually only takes a couple of hours to install the rough content of a website that even if someone were to fall off a barstool and come up on this domain by accident, it would still look like a real web site.

I have set up sites now in fields that I know almost nothing about, but they can be populated by the new owners in just a matter of minutes, well OK hours. I have built sites in cars, sports, health, history, medicine, saw mills, machine tools, hunting, camping, scouting, sales, bargains, credit, wine, geo based (like city names,) travel, dogs, weddings, antiques, art work, collecting… Get the picture?

You can do this too. Make a few bucks setting up sites for your friends, families, neighbors, and local businesses. You can do it!

First and foremost, in my opinion, is get yourself comfortable with using an ftp program. I held out on that one, and realize that was my weak point. I had played around a little with file transfer protocol in the late 1980’s. That is when I grew to hate programming. Well the ftp programs of today are not your typical father’s ftp program. There’s dozens of them and I’m not going to try to influence you with one over the other. They all do the same thing. Join a forum. Google the Hell out of any questions you might have. The ftp program will be your new best friend.

If you are just starting, pick a domain registering hosting company, (not GoDaddy,) buy one of their cheap programs, and get started. Sure the cheap ones will have you parked on a Tinker Toy server, but you get what you pay for. You can always upgrade, which you will soon do.

I now pay for hosting with three companies, two average ones with average services and bandwidth, and one super duper one that costs more that I ever thought I would pay anyone for anything, almost. But the Damn thing works and never is down. I recently struck gold with setting up a news story related website that I was able to get in on the first floor with. As an early adopter with a keyword rich url and dozens of posts, I am on the first page of you know who in just one week. I haven’t started to monetize this site yet, but I will after a while. With any luck you will be reading future posts, say in a year or so, from the South Sea Island pictured above.

Most of all, read good Blogs in the mmo field to get the impetus to get off your butt and get going. Join some forums, take some online courses, and learn from those that have been successful. I have been doing all of the above for only eight months. Now I are not quite an expurt, but I’m gaining on it.

Here is my recommendation for one of the very best programs on the Internet, and I am not even going to use my affiliate link, I believe in this man and what he does so much that I want you all to join. Like TODAY!

Yaro Starak! What a great name! This guy is unforgettable by having a name that is so like poetry that it will make you want to change your name. But that is not the reason to remember him best by. You absolutely MUST join his Blog Mastermind program! He just started one up again a few sessions ago. You will not have missed anything because all of his mentoring sessions are recorded and downloadable to the students.

You will be tied in to a Blog Mastermind forum, where you can post questions and get real excellent answers from those that know their stuff. You will be tied into a major group with a well known company, that will give you a way to help other students with social networking and to receive the same in return. That in itself is almost worth the price of admission. You want traffic? You can’t handle traffic…! (Oh no, that was from an old movie, I think.)

How’s that for a rant?

It all starts by learning WordPress. It’s not just for Bloggers you know.

I’m Rich!

(Oh by the way, in case you were wondering, you have my permission to give this post a little Link Luv by using your social networking tool listed below.)

In Asia it is standard custom to pay attention to and honor your elders. That certainly holds true everywhere, or should, but let me tell you about some one else that makes sense far beyond his years.

Jason, the University Kid.

At first when i started reading Jason’s posts, I just presumed he was spoofing us and that he was pulling something like the John Cow deal. I am now convinced he is everything he claims to be, and that he really is a kid of University age. Amazing wisdom!

I have been reading and commenting and meeting others through his Blog and I am very impressed with the youth of this world! For all the bad things you hear about and read about and see on TV, there are certain members of this younger generation that are shining examples of success in the making as well as success right now!

I’m pretty sure that Jason will make it VERY BIG in this world. I don’t know him except through his Blog, but I can tell you this, he is generous to a fault with sharing his methods and advice, and if I were you, I would (and do,) pay very close attention. The make money online (mmo) world is full of wannabees. Jason is a doobee.

Check out his excellent website at: TheUniversityKid.com

I have several old Blogs in Google Blogger under various subjects. They are well known, firmly entrenched and are my major traffic generators for the fields they are in. I use Feedblitz to handle the subscribers on them.

If you use Feedblitz as an email subscription handler, then you probably received an email similar to the excerpted parts below.

Hello, (yaddy yaddy…)

Custom domains are fully functional micro-sites that make life simpler for your subscribers by simplifying access to your newsletters and (, yaddy yaddy…) To make things even easier, we have reserved the following domains for you (these default reservations expire Aug 10, 2008, 23:59:59 EDT, which is why I’m writing to you now.)

(Entered here are various versions of your website’s partial url, the main keyword from your website, your email name, etc. all with the dot feedblitz.com extension.)

(For instance, but not offered for this website because I do not use Feedblitz on this one, eg: linkmoney.feedblitz.com and richhill.feedblitz.com.)

For under a buck a month per domain you get branded pages, simplified access and brand security. Even if you do nothing else, we recommend buying the domain for your main blog. Go to www.feedblitz.com/ (, yaddy yaddy…) now to see the reservations we’ve made on your behalf and activate the ones you want before they expire.

(Inserted here is a warning that someone else might gobble this up and become your competition.)

Thanks,

Phil Hollows,
Founder,
FeedBlitz, LLC.

————

Does any of that smack of extortion to you?

Actually I don’t see anything to worry about, because this same sort of thing will be happening with all of the new TLDs that are coming out in a year or so, this just sort of caught me off guard and I was upset to see the samples shown, with my own hard earned domain names in them.

Oh and when you click on the sample it takes you to a demo site that does not say anything at all about the dot feedblitz extension, it just plain says something like “Welcome to LinkMoney!” (Again, used as an example, not actual.)

I bet that email will piss more people off than Phil ever expected.

LOL

As was postulated on the previous posting of this dot ME subject, GoDaddy Giveth and GoDaddy Taketh Away.

So after receiving a receipt and then a confirmation email that I was the proud new owner of three bouncing baby websites with a dot me extension, I was elated. Cigars all around.

Well that birth was aborted. GD sent an email about an hour later that said they were real sorry but those domains had been previously sold. Remember that term “Previously Sold !” they also said I would get a full refund for the money that I gave them in one business day. Remember that term, “One Business Day !”

So yesterday I got a very nice telephone call from Jennifer at GoDaddy. She was really very sorry that they had to strip me of my happiness. (My description, not what she really said, but what she meant anyway.) I was not upset in the least, thanked her for calling, told her GoDaddy was my least favorite registrar and that I mostly did not like their “In Your Face” crappy website. They CONSTANTLY try to sell you something, buy this, buy this, buy this.

Jennifer said I would be getting a full refund within “48 Hours.” 48 Hours from when? What happened to the one business day? GoDaddy got to use many millions of dollars to draw interest on for a few days, you can just bet on that, and in my opinion they knew just EXACTLY what they were doing.

I actually was very nice to Jennifer. It is not her fault she works for a shitty company. Oh by the way, “if there was anything that I wanted to purchase today while she was on the phone, that GD would consider a slight discount.” …

So after reading many other messages about this whole mess I found out that there was a new website to auction off dot ME domains that there had been more than one buyer for. So I went to the dot ME auction website and surprise! Two of the domains that I had bought and paid for were listed on the GoDaddy auction site. Turns out that they had not been sold to someone else after all. Someone on another Blog called this Bait and Switch. Is it?

So I tried to register to bid in the auction. I was told I did not have permission. So I sent an email to GD very politely asking how might I get permission to register for the auction. I received an email this morning from GD that said they were very sorry but only people that had made purchases and then had them taken away would be able to register for the auction. Huhh? WTF?

So I very politely sent them another message back stating that I was one of those same unfortunates and gave them my receipt number. We’ll see what happens today, but I think the auction starts tomorrow. so this just might be a way to shut out every one except GD’s best butt buddies. I’ll let you know what happens.

Think BlueHost people, and I’m not even going to insert my Affiliate Link.

Tell us what you think about this whole raw deal. Are we going to soar to new heights with our favorite dot ME domain, or crash and burn into a brick wall? Leave your comments below.

Use the little Orange button at the top to subscribe to this Blog and we will keep you posted.

Rich

*** PLEASE - PLEASE - PLEASE - Do me a favor, especially if you are pissed off with GoDaddy. Please use your favorite social bookmarking tool to vote for this Blog. Mostly I would consider it a VERY special favor if you would take some time to DIGG this Blog. If we can get a high enough DIGG count then more and more people will learn of this mess and maybe something can be done about it. ***** (DIGG it!)

Shoemoney posted a blog yesterday about the new TLD .ME to become available on Thursday July 17, 200 at 8:00am Pacific time. I knew that this was going to be happening soon but had not paid much attention to it.

So after a lot of discussion in the comments section of Shoemoney Blog, I got hooked.
http://www.shoemoney.com/2008/07/16/me-landrush-starts-8am-pst-tomorrow/#comment-77594

Last night I made a hot list of about a hundred domains that I thought would be really really cool, knowing full well that I would not be buying more that two or three, but Hey I can dream can’t I?

Well naturally even with all best plans to lurk over the keyboard with my finger poised watching the second hand just like on an Ebay snipe, I totally forgot about it. LOL

So about noon Eastern time I signed on to GoDaddy and sure enough the dot ME was being sold. So I started down my list, SOLD, SOLD, SOLD, SOLD, etc, etc. You get the idea. Then lo and behold I got one! Then another, then another! What a shock. I’m not going to brag about what they are yet because some of the discussion on Shoemoney was that if domains had multiple requests, they would go in a bidding war.

I don’t know if that bidding war stuff is real or not, I can’t find anything in the fine print, and I did get a receipt and then a confirmation email. Incidentally I used the coupon (gdp0422v - Save 20% off $75 or more.) It saved me over twenty bucks.

You pay $19.99 per year with a two year minimum, so it isn’t exactly a bargain domain name.

What do you think about this new domain name .ME? It is the country domain name for Montenegero, but anyone may purchase one, as far as I know. We reported in a previous post on this Blog about ICANN opening up possibilities for any TLD name that you want. Read about the ICANN Paris announcement here:

Can you think of some good .ME names? As I understand it there are no two letter names available, but I did snag a good three letter one.

Would you take a gamble on a dot ME domain name? It might tie up your money for a while and then if the scuttlebut is any where near true, you might even lose it after you have made the purchase. In that case I guess GoDaddy would likely have many millions of dollars in their interest bearing accounts before they have to issue a refund.

Let us know what your thoughts are on the .ME domains.

(Click on comments below.)

( Read more on this dot ME Fiasco )

To all of the Bloggers and SEO experts out there that say;

“Oh never put hyphens in your domain name!”
“Google will penalize you for multiple hyphens in your url.”
“Google will lower your page rank if you use hyphens.”
“Google just might delist you if they think you are trying to game the system.”

So is all of the above true, or just a bunch of Bull Shit?

Do the SEO gurus know what they are talking about, or are they just repeating drivel that they heard about or read some where on another “expert” Blog?

Case in point. I wanted to review how to backup or copy and transfer Outlook Express contacts for a friend that I was going to do this for later today. So naturally I did a Google search of just exactly the following search phrase, with no quotes:

how copy and transfer outlook express messages and contacts

Received Title Bar in Number one place, (That’s Page 1, #1!) that reads,

ABC Outlook Express Backup:outlook express data backup and restore …

and the url is: www.outlook-express-email-backup.com/

The website arrived at is: StartKing Software
They sell a software package to do this backup and transfer for $89.00!
(Remember this is ahead of Microsoft and everyone!)

StartKing has a GPR of 3/10 and an Alexa rank of 4,182,018 when I checked it this morning.

Eighty Nine bucks for something that you can easily do yourself with just a little cut and paste of a few files that Microsoft explains in great detail when you follow the above search a little beyond P1, #1.

How the Hell does a website with only a GPR of 3 and an Alexa in the 4 millions beat out everyone else? HYPHENS people!

So is StartKing gaming the system? You bet! More power to them! This move was genius. Three hyphens in the url that clearly are only there to spoof the munificent Google spider bots! LOL - No, ROFLMAO !

Congratulations StartKing. Don’t listen to all those SEO experts.

www.outlook-express-email-backup.com/ … Indeed!

And no, I have absolutely no connection with this company. The above is a totally true unbiased story.

Rich Hill

LinkMoney.org readers will remember that we discussed Social Networking in a previous post.

LinkMoney dot org Let’s Get Social

Now we want to discuss this in a little detail in case there is anyone that does not know how to go about getting involved. These Social sites are becoming more and more prevalant. You can literally subscribe to hundreds of them.

We at LinkMoney generally find that about a half dozen of the more popular ones are good enough for our purpose. We often use StumbleUpon, Digg, Technorati, Delicious, and Twitter. Ok, five then.

Here’s how it works. You first must visit those sites and sign up for an account, always free, as in no cost at all. You will get a user name and password to use every time you want to sign in. If you sign in on a regular basis say once a day, then you generally do not have to sign in each and every time you want to promote a website.

The purpose of these Social sites is to give you your own one vote to tell the world that you approve of a site. The more votes the sites get, the higher their notification count goes, and if they become viral in nature, your favorite website might just get many thousands of visits in just one day!

It is a little nuiscance to go through the sign in and captchas but it is a small price to pay of your time to help out a fellow Blogger or website that you feel is of special mention.

Our friend in Blogging, Michael Martine, Blogging Consultant, over at MichaelMartine.com has posted an extremely helpful explanation regarding how to set up a BlogPack. His logo of a pack of wolves is certainly understandable, but I would like to think of this idea as the team in a circle with all of the players hands stacked up on one another at a ball game. Give a cheer and help your friends out. You will be amazed at how it will come back to help you.

Visit the BlogPack blog.

Incidently, if anyone wants to start a BlogPack here just do your thing and let us know about it. We’ll visit your site and reciprocate. Try to stick with the proper theme, such as; Blogging, Make Money Online, SEO, wordPress and so on.

Enjoy!

Do you want to be a Domainer? Or perhaps you just want to do some keyword research on a domain name for your personal Blog. This post will help you.

Do you own a couple or more of domain names that you purchased when you had a brainfart? Do you have several domains parked just waiting for the chance to get the time to set up websites and become the next Darren Rowse?

Well I wish I only had a couple, but truth is I have over a hundred, with only a little over a dozen that are activated and in various states of growth at the moment.

Did you know that there are large numbers of people that invest in domain names? I had suspected so but after searching around a while I was floored with the enormity of this Domaining business. There are worldwide auctions in fancy places that attract the high rollers, the champagne and caviar set, and from the podcast auctions I have heard the former had been liberally doled out.

Here are just a few Domains that sold in 2007 with prices realized; computer.com, Five million dollars, seniors.com 2.1 million, vista.com 1 and a quarter million, guy.com 1 million, ok you say, so what, I’ll never have that chance?

Well how about DIY.net $200K, BoiseIdaho.com $175K, travel.info $116K, bulk.com $100K. It is not exactly too hard to come up with something close that has not yet been purchased. Buy something you think is cool, sit on it a while and offer it for sale. My father always said, “If you double your money, you’ll never go broke.”

Even any commonly used terms, dictionary word one name urls, three or four character urls sell for many thousands of dollars. All of the dot com LLL or LLLLs have been sold, but they do show up in the expired or after market sites quite often. One man last year purchased five LLLs for less than $3,500 from a domain holding company that released them on the aftermarket at a very low price. The blog at www.dailydomainer.com says he could easily sell them for $50K any day! Three years ago I purchased three LLLLs for one of my websites and use two of them as redirects to the first. If I had only known then what I know now I would have purchased as many LLLs and LLLLs that I could afford.

This means that someone was quick on the draw and was able to scoop up these choice names whenever they became available for the first time, or perhaps a few years later when the original owner neglected to renew them. That happened to me once on a domain that I had been using and then had transferred the website over to a nice easy four letter dot com but I had still left the old name active and it pointed to my new site. Well I had moved around several times in a five year period and between postal and email changes the renewal notice never got to me. Next thing I knew the old address was gone and there was nothing I could do about it.

I suppose I could have contacted the new owner and tried to negotiate a repurchase, but as I was only using it as a redirect I decided to heck with it. Lesson learned. It will never happen again.

You all no doubt know that the age of your website, among many other factors, does help to improve your ranking with some of the search engines. So keep track of all your domains and make sure they are renewed far in advance. I keep all of mine in a spreadsheet database and I also keep adding the new purchases as I build this collection.

I look at domain names as falling into two categories, a Brandable Name, and a Keyword Name. Seems like in the early days of the Internet it was a scramble to come up with cute names that might be an acronym of your business name or that just was memorable for its bizarreness. Consider names like YAHOO, GOOGLE, EBAY, There certainly would not be anyone apt to search for those terms, however they have become Brand Names and easy to remember. Google has even become a verb!

Then we come to the type that many people look for today, as being search engine friendly. For instance you want the Keyword or Keyword Search Phrase to be built right into the domain name. Some of the search engines use the url line in the search algorithm and then the title bar of the website’s internal pages becomes an associated part of the search strength. For instance www.LookingForMr.com might be followed by Blog page headers of Goodbar, or Handsome, or Right, or Fixit. The words in the title pages become what are called the Long Tail Search Words.

The domain name and the long tail are not the only factors involved in having your site found, there is of course content, links in, social bookmarking, Buzz, and many other details, but the names do help. Oh, and did I mention content?

If you are a Blogger in the world of Internet marketing or niche marketing specifically, then it would most likely behoove you to purchase a domain name that might be easily related to the product that you are humping and certainly if you can get the product theme in the url line than that is a plus.

Let me tell you the procedure I use to investigate the availability and the possible demand for certain terms that might make a good domain name. Others no doubt have their own method, but this works for me.

I use a pc almost exclusively with Firefox. Other computers and browsers might have some or all of these features available, but I do not know about them. Firefox allows you to add many different tools or utilities that they call Addons. One of the newer Addons that you can install on Firefox is LinkBun.ch (note the TLD of ch) and what this tool does is to allow you to open up as many tabbed websites that you wish and then create one LinkBun.ch bookmark. That way the next time you want to open that same series of websites all at once is to go to your bookmarks and open that one LinkBun.ch. It is still in Beta but I have not found any flaws in it, other than you have to say yes about an annoying three times to get it to open. Still pretty cool.

So here is what I have for my Domainer LinkBun.ch. I open the following list of tabbed websites:
http://www.google.com
http://www.yahoo.com
http://www.freekeywords.wordtracker.com
http://www.pcnames.com
http://wwwfreshdrop.net/index.php
http://www.archive.org/web/web/php
Then I create a LinkBun.ch out of that group, save it to bookmarks and then any time I want to use this group of pages they are right there. All of these sites are free to use. There are subscription services and software that you can purchase that will do a much more accurate job but the free ones are good enough for me for now.

If I already have an idea for a good name and want to see if it is available I go right to pcnames. This one has a block where you just start typing the name in and pcnames lets you know if any of the names are available instantly right as you are typing in characters. So I just used the example above; lookingformr and started typing them in. As I got to “looking” all are taken, but org and biz are for sale, then as soon as I started adding additional characters, “f” & “o” available, “lookingfor” are all taken but org and info are for sale, then added the “mr” and surprise! They are all available! The dot com, net, org, info, biz and us are the TLDs that pcnames returns. They do qualify the results by saying that the data might not be entirely up to date, but I have only seen one time that I went to register a domain that pcnames said was open to find that it had been already registered.
Another nice feature with pcnames is that if the website is taken there is a WHOIS button right there so you can check and see who the owner is. Normally the owners are cloaked behind a privacy shield, but sometimes you can find the name and address of an actual owner.

Before I register the name I check the keyword url in wordtracker and Google within quotes. That will give you some idea of the popularity of that specific search phrase. If no one or very few people ever search on that phrase then I do not buy it.

Freshdrop.net – TDNAM Closeouts are names that have been in service before. Many have fair Google Page Rank, age and traffic. These dropped names usually have just recently expired and the registrar gives you a chance to pick up a domain with some ready made juice. There is a filter box where you can select any number of TLD’s or all if you want. Here you can register a great many TLDs that you normally do not see at most domain registries. For instance besides the customary dot com, net, org, biz, info and us, you can also search for dropped dot mobi, tv, name, cc, ws, de, am and fm.

The filter box also lets you put other limiters in your search, such as starts with, contains, ends with, insert a number for minimum GPR, select whether the GPR might be fake or not, and insert a minimum age in years.

I generally look for names that have a minimum GPR of 2, age of 2, not fake, [mykeyword] and am often surprised that there is something right down my alley for a mere five bucks! There is no guarantee that the page rank or any juice will follow you when you revive this turkey, but hey the age has to be a plus factor.

I suspect that GoDaddy is behind just about everything here, but I don’t know that for sure. Every time I have registered from Freshdrop it has been GoDaddy on the other end of the line. Oh by the way you will have to register through GD to obtain an annual TDNAM account to be able to purchase any of these TDNAM domains. As I recall it was less than five bucks for the annual renewable account. The other thing is that in addition to the $5 purchase you have to pay an additional $9.95 for a one year registration fee, plus .20 ICANN fee, so it’s a little over fifteen bucks for this baby.

There is another section called “Exp Names,” these are expired and available at auction. The minimum bid is usually fairly low, and you can see the number of bids on each domain name. You could get lucky and pick up something that you could promote for as little as $10, however they usually sell for a bit more, sometimes in the hundreds.

There is also a section for SEDO Auction, Ebay, Afternic and others, but they almost all sell in much higher prices and I only look for bottom of the barrel bargains. I know that it would be smarter to purchase a better name, but I can’t afford it on a gamble and I know for sure I can do something with the low priced names I do get. This Freshdrop site reportedly gets updated on an hourly basis.

If you want to see what the website used to look like before, that’s where I use the page that we opened with LinkBun.ch for www.archive.org. This site has a feature called “The Wayback Machine,” and you can see what the site used to look like at various dates in the past. You should keep that in mind when you plan on restarting this domain. Will its previous iteration help you or be a hindrance?

GoDaddy also operates a site at www.tdnam.com where you can purchase high priced domain names. I see things like cavemenblogs.com being offered for $50K minimum, theguypage.com with one bid at $35K, adsensewebsites.com for $950, and so on. Oh you can pick up the bargain presedenthillaryclinton.com for a mere $1,000, note the misspelling, but hey what about 2012?

Why would you buy these and then not do anything with them, you might ask? Well I do intend to use every one of them eventually. There are just too many things going on in my life to keep installing new websites every day. So what I do is park them. Some places charge you a monthly fee for parking, like GoDaddy, but I park mine at namedrive.com for free.

That way a fake website is created with that url and it looks like a website full of information, but they are all ads. Well if someone blunders on to that site and clicks any of the ads or makes a purchase, then you get a share of the advertising revenue. Hey I would rather get a couple of bucks every once in a while, then to just keep them hidden. I doubt the website gains any ranking but it should qualify as helping in the ageing of the website. Then when you do want to get it set up all you have to do is transfer it back and install your website.

Just as much as GD is no doubt the best known and I do register many domains with them, they are not my favorite. I think that BlueHost is the very best hosting company out there, particularly for customer support. So I quite often pay ten bucks for a domain through BlueHost just because I like this company so much.

Very big changes are coming and I have no idea, nor have I read any of the experts predictions yet, but the Domaining world is about to change within the next couple of years. ICANN this year at the Paris meeting voted to allow any type of name to be registered. You can create any kind of new TLD by paying $100,000 to ICANN and then you can become the registrar for the millions of urls that will be set up under what ever you selected. Lets say you wanted dot movie, or dot Ford, or dot catpoop, whatever. A hundred K and it’s yours! The buzz is that this will come into effect about 2010.

I have a hunch that dot com will still reign supreme for a long time to come.
(Oh and by the way if you register the above www.LookingForMr.com please let me know.)

Annotated Terms used in this post:

BlueHost – Ten bucks to register a name, but the very best company to deal with in the way of tech support and ease of use of their website features, in my humble opinion. The hosting that they provide has many free features that comes with it where other companies charge you extra for them, like a shopping cart, large quantities of email addresses, and others.
DNS – Domain Name Service – this is the service that converts your readable character domain name into an IP Address like 208.22.38.109, or what ever your name converts to.
Domain – The name of the url
Domainer – a person that owns several domains, either for eventual use or to hold for resale at a later date.
GoDaddy – Domain name registrar and hosting company. They are probably the cheapest registrar. Their website is very confusing and they are always trying to sell you something more. I have nothing personally against GD other than the confusion I previously mentioned, however as I was writing this today on the Fourth of July one of the Blogs that I subscribe to in my reader, webmaster-source.com, came out with a story about horror stories with this registrar/hosting company. You might want to read it and come to your own conclusions.
http://tinyurl.com/5dmmoc
GPR - Google Page Rank.
ICANN – Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
LLL – any three letter domain name.
LLLL – any four letter domain name.
TLD – Top Level Domain (like com, org, net, etc.)
TDNAM – The Domain Name After Market.
URL – Universal Resource Locater.
WHOIS - A place to look up the name and contact address for the owner of a domain. Most are hidden behind a cloaking registrar site, but several will have the actual name and address of the owner.

OK readers, here comes my personal request. If you have found this article of interest, or helpful in any way, I REALLY would appreciate some feedback, comments, links in, social bookmarks, or any type of input at all. This is a fairly new website and I really need to get some traffic. Thanks. Rich Hill

We had a column of Amazon Book and Kindle Products on this website previously, however the website was running slow due to waiting for Amazon’s servers to fill our product advertising block.

So we are going to try something different and write a post specifically about certain Amazon products and post them here in the Blog.

To be a success in Internet Marketing you will benefit from any of these fine products.

The Amazon Kindle is a unique electronic text reader that has a superior display to any that you have seen before. You will want to read all about the Kindle’s features on the product page. Order: Amazon Kindle (now in stock)

How to Use the Amazon Kindle for Email & Over 100 Pages of Other Cool Tips (The Complete User’s Guide to the Amazing Amazon Kindle) (Kindle Edition) by Stephen Windwalker Order: How to Use the Amazon Kindle

Problogger Secrets by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett Darren (Problogger) is one of the best known successful Bloggers on the Internet and consistently earns a six figure annual income from his Blogging. Order: Problogger Secrets

Internet Riches by Scott Fox. “STARTING YOUR own business on the Internet is by far the number-one business opportunity currently available to entrepreneurs…” Order: Internet Riches

A Practical Guide to Affiliate Marketing: Quick Reference for Affiliate Managers & Merchants by Evgenii Prussakov Order: A Practical Guide to Affiliate Marketing:

Riches in Niches: How to Make It Big in a Small Market by Susan Friedmann Order: Riches in Niches:

The AdSense Code: What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense by Joel Comm Order: The AdSense Code:

Blogging For Dummies by Susannah Gardner A good book to start with. Order: Blogging For Dummies

Affiliate Millions: Make a Fortune using Search Marketing on Google and Beyond by Anthony Borelli Order: Affiliate Millions:

The Stay-at-Home Mom’s Guide to Making Money from Home, Revised 2nd Edition: Choosing the Business That’s Right for You Using the Skills and Interests You Already Have by Liz Folger Order: The Stay-at-Home Mom’s Guide to Making Money from Home,

WordPress For Dummies by Lisa Sabin-Wilson (Author), Matt Mullenweg (Foreword) (You absolutely need this book!) Order: WordPress For Dummies

WordPress 2 (Visual QuickStart Guide) by Maria Langer (Author), Miraz Jordan WordPress 2