I read an article the other day that basically said that domains don't matter any more for SEO. I don't know if that's true or not, but maybe it has been diminished substantially.

Some time later, I set up an index page for one of my domains. I wanted to see if it had any traffic. I simply created a page that spit out the Domain name and included a stat counter link.

A few days later I started getting traffic to that domain.  It wasn't type in traffic.

It turns out that people were going to Google and typing in that exact domain to search, then they would follow the link back to my page.

So this makes me think that YES keyword domains still matter, since people are using search engines to find those domains...

A couple of weeks ago I watched an ESPN show about car auctions. During the program there was a nice old car on the auction block. The high bid was $30K. They put the BIN at $39K. The high bidder kept asking the auctioneer, "what's real money", "what's real money". He spoke to the camera, "the last time I overpaid $100K because they had me bidding against myself!" Which brings us to domain name negotiating. A couple of weeks ago I made an offer on a domain name. On Monday, the seller came back and said the BIN was $1000 more than my offer. I was tempted to buy it for the BIN but I resisted. I kept thinking about the guy on the car show and how he was bidding against himself. So I stood my ground with the original offer and saved $1000. I wonder what would have happened if I had let it go, I might have gotten it for even less than my original offer. At the very least I learned my lesson and didn't bid against myself!

I finally signed up for GoDaddy's Domain Discount Club. I don't know why I didn't do this years ago. We currently have 67 domains over at GoDaddy. After paying for the yearly club fee, I will save at least $130 per year. If I move my other domains to GoDaddy the savings may increase more than 50%.

Tonight I was watching the Super Bowl and playing on the internet at the same time, of course. Lately, I've been watching the action in the LLLL.com arena. The prices of these domains are going through the roof. There seem to be 30 or more LLLL.com's at SEDO with bids above their reserve prices. It feels like 2002 / 2003 all over again. I remember when all of the LLL.coms were being bought up and I sat there and did nothing. This time, I decided to buy a few. You can still find a few LLLL.com's under $100, but not many. The best way to get them is to make bulk offers. I hate to buy domains without an exit strategy. So I try to make sure I only buy LLLL.com's that are pronouncible, or at least have a lot of query results from Google. I can't wait to see where these prices will be during the summer. Tonight I was thinking about the differences between domains and stocks. It is so cool that domains can be bought and sold outside of a stock market. You can trade domains any time of day, even during the Super Bowl!

A few days ago Pool.com caught a three letter domain that I was interested in. Since I'm used to bidding on ebay, I waited to the last minute to place a bid. Unfortunately for me, the Pool system adds 5 minutes to the auction end time if the price changes. This gave another bidder a chance to "feel out" my bid. We went back and forth changing the price a couple of times. If I was smart, I would have bid a few hundred above the current amount so that the other guy would not have had time to feel out my max. Needless to say I didn't win the domain. But I did learn a very important lesson...

It is that time again. Time to come up with resolutions that will only last a month. My main resolution is to kick the Diet Coke habit again. I'm going to do Steve Pavlina's 30 day trial. That should be easy enough... In other news, I read this interesting post from Zed Shaw called Rails is a Ghetto. In even other news, the SEC is doing fairly well in the bowls. I was disappointed in Florida for not beating Michigan. And I have no clue what happened to Arkansas. I hope LSU plays as well as Georgia did against Hawaii. It must have been shocking for Hawaii to run into The Dawgs!

Recently I added my three letter dot com to my Sedo portfolio. Within a week or two, I received my first offer for the domain. My three letter dot com is weak. Two of the letters are Z and Q, if that gives you a clue. According to the 3character.com Price Guide, the lowest observed price since November 1, 2007 for even the crappiest of three letter dot coms was $6000. So I was kind of surprised to see someone bid $2500 for it. Maybe they are assuming a $5000 retail price and trying to buy it "wholesale" for half off. I wonder how many owners would even consider an offer this low. Another scenario is that they are "anchoring" the price to the low four figure range and hoping that this will some how influence the owner to counter with a mid four figure offer. The final scenario is that they just don't know what three letter dot coms are selling for. This is highly unlikely since they are using Sedo. So now the question is what do I do. I could do nothing and let the offer expire in seven days. I could decline the offer. This is one thing I HATE about Sedo's offer system. They FORCE you to enter an amount, even if you are declining an offer. There's no way I would accept the offer since I paid more than $2500 for it. Another alternative is to make a counter offer. Part of me wants to counter with a $25,000 offer just so that I can tell the bidder how far off the mark they are. Since I think they already know this, that would be a waste of time. The final alternative is to take the domain to auction. I'm just not ready to sell it. I've only had it for 6 months or so and the value has already gone up 50%. I don't have any stocks doing that well. Who knows, maybe by next summer it will have doubled in value. Besides that, I just like saying that I own one. The more I think about it, the more I like this bidder's approach. If you know the retail value of domains, it might be worth your while to go around making 50% offers at sites like Afternic and Sedo. Who knows, maybe you'll get lucky and one out of a thousand times and find an eager seller. The trick is KNOWING the retail value. Three letter dot coms are easy to gauge since we have the three letter dot com report. Even if you bid $4000 for them, there's very little risk. This may be an avenue to explore during 2008!

I have close to 100 domains but have never sold one before. That changed last week when I sold my first domain through Sedo! (Actually, the transfer is still in progress, but Sedo has the money.) The week before I received an offer on a .mobi I bought one year ago. The buyer actually wanted to buy the singular and plural version of the domain, but they offered less money for the plural. If you get an offer through Sedo, they allow you to take the domain to auction using the offer as a starting point. If no one else bids, then the person that makes the original offer is still obligated to make the purchase. That's what happened. I took it to auction but no one else bid. Here's the crazy part. The ROI is 915%. I paid $78 one year ago. And will get $792 (after paying Sedo 10%). I wish I had a hundred of these...

Yesterday on ebay I saw an LLL.org go for a VERY low price. ZXQ.org sold for $152.50. I don't think 3 letter combinations getting any worse than that. The ones I have come close.

Here's a useful service somone pointed out to me today DailyDomainDrop.com. Each weekday, they sift through thousands of recently dropped domains and narrow it down to the 50 to 100 most valuable ones. The standard plan has no monthly fee. But a $5 honor payment fee* is required per registered name. The premium plan costs $60 per month with a $2 honor payment fee. Of course the premium members get the lists earlier, along with other perks. Even if you were only able to find ONE domain per month, the price would be worth it.