Domainer's Gazette-Home

Welcome - everybody - to The Domainer’s Gazette. As the saying goes, you don’t seem to know where you’re going unless you understand where you’ve been, so here’s a quick summary how I came to build this site - and what you can expect from this blog in the coming days-weeks-months-and years ahead.

I stumbled into the domaining game by accident, like most others it seems these days. My background over the past 10 years has mainly been tied to the SEM market - launching, managing, optimizing, and analyzing paid search campaigns for mid to large companies in and around the Atlanta area. Even helped build an SEM software application to centrally manage AdWords, YSM, and MSN adCenter. But I always knew paid search was only covering one side of the coin, and for me to compete and educate myself, I knew I had to get exposed to the SEO side. This was back in 2004.

Having zero exposure to HTML, it was a bit of a climb before I began to understand basic design commands. But as I got a better handle on the language, I was able to - thankfully, be exposed to the literature of two people, Aaron Wall and Jim Boykin. Aaron’s SEO Book taught me Search Engine Optimization from the ground up, and Jim’s blog taught me the nitty-gritty of SEO, the ‘in-the-trenches’ techniques that - if I had hired some random SEO ‘expert’ - would have easily cost me thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars. Both were instrumental in regards to where I am today - and, oddly, I’ve never met either one of them. [UPDATE: I actually got a chance to meet and hang out with Jim Boykin at Pubcon Vegas 2007 … also got a chance to briefly meet Aaron]

So, after building around 20 of my own sites, with brand-spakin new domain names, I ran across Jim’s article about buying old sites. And once I began to realize the importance of old, indexed, heavily back-linked domains names, I got exposed to the domain auction niche of the industry, which includes SnapNames, Pool, and GoDaddy’s TDNAM - SnapNames being the obvious juggernaut due to their relationship with Network Solutions.

So, now here I am two years later, investigating every angle of the domain game, every possible way to monetize domain names - either through parked pages, affiliate CPA deals, contextual advertising, or hocking them in on message boards or live auctions at the TRAFFIC Conferences.

So, that’s where I am today. Looking forward, I plan to cover all things domain, and hopefully provide some of my own personal insights along with a few clever tips or tricks to help - as much as Jim and Aaron helped me in my early days. Stay tuned!

This entry was posted on Friday, March 30th, 2007 at 9:02 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.