Last year I did a post that got some good feedback - particularly through Twitter - regarding my best domain purchases for 2009. It's interesting to me to look back at my acquisitions, my plans, my execution and compare that with what I've acquired this year, so I'm going to continue the annual tradition by listing my best acquisitions of 2010. Thi...

It's been awhile since I've posted a full blog entry, but 2011 has me really giddy for a lot of reasons and so I've decided to start posting again. The thing that has gotten me the most excited though has got to be the strong sales of .INFO in the last 6 months. The current trend is very strong. So much so I think we'll see our first (of many) 6 fi...

It was a year ago that I did my first review of DevHub - and came away impressed. I continued using the platform to develop a geo domain and some other product names. The more I used it, the more limitations and frustrations I found. The glitz and glamor of drag and drop site design very quickly fades and the underlying functionality of the tools y...

While reading up on my tech news tonight, I ran across a story at the Financial Times about the iPhone 4's reception problems and how they might lead to a class action lawsuit. Another day, another class action lawsuit. No big deal. As I scrolled down through the story I caught sight of a rather large ad for Storage Containers:I wasn't sure why the...

This month, Utter Domain officially turns one year old. Hundreds of hours spent writing posts, creating back links, promoting my site via Twitter and in general building the Utter Domain brand, but over the past year, with over 70 posts at fairly regular intervals, this site really has gained no traction. Except for the traffic spikes associated wi...

One thing I really want to do this year is bundle my domain names with additional products, services, hosting and more so that someone with no skills at webdesign or marketing can get up to speed really quickly on their new domain name. This adds value to the domain but it also means that I'm building a deeper connection to my customers. I've been ...

Tomorrow I'll be starting a race between domain flipping and domain development to see which one will net me $1250 first. The domain in question: WirelessRouters.us. Granted, the race is a little skewed towards flipping as the name is up for auction at Bido tomorrow with a Bido Price of $1250. Now, obviously a developed site will be much easier to ...

This is kind of a scary post to write, because I'm shamefully behind on developing my portfolio (look for a New Year's Resolution post about that soon!) and I'm sure many people will get a good chuckle out of my purchases and my lack of production with these sites. But this post is for me. To document my results for the year, my feelings at this po...

A couple of weeks ago, I posted up my Two Strikes, You're Out guidelines for domain investing. In those guidelines, I touched on Keywords, but now we are going to drill into what really makes a good keyword domain. And while you are free to draw the line as far as quality of the keywords you want to invest in anywhere you want, my rule of thumb is ...

After our poll results from earlier in the week showed that .net is favored a full 3rd of the time by domainers looking to develop keyword domains, I did some searching to find how well alternative extensions are doing in search results. Now, I don't know of a scientific way of doing this as the percentage of developed and ranked alternative extens...

I have a fairly basic thought process when it comes to domain names. It works like this: How many strikes does the name have against it? The guidelines below are what I use to determine the quality of a domain name. In most cases, failing any two of these criteria will immediately cause the name to go into the circular file (ie. the trash can).Exte...

I posted this poll up a little earlier as I have couple of names I'd like to develop where I own multiple extensions but I don't own the .com. For example, if you own the .net and the .org, which one do you develop? I know, many of these decisions depend on the name itself, but it doesn't hurt to ask:http://twtpoll.com/3fwrltAnd while it's early ye...

Life. Don't talk to me about Life.-MarvinIt's been a crazy week for me personally and a boring week in the domain world in general so you've just got 3 awards to tide you over 'til Turkey Day. Live with it.The "There's absolutely nothing funny about it" AwardGoes to Francois Carrillo, the Frenchy bastard that does a helluva job running Domaining.co...

Confession time.I don't read "self help" books. I avoid "get rich quick" programs. And unfortunately I've never read 4-Hour Work Week until, well... this week. That may mean I'm in the vast minority as there are nearly a thousand reviews of the book on Amazon. That may mean that this little book review isn't useful to you at all since seemingly eve...

Welcome to the second edition of the Domain Awards of the Week right here on UtterDomain. In the fine tradition of... well, last week, we take a sophisticated and professional look at the weeks news and throw all that out and focus on the fluff. So let's dig in:The "New Kid on the Block" AwardGoes to LuxuryNames.com for their newly announced auctio...

The bad news first - not a single bid on SpecialEffects.TV today at Bido. There was a reserve, so that might have caused people to hesitate with putting in a bid, but with 40k exacts and a relevant extension, I would have expected at least one bid. I hope the upcoming auctions on Friday prove that the issue was really that the .TV extension is dead...

Along with a number of new features I'm adding to the site redesign I'm working on for UtterDomain, I'm trying to fill some niches for the articles here. You may have caught my first "Domainer of the Week Awards" post on Friday, for example, which will hopefully become a staple of the site every Friday. One of the other new things I'm looking to co...

I'm starting a new series here every Friday. We'll take a satirical look at the best and worst of the domain industry and make up completely pointless awards. The best part is that the winners will receive absolutely nothing. This is a great week to get started as there was plenty to talk about, starting with:The "Me Too" Blog Award goes to the ent...

So, I've setup my Bido auctions using the new Bido Credit system. I used 5 credits to set reserves for each of the following domains that will all be auctioned on Friday, November 13 (lucky Friday the 13th!). If you've been following me on Twitter you'll notice some of these are recent hand reg's and some are drop catches. It may seem far fetched t...

While I'm not sure how many spots are left, Bido is giving away free credits (more on these in a minute) to the first 100 people that tweet what the best deal was on Bido for October. If you want a free Bido Credit, post a Tweet in the following format: <your bido nickname> says <the name that sold> for <the closing price> was the...

Rick is running a new contest for chance to win a ticket to TRAFFIC South Beach in 2010 by guessing the sales price of Rio.com at the upcoming Rick Latona auction at TRAFFIC New York. I put a bid in for his last contest "Appraiser of the Year" and was only edged out by the fact that WaterPurifiers.com didn't close during the Live Auction (but sold ...

Well, Sahar, you asked for it :) - over on the Conceptualist.com. Before I start though, I really do appreciate Bido, I have a tremendous amount of respect for the people behind it and I am thankful that they are so willing to listen to criticism to create a better product. Okay, here it goes:Copyrights - or rather, the lack of concern there of by ...

I like Sedo. I have over a hundred domains parked there and quite a few more listed with them. Today I just closed an auction on one my names (Submit.cc) for $80. They do a tremendous job of moving names. But their latest decision seems quite greedy. They've announced that on October 21st they will be implementing a new "No minimum commission" offe...

Search through some Google and Bing results and you'll notice a few things right off the bat:1. .COM represents a significant portion of the results2. There are very few exact match domain names in your results (as a percentage of the results), but instead exact match Page Title and URL strings and partial match domain names make up the majority of...

I tried posting this comment directly to Rick Schwartz's blog post, but it said it couldn't be posted. I guess I rambled too much. In his great post he talks about trying to connect and engage the faceless type-in visitors to his many premium generic domains. I like Rick's posts and he's got a great business sense so I don't think he would disagree...

So, I've had mixed results with WhyPark over the last couple of months. Some of my sites - including a mini site for Insurance in Corvallis initially did well, given enough unique content, customized ad displays, affiliate links, etc. I also had a very nice Yahoo! ranking for a site about fixing yellow teeth. I even wrote about how much I liked Why...

If you haven't noticed, I've been a bit inactive on the blog in favor of quick updates via Twitter. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/UtterDomain if that's your bag. I've been thinking a lot about how to improve the returns on my time spent on both this blog and on twitter. What I've found is that there's a lot of room for improvement on my o...

We've gotten a lot of positive feedback from our Shoot.us press release, but we actually have 3 domains going up for auction today, all for no reserve:Shoot.us - This is a great brandable domain, a premium keyword with 100,000,000 Google results. This domain could easily be used for wedding or portrait photography, hunting and sport shooting webzin...

I'm preparing for the shoot.us auction on Bido on July 30th. There are a number of people who have comparable names, who have expressed interest in the name or have relevant businesses that could capitalize on a great brandable name like shoot.us that I have been contacting via email along the lines of the following:I apologize for the unsolicited ...

I'm very proud to announce that we've acquired the domain SpaGetaway.com. This new domain fits very well into our Vocav.com plans as many of our sites are prime Spa and Resort destinations. The listings and ad revenue from SpaGetaway will also give us a nice income stream along with the cross promotional possibility that the Vocav.com platform prov...

Whether you have a generic city/state/region domain name, or if you have a City+something name, DevHub is a quick way to get a site up and running. Most of my geo domains use the .IN extension, but those will be running on our Vocav.com platform. I have a couple of geos using other extensions though and so I decided to experiment with DevHub for bu...

I know, it's been around for several months now, but I just got around to really taking DevHub for a spin... and I walked away very impressed by it's ease of use, the available customizations and the very effective monetization options. There are a few short comings but for those who are either looking for a quick site setup or those who don't have...

I walked into my local Super Target the other day and was thunderstruck. I just stood there at the front of the store that I had walked into many times, and saw for the first time just how massively, horribly, grossly inefficient retail stores are. I know, big shock right? But free markets, when operating properly, should remove such pronounced ine...

Well, DomainMassDevelopment.com is running an awesome special between now and the end of the month. Buy a 10 domain development package for $999 and they will give you a full 10 extra websites for free. For those that flunked out of math class, that's $50 per mini-site. But not everyone wants a mini-site. And maybe you are still on the fence, so to...

I used my handy little spreadsheet to register a couple of CityName+Insurance.com names today. Sure, they weren't major cities, but Corvallis and Cedar Falls are by no means insignificant. But that's not what this post is about. One reason why I decided to register them, despite their apparent lack of value according to Estibot is that I wanted to ...

If you have been paying attention to what I've been saying about geo domains, you would have found these already! Get the spreadsheet. Check the names. Register and build them in bulk! But I realize the spreadsheet doesn't list every possible Geo domain. It's conceivable even I've missed a few... Also, Go Daddy doesn't offer bulk registration of .T...

It'll be one of those moments that's too horrible to watch and too horrible to look away at the same time. I'm referring to the Domain Roundtable 2009 Live Auction that takes places today at 4pm EST. I've been watching Domain auctions for a while and I really think they've set themselves up to fail here for a number of reasons. They have way too ma...

If you like the .US extension, now is the time to stock up. If you register 6 or more .US names, you can get them for as little as 2.99 a piece at Go Daddy. If you don't know what names to register, you can use my Geo Domain spreadsheet to generate a ton of Geo domain combinations and then plug them in to GoDaddy's bulk registration tool. Just clic...

The reason I switched to Google years ago was it's ability to find exactly what I was looking for no matter what I typed in... with the first result being the exact right site 90+ percent of the time. It was really magical. But progressively, Google's search engine has gotten less and less accurate. I've noticed this over the course of at least a y...

Sometimes affiliate marketing makes me very angry. For example, I need to start a list of "don't bother" affiliate programs because there are some down right disgusting companies to work with. But that's really not my problem with affiliates. That's my issue with the human race in general. There are just numerous flaws with the system in general, t...

So, you might be wondering how we picked up 600 prime geo domains using the .IN extension so quickly. I'm going to go over how we went about making the most with our funds by targeting and attacking domainers.While a large number of those domains were drops, over 100 of the domains we bought were purchased through private negotiations over the span...

Google just released additional videos from their I/O conference in regards to the inner workings of their newly announced Google Wave collaboration and messaging solution. The links to the videos are below:Programming With and For Google WaveGoogle Wave: Under the hoodGoogle Wave: Powered by GWTIf you want more info on Google Wave, check out the o...

So the online chat at Bido.com during the auction of Misconception.com went fantastically well, I think. I had a whole hour to talk about the stuff we've been doing with Vocav.com and Collaborative-Tools.com. There were a lot of good questions and comments and I think it was a really healthy debate over a lot of relevant topics. In fact, it was so ...

Theoretical Games, LLC is proud to announce the launch of Vocav.com - the latest in technology for powering local websites. Theoretical Games has also recently acquired a massive collection of over 600 geo domains - exact match city names, states, provinces, and more from all over the global - exclusively using the .IN extension. This collection of...

I've been asked to be the Guest Speaker for this Thursday's Bido Live Auction chat. If you haven't participated in a Bido chat before, this is not only a great chance to get to know yours truly but also to meet some of the most influential and successful domainers in the industry. The 1 hour Live Auction of Misconception.com will take place this Th...