IDN Talk

Domain King Rick Schwartz starts a soon to launch public blog. Even for a short time I had a chance to be a member of his forum & realize there are domainers that grow their domain business towards different markets. Rick is geared towards the US corporate market but his way of business does give one ideas for the future corporate IDN markets.

Although personally I hate to admit it, I already know that anonymous comments will be shut off by the middle of next week.

if you want to take a look at it, it’s at

http://rickschwartz.typepad.com/

Good luck Rick, hoping to read more corporate domaining insights.

Lately I haven’t really taken the time to optimize my IDN portfolio at NameDrive. The portfolio does make a bit of money but instead of concentrating on optimizing I’ve been trying to buy content to develop domains.

I personally am not happy with restrictions in Domain Parking.

I’ve asked a few really normal Japanese people to look at default parking pages & I was surprised they thought they were error pages.

Not being able to backlink means you have to rely solely on typein. We all know this will rule will have to change after ie7 if you understand how typeins work.

Anyway I love the ability to tweak & link back to my domains plus control the content on it, & the links that’s on it.

With my portfolio even at a small minimum I am estimating I can create 200 sites that produce an average of $1 each a day (by the end of the year). This is only a small figure but if I fail I think I can still produce half by summer time.

Some may question if this is doable why not keep purchasing? After the first 100 to 150 you will see what produces revenue the best. I am on haitus until I have this data. Next month I’m hiring to create content on higher paying markets.

Of The Domain Registries in Japan what do they offer in terms of IDN Domains?

There is a massive surge this week of members at IDNF buying & selling IDN.ws but I am a bit concerned about after buying these domains what to do with them. I don’t want to down the extension since I myself own 2 Japanese dot CC 日本語ドメイン (Japanese IDNs)
転職.cc (job change)
就職.cc (employment)

& I own 3 dot TV
マンション.tv (Condo)
アパート.tv (apartment)
携帯.tv (cellphone)

The dot CCs were bought with the idea to see if they can rank for the keywords just like the jps I have. Both currently have poorly developed sites on them.

What about those buying Japanese keywords to sell them?
I took a look at the major registries that do offer IDN Domains to see what extensions do they offer to users in IDN.

These are the 4 companies I’m most familiar with for IDNs.

Onamae.com (GMO Internet)
http://www.onamae.com
IDN.jp
IDN.com
IDN.net

Value-Domain.com (DigiRock, Digi-Rock)
http://www.value-domain.com
IDN.jp
IDN.com
IDN.net

21-Domain.com
http://ww.21-domain.com
Can register
IDN.jp
IDN.com
IDN.net

Humei
http://reg.humeia.co.jp/

Only Accepts IDN.jp

I keep thinking about Japanese end users or companies with my portfolio selection. Would my domain be something I would want to represent my company? If I look at it from the English point of view I never used a site that had the .ws etc. If it’s not offered in Japanese currently there is no guarantee Japanese users will get to know it’s available.

If you are like me with 600 or more domains spend the money to develop a few, I can read Japanese well but I can’t write professional articles. Even I started to buy content lately.

Last night I regged one of the best domains I could possibly want for the Japanese market. The English translation is not appealing as what the domain means for young Japanese guys.

One of my first batches of domain registrations landed me グラビアアイドル.com

Gravia Idols is the term for the buxom bikini clad models plastered everywhere in Japan. They never pose nude but it’s easy to imagine.

Anyway on Yahoo alone this term グラビアアイドル is searched for over 1,000,000 times a month. The industry for these girls might even make more money than adult because of TV endorsements DVDs etc. Fans are everywhere.

Well I thought I was lucky enough to own the dot com. Last year I got the term ダイヤモンド.jp (Diamond) as a drop. I thought after that I couldn’t get any better quality.

Last week I was talking to my roommate who owns a small Advertising agency & told him about the domain market. I told him about Gravia Idol.com & he informed me it would be better if I had the jp because this is what he’s seeing recently around the web.

Something told me to check it out & by pure luck it was about to expire. What’s the actual odds of owning a premium keyword in any competitive market & getting the same keyword in an equal or better extension.

Yep that’s right. I couldn’t believe it myself.

I own グラビアアイドル.com & グラビアアイドル.jp
The dot jp has nothing on it but I am seriously thinking of how to develop this baby or sell it off to one of the companies that manages these girls. My roommate & the company I work for both have clients that are the management companies of a few of the biggest Gravia Idols in Japan…

The Overture for last month was
1163191 グラビアアイドル

Since I bought the domain the OVT has been in the millions. This is truly one of the most searched terms in Japan… Sometimes I see domains with extremely high OVT & don’t exactly see why the domain is worthwhile. This one is no mistake.
I won’t say I can’t get better. I just don’t think I can get better paying reg fee prices.

So these babies are my biggest pair (pun intended)

I decided to revamp DNFocus.com
The new version of dnfocus.com is a domain name site related search engine. All the results come from Google, I’m not crawling the sites but actually using what’s already indexed to produce search results.

So far it’s using
IDN Forums
DN Forum
DN Journal
DN Local
Acorn Domains
Eachnic
Name Pros
& Domain State

I’ll be adding more sites & blogs as I run across them. I made it simple so that it can be used in any language.

www.dnfocus.com 

& truthfully with DNForum, DNJournal, & DNLocal running it’s pretty hard for me too to not make a mistake typing in my URL.

So far in Japan one of the best run affiliate programs is operated by Value Commerce . They literally have hundreds of thousands of affiliate products. When I signed up just less than a month ago I actually loved the system since it was bilingual, English & Japanese. The only problem I had was the affiliate URLs. You have to make what is called an “Ad Flight”, this is code that contains ads for a particular theme, or category.

For example I have a few Career related IDN sites.

I can create an Ad Flight called “Career standard banners”. I can set it to contain only 468×60 image ads with the career related affiliate programs I choose. It works like a built in Banner rotation tool.

The amount of margins I’ve seen can range from $5 to $200. It depends on the niche. You can also use the amounts as a guide to see what markets are spending money online. I haven’t put up too many links yet but I think the system is great.

The big problem that people are having is you need a Japan based bank account. I spoke to a Value Commerce employee the other day & they are fully aware of that. The can not offer it right now but people within the company do want to get a solution.

So if you want to know in Japan

アフィリエイト is Value Commerce

In 2005 many of investors in the search of a place to research, buy, & sell IDN Domains left DNForums.com. In 2006 I think it was a big surprise to all of us when DNF made sections catering to IDN investors. At the time Adam Dicker was still actively the global admin for the site.

Not only did Adam create IDN sections but I believe he was the first speaker to speak about the potential of IDN Domains at TRAFFIC. I still haven’t seen more than 2 of his registrations but hear he has a large collection in various languages. The rumor is Adam aka DCG (Dot Com God) has about 5,000 of these babies closed away.

Adam was also scooped up to work in domain acquisitions for iReit to provide a way for domainers to sell portfolios. It seems like he has a good vision for IDNs & I’m wondering how DNF will change with the recent interest in global investing.

There are a lot of changes in the industry as a whole, search engines, type in traffic, browser support, PPC, parking affiliates, but DNF has been stable as the biggest business resource for domainers. You can access the IDN sales section at DNF here

December we started to test the strength of IDN Domains for the Japanese market at a good rate. We are trying to rank for some of the biggest keywords in Japanese. I own a pretty good amount of competitive big keywords so it’s easy to test the limits.

So recently a few of my coworkers are interested in IDN Domains. One of my closest coworkers pulled out the credit card over 5 times to fund his domaining account. He swooped up about 15 domains. I freely gave him all the best advice & tools I use (Even a few I’ve never wrote about). He got the point.

Since I believe we need to develop more domains he only bought domains that he can place affiliate ads & content on. A few were seasonal & the others were consumer product related.

The next step is to develop & see if we can rank for the keyword. Out of about 25 IDN minisites I am ranking well for the keyword for about half of them. The ones that aren’t ranking actually are designed with a bad structure.

We are going to follow what I did to rank well & try to make more sites. It also let’s us see how far the domain is used in a search engine’s algorithm.

I came into buying domains to develop them. I think I had my domains for years before I even thought of parking or trying to park them. They just all rested on one of my servers until I wanted to use them.

Now I’m into Japanese IDNs & the year is 2006. With over 600 domains (dot com, & dot jp mainly) my yearly registrations will be about $10,000 a year. This got me thinking about trying the current parking services. Sedo is IDN compatible & so is NameDrive. I haven’t tested Sedo in a few months but NameDrive’s system  is pretty good handle IDN Domains.

But for the market I’m into I always think can domain monetization services be better?

If I had to guess what could be a great domain monetization I think many would be surprised.

I strongly believe that if Value Commerce the Major Affiliate Marketing made a platform that users could park their domains & put their affiliate ad feeds on it, it would be a win, win situation.

Some of the things I like about affiliate marketing is

• You can promote your domain
• You can encourage users to click the ads
• You can build up the popularity of your domain
• You would not be limited to what extra text you put in the domain to attract target users.

After you have a great domain indexed, with good ads that help with your search engine ranking if a buyer wants the name they gain more for the buck.

I haven’t heard about them creating something like this but I think someone might have the ties to put a buzz in “The Big Guy’s” ear.

It’s a real stereotype that Google is the number one search engine for the whole world. Truthfully it isn’t. This post no way is degrading Google as a company.

In Japan efforts should initially be concentrated on Yahoo! Japan. It clearly has the lead in Japanese users. It is estimated that Yahoo! has about 53% of the Japanese search market while Google has about 33%.

Recently I’ve made a few Japanese minisites with my IDN Domains. It feels good to get traffic. I’ve developed about 20 so far. 5 with RSS feeds, 3 or 4 fully functional sites, & about 6 or 7 one to 3 page static sites.

About 6 of the one to two pagers are ranking from position two to 12 on Yahoo!Japan.

A few of those are getting about 40 to 60 unique visitors a day.

Unfortunately I don’t think I can duplicate this with existing parking programs. I might be able to if there is a localized Japanese domain parking company.

I have 4 domains that together make more each day than I ever did with the current parking services. If I develop 100 out of my 600 domains I think it would earn more than my current salary per month.

The great thing is this is only coming from Yahoo. If Google does indexed the sites it’s a plus but since it can take 6 months to a year to get ranked for competitive keywords my strategy isn’t going to depend on it.

& this is about Google Search, I very much need Google Adsense.