Domaining, Internet Marketing & SEO - DomainerSEO

Interview with Rick Schwartz the ‘Domain King’

October 13, 2008
By: Chef Patrick

Q. At the last T.R.A.F.F.I.C. event in Brooklyn NY 250 Rick Schwartz bobbleheads were handed out. Who came up with this idea?

A. I was contacted by Warren Royal who is a domainer that bought Bobbleheads.com and asked me if it was ok to do one of me to promote his new business. I thought it would be fun and agreed to it. They did a really good job and shows the depth domainers have when it comes to business. Warren also recently authored a book and has several other projects going.

Q. What is your educational background?

A. I am a college dropout, who barely made it thru high school. Because of my dads occupation and in a previous recession back around 1970, I had moved around too many times to count. To give you an idea of how hard it was looking back, I went to 3 different high schools in my last 3 semesters. A total of 6 school systems in 5 states from 4th grade to graduation. Only when I look back do I realize what a tough thing that is for a kid to go thru.

28 Symptoms of a Serious Crisis in Domaining

If We’re All Doing The Same Things We Used To, How Can We Experience Different Results? We can’t. The fact is, breakthroughs in technology and drastic changes to the advertising landscape have resulted in what’s most definitely a new era in domaining and in online business in general. That’s why I sat down last week, nearly shut myself off from the rest of the world, and became determined not to come out until I had my head around it all. I sought to understand the problem completely — what got us here and what’s going to get us out. Finally, after many days and a few sleepless nights of thinking, reading, writing, and re-writing, I have finally identified what I believe to be the core issues facing us all. I’d like to invite you to share in what I’ve found here, so you can first understand where I’m coming from, but then, more importantly, I’ll let you know what I think is the clearest and most straightforward path to get us all where we need to go.

EvoLanding Sux

I had high hopes for EvoLanding.  In most cases their sites looked really great.   I parked around 70 domains with them some months back and I was pleased with the content-rich sites that they created.   Their business model seems to be automated content creation that includes media such as video.  They urged me to keep my domains there so that they would gradually build traffic and income.  It never happened.

Marketing Your Content

It isn’t enough just to write good content, you also have to market it. But how? I use the power of Blogs. You see, my experience has shown that people want to be served. They would rather have content delivered to them than have to go out and search for it.

Search = Work

RSS feeds and other ways of delivering content on the web today looked like a clear answer. After all, webmasters can sit back and have the content dumped in their laps in minutes without having to think about what they want and go looking for it. Sounds good, but I have talked to the big bloggers in many industries and their biggest gripe is all the SPAM that is sent to them via RSS. One blogger mentioned that he was getting so much SPAM through RSS that he just killed the feeds. “It was to the point that I was getting ten SPAM articles for every legit one.” It’s too much work to go through.

What should you do instead?

From those I spoke with, they only rely on a few key outlets for their content. I suggest you find the main bloggers in your space (Google Blogsearch).

There has been some debate on how the current banking and financial crisis is affecting the domain industry. Whether or not this specific crisis affects domains, the general economic slow-down is definitely having an effect. While $2,000,000 did change hands in Moniker’s T.R.A.F.F.I.C. New York live domain auctions, this is down from $10,000,000 in 2007. Last month’s newsletter provided information on similar deceases in parking income; and on Oversee.net’s staff cuts.

Perhaps most telling is the fact that there will be only two T.R.A.F.F.I.C. shows in 2009. T.R.A.F.F.I.C. had three shows in 2006 and in 2007. There were either three or four in 2008 (depending on whether you count T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Down Under). If Rick Schwartz and Howard Neu are slowing down, then you can bet that the domain industry is slowing down.

How does this affect your domain strategy?

NameBio 4.0 Includes Powerful Enhancements

Domain sales database now easier to use and more valuable for finding domain name sales data. NameBio, a web site offering historical domain sales data, launched version 4 last week. I’ve been playing around with it and am very impressed. It’s now easier to use and allows you to quickly adjust search criteria. There’s also a new premium service.