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Domain King Rick Schwartz sells two more domains in the six figures, one hand registered for less $100

Sydney Hotels

It’s not often that Rick Schwartz sells a domain name or least shares the sale publicly.  Since the nineties, he has only sold a handful of names out of his portfolio of thousands.  But the total sales for those domains is in the millions.  The Domain King, who got his start in 1995, with the purchase of lipservice.com for $100 has sold less than 20 names.

Today Rick Schwartz announced the sale of two more domain names, each in the six figures.  The first one, according to Rick’s blog cannot be disclosed at present, but the second sale which sold for $100,000 was a name he registered early on in his domaining career: SydneyHotels.com. 

A name he purchased for less than $100.

These aren’t Rick’s first sales in 2010.  In April Rick sold the numeric domain 273.com for $50,000 to a Chinese buyer.

It’s unlikely most domain investors, will see the same results as Rick Schwartz, but if there’s one thing Rick Schwartz can teach you – it’s that patience pays off.

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Professional Poker Player and Domainer, Dutch Boyd wins second WSOP Bracelet

"Dutch Boyd"
Dutch Boyd not only blogs about his Poker exploits, but he also blogs about domaining.

He did it again. Dutch Boyd the professional poker player and domainer has won his second WSOP bracelet.  He won his second bracelet this past Sunday in the six-handed limit hold ’em event and collected over $200,000 in winnings.

The buy-in for the tournament was only: $2,500.

Not a bad return for the second youngest law school graduate ever, who chose poker and domain names over practicing law. 

Dutch Boyd has struck it big in 2010 with the sale of Cured.com at GreatDomains for $25,000, followed up by his second WSOP bracelet.

We’re fans of Poker and poker domains as well, so news of Dutch’s win at the six-handed limit hold’em event, prompted us to hand-register a few domain names while writing this story, including: Sixhandedholdem.com and ShorthandedHoldem.com.

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The Perks of Writing a Blog about Domain Names

 blogging

You can read blogs about the domain industry, however, if you spend the time to write a blog about the domain industry, there are quite a few perks that often get overlooked.  Of course, getting long term sponsors like National A-1 and Domain Tools is a big plus, but the list of perks goes much further than just sponsorships.

Running a blog gives you a chance to promote your own products and services to a relevant, targeted audience.  With your own website, you have the power to market all you want.  While the idea is not to make every post a product pitch, readers who are on your site might find your writing interesting enough to browse around. 

When you can’t find an advertiser to fill a spot, you can create your own ads for your own products and services.  Beyond this, you can fill up spots with third-party ads like Google adsense or search out relevant affiliate offers that are tailored to your audience – such as discounts on domain registrations.

You can connect with readers, domainers, developers, and other people within the domain and marketing industry quickly who are willing to share advice and opinions.  I’ve had a chance to chat with Stephen Douglas, Bill Kara, Andrew Rosener, Shane Cultra, and a number of people in the domain industry.  Despite being anonymous, lots of people find the content acceptable.  Sure, it’s hard to build up trust when you’re anonymous, but people build up trust through their writing also, not just throug their name.

I started this blog in September 2009 and thanks to Francois Carillo (Cybertonic), I was able to quickly reach an audience by getting listed on his widely read Domaining.com website.  As a result of the listing, traffic to Fusible soared from 0 visitors in September to over 20,000 unique visitors per month.  The site has been mentioned in The Guardian, Calvin Ayre, and on a number of well-respected domain industry blogs.

To blog or not to blog?
 
If you’ve got a domain blog and you’re looking to reach an audience, I’d highly recommend getting set up on Domaining.com.  The set up fee is well worth it.

If you enjoy writing about domain names, you owe it to yourself to get a blog up and running.  It’s basically on the job training that gives you a chance to learn about the industry by writing about it.

Some might argue that blogging is a waste of time, but if you really enjoy it, you can reap a lot of benefits, even if it’s not all money.

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Group Buying Startup Craze shows Hand registered domain names still have lots of potential

A rush of group buying sites have hit the web in the past year using domain names like WowWhatSavings.com and TownHog.com. This might surprise some of you, but a lot of the group buying sites aren’t using category killer domains or even purchasing names on the aftermarket – they’re hand registering the domains.

Group Buying Website
WowWhatSavings.com and 3oclockclub.com was registered in June 2010.

Though category killer names have not lost their allure, online startups focusing on budget are setting up their websites with domain names available to any one. While some of the domain names might sound puzzling – like GetGrouby.com just registered in March – the startup entrepreneurs are showing .com is still what they’re focusing on.

Group Buying Online Startups, and their Domain names

While it can be a struggle for startups to pick and buy a great domain, many of the websites using hand registered domains, have been quite succesful at group buying – others not so much, but the group buying craze is still early, and players getting into the game now even with so-so names, could see it paying dividends later.

TownHog.com was registered in October 2009. In April, the website had nearly 20,000 visitors according to Compete.

CrowdSavings.com registered in July 2009 recently hit 12,000 visitors per month.

There are plenty of group buying websites who plucked their hand registered domain names in the past year, here are just a few.

LocalGroupDeals.com was registered in october 2009.

GetGrouby.com was created in March 2010.

Youvegottagetit.com registered in April 2009.

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Kevin Ham’s Armageddon.com and Heaven.com undergoing changes

heaven

In May it appeared Kevin Ham’s Gospel Media Network of domain names was taking a backseat to other ventures like GoodNews.com and Vancouver.com, but names within the Gospel Media Network are undergoing changes, the latest makeover to the domain name Heaven.com which now has a landing page that allows visitors to subscribe to be notified when Heaven.com launches.

Armageddon.com currently displays a Apache 2 HTTP test page.

In 2007, Kevin Ham purchased Heaven.com and work of developing out sites Armageddon.com, God.com (and others) in a progressive and integrated manner was said to be taking place in 2008, but instead other sites were launched by Reinvent, such as BlackFriday.com and Vancouver.com.

It looks like this month, big changes are underway for several of the domains within the Gospel Media Network as the registrant records for Armageddon.com changed yesterday and Heaven.com was updated on June 1, 2010.