Two .de domains sell for combined EUR 100,000.

Domain domain aftermarket Sedo has completed the sale of gartenmöbel.de & gartenmoebel.de for EUR 100,000 (about $135,000 USD). The word means “garden furniture” in German.

Sedo turned in an impressive list of country code domain name sales over the past week including:

tech.de 15,000 EUR
loisirs.fr 15,000 EUR Recreation in French
jouet.fr 13,000 EUR Toy in French
sky.ch 11,000 EUR
adaware.de 10,500 EUR
http.co.uk 10,100 EUR
redtube.to 5,000 USD
joueraupokerenligne.fr 5,000 EUR Play poker online in French
steroids.co.uk 5,000 GBP
autoaufbereitung.de 4,000 EUR Auto purification in German

On the .com side 92.com was the big winner, coming in at about $73,000 USD.

92.com 54,000 EUR
geneve.com 15,500 EUR
soldes.com 10,000 EUR
pawnation.com 10,000 USD
goby.com 10,000 USD
toolstop.com 8,000 USD
endorsement.com 6,100 USD
doginfluenza.com 6,000 USD
roadrush.com 6,000 USD
jxw.com 5,601 USD
mdw.com 5,451 EUR
comprarpiso.com 5,000 EUR
videoweb.com 5,000 USD
backupspace.com 5,000 USD
123business.com 5,000 USD
plus44.com 5,000 GBP

Sedo also sold a few notable non .com domains:

disk.net 6,733 USD
new-york-casino.org 4,500 EUR
vegasslotcasino.info 4,500 EUR

Sedo’s monthly Great Domains auction ends on Thursday. So far the top domain to meet its reserve is t0.com at $9,999. It looks like PVC.com has a chance to sell as well; it’s up to $41,250 with a reserve somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000. Loading.com has been bid up to $12,500. The reserve is between that and $25,000.

An auction for StimulusMoney.com is only $80 and carries no reserve.

A look inside the domain name thoughts of insurance agents.

In many ways insurance agents are in business for themselves. So it’s interesting to read discussions amongst agents about what makes a good or bad domain name. Many insurance agents are savvy about domains, understanding the importance of a short and easy-to-spell name and the traffic that these domains can generate.

Here are two threads from a popular insurance agent forum.

In the first thread, an agent is registering a domain for his business based in Kansas. But his business is right on the border with Missouri, and he doesn’t want to use a Kansas-centric domain name that would put off his Missouri customers. He’s having a tough time finding the right domain.

Another forum member responds with some good advice:

You want to keep it simple and easy to remember and spell.

Example, I own www.rosenthalfinancialservices.com but it is too long, hard to remember and some people can’t spell very well. SO I made others domain names that will forward you back to my main site. Example www.realfastservice.com . People can remember it better.

The second thread is about the importance of having a .com domain name. The poster wonders if he should register a .net, .org, .info, et al domain name because the .com is taken. The answers from his peers are a resounding “no”.

If there was one thing I’d want to impress upon insurance agents and other businesses, it’s that you don’t have to find a domain name that’s unregistered. You can often times buy a good quality domain that will drive traffic and business for $1,000.

Drive traffic to your geo domain web site.

I’ve been researching offline promotion methods as I prepare to launch my Lakeway geo web site. Here are the ideas I’ve come up with so far:

1. Sports team sponsorship. Lakeway has one high school, and the city rallies around its sports teams. I’m working to get football stadium signage, program advertising, etc.

2. Billboards. If you want to make a big splash and get noticed, consider renting a billboard for a couple months. In some cities prices are depressed right now; if you find an empty billboard you can probably bargain. It looks like I’ll have to pay $2,000-$5,000 a month in the area I’m focusing on.

3. Chamber of commerce sponsorship. Talk to the local chamber of commerce about sponsoring an event or mixer. This will also give you a way to meet potential advertisers.

4. National Public Radio. If you listen to NPR then you’re familiar with its short “sponsorship” blurbs during shows such as All Things Considered. I’m looking into pricing right now but I believe it’s reasonable assuming you want to target an entire metro are.

5. Grassroots marketing. T-shirts, bumper stickers, flyers at community events, etc.

6. (Bonus) Business cards. Get business cards printed that include your city domain name and logo. Tack them up on notice boards, include them in the credit card folder after paying for meals at restaurants, etc.

The challenge, of course, is it’s harder to monitor offline advertising results than online advertising.

Anyone have other ideas that have worked?

“Search registration” spam hits inboxes.

Earlier today I wrote about the resurgence of the domain name appraisal scam. Many readers have also forwarded another email making the rounds right now, of which I’ve also received in my inbox.

The subject line reads:

Domain Notification: FIRSTNAME LAST NAME This is your Final Notice of Domain Notification – YOURDOMAIN.COM

The notification looks like an expiring domain notice, but it’s actually not the old scam that tries to get you to renew your domain name through another service (e.g. “Domain Registry of America”). Instead, this notification seems to indicate you need to renew your “search engine registration”, which I suppose means submitting your web site to search engines. Of course all of the language seems to indicate not responding could mean your domain expires, which isn’t the case. The notice includes disclaimers saying this is an offer and not an invoice, but history tells us that small business accounting departments will end up faxing in their authorization.

The “address” on the notice is for Long Island City, NY. Long Island City is a neighborhood in Queens, not a city.

Here’s the full text of the notice:

I: REVIEW SOLICITATION

Attn: FIRSTNAME LASTNAME
As a courtesy reminder, we are sending you this notification for your business Domain name search engine registration. This letter is to inform you that it’s time to send in your registration and save.

Failure to complete your Domain name search engine registration by the expiration date may result in cancellation of this offer making it difficult for your customers to locate you on the web.

Privatization allows the consumer a choice when registering. Search engine subscription includes domain name search engine submission. You are under no obligation to pay the amounts stated below unless you accept this offer. Do not discard, this notice is not an invoice it is a courtesy reminder to register your domain name search engine listing so your customers can locate you on the web.

This Notice for: WWW.YOURDOMAIN.COM will expire on March 24,2009 Act today!

Lest you think this sort of misleading solicitation only affects domain owners, I get yellow pages solicitations like this all of the time.

A record traffic weekend sounds good. But was the traffic valuable?

All web traffic is not created equal. Most web site owners know this, and smart domain name parkers understand it, too. Yet I frequently see people new to the industry saying “hey, a visitor is a visitor and a click is a click, right?” The answer is an unequivocal “no”.

Consider this weekend on Domain Name Wire. On a typical business day I typically have 20-30 people surfing at DNW at any given time, and on weekends the number tampers off.

But a story I wrote about Toys.com losing its Google rankings made it to the front page of Digg on Saturday. At the peak Saturday, I had well over 500 people on the site at a time. I had about 30,000 page views on Saturday and Sunday alone. (Clarification: 30,000 combined across both days).

This sounds great, and I’m not complaining. But was this good traffic?

It’s not nearly as good as getting 30,000 visitors from Google search, Domaining.com, or my other sources of traffic. On the face of it, you may think a Digg visitor is “qualified” since they clicked on a link and were aware of what content they’d see. People say this about parked pages all the time (“The person clicked on the ad, so why does it matter where the visitor came from?”)

But the typical Digg visitor doesn’t view more than one page and hangs around for about 16 seconds. I count a “good” visitor as someone who views more than one page, stays on the site for a couple minutes, interacts with the community by leaving comments, considers returning to the site, and is hopefully a qualified visitor for one of my advertisers.

Here’s a look at my top 10 referrers over the past month, ranked by average time of visit:

As you can see, the typical person visiting from Digg isn’t highly targeted and leaves the site after reading one article (if that). This is typical of most “social” traffic, which is a quick hit and then moves onto the next site. To be sure, a small percentage of the visitors are more qualified and will return to DNW in the future.

Compare this to traffic from domain name related sites and people who search a domain name term on Google (or click from the RSS feed on Google Reader). They are highly targeted and more likely to stick around. They’re also more likely to leave a comment or click on an advertiser’s banner (this is one reason I don’t sell ads by CPM…that would just incentivize me to drive lots of low value traffic).

Sometimes an influx of non-domainer traffic is good. For example, when a TechCrunch article links to DNW I see an uptick in banner clicks. The TechCrunch audience is technical in nature but doesn’t know as much about domain names. A visitor might see National A-1′s ad for buying domains and say “Hey, I’m a techie who registered some domains in the 90s. I should see what this is about”.

You can make a similar argument for a parked page. Type-in traffic is probably best, since someone said to themselves “I’m looking for fruit cobbler, so I’ll type in “fruitcobbler.com” because it’s intuitive. Residual search engine links are a rung below that, because people think they are going to a particular article or information source, and will not find exactly what they expected. As for purchased traffic and arbitrage? You get the picture.