A simple guide to take advantage of Sedo’s new integration with Moniker.

Thousands of domainers can now add their domains to SedoMLS Premium thanks to the company’s new agreement with Moniker.

With SedoMLS Premium you can list your domains across Sedo’s network of partner sites (including in the registration path at many registrars) and they can be instantly purchased and transferred.

I just went through the process of adding a couple domains to MLS. It’s fairly similar to the process with Afternic.

1. Log in to your account and go to your domain management console.

2. Click “optimize” next to the domain you want to add to SedoMLS.

3. Select a Buy Now price and your domain registrar. (Note: be sure to click “OK” after each of these or your settings won’t be saved even when you click “activate”.)

On the next page you’ll need to check the box and submit.

4. You’ll receive an email from Moniker with a link to approve the domain from within your Moniker account. Follow the instructions.

Your domain is added to the SedoMLS network almost instantaneously.

A couple things to note:

1. Sedo has a bar graph that shows your promotion level. Don’t worry if one of the squares isn’t full; it likely just means you aren’t parking the domain with Sedo. Sedo says sales increase 40% for domains that are parked with it since they include a for sale link.

2. As an added bonus when you add a fixed price to your domain, Sedo will email people who previously made an offer on your domain to let them know about the new fixed price.

3. Sedo lets registrars add a mark up of up to 15% to your domain price. For example, I listed AlabamaPainter.com for $1,288. SedoMLS partner United Domains lists it for $1,417 and Dotster lists it for $1,481. I listed AnaheimCardiology.com for $2,500 and UnitedDomains is asking $2,750 and Dotster $2,875. So United Domains is adding 10% to the price and Dotster is adding 15% but your commission is still taken off your asking price.

This is somewhat disconcerting as it adds to the overall cost and makes it harder to sell the domain. For example, if Dotster sells AnaheimCardiology.com then the end user paid $2,875. After Sedo’s 20% commission on $2,500 I’d have $2,000. So total commissions are roughly 30%.

That said, this increases the incentive for registrars to push your domains.

Tool helps domain investors win domain auctions at lower prices.

Last week at TRAFFIC I had a chance to sit down with the team behind ProTrada, a (beta) system for buying domain names across multiple platforms.

The idea is simple: find the best domain names available on exchanges and expired domain sites and get them for the lowest possible price.

The basic features of ProTrada are nothing new; it’s how they’re all brought together that makes this a killer application. ProTrada has married domain searching with bid management. Big scale domainers have their own internal tools for doing this. ProTrada has brought it to the masses at $49/month.

There are a bunch of features, but at its simplest form this is how I think most users will benefit:

1. Use filters to find high quality expiring or auctioning domains.

2. Use bid management tools to place automated bids toward the end of the auction.

ProTrada is integrated with all of the major domain marketplaces including Go Daddy, Sedo, Afternic, SnapNames, NameJet, Pool and eBay.

In addition to helping domainers improve their business, ProTrada is preaching domains as an investment to the masses. This can only mean a good thing for the industry.

[ProTrada is an advertiser on Domain Name Wire. I am not being compensated for this post. There is a waitlist for advertising on DNW so I do not let advertising affect product reviews.]

New Mexico company claims trademark infringement over BBX name.

Software company BASIS International Ltd yesterday filed a lawsuit (pdf) against Blackberry maker Research in Motion over the company’s choice of name for its new Blackberry operating system, following up on a legal threat it made last week.

Research in Motion announced its next generation Blackberry BBX last week, and BASIS says it immediately began receiving confusing inquiries from its customers. BASIS provides software development tools that allow people to write products not tied to a particular operating system, including multiple mobile platforms. BASIS calls its products BBX.

In its suit, BASIS writes:

After RIM’s public announcement of its BBX operating system, BASIS began receiving inquiries from confused customers. In addition to the inevitable confusion created by RIM’s use of the mark BBX for related goods, customers and prospective customers are also likely to wrongly believe that software applications created using BASIS’ development tools are only compatible with RIM’s BBX operating system, thus impairing and destroying BASIS’ reputation for providing software development tools for cross-platform development.

This reminds me a bit of Apple licensing the iOS and iPhone names from Cisco.

ICM Registry has already pocketed 8 figures from .xxx.

.XXX Registry ICM Registry has already taken in $10 million for the .xxx launch…and general availability hasn’t even started.

ICM Registry has received 42,000 applications for .xxx domain names with just five days remaining in the sunrise period. At an average application fee of $200 this means registrants have already forked over $8.4 million to get (or block) .xxx domain names. ICM Registry gets about $162 per sunrise application, so that comes out to $6.8M from sunrise so far. Combined with founders sales and other revenue the registry has hit about $10 million in sales.

The sunrise applications are five times as many as ICM Registry anticipated. If trademark holders are like many other businesses, we can expect a flurry of applications before the sunrise period ends this Friday so the numbers will grow.

.XXX has benefited from some savvy (and expensive) marketing, lots of free press, and intellectual property lawyers selling fear to their clients.

It will be interesting to see how the final numbers come out, but this is certainly a boon to the domain name industry.

[Updated story with $10 million figure and more revenue details.]

How do people misspell weird?

Here’s an interesting tidbit from Spin Magazine’s recent interview with “Weird Al” Yankovic.

Spin asked Weird Al how often people misspell his name wierd (with the i and e reversed). He responded:

Quite a few. In fact, I believe we still have that spelling registered as a domain name. Scarily enough, I checked the traffic once, and 20 to 30 percent of traffic to WeirdAl.com is people searching for it with the incorrect spelling.

Now I’m not sure if he means WierdAl.com sends 20%-30% of the traffic or if people search Google for “wierd al” instead of “weird al”. Either way, if your domain name has ‘weird’ in it, you might want to register this (apparently) common typo.