truth is, domain selling is a very specialized field.. there are guys that make $200,000 per year JUST flipping domains… but there’s some classifications to domains that make them worth TONS… The 4 or 5 criteria don’t fit for this domain

That doesn’t mean the appraisers might not know something or some market or thing about this domain I don’t.

Classifications that make domains worth millions:

Direct Entry Traffic (lots of people type www.computers.com into thier address bar)
In otherwords it has existing traffic.

High Pagerank Domain (Google values it) It has links from places like CNN, the federal gov’t etc…
In otherwords, it can or does rank for top keywords on Google.

Old Age - As with good wine, a domain over 8 years old can easily be worth a ton of money
especially if it has links elsewhere on the web.

Brandable domain (sounds like or is a good problem solver) like stopsmoking.com

Ultrashort domains like www.what.com or computers.com

Bonus: Community.. A strong community of people who like/talk/discuss the topic or
name etc…

Without any of these characteristics, it’s just a whim and a guess or some emotional attachment humans
Get to an idea that makes them think/feel it’s worth something but may not necessarily be so.

Domain apprasials, much like getting hockey cards graded can actually give a domain name crediblity
when selling it and add to it’s value even if it’s a generic domain with no real potential.

Being liked is actually more of an issue than you might think. I didn’t realize it of course myself until I saw this book in a thrift store. It was surprisingly newer than I thought. It looked like an old book, but it was actually fairly recent and I’m telling you…. It’s called “L-Factor”

IF you HAVENT read this book yet, you shouldn’t be in business.

Ok, perhaps that’s a bit harsh but this book is really quite good. He starts off describing how a typical unliked person goes through their day and the disasters that come of it. Annoying doctors, never getting chosen for anything, hated at work, people not working with you and of course the final thing… Divorce.

Then, he describes the life of a person who’s actually quite well liked and backed each piece with scientific evidence.

Fact – Doctors actually spend more time with you, and work harder on diagnosis if they like you.
Fact – Employees stay around even if compensation may be better elsewhere.
Fact – Bosses keep you longer (he gives an example from within the ranks of Yahoo! and their down sizing and how one guy maintained his job through 4 lay offs)
Fact – They stay married longer etc…

Bottom line is that life is just plain better when your liked.

Perhaps your wondering, like me what it takes to be liked. What it takes to power network, and actually connect with people on that level (through a glass screen or in real life)… It’s a good book, and I recommend you pickup a copy. It seems to read really fast and his 4 points to being liked are pretty straight forward.

Highly recommended.

Saw a video online today (quite an old one) that apparently went uber viral. Sort of a farce video about a kid recieving something for Christmas….

In the next few months, I’m going to litterally lay out an ENTIRE roadmap on how to make YOUR product produce these kinds of reactions from people.

.”Discover the mental trigger that FORCES prospects to buy your products even if they can’t afford it, don’t need it and can’t even use it yet… Hint: Apple’s used it for YEARS!”

WARNING: If you don’t like, share, tweet, or comment on this, it won’t have the social pressure needed to force me into going through with this.

This is probably one of the biggest pieces of news in my career. Certainly not THE biggest, but one of them. Google analytics now showing social engagement on all major platforms. This is game day for brands. This is now the KPI, the big metric people are going to chase. Should they? Absolutely. Popularity has reigned king of media since day one.

Amazon Axes 10,000 Affiliates. Yes, folks Amazon is actually throwing away good affiliates from their roster because their state chooses to charge taxes on online orders. It’s insane, it’s crazy – it also shows how weak Amazon’s sales model must be. That a few percent has a huge impact on how they run their business. If the USA declares online sales tax, they will likely go under. Imagine how much loyalty they will have lost not only in 10,000 affiliates, but in 10,000 buyers.

Google and Virgin airlines are going to give away free Chromebooks, Google’s also giving them out at their IO conferences and other places….

Well, if you can believe it, I was thinking the other day about how I could serve more people, and spend less time doing it. Finding ways that our company, resources and team could benefit others without actually causing those people to spend money. We’re not at a point where we have time for ongoing webinars, I tried doing a daily video writeup, but the amount of time it took to slice it together and make it feel right was crazy…

So, the newest thing is going to be a Podcast episode every once in a while. Hopefully daily but I can’t imagine there being time for that all the time. So, for now lets just stick with as we have time.

Google’s launched yet another tool (looks like today or very recently) called WDYL.com. It’s really a tool that lets you search a topic rather than a keyword.

The tool seems to integrate with plus one and Gmail and it’s interesting that it does not give you the option to share on Facebook or Twitter, indicating this may be an extension of their Plus one platform and their new social network.

WDYL helps you find:

• What’s nearby you
• What’s on youtube
• Things on Sketchup
• Things on blogs
• Things on your calendar
• The USA Patent search
• Books
• Images
• Voice
• Picasa
• Transalte
• Google Earth
• Mobile
• Trends
• Gmail
• Google news
• Google Moderator
• Google Groups
• Alerts
• and Product search

I know that’s a bold statement, but I think that Facebook has had it’s run. I’m getting quite tired of some of the things Facebook doesn’t do well. For one, it doesn’t take into account certain circles. Your friends vs your parents. Your church vs your corporate life.

Introducing Google Circles..

It doesn’t let you hang out with certain crowds wher eyou can video chat with multiple people, hang out any time anywhere.

Introducing Google Hangouts..

and way more things. I won’t report on what’s already written about on the website for the project. As usual this a by invite only thing just as Gmail was launched so many years ago. You’ll have to wait until someone invites you to get in.

A demo of the platform is available here. I’m excited of what I’m seeing on the inside already…

Different corporations, not for profits and organizations around the world have different policies on the use of blogging, web design and social media…

Here’s a link to 178 different corporate compliance and social media strategies…

What’s yours?

Twitter is probably one of the more confusing social networks on the internet today. It’s confusing because, unlike Facebook, it’s not exactly the most obvious of things to understand how it works.

Facebook’s a simple platform. Most people understand that you add your friends. Your friends see what you post, you add more friends, you connect with others via your posts, posts on their wall or via private message.

With Twitter, it seems (at first) very one way. You post stuff on your account, and call it a “tweet”. You can also @reply people and chat openly or direct message (which is abused so often it’s lost effectiveness).

There’s no doubt that however you choose to use Twitter to market your business, having another channel of fans with which to broadcast your message is no doubt useful. Twitter can be just that.

What’s new this week!

What’s new is, in the past, when you added a “follow us on Twitter” button, it always went to Twitter.com and you had to follow that person from there, sign in etc.

They’ve now created follow buttons you can use that don’t require you to leave the web page your on!

Try it Here:

Follow @answerswantedbc

Create your own follow button here.

Did J.C. Penney break Google’s trusted and respected algorithm laws by disobeying some of it’s search algorithm laws? Experts think so, even though it seems the spokesperson at J.C. Penney suggests they didn’t do it.

Those of you who know me (Daniel Deyette), know that I’ve been involved in search marketing for … let’s say over 10 years since I started playing with online marketing. Quite a long time. I recall the best ranking I ever got took us months of work, and a bit of grey-hat marketing to get us where we needed to be. I out ranked Enterprise Rent A Car for “Car Rental” for a few days.. but we hovered around position 3-4. That’s pretty amazing for such a competitive term…

These guys now have an entire article by the New York Times listing their folies and their mistakes. Incredible! I mean how many people do some dark art SEO and actually get world-wide publicity from it. Based on my experience, I *know* these rankings and links are no mistake. I wouldn’t doubt (if you’ve ever worked with corporations before) that the top knows very little about what the bottom is doing. That’s usually how things work. The executive and media spokespersons likely have no idea about the intricate details of their SEO Campaigns that are going on in the marketing department or being executed by some outside third party. Regardless, you know this wasn’t by accident simply by the phrases and the incredible scope of phrases that they’re ranking for. Just ONE of those phrases would have required links and strategies that would have cost in excess of a $50,000 in work to accomplish. Not that it wouldn’t be worth every penny though. Think of the value of being #1 for “Dresses” even for 24 hours!

I remember a friend back in the day who used to use the free Yahoo! PPC credits to build fake accounts, use their affiliate link to promote Viagra, out bid everyone at some stupid amount like $100 per click. Yahoo! would give new accounts some credit so they’d be able to get 10-20 clicks at that price before being shut down. Back then, you could create as many accounts as you could email addresses, so they did this 20-30x. Given the commission on Viagra sales, the money was no doubt really good! These tricks don’t work anymore, but knowing what being #1 on a paid ad (which only gets about 33% of clicks on a search result) pays out… and how well you do with just PPC, imagine being #1 for days via SEO!

However, there is a dramatic down side. If Google does indeed punish them, which they’ve been known to be reactive to Journalistic pushes and SEO outcry’s (like those of David Naylor, Danny Sulivan and Aaron Wall, when they spot a foul) these guys are likely going to get shut down. And while the value of making potential hundreds of millions per day in the mean time may not spell off a possible year or two ban and reset of all value to their domain in the long term. The effects of blackhat SEO always come back to bite you.

Original New York Times Article