Successclick, Domain Monetization

FUTURE TREND DOMAIN-SELLING STRATEGIES – The New Media Domains

Hi Gang,

For everyone submitting FT domains for the Future Trend Domain Auction™, please remember this auction is not only about 3D/HOLO domains. The auction also covers energy, cellphone, lifestyle, and other new technologies you believe might become popular trends “in the future,” near or far.

Additionally, the Future Trend Domain Auction™  is not meant for any FT domain investor looking for a “killing” right away on the sale of their domains. Unless you own a one word lockdown premium .com, you’re probably not going to sell a domain and retire next door to some sanctimonious Florida chest-beater.  It’s a new frontier, and we’re testing the interest, not only within the domaining industry (as a strategic OOTB and even low-priced aftermarket purchase for future upward value), but also in the New Media marketing sector, outside the domain industry.

That latter part is extremely hard, as every domain auction company has discovered. Significant education is needed for the players in the New Media marketing sector, and all of us involved in promoting future trend domains need to give more information outside our circle other than a quick offhand comment on domain blogs. We need to push into New Media marketing forums, tech marketing news sites, and new tech company providing prodservs that advertisers turn to in order to get that “sudden burst”of marketing advantage ahead of their competitors online. For those of you really wanting to see a massive change in corporate buyers attitudes towards these domains, would you invest $200 for a PRwire announcing the sale of your domains, also promoting the genre of your domains?

Sure, you can leave it all up to SuccessClick and Moniker to try to reach all the potential buyers, and you’d think Moniker would do all that for their 15% commission. Your domains are so great, they’re lucky they have them to sell, right?

Wrong. Domains, good and bad, still need massive promotion.

We’re now at this crossroad where a common interest, ultimately augmented by thousands of comments on blog articles, can seriously galvanize a large group of domainers to work more at pushing their domains and their genre to potential buyers, instead of posting quick comments on blogs stating how lucky they are to have “nabbed” a certain domain. Think your domains are valuable and the next “big thing”? Then prove it. Get involved with the Future Trend Domain Auction™ by signing up on every marketing website and making your sales pitch. Over 150 people have submitted domains in this auction.  Imagine that amount of feedback daily flooding the comment section of top marketing websites for the next 30 days.  Imagine.

This means everyone who is informed that one or more of their domains are accepted into the Future Trend Domain Auction™ will be required to put a bit of their gray muscle to work in order to educate the market and participate in this auction. We aren’t just “throwing domains into the wind” and hoping they do a Forrest Gump feather-float while pretty music is playing in the background.  It means, everyone who has been posting on Successclick and our friend Michael “Embee” Berkens’ award-winning blog article at http://www.thedomains.com regarding their wonderful domain finds, can instead push this information outward - cool future trend news, questions, answers, commentary and more — direct all your energy now to describing YOUR domains that have been accepted into the Future Trend Domain Auction™ to every relevant marketing and news location online.

There will be more articles forthcoming here, but before I end this one – a revealing tip for selling your FT domains:

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THE NEW MEDIA DOMAIN REVOLUTION – IT’S OFFICIAL! The Future Trend Domain Auction™

by Stephen Douglas
President of SuccessClick.com

(With Honors To Michael (EmBee) Berkens, and support from hundreds of novice and professional domainers. Everything here is a conglomeration of many domainers assisting me, and preparing me for this event. Thank you to ALL!)

The following information regards the participation of buying/selling domains in the Future Trend Domain Auction™, and the importance of these domains in the near future.

Innovation. Technology. Future Trends. These are the building blocks of New Media marketing through keyword descriptive domains of products and services, many that are already maturing.  This is the first-ever category auction in this niche, and this is what you’ve read and heard about for the last four months: the Future Trend Domain Auction™.

The Auction Date Has Been Officially Set, and the Production information is below:

DATE: June 21 – June 28, 2011

AUCTION HOST: Moniker Showcase

ADMINISTRATIVE OPERATIONS: Powered by Snapnames.com

PROMOTION: Successclick.com

After the record-breaking comments replying to the blog article written by Michael Berkens about 3D domains being “the next big thing” less than a year ago, it was time for me to break out the big guns and start introducing the area of domain investing that I initiated back in 2003 – buying “Future Trend Domains”.

The topic of Berken’s blog article was so fascinating and full of promise that over 2,650 comments have been posted to date on his blog. This feat has never been done before in the history of domain investment discussions and it stands alone as the pinnacle of domain topic interests, equal to that of geo-specific domains, and beyond any new TLD being introduced.

Because of the impact Michael Berken’s “3D” article has had on the domain community (truckloads of opinions, a literal “Fort Knox” of domains presented for “acceptance”, and thousands of questions answered, with amazing new technologies revealed), Successclick.com decided that the time for producing the Future Trend Domain Auction™ had clearly come.

After talking with every reputable domain auction site we determined it always came down to who we trusted the most: The Moniker Showcase and Snapnames. With almost a decade of experience, and tens of $millions in domains sold, we believe that Moniker (a company of Oversee.net) is a continuing force behind domain promotions and sales in our industry.

There are going to be new ways in marketing these Future Trend (FT) domains. Important responsibilities will be expected from every domain owner whose domains have officially been accepted. Every person wanting to get involved in this auction (we’re looking to go directly to end users, but domainers are also welcome) will receive a detailed catalog description of every domain, so as a potential buyer, you will be able to read and follow the media connected to the domain, showing the power of each domain’s potential to be an easily recognized “consumer/business” trend. As a seller, your responsibility in this auction will be to let them know exactly what you have, and why it’s worth big bucks.

To get your domains reviewed by the Moniker team next week in the first submission of FT domains (we have already over 500 domains to appraise), please submit them before Monday this week at midnight PST.  Don’t fret if you don’t make it, because the deadline for submissions officially is May 22.  But if you get them in today, you’ll get a jump on competitors because on Tuesday, the first “FT FILE LIST #1” will be submitted for review by Moniker and Successclick.

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WHY A DOMAIN NAME CAN KILL YOUR COMPETITION (re: BusinessInsider.com article)

This was my response to my friend Alan Dunn’s article on Business Insider regarding why purchasing a domain name was important for a company. Special thanks to El Silver’s blog article.

It’s great to see an article about the real value of domain name investing, which should be the first, and continuing investment, for any company.

THIS IS A LONG COMMENT, BUT IT IS PROFESSIONAL ADVICE THAT CAN MAKE A HUGE DIFFERENCE IN YOUR COMPANY’S SUCCESS. HOPEFULLY MY COMMENT WILL SUM UP THIS ARTICLE AND FILL IN THE BLANKS OF WHY DOMAINS ARE PARAMOUNT IN A COMPANY’S SUCCESS.

FACT: Companies spend 25% of their annual budget in advertising. This can be meausred in millions of dollars a year for their annual advertising budget. This covers every “traditional” advertising medium, which New Media experts label as “TV, Magazine, Radio, Newspaper, Banner ads, Adwords, and others”.

FACT: Every company has an “online presence”. Will your company’s presence only be represented by your company name, which may not define the prodservs you offer? Wil you need to spend thousands of dollars monthly for SEO work to manipulate your position in the Search Engine results? Or will you have an online presence that IS your prodservs?

Let’s look at a $10,000 budget for advertising and see how far it takes your company in the advertising and marketing world. You’ll quickly discover that you can’t get a decent ad agency for that amount, so you have to create your own marketing campaign. If you go the traditional route, which has been embedded in the minds of business owners for over a century, you will find that in about a month, regardless of what traditional advertising method you use, your $10,000 is GONE. Zip. Nada. Let’s hope you received some eyeballs and conversions with your investment in any of these “vapor marketing” methods.

On the other hand, invest $10,000 in a keyword descriptive domain name that eliminates your competition in their effort to “lock” down their prodservs online. I call this a “keyword lock” for your company. Do you sell “fur slippers”? Then owning that combination of keywords, and hopefully with the .COM extension, you’ve just captured the “keyword lockdown” of your prodservs online. This is a greatly rewarding experience, and NEVER has a smart marketing director of a company owning a keyword “lock” domain for the company’s prodservs SOLD that domain. I will tell you WHY that never happens as you read on —

If you own the “keyword lock” domain name, every time your competitors use that keyword phrasing of the domain name you own, they are simply doing one thing: Promoting your website. So if you owned “furslippers dotcom”, your competitors will be PROMOTING YOUR WEBSITE every time they use that phrase in their advertising or marketing. Customers type in “furslippers dotcom” so they can find what exactly what they want, and your domain name controls the prodservs the user is looking for. It doesn’t end (if you keep it renewed). The domain name continues to work for you nonstop, all day, all night, all year long. Additionally, owning the keyword lock domain name gives your company a huge jump in prestige. Your company IS the keyword of the prodservs you and your competitors are selling.

When your advertising budget has been spent, and you think “man, my agency sucked, and we chose the wrong ad campaign. That hurt us,” your ad money spent is gone forever. Many companies suffer a bad financial quarter or even longer, when investing in a “wrong” ad/marketing campaign. Every company knows what if feels like to lose huge amounts of money in advertising, where it’s even worse when you hire an ad agency to provide you with what you hope your customers will grasp about your prodservs, and their campaign doesn’t perform.

HOWEVER, this is the Big Secret: With a domain name, defining your keyword prodservs, you can use the domain to simply blast it out in any advertising, or just let the domain point to your website where you’ll get typein traffic to your site from online users, although this is NOT the reason to buy a domain name. The real reason behind buying a keyword lock domain name is that you now OWN YOUR COMPETITION and that the product/service (prodservs) you sell are “locked” to your company, identifying and BRANDING your company with your prodservs (and your competitors’ prodservs). Your competitors can’t promote that phrase online, offline, anywhere, without actually promoting your company because you own that domain phrase.

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Future Trend Domain Auction™ Updates! – Series #1

Greetings to FT Domainers and Buyers, and the domain industry as a whole.  BIG NEWS: SuccessClick has now secured the auction company we confirmed is the best-suited for producing a successful “Future Trend Domain Auction™”.

It’s been a long haul to get here, but we had to consider every option and consider all factors in giving this new domain category the important promotional attention it needs to establish it as a viable niche. It is important for all FT domain investors to determine which sub-niches have matured to allow the generic domains for all the niches to find their value point at this time (what your “Future Trend” (FT) domains are worth right now). It doesn’t mean that your FT domain values won’t increase/decrease in the near future, just that discovering what they could be worth at the beginning of this “new category phase”. Please consider the previous sentence as your mantra, because I’ve waited over five years for many of my FT domains to reach even this type of attention, so you also can expect a possible waiting period beyond this auction to find the high end of value for your FT domains.

First and foremost, some background information and credit.  This auction was kicked off by SuccessClick after seeing the incredible insight of Michael “EmBee” Berkens of TheDomains.com writing an article about 3D.  When I saw that his blogpost (July 2010) regarding 3D domains caught on fire (the little flame started after about 250 quick response comments, with no sign of slowing down), I was confident that 3D domains were maturing. So kudos to EmBee – the unchallenged King of FT Domain Promotion. As of this date, Berken’s blog article is reaching an astounding 2,500 comments.

I’ve been in this business for over a decade, and I’ve worked with almost every domain industry company there is. That fact was paramount in my final decision on which auction company was actually the most trustworthy, technologically and financially capable of providing domain investors with the best services for our auction. The company we chose is heads above all others to be able to produce, promote and administrate the Future Trend Domain Auction™ to the level of success that our company (and particpants) expect.

That said, SuccessClick is pleased to announce that our domain auction company of choice is Moniker.com.

Moniker is owned by Oversee.net. Their Showcase auctions, either produced live or online, have proven to be the most reliable and profitable service for domainers worldwide. We are happy to announce our agreement with them to produce SuccessClick’s Future Trend Domain Auction™.

WHAT HAS OCCURED SO FAR: There have been over 50 domainers offering up their domains for sale on the upcoming Future Trend Domain Auction™.  Almost every domain submitter has provided at least one domain that can be included in this auction from our initial review. This isn’t confirmed, but I’m impressed with the quality of domains submitted. I hope the auction site experts we’re using feel the same. Over 500 domains have been submitted to date.

The news on 3D and Hologram technology is exploding everywhere.  Be sure to SAVE THOSE IMPORTANT LINKS if you’re submitting domains in this auction! This is an important part of participating in the Future Trend Domain Auction™. More instructions about this will be forthcoming if any of your domains are accepted into the Moniker Showcase auction.

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“THE AUCTION”: 3D / HOLO / FUTURE TREND DOMAINS ROLLING OUT HUGE

I’m convinced I made the right move buying some select 3D domains starting back in 2004 and continuing forward.  I’ve turned down almost hundred of those “maybe he needs the money” offers for these domains, laughing.  I’m sure many of you have too.  This now is our chance to show a unified force of Future Trend domain investors!

It’s TIME to submit your domains for review and acceptance into the largest 3D / Holo / Future Trend domain auction ever held:

We can’t reveal all the details yet (they’ll be announced to those people whose domains are accepted into the auctions), we also can’t announce the company or the exact date of the auctions yet, although we tentatively have them planned for late April this year. You can be assured we are working with the industry’s best.

Here’s the quick and simple directions:

1)  Go through your 3D/Future Trend domains and pick your TEN BEST. (Adult may be considered)

2) The domains can be of ANY EXTENSION, including ccTLD’s. Also, any domain you feel is “new or a future trend” will be considered.

3) You are under no obligation to participate to sell any domains you submit initially. You’ll be informed of the details to participate in the auctions if your domains are selected by my team co-producers and myself. If you agree to the terms, then we can move forward with promoting and auctioning your domains.

4) It will take approximately 2-3 weeks to finalize the selection of domain auction inventory for all 3D domains/ Holo / Future Trend domains. If any of your domains were selected, you will receive all the details on how to be eligible to sell your domains, including requirements, paid commissions, dates and times,  exclusivity, for the FT Auction.

5) Before submission, please place your domains on an excel or csv file, with “DOMAIN NAME”,  “RESERVE PRICE” as the column headings. (A “reserve” price is the lowest amount you’ll sell the domain).  Don’t forget to include all your contact information in the file, and then save the file with your last name followed by “domains’ so your file can be quickly found.

6) Email your domains, in their file, to SUCCESSCLICK [at]  GMAIL.COM (convert the “at” to “@” of course).

7) In the SUBJECT LINE of your email – write (in ALL CAPS): “DOMAIN SUBMISSION FT AUCTION”

The most important thing right now is NOT TO SIGN AN EXCLUSIVE RIGHT TO SELL YOUR DOMAINS TO ANYONE PRIOR TO THIS AUCTION until you find out from me if they are selected for the auctions, and agree to the details on how this FT auction will be held.  This Future Trend domain auction will be exclusive, so be aware not to prevent any of your domains to be locked down somewhere else.  This is your choice, we don’t have any liability if you turn down a deal now in order to try out your domains for this auction. So if you have now have an interested buyer and you feel comfortable with your selling price, go ahead with it if you choose. We make no promises we will get you more money for your domain sale. (We can help you broker the domain, though!)

This is it, FT domain treasure hunters – our first official foray out into the domain industry as a bona-fide Domain “Category” Auction!

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“THE 3D MARKET IS GOING TO EXPLODE” – “Avatar” Director James Cameron

I’m feeding the fire, because usually I don’t post this much on my blog. However, I’ve been getting my google alerts pounding me on 3D and Hologram technology like this thing is ON FIRE.

There is no doubt in  my mind, and my mind is usually doubtful, that 3D/Holographic technology is currently the biggest thing all across the board for entertainment, including movies, TV broadcasts, cellphones, TVs, tablets, business communications, etc etc. This technology is so far into the “marketing pit” that there’s nothing that can stop the growth of this medium.

I’ve read hundreds of articles, including a few “naysayer” stories, regarding the 3D/hologram revolution. All I see, and have seen for over seven years now, is that this technology is set in stone. In other words, the glitches and problems with 3D now are rapidly being fixed, and thousands of companies worldwide are working on fixing 3D presentations in all forms to be easy, affordable, utilitarian and foremost, enjoyable. More enjoyable than 2D entertainment by far.

Here’s a link to a nice article by one of the biggest promoters of 3D, and the subject of this article’s interview, Director James Cameron, (“Titanic” and “Avatar”) has a reason for doing this, so consider his bias.  Then research his comments to see if they stand up under your analysis. Remember, no “future trend” domain is “perfect” until you can establish that there isn’t a huge backlash against it, and that there could be a major consumer/business common purpose for it.

We’re coming closer to securing an official 3D/Future Trend domain auction, so if you haven’t yet subscribed to our newsletter, now is the time.  This will enable you to be informed immediately when it is time to submit your domains.

NOTE: Make sure your domains have been at least evaluated, and if you can, get them appraised before submission. We will be selecting the best domains of our clients and readers, and we would like you to know which domains are your best.  It makes things easier for us and the company who will be holding the auction. They want only the best domains.

SuccessClick.com does all evaluations and appraisals manually, but we also recommend Rob Sequin, and  DomainConsultant.com for these services. (Please let us know if your company does manual evaluations/appraisals of domains, and we will include you in our recommendations if you meet our stringent requirements.) 

NOTE: We do NOT recommend “automated domain appraisal services” online. Not only are they expensive, they never work, and there’s no way to get them to have the AI for them to consider all the factors needed to get your domains properly evaluated/appraised without a human eyeball with experience looking at them.

We believe big domain sales are coming in this market. Make sure you’re prepared for it.

HOLOGRAMS ARE APPEARING THROUGH CONSUMER PRODUCT HACKING!

I just ran across this amazing story, which comes with a youtube video. I can’t verify the truth of it, but the website the story appears on is legitimate.

If true, holographic images, their usage, creation, and insertion into our lives is closer than you think.  To me, this is groundbreaking, because when I invested in some of my holo domains, I understood the common thought for a scientific timeline on real world applications for holography would be by 2015 and most likely later.

However, I suspect by the stories being published on holography right now is proving to us that this incredible technology will be accessible by the end of 2012.

Domains in this arena are dancing.