Morgan Linton

Domaining MBA Monday: TRAFFIC Announces One-Day Passes + Why You Should Go For The Full Event

by Morgan on May 20, 2013

Domaining MBA Monday Today TRAFFIC organizers announced the addition of two one-day pass options for the TRAFFIC Vegas show coming up next week. Their decision to offer these passes was based on requests from potential attendees who wouldn’t be able to make it for the entire show. I am definitely a fan of getting as many people to TRAFFIC as possible and think that Rick and Howard definitely made the right move here…that being said I do agree with Rick that you really don’t get the full experience in one day.

I know this from experience as I’ve attended some conferences like Affiliate Summit on day passes and found there to be a night and day difference between this and the full conference experience. This is especially true of TRAFFIC which has pre-event Cabana networking which is incredibly valuable. We went to TRAFFIC Florida early and we’re coming to TRAFFIC Vegas early, this is where the networking begins and poolside at the Bellagio is a darn good place to start your week.

I also see conferences as a progression of relationships, some that have existed for years, others that start and evolve over the course of the week. While you could jam as many meetings as you can into a single day, sometimes it’s just the serendipity that happens over beers that makes your year and changes your business.

Don’t get me wrong, like I said above, I think it’s great that TRAFFIC is offering these passes. What I will urge all of you to do is ask yourself if you’re buying a day pass because your schedule is busy, or because you want to save a few hundred dollars. If you’re going for a day to save money, what you lose in experience won’t be worth it. If your schedule really is too busy to come for more than a day then so be it and it’s better to come for a day than not come at all.

The domain industry is full of incredible people and there are only a few times for us to meet together during the course of the year. Daina and I love TRAFFIC because it not only brings Domainers together, but also brings their families with them. In fact I think Shane’s even bringing his Mom this year! If you can make it for the whole show I can tell you it is absolutely worth every penny and then some!

See you in Vegas!

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Google Adwords Keyword Tool Going Away

by Raymond Hackney on May 20, 2013

Google

The tool that so many domainers love to use for exact search numbers is going away. Google said today that they will be unveiling a new product called Keyword Planner.

With the launch of this new, combined tool, we will be sunsetting the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator in about 60 days. Please view this article for an in-depth look at the differences between using Keyword Tool and Keyword Planner. Going forward, you’ll have to log in to AdWords to use Keyword Planner, which will enable you to get customized results and estimates. We hope that this integrated workflow will help you build and grow your campaigns even more efficiently. To learn more about Keyword Planner, you can also visit the AdWords Help Center.

Certainly Google does not care about how this affects domaining, things suchs as, Domains wanted listings that specify I am looking for a keyword with 10,000 exact monthly searches will have to be tweaked. It certainly will required a few extra steps as you must have an adwords account, and you must be signed in.

Read the full post here

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Weekend Musings

by Morgan on May 18, 2013

Hello, happy Saturday, and welcome to my weekend musings. As I said in my last musing, I’m going to be adding more photos to this weekly post, I’m a photo nut and loving sharing my photos and since I don’t do it much on my blog I thought my weekend musings would be the place to do it. On that note I’ve also started a Tumblr blog just for photos so if you want to see some of my photos during the week you can find them there. I won’t be writing on the Tumblr site at all, just posting photos so don’t expect anything domain-related.

The image at the top of this post is from our hike in the Sierra Madres mountains last weekend. Daina and I have decided to go hiking every Sunday. We both love hiking and have found this is a great way to clear our minds. For those who haven’t been to Southern California before we have some of the most incredibly hiking on the planet, and thanks to our weather, we can hike year round.

What we really love about the hike we did last weekend is all the different scenery we pass through along the hike. From the above shot at the top of Mount Zion to the image below inside the dense forest.

Last night we went to see the new Star Trek movie. If you don’t know, Daina and I are huge Star Trek geeks (Daina even more than me!) and we were really looking forward to J.J. Abrams latest creation. Marina del Rey has an awesome AMC Dine In theater with reserved seats and dinner/drink service available at the push of a button. The seats are like big recliners you’d have in your living room and yes, just like your living room you can recline.

Overall I felt that J.J. Abrams did a great job with the action scenes which were incredibly fun to watch, and it’s also neat to see one of my favorite characters come back to life…but it did seem like a much weaker storyline than his first foray into the Star Trek world. Also Daina didn’t like that the Klingons wore masks and used phasers which is very out of character for them based on the last 20+ years of TV shows.

Every morning we go for a walk on the beach and I’ve been posting photos from our daily walk on Facebook and Instagram but will now be including them on the new Tumblr site as well. I’m not sure how exciting beach photos are on a daily basis but I’ll be trying to mix it up so they are from different angles with different effects, etc.

From morning until night we have been working incredibly hard on Fashion Metric and our morning walks are spent planning the day ahead and discussing strategy. We were initially doing these meetings in our office sitting in desk chairs but decided to take these meetings to the beach. Environment really does make a difference and this has really worked out well for us, especially considering that most nights we’re working until nine or ten at night so a morning walk really helps to clear our minds.

This week we were very excited to have an interview with us featured on WearToClick and enjoyed an awesome co-working session with a couple other Fashion Tech startups in LA on Thursday.

As for Linton Investments I’m incredibly happy with how well the team is doing. As you all know I’ve worked incredibly hard to build a domain business, rather than a self-employment job for myself in the domain world. We’ve sold six domains so far this month and one more deal just closed this morning. It looks like this could be a new record for May and it’s all happened without me having to spend my days working in the business.

I am really excited for TRAFFIC which is less than two weeks away now! Daina and I will be coming early and look forward to hanging-out at the cabanas with some of the other early arrivals. If you haven’t bought your ticket yet, you should, TRAFFIC Vegas is shaping up to be one amazing conference!

Well it’s 8:40AM and we are getting ready to head to the gym for our Saturday morning Cardio Core Ball class. I hope you’re all having a nice start to your weekend!

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Don’t Expect Your Buyers To Know Anything About Domain Name Transfers

by Morgan on May 17, 2013

About 90% of the domains we sell at Linton Investments go to end-users, normal people who are buying a domain name for their company or a brand new business they’re starting. While they often have a particular domain in mind or a list of names they’re interested in they often don’t know anything about how to purchase and transfer a domain name.

The first thing I tell people is to avoid Pay Pal at all costs. This is an incredibly insecure way to purchase domain names and I insist on using Escrow.com for most of my domain sales.

Picking a good registrar also makes a huge difference, that’s why I recommend NameCheap, Go Daddy and OnlyDomains for all .COM, .NET, and .ORG domains. When it comes to ccTLDs 101Domain is the only choice in my book as they specialize in ccTLDs and offer the best support.

This week Go Daddy really went above and beyond for me and I’d like to give a huge thanks to my account manage Neil who made the transfer process much easier for my buyer. Just to emphasize the point I make in the title of this post, don’t expect your buyer to know anything about domain name transfers.

One of the domains I sold this week went to a large payment processing company in Canada. Really nice people but they knew absolutely nothing about how to accept a push from my Go Daddy account to theirs. Neil, my account manager at Go Daddy went the extra mile and actually called them on the phone personally to walk them through the process. I can tell you that I’ve had great experiences with the support team at both NameCheap and OnlyDomains as well which is why picking a good registrar really makes life easier.

The worst experience I’ve had is with Melbourne IT who took two weeks for a transfer to go through scaring the crap out of my buyer. I kept trying to explain that they were slow but the poor guy thought he was being ripped-off, and I can’t blame him, he knew nothing about domain transfers…and let’s face it, they shouldn’t take that long, ever. This is why I’ll never use Melbourne IT again but also why I have grown even more patient over the years.

As many people are now realizing, gone are the days of building a business selling domains to Domainers. The focus needs to be end-users and when you’re selling to end-users get ready to teach them how the whole process works. To help make things easier we are putting together some tutorials on the Linton Investments site, once they are done I will share them with all of you.

Just remember, while you may buy, sell, and transfer domains every week, for many people this is a completely new process so you’ll have to hold their hand through it. Or, if you’re with a kick-ass registrar like Go Daddy you might find someone like Neil who is nice enough to do it for you. Thanks again to Neil for saving me some time this morning and leaving my buyer incredibly happy with the whole experience!

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Fashion Friday: Fashion Metric Founders Interviewed On WearToClick

by Morgan on May 17, 2013

Fashion Friday

Good morning, happy Friday, and welcome to another Fashion Friday here on MorganLinton.com! It has been an incredibly busy and exciting time at Fashion Metric and this week an interview with me and Daina was published on WearToClick as a part of their Insider Clicks series.

The founders of WearToClick, Rebecca and Alison asked some great questions and if you’ve ever wanted to delve a bit deeper into the Fashion Metric story this is a great read. For those who don’t know much of the Fashion Metric story, I left my day job of nine years in September of last year and Daina dropped out of her PhD so that we could both focus on Fashion Metric full time starting in October of 2012.

Since then we’ve been working 12+ hour days and loving every minute of it. While we’re working harder than we ever have we are also learning how to strike a nice balance. For example, we have so much going on that we need to have a morning meeting every single day. We used to do this meeting in our office with a whiteboard, now we take our coffee mugs and spend the first hour of our mornings walking on the beach.

This is the best part about running your own company, you decide how you want to work. Neither of us ever liked the idea of working in a cubicle or sitting in an office that looks onto a busy street. We love the ocean, the marina, and falling asleep to the sound of barking seals. You’ll find that once you are able to optimize your working environment, the work doesn’t feel like work, couple this with the fact that we love what we’re doing and each day is more exciting than the next.

I used to dread Monday’s, now Friday’s come to soon. So if you want to learn more about Fashion Metric make sure to read the Insider Clicks feature on WearToClick. Huge thanks to Rebecca and Alison for featuring us, we’re honored and it’s been a blast working on this collaboration! Happy Friday, stay fashionable!

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Getting Ready For TRAFFIC? Watch My Latest Video And Come Prepared

by Morgan on May 16, 2013

As many of you know I am part of a monthly video series on iGoldrush.com, an awesome free Domaining resource by my good buddy Paul Goldstone. Like many people in the Domain Industry I am busy putting-together my meeting schedule for TRAFFIC Vegas which is now less than two weeks away!

My business would not be where it is today if it wasn’t for conferences like TRAFFIC and I can tell you that Rick, Howard, Ray, Barbara, and the whole team put a lot of time and energy into making it the incredible event that it is today. If you think you can’t afford to attend, I’d argue that you really can’t afford not to attend. The business you get done at these conferences is so valuable and now that TRAFFIC is in the first half of the year it’s a great way to setup for an amazing second half of 2013.

In this month’s video I cover how to prepare for meetings at conferences so you get the most from them. Basics like setting goals are critical to maximizing the value you get from a conference. Come unprepared and just hope that magic happens isn’t a recipe for success. Watch below and make sure to check-out the full summary on the iGoldrush site.

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Google I/O 2013 Keynote Highlights

by Morgan on May 15, 2013

The first day of the Google I/O conference has come to an end and San Francisco is now jam-packed with geeks partying like the rock stars that they are. A few people thought that I was in San Francisco at the conference however I’m actually still here in sunny LA watching the conference live on You Tube while I’m here working away! This morning I did my best to keep up with the keynote and share some of the highlights, if you missed these you can read them below:

Now that the first day is behind us I thought I’d share a few quick highlights that I didn’t get to this morning. When Google makes moves it impacts every single one of us, especially those of us who generate our income from the Internet. To make your life easier I’ve decided to make these highlights short and sweet:

Google All Access

Google’s new music streaming service is called Google Play Music All Access, it does have Pandora-like features for creating your own radio station and is available starting today with a 30-day trial. After that the service is $9.99/month unless you sign-up before 6/30/2013 and then it’s only $7.99/month. As a music nut I will be trying this and sharing my feedback and maybe even a video of me rocking out if Sonos decides to add it soon. You can check it out at play.google.com.
Of course what most of you have been waiting to hear is changes announced to Google Search. The big announcement here is conversational search for desktop which means that we are getting one step closer to a keyboardless society. Rather than just doing a boring old voice search you can now ask Google questions as if it were a friendly robot there to help you along the way, a bit like Siri. So now you can say things like, find cool bars in Marina del Rey and places like Bin 73 will pop up for your libational pleasure (yes, that is one of my favorites). However, like Siri, I think it sounds cool in theory but don’t think a lot of people will use this, still only time will tell.
Google maps is getting a nice refresh but you’ll have to wait until this summer to check it out. Since it’s clear that Apple has no idea how to do maps correctly I’m pretty sure Google maps is going to be a dominant force for the foreseeable future and I look for ward to seeing these updates in action. One of the coolest new features I saw them demo was the ability to search maps by activity, here’s a screenshot of what it’s going to look like:

New Google Maps

Google added 41 features to Google+, not sure why they didn’t go with a nice round number like 40 or 50 but heck I guess 41 is better than 40. One of the most notable is a new three-column layout. Think nobody is using Google+, think again, there are over 390 million active users on the web, boom!
No major new announcements with Google’s Chrome browser except for the fact that it’s the #1 browser in the world with over 750 million active users. Chrome is really bad for any Domainers out there that make their money with direct navigation traffic since the URL entry bar defaults to search rather than .COM. The only browser not doing this now is Firefox which will most likely do this soon. Of course that doesn’t mean direct navigation traffic is dead, people still type in keyword .COMs all day long, but typically for sites they already know and love.
Last but not least Google wasn’t shy about the fact that android is kicking ass and taking names. I’m still a Mac geek but I know plenty of Android geeks out there and the developer community is huge. So far 48 billion apps have been installed from the Google Play store…in my book anytime a number in the billions is thrown around, that’s a big deal.

These are just my highlights, for full coverage I highly recommend you head over to TechCrunch and soak it all in. Oh and sign-up for Google’s new streaming music service if you want to lock-in the $7.99/month rate or at least to just play around with it for a month. I’m a big Pandora user so I’ll be doing some heavy comparisons of All Access vs. Pandora over the coming weeks.

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Google Announces Google Play Music All Access

by Morgan on May 15, 2013

Google Play All Access

A few minutes ago Google announced Google Play Musics All Access their foray into the music streaming world. I was crossing my fingers that they would include Pandora-like qualities into the service and they showed this feature in action. While you are listening to a song on All Access you can instantly create a radio station and like Pandora you can tune your station to your own musical tastes. Here’s a first look at what the new interface looks like:

Google All Access Demo

Google All Access Demo 2

The new service launches today and will be available from play.google.com along with a 30 day trial. The regular monthly price for the service will be $9.99 however for those that sign-up early Google hinted at a $7.99 monthly fee which means those that get in early could get a good deal. The service is available on portable devices and online and I’m really hoping to see it soon on Sonos, fingers crossed!

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Google Gaming Demo Fails Live On Stage At Google I/O

by Morgan on May 15, 2013

Google Gaming Demo Fail

Don’t you just hate it when your live demo doesn’t work, so you try it again, and once again it doesn’t work. That just happened a few minutes ago at the Google I/O Conference in front of a huge crowd during the keynote address. Google was attempting to show-off some of the cool new multi-player gaming features they announced today and with the demo up and ready to go, things didn’t go quite according to plan.

Google Live Demo Fail

After trying it a second time they decided to go for a third try but after a third fail they decided to call it off with the moderator blaming the issue on challenging networking issues at the Moscone Center. While the moderator wanted to keep going and even suggested that they even show one player mode, they decided to scrap the demo and move on. Hey, it happens, and companies like Microsoft have definitely experienced some of the most embarrassing demo fails.

For all the startup founders reading this hopefully this gives you a bit of solace next time you have a demo fail in front of a few hundred people. Just know that tech giants like Google have the same problems, it’s all part of life and what’s important is how well you do when things don’t go according to plan.

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Google Announcing New Music Service To Compete With Spotify and Rdio

by Morgan on May 15, 2013

Google Music

There is a lot of buzz going on about the Google I/O conference that is set to kick-off in less than two hours. One of the latest rumors that is very likely to be true and unveiled this morning in San Francisco is Google’s new streaming music service that will go head-to-head with streaming giants like Spotify. While sources have said for years that Apple is working on a streaming music service, big old Google beat them to the punch.

According to music industry sources Google has signed deals with Universal, Sony, and Warner which are needless to say pretty big players in the music world. Of course, Apple will have no trouble making deals, but Google is beating them out of the gate and there is certainly going to be a lot of buzz about it today.

As many of you know I’m a huge Sonos geek so all I want to know is when can I start rocking out to Google’s new music service all over my pad? Stay-tuned, I’ll be covering the announcements from Google I/O throughout the day!

Photo Credit: Max Braun via Compfight cc

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