One of the newest and most active blogs to enter the Domaining Blog space this year was DNFBlog.com written by Puranjay, a domain investor and blogger. The blog launched in January of this year and quickly ramped up with 58 posts in March and 61 in April. The blog covered a variety of topics from industry news to tips and tricks for investors.

In April they added a video intro that launches every time you go to the site introducing the blog and DNForum itself. I found the video a bit cheesy but at the same time can understand the value of it for new visitors who might not know much about the blog or DNForum. Since the focus of this blog was educating new Domainers I could definitely see this making them feel more comfortable.

Now it looks like the blog has gone dark with no posts coming out since May 1st. I was a fan of this blog and thought it was a great addition to the community, now the question is, what happened to DNFBlog?

I have been thinking about this for over a year now so decided to share it with all of you before taking the next steps. This idea initially came from a new blog reader who asked me if I had anything with my top blog posts in physical book form. I told him that I did not but did send a recommendation of a few of my most popular posts. He then responded saying, “Well if you ever make a physical book with your top posts in it, I’d like a copy!”

Now a year later I’m seriously thinking about doing it. The question for me is, are more people interested in buying something like this, and what service should I use to do it, if of course people are interested?

My thought was to break the book into four different sections:

1. Buying Domains
2. Selling Domains
3. Developing and Monetizing Domains
4. Running a Domain Business

There are a number of services that can turn your blog into a book but since I have no experience with any of them, I thought I’d reach out to all of you for some advice. Here are the services I’ve look at so far:

• Blurb.com
• Blog2Print.com
• CreateSpace.com
• Lulu.com

Let me know if any of you have had experience with these services, and most importantly, if you would want to buy a physical book like this!

At the beginning of this month I did a post about the difference between exact and broad match search volume. The post was inspired by all the readers who submitted names to my domain contest who didn’t know the difference. It was actually sad to see in some ways as there were a good number of people who thought they had names with great search volume that actually had none.

After the contest I had a few panicked domain investors email me. Most of their stories went something like this, “I bought all these domains thinking they had incredible search volume. Nobody wants to buy them and I’m losing money, I read your post and found-out I was using broad rather than exact, what should I do?”

These are great examples of why no matter what you’re investing in, be it domains, stocks, bonds, real estate, etc. it is absolutely critical to take the time to learn before jumping in. The silver lining is, better to find-out now than two years from now when you’ve wasted even more money. So I decided to take my previous post a step further and show a video illustrating exact vs. broad match search volume to make sure everyone is crystal clear on the difference.

As many of you know I held an exciting contest on my blog to buy a domain name for $1,200 from one of my readers. With over 120 comments this post caught a lot of attention and had some great names submitted to it. I spent the weekend crunching the numbers and picking a domain from those submitted. In the end I choose WeddingFlorist.com as the winner and sent a congratulations email to the owner.

A day later I hadn’t heard anything back so I sent another email this time trying both the email address on the WHOIS as well as the email address used to submit the comment. The next day, still nothing. So I tried calling the phone number on the WHOIS record, wrong number.

Of course I know people are busy so I waited another day, still nothing. I tried emailing again over the weekend but am sad to say that I don’t think the owner of this domain exists, or if he does, he doesn’t seem to have the correct WHOIS information or email address in his blog comment.

I would still love to buy this domain so if anyone reading this post happens to know the owner, let him know I’d still like to buy the name. If not then I will be buying my second choice name which I’ll announce later this week. Still, I’m a nice guy and fair is fair so I want to make sure I’m giving the owner a fair chance. Heck I know that this is a great time for a vacation and many of us unplug on vacation so I’d hate for him to miss my emails while he’s enjoying some R&R.

So I’ll give it until Wednesday of this week. If any of you happen to know the owner if you could be so kind as to ping him that would be great. Either way it was a very successful contest and I will be buying a name from one of my readers for $1,200…that name might just not be WeddingFlorist.com.

Well I decided to cancel Small Business Sunday today because this day should be about one thing and one thing only, Mom! Right now we are nestled in the woods in a beautiful house getting ready for a day of wine tasting with my Mom. After that we’ll be coming back to the house where we’ll be making a feast and relaxing in the hot tub enjoying some of the great wine we discovered during the day!

For those of your reading this post who are Mother’s I would like to wish you a very Happy Mother’s Day. Without you none of us would be here today and I know for me, I wouldn’t be half the person I am today without my Mom. Our Mom’s inspire us and show us the magical adventure that is life!

If you’re reading this right now, stop. Today is not about Domaining, today is about all the Mother’s out there. So close your laptop and spend some quality time with your Mom!

Wow – what a week! A lot has happened this week and a lot is happening this weekend, in fact right now I’m sitting on a plane cruising along at 35,000 feet. This week has been exciting with some major appraiso announcements on the horizon, one nice five-figure sale, and two end-user sales that look like their going to close next week!

Yesterday I was in a kayak on Big Bear Lake, a lake at the top of  a mountain less than two hours from LA. Now we’re on our way to Sonoma for a wedding and followed by a weekend of wine tasting.

Since this weekend really is all about spending time with Daina and my family I’m going to keep this particularly short and sweet, okay maybe it won’t be sweet, alright, I’m really bad at short too, here we go!

• We launched a new kayak store on Kayaking.org that is run by our partner, Outdoor Play, the first website on the Internet to sell kayaks! This has been one of the top requests from our visitors and I am very excited with how it all turned-out.

• BlogAboutWine.com crossed the 3,000th fan mark on Facebook. This feels good, we’ve turned something that we love into a resource that other people truly enjoy, and we’re still at the very beginning. This weekend we will be doing some great coverage of what Sonoma has to offer.
• The top story in the Domaining world this week was .CO and some statements made by Juan in a video. I have stayed-out of this one but will say that like many of you I was not a fan of what was said. Still I like .CO and think that they are doing some very innovative things to build their brand.
• I’ve been getting a lot of questions from readers about the Google Penguin update. If you haven’t had a chance to read my post about 3 ways to rank better after the Penguin update, make sure to check it out.
• I am blown-away by how fast WPEngine is, seriously, it’s insanely fast. Next week MorganLinton.com will be moving over to WPEngine so get ready for a much faster experience with my blog!

Last, but certainly not least, Happy Mother’s Day to all the incredible Moms out there! Have a great weekend, now back to the flight!

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Like it or not, Panda came and changed the face of search forever. Now Penguin has come and it looks like once again, the search world may never be the same. While many people are frustrated with Google as their sites dipped in the rankings, many others are looking for the opportunities ahead now that search works a bit differently than it did before.

I’ve been getting a lot of email from people wanting to know what they can do to rank better now that Penguin is here. Many of you will be surprised to see that some of the main ways to improve your rankings are tips I’ve been giving for years now. It all centers around building a site for users, not for search engines, and this can be a very good thing.

Below are three ways that you can help your site rank better and hopefully bring your blood pressure down just a bit. Don’t worry, it’s all going to be okay, heck, I’ll go a step further, there’s no reason why you can’t even leap ahead of where you were before. Follow the tips below and you’ll be well on your way:

1. Fresh, unique content. This has been #1 on my list for a long time now. Don’t buy cheap poorly-written articles, and don’t even think of using one of those funky content spinners. Get real writers that are passionate about the subject matter to write great articles. Fresh is more important than ever so you’ll need to keep the quality content coming.
2. Backlinks to Internal Pages. Too many SEO companies focused on getting backlinks to the main page of a site. This doesn’t look organic to Google and it shouldn’t! Think about it, there should be more interesting things on your site than just the front page, Google knows this and that’s why they expect to see a reasonable amount of backlinks going to internal pages.
3. Go Easy On The Ads. Users are instantly turned-off when they encounter a site laden with ads, you want to build for the user now so go easy on the ads. If you’re closing direct ad deals you might be in better shape but filling your site with adsense and affiliate offers isn’t going to help.

As always I’d love to hear from you, feel free to share your own tips or ask any questions you might have below. Comment and let your voice be heard!

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For those keeping score, .ME has been having one heck of a 2012 with strong support from major startups and big sales happening every single week. One of the areas where .ME has really shined is mobile where app developers are seeing .ME as a great extension to build their brands on. Given that mobile is probably the fastest-growing industry on the planet, this is a very good sign for .ME and .ME domain owners.

Starting on May 24th .ME will be holding a premium auction on Sedo with some absolutely incredibly domains. There really is no limit to what a one-word .ME can sell for which was very clearly illustrated with the $450,000 sale of Meet.me, a domain purchased for under $6,000. I will definitely be bidding in the auction this month and while I don’t want to give-away all my favorites I would like to share some of my top picks.

Boats.me – boats are expensive and there are plenty of people that are fanatical about boats. This has great development and end-user potential and would be perfect for an boating-related app.

Cruise.me – while we’re on the topic of boats, let’s not forget the cruise industry. I can already see a daily deals site for cruises or a slick app to find a great cruise near you.

Debt.me – nobody likes to be in debt, everyone who is in debt wants to get out of debt. I think this could be one of the names to go for the highest price, and I’ll definitely be one of the bidders.

Graduate.me – the education space is big money, this is one of the top category-killers in the entire niche.

LosAngeles.me – I live in LA and love this city as do millions of other people, this would be a great domain for an “Around Me” like app specific to LA.

Rap.me – turn the videos you shot on your smartphone into a rap video with Rap.me, I can already see it now!

VentureCapital.me – what VC wouldn’t want this for their blog?

Traffic.me – we all deal with it, some of us more than others, traffic apps are huge and this would be the perfect name for the next big traffic app.

There are many more great names in this auction. I am writing about this because I think it does truly represent a great opportunity for investors. Think about it, three very savvy Domain Investors bought a .ME domain with each spending less than $2,000, and each walking away with over $100,000. Mobile is hot, .ME is hot, put the two together and there could be some future six-figure sales on this list, and you have a chance to get one for much less in a few weeks!

I had an interesting experience this week that I wanted to share with all of you. It’s a great lesson in Business 101 as well as a good example of how to screw-up your chances of making a sale to an end user. It all comes down to the fact that at the end of the day, businesses don’t do business with businesses, people do business with people.

So here’s what happened. As many of you know, I work with startups and Fortune 500 companies to help them acquire domain names for their business. I do not broker domains for investors but instead help real businesses get the domains they are looking for. This year alone I’ve done close to $850,000 in deals, I can’t talk about any of them, but if there’s any way I can in the future you can bet I will!

One of my clients contacted me inquiring about a few domain names they were interested. None were category-killer by any means, in fact most were mediocre three-word .COM, but the client really wanted one of them and had a six-figure budget for the name. So I emailed all the domain owners asking what price they might be looking for.

Of the people I emailed (six in total) three came back with a price range, two said they didn’t want to throw-out a number but would consider an offer, and one guy was just a complete jerk. It was the guy who was a jerk that I didn’t quite get, he wasn’t sitting on a six-figure domain, it was a name worth maybe $10K-$20K (and only to the right buyer) but if he got six-figures I can tell you he’d be jumping with joy. So what did he do?

Rather than throw-out a range or ask me for an offer he responded by saying, “If you really wanted the domain you would have made an offer.” Poof, no deal. We emailed six people and sure, not all of them gave a range, those that asked for offers, we submitted offers to, but this guy lost the deal by being a jerk. While I myself also push potential Buyers to make an offer, I simply ask for an offer. This rude response let me know right-away that this was not someone I would ever want to do business with, and since my client had plenty of other options, we bought a different domain.

If you want to lose a potential end-user sale, be a jerk right away and watch people avoid you like the plague. Not only did we not respond to this email, but I’ve marked down the owner so I know in the future to stay-away from this guy. If he would have simply said, “I only accept offers and will not throw-out a price.” We would have made an offer, but by being rude and showing he was someone that would be a complete hassle to do business with, we looked the other way.

Now just to be clear here. I’m not talking about a category-killer one or two-word .COM, and I’m not talking about any big Domainers that we all know. I’m talking about a guy with a mediocre name and a missed opportunity. Like I said in the beginning, businesses don’t do business with businesses, people do business with people. Responding rudely to an inquiry is a great way to lose a potential sale, and you never know who is making the offer or what their budget is so you might just miss that one big chance.

I am excited to announce that the second edition of my free guide, Domain Monetization 101 has arrived hot off the press! Actually, there is no press since it’s an eBook but let’s just pretend that it is! While this is the second edition of the guide almost the entire book has been re-written so it might be more fair to call it a whole new book.

The idea behind Domain Monetization 101 is simple – people ask me all the time how to get started with Domain Monetization. Rather than trying to share everything I’ve learned in an email or short phone call I put all the basics together in one guide that I give-away for free. The guide covers Monetization from start-to-finish and shows anyone coding experience or not, how to build something meaningful on their domains.

To get your free copy of the book all you need to do is sign-up for my newsletter. Oh and don’t worry, I don’t send-out Newsletters every day, or even every week. My newsletter is all about education and when I do send it out it’s jam-packed with articles about Monetization, SEO, and Domain Flipping with a focus on specific techniques I haven’t covered yet on my blog.

So if you’ve been waiting to take the next step and start monetizing your domains, or if you’ve been trying to monetize your domains without making much progress, I am confident Domain Monetization 101 will help! If you are already a newsletter subscriber and you would like a copy just shoot me an email and I’ll send it over. Of course feel free to ask any questions you have in the comment section below, I’m always here to help!