I am always looking for ways to increase efficiency. Efficiency can often be impacted the greatest by choosing great tools that automate and consolidate things that you do regularly. Above.com is most well-known for their Parking Manager, which is the most popular tool for identify the best parking service for each of your domains.
The Parking Manager automates a process that done manually takes a very long time and is incredibly error prone. Without an automated tool like Above you would need to keep spreadsheets of data and manually change your DNS every time you want to test on another service. With this much data it is all too easy to make an error when reporting updated stats one day, really it could easily become your new full-time job. Don’t worry, you can be replaced by an algorithm, and Above.com has it.
One of the cool things that most people don’t know about the Parking Manager is that if you want to simply consolidate all of your parking stats, you can do it without having to change your DNS. Maybe you’re happy with your parking stats or just don’t want to test between services right now. Fine, keep your DNS setup exactly as it is and simply load the parking services you use into the Above.com platform. Now you can see all your parking stats all in one place.
I personally use three different parking services, TrafficZ, ParkLogic, and Internet Traffic. I really like them all but it’s annoying to login to three different systems to see my stats. Above.com allows me to view stats for all of these, all in one place. If I ever want to take a deeper dive and start to really compare these services across my portfolio, I can update my DNS and let Above do all the work optimizing.
This services alone saves an incredibly amount of time and increases your efficiency. However many people don’t realize that Above goes beyond being a parking manager, they also have a registrar and marketplace, and of course they are all connected.
As you all know I’m a data geek, so I’m going to get a bit geeky here. I love data, and when I buy domains myself, data is a major part of how I make my decision. The problem is, getting real, verifiable data around the traffic or revenue of a potential purchase can be hard. Unless I really know the person, I’m just not going to believe the domain makes $100/month until I see the data from a 3rd party service that can guarantee the authenticity of the data. The Above.com Marketplace has this feature built-in so as a seller I can see this data and not have to worry about faked screenshots or taking someone’s word for it.
If you manage your domains with Above, you can put them on the marketplace and instantly give potential buyers access to your stats. I don’t currently use the marketplace but in the next part of this case study I will walk through the process of adding domains to both the Parking Manager and the Marketplace so you can see the entire process.
Buying, selling, and registering domains. I haven’t used the Above.com registrar yet but will also be trying that out as part of this case study. It is a registrar built for Domainers and they don’t nickel-and-dime you on services thanks to free privacy and discounts on bulk transfers.
2013 is just around the corner and if you’re looking for ways to increase your efficiency next year, Above.com could be part of your answer. Oh and did I mention it’s free? Stay-tuned for my next update on this case study which should be out sometime in mid-Jan. If you’re interested you can join in the adventure and try Above.com for yourself.
As always I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to share any of your experience with Above or your trials and tribulations trying to manage multiple parking services manually. Comment and let your voice be heard!
