Weekend Musings and Why I Can’t Stop Talking About .COM

It is an absolutely beautiful Saturday in Los Angeles, summer is definitely here in full force. My Dad is visiting for the weekend and I had a chance to enjoy a nice family dinner with him, my aunt, my cousin, and of course Daina – it was really nice to all be together. I’m not sure what it is about Saturday but I get particularly reflective, guess that’s why it’s the perfect day for my weekend musings post.

  • My first reflection has nothing to do with Domaining, Startups, or Business, it just has to do with appreciating life. I was sitting at the dinner table last night after a particularly intense week and I thought, wow – this feels really good. I think it can be easy for all of us to get caught-up in the intensity of all we are trying to accomplish, especially as my business has become more successful I have become busier than I ever have in my life. I love every minute of it but it’s also important to take a step-back, look at your life, and realize just how lucky you are. I had that feeling last night and it didn’t have anything to do with great revenue or closing an incredible deal, it was just about the people who I was with at that time…never lose that!
  • Okay, now onto the geeky stuff. I flipped two .COM domains last week both purchased in the $xxx range and sold in the $x,xxx range. Call me crazy for not realizing it sooner but damn life is better now that I’m focusing on .COM. Yes, I know, I can’t stop talking about .COM but there really is a huge difference when it comes to selling domains. On the monetization-front I’m finding they rank and monetize just like my .US, .NET, and .ORG names…except I know that when I want to sell them I’ll get top-dollar because, well, it’s a .COM!
  • Setting-up my Rackspace Cloud has been a lot of fun, and a lot of work. Rather than outsourcing this I’ve decided to do it myself because it’s something I really want to master. After setting-up Apache, MySQL, and PHP I decided to scrap my super-tweaked custom-linux install and go with cPanel. Who knew that CPanel took over two hours for the installation software to run! Now I am configuring cPanel and by next week I’ll have a much more manageable cloud server. It wasn’t easy to get to this point but I’m really glad I know how to do this.
  • I’m debating between forwarding my available names to a sales page where people can put-in offers vs. mass developing using Epik. I went through DevRich with a good friend of mine yesterday who it’s working well for. He’s getting some names ranked for pretty competitive terms. I’m not looking at this to generate revenue but instead to get more offers on names through people finding them through search. Any feedback from people who have used DevRich in the past would be great – just to be clear I’m not talking about monetizing, I’m just talking about getting indexed and getting my domain in front of more potential buyers, I’m still focused on building-out brands with my team and using my own designs when it comes to generating revenue.
  • One of my debt .COM sites made it to the first page of Google last week for a few very competitive debt terms. Good content goes a long way and Social Media was the key to exposing more people to that content. According to Google Webmaster Tools by page impressions have gone up by infinity, that may be a bit of an exaggeration but yes it made a major impact on my traffic.
  • Sierra Nevada is my new favorite beer. Yes, I am a wine guy but that doesn’t mean I don’t like beer. Bristol Farms has had a sale on 12-packs of Sierra Nevada for the last couple of months so this has been my beer of choice, I used to just like it, now, probably through repetition it is at the top of my list…for those interested, it unseated my long-standing favorite, New Castle.

As usual I could go on for another ten or twenty bullet points but come on – it’s the weekend, so stop reading blogs and get outside. Oh, one last thing, if you haven’t had the chance to pre-order Eric Ries’s upcoming book The Lean Startup I highly recommend it. I was able to get an early release at the Startup Lessons Learned conference and it is so far the best business book I’ve ever read in my life, period. Okay, now you really have to stop reading, and have a beer, may I suggest a Sierra Nevada 🙂

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton