Weekend Musings – Wine Country Here We Come!

Well another week of 2011 has flown by and as usual we’re getting ready to leave for another beautiful weekend in Santa Barbara wine country. This trip is a nice mix of business and pleasure as we’ll be looking at potential venues for our wedding, and meeting and interviewing wine makers for our wine blog. I know most people don’t like to get up at 8:00AM on a Saturday but for us, driving along the California coast and into paradise is just about as good as it gets!

wine_country

Since we’re literally on our way out the door I’m going to keep these musings short and sweet.

  • One of the biggest highlights of my week was recovering a domain for a clients we’ve been working with at DomainTheft.org. It took a couple of weeks but on Friday I received a very elated call from the original domain owner – the domain had been recovered. We spent about 30 minutes on the phone talking about the recovery and the owner will be writing a guest post on our up and coming DomainTheft.org blog launching later this month. At that time you’ll get to hear directly from the owner about the theft and how we helped him get the name back. It’s a great feeling to help someone out, especially when we’re doing it completely for free – leaves me with a nice warm glow going into the weekend (and no I haven’t had any wine yet!).
  • I sold three domains to end-users this week with one more sale that hopefully will come through early next week. Still working-out if I can share the details of each of these sales, as always if I can I absolutely will. I can tell you that every single domain I sold to an end-user was a .COM, and one was actually hand-registered on Monday of last week!
  • We’re working behind-the-scenes on a number of exciting development projects that I’ll be announcing over the coming weeks. We are averaging around 3 sites/month however I don’t spend any time on these, my focus is on our major brands like Kayaking.org. While I agree that mini-sites aren’t a great way to make money, I still build plenty of them – they are the best platform to build a brand on. Most of our mini-sites rank for over 100 different terms, this means that when we launch a full-scale brand and business on the domain we already have a nice stream of traffic and partners within the niche.
  • CivilizedTravel.net reached a nice milestone this week passing 1,600 fans! Bimmer.co is also seeing some great traction on Facebook as well with 700 fans and more coming each week! Social Media is such a critical part of building a brand online and while so many people put their focus on Twitter, Facebook Fan pages are not to be forgotten. This is just another great channel to share content and interact with fans.
  • Seeing snow next week! It’s been sunny and beautiful in California but I’ll be leaving our sunshine paradise for a week in chilly Boston. It’s going to be an action-packed couple of days with wine tasting this weekend and then onto a plane first thing Monday morning. Never a dull moment!

I hope you all had a great week and are ready to enjoy a nice relaxing weekend. As always I’d love to hear from you – feel free to share your own weekend musings in the comment section below!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton