An email that was forwarded to us from a concerned party looks like this:

———————————————————–

Hello,

We are going to purchase your domain name.

Our company is in hosting and domain name business.

Please email us your desired price in USD or euros for the domain name in the subject line.

If you have other names for sale please email us your domains with prices.

Looking forward to doing business with you.

Regards,

Jerad Martensen

CEO

Domain Investing Inc
Domain Name Investing & Web Development

———————————————————–

The email comes from martensen@domaininvestshop.com.

Avoid this idiot like the plague.

Update: We were able to stop this individual from forwarding their domain to us for the time being using htaccess.

Another Update: Apparently this is an appraisal scam.  Don’t pay for an appraisal from this individual.

As you can see from the graph, when mini sites are doing well parking isn’t, and vice versa. I think Aron Meystedt’s prediction that “you’ll soon see that parking companies will offer more development services to supplement their parking business” is right on the money. When their parking arm is floundering, their mini site development arm will flourish, and will result in a much more steady flow of revenue. Parked.com already started the trend with the acquisition of WhyPark, we’ll see who follows suit.

LandSurveyors.com
Google: 3
Yahoo: Not in top 100
Bing: Not in top 100
AOL: 3

Comment: Ok, not too bad. This has 14,800 exact searches per month and 974,000 competing pages, so it has some competition. But that’s the first example posted which will obviously be the best, so let’s keep going.

PlasticSurgeonReviews.com
Google: Not in top 100
Yahoo: 7
Bing: Not in top 100
AOL: Not in top 100

Comment: Ranking well in Yahoo for a very long-tail term with only 480 exact searches per month and 178k competing pages, but nowhere to be found in the other search engines.

NouveauArchitecturalStyles.com
Google: Not in top 100
Yahoo: 33
Bing: Not in top 100
AOL: Not in top 100

Comment: This is about as long-tail and low competition as it gets… with search volume so low that Adwords doesn’t even have data on it, and 20,800 competing pages. Being on the third page of Yahoo and nowhere in the other search engines isn’t very impressive.

DubrovnikVacations.com
Google: 11
Yahoo: 33
Bing: 5
AOL: 8

Comment: Decent work on this one, he didn’t launch it that long ago and it is ranking pretty well across the board. But there’s only 170 exact searches per month and 47,600 competing pages, so it isn’t something that is hard to rank for.

ParabolicSkis.com
Google: 15
Yahoo: Not in top 100
Bing: 4
AOL: Not in top 100

Comment: Not exactly a high competition term with only 720 exact searches per month and 40,200 competing pages. Not on the first page of Google, and nowhere to be found in Yahoo or AOL.

BondRatings.com
Google: Not in top 100
Yahoo: Not in top 100
Bing: Not in top 100
AOL: Not in top 100

Comment: Seems like the search engines dislike this one across the board, even for the exact match. This one has more competition, with an exact search volume of 4,400 and 247,000 competing pages. Mike says his sites have the most content of all providers and that search engines love them, but I guess in some cases more isn’t always more.

GovernmentCareers.com
Google: Not in top 100
Yahoo: Not in top 100
Bing: Not in top 100
AOL: Not in top 100

Comment: Same deal as the one before, a little competition and the site can’t crack page 10 on any major search engine. 8,100 exact searches per month and 250,000 competing pages.

EasternCaribbean.com
Google: Not in top 100
Yahoo: 47
Bing: Not in top 100
AOL: Not in top 100

Comment: Another decent domain, but it doesn’t stand up to even moderate competition. This term has 2,400 exact searches per month and 1,350,000 competing pages. This one is on the fourth page of Yahoo, and nowhere to be found in other search engines. Not the results you would expect from an SEO expert.

Beachwear.com
Google: 10
Yahoo: 8
Bing: Not in top 100
AOL: 7

Comment: 33,100 exact searches per month and 2,450,000 competing pages. Much more competitive than any of Mike’s keywords, yet it ranks well despite our supposedly weak on-site SEO.

Motorsports.com
Google: 6
Yahoo: 1
Bing: 2
AOL: 2

Comment: There are 90,500 exact searches per month for this term, with 14,700,000 competing pages. That is major competition but the site we made stands among the best sites on the internet for the term in the eyes of the search engines.

Housekeeper.com
Google: 5
Yahoo: Not in top 100
Bing: 3
AOL: 4

Comment: 22,200 exact searches per month and 6,340,000 competing pages, yet 3 out of 4 of the top search engines deem our efforts good enough for strong placement on their first page of results.

Sitter.com
Google: 5
Yahoo: 3
Bing: 4
AOL: 4

Comment: All four major search engines think this is worthy of the above-the-fold, front page placement even though our SEO, according to Mike, leaves much to be desired. Odd, isn’t it? There are 8,100 exact searches and 20,500,000 competing pages, and the search engines see the site we made as being among the best.

I could go on all day with examples such as Wrenches.com, Bifocal.com, Bicycle.com, PetSitter.com, PaternityTest.com, MagicShops.com, etc., but I think it is pretty obvious that Mike Cohen is not the SEO expert he claims to be. His example sites, which he rarely shows to anyone without an email request being sent to him, are almost all failing in the search engines while he claims to be the best at SEO among all the mini site providers.

He also claims to have the best designs available, and said “That is why we offer 100% customization and none of the website’s we deploy will ever have the same exact look.” Look for yourself… seven of his eight example sites use the exact same theme, all of which are barely modified. How does he make a comment like that in the same post where he showcases a bunch of examples that all look the same? He must think we’re obtuse.

It is easy to see why his prices are so low with the quality of product he puts out. But would you rather pay $99 for a generic design that doesn’t stand up to the competition in the search engines, or $225 for a nice looking site that will get love from the search engines? That’s a pretty easy decision if you actually believe in your domain enough to make a real investment in it.

Bido is holding its first service auction on Wednesday, April 15th.  The concept of auctioning a service really interested us, so we were thrilled to get a call from Sahar asking us to sell our mini site development service from MiniSites.com in the first ever Bido service auction.

The auction will certainly be a win for everyone involved.  The winning bidder will get to purchase our service at a discount, Bido gets their commission, and we get more exposure for our service.  I expect to see a lot more auctions of this type coming out of Bido.

I will be participating in Bido’s chat room during the auction to answer questions about our product and company.

Following is a blurb from the auction description:

The winner of this auction will get a mini site created by MiniSites.com – their “Big Mini” site development service. A $350 value, the mini site comes with five pages of unique content written by a native English speaker, custom header design, text-based logo design, along with search engine optimization, targeted keyword research, advanced link building campaign, and an analysis of monetization options. Hosting is included at no extra charge.

Bido also recently debuted another really interesting feature: if the winning bid was made as a pre-bid before the start of the auction, the buyer gets 2% cash back.  This obviously encourages a lot of action even before the auction starts.

You can place your bid here.

However, I would prefer my name servers be branded and to show up as NS1.DNMEDIA.COM and NS2.DNMEDIA.COM.  It is a lot easier than you might think, you don’t even need to run your own name server software.  First, I need to figure out what IP addresses NS1385.HOSTGATOR.COM and NS1386.HOSTGATOR.COM point to.  I do this by opening up the command prompt in Windows ( Start >> Run >> Type in “cmd” >> Hit OK ).  Now I’m going to ping these two addresses by typing in “ping ns1385.hostgator.com” without the quotes and hitting enter, and it will tell me what the IP is.

In this case, the IP address of NS1385.HOSTGATOR.COM is 174.132.164.66, which I write down for later use.  Now I ping NS1386.HOSTGATOR.COM to get its IP, which is 174.132.164.67, and I write that down as well.  As you can see from the first screen shot, the domain name is registered with Godaddy, so I log in to my domain manager and click on DNMedia.com.  In the bottom left under “Host Summary” I click “add”.  Then I enter in “ns1″ without the quotes in the text box for “Host”, and the IP address of the first HostGator nameserver for “Host IP 1″ (174.132.164.66), and click OK.

Now I click “Add” again under “Host Summary”, enter “ns2″ for the “Host” and 174.132.164.67 for “Host IP 1″, and click OK.  The final step is to set the name servers of DNMedia.com to NS1.DNMEDIA.COM and NS2.DNMEDIA.COM.

There are a lot of other much more useful things you can do with this trick, but I think that requires a separate post.

PayPal, in cooperation with VeriSign, has released a security measure that, in addition to your user name and password, needs to be entered when you log in.  You have two options: a security key token, or a mobile phone security key.  The first option is an electronic device that attaches to your key ring.  When you are ready to log in to PayPal you press a button on this device and it generates a random six-digit security code, and a new code is generated every 30 seconds.  The second option is to have the random six-digit security code sent to your cell phone via text message when you log in.  Both options mean that even if a hacker breaks into your email and finds out your PayPal user name and password, he still can’t log in to your account and go on a shopping spree.

So how much does this cost?  The cell phone option is free other than your provider’s standard text messaging charges.  The token option is a one-time fee of $5 including shipping.  With the most expensive option being $5 and a free version available, you can’t afford not to add this layer of protection to your account.  Learn more at the hard-to-find link below:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/Marketing_CommandDriven/securitycenter/PayPalSecurityKey-outside

To understand how WHOIS works, you must first understand that there are two types of WHOIS models, “thick” and “thin”.  In the thick model, registrant information from all registrars is stored centrally, meaning in one location.  This model provides for consistent data in terms of both formatting and the fields presented, and is used by .org and a few ccTLDs.  In the thin model, registrant information is stored by the registrar the domain is managed by.  This model is used by most gTLDs such as .com, .net, .info, and by just about every ccTLD.  At this point you should be wondering: if the data isn’t stored in one location, how do you go about accessing it?

To access registrant information that is stored at the registrar level, you must first determine which registrar the domain is at and what the address of its WHOIS server is.  That is where CenterGate Research Group comes in.  They provide a free service at whois-servers.net that, when queried properly through software, will tell you the registrar, WHOIS server, name servers, creation/expiration date, and status.  The service listens on port 43 at ext.whois-servers.net where ext is the extension of the domain you are checking.  CRG does not limit or throttle the number of requests you can make, so keep that in mind for later.  A response for a thick-model query contains the registrant information.  A response for a thin-model query looks like this:

Domain Name: DNMEDIA.COM
Registrar: GODADDY.COM, INC.
Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com
Referral URL: http://registrar.godaddy.com
Name Server: NS1385.HOSTGATOR.COM
Name Server: NS1386.HOSTGATOR.COM
Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Status: clientRenewProhibited
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Updated Date: 23-jan-2009
Creation Date: 11-sep-2005
Expiration Date: 11-sep-2011

The line we care about is “Whois Server”.  We now know where we have to query to get the registrant information.  One more request and we’ve got our data.  Let’s stop for a moment and see what a response looks like from a thin query when a domain is not taken by someone else and is available to register (the response for thick query is “NOT FOUND”):

No match for "TSATWERASFSADF.com".

You’re probably wondering where I am going with this tangent.  One common question I see on the forums is how to do a bulk availability check.  When I say bulk, I’m not talking about 100 or 500, I’m talking about 10,000 or 50,000.  The script below presents you with a text area to paste domains, loops through querying whois-servers.net until all have been checked, and then displays the available ones.  This has two major advantages over checking availability at a registrar.  The first is obviously that you are not limited to 500 results.  The second is that you don’t have to worry about front-running, because the script is executing on your own server and you have complete control.  Nobody will be selling your searches, and thus I recommend using this script to check availability even if it isn’t in bulk.  If you’re scanning a big list, you need to make sure the max execution time for scripts on your server is set to 0 (zero) so it doesn’t time out.

http://www.dnmedia.com/bulk_availability.php

That’s pretty useful, but the real power comes when we do the second query, the one to the actual WHOIS server holding the data.

Let’s say you have a domain name that you’re trying to sell to an end user… you’re probably going to end up sending 50-100 emails.  Having to check the WHOIS for each end user’s domain is really time consuming.  If your WHOIS source displays the email in plain text for you to copy/paste, they usually have a CAPTCHA to slow you down.  Otherwise, like DomainTools, they will usually display the email in an image and you can’t copy it.  Regardless, doing all of those WHOIS queries one at a time just plain sucks.  Well, with the following script you can paste the list of domains you want to email a pitch to, and it will output a list of their email addresses in CSV Format.

http://dnmedia.com/bulk_whois.php

TIP: Enter keywords for the domain you are trying to sell at DomainTools.com Domain Search and it will give you a list of domains that are related to your keywords.   You can use this to find prospects in addition to standard methods such as checking who is bidding in Adwords, who shows up in search engine results, etc.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: It is against the TOS of all registries and registrars to query the WHOIS database for mass, indescriminate, emailings.  Only use the bulk WHOIS script once you have narrowed down your prospect list, and send out a personalized email to each company.  Do not abuse this script… and remember, I’m not responsible for what you do with it.  Spamming can get you slammed with some very heavy fines, so use your best judgement.

I hope you enjoyed this article, and if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask.

Screenshot of the new feature is below:

Step 1: Register a keyword with TextMarks.com.
TextMarks allows you to register a keyword for their short code, 41411, and allows you to have a custom script receive the data. I’ll be using “txtreg” for this example, but there are plenty of other good ones available. Just pick something you’ll remember in the heat of registration.

When you go to the site, click the “Create” tab at the top. Pick your unique keyword, in my case I’m doing “txtreg”. In the second part of the form, select the radio button next to “Respond to a keyword with text from a web page”. In the URL text field, put “http://www.yourdomain.com/regg.php?user=\p&req=\0″. That’s a zero on the end, not the letter O. Replace yourdomain.com with the domain name you will be uploading the processing script to. Now click the “CREATE” button.

The next step will ask you to create an account at TextMarks. You’ll enter your phone number, user name, and email address. Make sure the phone number is valid, as they’ll send your temporary password to your cell phone so you can log in. Once you’re done with that, you’re ready for Step 2.

Step 2: Modify and upload the processing script.
Go to http://dnmedia.com/regg.php to view the script. Copy and paste everything into Notepad or a similar text editor, and save the file as “regg.php”. Now in the script, modify the following:

• Change $dynadotUser to be your Dynadot user name. If your user name is Domainer123, that line should read: $dynadotUser = “Domainer123″;
• Change $dynadotPass to your Dynadot password. If your password is 12345, that line should read: $dynadotPass = “12345″;
• Change $phone to your cell phone number that you want to be able to use this script from. It will only work from the number you specify. Also, you must put your country code in front of the number. If your phone number is 555-555-5555 and you are in the U.S. (country code is “1″), the line should read: $phone = “15555555555″;
• Change $pass to be a short password you will send in the text message. This is for added security. If your password for the app is 597, that line should read: $pass = “597″;

Now save the script again, and upload it to the server you specified when you set up the short code keyword in Step 1.

Step 3: Register some domains like a pro… through text messaging.
OK, so to recap, the short code is 41411, the example keyword is “txtreg”, and the example short pass is 597. All you have to do is send the following text message to 41411:

txtreg Domain.ext 597

The script will shoot you back one of three messages: “The domain was registered.”, “The domain was not available.”, or “You are not authorized to access this application.” The first two are self-explanatory. If you receive the third message, you are either trying to access the service from a phone that you didn’t register in the script (or you entered the number incorrectly in the script), or you entered the wrong password in the text message.

This script supports the following TLDs: com, net, org, info, biz, mobi, tv, co.uk, asia, me, name, ws, us, cn, cc

If you have any questions feel free to shoot me an email and I’ll help you out. Enjoy!