Don’t get sucked in!

This is the email I got, or one of many I get on a monthly basis.

DOMAIN LISTING SERVICES

8171 Yonge St. Suite# 149

Thornhill, ON L3T 2C6

Canada          

________________________________

 

FINAL NOTICE

________________________________

 

(Please make necessary changes)

ATT: XXXX

ADMINISTRATIVE CONTACT

XXXXX

 

www.ozphone.com

 

 

DESCRIPTION OF SERVICES:

Premium Package

 

 

 

 

ANNUAL WEBSITE SEARCH ENGINE SUBMISSION

FROM SEPTEMBER 1,2008 THRU SEPTEMBER 1,2018 OR FROM SEPTEMBER 1,2008 THRU SEPTEMBER 1,2013

 

TOTAL

 

$295.00

 

$185.00

 

 

SUBSCRIPTION INCLUDES:

 

 

 

 

*     Custom keyword research

*     Optimized title and meta tags

*     Submission to 900 search engines and directories

*     safe follow-up re-submissions every 3 months

*     Helpful professional support

 

     

 

THIS IS NOT A BILL. This is a solicitation. You are under no obligation to pay the amount(s) stated unless you accept this offer.

 

________________________________

 

Domain Name

 

www.ozphone.com   Amount

 

      Requested Reply

 

August 11th,2008 

 

THIS NOTICE IS A SOLICITATION AND A RECEIPT OF PAYMENT WILL CONFIRM YOUR ANNUAL SUBMISSION *100% SATISFACTION IS GUARANTEED OR YOUR MONEY BACK

 

Please select the number of years you would like to signup for [ ] 10 Years ………. $295 (Best Value, Most Recommended!)

[ ]   5 Years ………. $185

[ ]   2 Years ………. $99

[ ]   1 Years ………. $75 

If you have other domains you may list them below (please send a separate check for each domain and write your domain name on the memo section of the check) Other domain(s) __________________ , __________________ , __________________

 

 

Total $ _______

 

 

________________________________

Signature

 

________________________________

Date

 

 

Payment by Check or Money Order

Print and mail a copy of this order form along with a check or money order to the address listed below:

Domain Listing Services

8171 Yonge St. Suite# 149

Thornhill, ON L3T 2C6

Canada

 

Please do not forget to include a copy of this order form with your payment!

 

Payment by Credit Card

If you wish to make a payment by credit card, just fill out the information below and fax this order form to (718)208-4213 OR you may mail it to us to the address provided above.

Name:

E-mail address (please print clearly):

Phone:     

 

 

www.ozphone.com

 

________________________________

 

By accepting this offer, you agree not to hold DLC liable for any part. Note that THIS IS NOT A BILL. This is a solicitation.

You are under no obligation to pay the amounts stated unless you accept this offer. The information in this letter contains confidential and/or legally privileged information from the notification processing department of the Domain Listing Services Inc.

 

This information is intended only for the use of the individual(s) named above. Email domainlistingservices@hotmail.com if you do not want to receive further updates from DLC.

If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that disclosure, copying, distribution or the taking of any action in reliance on the contents for this letter is strictly prohibited.

 

* 100% satisfaction guaranteed, you may request a refund within 30 days if your are not satisfied with our services.

This email is just a scam, I will post more as I get them.

You could call them cybersquatters … well most of them are, but they prefer to call themselves “Domainers” or “Domain Investors”

I upset a few Domainers at Namepros when I mentioned the term “cyber squatters” in that blog post.

So I decided to write this blog post on the difference between cybersquatters and domain investors.

Cybersquatters

Cybersquatting is carried out when a person registers a domain name in bad faith for which that domain name may be associated with a registered Trademark or the Domain Name represents a famous subject, person or product which may confuse people when visiting the domain name or website.

These domain names are only registered by people for the pure aim of profit.

Cybersquatting is also associated with the term ”Typosquatting” or a domain name is known as a typo this is where Domain Names which are usually registered in bad faith containing spelling errors. Internet users browsing the Internet will accidentally type the domain name incorrectly into their browser bar expecting that they will go to a companies website, and then be misdirected to the misspelling of the companies domain name and visit a website which may or may not be confusingly similar or offer items, whether they be e-products or hard products for sale in competition to where the visitor intended to go. Therefore the “typo squatter” will hope that the person who misspelled the companies domain name, may either buy a product or click on an advertisement for a quick commission.
I would like to state that not all people who invest in Domain Names are cybersquatters or typo squatters, and not their is only a very small percentage of domain names registered are associated with Trademarks or famous items, objects, people and so forth, and the risk of a lawsuit is very small.

In regards to Domain Name investors registering misspelled Domain Names I would like to give you 3 examples on how valuable a misspelled Domain Name can be worth.

Well I am sure you’ve all heard of the very popular website called Download.com … well look at the following amazing misspelled Domain Name Sales, I have retrieved from DNJournal for you:

Misspelled Domain Price Year
Downlaod.com $26,667 2004
Donwload.com $26,667 2004
Dawnload.com $26,667 2004

Why so much for a misspelled domain name you may ask? Well as I mentioned above, it is only natural for people to make mistakes when typing on their computers in the browser bar, some people just do not how to spell, so they guess, some people may not be from an English speaking country, so once again they guess, or think it is correct, and some may be just little kids.

Speaking of little kids, there was a very famous case of the Domainer John Zuccariniwho was actually jailed for over 2 years and fined over one million dollars for registering misspellings of Disney Domain Namesand pointing the domain names to pornographic websites. Can you imagine that? What person in his right mind would be that stupid to redirect his illegal Disney Domain Names to pornographic websites, knowing that most of the visits to the misspelled domain names would be children. As far as I am concerned he deserved a sentence a lot longer that 2 years.

Companies who feel that people have registered domain names which may be confusingly similar or are associated to their Trademark or business do have a right to challenge who they may believe are cybersquatters for the legal right to “their” domain name.

They can lauch legal action through the World Interllectual Property Organisation(Wipo) via the Domain Name Dispute Resolution

Search WIPO Cases and WIPO Panel Decisions

So, hopefully the above may explain in my own terms what a cybersquatter is.

Domain Name Investors

Domain Name investors are ordinary people like myself who register Domain Names as an investment, similar to that of buying shares on the share market.

But in my opinion, I believe that in the long run Domain Name investing pays far more that what the share market does.

Domain Name investing is like a hidden underground market that I would say 95% of the worlds population would not know about. I found out about Domain Names in the year 2000, just after the dotcom bubble burst its banks, I remember one day soon after getting my first computer, I was extremely bored and was searching the internet on tips on how to make money.

I cant remember the exact keywords I used for the search but I remember my search taking me to Afternic and it was there I saw many domain names being sold for thousands of dollars, and much more.

But I remember another website which listed the highest selling domain names on record at the time, like altavista.com, autos.com, wallstreet.com, wine.com and from there it was the start of a new adventure in making easy and hard money.

I was a domain name newbie and I did not listen to advice and as a Domain Newbie usually does he or she just goes and registers a lot of domain names thinking they will make themselves an easy million dollars!

But it was not as easy as that, I registered a lot of names, and 99% of those names were absolutely ridiculous.. some I remember were winetodaytonight.com, wowdots.com, ozemarketing.com and many others I cannot remember or refuse to mention due to the embarrasment it may cause.

It took me over twelve months to make my first sale after spending a small fortune on my little portfolio, I remember the day, I was so happy to have made a sale finally, the domain name I sold was tiesrus.com (ties r us) for the price of $500USD not bad for an original registration fee of around $15 for the name.

That was a profit of $475 from a $15 investment, better than the sharemarket, but then again I still had to pay ongoing registration fees for the rest of my domain names… so I suppose with that portfolio at the time I would have broken even or maybe even lost out.

But thats just part of the domaining game, you need to take risks and to use speculation.

An example of where I have used speculation and taken a risk is when Saddam Hussein was captured, I was watching CNN and I saw the headlines about the Americans having just caught him, so luckily I was on the net and I quickly registered the domains, HusseinTrial.com and SaddamHusseinTrial.com, it paid off, later in the year I sold HusseinTrial.com for a nice price… but not SaddamHusseinTrial.com, so I evently dropped that name.

In anycase the sale of HusseinTrial.com paid for all of my domain name portfolio at least twice over and I either invested the money in other domains or put the money to good use.

Domain Name investors invest in Domain Names purely to make money from potentional end users who could use the Domains to develop sites with as part of their business, we hope for a big sale in the thousands and more, but usually those big sales are rare and we end up selling our names in the $xx - $xxx figures.

There are also domain name investors who register many domains and “Flip-Sell” them for small profits, but when you “Flip-Sell” many domains over a small period of time, the profits can be very high.

There are many types of Domain Name investors who specialize in all forms of Domain Names such as LLLL.com, .com, .net, .org, .mobi, Numerical Domains, Hyphenated-Domains, keyword domain names, casino domain names, poker related domain names, medical domain names and so much more.

I wont say how much I have made from my Domain Name investing, but I believe it has definately paid off, it has saved my financial ass a few times, like when I need money, I can sell a domain name I own, or strangely enough when I financial crisis does arise, suddenly I will get a offer for one of my domain names.

There are so many lessons to learn when it comes to Domain Name investing, and I would say the biggest lesson to learn is not to be too greedy! I have lost two potential good domain sales thanks to my greed, one for example was when I got an offer of $3000 for a domain name I still own, I countered offered $500 and the potential seller cancelled all negotiations through Sedo Brokers, at the time I really needed the money and was so pissed off at my greed and stupidity. For a name that only cost me $10 on registration, for an extra $500 it was not worth the risk!

So I am a Domain Name investor, although I wont deny I have had one letter threatening a lawsuit over a domain name I once held when I was a newbie, the domain name was Olympic orientated and a stupid sound domain, yet I got an email from a lawyer representing the International Olympic Committee… I was scared, but when I look back now it was pretty funny and a lesson learned!

Oh by the way back to the misspelled domain names, remember Download.com misspellings? … one year later … look below at the increase in value, they sold again!

Misspelled Domain Price Year
Downlaod.com $68,000 2005
Donwload.com $68,000 2005
Dawnload.com $68,000 2005

This was my question

Parking Versus Mini Sites

About three weeks ago I came across a thread on Mini Sites and I decided that I would turn all my parked names into Mini Sites.

My names were not really earning much at the sedo parking program, so three weeks later I have around 160 developed mini sites with another 30 to develop. I have noticed that my revenue has increased four fold.

Any other domainers out there who have turned their names into mini sites rather than relying on domain name parking?

If so please show us your Mini Sites and let us know if your income has increased from developing Mini Sites.

Here are a few of mine using the Niche Store program

AFL Gear, V8 Motors, Backpacks, Motocross

Well it has been around 5 weeks since I first experimenting using BANS Sites / Mini Sites rather than using Domain Name Parking at Sedo.com, it seems to be paying off slowly, but reassuringly.

I am pretty impressed so far, my adsense earnings are slowly creeping up with the help of buying  Joel Comm’s Adsense Secrets

My earnings are on a par to that of what I was earning when parking, but it is only a few weeks since I started using BANS and once Google Spiders go through all my sites properly I expect that the adsense earnings will only increase.

However I would like to that that using the BANS program you have double the chance of making money, and that is with Ebay Partner Network.

I am using two forms of making money with Ebay Affiliates, the first one is via RSS Feeds on a few of my forums and the other is on my BANS Mini Sites

With the RSS Feeds and the Mini Sites Ebay Auction Ads, if people click on the Auction links, this is how it works:

1. Affiliate Commissions For Purchases

The eBay tracking cookie for purchases lasts for 7 days which means as soon as someone clicks on a product link in your store and is directed to eBay they are tracked with your affiliate id for a period of 7 days.

If they buy anything from eBay within that time period (ie not just those items listed in your store or that they clicked on) you earn between 20% and 75% of the revenue that eBay makes from the sale.

These percentage differences are attributable to variations in the four eBay affiliate programs and the amount of sale activity that you are generating (see below).

2. Affiliate Commissions For New Active eBay Members

The eBay tracking cookie for new active member referrals lasts for 30 days.

As with purchases, a visitor is tracked with your affiliate cookie as soon as they click on one of the eBay product links in your store.

If they then register as an eBay member and either make a bid or purchase an item within the 30 day period you earn a new member bonus of between $25 and $35 (see below for country specific member bonuses).

So since I have been using the Mini Sites and Bans, in the last 3 weeks I have made $154 which is fantastic.

I highly recommend to anyone who is currently parking their domain names to check out Build a Niche Store rather than relying on parking your domain names.

Goodluck Guys!

To do this type into Google “site:www.yourdomainname.com” This query will show every page that Google has indexed in there system. If your query comes back with No results and you have been listed in the past then there is a good chance you are banned.

How did it happen? There can be many different reasons your site may be banned.
- You may have over optimised your webpage’s.
- You may have adopted a technique that Google frowns on.
- You may have joined a link farm and placed a link on your web site to a link farm or other bad neighbourhood.
- You may have used a program such as webmaster gold that submits your web site over and over again to Google, they see this sort of activity as wasting their resources.
- You may have adopted a cloaking technique; this is where you show the search engines different content to the content that you show to human visitors.
- You may have copied content from another website and been penalised for having duplicate content on your site.

Source: Its Cold Outside

Being banned from Google can kill your Adsense Earnings!

This can cause alot of misery to the business owner or the company and could lead to you, your business or the company to losing one of their most precious assets … yes that asset is their domain name.

If your domain name is a developed website for your business and it is your main source of income, losing your domain would be devasting.

Can you just imagine this scenario? ( Yes a silly scenario, but just read it anyhow)

You own yourbusiness.com and it is a very succesful online website which specializes in delivering e-products to customers all over the world, your orders amass a daily delivery of 100 or more orders on a daily basis, bringing in a total of say for example $7500 per week.

Your loving this income stream and provides you with enough income to enable you to work from home and you don’t have to worry about finding a boring 9 to 5 job.

You decide that it is time for a vacation, work is just too busy, so you think you need a break to re-evaluate your business goals and maybe it is time to employee some other people to extend and improve your business.

You’ve booked your Holiday to a remote part of Borneo to go and see the Orangutuans, and you have made a promise to your wife that you will not touch the internet on your four week vacation, because she is sick of you spending 18 hours a day on the internet processing orders and answering emails.

So you make the promise, and prior to leaving you send an email to all of your clients informing them of your vacation and put an announcement on your site saying that you have closed your Online Shop for a few weeks, because your going on vacation.

Before you leave you check your site is update, but in a rush you don’t even consider checking your domain name information, because it is pointing correctly to your site.

You and your wife take off to the wilds of Borneo, see the Orangutuans and all of the beautiful wildlife, you climb Mount Kinabulu, living with the Headhunters for a week or two in the deep dark depths of the Jungles, of Borneo, make love under rushing waterfalls and renew your relationship and love for your wife again, totally forget your business back home and have the time off your life.

Unfortunately the time arrives for you to head back home to your busy and booming online business, you make a promise to your wife that you will employ a couple of people to help you with the business, because it is getting that busy, you cannot keep up.

On your arrival back home, your jet-lagged, your wife ges to bed to recover from the long flight home, finally you can get back on the internet to check on your site, you make a coffee and check your emails, and their are reminder emails informing you that your Domain Name is going to expire and you have failed to enable “Automatic Domain Name Renewal” those Emails were received just under four weeks ago!

Your stomach starts to get those funny butterfly feelings, but you just reassure yourself that everything will be fine, you’ll just go and update your details and pay for your Domain Names renewal for the next two years.

So you decide to check your Domain Name Account, you log in and your heart starts to beat a million miles an hour, you feel sick … your domain name has disappeared from your account!

Your domain name  has expired, and you did not even know that it was due to expire soon after leaving for your vacation to Borneo. You start to panic, your write to your Domain Name provider asking them to get it back for you, but unfortunately their reply is not good news.

The name is gone, not gone forever, but you have basically lost your name, your source of income, your customers, your business…. all in an instant!

This is just an example of what could easily happen if you do not keep your Domain Name accounts up to date on a regular basis.

Believe it or not, even though it is a silly scenario, these scenarios do happen on a daily basis, not just to a few unlucky people, but to thousands of businesses on a weekly or if not daily basis.

So how else can I lose my Domain Name?

1. Incorrect Email Address on Registration
2. Correct Email Address on Registration, but you delete that email address down the track and forget to update your domain name account with your new email address.
3. You choose not to Auto-Renew Your Domain name either by mistake or you choose not to because you think you will remember
4. Your credit card details change and you forget to update your credit card details
5. You go on a holiday without checking your emails
6. Your Auto Reminder email goes to your Spam Box in your email folder and you delete it without relising.
7. You Die without letting anyone know your account details!

Thats just an example of how you could lose your domain name and I am sure their are hundreds more ways!

Dying is just a joke, but I am sure it does happen to many people and they lose their domain names! LOL.

Anyhow back to that first scenario of losing your domain name.

Can you get it back?

Well yes there is a way of getting your domain name back, but getting it back may cost you a small fortune or hopefully in your case you may get it back at the cost of a domain name registration

The costly way of getting your domain name back is to sign up to as many Expired Domain Name companies as possible.

Some Examples of websites which specialise in catching expiring domain names are as follows:

Pool.com
NameJet.com
SnapNames.com

As I mention just above that it may be costly for you to get your domain name back, well thats when the Expiring Domain Name Auctions comes into place.

What happens is when Domain Names Expire they go into a pool and Expiring Domain Name Companies catch these domain names for Domainers who wish to invest in these domain names, or hope that if they are good domain names with good Page Rank, that the previous owners (like you) may wish to buy their domain names back off you.

You could call them cybersquatters … well most of them are, but they prefer to call themselves “Domainers” or “Domain Investors”

Domain Name investing is a multi billion dollar market which most people have never heard of, but thats another story I will go into at a later date.

Anyhow you sign up to these Expiring Domain Name companies and reserve your old domain name back.

For examples sake, your Domain Name had a page rank of PR5 and the website was hugely popular with thousands of backlinks and over a hundred thousand listings in search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

Finally your name drops and it goes into an auction, the auction starts of at $59 dollars, you make a bid of $200 thinking that you will easily get your name back … then a few hours later it goes to $2000, so knowing it is your business at stake, you bid $4000, then you watch frantically the auction come to an end, with minutes to spare. You click refresh, still at $4000, yes you got your name back … a minute left, click refresh and your stomach turns, some bid $4500.

Minutes later you receive an email informing you that your auction bid was unsuccesful, you lost your domain name to someone on the other side of the world.

Weeks later, you see your Domain Name parked at Sedo.com with a buy now price of $20,000.

Your out of work, your lost your domain name, your business, your livelyhood.

I could go on, but just think about that scenario, please make sure you keep your domain name account up to date, your password secure, don’t lose your domain name like thousands of others do on a daily basis.

Whether you be a small business owner or a large business owner, in today’s online market, it is imperative that your business also has an online presence whether it be a simple professional one to ten page website or a fully operational online business where customers can buy goods on your site via a credit card merchant check out system.

The main thing to be quite successful with your online presence is to have a good domain name which is relevant to your business. This domain name must be short, easy to remember and easy to type into the computer browser bar.

I am amazed that many Australian businesses only register the .com.au version of their business name (YourBusiness.com.au) and do not worry about also registering the .com version of their business (YourBusiness.com)

If you do not own both the .com and .com.au versions, it can be quite devastating in financial terms as you will highly likely lose potential customers and clients when running your own online presence, because the .com domain name is used globally where as the .com.au domain is only used in the Australian market.

An example of this is the Australian Football League owns AFL.com.au but unfortunately for them they do not own the domain name AFL.com, so they would be losing tens of thousands of visitor’s and potential financial revenue per day.

They lose potential revenue, visitors and clients because most Internet browsers will only enter the .com version and most of the time they have forgotten to enter the .au at the end of the .com and when it redirects to a webpage which is usually totally irrelevant to your business, or is another business selling the same product, then that’s when you will lose customers and revenue.

When this simple mistake made by the visitor or customer they will likely think that your website is closed or offline, or they will be simply be to lazy to try again and then that’s when you start to lose potential sales and customers.

I have been very familiar with domain names since the year 1999 and I have advised many business owners to ensure that they not only register their .com.au but to also register the .com versions of their domain names, some of who could have registered their .com versions of their business names when I advised them to, but decided not to and now someone else has registered the domain name and these business owners now regret their decision not to.

The owner of AFL.com would possibly be making thousands of dollars per day from people accidentally typing AFL.com instead of AFL.com.au, the owner makes money by people clicking on the advertisements on his one page website.

The same goes for registering your .com.au, I run a website called www.BeautUtes.com and unfortunately I do not own www.BeautUtes.com.au so my website loses potential revenue, new members, visitors and revenue, they enter BeautUtes.com.au and go to a blank page.

Did you know that there are tens of thousands of domain name investors who invest their money in domain names only, these people are usually the people whom are called “Domain Investors” familiarly know as Cybersqatters they seek out website owners who have not registered the .com version of their business name or need a good domain name to get their business presence online. Some successful domain investors make millions of dollars per year from the business practice, some call it illegal, but for the money to be made, some domain name investors do not care unless they are faced with legal action. See http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/ or http://www.icann.org/udrp/udrpdec.htm for recent domain name dispute cases.

Some domain names sell for millions of dollars, just for the domain name only, these people originally registered their domain names for $10, now they are selling from any between hundreds of dollars to millions of dollars.

Some say domain name investing is better that share market investing. The returns on a good domain name sale can be massive.

An excellent example of recent big domain name sales is the weekly published report on high dollar domain name sales site www.dnjournal.com There is also other websites which specialise in domain name sales and auctions which are www.sedo.com www.afternic.com www.greatdomains.com or www.buydomains.com there are many others. It is fascinating.
If you would like to register your domain names, I highly recommend the following websites, www.enom.com, www.godaddy.com, www.comscout.com or www.namescout.com there are many others, just shop around for a good price.

A good price for registering a .com domain name is around $10 per year and registering a .com.au domain name is about $25 per year. Don’t get ripped off!

If anyone would like to email me any questions regarding this article, I am happy to answer their questions or give advice to business owners and wannabe internet entrepreneurs free of charge.

It really is true, the internet is a global marketplace to the world and there is alot of money to be made off the internet.

The photo above is of the guy who owns the website http://www.Shoemoney.com  and the photo is of him and a cheque from Google Adsense … a whopping $132,994.97 US Dollars just for one months work on the internet.

As he says:

“This was the biggest paper check I have ever recieved. It was way back in August of 2005. 100% of this income was earned with organic seo. I had not heard of search engine arbitrage at the time and did not buy traffic from MSN Yahoo or Google itself. I did that about 1.5 years later ;)”

Did you know there are young teenagers earning tens of thousands of dollars per month from such companies like Google, Adbrite, Azoogle and so forth.

Here are some people who make big dollars off the internet from their websites.

Hopefully this may give you some inspiration to take the risk also and start your own websites.

1: Markus Frind: PlentyOfFish.com - $300,000 per month

2: Kevin Rose: Digg.com - $250,000 per month

3: Jeremy Schoemaker - $140,000 per month (See Photo Above)

4: Jason Calacanis: Weblogs, Inc. - $120,000 per month

5: David Miles Jr. & Kato Leonard - $100,000 per month

6: Tim Carter: AskTheBuilder.com - $30,000 per month

7: Joel Comm - $24,000 per month

8: Shawn Hogan – DigitalPoint.com $10,000 per month

And the young girl who owns http://www.whateverlife.com her name is Ashbo and she is only 18 years old and she makes over $7000 US Dollars per month from her website WhatEverLife.com see her MySpace Site here: http://www.myspace.com/ashbo

The above examples are of everyday people who have struck it rich from being motivated and dedicated to making money from the internet.

And it is not really that hard, as I say, all you need is the motivation, dedication and self discipline to take the risk and create a nice website with plenty of content, a site which is a little unique, a site which is crisp, clean and easy to navigate around.

Its not going to happen overnight, but I am sure eventually it will pay off.

I run around 7 websites, I don’t make that much money from Google Adsense, but it is enough to pay half my mortgage per month, and my earnings are growing on a monthly basis.
If I am still alive when I become an aged pensioner, I reckon that I will live quiet comfortably on my pension and the side income I earn of the internet.

So, hopefully this article will give you some inspiration to maybe do the same, take the risk, learn about the internet, make money from home, its as easy as someone clicking on those google ads!

Cheers

William