Things have been a little slow for me between developing on a couple of my new domain purchases so this has taken some time away from my normal "digging" to come up with stories to write but here are some things that grabbed my eye and thought you may find interesting.

MSN.com called Zappos Tony Hsieh "Dot-Com Star"?

I’m not so sure the Zappo’s founder is a "Dot-Com Star" because so many more domain investors are really the stars! Tony may be a Shoe Star but Kevin Ham, Rich Schwartz, Michael Berkins, National A-1, Frank Schilling, Adam Dicker, Larry Fischer are some Dot-Com STARS that I can think of off hand.

Pitchmen TV Show Airing Thursday

Last season of the TV show Pitchmen brought a TON of traffic to the web! Pitchmen shows behind the scenes of finding a new product from hopeful inventors, testing the product and being able to produce it cheap, making a commercial and selling it with the infomercial. In the past, the phone number was the important and only way these products were sold but not any more with the popularity of the web! Minisites are created and domains are used, as well as affiliate marketing. Even with one of the stars passing away (Billy Mays), his partner and pitchmen Sully is back at it for another season on the Discovery channel.

If things stay the same from last year, the products covered during the show will be in the top 5 of Google Trends the day after airing due to the vast amounts of people searching for the products. I did some digging and found several of the products (and the affiliate programs to go with them) that the show will be airing the first couple of shows.

Just an FYI, you will likely see several posts from time to time about these products, the domain names used and what I thought of the show. So far, only one product uses the exact match domain name. The rest include "my" and "buy" in the domains. I’m still waiting to get approved for several of the affiliate programs so I hope to get approved today for those. It sucks having to sign up for so many but like I said, the traffic was huge last year and people actually buy the stuff! This equal affiliate commissions if I do my work correctly.

Basically, the show becomes an hour long infomercial for the products and many adventure to the web to buy! It is an interesting show and fun to see them do their work and the amount of people and different searches done online in return!

Detective Work

I was just digging around the other day into the domain name FuelProgress.com which is owned by Exxon Mobil. They are using the domain name in some TV advertising and that is how I came to see the domain. Over a 3 year period, the same person owned the domain name.. but his "company name" changed three times? I found that a bit odd and interesting all at the same time. Then on 5/21/10 the domain name changed to Kerrico Names Inc. who is a domain name buyer for companies. By the 24th, the whois showed Exxon Mobil.

So if you happen to have KNI (Kerrico Names Inc) contact you about a domain, they are very likely buying for a big company! I’m not sure of the email address they use for contact but you can checkout whois data on Kerrico.com to have an idea because it’s a gmail address. TennPenny Group Inc. is another "secret" domain name buyer for large companies. Microsoft has used them in the past for a couple domains I have seen.

Changes Are A Coming!

September 6, 2010 things are going to be different around DotWeekly.com . More to come on this.