A look at the current worldwide political and Economic climate and 10 strategic predictions covering Oil & Gas, Health, Afghanistan, Asset Values & many others. A great - and still growing - divergence appeared in 2009 between public statements by leaders and their public performance.

The Most Profound Geopolitical Changes in the 21st Century: We look at 16 Megatrends Affecting Your Family and Your Finances. Along with Energy, Pandemics, Warfare, Democracy and Much more

Most of us are pretty lazy creatures. We’re content to be spoon fed our news by the major networks and tabloids. Most smart Entrepreneurs and investors know that if they want good actionable information they have to get it before it becomes news from reliable sources that are either on the ground in the relevant area or who have contacts that are aware of the real situation and the developments that are taking place.

I am looking for Great sounding advertising related domains. They MUST be .Com and be no longer than 2 words.The type of thing I’m after is: AdSpace.com, AdBox.com, Adzilla.com

Well we’ve been out of the domain/blogging business for a while as we have had 2 major projects to work on – one is still in development and the other www.oilprice.com is now ticking along nicely.
The site is now getting on average 2,500 uniques a day and these numbers are increasing quickly.

The sale of e.Biz certainly seems to be creating quite a stir. Could this be the shot of adrenalin that the registry needed? But sedo has more, Wet.Biz

I am selling the following 4 domains for a total price of $300. They are all generics and very brandable: BlogPrince.Com, ComputerWallets.Com

RXI.Com is currently on auction at GreatDomains.com. This name is superb if you are involved in the Pharmaceuticals or Biotech area as the RX industry is huge. The number of online pharmacies has shot through the roof and this is a great opportunity to differentiate yourself from the field.

I’m looking for good writers who can research and write an article that is informative and makes sense on various commodities. The person must have the skill to construct the article professionally and argue a certain viewpoint if necessary.

The Great Domains Auction has just started and there are some pretty nice names there. I’ve got my eye on one and one of mine is in there for sale.

I’m after a very good writer who can comfortably write about finance, Oil, Gold, and soft commodities. Initially there will be a batch of about 20 articles, but there will be ongoing work once the site is launched.

I am selling a very rare live recording of Jay Abraham’s elite 5-day Million Dollar European Super Summit, held in London in May 1997. Limited to only 28 companies in attendance, who each paid $25,000. This is probably the most in-depth example of hands-on, “make it happen” business strategy building you’ll ever encounter. This is one of the rarest recordings that Jay has ever issued. The only people ever to gain access to this incredible information were the original attendees, including Sir Clive Woodward

I’ve been scammed a few times now online. Twice with developers and once with a domain purchase. All of these occurred because I was a little green around the gills and hadn’t done the right amount of research.

Well domains sure are going for bargain basement prices these days. I just saw Cats.Net finish at Sedo for $7,000, which in my opinion is a fantastic deal for the seller but not so great for the buyer.

A few years ago, a good domain name wasn’t really worth all that much, a couple of hundred quid would have found you a short, brandable, memorable, gem of a name with quite a bit of development potential. But not any more and there’s a good reason for this as back then the Internet was still finding it’s feet (shortly after the .com bust) Businesses and investors were licking their wounds after the easy riches didn’t

The market is pretty tough at present and each and every one of us needs as much exposure as possible. So apart from the usual marketplaces it’s essential we think outside the box if we are to generate the sales we need. So lets go through a small list of possible places to sell our names:

Raw.Biz is now on auction at Sedo.
The bid is currently very low and the chances are you will get this name for a very good price. Please click on the below link if you are interested in finding out how the auction is going.
http://www.sedo.com/auction/detail/raw.biz/51325_us__

I’ve just launched a logo design contest over at digitalpoint. There is still 4 days to run, so if you know anyone who is a designer, a design student or just interested in design please point them the way of this competition. The prize is for $120

Well it’s about time I cleared some more room in my portfolio as I have a large development project coming up. Some of the names are: Walked.Com, BestDigitalCameras.Com, BasicProgramming.Com + others.

Domains on a whole, even great ones, are not going to be doing so good in a few months. A massive tidal wave of domains getting ready to drop…..especially alternative TLDs to the .com. It will be phenomenal to watch. The extra supply will lower the purchase prices willing to be paid by other domainers. End user sales on a whole might still do ok….but not good or great…..even for the best domains.

The cry that comes up very often from the domain community is, “they don’t get it, they don’t understand why my domain is worth xxx.” I myself have said just this and commented that we need to educate businesses and individuals on the benefits of owning a good domain name.

No one would willingly buy a bad domain name, but quite a lot of companies and individuals new to the Web are unaware of why some names are worse than others. Many have sadly learned that if you choose poorly your dreams for online business success can be over before they’ve begun.

There was an interesting thread at DNforum some time back where people listed their favourite domain related quotes and I took a note of my favourites. I’ve done this for years and have thousands of quotes collected on a variety of topics, anyway you’ll be pleased to hear I’m not going to witter on in this post but leave it to others to do the talking. Enjoy them.

I’m cleaning out my portfolio and the following names are all for sale at $30 each. They are all held at GoDaddy and the expiration dates are by the side. As you can see most of them are generic and pretty good names. Sadly I’m having to be ruthless with the portfolio and these names aren’t the direction I want to go in.

I saw a very interesting interview in Barrons today by Ray Dalio, CIO of Bridgewater Associates, whose Long Term average returns (net of fees) average +15%. Throughout the difficult 2008 their pure Alpha fund returned +8.7%. Basically this is a person who knows what he’s talking about, not a hack from the Daily Mail. I won’t go into all the details here, but just list some of the takaways I picked up.

Most of us would like to have the .Com to start a web business. But nowadays with prices of good .Coms reaching into the stratosphere sometimes we have to go with our second choice and quite often that comes down to the .Org or .Net. So as a prospective site builder which one of these would you go for?

I normally get three types of offers from people writing to me on my domains.
The first is from people who ask me to make the first move, “What would you sell x for? Are you considering selling X – what is the price?” I realise that this is a standard negotiating tactic and I will be going into this in a later post. The second is from the chancers who offer a couple of hundred dollars for a very good name. I still reply to them, but nothing normally comes of it.

This is not a joke, but an actual reply I got from someone I contacted to see if their domain was for sale. Now sure it was a nice name (a LLLL.com) – that could have probably fetched $2,000 on the aftermarket. But $2.5m and Domain Art? Now I haven’t been involved in this business as long as some but has anyone ever come across Domain art before?

Every name in our portfolios has been registered because we think we can make money off it. The sad thing is not all of them will sell. A few of them may pay their way with parking income, but even that is unlikely. So the others just sit there burning a hole in our pockets as we wait for the big payday to come along.

Well I’m not going to lie to anyone – it’s been a pretty tough couple of weeks. I haven’t had any serious enquiries on my names, but I have had a couple of $200 offers on my CC.coms and about 5 other ridiculous offers.

I was asked by a colleague of mine the other day (who knows about my domain moonlighting) if I had any domains I wouldn’t sell. At first I said yes, there are a couple of domains in my portfolio I will not be selling as I have grand development plans for them. After thinking about this for a little while I changed my answer to no

There was a rumour going round some time ago that Google takes the registration period of a domain name into account when ranking a new website. Basically a longer period of say 10 years tells your visitors (and Google) that you’re serious and in it for the long haul.

Last night I had another learning experience on Namecake. Apparently anything I enter on my site is by default being sent as new content to the feeds.
So adding domains I had previously forgotten to list has caused my site to send about 40 messages to the news aggregation services out there that republish the articles I post.

There are a raft of minisite services out there at present - all fighting for your valuable $$$, but not all of these services are equal.
I have recently had two sites built by the team at Sitegraduate.com and I am very impressed with what they have done for me. The first site was Sixth.com and the second was a prize I won on DNKitchen for the development of EuropeanBeaches.com

When I started my first large web development project i foolishly thought it would be relaitvely simple to grow the site into a popular destination and have hundreds of eager buyers looking over my domains.
I’d had some experience with running minisites and not only were they a doddle to look after, some of them were receiving over 300 uniques a day. How much more difficult could a larger site that’s actually selling something useful be?

I saw a very interesting post by Frankie over at SkyDomains.com yesterday. He had previously posted about minisites he was developing, but soon decided his efforts would be better served by focusing on one or two larger sites. One of these is Vowels.Me – basically it’s a marketplace for minisite developers that is similar to Guru.com. What happens is you post your site and what you’re looking for and then minisite developers bid for the job. Sounds simple

Looking around the web you see some well thought out sites on premium names that are a great asset to their owners. But there are also some sites built on names that are innocent at first glance, then you dig a little deeper and you find that innocent name has an entirely different meaning. Anyway, you should have a good laugh when you see some of these beauties:

Some days I curse Kevin Ham and Business 2.0 for the article, “The Man Who Owns the Internet.” As it was after reading this that I became involved in the domain business. I started off with rose tinted glasses firmly in place and expected my millions were just around the corner

Hi everyone – I’ve just managed to sneak away to my beloved laptop and just wanted to wish all my readers a Happy Christmas and prosperous new year. Nordsanta.org has recently reported tha Santa successfully completed his 2008 flight. Well done Santa!

Like most of you guys, time is my most precious commodity and there’s nothing I hate more than spending great amounts of it doing grunt work (checking e-mail addresses, sending mails, listing my site on directories, etc..) There are companies that can help you outsource these niggling time intensive tasks, but the problem here is that they are normally expensive and you find that quite often

I came across a very interesting site the other day: Cubestat.com - Similar in concept to Estibot, but for established websites. There’s also some other very useful data, such as Page Rank, Alexa Rank, etc… Now I think the figures they are quoting may be a little on the high side, but it sure makes interesting reading.

I’ve looked into this topic in quite some detail, spoken with some of the top SEO people in the business and found out that this is a bit of a hornets nest, where the search guys are split into three groups:

There seems to be an obsession amongst domainers about premium letters for their two, three and four letter names. Now I can see how Booo.com has more value than Xqwz.com (which by the way I think is utterly worthless) But people seem to get so hung up on having premium letters in their names.

There is no definitive answer to this question as one end user is completely different to another one (I know that’s stating the obvious.) The problem with most Domainers is that we are stuck in a certain mindest of strict aftermarket rules. Hyphens are bad, the letters aren’t premium, building a site on a .net or .biz is a waste of time, numbers and words don’t work,

Minisites seem to be all the rage now that parking revenues have taken a tumble.
It seems like every development company out there has a kick ass minisite deal that will help you get the most out of your portfolio.
But are they as lucrative as some would have you believe?

Selling domains is just like selling anything else, whether it be double glazing, apples or real estate. It doesn’t matter if you like selling face to face, over the phone or on e-mail, you still need to be able to let a prospective buyer know all the good things your product offers in a clear and concise way. This is where the elevator pitch come in.

I just wanted to let you know about a very bad virus that is circulating the web. It will come as a mail from Hallmark. Do not open this message or any attachment regardless of who it’s from, as it contains a virus that will

Most of us involved in the domain business have taken a risk. Some have taken small risks with their weekly allowance, whereas others have put their house and savings on the line. Look at Rick Schwartz, Scott Day and Frank schilling – people thought them madmen when they put everything they had into domain names at a time when there wasn’t a market and no one else saw the opportunity. And to be honest, they were!

Closing an end user sale is the only way to make serious money in this business. Yes it’s lovely when they approach you and make a fabulous offer, but this is rarely the case. So instead of waiting around for what is probably never going to happen, a small amount of domainers take the initiative and contact the end users themselves.

As I skim through the forums I see quite a lot of threads from people new to this business titled: I have $10,000 to spend on domains – what should I invest in now?
Of course there is lots of advice thrown around (quite a lot of it is very good), “LLL.com’s are cheap now, only invest in one word premiums, .Net is the way to go.”