discredit.org

Talk about a media blitz, I couldn’t help but notice that domaining veteran Frank Hsu’s new service AppBank.com is garnering a great deal of media attention. Frank has started a company which pays end-users for creating and uploading social content to social networks. Currently they are focused on Facebook and any end-user with a registered account on this social network can participate.

AppBank is a free service and deems itself as the place for making social money. Nice slogan! According to the Wall Street Journal the company is already turning a profit and currently has 3,000 applications that have been developed in beta stage. Considering that AppBank just launched live to the public on September 29th of this year, shows the impact of what a well executed idea is capable of.

Frank is an icon in the domaining industry and is set to make waves within the social networking arena as well. I haven’t seen other ideas similar to this, but I am sure if this idea continues to move at the pace as it has been there will be a number of competitors trying to grab a piece of the pay per social content model.

For a limited time try our new fire-grilled shrimp entrees from $1.99! Whoops, sorry about that got a little carried away. This ad has been making me hungry ever since I set my eyes on it. Today’s featured domain name is BajaFresh.com. Too bad this isn’t Rubio’s if I remember correctly they have Fish Taco Tuesdays! Enough of the food talk, lets get on with today’s domain spotlight. What amazes me about Baja Fresh or I should say Fresh Enterprises, Inc. is the pure fact that they have embraced the Internet to gain market share on other Mexican food chains.

The advertisement which I received in the mail features four ways to connect with the brand. They have facebook, twitter a phone number and best of all an effective domain name! (There vanity name even matches there brand: http://www.facebook.com/bajafresh) What more could you ask your Internet marketing team to do? This company gets it in a big way, if they were a publicly traded corporation I would feel confident as a shareholder to own shares in this company. It gets even better folks. If you decide to visit BajaFresh.com you are presented with a fresh design which works hand in hand with the type of food that they serve. I might not of stated it but they are one of my favorite Mexican food chains to grab a bite to eat from. To go even further the advertisements featured on the website match the same ads that were presented on the mailer! WOW! Lets move onto the icing on the cake, “Try Online Ordering!” DOUBLE WOW! You can even order your food using the website.

The company has done a great job in branding itself and representing its brand online. Embracing social networks like facebook and microblogging sites (twitter) a domain name just wasn’t enough for these guys. Looks like I will be trying the online ordering system in the near future. Lets hope that works as well as there marketing has!

I went ahead and made a few changes to the blog. In the top left hand corner of the sub menu you will notice a new category called Comic. This addition has been made due to the popularity of the DNPimping.com comic strip. In addition to this, content has been placed under the services section. This page was blank for quite some time and needed to be updated! You can find the services that I currently offer spanning from domain brokering to private label hosting solutions.

Next steps will be to work on the following sections:

Advertise (This section will be up soon, if you would like to advertise email me! info[a]dnpimping.com, it might even be cheaper than you think!)
Guest Writer (If you are interested feel free to contact me.)
My Websites (You’d be amazed but I actually do have a few websites!)
Paid Review (A section for those who would like a product, service or domain name reviewed.)

As most of you know, the comic was delayed due to technical difficulties. Since we made you wait the entire weekend for comic number 8 we decided to go ahead and post it today! This comic was inspired by an entry I read on nametalent.com, what’s better than domaining and poker? How about Pimp Jason versus Gus Hansen? Enjoy!

If you have ideas for future domaining comics feel free to submit them to info@dnpimping.com or call us at (909)257-PIMP! We will give you a $20 GoDaddy.com gift card if the idea is used!

We are in a state of emergency! The domaining comic for this Friday has been delayed. Due to the economic crunch our artist has been faced with the challenge of working with a computer clunker. Since no government programs currently exists to take care of this problem I have taken the matters into my own hands. Luckily I still have left over server components from my old hosting company. I will be loaning the artist (& friend) a computer fully loaded with the resources and tools that he needs to succeed.

Enough of the wise guy talk, to simply put it the comic is delayed and we will be releasing it as soon as it is finished. Stay tuned for this comic, I had a chance to see the initial concepts and I am impressed. The artist has definitely raised the bar with this one!

Today I received a voicemail from GoDaddy.com, luckily the number that I use for domaining forwards directly to my email. Since this is the case I am now able to post the voicemail message that I received here on the blog. I am posting this message for humor sake more than anything else. Enjoy!

[audio:http://www.dnpimping.com/audio/dnpimping.com_godaddy_message1.mp3]

I have no idea what a $405,000 area rug domain investment feels like but a group of Iowa investors will soon find out! This particular group of investors decided to team together to purchase AreaRugs.com, now my fellow domainers don’t jump on the bandwagon just yet! I can see it already, almost every product carried in the neighborhood bed bath and beyond will have a domain name pertaining to it. Lets keep that from happening, ok!

This is an incredible investment, but is it currently worth $405,000? I can only give my honest opinion on this and personally I can say that it just might be. The only thing that worries me about this investment is that it did not include the domain name AreaRug.com as well! I can see a number of people including myself simply typing AreaRug.com and forgetting the s! So why is this domain name worth $405,000 or shall I say why is this domain name worth the price of a basic house here in sunny California? The answer directly correlates with the google adwords keyword tool. According to this tool the keyword combination “area rugs” received an outstanding 3,350,000 searches locally in August 2009! That is a tremendous number for any keyword combination, let alone one geared towards an item such as an area rug. This statistic alone proves to me that the domain name is worth a pretty penny.

Now lets move on to discussing the current state of the site and future development plans. I am purely guesstimating here, but for this investment to be worthwhile in the long term the Iowa investors are going to have to put there running shoes on. Development will need to occur rapidly. With larger companies already established in such a key market such as overstock.com and rugs-direct.com these domain investors will be fighting a behemoth.

This brings me to my final thoughts on the topic. If $405,000 was spent on the acquisition of the domain name, how much has been reserved for development, sales and marketing? This is the magical question here. I almost feel that to effectively compete against the larger companies which are already selling items, there will need to be another $400,000 - $500,000 investment. In the end the investors might find themselves in a bit of a tough spot. The hard work has just begun. Although this domain name is a category killer, it won’t sell area rugs by itself.
To read more about this topic feel free to view the following press release.

It sounds like a scene out of a movie script, but when Kentucky made a crucial move to seize a number of gambling domains around a year ago the state didn’t realize that they might have to answer to a higher authority. Whelp that higher authority so happens to be the Kentucky Supreme Court! Techdirt discusses this further.

Taking a bit of a break today. I will continue the Domain Spotlight Tuesdays next week. Thanks to all my readers!

You know we had to do it! This Friday, we are directing our utmost attention towards the controversial art of domain squatting. Since there are mixed feelings towards domain squatters, why not poke a little fun at them! If you have ideas for future domaining comics feel free to submit them to info@dnpimping.com or call us at (909)257-PIMP! We will give you a $20 GoDaddy.com gift card if the idea is used!