websense

Now it’s April 2008 and for the heck of it, I reactivate my SEDO account and make another offer - 10k! I’m assuming they won’t even respond…

They counter with 15k!

In their counter, they mention that SEDO appraised the domain at 12k. SEDO gives me the option to accept the 15k offer, but what do I do? I’m an idiot, I choose to re-counter with 12.5, assuming they will reply soon. Thinking all the while, I can’t believe I’m going to get this domain for 15k.

They don’t respond for several days. The ability to accept their counter of 15k is no longer there. I hire a SEDO “domain broker” again…

I tell them the story, and ask that they just make contact, both the seller and I have already had the domain appraised by SEDO, so there is no reason to do that again, etc.

No Reply.

3 days later, they send me another appraisal, for 24k! Twice what they had just given the seller. What a racket!

SEDO broker disappears. Noticing a trend yet?

8 days after my first offer, the seller posts a new offer…15k!
I take it and want to pay as fast as possible to get this over with. Attempting to pay that night, so something crazy doesn’t go wrong, I scour SEDO’s site looking for means to make payment via Credit Card. Eventually, I find that for amounts greater than 5k, they will only accept wire transfers, which of course leaves little to no paper trail.

We wire the money the next morning. No response from SEO or seller for 3 days acknowledging payment! After 3 days, a notice in our SEDO account “Your payment has been received, we are now processing�.

Nothing happens for another 2 or 3 days. Frustration is building now. I’m not very patient.

Finally - 6 days after SEDO receives our money, the transfer process begins.

What should happen (transferring a domain) in 1 or 2 days, takes over a week. We finally get the domain into our registrar account.
Thank God! A few days later, we implement our plan and launch the new domain and email.

MSN and Yahoo! react well, and are indexing and ranking our site.
Google, is virtually ignoring it.
A little research, and we find the domain is on an RBL (Blacklist) as a result of being used for spam while at SEDO.

I love it.

Moral of the story; if you’ve got to buy a domain through a broker, be very careful and very patient. Nothing makes them move fast, and be aware that the brokers are making money on every angle. It’s in their best interest to get you to pay as much money as possible for that domain because they are probably making commissions and fees on both sides of the deal.

From 1997 - 2002, there was nothing we could do because www.tkg.com was owned by another company - then things got a little interesting…

2002 - The company that had the domain was acquired by a Fortune 500 (I’ve got some hope)

Nothing happens for a few years, but I keep watching it.

2005 - tkg.com becomes inactive and is up for sale on SEDO.com (even more hope); while on SEDO.com, the domain is used for spamming purposes (more on that later)

Now it’s early 2006 and I decide to make contact via SEDO to no avail - noone responds, not even SEDO. So I hire a SEDO “domain broker”, a service they offer and made my payment so that I could start moving forward with this whole process. Noone contacts me saying they received my payment, what the next steps were, nothing!

Several days later, I receive a “domain appraisal� for 33k! and an email telling me that they need to know the highest price I am willing to pay and that if it isn’t at least 60% of the appraised value i shouldn’t even bother. Of course, this is all so they can “negotiate on my behalf�. I translated: jack the price up as much as possible to increase their commission.

After going around a few times, I offer 25k for the domain and the SEDO representative disappears, never to be heard from again.

The seller contacts me directly, and says they will only consider 6 figure offers. I, of course, give up at this point.

I check the domain periodically over the next 2 years, and it hasn’t sold of course. Then comes April 2008, when my frustrations with SEDO hit an all time high!

Another post coming soon, with the rest of the details.

I wanted to take this opportunity to plug an event that we’re happy to be a small part of next week. The Interaction2008 conference will be held at the Taylor Institute at the University of Akron. The theme of the conference is “Mastering the Multi-Channel Marketing Mixâ€? and will cover a variety of topics. Our own Aaron Geh, VP of Marketing/Sales will be leading a course on “How toâ€? assess and improve a Web site. The interesting part of this conference is that there will not only be a lecture on the different topics, but also “how toâ€? sessions so that participants have practical “take away’sâ€? from the day long event.

In addition, the keynote speaker Jeffery Hayzlett from Kodak will also be awarded the 2007 Taylor Institute Marketer of the year. If the name rings a bell, you may recognize Hayzlett from his appearance on NBC’s “The Celebrity Apprentice” with Donald Trump.

If this is something that would be of interest to you, check out the all of the details at: Interaction 2008. If you register by Friday, you will save $50.00 on the registration fee.

After a 3 week long battle with SEDO, the domain broker through which we acquired tkg.com, it’s live! More on the battle later, but suffice it to say, customer service isn’t one of their core objectives.

So, our SEO experiment begins. We’ve benchmarked our stats some of which will be posted on Jen’s new SEO Blog, if you’re interested in seeing the impact that this domain switch has on us check it out there.

We’ve launched the domain this morning; let the link building begin!

So, lets pretend you have a moderately successful company, that generates many of it’s leads on the web. Lets also assume that this business has been online for a while, like 10+ years. All SEO’s know that lots of links get built, content gets indexed, rankings climb etc. over the course of 10 years. Your domain builds an online reputation, so to speak. So, after 10 years, this site has thousands of phrases generating really qualified traffic, some very general, some very long tail.

Then, one day, the owner of “said company” decides it’s a great idea to get a new domain. What do you, as an SEO who has already advised him that this is a really bad idea? By the way, walking out is not an option.

Well, that’s what we’ve done. I can’t believe it, but after marketing tkg.com for over 10 years, we were able to finally acquire a better domain. A few of us at TKG have been “stalking” the domain tkg.com for quite some time, and we finally got it!

How can we resist going from 15 letters to 3? Not gonna happen!

So, at the risk of our whole SEO department going AWOL, we’re doing it. We hope to be switching to the new domain early next week.

Of course, we have an elaborate scheme (I mean plan) to protect our rankings and the equity our domain has built up as much as possible. So, we’ll be running a little experiment to see just how quickly we can make this transition to our new domain.

It should be live early next week. If you feel like contributing to the cause and creating a link to the new domain tkg.com, that’d be great!

For those who are interested, we’ll be sharing the impact of this on our site, it’ll be located at tkg.com/tkgseoblog. We plan to share the whole scoop, SE rankings, Saturation, Link Pop etc. It’ll be interesting to see just how fast we can recover the traction we currently have.