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 Mix” and will cover a variety of topics. Our own Aaron Geh, VP of Marketing/Sales will be leading a course on “How to” 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 to” sessions so that participants have practical “take away” 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!

OK, so I gave in. We’ve been traditionally a PC shop for the last 10 years. However, over the last couple years, we’ve added a few team members that prefer Macs. And I have to admit, they’ve sold me on the usability and capabilities of Macs. To the degree that my wife and kids will hardly touch the PC at home. Needless to say, the huge beautiful monitor is a factor, but there is no doubt, the Mac makes photo and video editing much easier for a novice!

So, this afternoon we decided to pick up a couple of I Phones. Cool as heck. 3 or 4 of the guys at the office have ‘em and love ‘em. Of course, I love to spark debate because my Windows Mobile 6 device makes syncing with exchange extremely quick and easy. However the Moto Q has almost no “cool factor” when compared to an I phone. Lets be honest, a calculator with a color screen hardly looks good compared to a solid piece of brushed aluminum and glass that accesses the web, makes phone calls and takes pictures!

Now that I’ve sufficiently advertised the I phone; everyone knows Mac is known for ease of use right? Well, not if you’re a business. AT&T, the only provider through which you can legitimately get an i phone in the US, has zero accommodation for corporate accounts. So, we went to the AT&T Store, applied, got approved and received a confirmation code for our new accounts. Unlike a traditional wireless carrier, they don’t set them up at the store and hand you a working device. Rather, they hand you a couple really cool, but disconnected I phones with a “confirmation code”. Unfortunately, when you access their web activation site, via I Tunes, it has NO IDEA what to do with a “confirmation code”. Nor does anyone at AT&T, when you call them.

To try and shorten a long story, their web interface is useless for a Corporate Account. So are their sales support people available via phone calls. They told me I had to set it up personally, and they would convert it later! The person on the phone (after I had been transferred twice) actually told me we needed to “get around” the system to make this work. In other words, going into the store and setting it up before hand was a complete waste of time, which I know all small business owners love.

Now, because I wanted to keep the commitment I had made to a couple people regarding getting the I Phones, and the fact that i really enjoy cool new toys, I worked through this and got them working. But If Apple is smart, they will hopefully realize that not every business owner will be willing to spend 3 or 4 hours setting up something as simple as a new cell phone.

The syncing process for calenders etc. is awesome. If they could just carry the simple usability concept through their whole business!