Day three schedule: (final day)

10am – Inside the Candy.com deal.

Greg Belestrieri and Joe Melville, buyers of Candy.com, talked about their acquisition and view as the end user. No picture of this session, I didn’t show for this.

11am – 2009 TRAFFIC Awards and Brunch

The award winners are:

Parked.com – Sponsor Of The Year
Michael Berkens – Domainer Of The Year
Sedo.com – Best Overall Domain Soultion
Above.com – Best New Monetizing Solution
Candy.com – The “We Get It” Award
Shaun Pilford – Best Developer Of The Year
Ron Jackson – Best Domain News Blog
Michael Berkens, Michael and David Castello – Domainer Hall Of Fame

1pm – Man On The Street

Howard asked people on the street and domain bloggers about computers, Twitter, Facebook and websites. Video was recorded before the event in Florida.

From left to right: Rick Latona, Elliot Silver, Michael Berkens, Owen Frager, Ron Jackson, Rick Schwartz, Howard Neu

2pm – Meeting Of The Chiefs

Discussion of current and future PPC situation, alternatives, developing and the pros and cons of Google and Yahoo.

From left to right: Dr. Jeff Reynolds, Greg McNair, Ron Jackson, Lonnie Borck

From left to right: Divyank Turakhia, Sean Moriarty, Ammar Kubba, (not sure), Kevin Ham, (not sure), Donny Simonton

4pm – Moniker Domain Auction

Top domain sale was MultiVitamins.com for $45,000. To view a full list of sales visit DomainNameNews.com.

THE END – I’ll post something over the next few days with my overall experiences at the conference.

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Day two schedule:

9am – Breakfast

10am – Opening remarks from Rick Schwartz and Howard Neu

10:30am – Test Track “Shark Tank”

From left to right: Michael Berkens, Rick Latona, Jon Waterman, Rick Schwartz, Michael and David Castello, Dr. Chris Hartnett

3 Investment Presentations:

1. Kevin Wood of ByOwner.com asked for $150k in exchange for a 10% profit share. Kevin was seeking the investment to help grow his for sale by owner service, similar to BuyOwner.com. All panelists chose not to invest mainly because of the similarity to BuyOwner.com.
2. Mark Michael of DevHub.com asked for $1mil in exchange for a 10% profit share. Mark was seeking the investment to help grow his automated domain development service. All panelists chose not to invest due to concerns with current investors and details shared.
3. Daniel Dryzek asked for $1-2mil in exchange for a 20-40% profit share. Daniel was seeking the investment to expand his European domain marketplace, something similar to a Sedo. All panelists chose not to invest due to their own lack of knowledge on the Polish domain market.

12pm – Lunch and keynote speaker Rick Sanchez of CNN.com

Keynote speaker Rick Sanchez

Rick discussed social media, Twitter and the change of TV and print to online.

Lunch while keynote speaker is talking.

1:45pm – Ad Networks and Traffic Quality

Left to right: Alap Ghosh, Steve O’Brien of Click Forensics, Howard Neu, Adam Epstein of Ad Marketplace, Richard Sim of Anchor Intelligence, Adam Heimlich of Razorfish

3pm – Speed Networking

We switched seats every 2 minutes for one hour. Did not make it to everyone.

4:30pm – Rick Latona’s Domain Auction

Top sale was Rio.com for $450,000.

For a complete list of sold domain names visit DomainNameNews.com.

9pm – Skenzo Party at Club Touch

No other party pictures. Some things should be left private. 

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RIO.com sold today during Rick Latona’s auction at the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference in Brooklyn, New York for $450,000.

Here are the stats:

RIO.com $450,000
Google Results: 284,000,000 (does not show on the first page)
Google Page Rank: 4
Compete.com Traffic: 7,867 Unique and 26,902 Total Visits
Alexa Rank: 615,799

Congratulations to the buyer and seller.

Update – This was also the auction’s top sale.

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Today is technically day one of the Targeted TRAFFIC conference. I say technically day one, because for me it started yesterday. Several attendees flew in early to enjoy New York City and spend some personal time with fellow domainers. I immediately bonded with my roommate Danial Dryzek of MeetDomainers.com, Mike Robertson of Fabulous.com and Charlotte and Brian Gilbert, managers of Innovation HQ‘s portfolio. As the day went on and the evening activities began I had an opportunity to share a drink with the Castello brothers, Michael and David and then went to a club with Mike Robertson, Ammar Kubba of Thought Convergence and several other guys.

Ok, so back to day one, today.

10am – Vendors began setting up their booths

12pm – Attendee registration

5:30pm to 7pm – welcome party sponsored by DomainAdvertising.com

Parked.com booth setup and looking good

Barbara Neu (Howard’s wife) helping Dana Abbot and Jodi Chamberlain

Drinks and snacks after getting registered

Bag, badge and information given out at registration

Welcome party sponsored by DomainAdvertising.com

As a closing note, for those that don’t know what T.R.A.F.F.I.C. stands for, because I didn’t, it’s acronym for Targeted Redirects And Financial Fulfillment Internet Conference.

Now off to the after parties

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The following article is a guest post by my friend and fellow domain blogger Morgan Linton. Morgan is the publisher of Domainvestors.tv as well as author of Domain Flipping available at DNFlipping.com.

With blogs being used more and more for the creation of MiniSites it is important to understand some simple things you can do to improve the SEO of your blog. Many people think that SEO is a dark art that can only be done by “the experts.” While there are some advanced techniques that can help – there are some quick and easily ways you can improve your SEO literally overnight!

Follow the three steps below and your blog will be on the SEO fast-track before you know it:

1)  Change your Permalinks to include your post title – if you’re using WordPress you can do this by selecting “Custom Structure” in the Permalink Settings and changing it to: /%postname%/

2)  Put your best keywords in your title. Many people miss the importance of the “Blog Title”. Use a tool like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find the keywords with the best search volume related to your niche and put them in your title. Another great way to get good ideas for you title is do a Google search for the keywords you’d like to rank well for and see what the top results are using in their title tag!

3)  Make it easy for people to share your posts through social media. There are some great plugins out there that make it easy for anyone reading your blog to share your posts through Twitter, Digg, Stumbleupon, etc. The more people linking to your site, the more relevant search engines will find your content and the higher your blog will rank!

That’s it! These are three quick and easy ways to improve your Blog’s SEO – so easy in fact you can do it today. So if you haven’t done any of these steps, take twenty minutes out of your day and improve your SEO!

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