It’s been a very crazy couple of months for me personally and I haven’t done a good job with keeping up with business as usual. Work has been pilling up, I’ve lost tons of ground (competitively), and I have 1,000 new domains to develop by the end of the year.

One of the things I’ve kept pushing back is that minisite theme I promised everyone of my twitter followers. The theme is AWESOME and I’ve made it incredibly easy to manage for the domainers who don’t like getting headaches from php code. I want to add value to the community now that I have an opportunity to do so. If you are interested in the theme I’ll be giving away, please comment below. I’ll be adding a subscriber’s page soon to simplify the notifications and delivery of the theme.

So where is the fresh start? Well, I decided to make some gigantic changes to my business model and plan and I’ll re-structure dDevelop.com completely different. Domain development is easily replicatable and it has become a cheap commodity, especially in this market. It’s certainly a great thing for the countless domainers who depend on keeping their expenses low (everyone? lol) so I’m totally for it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not quitting the domain development game at all. You can call it a re-structuring of my business plan and how I’ll be making money from it.

Looking forward to lot’s of comments below!

Sometimes I hear domainers and developers complaining about wordpress being too much for a minisite, but I disagree. Most of the minisites being offered for $250 or even $175 are made using HTML, which is inefficient and complicated for a domainer with little coding knowledge to edit or add content. I’ve also seen some minisite developers using PHP as their language of choice, but they have no backend where you can add more content and increase the value of that minisite. 

Being a domainer, I want to keep my websites growing to capture more visitors. So why not have a platform that makes it easy for me to add unlimited amounts of content, manage my ads, have a nice contact page, change the logo, and alot of other things an HTML or simple PHP site will make extremely difficult?

In the last few days, I’ve been working on a free wordpress theme that will make it really easy for you to mass develop your domains. I see this as a perfect opportunity to share something back with the industry after so many of you have shared insights that have allowed me to succeed. If you would like to be a part of the initial BETA round of testers, please email me as soon as possible. My first “contestant” is Frankie Aladi from SkyDomains.com, he will be the lucky BETA tester number one. 

My goal is to allow the domainer who is trying to cut down on costs and develop some of their names to do so without having to pay for the base minisite. My only request is that you leave the footer link untouched, which will point to this site. 

I’ll be releasing the theme in the next week, follow me on twitter @DanSanchez to stay up to date!

After reading Rick Latona’s new blog post ( Things I’ve learned from ccTLDs.com ) yesterday detailing a few of the threads discussing .AR domains, .DE domains, .FR domains, and .IN domains, I became self aware of the fact that some companies have already started building their brands using ccTLDs to reach a global market. 

Case in point, Reckitt Benckiser. This English company own AirWick, the well known air freshener product that is constantly advertised all over the world. As I was watching one of my favorite TV Shows on BBC America, I noticed they were targeting American households by using AirWick.us. So I did a little digging, and to my amazement, they were using all major ccTLDs to build their AirWick brand. 

If you visit AirWick.com you’ll see they have created an entire network of websites dedicated to each country using that country’s ccTLD. I counted a total of 24 different websites, each using their independent ccTLD! When I talk about a company’s internet strategy, is mostly to bash their inadequate knowledge about the importance of domain names or optimization. But upon finding this company I was sincerely amazed at how they were able to target their consumers by taking advantage of that extension. 

Most of us have seen the “$3,000 a day domainer” video which talks solely about the power of a ccTLD. But it wasn’t until now that I see the massive potential of a domain name being targeted exclusively to a country’s population. I have yet to find a niche I am comfortable with, being fluent in spanish and having a minimal understanding of French, German, and Italian, I think the only aspect I’m missing is studying the local markets and finding local connections to minimize the dangers of registering generic domains in foreign countries. 

I urge you to visit Rick Latona’s ccTLDs.com forum and read the extensive wealth of information available for free. I know I’ll be there!

After losing my entire server to a hacker a few months ago, I finally got around to re-doing the site which means I’m back in business!

What have you been doing?

A little of this, a little of that… But I’ve been mostly acquiring alot of premium domain names for my own portfolio, as well as launching three other projects that will be detailed in later posts.

For now, let’s worry about your portfolio!