Yup, thats right. That is one of of the new aspects of GUA, our Twitter, and our Facebook. Please go ahead and follow/befriend us so we can keep in touch with everyone.

In addition, every blogger wants to feel like they are wanted, and appreciated. If my writing interests you, please subscriber to our RSS feed, by clicking the icon below our header.

Without further delay, I am proud to re-release the updated GUA Domain name Tools. I say re-release, however in reality these tools have never been publicly available in such a form. So what do we have?

The main attraction is our Domain Portfolio Manager. This tool allows you to add your domain names. It then collects the whois data, and displays a variety of informative data. You can search, and sort your domain list by every criterion you could ever want, you can categorize your domains, and you can utilize our unique graphing suite to monitor changes in revenues, visitors, or any other such stat.

You can have 500 names in your portfolio. This is such that the system works at its most efficient. Any more than this number can cause load lag, and the various who is servers definitely will not appreciate excessive queries. If you feel you really do need to have more domains, please contact me.

Another main feature is our Domain Whois Lookup. Forget domaintools. They are extorting you. The Gremlins Umbrella Authority now allows whois queries, which highlight the crucial data, and perhaps more importantly we offer a free Domain Name History tool. This allows you to compare todays whois with archived data. This can be useful in checking domain name ownership for example.

Utilizing this data we can also provide two further tools: Who owns what, and Nameserver Check. These tools allow you to look up what domain names a particular email address owns, and what domains are set to particular name servers respectively. Once again… FREE !

In fact all our tools are free, and always will be free as long as they are not abused.

If you want to repay us, please subscribe to the blog, follow us on twitter, or befriend us on facebook !

We also have some smaller, but none-the-less useful features such as the Masspay File Generator (pretty self explanatory), and our Domain Name Extractor. For those complicated lists that need processing there is also the Advanced Lists.

As is displayed above, we are trying to corner a market, and provide everything that domainers may need. I am a domainer, and these tools have been developed by me, based on my needs. Want something else? Let us know.

Meanwhile head over to your settings page, and fill in your ‘Domainer Profile’ to be featured in our brand new Domainer Directory.

Hope you enjoy the tools, and the blog. If you do please spread the word.

Tom, and The Gremlins Umbrella Authority

On many an occasion I have emailed people about buying their domains. I have had replies ranging from the simple ‘No Thanks’, and ‘Flame, flame flame’ to ‘Why do you people keep emailing me?’
It seems that some people are totally oblivious to the fact that their domains are valuable, and the reasoning behind people wanting to buy them.

It has gotten to the point where most domain owners are now appreciative of the value of their asset(s). If a domain investor has emailed an owner and they have politely explained that the domain is not for sale, then I can see why receiving a further 300 emails trying to buy it would be annoying.
I had an idea: an expansion of the GUA Domain Tools.

What if there was a system: a universal system which documented each and every domain name which was for sale. The premise behind the idea would be that an email would be sent to a domain name owner the body of which would say something along the lines of: ‘Is this domain currently for sale, and if not will it ever be for sale in the future’. A link would then be provided through which the owner could update their domains status.

Along comes Mr A wanting to buy this domain. Before he emails the owner he checks our database and sees that the domain is not, and will not be for sale. He wastes no further time, nor does he waste the owners time.

Surely such a system would save a vast amount of time for many many people?

There is however a problem. If I email an owner asking if their domain is for sale, I am spamming (technically): the email is unsolicited. This leads to a small predicament. No one likes spam, but if someone spams you with a $10,000 USD offer for your $500 domain you will likely accept the offer independent of its spam nature. I.E If it is something you like, then you will not care.

It is ironic… a paradox maybe… you need to spam to stop spam per se.
If you received such an email, would you care? Would you consider it spam, and complain?

It is a good idea in principle, but would it work in practice?
Let me know your views, and perhaps I will get on with developing it !

Domain Investment has its pros and its cons. An obvious pro is the ability to make significant amounts of money. Unfortunately however the biggest downside I see, I relate to drought. I will explain (please note this analogy is not watertight).

Imagine a prosperous and growing country/economy. Food, water, and jobs are in abundance. If you get there early, before the boom then you can set yourself up for a very good life. This was the state of the domain industry in the mid nineties.
Fast-forward 10 years, drought has hit. There is no more water, and although jobs are currently secure, no water is a sure fire sign of a downturn to come. Crops cannot be grown, meaning less food, meaning more imports are needed, jobs are lost etc etc etc
If you have land, businesses, a private water supply etc, then you are fine. You can still make money. You can sell your assets to others who now NEED them, and you can make money. What you have is now in demand.

The relation is that contrary to what others say there are NO MORE good domains. Not only that, but given the growth of the Internet, people who have these assets are NOT selling. There are no longer any naive, unknowledgeable domain owners who will sell you their gold for a dollar.
Thus if you have water/a domain you can make a lot of money by holding and selling to the people/company that NEED your water/domain. After all they cannot get it anywhere else.

In simple terms if you own a good domain(s), then lucky you. If you do not, you may as well not waste your time….

So you have your great domain(s), and you are holding it whilst waiting for some large company which needs it. So what now? You develop!

A lot of people have said to me that development is great: it prevents your domain being taken in a WIPO case. This is categorically NOT a reason to develop. Maybe you are waiting to sell in the long term, but whilst you are holding, you should develop simply because a good domain deserves a good website to complement it.
Furthermore, develop a domain well and you can make some money, and have some fun too.

My position is that I got in late, but still ended up with some good domains. I worked my butt off, and am now sitting here and weighing up my options.
It is getting harder and harder for me to pick up good domains. If I want to get a good domain, then I have to buy it off a reseller. If I do that, I have to pay a premium. If I am going to do that I MUST have a development plan, and a good one at that! Thus I am not really buying; rather I am developing what I have and hoping that I can make money from running good websites rather than flipping domains.

So what am I doing?

Anfield.com
I am a fan of Liverpool Football Club, and Anfield is the name of their stadium. It thus makes the perfect domain on which to develop a fan site/news resource.

MMMM.com
Mmmm….. Food. I have developed this website into an interactive picture based recipe website. Users design and add their own recipes, and can then share them with one another. Yum!

PubJudge.com
This website again has been developed by me as a user influenced pub rating website. It covers the whole of the UK, and allows visitors to read, rate, and review each, every, and any pub in the UK

And then of course there is GUA.com

In the works I have:

Good.Causes.net
A Domain hack on which I intend to document the best Charities, and funds around: what they do, what they need, and how YOU can help.

Quests.net
I intend to develop this into a new genre of social media: an online game/competition. I don’t want to spoil the fun, but it will be good !

It does not stop there. I will gradually be developing all of my domains, I simply don’t have the time to develop them all well in a week

Finally although I spoke of development (above) from the point from view of a domain flipper looking to maximize profits, I am actually a passionate web designer too. Fun is more motivation to me than money, and I like to produce websites which can be used, and enjoyed by everyone!

Finally I do not freelance, unless you are prepared to pay a premium for the best, most original domain development you can find. My ideas, and development are unique, original, and exciting. I don’t want to dilute the web

Cheers

These tools constitute a variety of scripts which help in the management, research, and purchase of domain names.

GUA Domain Portfolio Management.

This tool is aimed at those with a large volume of domains, at a variety of different registrars.

It allows you to copy and paste a list of your domain names. You can then ‘collect’ the data: creation, expiration, nameservers etc on the click of a button.

This tool, in NO way connects to any registrars, and you thus cannot change settings on domain names through this tool. Rather it serves as a panel through which you can see details on your domain names in a simple, and efficient manner. Then if necessary you can logon to your respective registrar and modify the domain.

This tool allows you to categorize your portfolio, and filter it by a variety of different criteria: registrar, age, expiration etc. It also provides visual representations of the makeup of your portfolio, as well as individual domain views.

Individual Domain Management.

This tool is a module of the main portfolio manager. It collects vital data relating to your domain, for example: Google backlinks, Alexa rank, and Technorai rating. Using a specially designed algorithm it also displays an estimated value for your domain.
The individual panel, contains a graphing suite. This allows you to plot graphs to monitor anything relating to your domain. Perhaps you can plot the offers you have received over time, the revenue over time, and so on.

Finally a few simple, but useful tools are integrated, such as a notes section, and a profit calculator. How often do you forget to add renewal fees to your sales prices, simply because you forgot!

Domain Whois Lookup

The GUA Whois lookup service, although not a completely original concept, is applied in a different way, and is free !

At this current time the service only works well with .com, and .net domain extensions. It queries the whois database, collects data, cleans it, and outputs it to your browser. Importantly, the service highlights the 3 most important aspects of a whois result: the creation/expiration dates, the nameservers, and the emails! All emails are modified to prevent spam bots, so no need to worry.

One of the revolutionary aspects of this service however is the ‘Whois archive’. When you do a whois query, we archive it. Thus when a domain is sold, you will be able to look at archived history to see previous owners.

This service thus in a sense relies on you doing whois queries (however we ask that you do not hound the servers of our host, and the whois database with queries). Over time this service will become more useful , as more data is collected.

What-They-Own

This service expands on the whois lookup tool. Based on archived whois data, this allows you to see other domains owned by a particular individual, or business, on the click of a button.

Say you are negotiating a deal with an individual. You are aware they own some high quality domains, but are not sure exactly what they are…. Well you can use this tool, and it will provide you with a list!

Nameserver Check

Another expansion on the whois lookup tool, this tool allows you to see domain names which are hosted on a particular nameserver. Run a hosting service, and want to see how many people you host.. use this (although you should really know anyway )!

Domain Extractor
This tool allows you to extract the domain names from a chunk of text. The data that a registrar displays to you is often very ‘busy’. Not many registrars simply provide a list of your domain names. This tool allows you to copy any chunk of text, be it a web page or your registrar account, and it will extract all the domains contained within. It then presents the domains as a list, AND in comma delimited format for usage with the variety of software and services available on the web.

Advanced Lists
This expands on the Domain Extractor tool. If you have a list of sold domains pending transfer, and a list of all the domains in your registrar account, you can use this tool to remove the domains contained in one chunk of text from the second chunk of text. Brilliant if someone wants a list of domains you have for sale, but you are unsure because many have already been sold…

and finally (for now at least), I am proud to release a tool which in essence is seperate from GUA.com but will in the future integrate: Domain Investment Updates, DIU.net !

Domain Investment Updates (DIU.net)
This website has been in production for a pretty long time, as you can hopefully imagine. Yesterday, I was made aware that domaining, a resource that I myself have used was becoming a paid service.
Now I actually contacted Francois, the owner a few weeks back, about a potential partnership, and advertising. I did not receive a response. I am quite glad I did not receive a response.
I have been trying to come up with ideas for tools constantly, and not once did the ‘Domain Blog Aggregator’ occur to me. Hearing this news, I thought bingo !

DIU.net does exactly that. It collates the posts of 7 top domaining blogs on one easy to view, well designed, clean, concise, and elegant page. This means you can keep up to date with all the happenings in the industry without clicking a thing.
One thing that annoyed me about domaining was the required registration to read other peoples work. DIU requires no registration at all. One feature that domaining doesn’t offer is the ‘Tags’ feature which may have seen on other websites. This allows you to view old, and new posts relating to certain keywords, be it WIPOs, sales, or conferences.

The real question now is: Which are you going to set as your homepage, GUA.com or DIU.net?

All questions, comments, and suggestions will be gladly heard, and are appreciated.
Best of Luck.

An extremely large announcement will be being made within the next day or so. It thus figures that this post should be made prior. The announcement to follow will bring with it an influx of traffic, and in an ideal world will continue to do so. We hope the site will grow, and that every domainer will use our tools daily.

If this is the case, great ! We have produced these tools for free because we want to help. I would however state, that at this point, regardless of our want to help others, it is also nice to get a bit of pocket change, and who knows how much it will cost to actually keep this site up.

I know people do not like them, but GUA.com and DIU.net will both contain adverts. These will not be annoying, pointless, hounding adverts, rather adverts to relevant, quality, hand selected websites, tools, and software. For example, we intend to advertise SEDO, Afternic, our awesome host Lunarpages, Godaddy, and Moniker to name but a few.

What we ask from our users is as follows. If you intend to use a service, say SEDO.. dont just type SEDO.com into your browser, rather click an advert from GUA.com. We are not endorsing click fraud, rather stating if you see an ad, and want to use that service click it. Keep the middle man in place, and help us out !

We intend to put nice looking, simple adverts on our sites in positions which do not affect your viewing pleasure.

Our other money maker is as follows. If you are utilizing our masspay generator script, you will see a checkbox underneath the form. Click this, and it adds another line to your masspay file. This line tells paypal to send $2 to us, on top of the payment you are making.
$2 is an extremely small sum of money we feel, and given the amount of man hours that have gone into the production of this website alone, surely you would agree that we deserve it…

That is it. Other than that, this site, and DIU.net are both going to be 100% free for ever. We would sooner close the site down, than charge a thing for a service, and let me tell you now we have NO intention if ever shutting shop.

Thanks for your support. It will be worth the wait.

If you were one of the early birds: one of those who visited this site/blog prior to this post, then you will notice that our domain has changed for the final time. We are now, at least for the moment utilizing gremlinsumbrellaauthority.com. Let me explain.

When I decided to build a web based business I was met by an opportunity to purchase a variety of domains. One of them was GUA.com. I decided that as this is by far my best domain, that I would utilize it properly, and develop it.
My team spent the next few days throwing ideas around as to an acronym: we were developing the meaning after choosing the domain. Gremlins Umbrella Authority was born, on the basis that it is completely barmy, and thus reflects my personality perfectly

Whilst development was underway, I had the domain parked at domainsponsor: to my dismay (if that is the correct word) it earned me a low $xxx amount each month it was parked. Great!
After completing the development (you see before you), I launched the site, placing adsense here and there. My revenues for the last month totalled less than $1.
This got me thinking, so I did some research. I checked out the keywords, the traffic sources, and did a bit of googling. As far as I could see, the traffic was arriving from people looking for GUA.com.my, a well developed website, and missing off the .my

Now this poses a problem. I bought this domain unaware of the .com.my version, and unaware of the traffic. I had never thought of it in this way prior, but the traffic it was receiving was negatively impacting me. The number of visits daily was extremely volatile, and random. Thus my analytics data was completely random. Analytics was giving me a view of how random typo traffic is, NOT how my site was growing/converting. What is more, the traffic could be utilized, and monetized !

My solution… a compromise. I decided that I would setup a lander page on the GUA.com domain name which would link to our new gremlinsumbrellaauthority.com domain name. Surrounding this link I would place ads: most likely adsense. I can then make money, and at the same time people who want my site, can have my site. After all, that is why I bought the domain.

BUT WAIT. During the course of writing this post, I had an epithany.
This was written prior to purchase of the gremlinsumbrellaauthoirty.com domain name (go register it if you want ). My intention was to schedule this post for publication, and then when I got the chance update the domain (ahh the power of wordpress).
Whilst writing about this I noticed that my intended new domain went against ALL my domaining peeves. It is long, it is 3 words, it is difficult to seperate the words etc If i were to change, I think I would actually rather have gremlins-umbrella-authority.com. I realised that I did not want that domain at all. I realised that I bought the domain GUA.com BECAUSE it was short, easily memorable, and brandable. I should not have to compromise (even if I am making money in the process) simply because another website has the same acronym, but their users dont look at the extension!

Thus I am rewriting my original ‘final’ paragraph.

My solution… a compromise. I will retain usage of the GUA.com domain, it is mine after all (without wanting to sound like a petulant child). I will however set up a landing page on the initial root domain. This will link to my blog/main site, so people who want my content can easily get my content. I will also place a link to the website the typo traffic visitors are looking for : gua.com.my, and to top it all I will throw some relevant adsense in the mix too.

So to summarise. Hopefully you managed to follow me documenting my thought processes over a 30 minute process. In simple terms the only difference is that my blog is now at gua.com/blog. Exciting !

Chow!

General Musings

I was having a good, old think about GUA, and how I would like it to proceed and grow.

I created this, as I was interested in online markets and business. However there are also a variety of other things which interest me.

For example today during a training session I was made away of ‘The Freedom of Information Act’, whereby essentially, and in simple terms anyone can request any and all kinds of information from a person, company, or entity, and unless real significant reason, they must legally oblige.

Pretty interesting stuff If I must say so, and thus I thought it would be quite interesting to ‘investigate’ this.

My intention from here is to advertise, and promote GUA. I intend to promote it as an ‘online-based-blog’, but what if I were to write about general musings as though it were a personal blog also.

I dont want to develop TWO blogs… BUT will having none domain/web posts cause me problems in terms of getting my blog listed at sites such as domaining.com?

Your knowledge, and thoughts about this would be appreciated.

Domain Tools

As many of you may be aware along with the accquisition of the gua.com domain name, I was fortunate to pick up a variety of developed sites and scripts.

Having spent a large part of yesterday looking through these, I was able to properly explore the ‘Domain Portfolio Management’ script which I had inherited. To be quite honest, it is excellent, and it got me thinking. Unlike dnzoom, it does not offer the actual ability to modify or edit domains at multiple registrars, what it does do is list your domains, a lot of details, and provides many additional features and options.

I thus proceeded to spend the rest of the day updating, modifying, and implementing this script. It is looking extremely good.

Before I release it to the general public however, I intend to continue to develop further features/modules to expand on this. I asked on the Namepros forums as to features users would be interested in. A few suggestions were given, and a few similar sites mentioned. I proceeded to take a look, and got a few great ideas.

All my services where possible will be free, and I intend to develop every imaginable tool, a domain name investor, or web marketer could look for. My first project is archived whois, and a general whois service. This will allow you to conduct whois searches, see recent changes to the database, see other domains owned by the same person, and monitor further changes.

Considering many people pay domaintools a lot of money for these features, I feel this is a perfect way to state my presence, create business relationships, and give back to the community.

Advertising

At this moment in time, I am looking for domain blogs, resource sites, forums etc whom are prepared to link to me. At this moment in time GUA does not have LOADS to offer, but it will! Thus, this is an opportunity for both me, and you. If you link to me, I will link to you… simple as.

After all, help make the site popular, and I will be more motivated to provide you with awesome tools, articles, and resources.

Thanks

I am proud and honoured to present to you (my first human visitors) ‘The Gremlins Umbrella Authority’.

After months of hard work, negotiation, worry, and financial termoil, I have succeeded in creating what will hopefully be my first, last, and only online business venture.

So who am I, and what the hell is this?

I am -GRUMBA-, or at least that is my online alias/handle from now on. My real name (offline alias) is Thomas Clowes. I have a loving family, and a boring but reasonably well paid day job (At least for now).

In a curious, and random series of occurences one cold night in March 2006, I was introduced to the world of online advertising, domain name investment, and web site development. Immediately I saw a great opportunity. The Gremlins Umbrella Authority is the result.

Motivation?

As far as I am concerned, the world is in a terrible economic state. I have always been interested in business, and investment: the current climate got me into the stock market, and now into online business. It is potentially a huge risk, but I intend to rise to the challenge, and give it a go.

I am a big fan of books such as Freakonomics by Dubner & Levitt, and have been in many ways motivated by projects such as Oneredpaperclip. This however is not a punt, or a gamble to such an extent as ORP. I feel that given the small, condensed introduction I have had that there is a lot of money to be made online.

This will most certainly be a learning experience, and ideally a money maker!

My intention/ideal is to turn -removed- hard earned United States Dollars of my own into enough to buy me a new house, new car, and provide me with a substantial income for life. A long shot I know, but it would not be a challenge were it not.

This website aims to be a humerous(where possible), down to earth, online instance of my new business venture GUA. I intend to keep you updated of my progress all the way.

Thanks

-removed- I had a sudden realisation a week after my initial post, that my investment is of no concern to my readers. That is meant with no disrespect, rather on thinking about it I feel that this blog is equally informative, and perhaps more helpful if the reader is not aware of my investment. Cheers