Perhaps the most important event this month was ICANN’s decison to relax the rules about naming domain name extensions. Now anyone with enough cash can buy their own domain extension. So we could easily see new top level domains like .sex, .london and .eBay. Is this a disaster waiting to happen or will this open up the pool of available domains. See what expert domainer Elliot Silver has to say on this development  and see what other people are saying about ICANN’s decision in this post on TheDomains.com blog.  

Meanwhile, the Self Made Minds blog has a post that offers some tips for domainers thinking of leasing rather than selling their domains. Once you have read this, read this post about domain leasing agreements and then look at leaseadomain.co.uk/. This is all very early in the development of this market, and I would recommend that you get yourself a good lawyer before taking the plunge in this highly speculative area. This is one area novice domainers should avoid completely.

Next, here is a short introduction in how to use the Wordpress blogging platform to build sites that actually look like sites, rather than blogs. This will be especially useful for domainers who want to develop domains into minisites, for example.

Many domainers are taking their best domains and developing them into fully fledged websites. These new internet entrepreneurs have learned how they can make a decent income by either selling their domain with its established website for good money or by developing their domains and enjoying good regular incomes. I like reading about successful internet entrepreneurs and this article How I Built A Six Figure Internet Income about the income potential of blogs, from the Financial Hack blog, is quite inspiring.

Finally, this post about domain name appraisals on the Domain Junkie blog is well worth reading. It compares domain name appraisals from Moniker and Sedo and recommends obtaining appraisals from two trusted sources before negotiating a price for a domain.