Pacific Octane

I’ve been reading Paul’s stuff on domaining for quite awhile now.  He’s very interesting to read because he puts teeth into his stories like Simon Johnson of DomainerIncome.com does and isn’t affraid to ruffle feathers in the big hen house.  His blog article about the ongoing ICANN “let’s make a million TLD’s” is on the heels of timely discussions amongst people that I share things with and talk to about the domain industry.  The story from yesterday is here.

My reply/email to him was rather long and I doubt he’ll even post it, but I thought that someone might want to have a read of it here.  I’ll paste it below.

G’day and very well said Paul.  However, I would like to add a twist to your take on it.  The ICANN talks of the new TLD’s to appeal to a broader scope of industries is revolutionary, but it’s also inviting big trouble in my opinion.

Take a section of waterfront property for example- you share revenue with council to get special compensations and approvals and you have a city by the sea envied by all that didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to be a part of the initial “land grab”.  Those late coming people are willing to pay more for a block of land or a developed block of land if they truly desire it.  Now with this said, let’s change the rules to appeal to even more people and possibly get the good old government to subsidise some of our costs- let’s bring in a section for public housing.

BAM!  There goes your property value and then what do you have- nothing but some really nice homes that have depreciated in value by 30% to 40% virtually overnight.

I’m a fan of yours and agree with what you have said, but just wanted to add my take on this specific subject because it’s been the hot topic with a few mates of mine as well as the CEO of Pacific Octane Pty Ltd for over 2 weeks.

Cheers and keep up the great work.

James Wester
Pacific Octane Pty Ltd

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Any comments will be posted-

JW

Early to rise at 3:30am is the way that I most like to do it and when I can stumble through my onslaught of emails that have come in from mostly Northern hemisphere folks, I usually have a scroll around a few sites to see what’s happened whilst I’ve been asleep.

I’ve been chatting back and forth with a few really smart people like Simon Pupo from www.NameDrive.com and Rob Taylor of www.Hey.co.uk about where the .au market is, where it’s heading short term and obviously I’m very interested in the long term.  When I was doing my morning stroll through the domain jungle, I went ahead against my better judgement and logged into eBay.com.au.  Apart from seeing what I did about 3 weeks ago which was over 60 listings of anythingunderthasunthatsoundedlikeahalfbakedcrackheadidea.com.au with starting bids of $1,000,000,000,000.00, I suddenly grasped that my marketing concept that I’m launching as a case study in about 10 days is really good.

New cars- new shoes- new clothing lines- new art- new sports drink- new perfume

All of those things involve heavy marketing, constant branding and cost effective competitive pricing that will endure the cliche selling word of “NEW!” or “New AND IMPROVED!”.  My case study into our .au positioning in the market place is going to take place on eBay.com.au.  As silly as it sounds, whilst you can have a look for yourself now at the 30 some odd .au domains for sale with ridiculous asking prices, I’m going to be asking close to some of the more reasonably ridiculous prices on a few of our names… but also with very good reasons.

Those reasons are prior TLD sales in the market place.  Why not offer the World end user or company, the domainer that’s savvy and believes in the .au or a website development company that wants to increase their brand by owning an already proven valuable domain?  Exactly… why not.

I’ll go ahead and place my marketing tease here:

According to the fabulous bloke over at www.DNJournal.com Ron Jackson, wifelover.com sold for $100,930.00 USD.  What is wifelover.com.au and wifelover.net.au going to fetch as a single package?  We’ll soon find out whether or not the .au can bring only 10% of the .com value if both .au extensions are sold together.  Most certainly the .net.au would be worth a mere 1% of the reigning supreme .com eh?

This liquidation of 100 .com.au and .net.au domain names in the form of a case study is going to accomplish 3 things I hope. 

1. Create awareness that there are people and companies here in Australia that are in the domaining industry that want to grow and are sincere in trying to assess the value of our TLD in the Global market place.

2. Create a nice early stage of branding for Pacific Octane Pty Ltd in regard to the services that we will be providing very soon such as domain leasing options, viral marketing campaigns, development and logo design on www.PacificOctane.com.au to the World and especially domainers interested in the .au market.

3. Make some damn money!  This is the BEST reason I can think of to do this case study.

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I’ll be publishing our auction links onto www.PacificOctane.com very soon.  The auctions will begin on THURSDAY JULY 24th at 8:00am sharp.  For the pommies, frenchies and yanks- check your clocks and adjust your times accordingly ; )  LOL *coming from a “yank” that’s pretty funny and I’ve got a huge nose!

James Wester

Whilst we are awaiting a decision from SnapNames.com and our awesome account rep Chris Leggatt at Moniker in regard to actually opening up our portfolio to the auction arena for TRAFFIC New York, I decided that I would thumb through our online property so to speak and discovered something amazing.

Going through our portfolio of well over 2,500 domain names, I earmarked 100 of our domains that have already been proven as VALUABLE ONLINE PROPERTY as per the reports of Mr. Ron Jackson of DNJournal.com in the archives of past top 100 domain sales from the years of 2006, 2007 and 2008 YTD.

I’m proud to announce that each of these 100 case study domains will be developed with a mini page in which to test the market of the .au extension in the market place. I will be publishing the pages live on the website here in the coming days.

James Wester

When people chat about the real estate developers that have “inside information” or a helping hand from councils (dodgy brothers central in most councils no matter what political party they belong to), they might be right on some accord.  However, when putting together the company of Pacific Octane Pty Ltd, it took approximately 3 years of research, testing, case studies and a lot of work.  Pacific Octane Pty Ltd is a full service online business consulting firm that caters to boutique companies and websites.  We specialise in SEO, SEM, matrix marketing, viral marketing, website development and domaining.

Domaining all over the World has been going on for quite awhile.  Rick Schwartz, the leading domainer in the industry in my opinion, is the most prolific virtual property owner and promoter in the World.  He has done for the domaining industry what Google has done for the search and data industry.  When I say that we have a head start in this online real estate market, I’m simply referring to our modest portfolio of domain names.

We own approximately 2,500 names in the .com.au, .net.au, .com, .net and other TLD extensions at the moment with roughly 90% of them being .au extensions.  Pacific Octane Pty Ltd has very brandable, generic and highly searched words in their portfolio.  A sampling of those domain names are addictedgames.com.au, atty.com.au, autos.net.au, borrowcash.com.au, contikitours.com.au, financeoffice.com.au, freelinks.com.au, greatdating.com.au, highestpayingkeywords.com.au, hostingpro.com.au, jetairplane.com.au, landpackages.com.au, lowermyrate.com.au, oooo.com.au, recordable.com.au, spammers.com.au, vphone.com.au along with zzzz.com.au.

Owning a portfolio with domain names such as these is very rewarding.  We were very happy to do business with IntaServe in Sydney.  Amin, Lana and the rest of the outstanding people at IntaServe have been 100% friendly, supportive, outgoing, informative, helpful and most of all passionate.  I of course recommend IntaServe for your domain registering needs until Pacific Octane Pty Ltd has our reseller account established with them.  We expect to have our domain registration reseller account online by July 16, 2008.

All very savvy organisations and individuals keep huge secrets of projected plans and speculative gold mines.  We believe in the networking.  We believe in the fortunate blessings of good will.  We believe in always helping others.  If this post or anything within our websites helps one person make their life better, then it will make me smile to receive an email saying “Thanks James!”.

We’ve only just begun- keep watching.

James Wester

We have been approached to see if we can actually pull off positioning a company number 1 in the search engines and especially in Google.  Naturally we’ve accepted the challenge to do this project.  This job of SEO combined with matrix marketing is how we are going to obtain our objective.

Project time break down:

Research- Approximately 36 to 40 hours
Coding- Approximately 14 to 18 hours
Ongoing Maintenance- Approximately 4 to 6 hours per week for 12 weeks.

Our case studies are posted onto this blog because we will be posting:

Domain name purchase date/time
Initial domain setup onto the server
Log of time spent on project from start to finish (not to include ongoing maintenance)

JW

We have quickly found out that with the .au TLD’s it’s definitely NOT SMART to park your domain names.  We will actually be sharing our details within this section as a “live case study” with parking our domains.  Currently we have over 2,000 domains with NameDrive.com.  We have allowed Lucas, Simon and the boys from NameDrive to optimise our portfolio.  Follow-up posts to come with hopefully some good results.

James Wester

Once in awhile the Universe will align itself just long enough to allow synergy in motion to take place and shift gears in an explosive manner.  The naming of our company, Pacific Octane, represents this and speaks of the imagintation, creativity and explosiveness that will be the growth of our successes.  What is Pacific Octane?  We’d rather show you than tell you, so please, by all means, move your coffee mug, swivel in your chair, lean forward, sit back, get the cat off of your desk, adjust your reading glasses, but please, we beg you, do whatever it takes to save this page to your favourites because we will indeed SHOW YOU what Pacific Octane is in the coming months and years.

James Wester