While still in its infancy, “emoji marketing” is gaining steam as each day passes, and a growing number of personal and corporate brands are adding emoji to their marketing toolbox and strategy.

From Hubspot to Visme to Neil Patel to “The Emoji Experts”, all of the aforementioned personal and corporate brands see no end to emoji marketing, having published their own emoji marketing guides, predictions and case studies.

As millennials $200 billion buying power grows, not including Gen Z’s influential buying power of $153 billion arriving to the market, emoji marketing is poised to reach unprecedented proportions of revenue for personal and corporate brands.

Not only are tech-related companies making good use of emoji to reach and serve more companies, but longstanding industries, such as the jewelry industry, are rolling up their sleeves and establishing their brands using emoji too.

No sooner than a person is introduced to domain investing, affectionately known as “domaining” by domain investors as known as “domainers”, that they soon encounter the ramifications of legally transacting payment and agreement of domains.

Most new investors, a few old ones too, blindly play the payment roulette game when using PayPal or a non-secure payment method when transacting payment and agreement of domains.

Individuals soon come to find out they robbed themselves blind from receiving payment as well as losing their domain in the most horrific cases due to payment clawback, chargeback or disputed credit card payment by purchaser. 

While attending and participating at MERGE! this year, I had the privilege of meeting and moderating a panel — Secrets of Domain Leasing — that included Stevan Lieberman (opposite end of panel from myself), IP Attorney at Greenberg and Lieberman.

It’s been one week since I boarded a plane from Orlando heading back to good ole’ Austin, Texas.

I thought I’d take a moment to share a few thoughts and interactions from my MERGE! 2018 experience.

Of course, financing domain names is nothing new under the sun. Domain leasing and financing certainly happens each and every week, if not on a daily basis.

It’s not news to read about a person or company leveraging varying financing options to hopefully stake their claim to highly-valued virtual real estate.

The question I pose is whether or not financing of new gTLDs is likely the chasm that separates registries that fail and flop versus those that wildly succeed. 

A little over five years ago, I accidentally stumbled upon something that forever altered my domain development experience: geo service domains.

Sometimes categorized as exact-match or partial-match domains, I encountered a geo service domain via GoDaddy’s expired domain buy-it-now/closeout auctions for a suburb of the greater Austin, Texas metro.

Although Google had issued an exact match domain update that devalued and slightly lessen exact match domains’ ranking, I decided to take a chance on developing my newly discovered geo service domain.

Little did I realize my development and SEO prowess would produce a page one ranking geo service domain website.

Years later, and many new and existing domain investors still question whether or not geo service domains are worth investing in.  That’s the question will attempt to answer in today’s podcast.

If you’re new to registering and owning emoji domains, then you’ve likely discovered the scarcity of single emoji domains, especially .WS and .TO emoji domain extensions.

Or perhaps you were one of many lucky persons able to snag a few circa 2014 or 2015 before emoji domain search sites and engines started popping up left and right.

And if not then, then maybe you purchased your favorite emoji domains by way of public auction, expiring auction, or a 3rd-party private sale.

Emoji domains are the current talk of the town. But truth be told, emoji domains somewhat remind me of the dog that barked and chased the car. How so?