There’s not too many people would quit or forgo business school or college to immediately start a business.

But today’s guest, Marianna Felsman, did just that decades ago on her way to becoming partner and entrepreneur of BlueAir, a thriving Austin-based Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) services company.

When entering into the domain industry with great hopes, wishes, and dreams of striking it rich as a domain investor, most domain investors would ever imagine having to mortgage their house in order for their dream to be realized.

Well, that very thought as well as few others was considered by Drew Wash — a long-time domain investor, and entrepreneur of MovingSites.com, a host of website communities designed to bring experts together.

There are countless carcasses littering the domain investing journey.

Folks often enter domain investing thinking it’s nothing more than buying domains while sipping mai tai cocktails on a beach.

And if not that image, then the image is that domain investors purchase domains at standard registration fees on Monday, and flip them for 5, 6, and 7 figure sales by Friday.

Very few domain investors do either one of the farfetched lifestyle of domain investing.

In fact, most domain investors are quite diversified across the following domain investing categories:

Since the beginning of the Internet, the ability to view who owns a domain name has been vital for those selling and buying domains.

And come May 25th, we’re forever losing this critical staple of information the domain industry, domain investors, and general public have become quite fond of depending upon: Whois Data.

If you haven’t heard about General Data Protection Regulation policy, as known as GDPR, and it’s impact on the domain industry and domain investors by now, then you’ve likely been asleep at the wheel. WAKE UP!

We’re less than a few weeks away from the arrival of GDPR and it’s wide-reaching impact on personal and business brands throughout the world.

And although how we live and do business online will forever be transformed by GDPR, there 5 actions to consider that I believe believe should help to prepare and weather the arrival of GDPR.

It’s been almost 6 years ago that Google forever altered the search landscape when it released an Exact Match Domain (EMD) Update — a filter launched to prevent low quality websites from ranking well simply because their domains had words or phrases that matched search terms.

This update wiped and hijacked search rankings for a number of websites overnight. One day websites were receiving hundreds and thousands of visitors, while the very next day was a handful of visitors, if any.

And although many website and website owners were impacted by Google’s EMD Update, there were a select few that weathered the storm without issue. In fact, some websites experienced increased search ranking.

One of those websites not impacted by Google’s EMD Update was an educational website dedicated to instructing and creating Java tutorials so easy, a 10 year old could do it.

When starting a business these days, one quickly encounters how challenging it is to reconcile a business name and the available matching .com domain that passes the radio test.

If you like most business owners, then you’ve likely not heard of the domain radio test or understand the importance it plays to your business and its digital presence. 

Welcome back to the latest The Week in Review for Emoji Domains.

It’s been quiet on the emoji domain sales front the last couple of months. Per DNAcademy, the last big emoji domain sale closed December 16th, 2017 at $3.1K — 😎.ws.

But from the looks of the latest action this week, emoji domain sales may have sprung to life! 🤩