If you’ve been around the domain industry two seconds or longer, then you’ve likely heard the name Rick Schwartz, also known as the DomainKing™.

He’s certainly not a new face to industry. A living legend, by many standards, not short on vision, stories, and facts/opinions about domain, business, and life in general, having held more than 30 jobs in a 5 year span.

It’s been an exciting few days here in Asheville as an eclectic group of domain investors traveled from near and far to share visions, dreams, and ideas to help one another and the domain industry in general.

The farewell breakfast Saturday morning and the Brewery Tour that same afternoon was just the activities to put a nice bow on all the good accomplished over the last few days.

About 40 attendees attended the farewell breakfast, and everyone shared their best memory of the event and stories from past events.

It’s always interesting to travel back through time, and examine the lifecycle and events of a trending topic, especially when it relates to domains.

Having been entrenched or involved with domains for the last 7-8 years, I find that the domain industry is no exception.

There have been a number of trends — blockchain, crypto, bitcoin, 4L .coms, numeric, and emoji domains, to name a few — that have come, gone, returned, and left once more.

Out of the aforementioned topics, emoji domains are the most intriguing for a number of reasons.

It’s hard to believe a few years has passed since I wrote the tutorial about how to use Facebook’s Graph API 2.X to retrieve the count for a given URL’s likes, shares, and comments.

I was informed a few days ago that my seamless solution for displaying the total count for likes, shares, and comments is dead in the water and no longer works.

Well, I guess this means we’re all in the dark now since Facebook’s most recent API upgrade doesn’t allow for such desired functionality, right?

It’s not everyday I stumble upon a business or personal brand actively growing their business through the use of new top-level domains (new gTLDs).

When I do, I find most business or personal brands are simply experimenting with such domains with no sign of commitment or results.

However, I recently stumbled upon a LinkedIn post containing a video promoting an Energy Management Consultancy based here in Austin, Texas.

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.

If you have a website — which is nearly everyone and their grandmother — and have not implemented a newsletter or mailing list sign-up form, then you are totally missing out on a good monetization opportunity.

And if you carelessly shrug your shoulders at the thought of possibly monetizing your website, then at least think about the opportunity of growing organic traffic.

Executing a sound popup form upon scroll, entry, or exit, or a sidebar, footer, or header sign-up form is a MUST for every website I develop. Why?