Here are some of the tools that I use to simplify automation of parking, listing and selling my Internet domain portfolio. You can see the results in action here: http://federal.ninja and domains for sale.

1. Parking Page: Use a parking template, Domena from ThemeForest, to advertise for visitors that my domain is for sale. I use an Excel spreadsheet to generate an Apache site configuration file with ServerAliases for all the domains.

You can download my Excel spreadsheet example from Scribd. The domain names are in column A. For generating a list of server aliases for my Apache site configuration, I use the formula:

=CONCATENATE(“ServerAlias *”,A2)

This helps me generate an Apache site configuration file such as:

ServerAlias *acro.io
ServerAlias *acroyoga.io
etc.

2. Advertising: On my parking page, I place an ad for WPEngine, which offers $150 per referral.

3. Dynamic pricing: I use the same Excel spreadsheet to auto-generate a Javascript file which customizes the price on my Domena template. e.g. When a user visits http://acro.io, the price is changed via Javascript on load. For generating my Javascript file, I use the formula:

=CONCATENATE(“if(location.hostname==”,CHAR(34),A2,CHAR(34),”) {price.innerHTML =”,CHAR(34),”$”,INT(B2),CHAR(34),”;}”)

This helps me generate a Javascript file which looks like:

if(location.hostname==”inkfeed.com”) {price.innerHTML =”$99″;}
if(location.hostname==”commonfilms.org”) {price.innerHTML =”$99″;}
if(location.hostname==”commonflix.org”) {price.innerHTML =”$99″;}
etc…

4. Dynamic HTML catalog: I use the same Excel spreadsheet to generate HTML for WordPress to list the domains in distinct sort orders (by price and alphabetically) e.g. my domain catalog.

For generating my HTML catalog, I use the formula:

=CONCATENATE(“<li><a href=”,CHAR(34),”http://”,A2,CHAR(34),”>”,A2,”</a> $”,B2,”</li>”)

This generates partial HTML for my catalog, which looks like:

<li><a href=”http://acro.io”>acro.io</a> $499</li>
<li><a href=”http://acroyoga.io”>acroyoga.io</a> $499</li>
<li><a href=”http://popcloud.com”>popcloud.com</a> $19,999</li>
etc…

I can generate different versions of this catalog by using Excel to sort by domain name or by price, et al.

5. Statistics. I use Statcounter and Google Analytics to track traffic to each domain. This helps me see which domains are most popular.

6. Catalog upload. With the same Excel spreadsheet, I can then easily customize SEDO’s portfolio spreadsheet with my pricing and domain catalog. I can also upload a similar spreadsheet to Afternic.

Posted by Jeff Reifman

Jeff is a technology consultant based in the Pacific Northwest.

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