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Troy
Rushton
CEO, Protrada.com |
When
I entered the domain business
almost
a decade ago I quickly found myself
spending 12-16 hours a day, 7 days a
week, researching, acquiring and
managing a rapidly growing portfolio of
domain names. I wish Protrada.com
had been around then - it would have
allowed me to get all of my domain
acquisition and management chores done
in a fraction of the time. Not
that I have any regrets - this business
has been good to me, as it has to
hundreds of others - but time is our
most valuable asset (it's the only
thing we can never replace) and
Protrada makes it possible to save prodigious
amounts of time and still run a huge
domain portfolio including all of the
tasks attendant to that - acquisition,
sales, monetization, management and even
a respectable level of development.
Protrada,
built by the same talented Australian
team that created the Parklings.com
domain monetization platform, made its
public launch this evening, but I got a preview
last night when the company's Business
Development Manager, Louise Munck
arranged for CEO Troy Rushton to
take me through a complete demo of what
the platform is capable of. I came away
from the hour extremely impressed with
what I saw. |
Protrada
might be described as the domain world's version
of the Swiss Army knife - it does everything
and it is extremely easy to use. I am
going to touch on a few of the features in this
post but the best way to see what Protrada can
so is to see it for yourself, something
they allow you to do through a free
7-day trial. If you decide it is for
you, they have four different monthly price
levels (ranging from $29 a month to $199 a
month) based on the number of domains you want
to have under management and the feature sets
you want. This is a serious platform with
unbridled power designed for domain
professionals (or those hell-bent on becoming
one). 
A
screenshot of a sample Protrada dashboard
detailing auctions you are watching, winning and
losing, as well as those you are selling. Access
to other functions are accessed from the menu in
the black bar at the top. Let's
start with domain acquisition functions.
You can enter specified keywords and each day
Protrada will automatically search all of
the major auction platforms (including expired
and aftermarket domains) and import a list of
names available that day along with key data
for each name to help you decide what to go
after (you can set up parameters in advance to
further filter the list to show only those that
meet data metrics you specify). The system will
also bid for you and hold those bids
until the last possible minute so your activity
doesn't attract competitors to names you are
interested in. It can even grab Buy It Now
domains that meet your pre-set price and
criteria. 
A
list of domains up for bid that have been
imported and assessed by the Protrada
system. (Note:
In addition to new acquisitions, you can of
course import any of your existing
domains into the system, either manually one by
one or in bulk with a text of .csv file.
You can also pull them into this system directly
from many major registrar accounts). If
you want to go off auto pilot from time to time
and get into the middle of the action there is
also a 24-hour live trading floor that
will be right up your alley. Another
great feature is that you can set up various Actions
that will automatically put the domains you
acquire to work instantly. Those actions
can change DNS to the nameservers you specify,
place the domain up for sale (on multiple
platforms with a price marked up by any
percentage you specify) or even do a quick
development project, complete with articles,
user generated content and social media features
that are much better received by search engines
than the usual parked page. 
The
powerful Create Action screen at Protrada Another
big plus is that you can collect email
addresses from your site visitors so you can
build a valuable lead database that can be
tapped over and over. You
can also add your own advertising network codes
to display ads and, if you wish, add your own
original content and images - but most will
probably prefer to let the system do all of
the work. Most sites are generated in well
under one minute. You can see an sample
auto-generated site at FiremanTShirts.com. The
Portolio area of the platform lets you
track how each domain is performing across a
variety of monetization options than can be
tapped with each name (everything from CPC and
CPA to Amazon, Shopping.com, ClickBank and
others). Domains are sorted into four
performance categories (from Dog to Star) making
it easy to see which ones are doing well and
which might be better letting go. 
A
screenshot from the Protrada Portfolio area In
the portfolio area you also have access to all
of your management tools including those
that edit the look and content of your auto
developed websites. The
Reports area is also extremely robust
with access to Google analytics, detailed data
on your sources of traffic and much more. Having
these stats constantly at hand can also be a big
help in selling your domains. As
I noted earlier this is a very intuitive
system than I found unusually easy to use for
one that has so much power under the hood. To
further aid those who need a little help along
the way, pop-up videos are available
across the platform to show you how
things are done. I've
barely scratched the surface here, so if it
looks interesting, explore the platform in depth
for a week via Protrada's free
trial and see how this compares to
the way you are currently managing your domain
business. This must be what it feels like to
upgrade from a Model T to a Ferrari.
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