The TRAFFIC East 2007 conference will be held October 9-13 at the Westin Diplomat Resort & Spa in Hollywood, Florida. Judging from the preliminary schedule, this is going to be a very important event for the domain industry again. For example, TRAFFIC East 2007 will have the most prominent keynote speaker in the history of the conference: Steve Forbes, Editor in Chief of Forbes Magazine and former presidential candidate.

TRAFFIC co-founder Rick Schwartz has always made bold statements before the shows and reality is, he has been right. Every TRAFFIC show promoted the domain business in a great way. Not only were more than $25 million worth of domains sold during the past TRAFFIC domain auctions, but TRAFFIC has also been the place where lots of sharp people found their way into the world of domain investing and where experienced domain owners connected to grow their businesses.

The formula of TRAFFIC hasn’t changed since the beginning: It is an event for the best of the best. This, I’m sure, has been the key to the huge success of the most important domain name conference. It’s a show for people who are passionate about what they’re doing. If you attend this year’s conference in Florida you can be sure to meet experienced investors and some of the greatest minds in the industry.

Now, let’s take an outlook at what TRAFFIC East 2007 has to offer beside high-level networking and entertaining parties. This year there will be lots of seminars again. For instance, there will be a panel with Adam Dicker (DNForum.com), Ron Jackson (DNJournal.com), Jonathan Boswell (LeaseThis.com), Owen Frager, Matt Bentley (Sedo), Ammar Kubba (TrafficZ), Peter Lamson (CEO of NameMedia) and Leland Hardy (NewYork.com) who will discuss the past and future of the domain industry. What has been accomplished already and how long is the way we still have to go?

Experienced domainers and bloggers Frank Schilling, Sahar Sarid, Owen Frager and Michael Gilmour will discuss blogs in another panel that should be very interesting. Other seminars will cover topics such as ccTLDs and local search, intellectual property, domain parking, type-in traffic, etc. You see, there is a wide range of topics and there are only top domain industry folks on each of these panels.

On October 12, there will be a highlight of the show, namely, the live domain auction with 200 high-quality domains put up for sale. I’m positive that this domain auction will set a new record again.

The fee for admission is $1,995. It’s up to you to decide whether or not the price for attending TRAFFIC is worth it to you. If you’re still undecided, you might want to read the following two articles by Ron Jackson from DN Journal about the two previous TRAFFIC 2007 shows:

Another Winning Hand! T.R.A.F.F.I.C. West Wows Record Breaking Crowd in Las Vegas

T.R.A.F.F.I.C. New York 2007: The Domain Business Takes a Bow on the World’s Biggest Stage

For those of you interested in better ways to monetize your domain portfolio’s traffic, Domain Name News has an extensive article on domain development today. The author, Ahmed F. from iBegin Source, points out that developing a domain might result in less revenue in the short term compared to domain parking. But building a unique content website under a domain name attracts more traffic in the long run. For example, Ahmed says that a domain he recently developed, Minnesota.com, now receives more traffic than before and that revenue is up, too.

There is a lot of data out there – both free and paid. And I don’t mean obvious sources like Wikipedia (which has been over-used). Project Gutenberg offers classic books for free. Perfect fit for literature/author domains. Geonames offers large amounts of local data for free. And those are only the free sources – there are a lot of paid sources that make a lot of sense for domains. In the post I mentioned in the beginning – the first comment is about developing local domains. There are tons of geodomains. Franky Schilling has mentioned local domains before. Frank M talked about Marchex utilizing local data on local domains, and even specifically mentioned where others could purchase local data. Heck SuperPages.com trumpeted their purchase of the LocalSearch.com domain. Why are parking companies just sitting around? Buying local business data may not make sense for one domain. But with tens of thousands (or even more) parked domains, it does make sense for parking companies.

Ahmed F. makes a good point. I have written about Marchex being on the right path before. Marchex (NASDAQ: MCHX) has purchased lots of local search data, business data and other relevant content that will help the company build its local domain portfolio into a powerful local search network, and it will help Marchex increase their domains’ revenue in the near future. So why don’t domain parking companies buy more images, text content and other data for their clients, too? This would make it easier for domain owners to attract more traffic, and I think it would increase revenue in the long run, because parking pages will look more like developed websites and parking sites might even be indexed by search engines better if domain owners were also allowed to add their own unique content in addition to the content from the parking company’s database. There is plenty of room for domain parking companies to innovate in this field. I believe that masses of domain owners will switch to the first domain parking provider offering an extensive content database and easy, flexible website development tools.