As I mentioned in another post back in 98 I was running a site about Trading Cards, it was actually an Auction site for trading cards.

I haven’t used this domain for a couple of years for anything other than my partners email. I also have an email alias for myself with this domain.

Recently via my alias I have been getting strange queries about items purchased on eBay, that have absolutely nothing to do with me. At first I thought someone must of gotten hold of my eBay user id details and was using my account.

When I did some investigation into the emails it turned out that some bright spark setup an eBay auction service using the .net version of my .com. I have repeatedly asked them to make sure their customers know to email the .net address and not use .com.

They haven’t done much to encourage the use of the right email addresses, and yesterday I got another email from someone asking about an item up for auction.

An idea started to form in my head after I wrote my piece about “Make Your Site Sell”, Ken also has an ebook called “Make Your Net Auction Sell” [aff].

Ken actually gives MYNAS away in the hope that people who read it will buy some of his other products.

Now all I needed was away to get MYNAS in front of people who got .net and .com mixed up. Which again got me thinking, a quick visit to my weblogs showed that a few hundred people a month where hitting the empty home page of my .com.

20 minutes later there is a brief index page on my .com address talking about MYNAS and suggesting that people use it to run their own auctions.

It will be interesting to see if this actually generates any income, and if it does I might even spend a bit more time and do a nice index page.

I have to admit this is a pretty unique situation, and you probably can’t use this tip straight out of the box, but it might help you get thinking about doing different things.

Some people might think that this is a bit of passing off, but hey I owned the .com 5 years before they bought the .net, and everything I wrote on the .com is 100% true.

If you interested you can see my quick and dirty page at http://auctionability.com