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Bolt Bus is Awesome!

If you are exploring ways to get to New York City for TRAFFIC in September and you live in the northeast, I would recommend taking Bolt Bus, which is owned and operated by Greyhound. I just returned from a trip to Lowell, Massachusetts via Boston and took Bolt Bus to get their. Not only is the price just about the same as a trip on a Chinatown bus line, but they offer free WiFi to stay connected while on the road. Yes, I have a Blackberry to check email, but I was able to do other things wirelessly while on my way up north.
Bolt Bus has stops in Philadelphia, Boston, Washington DC and New York City. Although they don’t operate out of New York’s Port Authority yet, it is still easy to find the bus.   Once in New York, you can quickly grab a cab or jump on the train to get to the hotel in Brooklyn.   If you want/need to stay connected while traveling to/from New York, I highly recommend taking Bolt Bus.

Creating Stickiness – Bringing Visitors Back & Making Money

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The goal of most websites (and businesses) is to generate “stickiness,” which is basically attracting visitors and keeping them coming back to the website or business for more of what is being offered. There are various ways a company or website can create stickiness, such as providing updated news and information (which can be time consuming and expensive) or having the visitors create their own content to bring them back.
Yesterday, I launched a forum on TropicalBirds.com in an effort to create stickiness. I have been very happy with the growth of the site so far, but I want to give visitors a reason to return.   I continue to add new content and videos to the site (no need for .TV – joking – take it easy), and traffic is rising as it gains traction in Google.   Although the site hasn’t gained much traction in Yahoo yet, I am optimistic that it will come in time.
I added links to the forum on the sidebar of every page in TropicalBirds.com, and I also added calls to action throughout the site. Since tropical bird watching is a fairly popular hobby, I believe people will be interested in discussing everything related to tropical birds in the forum. Hopefully this will create stickiness, which should help the site grow.
The challenge will be turning the eyeballs into dollars. Based on my minimal experience so far, I believe there are plenty of advertisers in this space who will be interested in capturing the attention of tropical bird enthusiasts who visit the site, and I will be able to accommodate their advertising needs when the time comes. As I mentioned before, when I reached out to bird breeders about free listings on the site, I had one breeder who requested a featured listing on the site, and now she is the featured breeder in six categories.
While generating advertising revenue isn’t as easy as that was, I believe advertisers will want to put their products in front of interested eyeballs.   I am spending the time and money to build a place for likeminded people to discuss tropical birds, and I wanted to share this strategy with those of you who are in the midst of development. As always, if you have any questions, I am happy to help if I can.

What's Your "End Game?"

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I think that every domain investor (and people in other businesses) should have an “end game,” or at least be working on establishing an end game as their business develops. What are your ultimate goals for your domain business? I think it’s very important for people to set goals – both business goals and personal goals. Everything that you do should be related to achieve your end game in some way. Whether it is an acquistion, developed website, or a sale, everything should be done to bring you closer to achieving your end game.
Part of my personal end game was outlined in a post I made a few months ago. Essentially, I want to have 2 fully developed geographic domain names that are generating advertising revenues.   I also want to have 2 product/service related websites that are generating revenue from advertising or inventory sales. Whenever I acquire a domain name, I analyze whether it can become a part of my “perfect portfolio” or whether it will help me to get to the perfect portfolio by selling it for a profit. I am building new mini-sites that can be grown into full websites and continue to acquire new domain names (PrenuptialAgreement.com and LastWillAndTestament.com last week).
While I think I am on my way to achieving my 5 year goal, I also need to think about the end game, which I certainly hope isn’t in five years.   What is my end game right now?   I really don’t have a clear vision right now, but it is something that has been evolving. I think it’s something to think about as you continue to grow your business.

A Logo is Important

I’ve seen quite a few logo-less mini sites (including one of my own), and as a person with a marketing background, I believe a logo is essential for a website. While search engines should bring a well designed website a large percentage of its traffic, it’s important to remember that a logo will help visitors remember your website’s name, making it easier for them to find it again in the future. Just about all of my websites have nice logos (at least in my opinion), and there are a variety of options out there for finding a good logo.
If you look around at brands from around the world – both large and small – almost every one of them has a logo to stand out from their competition. Some might be plain logos, while others are more elaborate, but the purpose is for customer recollection, brand positioning, and general marketing of the company. The same should go for your websites, as a logo makes the site – even a mini-site, look like its an official company rather than just a traffic-driving website built to generate revenues from PPC advertising. I received several compliments from people in the birding industry when I introduced TropicalBirds.com, and this allowed me to establish link trades of relevant websites. Without a logo, I doubt this site would have been taken seriously.
I have a web designer that created my geodomain logos, incorporating a variety of elements from each city. My other logos were designed by a company called LogoJeez, which has pretty quick turn-arounds. I always get the least expensive package knowing that they will re-do a logo if I am not satisfied with the initial 4 concepts. I’ve also used 99designs.com for a logo design contest, which I used for my blog’s header and my company’s corporate look/feel. There are plenty of options out there for logos that range in price from $100+.
As my track coach used to tell me, if you are going to do something, don’t do it half-assed. If you are going to build a website on a nice domain name with good content and SEO, you might as well pay a bit more and make it look even more professional.

Developing Great Domains vs. Average Domains

Developing a website takes the same amount of time whether you are building it on a good domain name (CoffeeHouses.com) or an average domain name (FreeCoffeeHouseDirectory.com). Likewise, the cost of developing a website is pretty much the same whether it is a good domain name or a poor domain name. For these reasons, I would prefer to only develop very good domain names rather than putzing around developing new registrations (like I did with DebtAssistanceClinic.com).
When you are building a website, there is absolutely no guarantee that your website will be profitable and make money. No matter how good the site looks and how high it ranks, you can’t guarantee it will earn your time and financial investment back. The more effort you put into link building, content writing, search engine optimization…etc, the greater financial reward you will reap. Doing all of these things takes a considerable amount of time, and as you know, time is money.
While it’s great if you built a website that makes $2/day with Adsense on a low quality domain name, it will be difficult to get someone to buy it for more than 2-4x annual revenue because there is considerable risk in this type of investment. Basically, after many hours of work (let’s say 5 full days) you have a website that may make $700/year. Personally, I think it’s hard to justify spending a ton of time build a great, money making website on a poor domain name.
I’ve noticed a number of developers “bashing” domain investors for parking their domain names rather than developing them. Many of these developers, designers and SEO experts talk about how they could make one of these parked domain names into a huge money making website, and the owner is stupid for parking. While I may agree that parking can be a poor solution in some cases (could cause Google de-listing for one), it is far easier to make money on a parked domain name than to try and build dozens of websites on a domain investor’s prime domain names (all without a guarantee of any incremental revenue).
To the people who think they can do far better developing a name than those who park, I challenge you to go out and make a strategic decision to find a good name and develop it. With your expert plan, why not go out and find an investor who would be willing to front you the money to implement your plan. There are also some fantastic financing options like Domain Capital that can help you pay for your name. With all respects, if you have a plan to develop a high value domain name into a money-printing website, but you don’t have the stones to put up your own money or finance it, maybe the domain parkers aren’t the stupid ones after all?
This is a bit tongue in cheek, as a few of my developer and SEO friends have recently jumped in and bought some great domain names to develop.
While you don’t need a great domain name for a great website, you will certainly make it much, much easier to make money with advertisers and achieve higher search engine rankings (again, if you owned a coffee house, would you rather be listed on CoffeeHouses.com or FreeCoffeeHouseDirectory.com?). Additionally, if you do wish to sell the domain and website, an investor will pay much more for the website with premium domain name.
Since one can only spend a certain amount of hours per day developing a website, its better to spend that time working on a website for a great domain name rather than just an average domain name.

Mini Site Template Development Strategy

One fairly simple development strategy that I am beginning to use involves building a website template and using that for all minisites. Instead of building a brand new web template for every site, save some time and money and use a very similar template. It doesn’t have to be fancy or flashy, but as long as there is room for content that can be viewed on a variety of browsers and screen sizes, room for Google Adsense banners, and room for other advertising banners from direct-to-advertiser sales (or affiliate relationships), you should be okay.
Personally, I wouldn’t recommend this for sites with a considerable amount of content or for high value domain names, as you probably want those to be more customized, but for your mini-sites that will have 5-10 pages each, I think one template should be sufficient. For those debating whether to use HTML, WordPress, or another type of tool, I am not the best person to make a recommendation. I think WordPress is easy, and I use Dreamweaver for HTML, which I learned on my own. Both are fairly straightforward and self explanatory – especially with a bit of background in HTML coding.
When it comes to the technical aspect of web development, my skill level started off at somewhere near a 1 on a scale of 10.   I am now probably around a 2.5, but I am still able to add pages to my WordPress and HTML sites easily. I’ve been told that I should use php to create my header, navigation and footer – which I probably should, but I’ve been too busy to learn. In the long run, I probably would save a ton of time by committing to a few hours now, but it’s hard to do that with so many things going on at the moment.
From experience, I can tell you that building a mini-site using strong SEO techniques will help increase traffic to a domain name/website. The more traffic that visits the site, usually the more revenue the site earns. I think if you put some time into development – but keep the time/financial commitment in line with your expectations for the site, you probably can’t go wrong. As I’ve always said, feel free to drop me a note with questions, and if I can’t answer them, I will try to put you in touch with someone who is more knowledgeable.

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