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Marketing BabyRegistries.com

Elliot Silver
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13

On Saturday, I posted an article about my new baby registry website, and a few people had follow up questions about the development process and marketing the site. This morning, I want to discuss how I plan to market and promote the website.

I have quite a few projects/websites on my plate that I actively market and update, including this blog, DogWalker.com, DogGroomers.com, and Lowell.com. This takes up a fair amount of my time. I believe that with BabyRegistries.com, my marketing efforts will be quite a bit different, and they will be less time consuming.

My main focus will be on grass roots marketing efforts to let parents know that the website exists. This will be done in a variety of ways:

Social Media: I set up a Twitter account, and I will be getting in touch with and follow people who mention baby registries in their updates. I will encourage them to sign up for a free account and stress that setting it up is easy. I will stress the idea that it makes it easy for friends and family to find and buy gifts that are needed.

Networking:  Although it would probably be most effective to do in-person networking, I don’t have the time or desire to do that. The site wasn’t a huge investment, and it will be more of a passive time investment. That being said, I plan to introduce myself and the site to mom bloggers and pregnancy websites. I had quite a bit of positive feedback from friends who recently had children, and I think the service will be something other bloggers will want to mention.

Word of Mouth: This is going to be the biggest driver of traffic. New and expecting moms love to discuss tips and helpful websites, and if they find the site beneficial, they will tell friends. In addition, as more participants send out emails to friends and family to let them know about their pages, others will sign up.

Search Engine Marketing: I will be making ad buys on Google and possibly Bing to drive traffic to the site. I will also try to buy advertising on some of the leading mom websites to let them know the site exists.

Contests: I may run a few contests to get people to sign up and post their registries. For instance, I may do a drawing for a $100 gift card to Babies R Us or Diapers.com for people who sign up. The tough part of this will be spreading the word about the contest and knowing legalities of running a contest like this.

Most stores are only focused on their own baby registries, and they likely won’t be interested in co-marketing efforts. Similarly, many baby websites offer similar (albeit different approaches) services on their own websites, so it will be difficult to forge relationships with the larger sites.

BabyRegistries.com is a much different type of site than my other websites. I won’t be responsible for driving traffic to the baby registries contained within the site. Since random people won’t be buying gifts, it’s up to the expectant parents to send their friends and family to their page. This means my focus needs to be 100% on awareness so expectant parents sign up and create registries.

I feel that this should lead to somewhat of a snowball effect. The more people that learn about and use the site, the more it will grow. I think it’s easy for expectant parents to create pages, and it certainly is easy for friends and family to see all of the registries. If friends and family find it easy to use, they will likely use it themselves. As such, marketing this site is far different than my other sites.

What are your thoughts on my next steps and marketing ideas?

My Newest Project Launched This Week

Elliot Silver
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40

Sometimes I come across a domain name for sale and I know I have to buy it to build it out. That happened the other day, and I want to share the newest website/business development project I have undertaken.

If you have any friends or family members who are pregnant or recently gave birth, you’ve likely had to purchase a gift. In the last few years, baby registries have become a popular way for expectant parents to choose gifts and supplies that are needed upon the birth of their baby.  Similar to a wedding registry, a baby registry can be filled out in-store or online, and friends and family can purchase gifts from various gift registries.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw that BabyRegistries.com was for sale, and before even buying the domain name, I had a vision for the site. It would be an affiliate based website where expectant parents could post links to up to 5 baby registries. They could send their friends a link to their page on BabyRegistries.com, and gifts could be purchased from one of the registries. Instead of having to look at several websites for a particular baby registry, the parents could have all of their registries listed in one spot.

There is competition for this particular website. For instance, BabyRegistryLocator.com is owned and operated by The Wedding Channel. TheBump.com is also competition, as are a few other niche websites.

Expectant parents can provide information about their registries and link to all of their registries on one page within BabyRegistries.com. Instead of having to search through a large list of similar names and/or finding the right registries, friends and family can easily find all of the registries for a couple on one page.

Monetization will be done via affiliate links and possibly direct advertising once the site has grown. I am planning to worry about generating revenue once traffic increases.

If you want to check out a sample page, you can check out Mike and Krissy St. John’s baby registry page. Mike’s a domain investor, and he and his wife is expecting in August. If you’re expecting, I hope you’ll add your own baby registries.

The website design was done (almost from scratch) by Theo Develegas of  Acroplex and the coding was completely done by Tia Wood, and I am utilizing the WordPress platform. There was a lot of work involved, and I am sure I am not the perfect client, but Theo and Tia were both very responsive to my needs and requests. There is still some work to be done, but please have a look at the site and feel free to leave some feedback and any errors you see.

The site took about a week to create, and I am pretty happy with how it looks. If I can manage a project like this, I bet you can, too. Comments, criticism, suggestions, errors, questions, and anything else would be appreciated.

BTW… if you are expecting a baby or know someone who is, please let them know they should sign up and post links to their baby registries!

Examine.com Launched by Domain Investor

Elliot Silver
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6

Sol Orwell (formerly known as Ahmed Farooq), founder of iBegin and a veteran domain investor and developer, recently launched a new pet project – Examine.com. Surprisingly, Examine.com was purchased in mid-March for just $41,000, which I think is a pretty good price for this domain name.

According to Sol, the domain name is just a part of the project. “The value of the domain is less than half of anything else I am going to invest into it. So domain is key, but you need a lot more than just a domain.” Instead of “Googling it” Sol hopes that people will come to Examine.com to “Examine it.”

Sol has created a “Wikipedia inspired” website for information about health supplements. The goal is to build the best online compendium on supplements, since there is a lack of information. For instance, if you wish to learn about fish oil, you can visit the site and learn about it. Who knew taking fish oil and green tea together was a bad idea? Both are supposed to be good for you, but green tea inhibits fat uptake, and fish oil … well, is a fat. It is information like this that Sol wants to get out.

I’ve seen quite a few sites that are Wikipedia inspired, but this one has the advantage of a great domain name that likely receives a decent amount of traffic from the outset. Although Sol intends to focus on health supplements, I don’t see why it couldn’t expand to other areas where people could “examine it.” I’m told that there are absolutely no plans to expand beyond the health, nutrition and fitness segments.

That’s one major advantage of launching on such a broad domain name instead of something more narrow like HealthSupplements.com. This is going to be a good project to watch.

After Half Million Dollar Purchase, Logo.com Now Live

Elliot Silver
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57

Logo DesignIn early November of last year, it was announced that Logo.com had been acquired for a half a million dollars by two Internet entrepreneurs. After months of business planning and website development, Logo.com launched softly a couple of weeks ago.

As you would probably expect, Logo.com is a site that sells professionally created logos. In addition to the logo work, the company also has web designers, branding experts, copywriters, illustrators, and other experts who can help companies enhance their presence online.

For those of you that might have web development or logo related domain names, a blog or a site dedicated to small business, their  affiliate program might be of interest to you. I don’t have the full details of the program, but I understand the company is currently offering a $50 CPA for every new customer (for a limited time). You can leave your contact information, and the company will be in touch.

Under the leadership of eCommerce industry veteran, Alan Townshend, and Internet entrepreneur, Adam Strong, I expect Logo.com will soon be one of the leading websites for logo design.

FMA Launches Forum on Arabs.com

Elliot Silver
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18

FMA
It’s very cool to see a friend launch a new website on a great domain name, especially when it has a greater purpose than to generate revenue.  Arabs.com is  a new forum-themed website that was recently launched by Future Media Architects and its founder, Thunayan Khalid al-Ghanim.

Thunayan took some time to write a thought provoking post on Arabs.com, which explains the forum’s purpose, touching on the historical significance of current events in the Arab world:

Though conscience is a concept difficult to define in general, it is quite easy for the person to credibly define their individual conscience. Individual conscience is the standard of credibility to which we subscribe and express ourselves. At Arabs.com, the human conscience, consciously defined by human individuality, is our source of credibility.

The greatest space of freedom is the one between a person’s ears. Arabs.com is concerned with safeguarding the independence and integrity of this space.

It is Arabs.com’s profound belief in the maturity of the Arab consciousness—which has transcended the stagnant political process and overturned historical convictions—that compelled us to lay the foundations for this forum. This is a forum for Arabs, by Arabs, from every dissent, without bias or preference for one voice over another. This is a forum to create a reality for Arabs without censorship or guardianship, where each person is responsible for their exercise of free choice and expression.

History is made not by super-powers of heaven or earth, but human-made, through the collective exercise of humanity expressing its self freely, and that is our strategic philosophy in contributing to the creation of a new reality in the Arab world and the world at large…”

FMA has tens of thousands of domain names, and likely hundreds of top quality domain assets like Arabs.com. Development is time consuming, especially when you consider the moderation that must go into operating a forum such as the one on Arabs.com.

Although I don’t speak Arabic (some might say I am still trying to master the English language), I want to wish Thunayan and FMA, bettawfeeq – good luck on this new venture.

I also look forward to seeing the launch of one of my favorite FMA domain names, Ibiza.com, which is expected in April. Hopefully I will get to celebrate the launch of the site with him in Ibiza (wife permitting of course).

Direct Ad Sales is The Way to Go

Elliot Silver
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4

I read an interesting article in the New York Times a couple of days ago, and I want to share it with you. It seems that many large websites are creating their own ad “networks” to sell remnant space on their websites.  Instead of the teeth  whitening  and belly  flattening  ads you are accustomed to seeing on large websites, you may actually begin to see some better targeted advertising.

The publishers  are able to accomplish a few things when starting their own advertising networks. First, they are able to eliminate the middle man from their ad sales. Instead of paying an outside ad network to aggregate advertising, the websites are able to work directly with their advertisers.

Secondly, the publishers are able to offer more targeted (and more relevant) advertisements to their visitors. This should encourage higher click throughs and better conversion rates for advertisers. Again, this will help increase the CPM for publishers who find that advertisers are able to offer more money for their remnant positions.

Finally, publishers can keep all of the valuable consumer and visitor data that is usually taken by the advertising networks.  This information is valuable for the publishers, and it prevents third party networks from doing funky things with it.

To me, the most surprising thing is that it seems that these publishers are just starting to do this. I am sure selling advertising across a huge network is a big challenge, but smaller websites (like this blog) have been successfully selling direct ads. I don’t have to generally worry about receiving payments and there’s no middle man to take a big cut.

The NYT article is an interesting read if you have a few moments.

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