Rick Latona: Inside WeBuyWatches.com and New Consumer Division

Elliot Silver
-
0

When Rick Latona and I were chatting about business development a couple of months ago, he mentioned that his company was going to launch a watch website with a similar model to companies like Cash 4 Gold and others. Customers would visit WeBuyWatches.com and they would send their watches to Latona’s company in exchange for cash. It would be a quick transaction to allow consumers to trade their luxury watches for money.

I read an article on Fusible.com this morning (a site that provides good insight into what domain investors and others are doing with top domain names), and I followed up my conversation with Rick regarding his newest venture.

You’ve recently launched two consumer sites with Vino.com and WeBuyWatches.com. Are these long term plays, or are you looking to build these two business and sell them in the shorter term?   What else is in the pipeline?

They are definitely long-term plays. I’ve been an internet guy a lot longer than I’ve been a domain guy. In a lot of ways, I’m just getting back to my roots.

My business partner Ryan Steel and I have a lot of experience creating and working with revenue generating sites for other people and this is a focused effort to put everything we know into one high-quality site at a time.

Is WeBuyWatches.com solely a Rick Latona, LLC venture?

Many members of our team have a piece of the action but there are no third-party companies that are involved. For instance, Escrow.com isn’t involved. They are only on the whois record because the domain was purchased on payments over just a few months. The record will update soon.

Do you find that people are apprehensive about sending a high value watch through the mail to a company they don’t know? Does having a name like WeBuyWatches.com give you added credibility in the marketplace?

Some are apprehensive but we are getting through a lot of the objections. Honestly, I don’t think the name has much to do with it. This really isn’t a domain play. It’s basic internet marketing. After that its all about negotiating deals and helping the customers. This is a business in and of itself, just like Vino.com.

Our new consumer division has nothing to do with domains other than all of the sites will have one. If we don’t want to be in the business we won’t build the sites.

I know you closed AEIOU late last year, but would your company help build a business like this for other domain investors?

No. Honestly, there is too much that has to go into building internet businesses. These are full-time gigs with their own staff and expense structures. We are incubating our own properties and simply don’t have the time and resources to do them for others.

How has your experience as a pawn shop owner helped you with this site?

Heh. Tremendously! Without going into details I’ll just say that there’s a certain art to dealing with hard goods and customers in this sort of environment. It’s not something that can be mastered in less than a few years.

Can domain owners who invest in domains part time do something like this, and what would you advise someone who wanted to build a business like this?

There are different types of domainers. I was never the type to build a portfolio of names that generated healthy PPC returns. I fall in the category of domainers that buy and sell for a living. As far as I’m concerned, what I do is buy things to sell at a profit. I really don’t care if it is a domain or a Rolex. If you are a domainer and think like me than I don’t see why you couldn’t do something similar. Just find a niche other than watches because I don’t intend to leave much room. 🙂

How important is the domain name in this venture when compared to other things like SEO, marketing, customer service…etc?

It’s not important at all. We bought WeBuyWatches.com because we though the domain would make a good brand. To us, it is worth more than watches.com which would sound like a retail site. It’s all about SEO, marketing and customer service.

What else would you like people to know about the start-up and/or Rick Latona, LLC as it relates to consumer websites?

You ain’t seen nothing yet. Vino and WBW are a result of 3 months effort. Wait until we are fully rolling.

One Reason to Use Godaddy: Free Hosting

Elliot Silver
-
0

I primarily use Moniker for my domain registrations, but I have a few that are registered at Godaddy, and I just realized one advantage of using Godaddy. Domain names that are registered at Godaddy are given free hosting from the company, although they have the ugly banner across the top of the website.

For many people, this ugly banner is a deal breaker, but in reality it shouldn’t be one. I registered a few “throw away” domain names last year with the intention of building very small websites for SEO purposes (just as a test). I only got around to building one single page website that had information and several links to another website of mine I wanted to assist with SEO.

Lo and behold, I came back to the site close to a year after launching it, and I noticed that Google has it ranked PR3. I know that people often debate about the value of Google’s PageRank, but the “website” consists of 3 paragraphs, has no photographs, used a free CSS template, and took about 30 minutes to create.

I know PR3 isn’t exactly hugely impactful, but all things considered, it was a pretty simple back link with no downside.

Double Dose of Development Tips: Develop Complementary Sites & Use a Coming Soon Page

Elliot Silver
-
0

I want to offer you two separate development tips today, although they aren’t exactly related to each other. I have had very good luck with DogWalker.com, a site which now boasts somewhere around 80 paid/paying customers. As more and more companies signed up, I began to seek ways to scale this model.   $10-20k/annually is great revenue for a website like this, but it’s not exactly enough for someone to do full time – even if it grows at a 15% clip.

I thought about different ways to scale, and one idea I had was to acquire another domain name in a similar vertical. I wouldn’t want to cannibalize my listings by marketing a product that was too similar, yet I would want to offer something that was different, enabling me to have a cross-marketing opportunity. I sought out quite a number of names, and most owners were asking for more than I would be willing to pay – even knowing that the model would work. I finally came across CatSitter.com, and made the acquisition.

CatSitter.com will be a great complementary website, and it is going to make money. Not only does it get traffic (had 19 visits yesterday), but many companies that offer dog walking also offer cat sitting services and/or cat boarding. I also paid much less for CatSitter.com, and I can use the same platform as DogWalker.com, lowering my development costs. I can then pass the savings along to customers, in the form of a cross-marketing discount.

One of the smartest things I did after launching DogWalker.com was contact several large organizations and franchises to seek their assistance marketing to members/franchisees, and the largest pet care company agreed to do so. The result of this was that I have about 18 listings from one company’s franchisees throughout the US, and more franchisees sign up each day.   Many of these franchisees offer cat sitting services, and I already have commitments from paying customers on DogWalker.com who are waiting to pay for a CatSitter.com listing when the site goes live.

The second development tip I have today is somewhat unrelated, but it’s important. Despite the fact that CatSitter.com is making a bit of money at Parked, I have taken the parked page down and put a search engine optimized coming soon page up. I anticipate launching the site very soon, but I want the visitors to know there is something better coming. I stupidly forgot to do this several days ago, but it will be going up shortly.

Not only will this be used for lead generation in the meantime, it will also be used to show Google/Bing that something is coming after being parked for 8 years. When I did this with DogWalker.com for 3 weeks, I had 3 inquiries (plus 3 or 4 sale inquiries), and the site launched as a PR1.   Although there will be less time in between the coming soon page and the site for CatSitter.com than there was for DogWalker.com, it’s still something I am going to do and would advise you to do.

Well, that’s it for me for today. Hope these tips were helpful!

Follow Along as a Category Killer Domain is Built from the Ground Up

Elliot Silver
-
12

I’m not writing this post because Rick sent me bottles of wine.   I am writing this post because I think we all have a great opportunity to observe the launch of a new brand on a generic domain name – Vino.com. By following the progress of this company from its infancy, I think we can all learn quite a bit for our own projects.

Over the coming weeks and months, keep your eye on site changes.   Do Google searches to see how rapidly pages get indexed by searching site:vino.com. See how the pages rank for competitive terms like “wine of the month club,” “wine club,” “vino,” and other related search terms.   See how Rick and his team go about building and getting back links for the site by searching for link:vino.com in Yahoo Site Explorer.

You might even consider signing up for the service. For $69/month, you will get some unique wines, but more importantly, you can see what offline marketing efforts Rick and his company are making to promote their brand. As a wine of the month club, the hope is that people won’t cancel their subscriptions, so you can see what they are doing to keep membership active.

It’s not often that we have the chance to follow a start-up, but Rick has given us this opportunity.   As much as its important to follow the success of Vino.com, it will also be great to learn insight about how an entrepreneur builds a business on a great generic domain name. Rick announced that Latona’s has launched a consumer products division, and that is going to be interesting to follow as well.

I recommend these things to follow along as Vino.com grows:

  • Join the newsletter
  • Test the customer service
  • Navigate the site
  • See SEM efforts in Google and Bing
  • Sign up for the club

My hope is that Rick will share some insight into the site’s growth. It would probably be in his auction company’s best interest to show how an entrepreneur can take a generic domain name and build a business on it.

Using All in One SEO Plugin

Elliot Silver
-
0

I have the All in One SEO plugin installed on all of my WordPress websites. It’s a free plugin from Semper Fi Web Design that makes the process of SEO much easier and automated. However, up until today, I wasn’t really harnessing the power of the plugin on my websites.

For most of my sites, I was basically using the default settings that come with the plugin. Each post/page title would be listed as the article title, and I didn’t add a meta description sentence for individual posts. I figured Google and Yahoo would be smart enough to pick up the content and rank it accordingly.

Although it’s worked fairly well, it’s silly not to use this plugin to its fullest. From here out, I plan to add a different page title and description instead of the default, which was the post title and the first 160 or so characters of the post. Usually that would be a lead in, but not really the meat of the post.

Over the next few months, I will monitor the percentage of my traffic that comes from search to see if it increases as a result of my efforts. With many people using WordPress for various websites, blogs, and mini sites, it doesn’t really make sense not to install the All in One SEO plugin – and once it’s installed, it’s silly not to use it.

Problem with WordPress Upgrade

Elliot Silver
-
11

Wordpress LogoI think about 50% of my websites are built on the WordPress platform, while I use Dreamweaver for the others. I am not a programmer, and at best, I am a novice developer, so I like WordPress because it’s easy to operate. One of the best aspects of WordPress can also be one of the most frustrating. Whenever WordPress rolls out a new version, or a plugin is upgraded, WordPress lets the publisher know that the newest version is available.

The notice is in a spot to ensure that people upgrade, since security patches are generally a big component of upgrades. It isn’t distracting, but positioning of the notice makes you feel like it’s very important to install the new version, whether it actually is critical or not. All you need to do is click the “Please upgrade now” notice, and you are taken to a page where you can easily upgrade to the newest version with the click of the mouse. Sounds simple, but it can cause major headaches for you.

With a custom designed website residing on the platform, an upgrade that goes wrong can lead to problems, which aren’t always obvious. Despite having an issue a few months ago that was the result of an upgrade gone wrong, I decided to take a chance and upgrade to WP 2.9. I had recently backed-up the entire site, so I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal if things went haywire.

The day after upgrading, I found that a post missed the schedule, which was an issue that happened last time. I did some testing (changing to the default theme and turning off the plugins), and I had the same issue. I got in touch with my designer, and he did a bit of research on the issue. Luckily for me, he found a thread on the WordPress Support Forums, where several people complained of the same issue. In a few minutes, my designer found the potential solution, which worked for my site.

The same type of WordPress problems can exist with a plugin upgrade, patch installation, or other WordPress upgrade. Before you are tempted to upgrade, make sure you back-up your full website. If you do run into a problem, do a Google search to find others with the same problem so you can either diagnose it or find someone who can diagnose it and remedy it for you. It’s great that WordPress makes it easy to upgrade, but it can cause you problems if things don’t work out as expected.

1...222324...53Page 23 of 53