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WhyPark Monetization Changes Announced

Elliot Silver
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2

WhyPark announced some changes to their monetization model today, and these changes should lead to higher payouts for domain owners who have sites with WhyPark. It’s also a good way to test your ad system vs. their feed in a vacuum environment (testing is the best way to see what works and what doesn’t).

Personally, I used WhyPark for my wine-lovers website, Oenophiles.com. I was very pleased with the support from WhyPark, and the name is doing better with them than it was doing parked (by a lot).

I will be publishing an interview with WhyPark CEO Craig Rowe next week, and I am sure industry veteran Stephen Douglas will have some good input as well.

Domain Partnerships

Elliot Silver
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11

Partnerships can be a great way to leverage a domain name with another company’s labor, intellectual property, financial accumen, and experience.   When successful, they can lead to substantial revenue growth and a well developed website. There are a number of partnerships within the domain industry including:

Monster Venture Partners & Castello Brothers – Traveler.com,
WashingtonVC & Internet Real Estate – Phone.com & Software.com

There are a few things I can think of when it comes to partnerships that people should consider.

Set benchmarks – If you agree to a partnership and you give up ownership in exchange for a website that doesn’t drive additional revenue, there really is no purpose for the partnership.   Make sure you set benchmarks for revenue, and reward more based on success.

Create contingency plans – If for some reason, one partner will not be able to fulfill obligations, there should be something in writing that determines what will happen.   Many things come up, and you want to protect your rights.

Set timelines – If your project suddenly becomes backburnered, you should have recourse to ensure that you aren’t obligated to continue a partnership when it’s clear that your site isn’t a top priority and won’t be ready when expected.

Reward excellence – If the new website generates much more revenue than expected, you should want to pay a larger percentage of the earnings to reward   success and encourage outperformance.

What else do you think is necessary when working with a partner?

Don’t Develop Dumb Domains*

Elliot Silver
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29

Development is the way to go for premium domain names if your company has the time and/or inclination to develop. There are many great development options, as I have mentioned several times on this blog, some of which can be found under the “Sponsors” title to the right. However, I would evaluate the domain names you want to develop and stick with developing the best of the bunch.

Don’t waste your time or money developing brandable or cute domain names, with the * in the title being *unless you have a very unique product, service, or information that you can offer visitors that they won’t find elsewhere. Development is hard work, and the domain name is the primary key to success if you don’t bring something unique to the table. There are plenty of unique sounding websites out there, but just about all offer something that helps to overcome the domain name.

A developed premium domain name can help the owner get the website indexed in the search engines, increasing traffic and revenue. It can also help prevent overreaching companies from trying to claim bad faith due to non-use or even parking. However, I don’t think building an average website on an average or below average domain name will be beneficial – aside from good practice with your development skills.

As other developers can attest, good development is difficult work and it is time consuming. Stick to developing and growing your best domain names, and you won’t get stuck in neutral.

****EDIT***

I bolded one of the most imporant parts because some people missed a MAJOR point of my post.   Yes, YouTube.com and De.licio.us are dumb domain names.     HOWEVER, they have unique services to compensate for the poor domain name. I repeat, go ahead and devlop your dumb domain names if you have a killer idea that will be able to overcome it.   I just don’t think you should build a mini site on a crap domain name.

Case in point, I am building a mini site on BerkeleyHeights.com – a town in NJ. I wouldn’t waste time or money building a site on BestBerkeleyHeightsSite.com.

TrickOrTreating.com Sell or Develop

Elliot Silver
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10

I decided I am either going to sell TrickOrTreating.com in the next few days or I am going to develop it.   First, here’s a brief sales pitch. The keyword “trick or treating” appears to be highly searched, according to Google’s Keyword Tool.   As one can imagine, most of the searches are done from September through the end of October, as people are looking for trick or treating costumes and seeing when their city permits trick or treating.   The BIN price is just $7,250 for this great top Halloween domain name.

If it doesn’t sell at this price, I am going to develop it.   I figure I might as well layout my ideas for a site here, and the buyer can use this as a reference, or I can email this to my developer and tell him to follow the plan laid out here.   Either I am generating some revenue to offset tax costs, or I am saving myself an email to my developer!

Now for the development pitch. I think most of the searches are for people looking for information about trick or treating in their community.   Most of this information can usually be found on the city website, and there generally isn’t much to discuss aside from the permissible times. Sometimes, like in the case of Burbank Trick or Treating, there is a special event to coincide with trick or treating, which is great because it usually means more people are searching for this info.

For the template, I want a very cute Halloween themed logo and header.   On the side or top menu of the template, I want spaces for 2-4 banners of various horizontal sizes (maybe of cute shapes), each connected to affiliates that sell Halloween costumes and Halloween candy.   Below this, I would like a link of resources, some external, but many internally created pages, such as “Trick or Treating Safety,” “Popular Halloween Costumes for 2009,” “Trick or Treating History”…etc.

Now for the meat of the project…   On the home page (in the middle), I want text that says, “Trick or Treating Times for:” and below this, 2 drop down menus – one for state and one for city.   When a person chooses a state, the city list populates and they can then choose the city and hit the “Go” button.   It will take them to a page that has the time for trick or treating for that city, a link to the city website where it mentions trick or treating, and any additional special information.

Most people will find the site through search engines, when they are searching for something like “Lowell Trick or Treating Times.”   Because the site will launch 7 months prior to Halloween, it will gain trust in Google and continue to rise in the rankings. Additionally, because the site will look very professional and have good information, I presume there will be links to the site from bloggers and other websites who post trick or treating times.

I won’t add Adsense to the site until July or August because there probably won’t be a lot of traffic, and Google might think it’s “spammy” if a large site is launched with Adsense.   I will launch each state/city separately – slowly, so Google doesn’t see a 500 page site go up over night, and because it’s going to take a bit of time to get all the data. If I can figure out a database option, I will use it to make the data load easier.

The site will be built on WordPress, and the actual site skin and logo should be fairly inexpensive, depending on the style customization.   The difficult part will be finding all of the trick or treating times, but I did some checking and the information is readily available.   If the project is started ASAP and built over the next few months, I think it will lead to big rewards every Halloween.

There Will be Less Domain Development

Elliot Silver
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16

When I was on WebmasterRadio.fm, I was asked to make domain industry predictions for 2009.   I hate making predictions, but one of my off the cuff answers was that I thought there would be less development by domain investors by the end of 2009 than there is now.   Although this contradicts what has been going on throughout the past several months, I’d like to explain my thinking.

With PPC revenue down and UDRP complaints against generics/acronyms seemingly at an all time high, domain investors at all levels have been moving towards developing their domain names.   Some people are using mini site services like aeiou.com or SiteGraduate.com, other people are using companies like WhyPark to build a continually updated site, others are hiring great developers to build websites, and others have been working on their own to build out their sites.   Development has been the main theme or at least a big talking point at all the domain conferences since late 2007 and early 2008.

The one big problem/obstacle is that development is hard work.   Sure, a 5 page mini site will get indexed vs a parked page which typically won’t, driving organic search traffic to the site.   However, to really make good money and a solid ROI, I think more than 5 pages are needed to capitalize on the long tail in addition to the lower hanging fruit.   Since most competitive keywords and key phrases have considerable competition from fully developed and deeply rich sites, a great domain name usually needs more than just a mini site to see strong results. My mini-sites that do well started off as mini sites, but I also took time to add content.

This being said, the people who have been spending time and money developing are realizing just how difficult it is to make a good return on investment, and some will throw the towel in and either stop developing and building their sites or slow the pace at which they were going. I think we will see this happen towards the end of 2009. People will still be developing their best domain names, but I don’t think it will happen at the same rate that it has happened the last few months.

Again, I repeat, development is hard work. A great domain name doesn’t need to be developed to make money, but development will usually bring in more money and traffic.   The domain owner needs to determine whether it’s worth the money and time to do this.   Ultimately, I believe people who have been spending money developing “brandable” domain names will realize that they aren’t bringing anything special to the table, so they aren’t generating a positive return on their investment, while owners of great generics slowly realize that development is more effort than they initially thought.

There are great options out there to develop good domain names.   However, it takes time and effort to grow websites into revenue generating websites, and I don’t think all domain investors will have the desire to do this.

What do you think?

Using Traffic Data to Register Domain Names

Elliot Silver
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6

A few years ago, I bought a couple of domain names for my dad’s business – one of which is the exact name of the store and the other is the shortened version, as it is commonly known. My dad had a website built, and about two years ago, he had Verizon re-design and manage the site, as part of his advertising with Super Pages.

Because it’s a local business, my never really focused on building a highly interactive website.   IMO, the main point was to have a website to inform people of the business who use the search engines or SuperPages.com. I figured that as long as there was information about the business, the brands carried, the store hours, and contact information, all would be good.   I never paid much attention after the site was launched.

Last week, out of curiosity, I installed a tracking code on the website, and I began to see how people were finding his website.   There wasn’t a lot of traffic (under 20 UV/day), but a good enough amount that it might be important to re-design the site. I was able to see that most people were finding the site via Google searching for the name of the store, and most had IP addresses that were local to the store. I also saw that some people are searching Google for industry keywords plus the city or region. Finally, I noticed several Google searches for a couple of long tail keywords that are important to the industry.

Interestingly, my dad’s small business is ranked in the top 10 for these two long tail industry keywords, and I also saw that the keywords in .com were deleted.   I decided to register the names and am now going to see how I can leverage the domain names to help improve this ranking. I am not an expert in this area, but even if owning the keywords don’t help the store, at least someone else can’t register and develop them, which would hurt the store’s ranking for these keywords.

I think website analytics is a neat way to locate solid keyword domain names, and I plan to do some searching through my websites to see if I can find any unregistered keyword terms.

How would you leverage a keyword domain name to help boost the traffic to a developed website?

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