Castello Brothers on Successful Site Development

Elliot Silver
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The Castello Brothers Top 10 Suggestions For Successful Site Development

My brother Michael and I have done well financially (is there any other way?) developing our sites. Nevertheless, we’re both on a lifelong learning curve and after 10+ years in this wonderful business we still feel like we’ve just begun. Here are ten suggestions we’d like to share with you so you can unpark your names and start making some real money.

1) Choose a domain name that reflects a topic you’re madly passionate about. Don’t do this and your site will become the worst thing it can be – work.

2) Stick with dotCom or the ccTLD of your country. If you don’t agree, please visit our portfolio, choose one of our names and develop the dotNet.dotOrg or dotInfo version into a huge site. You’ll quickly become our best friend and we’ll buy you a bottle of 1995 Dom as we toast the direct nav traffic you’ll be giving us.

3) Don’t build a site, build a brand. There’s a difference. Anyone can build a site.

4) Write at least a page of original content a day (in a year you’ll have 365 pages). What would motivate you to do this? See suggestion #1.

5) The content you write must turn your site into an authority or “reference site” about its topic. This is important for site credibility, SEO, return traffic and selling to advertisers. Remember, the last thing you want is someone having to go somewhere else for info about your site’s topic.

6) Do not put Adsense on your site. Why would you send valuable visitors away for pennies on the dollar? Who thought of this? Google (and that’s why they’re rich and you’re not). Furthermore, you need these people to tell you why they’re on your site so you can continue to build the user experience and discover their expectations (and you’ll also meet somebody else – potential advertisers). This will not happen when you keep sending them away. On a developed site, Adsense is the equivalent of opening a store on Madison Avenue and guiding customers from the front door straight out the back door as they hand you a quarter along the way.

7) Add a forum and blog that is monitored daily. Forums and blogs instantly turn an inorganic site into a living, breathing thing with a heartbeat. They add excitement, personality and lots of loyal, returning visitors. Also, add a Calendar of Events that is relevant to your topic.

8.) After you’ve developed the traffic and SEO rankings start selling static advertising to people who would profit from being on your site. Who are these people? By the time you’ve developed the site and achieved high SEO rankings they’ll be right in front of your face. For example, we’ve met many who were giving us listings to be on our Calendar of Events and didn’t know they could be on the front page for a fee.

9) Never, ever email a potential advertiser. This is Sales 101, but most people don’t know this. Get them on the phone or, if possible, meet them in person. If you won’t do this get someone who will and share the revenue with them. Don’t ever try to sell someone something you wouldn’t buy. You’ll come across as disingenuous and nothing will kill your reputation and credibility faster. On the other hand, if you believe in the power of your site that passion will be instantly communicated and selling is a cinch.

10) During this whole process, make the site an extension of your personality. It’s got to have your creative fingerprints all over it. Your site is your baby and never hand the reins over to someone else unless you’re selling it.

Richard Douglas Begins Geo Domain Development Series

Elliot Silver
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My friend Richard Douglas posted part one of his geo domain development series today. Although Richard is being a bit secretive about the domain/website at the outset of the series, he will be revealing it later on down the road. I’ve been chatting with Richard about this project for the last several months, and the site is legit, as his success with it.

I am looking forward to more informative posts by Richard, as I know he has a lot of good information to share.

WhyPark Monetization Changes Announced

Elliot Silver
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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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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.

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