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Steps to Building Out Bahamas.co

Just a quick   evening post to let you know where I am at with the development of Bahamas.co and the steps I’ve taken so far. I want to show you how development doesn’t have to be time consuming.

1) Posted a coming soon page on Bahamas.co and submitted it to Google Webmaster Tools. It’s nothing fancy, but I figured that I might as well put up a placeholder for now. As you can see, it’s already been indexed in Google.

2) Held a logo design contest on 99Designs.   I invited some designers I thought did quality work, and others participated as well. Hey – why don’t you take a minute and vote for your favorite logo?

3) Found a few templates I like on ThemeForest.net, which will be modified and customized to my liking. I don’t have much time to get the site live, so the custom option is going to have to wait. I plan to have a travel search function eventually, but for now a template is going to have to suffice.

4) Did some research to see what people are looking to find when looking for information about the Bahamas and wrote down a list of article topics. There are roughly 40 article topics in total.

5) I posted a job listing on eLance asking for writers to create a proposal for the aforementioned articles, which will need to be sent to me within 2 weeks. All articles need to be custom written and come from at least 2+ sources (with citations in the event there’s ever an issue). I then selected the most cost effective proposal.

One I have the articles written for me, the logo chosen, and the template modified, I will begin the time consuming process of loading the articles onto the site. I will then build a XML sitemap, submit it to Yahoo and Bing, and hopefully start gaining some traction.

At the beginning of 2010, I promised myself there wouldn’t be any additional development projects this year. Having the opportunity to build and own Bahamas.co was too good to pass up, and it is going to launch in a couple of weeks.

Rick Schwartz Floating TRAFFIC Without Sponsors Idea

I received an email from Rick Schwartz this morning with the subject, “BIG News from T.R.A.F.F.I.C.” and I immediately read the email.   Rick and Howard are expecting a big show in Florida in October (I am not surprised about this), and they are already discussing the format of TRAFFIC in 2011.

According to Rick’s email.

“In 2011, T.R.A.F.F.I.C. is strongly considering the possibility of having a “Non Sponsored” event. That means NO SPONSORS! Domainers only. The purpose is to keep the advertising and commercial part out and the ideas in.”

First off, I dig the idea of the more relaxed conference. I’ve hosted a few get togethers in New York, and because the crowd is made up of from anywhere between 15-35 people, it’s very relaxed and cordial. We haven’t had many sponsors for the events and that is usually intentional.

I think there will be a few big issues with doing a non sponsored event and I hope it doesn’t happen.

Most companies will still send representatives to meet with clients who attend the show. Right there, the idea of a non-commercial event is kind of thrown out the window. Even if Rick and Howard would try to limit the event to domainers and exclude larger companies, that would prove to be a difficult challenge in and of itself since many domain investors have become providers of some sort.

If sponsors are let in without booths and/or event sponsorships, it’s still going to be commercial, except sponsorship revenue won’t be there. This brings me to my next point. TRAFFIC is already known as the most expensive domain conference. The current rate for South Beach is $1,295, which is double what DomainFest costs (Howard corrected this in the comments). Without sponsors to defray some of the costs, I can only imagine the price increasing. Nearly every company is either facing cutbacks or not spending more, and a price increase or a smaller conference would probably keep attendance very low, which in turn would dissuade fence sitters from attending.

One of the reasons I think DomainFest has been so successful is that domain investors want to meet with their account representatives face to face at least once a year. Oversee has very long tentacles when it comes to the domain space, and they have thousands of clients in their lines of business. Having a personal relationship with certain account representatives is very important in a business like this, and attending DomainFest is that opportunity to meet with account reps in addition to other domain investors. Without the commercial sponsorships, it’s one less reason to attend.

I realize that many people who have been in this business for a while remember DeanFest (the first real conference), and most would relish the opportunity to relive that experience. Unfortunately, this business has grown so much over the years that reclaiming the old days is as likely as going to a college reunion hoping to relive the college experience of staying out drinking until 4am. Unless you happen to be Gregg McNair, you probably won’t be doing that and will wake up the next morning with a massive hangover.

Times have changed. Domain investing has become a larger industry in and of itself. New people have entered the space, and it’s not as collegial as it once was. The growth of domain investing has made a lot of people very wealthy, and there are plenty of negatives that come along with this. I don’t think having an unsponsored TRAFFIC event will draw a big crowd, and I think it could hurt the TRAFFIC brand.

DomainMarketplace.com Launched by Internet REIT

I haven’t heard anything from or about Internet REIT in a while, but I received an email this afternoon from Lisa Box who is Vice President of Sales for iREIT. Lisa wrote to let me know about the launch of DomainMarketplace.com, a website that has iREIT-owned domain names for sale:

I hope this email finds you well.   I wanted to let you know we have recently launched www.domainmarketplace.com! Here you can search the iREIT inventory and buy directly from the site.   We are still testing…”

If you don’t know about Internet REIT, you can learn more about the company on its LinkedIn page. They received funding from Maveron, were a big buyer of domain names a couple of years ago (I see several names I previously owned in this new website), ran into trademark issues, and their domain names receive millions of visitors each month.

DomainMarketplace.com has domain names priced from as low as the $50 range all the way up to 7 figures for OfficeSupply.com and Netster.com. It looks like they would also consider offers on their domain names as well.

Why Don’t Some Startups Use Their Domain Name to Brand Their Company?

I don’t get it. I was reading another article on TechCrunch yesterday about a startup company whose brand name is different than the domain name that is being used by the company. I understand that many “cool” domain names aren’t available in the .com, but in my opinion, the company should use another domain name that matches their brand, even if that means coming up with a unique name.

Take the payment company known as Square for example. Square.com has been registered for many years, so they had to use SquareUp.com.   Why not just brand themselves as Square Up instead of causing consumer confusion. Should the company grow extensively, they can afford to spend the money to buy Square.com and then rebrand as Square. This way, there’s no confusion and they’ll control both domain names. Sure, customers who go to Square.com will realize they’re in the wrong place, but why would any company want to take a chance that they would lose a customer.

Yesterday I read about a startup called Lookout, and I visited Lookout.com to check them out. As you can probably tell by the title of the article, they aren’t using Lookout.com, which was registered many years ago. Instead, they are using MyLookout.com, which isn’t a bad domain name. I would think they could match it up and use My Lookout as their brand.

Assuming 15-30% of a start-up’s traffic is type-in traffic, it doesn’t make sense to add confusion to the market while increasing the value of the other .com that is parked and will earn more ppc revenue. As a result of this, the domain owner would be less likely to negotiate to sell the domain name, fearing that the company would try to entrap them by negotiating. Further, there is little reason to sell a domain name whose traffic and revenue consistently grows.

Many people will argue that the domain name isn’t as important as the product or service being offered, and I agree wholeheartedly. However, I think it’s silly to be known as one name but have a different domain name. Square and Lookout are just two of many start-up examples.

Learn About Epik & Rob Monster in Today’s Webcast

Rob Monster is one of the most approachable people in the domain space, and I think his company has a good business model that may work for some domain investors. Epik just launched BumperProtectors.com this morning for my company, and as I promised, I will keep you apprised of the results in a future post.

For now though, I would like to remind you that Rob will be taking part in a free webcast this afternoon at 2pm EST (approximately 2 hours from now). The purpose is to learn more about Epik and Rob, and to learn how their services may be able to help you develop your domain names, as I did with BumperProtectors.com.

You need to sign up prior to the webcast to participate, so you might want to do that ASAP. I am sure this webcast will be available at a later point if you can’t make it or have other things going on, but you’ll want to check it out, especially if you’ve never connected with Rob before.

Buying .CO Domains for Typo Traffic

As one would expect, there are many people who are buying .CO domain names with the hopes of capitalizing on typo traffic. These people are looking through Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, and other various traffic estimation tools in the hopes of purchasing .CO domain names that will get traffic intended for the .COM.

One thing people need to be cognizant of (aside from trademark issues which I am not going to discuss) is that many high traffic websites get significant search engine traffic, and there isn’t going to be leakage from that. If someone visits a website via search engine or other referral, there will be no leakage to the .CO unless the referrer makes the typo.

Yesterday evening, I was asked if I had an interest in Burbank.CO. A reader of my blog offered his position in the auction because I didn’t back order it, and I wasn’t interested. I’ve been very fortunate with SEO and referral traffic for that site, and at the present time, only about 14% of the traffic is from type-in.   Assuming 20,000 visitors per month total, that means under 3,000 are typing it in to their browser.   If .3% of this traffic typos it, that’s about 9 visitors a month that I am losing.   It just doesn’t make that much sense to pay more than $500, which is where this name ended I believe.

There are a number of .CO websites that are live, where the .COM website is also live. Sex.com/Sex.co, Porn.com/Porn.co, Porno.com/Porno.co, Hotels.com/Hotels.co, and Weather.com/Weather.co are five such comparisons you can do, as I would imagine these sites rely on significant type-in traffic, which is where the leakage would take place. Since I don’t know how long each .CO has been live, I can’t say whether it’s 100% accurate, but here are the Compete numbers and % of traffic:

  • Sex.com – 135,793 | Sex.co – 393 – .CO % of .COM traffic: .23%
  • Porn.com – 1,807,569 | Porn.co – 1,015 – .CO % of .COM traffic: .056%
  • Porno.com – 233,909 | Porno.co – 656 – .CO % of .COM traffic: .28%
  • Hotels.com – 4,822,172 | Hotels.co – 1,698 – .CO % of .COM traffic: .035%
  • Weather.com – 31,992,990 | Weather.co – 29,893 – .CO % of .COM traffic: .093%

As you can see, there isn’t much leakage to the .CO, so investing a lot of money with the intent only to capitalize on typo traffic isn’t smart. Of course .CO domain owners can (and many will) develop their .CO domain names like I am doing, however, relying on revenue from typo traffic here might not be a smart play.

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