Domain Investing News, Strategy & Tips

Sunday’s Quick Thoughts

Elliot Silver

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July 26, 2009

Red Bellied Piranha Here are some quick thoughts on this nice Sunday. I hope you enjoy the last day of your weekend! Rest up for a successful week.

When you’re buying domain names, you should check to see if there’s a website developed on the domain name. I get annoyed when people email me asking if I would sell “the domain name Lowell.com” or another one of my developed websites. Clearly it’s not just a domain name and if I get annoyed as a domain investor, it’s probably going to annoy people who have businesses on their domain names.

I want to welcome LuxuryNames.com as a new header banner advertiser. Take a minute to sign up for their newsletter. The company owns great domain names such as PrivateAirplanes.com, HomeInsuranceRates.com, MicroLenders.com, and many other great names and you want to be subscribed when they offer names for sale.

I think it’s great that guys like Mike Berkens and Rick Schwartz write blog posts many times per week. These guys have sold incredible domain names for large sums of money, have deep portfolios with top domain names, and they could be sitting on the beach or playing golf all day. I don’t always agree with everything they say, but their posts make me think about this industry and my business, and I really appreciate their willingness to share with us.

When you develop a website, it can take a long time to start seeing results. As mentioned before, I’ve been blogging for over two years, and I am just starting to generate a decent amount of revenue. Likewise, Burbank.com has been launched for about a year, and traffic, revenue, and advertising inquiries are up quite a bit in the past few months. Developing a business on a domain name isn’t easy, but it’s a great way to increase the value and generate revenue over the long haul.

I just bought RedBelliedPiranha.com and RedBelliedPiranhas.com, and I am psyched to create a mini site for one with a forward of the other. As you can probably tell, I like building mini sites that have vivid pictures. I haven’t done much CTR testing with Adsense, so I don’t know if the theory about having an ugly site leading to more clicks is accurate with mini sites, but I enjoy searching for cool photos.

Speaking of mini site testing…. has anyone tested design layouts for increased revenue/click throughs? I’ve wondered if someone has tested layouts, images, content length…etc to find the “perfect” mini site. This is something that would be very interesting to me. The website would have to have enough traffic to make the results statistically significant – and it would probably have to be done using several mini sites over several months with a straight up A|B split. I would be happy to post results here for others to see if the test is legit and not just a sales pitch.

Red Bellied Piranha Photo Source:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gregory-moine/ / CC BY 2.0

Relevant Expired Domain Names

Elliot Silver

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July 26, 2009

4

When you have a developed website and are looking for ways to grow your traffic and rankings, redirecting (via 301 redirect) related, expired domain names is a good way to do it. On Lowell.com, I had a difficult time getting inbound links from the city websites and local organizations, as many of them work closely with the city of Lowell. I get frequent compliments and submitted press releases from many of them, so I know they like the site, but getting returned links has been a difficult task.

Needless to say, there are many small organizations and/or Festivals in the city. Some of the Festival organizers have websites that for whatever reason have been neglected. On occasion, they even let these domain names expire, which isn’t a surprise since these have generally not been updated in a while. Oftentimes, these websites have links from businesses, cultural organizations, and government websites in the area (not all .gov though). Most are links without anchor text, so the SEO value is very little, but that isn’t entirely the point.

Instead of letting someone else grab them and park them for the small amount of traffic they receive, I bought a couple and forwarded them to the correct event pages on my website, which contains information about the event history and dates. If/when people type these domain names-in or click on a link, they will get the information they looked to find. Most visitors probably won’t even notice the difference because they simply wanted to learn about the event, and that’s what I am doing. An example was a recent ethnic Festival, and I received about 20 visits from one website that had a link to the old site.

Ironically, the minor league hockey team operates on LowellDevilsHockey.com and LowellDevils.com dropped very recently. I was debating whether to buy it or not and opted against it. I informed all of the executives about the pending drop auction, and their marketing person told me they don’t need the domain name. I opted not to buy this one, as I didn’t want to have to deal with a professional sports organization asking why I own this name, while not understanding how I ended up with it.

The key is to pick and choose which names are worth buying and which could be infringing. Most of the Festivals have generic names, and if the Festival founders ever want the names back, I am more than happy to oblige. However, the hockey team name wasn’t close to being generic in my opinion and wasn’t worth any type of legal trouble. There’s a fine line between being helpful and being harmful, and I didn’t want to be perceived as being harmful.

If you operate websites, you can find expiring domain names that might help build awareness of your site and perhaps even add some SEO value. I want to give a tip of the hat to a friend who is a great SEO for this advice a while ago.

Twitter Call to Action from Best Buy

Elliot Silver

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July 25, 2009

11

I saw my first television commercial with a Twitter call to action in lieu of a phone number or corporate website. Best Buy had a commercial on National Geographic where they had the url Twitter.com/twelpforce across the screen for the length of the commercial. As a direct marketer, I don’t really like this idea for a few reasons:

1) Unless they have a special deal with Twitter, they can’t track the results (how many people visited the page)
2) They are building Twitter’s brand, not Best Buy’s brand
3) It’s difficult to remember the url, and if a visitor typos it, they get a Twitter error message, not a Best Buy 404
4) Not everyone knows Twitter – presumably much less than people who know Best Buy
5) Many people that know Twitter don’t use it
6) Could lead to a very short and annoying user experience if visitor is not familiar with Twitter

IMO, if Best Buy wants to encourage people to visit or befriend its Twitter account, they could have sent people to Best Buy’s website with a backslash for Twitter. They could explain why people should use Twitter and why they should follow Best Buy on Twitter. For people who don’t use Twitter, this would be a nice lesson about what Twitter is and a real world example of the power of Twitter.

With this call to action, if someone who is unfamiliar with Twitter visits the site, they might leave unsatisfied, whereas if they visited the Best Buy website, they could at least navigate to other Best Buy pages. The irony of the situation is that Best Buy has a call to action on its Twelpforce page, encouraging Twitter visitors to visit BestBuy.com/Twelpforce – ironic, no?

At least had they sent people to the Best Buy website initially, they could track the number of people who typed it in when the commercial aired and could further track the customer experience on their site. By sending the visitors directly to Twitter, they can’t track the visitors or the return on their investment.

Burn Down Value of .com Domain Names

Elliot Silver

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July 25, 2009

21

House on Fire

I’ve seen this written in the past and I’ve said it as well, but I want to reiterate another reason for why I have been developing strictly .com domain names so far. There is significant burn down value to .com domain names – more so than other extensions, in my opinion. By burn-down value, I am referring to the domain name’s value if I tear down the website that is built on it. “Burn down value” is more of a physical real estate term quantifying the value of a lot of the home was to be destroyed – or burned down.

I’d like to use Torah.com and Burbank.com as examples. Before building websites on these domain names, I received offers that were significantly higher than I paid. This solidified my decision to move forward with development, because it gave me confidence to know that I could sell them if development failed, as there is significant burn down value. In reality, I don’t have to worry about doing something that would be detrimental to these brands (because I wouldn’t), but there isn’t much that can be done to impact the value of the domain names, as other companies would love to own them as well.

The name value in .com means something, and the value is great because a significant amount of people type in these domain names every single day, whether they know exactly what they want before they get there or are just hoping to find what I am offering. Type-in traffic may not be the be all, end all, but its something that has been significant before Google and will continue to be significant, despite what people might say, as type in visitors are potential customers that have no acquisition cost (aside from the cost of the domain name/websites). This could be a whole post, but it’s been said, and offhand I can’t even think of a major business that operates on a keyword domain name that isn’t .com.

If I spent $25,000 building a website on a vanity URL, it is likely that I will lose money if my venture fails or if I decided I want to do other things and attempt to sell it. What is a name like Burbank.notcom or Torah.notcom worth? I have no idea, but I would bet I couldn’t recoup my investment if I built either of those into expensive websites – unless it was self-sustaining businesses that made significant revenue with low ongoing expenses.

Does it make sense to build a multi-million dollar mansion on a low value piece of land in the middle of nowhere? Perhaps it does, but if that land is in the middle of Antarctica, and nobody is buying mansions in Antarctica when I try to sell it, I am going to lose a lot of money on the back-end. Sure, I might enjoy this luxury home while I live there, but it will be expensive to heat and furnish, and at the end of the day, it will be tough to find a buyer whose interests are exactly the same as mine.

With .com, people are coming because they recognize the keyword + .com as a brand. They are coming to the site and returning because of the brand – not necessarily what I put on the site. With many vanity extensions, people are coming more for the content (which isn’t bad), but there will be significantly less burn down value in the domain name if you scrap the website. The website owner relies heavily on the whim of search engines for traffic, and heavens forbid a website redesign or error where back-links are lost.

As a domain investor, you must be aware of this because if you put your heart, your soul, and thousands of dollars (or tens of thousands) into a project that doesn’t work, at least the underlying domain name would have significant value if you build it on a category defining .com.

BTW, don’t tell me that you can’t buy one because you recently started out in domain investing because I am no genius and have been buying them for a few years – and there are some good deals to be had now.

PS: I do own a few domain names in other extensions, but those are purely speculative investments. I wouldn’t build websites on them right now, and that’s the point of this post. I have had several emails in the last couple of weeks asking for advice on which names to develop, and if you are trying to build a business – not just a mini-site or fun project – you should use the keyword .com.

Photo Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dvs/ / CC BY 2.0

When to Develop .org Geodomains

Elliot Silver

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July 24, 2009

25

org over com This advice goes against much of what I’ve said about geodomain names during the past couple of years, but hear me out. I am very interested to hear what David Castello has to say about my rationale – and I look forward to his comment, which I bet will happen soon. There is a time when developing a .ORG geodomain is a smart thing to do.

I will preface this by saying that I believe .org domain names are perceived by Joe Interweb as trustworthy, which is what you need for a website. The problem is that many people confuse .org with .com, and if the topic/content is similar, they are likely to just stay on the .com, patronizing the advertisers and making hotel reservations on that site. It’s easy to lose a potential customer due to confusion if you own the .org and not the .com, which is why I think many organizations own their .com, too, and forward traffic to the .org.

In any case, the perfect time to develop a .org geodomain is when the .com is a fully developed business completely unrelated to the city/town/region. If you visit Concord.com hoping to find information about Concord, New Hampshire, you will end up on Computer Associates’ website, and you will scratch your head and say, “shoot, I thought my buddy told me to go to Concord.com to make my hotel reservation. Shoot – what was that address again? Oh yeah Concord.org!”

If a person is looking for Lowell.org but types in Lowell.com, I hope that my site will give them more than enough information about Lowell, Massachusetts and they won’t even remember that they were initially looking for Lowell.org.

One example of a great .org domain name to develop is a name I am bidding on at Snapnames, but I probably won’t win. Worcester.org is up for auction (August 3), and I think this is a great domain name to develop because of what I said above. I am having a tough time managing 3 geo websites, so I doubt I’d have time to develop this, too – although I will be bidding less than I think it’s worth just in case.

So why is Worcester.org a great domain name to develop? For starters, I have tried to buy Worcester.com with no luck (even with a serious offer). The domain name is being used for its nameservers right now and doesn’t resolve. Worcester is a great city in central Massachusetts that’s home to a professional minor league hockey team, several colleges, many big companies, and is centrally located, making it great for conferences and events. The Worcester Centrum (now the DCU Center) hosts concerts and other events – I remember commercials for the Monster Truck rallies held their annually.

Anyhow, since it doesn’t appear that Worcester.com will be developed into a geodomain any time soon, I think the .org would make a great acquisition.

There are other similar .org domain names that are ripe for development.

The Shoemaker’s Son Has No Shoes

Elliot Silver

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July 24, 2009

3

Have you ever heard of the famous saying, “the shoe maker’s son has no shoes?” This saying generally means that the cobbler spends so much time repairing the shoes of his customers that he doesn’t have the time to repair his childrens’ shoes. The saying can also be applied to domain developers and designers who have outdated and/or ugly websites.

How can web designers expect to get new customers when their own websites look so horrible and uncreative? With my favorite web designer booked up for a while, I’ve been looking for someone who can fill in just in case I have a project come up (like a creative mini site header for MountainBikers.com as an example if it doesn’t sell for $6,300). I’ve been searching for links on 99Designs, eLance and even Craigslist, and a number of designers’ sites I’ve come across are just bad.

When marketing your services, you need to market yourself first. If you have a crappy website, some people might expect your work to be crappy too. I guess the same goes for domain blogs. If you have crappy domain names, people probably expect your advice to be crappy too 🙂 LOL

If you happen to know of a good designer looking for a couple small future projects, let me know. I don’t have something right now, but I am always asked about great designers and I am always happy to add someone to my rolodex!

DomainInvesting.com

Sunday’s Quick Thoughts

Relevant Expired Domain Names

Twitter Call to Action from Best Buy

Burn Down Value of .com Domain Names

When to Develop .org Geodomains

The Shoemaker’s Son Has No Shoes

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