I am preparing to launch a new website on EventPlanner.com. I’ve am in the process of having the website built, and I am working on having expert articles written to help people plan their own events and to guide people on how to find an event planner. I will also be sure to include information about how aspiring event planners can start a business.
One of the first steps in getting traffic to the new website will be to get event planners to sign up for listings on the site. This will add more unique information to the website, will give visitors a reason to check out the website to find an event planner, and it will drive traffic to the website via search.
Contacting businesses to offer listing discounts can be a time consuming task, but I can now use LeadRefs to cut down on that time. Instead of finding and visiting various event planning websites, I can do searches for domain names like these:
- EventPlanner.com
- WeddingPlanning.com
- PartyPlanning.com
- BarMitzvah.com
- ….etc
These searches will provide the Whois contact for similar domain names. Although many names aren’t owned by professionals in the field, I can scan through the list and find qualified event planners. For instance, JanesSpecialEvents@yahoo.com would probably be a good indicator that emailing Jane about a free listing will yield positive results, while info@protopixel.com would indicate a domain investment company and not an event planner.
I am going to try to get event planners to sign up this way, and I’ll let you know how it goes.
Hey Elliot,
Congrats on the domain purchase. Excellent name. Good luck with your development project!
Tom
Great idea, I’m wondering if it might be better to crawl those sites you find in leadrefs and populate the data first in the directory–and then ask them to verify their listing.
@ Bill
That sounds like a very good idea, but I have no idea how to do that 🙂
Great idea Elliot and an awesome use for Leadrefs!
Are you doing this yourself? I’d recommend you hire someone to do this so you can focus on the strategy and let someone get paid hourly to do the tactical here.
Either way great idea!
Hi Elliott,
I used to work in the tourism business. This is one of the key organizations for meeting /event planners.
http://www.mpiweb.org/Home
Cheers,
Pat
cool, you can also go to a few event planner/planning tradeshows as well.
When I sold BourbonStones on leadrefs I also entered “like domains” such as BourbonRocks.com, WhiskeyStones.com, etc to find a end user.
I see the new ways you have been trying to contact and find buyers and sellers of domains, I looked up the Whois of a .co.za domain I wanted and smsed the registrant, replied back in less than 5 minutes.
Lead refs is an interesting concept! It’s just that I am a bit concerned that they are throwing around the email address of the owner, I mean it’s really highlighted. How are they combating spaming?
I am also uncertain about their business model. They charge you 12.50$ for 100 searches. 1 search (for example whoapi) shows you one result. However, 1 search (for example hotel) shows you thousands of results. This means that for 12.50$ there’s a big difference in a number of queries you are making.
The service is very helpfull, and I am interested to see other uses as well.
I like how LeadRefs made their service free for an extended period of time to demonstrate its value and then flipped the switch to a pay-for model.
Between them, DomainTools, Estibot, FreshDrop, etc (I do not personally have accounts at all of them)…being a domainer can be expensive!
@ WhoAPI –
You get 100 searches a day.
Not 100 searches total.
@Todd
I know you get 100 searches a day. I wasn’t commenting from a users perspective, but from the business owner. I will try to clarify my example.
If you pay 1 cent to make a query for tretretre.com you will get fewer results, than if you pay 1 cent and query hotel.com. (for hotel.com I suppose you could get as many as 10 000 results)
Meaning, the system received 1 cent for 4 results, and it received 1 cent for 10 000 results. Meaning, bad/unscalable business model. I know it’s a little bit offtopic, but I love to talk about things like this 🙂
I can’t believe this name wasn’t taken before!!! Only the name will bring you a great deal of traffic.
Good luck with your business!
@WhoAPI – If I understand correctly you are suggesting we change it to cost per leads found?
We feel that this would only hurt those domain owners with very generic domains. Our goal was to provide a low cost service that would allow people with high quality domains to find leads almost instantly. If we charged more for better domains with more leads, we feel it would drive those high quality domain owners away.
@Todd That’s fine, as long as you have a good reason to set up pricing like that, you know your target audience and you stick to the plan. Good luck!