That Mobile Internet Thingy Is Going To Be Big Someday

I was just doing my daily perusal of various tech news and ran into a couple articles on Mashable and ReadWriteWeb that really show the changing usage of internet users, both non-techies and the early adopters.

With mobile broadband becoming more ubiquitous everyday and it seems like every device in the world has wi-fi built in this trend of app based access rather than browser based access is going to continue.

One thing that will continue as well is a deeper integration of communications (group messaging, VoIP, etc) directly into the apps. Social=Communications and having SMS and voice directly in the apps on our mobile phones will only increase stickiness as we will not have to exit an app to go communicate what we are experiencing in the app.

The two articles that are linked to above show that consumers are spending more time on mobile apps than they are browsing the web now. That is a first.

What is driving this? Well recently the combined shipment of smartphone and tablet sales surpassed those of desktops and notebooks. This drives app usage as many people just click on a branded app rather than going to a browser. This growth will continue as wireless penetration continues.

With rural broadband growing by the day, and wireless being one of the most common ways to access these areas this affects not only metro areas but smaller regions as well.

One very interesting statistic is that the growth year over year is 91 percent for mobile app usage, and the general consumer is just now starting to understand the value of smart phones and tablets. In todays world it will not be enough to just target consumers with a great website, now it is going to take a mix of web, social media, and apps if you want to catch your customer each step of the way. I would venture to say many younger consumers will default to mobile apps before they even head to a browser.

Check out the articles linked to in the top paragraph. Interesting reads on both accounts.

Thanks To The Castello Brothers For A Great Weekend in LA

I wanted to type a quick public thank you to David and Michael Castello who showed me a great weekend in LA this past weekend. Between great sushi at SushiRoku, cigars at the Buena Vista Cigar Club in Beverly Hills, or great wine and food at Si Laa Thai, they made sure that my time there was great.

For my readers that are from outside the domain industry you can see the successful online real estate properties that the brothers own at CCIN.com. Although the details will come in another post many of you have heard of the Grape.com project that has started with them.

But one thing great about visiting LA is I also got some great time with my good buds Jason Thompson and Morgan Linton, I have not been out that way in awhile so was very excited to get some time with them as well and also want to thank them for their hospitality, seems Morgan always ends up being my chauffeur when I am in town, sorry bud:)

Every time I get to spend time with the Castello Brothers I come away feeling energized, one thing about them is they see the big picture. They see more than a great domain name, that is a very important thing to get. Too many times I see domain investors talk development and think that ends with the website. The Castello Brothers have the same mindset that I like to think I have, seeing that the domain name is the foundation for a real business that just starts at the website but really takes off when you take advantage of the BRAND that is the great domain name. And that means more than just getting traffic from the memorable name, it means revenue from developing a real business by either getting out there and working the streets for ad sales or selling a product on a category killing product domain name.

Sometimes we get to busy and wrapped up in day to day work or business and can lose track of the bigger picture, this weekend with them helped re-energize and focus my efforts. Stepping back from day to day but still keeping focused on business can be one of the best refreshers you can get, sharing ideas, brainstorming, in a different and energetic environment helps the creativity flow.

Also, the domain industry should give a big thanks to David, watching him come into dinner Saturday night after doing several interviews live and recorded after being sick all week was interesting, he was a trooper and made it though, if you do not know what I am talking about take look at the Good Morning America video of David discussing the "Playboy Plague". If you could of heard the conversations he pushed at the stations in between interviews you would know why I say we owe him a big thank you, he could not help but to sell the value of domain names and why they are so important. And before you think that having a few conversations about domain names and what domaining is to producers, etc does not mean much, think about how most big ideas start and know that he did have emails coming in from one I know of for sure wanting a follow up on the industry. It is a start.

Thanks guys, appreciate all the hospitality!

A Couple New Domain Development Projects

As mentioned in a previous post about high dollar affiliate programs and possible lost revenue, I have been working on researching affiliate programs that generate higher dollar revenue than typical PPC or product affiliates on Amazon, etc.

As part of this I have also been making it a point to develop a smaller number of sites into larger sites. Although I am still not close to done on either of these development projects I thought I would talk about which sites I have started down full development process on.

Both of these sites are being developed using content mainly from TextBroker.com and using Wordpress themes from iThemes.com. (Neither of those are affiliate links, but are products that I use daily at this point.)

The first site, PrivateJetCost.com, is a project focused on private jets and either booking or fractional jet ownership, I mentioned this site in my TextBroker.com post comments. Although I currently have Adsense on the pages as the site progresses it will be focused almost exclusively on affiliate revenue.

Currently I have affiliate approval from the two programs I submitted to and am working on implementing the second one. The goal is to provide a content rich site and continue to add new content weekly. This is not a site that will sit dead, for a competitive industry such as this the "set it and forget it" mini-site model will not work. On a side note, thanks to Melly Walker for the work on the logo and header. She also did a few articles for the site and she provided great work on the logo for the next site as well.

The second site, which is a little behind PrivateJetCost.com, is RetirementSeminars.com. The content is just coming in for this site, the site will also have content added weekly and is starting with Adsense as I determine the revenue path for this domain name.

There are many options so it is not a matter of not having a good path, its a matter of finding the best path. Retirement seminars are big business, especially as the baby boomer generation marches towards retirement in this tough economy. Once again, this is a site that will not benefit from sitting still. There will be an event calendar and directory added after the initial site content is complete but for now its all about article content.

Although these sites will have hundreds of pages of content as they move forward these are really smaller projects compared to another project that will be announced in the very near future. There is some fun stuff going on that I cannot wait to talk about.

TextBroker.com Works – Thanks Elliot

I have bought hundreds, actually over one thousand, keyword targeted articles for websites over the past years and have used various sources but one of the issues typically has been turn around time and at times cost per article.

Although I am a fan of sites like elance.com and guru.com, I always found for article writing they were more than a bit cumbersome. Although I had some great work I received from those sites it always seemed like it was as much work to prep the project as it would of been to actually write the articles myself.


Well, after seeing Elliots post about TextBroker.com I figured I would give it a try this weekend as I am wanting to add quite a bit of content to a project I am currently working on and was in the mood to work on the site and needed some additional content to work with.

Well, all I can say is that TextBroker.com will become my first stop for content moving forward. It was very simple to set up the "assignments", pick pricing, number of words, SEO options, etc. And I now have 4 quality articles in hand for the topic I needed content for. Based on that there will be many more sent that direction. I must say, having a marketplace just for content and quick turnaround time like this will make projects much easier moving forward.

Thanks Elliot for the tip.

Aviary.com Makes Online Image Editing Easy

If you are looking for a quick and easy to use image editor and do not have the needs of a something like Adobe Photoshop or other full suite image editors you may want to take a look at Aviary.com.

I tend to rely on others on my team, and extended team, to handle graphic and logo editing. I figured out along time ago that editing images is not my strong suit. So, based on that, I have never been one to load my laptop down with a bunch of tools to manipulate images or other graphics.

Every once in awhile though there is a simple project that I need to whip out and I always wish that I had a bit more of a tool to edit images and maybe make some tweaks to a header or logo. Well, now with more and more tools becoming web or cloud based my life is getting a bit easier.

Aviary.com offers online image editing in a web based tool that is super simple to use, fast enough to not be annoying, and now in an HTML5 version.

One of the initial frustrations is that Flash was required to do the editing, now with the HTML5 you are not limited. Another nice touch with the HTML5 version is that you can actually embed the tool in your website to allow people to edit images and never leave your site.

There are several more features as well, a couple key ones are music creation and audio editing. Admittedly I have not used those yet but it shows you the power of cloud based apps.

Take a look at the Aviary.com blog for some nice tutorials. If you are looking for an easy way to edit images, etc but do not necessarily need a full photo editing suite AND appreciate online tools this may be the way to go for you.

Now, if some Photoshop expert complains about limited functionality, etc I think it is fair to say that the tool should be expected to have less functionality. I am not saying this is a replacement but something for "the rest of us" to consider.

Tablets.com Launches Free iPad Giveaway on Facebook

Make sure if you are on Facebook you go "like" the Tablets.com page. Aron Meystedt, owner of domain names such as Copier.com, Jets.Co.Uk, HY.com and other top end domains, has launched a free giveaway of an Apple iPad for every 1000 friends (likes) the Tablets.com Facebook page gets.

I have to give Aron credit, we discussed this yesterday over coffee and today he already had the page created, banners promoting it on the site, and started promoting the page. Moving once an idea hits is never a bad thing.

If you do not have an Apple iPad yet now is your chance to try to get one for free. If you do have one and win an iPad from Tablets.com I am sure someone would love it for Christmas.

Click for the Tablets.com Facebook Page.

FreeShampooSamples.net Making Bank

On a lighter note than my last couple blog posts I have to give a shout out to one of my employees, Nick Howlett.

Nick is not a domainer but at one point he picked up a domain name that, to be honest, I am not sure I would of given a second glance. The domain name is FreeShampooSamples.net. This is a prime example of taking a name with reasonable search stats but no real value as a pure domain name and creating a decent revenue stream from it.

Nick wanted to take a bit of what he had learned around the office and put it into practice to see what he could do with Google Adsense. With a name like Free Shampoo Samples I would of expected him to make a few bucks a month from PPC but nothing substantial. It was more of a pure training exercise than it was someone trying to even make any decent revenue. In this case the estimates were a bit off relative to what we were thinking.

Nick first did a minor amount of SEO research on keywords, put together a small website using Wordpress, and then did link building through various means. Total work was less than 4hrs, keep in mind that this was one of his first experiments and as such he started with a basic theme and mainly focused on learning the ropes.

Well, several months later the results have been nothing short of amazing for such a small site, the site now ranks #3 in Google for the term Free Shampoo Samples, although the amount of traffic to the site is around 20 views a day the revenue since March has been 679 dollars.

Although that may not be enough to retire on anytime soon for Nick, for a college kid that spent 4 hours and less than 10 bucks it is good fun money that comes in passively every month.

Nick, you are buying lunch:)

You Just Lost Affiliate Revenue!

After spending the past few years working on various ways of monetizing product domain names through either Smartname.com ecomm sites, Adsense, or affiliate programs I decided it was time to try some larger dollar affiliate programs.

The one issue with product domains is that it takes quite a bit of product being sold to add up to real money, do not get me wrong, it is nice to have sites making a nice stream of revenue from PPC and affiliate revenue but in reality there are times I would prefer to have higher dollar, bigger hit, affiliate sales coming through.

My good buddy Morgan Linton has been working on this and has found a nice partner in his niche paying $150.00 per lead. Now you are starting to talk some real dollars for one click and conversion. That is something you do not get from product domains.

In no way is this post a knock on product domains, I LOVE THEM, but sometimes it is worth it to go for the less is more strategy, one solid lead to a high revenue service provider will pay you more than PPC on your product domain does for a year at times.

Now, with all that said, after some research I decided the niche I wanted to focus on and after some initial testing with SEO determined that with a quality domain name plus proper SEO gathering targeted traffic in the niche would be a challenge but one that can be won in a reasonable amount of time.

But (sorry Morgan) the great thing is that it is completely reasonable to expect $250 to $500 commissions in this industry. To be clear I have not launched yet, but we are talking reputable companies that have real customers with real money. That is the type of pay back I am looking for on a per lead basis rather than .22 cents per click.

After researching the affiliate programs one thing became very clear and has the potential to make or break a site trying to make money off this niche, and in reality it became clear that it can make or break many big dollar sales that people research online but purchase offline.

The PHONE call could be my biggest enemy.

As much as the niche I am targeting will get a portion of bookings online the pricing is high enough that I would expect a) many of the buyers to be savvy enough to look online but b) not trust big dollars for their purchase online. In other words they will do every bit of research and decide to buy but then pick up the phone and dial the 800 number on the website to actually purchase.

I know this is nothing new to people, no big epiphany here, but as we domain owners with quality properties that drive customers to other people through partnerships and affiliate programs move to finding ways to eke out every dollar from our development we need to watch for revenue leakage every step of the way.

Although there are people starting to work towards pay per call affiliate models the majority of affiliate programs do not offer this. And when a site first launches and targets a niche it is unlikely special consideration will be given to the person applying for acceptance until revenue is proven.

One special thing to request would be a special 800 number for your clients, but that only works if they do NOT click through to the partner site and stay on OUR domain, once they get to the partner site the main corporate 800 number would be on the site.

There is no perfect answer for this at this time, but it is something to watch out for. It is very likely if you are working in high dollar lead areas that you may be leaking revenue through that old school technology called the phone.

That said, I am moving forward, I hope to have something launched and discuss what niche I am working on in the near future and maybe some other fun things that have been going on in the background as well on some partnerships.

Building A Website Is Not Building A Business

One of the frequent conversations I had at the domain conferences was about developing websites. Due to the Missouri.me launch and some of my other projects many people had questions about how to develop the sites, tools used, where we get content, etc. I am always happy to share as much as I can but there was something that I would preach to anyone who would listen and it seems to escape many.

There is a huge difference between building a website and building a business. In most cases people can have many great ideas about what they would like to do with their great domain name, they may even have all the technical abilities to create an amazing e-commerce site or content rich geo site but in so many cases there is no plan for what to do once the site is up.

If you put 50K into a wonderful website, do all the hard SEO work, if you do not have a plan on how to generate revenue after the site is up it is really just a website, not much different than a parked page, I can imagine if you spend 50K or even 10K on developing the perfect website you would want to have a plan for something more than Adsense for revenue.

So, when talking about domain development you need to think about taking it past the web development phase and how to get it into the business development phase.

To understand what I mean take a look at what the Castello Brothers have done, they understand business. With sites like Whisky.com and PalmSprings.com they have created businesses. I have really enjoyed my conversations with Michael and David and love the fact that they focus so much on the business rather than just the website. That is the difference between successful domain development compared to someone just building a website.

Now, everyone has different skills, I know many people much smarter than myself that can create amazing web sites but they lack the skills necessary on the sales and marketing side. This is where partnerships come in. If you have a great idea and have all the skills to implement the product and technical side then you may want to look for partners for the sales side. I know I could not of come close to creating everything my development team did on our state geo platform.

So, what is the point of this post?

Well I have heard so much talk of domain development, as we all have heard over the past year or so, I want to see people be successful. In most cases people will not be able to do it on their own, if you plan on building your domains into real businesses and not just websites you need to evaluate what you are good at and determine what pieces to build a business are missing from your skill set. Find people that you can team up with to fill those gaps. You may find that 1+1=3 when you do this.

Smartname Shops Adds Value To Undeveloped Product Domain Names

As I mentioned in my Smartname Content Site review the other day I had also been testing the Ecommerce templates from Smartname.com as well. As most people know the majority of their domains bring little traffic if any (Smartname, in their webinar, shows a 90/10 split), and it is impossible to fully develop hundreds (or even dozens) of sites without a large amount of capital.

Even at 200 to 400 dollars per site it becomes almost impossible for most domainers to justify developing more than a few sites to even a minimal level. Affiliate stores and other rapid development solutions are great, but if you have 1000 product names can you really develop them all?

So, if you cannot afford to develop all of your names but want traffic to them so you can justify holding them what is the answer?

Well, I must say, so far I am really happy with the Smartname Shop sites, although I just started working with them recently so I cannot speak to revenue over a long period of time, I can say that the potential is really good based on the results I am seeing.

Why? Well the sites are ranking extremely well in the search engines, not bad for something that takes less than a few minutes per site to turn up.

Here are four examples:

BMX Freestyle Bikes

Low Cost Laptop

Maternity Pillow

Cotton Bed Sheet

Yahoo is sending a nice amount of traffic to 3 of the sites now and I expect the same soon for the fourth. I am also seeing terms in Google sending traffic as well for long tail terms and the exact match terms are moving up as well.

Did I mention long tail? That is the trick here, by developing the site you are able to gather traffic from related product terms.

Although the revenue split will not be the same from doing an affiliate relationship direct with someone it is also not reasonable to think you could mass deploy either.

Now, I will say that if a domain name already has traffic I would likely not do this, but if it is minimal or is a product related name that would do well as a shop these sites are well worth considering.

As I said in my previous post, this is NOT A PAID post, this is my opinion and I really like where this is headed. Between this and the content sites I think there is real value being added to domains that previous received little or no traffic. And with the ability to insert your own Google Adsense ads you can also take full revenue from that while sharing the revenue on the products. Not a bad deal.

Next Page »