Looking For Traffic? Smartname Content Sites Work

While at DomainFEST last month I had the pleasure of sitting down with Ted Olson from NameMedia/Smartname.com. Ted took me through the new content site solution that Smartname has put together for domain names that currently do not have large amounts of type-in traffic but may still be great names.

After taking a look I was extremely excited to try it out as I could see that it really took automatically created sites to the next level, with just a few minutes of work per site a domain name could be taken from nothing but a domain name to a full fledged website. But until I had the chance to really get in there I wanted to be careful giving to many kudos to the system.

As someone who has developed several news aggregation sites in the past I was not concerned about the duplicate content issue that some people worry about with these type of content sites, I knew that even if a site cannot be ranked for all the leading terms, overall the long tail traffic you can pick up can still add more value to the site than just sitting there with no traffic. Dynamic sites seem to be given a green light by search engines.

Smartname.com has taken dynamic site development to the next level, after trying out the system I can say without a doubt that you can really create a site that has been SEO'ed to some degree in minutes. There was only one minor nitpick issue I came up with and it will be fixed in the next release.

When you first login and then select the domain name to manage you will see a few different options for the type of site you want to create: standard parked page, content site, or Ecomm (to be reviewed later). The site type I wanted to test first was this content site, Ted had shown me that they could get ranked, I wanted to see if they could get ranked as easily as doing so on Wordpress.

After selecting content site you can then select a theme (there are hundreds of selections ranging from Army to Finance), a color scheme, and even choose a header image. After doing this you can also manually selected keywords to be used on the site, this is very important for targeting sponsored links, etc. There are also tabs for modifying the header and footer text and images, all and all a nice setup for a quick site deployment. This also makes it easy to add text for SEO reasons as well.

When you get to advanced settings you actually get the option to add your own Adsense or affiliate ads in, thats right, along with the shared revenue from the sponsored ads you can also insert your own ads that gives you 100 percent revenue from each click or purchase. You also have the option of enabling things like social media links, etc as well from this page. When you put all this together you really have a full featured content/news aggregation site with true value to the user.

There is also a SEO configuration tab that has many useful options in it (titles, meta descriptions, etc) but what I really found useful was the fact I could add in Google Analytics and Google Webmaster info so I can manage these sites just like any other site development I have.

So, verdict on management and usefulness of the platform so far, very positive. These sites turn your non-traffic domains into real websites and bring traffic (and in most cases revenue) along. They are SEO friendly and with a few changes coming up soon this gets even better.

But, how do they rank, do they really get ranked in the search engines and bring traffic?

Well let me show you an example, a few weeks back the very first site I did was Deployed.net, even though I did the least amount of tweaking on this site (no tweaking of sponsored keywords, etc) it still ranks first page (number 6) Google based on having real content, it is a full fledged website, it also ranks very high on Yahoo as well (number 4).  From working on news sites like these before I feel confident that the ranking will stay.

A couple more sites I turned up before leaving for DMG but have not had a chance to link build yet are: MedicalQuestions.us and GreenhouseEffect.us , both of these are newly turned up but look how great they look. Great job by the Smartname team. These are names that would receive very little of any type-in traffic but as real value added websites I have added value to the property as well as revenue.

I think part of the problem that many domainers will have is that they discount the value of doing this since they look at it as parking and they are afraid their sites will not rank, in this case many of these sites turn out better than professional sites I have seen done. These are real websites not parking pages.

If you are looking for a way to turn your non-traffic names into revenue producers with minor effort and ZERO cost I recommend taking a look at the Smartname.com solution.

And, as I have made clear in other posts, this is a NON PAID post, I tested the system and liked it. I am also testing their Ecomm platform and liking the rankings I am seeing so far, look for a review on it soon.

A few things in closing, this is phase one, they have phase two coming in the very near future that adds several new features  (add your own posts, etc). Also, Ted sent the following as well:

SmartName continues to lead the industry with high payouts and the largest breadth of innovative monetization solutions (Enhanced PPC, Instant Shops and Full Content) allowing portfolio owners the opportunity to make more money from more of their portfolio - all managed from one simple dashboard. Moreover, unlike a pure-play parking company, we can link your parked pages to the industry’s leading domain marketplace where professional domain sales representatives can help sell your domain names 7 days a week. Adding a SmartName For Sale link that links directly to our Expanded Promotion network (AfternicDLS/BuyDomains) has proven to increase sales velocity by 225%. Our goal is simply to make our clients the most amount of money based on their portfolio objectives.  In sum, SmartName provides domain owners monetization solutions that fit their unique financial objectives and domain portfolio. PS – if you missed our latest webinar: Discover the Top Domain Parking and Selling Strategies for 2010, view it



here @ https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/792040306

I highly recommend listening to the webinar to get a more indepth idea what I am talking about above.

If you have turned up any names on the content site system at Smartname.com shoot me a message, I would love to see them.

MissouriWine.net Next Up For Launch

One thing many people do not realize is how the Missouri wine industry is growing, Missouri has long been one of the top wine producing states in the US (at one point grapes from Missouri were used to seed some vineyards in France after a widespread die off of grapes in France) and as of late there have been some very large new wineries popping up.

One of the fastest growing new wineries is located about 20 miles from where I am located and based on that we tend to get a lot of information locally on wine tourism in Missouri, etc.

Since we have quite a few contacts in that industry we decided it was time to start development on a site focused on winery reviews, directory information, and other content related to the Missouri wine industry. One of our writers has been working diligently putting together 80 plus articles to cover each of the wineries and we have people lined up to add content weekly in the near future, all in all the site will turn into quite the resource for people looking to plan a wine tour in Missouri.

Yes, this all works quite well with Missouri.me and really augments packages that we offer to certain types of customers.

There are a few areas of the site we are still need to finish before actual launch (the layout of the main content area of the site is NOT the final version by any means) but one of the things I am finding interesting is that we are already starting to get relatively decent traffic based on ranking high for quite a few terms. Quite a surprise based on where we are in the site development cycle.

You can take a look at MissouriWine.net, we still need to lighten up the internal site links that are there (the plugin is being very aggressive right now) and finish up the front page main content area and then finish adding the rest of the directory but so far so good while it is "soaking in".

I am looking forward to finishing this up, and sampling some of the products:)

Testing CTR and Landing Page Optimizations

When it comes to conversion rates, SEO, CTR, and everything else to do with optimizing the revenue and traffic to a website we all like to talk about testing variations.

We look at testing landing page layouts, color on adsense ads, various SEO methods and then we analyze and then test again, and again, and again, and again.

That is great, we have to do that, on a high traffic site a 1 percent difference in CTR can make a big difference in revenue so every tweak can make a big difference, make sure you track the changes you make though and see what the results were.

I recently did this on a high traffic site of mine, it is a site that has had a very predictable CTR and RPC for over a year. To me this is the easiest site to test on sense any change you make can be compared to a long track record, if you have only had a site up for a month it is hard to compare any test data against a long term trend.

But after I tried my first test I did not get any meaningful results, so I tested again (all theme layouts targeted at getting higher CTR) and then I tested again. My last two tests actually dropped CTR compared to the long term trend.

What is interesting about that drop in CTR was that the themes I tried were actually very high performers on other sites, literally got 3 times the CTR than the theme I was using on the site I was testing, but when I used them on the test site the CTR dropped. Wow.

So, whats the moral to the story, test and test again but in many cases the grass is not greener on the other side.

How To Build A Wordpress News Aggregator Version 2

After seeing all the downloads of my original free E-book on how to create a Wordpress news aggregator in 15 minutes I realized that it was probably time for an update. In this version I will show a more streamlined approach to creating the news aggregator, once again it is not my place to judge the value of Wordpress news aggregators, people love them or hate them. I can say I have had very good feedback on the ones I have implemented to the point where I have actually had people request their feeds be added based on traffic to the site.

Assumptions before we start:

Domain name has been purchased, if you are a domain investor you probably already have your favorite domainer friendly places, if you are not and you need a domain name to start your aggregator you can go to the consumer friendly GoDaddy.com

Hosting account has been setup, if you need hosting check at Hostgator.com for great packages for Wordpress hosting, I use Hostgator for this blog and also use their dedicated servers for Missouri.me.

DNS has been switched over to your hosting provider.

Last assumption, your hosting provider uses Cpanel for the management of your account and has Fantastico installed which allows for easy as can be Wordpress installation.

After the steps above are taken care of it is time to install Wordpress, as mentioned you will want to first login to your cpanel account, to do this go to:

InsertYourDomainName.com/cpanel

Example for the site I am using for test here: http://NewspaperHeadlines.net/cpanel

After doing this a login window should pop up, here is an example:

After you have logged in with your username and password it is time to find the icon for Fantastico and install Wordpress, in my case Fantastico is at the far bottom right of the rows of icons. In your case it may be elsewhere, it is the icon that is a little blue smiley face, here is an example:

Click on the icon and you will get a screen with a row of menu items on the left, under blogs you should see a menu item called Wordpress, click this. You will then want to click on New Installation, you will then get a screen with several items to fill in that looks like this:

In my case I am wanting to install this as the main site for the domain name so for directory I will leave blank, for admin user id you can input what you want to have as the admin id and then select a strong password.

For admin nickname, this can be anything although I tend to make it either the name of the person who is writing if it happens to be a blog, but in this case I am using reporter as the nickname.

Choose the email address you want to use unless you are using the default that it sets and then select a site name, in my case I am switching this from the domain name NewspaperHeadlines.net to Newspaper Headlines.

For description something short but descriptive, somewhat like a tagline, should be used.

After those fields are completed click the Install Wordpress button.

It will take you to step 2 of 3, click on the Finish Installation button and Wordpress is installed. If you want the details of the installation sent to you input your email address into the box shown in step 3 of 3 and click send email.

At this point you are done in Cpanel and Fantatsico and will be doing the rest of the work from the Wordpress Admin Panel.

To get to the Wordpress admin panel go to:

YourDomainName.com/wp-admin

You will see a screen that looks like this, login with your admin login and password that you created previously.

At this point you are ready to start making some tweaks in Wordpress, although going through all the various plug-ins and site tweaks I like to make is outside the scope of this how-to there are a couple things I do want to point out before we do show how to install the plugins required to start the news aggregation.

First off go to the menu item posts in the left hand menu, you will see a screen that has Hello World as the only post in your installation, if you mouse over the words Hello World you will get a little menu that gives you the option to delete that post, delete it.

After this you will want to click on the links menu in the left hand menu, you will want to check the box next the the word name in the gray menu bar, this will select all the links automatically installed, after doing this click the drop down box where the words Bulk Action are and select Delete and then hit the Apply button, this deletes all the automatically installed links.

Now, one more deletion and then we move on to just a couple more tweaks, click the Page button in the menu bar on the left, you will see an About Page, high light the text and delete that page or you can keep the page and edit it later to show what your site is about.

At this point you need to click the Settings menu button on the left menu bar, after doing this you will see a list of menu items drop down under where the word Settings was by itself before.

First you will want to click the menu item under settings that says Privacy and select that you would like for search engines to be able to index your site and hit Save Changes.

After this click on Writing in the left menu bar, after doing this you will want to click the boxes for Atom Publishing protocol, and the one below it that starts with Enable the Wordpress, etc,etc, publishing protocols.

Save changes and then we have one more tweak to make.

Under the settings menu select Permalinks, you will want to select custom structure, this allows for Wordpress to have title names that are readable by the search engines and more likely to be indexed. I would use the custom format of /%postname%/

This uses the title of each post name as the file name that the search engines will see. You also may want to use keyword rich category base and tag names as well.

After completing this you will want to click Save Changes.

Now it is time to install the Wordpress plug-ins required to run the Wordpress news aggregator, to install plug-ins you will first want to click on the Plugins item in the menu bar on the left, in this case I am only going to show the specific plugins required but if you want more information on the Wordpress Plugins I use on a full installation of a blog check out Wordpress Plug-ins.

For this though we will want to install FeedWordpress and the FeedWordpress Duplicate Post Filter.

After you clicked on the Plug-Ins menu item you should see a couple additional items below the Plug-ins button, hit the Add New button. You will see a screen like this:

You will want to do a search for FeedWordpress and hit Search.

The top one in the list will be FeedWordpress. You will want to hit the install button, and then when you get the pop up you will want to hit the orange Install button, and then after that you will be at a screen that gives you an option to activate, hit the activate button. After you activate you may get a pink box at the top of your Wordpress admin panel that says that Magpie RSS is out of date, hit the upgrade button, it is a one second upgrade with one click.

Now it is time to install the duplicate post filter. Once again you will want to hit the Add New button below the Plugins menu item on the left and now search for Feedwordpress duplicate by hitting search plugins. Just like before you will want to hit install next to the top item which is FeedWordpress Duplicate Post Filter and then hit the orange install button in the popup and then activate.

At this point you have what you need installed to start your aggregator, now it is time to add a feed to the site so news will start to flow, you can add as many as you like but for purposes of this example we will just do one.

You will want to first hit the Syndication button on the left, now you will see something like this:

In my case, for testing purposes only I chose StlToday.com which is a news source in the St. Louis, MO area. Long term I would choose many options and have them in different categories.

To select StlToday.com I put the URL http://StlToday.com in the Add New Source box and clicked syndicate, after going to the next screen I clicked Use This Feed.

Technically at this point you are complete but there are a few more tweaks. You will notice after going back to the syndication page it shows that automatic updates are not on, it is possible to hit the Update button and have the news fed in now but lets make it easier on ourselves and turn on automatic updates.

You will want to click on Feeds and Updates in the left hand menu under Syndication, there are a ton of options for FeedWordpress which are outside the scope of this post, they are all very well defined and you can determine how you want to configure each option, in this case though we will simply turn on automatic updates so each time new news comes into the feed it will be posted automatically.

You will see under Update Scheduling a drop down, the top item is cron job or manual updates, in this case we will set it too automatically check for updates after pages load.

After doing this go to the bottom of the screen and select Save Changes.

Now click on Syndication again and click the Update button. It will automatically load the news from the feed, and now every 60 minutes get any additional news.

You will want to read through the various options for the FeedWordpress configuration, there are options to have clicks of the titles automatically direct you to the feed source or to keep the content on your site and then after reading the article they can click through to the source.

Although outside the scope of this how-to you will also want to configure categories and other items to finish up your Wordpress installation and also want to upgrade your theme. Although there are plenty free ones out there I am been really pleased with the themes as StudioPress.

Thanks for taking the time to read, hope it helped you get moving.

SEO Content for Black Friday and Christmas 2009

As the holidays fast approach we have been getting several content requests from customers who are wanting to optimize some of their new site content around Black Friday, Thanksgiving, Christmas 2009, and the New Year.

As the first year that I have had a company that created content for other people it has been interesting to see the types of requests that come in, since I do not focus much on seasonal traffic I was a bit surprised at the level of work people want around SEO content yearly. But to be honest it makes complete sense.

As we know if you continue to add content to your site Google comes back more frequently and indexes faster (at least it seems) and if you have kept up through the year with putting content up you will be indexed fast as you put up your content related to the holidays.

It can be as simple as adding a Christmas 2009 Specials page to a site, or New Year Parties 2010 page, there are many options, but seasonal traffic can be amazing for the right sites that are properly optimized for the terms they need. I read a couple years back about a site that makes 10s of thousands every June/July just on Fourth of July focused traffic.

Although you may not make it to the first page for a term like Black Friday you may do well for long tail search terms around it. That is the goal for many of the customers I am working with.

Do you have a product related site that could benefit from content purposely optimized for the holidays  in 2009, let me know we would be happy to help.

Focus On What Could Be And Not What Is

It still amazes me (ok, probably not actually) that people ask me why I took the time to start a business on a dot me domain name. Why waste the time???

Well, as I have mentioned in past posts, the first thing domain investors need to do when they start to think about building a business is step outside of the inward focused thinking we all do since we are so close to our domain investments. We need to quit thinking about the NAME and more about a business model.

Much like buying the right domain names to resell is about building the correct domain investment model, the same goes when you have an idea for a business based on one of your domain names. No less than three times I have had people say why not just buy the .COM for X amount of dollars.

Come on, seriously, if you are going to start a business and you are not already starting with 10 million bucks in the bank of someone elses money before you have a dime in revenue how smart is it to actually spend hundreds of thousands on a domain name?

I know there are plenty of "dot anything other than .COM haters" out there that are disagreeing, probably never will read this blog again, but oh well. It is the truth. There is a reason you see many companies that have started up not get their .COM domain that they end up spending 100K on until after the fact. That reason is that they would of never even got off the ground if they would of spent that money on the name rather than focusing on their business first.

Do not get me wrong, most people miss the point with the conversation above, the point is not that the name is not valuable, but it is not so valuable that the business should never start just because you do not have the name. It cracks me up when people act like that, and I see it virtually anytime I head to the message boards or make a post about alternative extensions.

I know you are thinking what the heck, why would you say this when you want to sell domain names at a profit. Once again, you miss the point, the point is the name is valuable, they should buy the name at some point. In many cases these whiz bang new companies end up on TechCrunch in a story that XYZ company buys ABC name after getting their B round of funding. How many times have you read stories like that? It has been more than a few times. But if the company had 250K of seed funding does it make sense to spend 100K on a name? NOPE NOT AT ALL.

So, if you are a domain investor and you have a great idea for a business but since you are so close to the domain industry you cannot see what could be but instead are only focused on having to have the .COM before starting you need to step out of the industry for a second and think like so many other people who HAVE started successful businesses without their keyword .COM and get moving.

I will say it one more time, focus on what could be not what is!

Optimizing Revenue From Old Website Content

One of the things I have been taking the time to do lately is watching to see which one of my posts from the past receive traffic from highly searched terms and then optimizing the affiliate links and other info on the site to get the most out of the current traffic.

This is something I had really never done before but a few months back I remember reading (and unfortunately I cannot find it now) a post by someone about making sure you go back to old posts and update them, add a link to a new resource, add a new sponsored link, etc. This made absolute sense to me and I made a commitment to start to do that. In many cases when you build a website, or in this case a blog. You write the post and basically leave it as is for the lifetime of the site.

But doesn't it make more sense to watch watch posts are getting traffic and for what specific terms and then optimize the ads around that term, that is very targeted advertising and even though I have just started down this path it seems a pretty obvious way to generate revenue from old work.

One example is that quite sometime ago I did a real quick ebook that was really just my notes on turning up a Wordpress News Aggregator, although not my best work it does continue to get traffic. A quick optimization I did was added a Hostgator.com banner that focuses on Wordpress hosting. This is very targeted towards his post and the conversion rate will be hire than if I slapped it into a completely unrelated post.

Just wanted to give a little tip if you see you have old posts continuing to get traffic you may want to go back to them and optimize a bit. If I find the post where I found this little idea I will update this post with it.

How To Search Engine Optimize For Google Image Search

After my post earlier today I had a couple questions asking for more detail about SEO for Google Image Search. I Thought I would do a quick post with some quick and easy steps, by no means will I ever claim to be an SEO expert but I do think there are many basic rules you can live by to give yourself a solid chance at success.

Here are the things to look at:

Image File Name - Make sure you name the file based on the keywords you are optimizing for, in other words if the page is about iPhone App Reviews do your keyword research to determine the optimal words to put in file name. The easy way to look at this is it is not much different than the file name for the actual site page.

An example, and Aron will hate me for this (Sorry Aron) but search Google for Aron Meystedt or click here. You will see I rank on the page first based on my file name of the image when I did the interview with Aron.

Also, a little tip that seems to work but if you look around you will see much debate on, is using dashes in a file name rather than running the words together, i.e. Bruce-Marler rather than BruceMarler. I try to use dashes.

Content On Page - The content and surrounding information on the page around the photo is taken into account by Google as well, this will have an effect on how your images rank. In otherwords, do not try to scam Google by ranking high for an image name for Debt Consolidation on a page about iPhones.

Title Tag - The next thing is to make sure you have the title tag set an based on the keywords you are optimizing for, here is an example:

<img src=”http://YourSite.com/Keywords-Here.jpg” alt=”Keyword Focused Description.” title=”Keyword Based Title” />

This is something quick and easy to do and CMS software like Wordpress has a place to insert this text when uploading a picture making it really easy.

Alt Text Tag - You can see in the above example that the "alt" tag is also set based on keywords, this is the text that show if the image does not load or the browser does not support showing images.

Although there is also debate about how much emphasis Google puts on these tags, any extra edge you can get is important. Set them and you may of given yourself just enough juice to move higher.

I hope this helps answer some of the questions. Good luck!

Google Images SEO And Other Quirks

If you are not taking the time to optimize your image titles for SEO reasons then you are not taking advantage of the love that Google gives back for that little bit of work.

We recently did a spot check on some of our customers websites looking at traffic, keyword rankings, and other things. One of the things we noticed was that a couple of our customers sites were getting large amounts of traffic when we really did not expect it, these were customers in very targeted niche areas and the customers had really done little to nothing to add content to their sites since we had turned them over so although they were ranking well for the terms they had been optimized for they really should of had minimal growth except for some long tail terms.

As you can imagine as we scanned the Awstats logs it did not take long to figure out what was happening, in one case for a very highly searched term the customer ranked in the number one position in Google images for the term. This was a nice surprise and what was nice is the pageviews did not trend downward as I would of expected based on the typical bounce rate you expect on images. So, based on this picture and the quality of it the users were actually taking the time to look at the website.

As I continued to look through the stats of other sites I noticed something else, on one of another of our customers sites traffic had increased more than I would of expected since he had only had it up for less than 3 weeks. We had given him a tip sheet for what to do when he added content, etc and it looks like he actually used it which is a great thing. When adding images and content he took the time to optimize the image names, titles, etc and based on this sure enough his traffic was moving up nicely.

I know many people discount the quality of traffic from Google image search but to me every visitor is a potential customer.

One little quirk I noticed, and I know most of you have probably had this happen, we were turning up a few Geo niche sites and one of them had not even gotten past the initial Wordpress default Hello World page but was ranking on the first page for a rather competitive niche term. Sometimes Google makes me want to scream, it cracks me up how we can spend so much time sometimes on less competitive niches and take forever to show up but on a site that we have done nothing on there we are, first page.

EzDevelop.com Getting Ready to Launch Free Minisites

As mentioned a few weeks ago we are working through beta testing of EzDevelop.com which as many know will provide free minisite creation tools that allow for modification of key components of the site in a very easy to use manner.

So far the feedback has been great, as always in beta there were a few bugs found in the beginning and the feature requests start flying, but we have already made it through the majority of the bug fixes and started adding features that will be in the launch version.

This tool is being created for the DIY crowd, those without the resources to pay for large amounts of sites, and those that have little too no technical know how on hosting, FTP, and other things around turning up a site. As I mentioned before I do not plan to actually be building minisites as a business but by creating a tool that helps people create content rich sites it will make it easier for those that do not have the time or technical know how. To make that point I expect to announce an exclusive partnership with a minisite company before launch that will be our preferred partner for those looking to have someone else do the lifting.

Although I am not listing all of the features yet I will give a bit more info here:

Free Version - We plan to offer a free version that allows for a certain number of sites to be created each month and does not use our hosting. This will be basically the tool how it sits today with a few more tweaks around modifying ad location titles, more themes, and some others. We have already had people ask what we are charging for it as it is, well that answer as it is will be free.

Paid Version - We will have a low monthly cost version that includes unlimited site creations, social media notification of site launch, as well as more templates and pictures. This is a real value, once we announce how much we are charging you will understand. This basically allows you to create a custom site that can be downloaded by you to be moved anywhere you want or can be hosted on our system so all that needs to be done is the switching of your DNS.

Here is a customer testimonial, Don had sent me a very nice email about the platform and I thought I would put it out there:

EZdevelop minisites are so easy to build for a beginner like myself it's almost as though it builds itself. I've tried other programs and got frustrated from the start and of course many didn't get completed because of the time involved. I don't have much time to build sites but EZdevelop made time for me and that's precious.  Thanks EZdevelop .

Although we are still working out a couple tweaks (dang apostrophes being cut and pasted...) I have used it to create a few sites and so far there have been over 100 sites created by our users with the tool since beta launch, here is an example of a couple of mine, JetOwnership.com and RenewableEnergy.me

We look forward to finishing up and letting everyone try it out, keep watching here:)

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