Books For Domainers Not About Domaining
I spend alot of time focused on reading books about marketing, online marketing, and other areas that at the end of the day will make me a better domainer and business owner, because if you are running your domaining business properly it is a business. If you are focused on developing your domains into real online destinations this is even more important as you want repeat customers and provide a product and experience that they find better than your competitors.
Here are 5 books that I have found valuable, if you have more feel free to comment or suggest more:
Click: What Millions of People are Buying Online and Why it Matters
Author: Bill Tancer
This book was absolutely fascinating in its analysis of online user behavior and how search matters. As domainers we focus on keywords and search to understand what names are valuable. This book will take you to a new level of understanding and appreciation for search and the importance.
Outliers: The Story of Success
Author: Malcom Gladwell
I was a big fan of both The Tipping Point and Blink by Malcom Gladwell and this book did not disappoint. The book will show you how seizing upon an opportunity at the time it is presented is the most valuable thing a business will ever do. It shows how being at the right place at the right time may be the most important thing to being successful though. Interesting read.
Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Author(s): Chip and Dan Heath
If you want to know how to communicate effectively and make people remember you, your idea, or your product you will find this book useful. Personally think this book should be handed to every salesperson or marketing employee I will ever work with or hire.
The 4 Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
Author: Timothy Ferriss
If you have ever dreamt about being able to work anywhere, travel constantly, and enjoy every minute this book is for you. This book really could be the the holy grail and inspiration for many domainers trying to escape their daily grind sitting in their cube at work dreaming about running their own business. With tips on outsourcing tasks effectively and delegating responsibility to allow yourself time to LIVE it was a great and useful read.
The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More
Author: Chris Anderson
A recently revised version adds even more detail to the book that made the term "The Long Tail" a common term. I can remember reading the original Long Tail article in Wired magazine. Once again, as domainers we understand the value of search terms and niche markets. This book was the first to really show how and why that model works. If you want to understand niche marketing read it.
I purposely did not put any affiliate links to Amazon.com for these books, I have found them valuable in their own right and think that shows even more by not using them as a sales tool. Enjoy and let me know what you thought of them.
One rule I live by is if I enjoy or find a book useful I pass it on to someone else who I think will find it useful, a good rule to live by.
Mini-Sites Compared
After all the interest recently in the domainer community on development vs. parking and then seeing several (dozens...) of companies popping up offering up rapid development services I decided to try a few out and make some comparisions. It should be noted that I have put together sites of my own , such as iPhone App Reviews which receives 1000's of pageviews a day but I really did not consider myself a real developer but thought I could probably be able to evaluate some of the techniques used for SEO and site development.
For comparison purposes I evaluated AEIOU.com which provides a 5 page mini-site using either Wordpress or a PHP based template for $250 (discounts available for volume purchases). I also tested the services provided by the Estibot.com team which provided a 5 page site (using Wordpress) for $99 and then a very low cost provider off the namepros.com forum which provided a 5 page site (HTML) for $39 dollars. Oh yeah, and I thought I would compare results to a few pages I built using the very easy to use Prosense theme for Wordpress with articles outsourced, total cost of each lsite ess than 50 dollars but requires a bit more work on my part.
By reviewing the product that should be received from each of the companies it sounded like the AEIOU.com and Estibot.com services should be very much alike but the random forum developer would be less so, so I thought this would be a good test of "get what you pay for".
We will start with the low cost provider, I must first say the individual did a very good job communicating and was very open to making changes, asking what topics I wanted, etc but one difference is that no link-building was included in the package. That was ok since I was really comparing low cost vs. high cost. The sites I had built by the low cost mini-site provider were:
Moms.org.uk Pregancy Tips
WomensBikeShorts.com Womens Bike Shorts
OnlineGraduateClasses.com Online Graduate Degrees
Although the sites looked reasonably good for the cost I was rather disappointed in the content, specifically on WomensBikeShorts.com. I had to re-write quite a bit just to make it readable but stopped after a bit since the whole purpose was to test the site as is from the developer. If you have to rewrite most of the site its not really worth your time to purchase it, defeats the purpose.
Also, there was quite a bit of SEO work that had to be completed although that was said to be included, tags had to be moved around, words were not spaced, etc. That had to be fixed as well. All in all I found you do get what you pay for. I would not use the service again although I want to be clear that the actual customer service provided was actually superb.
The estibot.com service was basically the same as AEIOU.com for a much lower cost, I had 2 minisites done:
MexicanVacationSpot.com Mexico Vacation Spots
HDTVTelevision.net HDTV Reviews
Both these sites looked reasonably good for the cost, the content was good compared to the $39 dollar sites but the frontpage content of HDTVTelevision.net was weak. I had originally planned on using the included hosting but determined quickly that I would not have the ability to truly use Wordpress as I would be able to on my own server or be able to get the stats I like to use from Cpanel. This is not their fault really but just something to be noted.
After installing the sites it was found pretty quickly that they had the the wrong keywords in most of the pages of the site, people that are not savvy with code at all would not of found these errors since they would not know where to look for various tags and other items. There were a few other items that had to be corrected. But once again, the support was superb.
Now for AEIOU.com, they are the higher cost provider but in comparison have, in my mind, had the best looking sites of the rapid mini-site services, so I thought it would be worth a try. The first sites I had developed were:
BransonMo.net Branson Mo
PortIsabelTexas.com Port Isabel Tx
Out of all the services the sites were the closest to being spot on out of the box. Although some of the content is a little generic you could tell the keywords had been researched and used accordingly. I do think the way the titles had been setup originally was probably not optimal for SEO and I have since corrected this after allowing for time to test. That was the least amount of work required between the (3) paid services.
I have deployed plenty of my own mini-sites using Wordpress, a few examples are:
BiometricFlashDrives.com Biometric Flash Drives
PensacolaBeach.me Pensacola Beach Fl
ifones.com iPhone Apps
Obviously these require more work on my part, but at the end of the day this is all based on ROI, so the question becomes is my time worth it or is it worth it to outsource?
So, after letting these sites sit for a bit of time the results are pretty straightforward. The 2 sites I have listed above from AEIOU.com have received better results in Google, and inturn have received much better returns in ad revenue. PortIsabelTexas.com actually ranks first page in Google for many terms that would be considered prime for this name.
The close 2nd is actually the sites that I developed on my own, ifones.com is more than a minisite so probably should not be used as a comparison but PensacolaBeach.me and BiometricFlashDrives.com could be considered a direct comparison. They both receive comparable results to the AEIOU.com sites and better results than the other services.
All that said though, the question becomes could you spend the saved money from the Estibot.com service and use that for linkbuilding to get the same results as AEIOU.com gets? Maybe so.
AEIOU.com does a great job sending a report after the linkbuilding is done, I do not want to give up any of their internal details but will say they use several different long lasting link techniques that seem to work.
I have purchased more sites from AEIOU.com:
DrugAbuse.net Drug Abuse
MathBooks.net Math books
I have not had the sites up long enough to judge results. Based on their past results I felt strongly enough to be a repeat customer. Note that I do not have any sort of relationship with them other than being a customer and a purchaser of a name from Rick Latona.
Moving forward I will be doing a mix of personally developed sites and AEIOU.com. Feel free to comment with your own thoughts.