Dropped Domain to Minisite in The Same Day
With my focus lately on my geo developments I have not spent much time on domain drops or minisites. In the past week though I spent sometime going through drop lists and one of the names I acquired on SnapNames was DallasTexasMortgage.com which has a solid exact match result in the Google Adwords Keyword Tool with 8,100 local exact match searches and has a solid PPC value as well. For a financial or mortgage name I was pleased with those numbers.
After acquiring it yesterday I realized I had not put one site together in a few months, I thought it may be fun to spend a couple hours turning it up and building a few links. First thing I had to do was determine if I was going to use Wordpress or standard HTML. I chose to base it on one of the templates I had received from AEIOU.com in the past.
After choosing the theme it was time to make the modifications needed, I had someone throw together a quick header for me since I admittedly have no graphic skills and then I started making the proper changes to the site titles (per page), made the proper SEO changes to name of each file of the site, and then started to write the content. By no means is the site full of information, but for the time I was allowing myself I did not expect to have the be all end all of a mortgage resource site, that happens over time. My attitude is if you never start you can never finish.
After writing the content and making the proper title and meta tag changes it was time to load up the site which took less than just a few seconds since it was a simple 5 page site. After that though a few links needed to be built to at least start the process, a few tweets, a couple stumbleupons, and a few posts on blogs that we have that get reasonable traffic and we were good to go there.
I expect Dallas Texas Mortgage to be a reasonably tough term to get ranked for but with the larger development plans we have for this name and some other links that we have at our disposal I hope to work this one up the Google search results over time. At the end of the day though this was done for fun and it should turn into profit as well, I was missing having my hands on the keyboard and turning up a site. From the time I started to the time I finished was less than 2 hours. Still some more link building to do but I am more pleased with this than I would of been with a purely parked site.
Great site Bruce! This post really intrigued me as I am working on a couple of geo-targeted niches as well. I thought it pretty interesting that you were able to turn this domain around so quickly. Thanks for the post and keep them coming.
Michael
Great name, It just shows that in only 2 hours you can build something that will pay you back in time. I also like that you put the for sale link on the blog.
Brian
Hi Bruce,
Nice looking site,can explain a bit more where you get the template.
I am also looking for these kind of templates to add adsense on instead of just parking my domains.
Thanks in advance.
Richard
@Michael Appreciate the comments, geo targeted niche sites are some of my favorites. Good luck with yours!
@Teendomainer – I heard you have a blog now:) LOL. And yes the for sale link was a must, i had done a post before showing that even though its a minisite people are still willing to make an offer.
@Richard – I had paid for a few AEIOU.com sites in the past and I used some of the files they sent and modified accordingly based on my needs here.
Bruce,
Thanks for the information.
Regards,
Richard
There are definitely diamonds in the rough to be found in every day’s drop list. This is a good one, although not the type of pattern I typically look for… let us know how the traffic goes!
Hi Bruce,
great domain, I can testify that there are still a lot of these good geo names out there, I am picking them up daily ( I mean hand registrations and hand registrations only! )
What I am curious about is that why are there on the current template you are using two adsense blocks? Doesn´t work it with one alone?
Regards
Interesting post Bruce, just change Copyright © 2008 in footer.
@Jason – Will for sure keep people updated. I think this one may take a bit of work to get ranked for such a competitive term, but it didnt take long to come up with a plan on how to drive bigger revenue than just Adsense from this.
@Chris – There are plenty of hand registrations to be had, but lets keep it a secret:) LOL
As far as the amount of Adsense blocks, that was part of the template I was using, I did not make any changes in that part of the layout. There are reasons on a template like that though that moving to one can actually benefit revenue and I may try that out.
@DjiDji – Missed that:)
Bruce,
2 probs with site… layout it a mess in Firefox (im on 3.5.3) see screengrab here: http://www.domaining.ie/images/Dallas_Texas_Mortgage.png so needs to be sorted asap and I think the adsense is too in your face the minute you hit the site.. nice name tho.
Alan
Domaining.ie
@Alan – Strange, I just checked it in IE, Firefox, and Chrome and had no issues. Its the same theme I use on other as well, weird. I will have to do some research, just odd….
Ok just checked on PC and its fine… seems to be mac only problem. Hope that helps.
Alan
Great domain name (in my opinion) and nice looking site.
I use a service at http://keywordvideogenerator.com to keep my Wordpress blogs up-to-date with videos from youtube. You can import a few dozen or even a few thousand keywords and set the interval (time between postings) and keyword video generator will automatically post the video on your blog.
My traffic and ppc income has shot straight up after using their service.
J.R.
@JR: But you still have to write the post right? Dont see how this can increase traffic to a site?! Please explain how it would help Bruce’s site for example?
Actually the program will write the post and pull the comments from youtube. So let’s say you import 1,000 keywords all related to a particular niche. You set the interval to post a new message based on the keyword every 1500 minutes. This would mean that every 25th hour there would be a new post automatically at your blog.
So if niche is about; cars and one of the keywords you imported was convertible cars there would be a new post titled “convertible cars.”
@JR: Interesting.. I take it this is your product at $67 you are promoting rather than just a service you use? Both your domain and ‘the service you use’ are at the same physical address. There is also a direct link from your site… nice Land Rover there too…
Anyway nice script..
@JRJackson – I like the thought of what that script does. Will have to research it a bit.
@IrishDomainer – Nice sleuth work:)
Yes, IrishDomainer this is one of my services.
After re-reading my comment I see how it appears as though it was a 3rd party service.
I apologize if this confused anyone.
J.R.
JR: no worries.. no need to hide a good product!
Cheers,
iD
Bruce: try adding 10px onto the width of your #page DIV from 960 to 970px; should fix the mac FF problem.
Cheers,
iD
Cool, will try that later tonight, thx much bud!
No prob mate… hit me up when done so i can test it here for you on mac FF.
Cheers,
iD