100 Domains Moved to Whypark.com Today

Although I am a big fan of minisite development  and also use Parked.com and SedoPro for domain parking I have also had a Whypark.com account for a couple years but have never used it to its full potential. Well, today that stops.

Although people have voiced concerns about the potential for duplicate content and also unrelated content at times, the overall upside to using the Whypark.com base services outweigh those concerns from the experience I have had with some past names I used Whypark for.

Although I am still plan to continue development and outsourcing of  both minisites and fully developed websites I think the Whypark.com system is a nice middle ground.  After seeing parking revenues decline and my minisite revenues continue to climb it only makes sense to use the tools at hand (i.e. my lightly used Whypark.com account).

I plan on also taking advantage of their premium services such as content creation and syndication, they announced these services sometime back but I have yet to take advantage of them. When taking advantage of these services the Whypark.com system will no longer be a middle group but becomes no different than the unique content based sites that I have been focused on.

Over the next couple months I expect to report back on initial success with the domains I have moved, it will be nice to see direct comparisons between their parking stats and Whypark.com stats. 

I moved 100 names over today, all keyword rich, all but a few .COM, .NET and .ORG names. I have made no tweaks to the autogenerated sites that Whypark put into place and will be using the Whypark ad feed. 

Although I do not expect Whypark to be the ultimate answer for some of my domains, I do think domainers with keyword rich domains that have seen shrinking parking revenues could use the system to their advantage. I expect it to be the answer to my "needing more hours in a day" request I keep asking for:)

Interview with Web Developer and Domainer Tia Wood

 

With todays push on web development for domainers and the decrease in PPC revenues hitting the bottom line of most domainers, finding a web development partner that understands the mindset of domainers is more important than ever.  With that in mind I bring you an interview with Web Developer, Writer, AND Domainer Tia Wood.

 

Tia, you have an appealing array of interests, whether it be music, writing, or web development: your passion shines through. Can you tell me a bit about your passion for writing and music?

Art is a very powerful form of expression especially when the subject has no words that can justify its meaning. For instance: how does one describe love? Or envy? Or human suffering? Some things are best shown in some form. That's why I believe every individual has an interesting story we can all learn from best told via some type of art medium: writing, music, graphic design, photography, philosophy, etc.

This is a personal side of me many people do not know but stems back to childhood. Art is in my blood. I remember in 3^rd grade, I wrote a poem about the Gulf War and was made to read it in front of the entire school. I won little awards throughout my school years for my writing. I write for selfish reasons: to relax my mind and relieve stress. Other than that, I do not care to be famous by it.

Music is the other beast. I always have music playing somewhere: on my computer, in my car or singing out loud. Even my daughter cannot fall asleep without it. Me and her both sing. Even my extended family has some sort of musical ability in one form or another.

Photography and philosophy are my other hobbies. Photography is about capturing perspectives. The same as with philosophy.  

They must feel I'm rude at church because I draw in an art book while the preacher is talking instead of looking at him.  The point is: I do these things and I do them ALL THE TIME whether it is through writing, music, art, graphic design, etc.

How are you so sure that your reality is the correct perspective if you don't try to look through someone else's eyes? I guarantee you it is not and if you neglect this side of yourself you are missing out on the vast understanding that one gains ONLY by learning what others already MASTERED.  

 

Tell us a bit about the process of writing a novel, the focus and dedication that it takes is impressive.

Novel writing is an exhausting process that requires constant care. You have to be interested in writing, for one and interested in your subject. But all it requires is one page at a time. If you write three pages a day, you can work yourself to a novel over time. Write first, edit later. The same goes for those interested in eBook writing.  Or anything else you would like to accomplish. To build a house: lay one brick at a time. To build out your domain portfolio: concentrate on one concept at a time, one page at a time.

 

Not only do you have the ability to express yourself with words, you also have musical talent. What instruments do you play? Do you have a good karaoke story?

I play acoustic guitar. Several of my family members do as well. When I was a teenager, I would sit outside in the Florida night and sing songs I wrote that day. I never formally learned to play but I play by ear. Which reminds me: it's time to buy an electric guitar, lol! We haven't had guitars in the house for awhile and my daughter is old enough to learn. That should be fun.

The word "karaoke" is something close to heart. When my grandfather, Terri, was alive he would take me fishing at the Florida lakes when I was a kid. I suck at fishing but we had fun. On some nights, he would take me to karaoke.  He also played guitar and had an exceptional voice. He would sing songs such as "White Sport Coat" and "Teddy Bear". The first time I sang in front of a crowd was with him at age 11. I sang Boys II Men, "On Bended Knee" in a room packed full of adults. I was a nervous wreck! To this day, I still get terrible stage fright even though I have been told I'm not a bad singer.

 

So your creative side obviously leads to a talent for web design and vision of what a site can look like. How do you approach the start of a project?

In web development, I would say there is a good balance between functionality and graphic design required. However, if a site doesn't function properly, it's just a pretty photo album. What keeps me interested in web development even though it can get fairly technical is the creative approach to solving problems and developing solutions for a client.

Some people overlook the scope of work and vision required that goes into the backend of development. The initial approach is focused on what the individual is trying to achieve with their site whether it be for profit, promotion or data capture. Each project is a different challenge in its own unique way. No project is ever the same even if it's just a Wordpress installation.

 

So, tell us a bit about your domain investments, what extensions do you buy, what's your thought process on buying a domain?

I tend to focus mostly on .com. I purchase names based on long term goals and choose those I know I can attack with a business plan. It's too late to buy one word generic domains. Buying for development is how I make up for this handicap.

One of the great things about domaining is you can still choose what niche you want to focus on and succeed. Some may buy for SEO. Others may buy for revenue. It doesn't matter. But focus on something and do that something well.

 

Give us your thoughts on mini sites and mass development.

Mini sites and mass development have their audience but are for a specific type of domain and a specific type of domainer. You should never, ever develop a website you are trying to launch a business with in this method. There are better ways to serve your audience versus slapping together pages so it won't sit empty. For instance, an article I wrote titled "The New Under Construction Page" talks about this. If you want your website to do something other than serve a blank page while waiting for development: COLLECT DATA! Which is more valuable to you: a few dollars from a user you will never see again or a guaranteed contact who is interested in your website? Never sell yourself short for the almighty click through.

 

OK, you gotta give the story behind BulkDevelopment.com. Your focus is obviously on full development. What led to this fun little test?

I'm normally a private, quiet person. But lately I see individuals attempting to provide glorified MFA (made for adsense) sites and trying to claim this method is "web development". While technically it is: these types of websites have already been proven a failure when they were branded as MFA sites. I'm not referring to real solutions that attempt to provide alternatives to domain parking such as MiniSites.com, WhyPark.com and AEIOU.com. I'm speaking about individuals who promote these glorified MFA sites but yet cannot provide real examples of their success.

I realize this was partially my fault because I choose not to educate people for so long. It's my fault and the domain developers like me. BulkDevelopment.com was the silence breaker. Since then, I restructured my main blog at TiaWood.com to further educate domainers on the differences. The response has been fantastic. I want domainers to know the difference between mini sites, mass development and full scale development.

There are great consequences if you don't know what you are working with. What if you under develop a domain? You will miss out on how powerful the domain can perform. What if you over develop a name? You lose money and time. There is no "one size fits all" to development.

 

dnRehab.com and BulkDevelopment.com are both fun domainer spoofs, any other sites of your own that may be of interest to domainers?

In addition to those, DomainIdeaBox.com was created for my personal use but I wanted to share this tool with domainers.  The tool sorts keywords into "data sets" or categories and allows you to generate ideas based on keywords before or after the data keywords. I use this all the time, especially for Geo names. Search results are not saved as I highly value domainer privacy. It's a neat little tool that makes hand registrations easier.

 

Who do you admire in the domain industry and why?

Whew! Too many to name. There are a lot of domainers worth respecting for many different reasons. But Sahar Sarid and Frank Schilling always are at the top of my list of people I admire. How they both entered domaining is inspiring and shows their dedication as individuals.

 

My daughter took a particular liking to one of your client sites: LittleSantaClaus.com. How do your sites perform in search engines? Can you give some examples of results?

It's funny you say that because I actually had my eight year old daughter help me with that site.  She was my critic.

For LittleSantaClaus.com, we targeted particular keywords that were commonly searched: santa books, santa claus wallpaper, etc and have already been indexed for those terms. The site is appearing on the 1^st page under multiple targeted keywords. The development is not complete at the time of this interview. We plan to target the keyword "santa claus" by Christmas of this year.

By the way, those of you with kids should check out the site. It's about a book series called "The Little Santa Book Series: The Childhood Adventures of Santa Claus" written by Sergio R. Rodriguez.  The first book available is called "Little Santa and Snowboy" which is beautifully illustrated by Simon Scales. I'm personally excited about these books because it presents a different aspect about Santa Claus and the character designs are amazing.

 

 

You recently learned you had Hashimoto's Disease.  Can you tell us more about Hashimoto's and how it affects you?

Hashimoto's Disease is an autoimmune chronic illness that attacks the thyroid gland and causes thyroid disease. For six months, I knew I had thyroid disease but recently discovered the underlying cause: Hashimoto's Disease. So basically, one disease caused the other. I have had Hashimoto's all my life without knowing it. It attacked my thyroid over the years until it was no longer functional.

The thyroid gland controls many functions in your body: weight, metabolism, mentality, emotions, etc and produces hormones that control and throttle these functions. With thyroid disease, these hormones are either produced too much or too little (in my case too little) and affect a person in so many negative ways.

I am outspoken about having this illness because of my initial misdiagnosis. This illness causes symptoms very close to bipolar disease. Therefore, I initially went to a psychiatrist instead of a doctor. I was diagnosed and treated for a mental illness instead of a physical illness. I was put on lithium and suffered a month of hell from the wrong diagnosis. It is important for people with these symptoms to seek not only multiple tests but multiple opinions from different doctors.

More information about that story here: Tia's Story

Hashimoto's Disease information here: Hashimoto's Disease Info

 

What projects are you currently working on: personal or for clients?

One project is DrugReform.com that debates the topic of drug reform. This site has an interesting social presentation that allows people to present both sides of the opinion spectrum uncensored. We are focusing on social marketing. It will be interesting to see how this format shapes itself.

Another client project is popular.ME; the first in a series of the .me domain extension I'm developing for a client. This, too, has a social marketing aspect and I can't wait to launch it.

For my personal work, I have a couple sites next in queue: NameHoney.com and HashimotosDisease.us. I don't want to mention the development focus for NameHoney.com yet but it will benefit domainers. HashimotosDisease.us will be an awareness and support site for individuals suffering with Hashimoto's Disease.

 

What do you have planned for the future?

Ah, the future is bright and full of possibilities. Last year, I discovered the power of social marketing. Therefore, I have been focusing more and more on using this type of promotion in combination with development. The projects that solely use this method are almost complete and I'm very excited to explore this further. I have discovered new mediums that even domainers aren't fully aware of yet. I'm terribly excited about it but I plan to take my time to explore them fully. All I can say is: watch what happens next! There will be major contributions to the domain industry coming in the future.

 

Thanks to Tia for taking the time to give her views on Web Development and Domaining!

Minisite To Google First Page In Less Than Month

Its been about a month since launched the Mathbooks.net minisite. I thought it would be good to review the results of the launch of this keyword rich minisite.

First off this site was done a little different than others I have done in the past. I had originally planned to build the site myself but due to time constraints I chose to outsource to AEIOU.com. So, this site is a combination of keyword researched content written by a selected writer I use for many of my sites and SEO and site development done by AEIOU.com. I also did a bit of my own link building but the majority was done by AEIOU.com.

Rather than take you through all 15 keyword selections I chose to target we will show the results for the top two: Math Books and Mathbooks. These are the most generic terms that could be chosen other than the singular version of the words which normally means that they will also be the most competitive. Math Books was shown to have a search volume of 90,500 in the month of March per the Google Keyword Research Tool.

Before the minisite I was getting anywhere from 1 to 3 visits per day parked. This created revenue but I knew I could do better with a site if I could rank well for the terms selected.

Well, the results are in, currently if you search for the term Math books the site ranks between 4 and 6 (seems to move around a bit but always consistent) and Mathbooks is ranking in the 4th spot. That is in less than a month, first page for a generic keyword in less than a month is a very solid result and shows that the work and investment can pay off.

Traffic is more than 10 times the visits per day than parked and revenue has obviously increased along with that. I very soon will be implementing Ebay Affiliate Ads on the page as well which should allow for even further increased revenues.

Free Minisite Ebook – Wordpress News Aggregator in 15 Minutes

Wordpress Minisite News Aggregator in 15 Minutes

UPDATE: A new version also now exists at How To Build A Wordpress News Aggregator although not in downloadable format, if you want a PDF this is the post for you.

Minisites for your Domains come in many different forms. One that has become popular is taking a niche and building a news aggregator using Wordpress and the FeedWordpress Plugin which is built specifically to aggregate RSS feeds from sources that you choose. This How-To Create A Wordpress Minisite Tutorial will show you how to create a Wordpress Minisite aggregating news for a specific topic, in this case using Cpanel and Fantastico.

If you do not have hosting with Cpanel and Fantastico then you should head to Hostgator.com, since they have packages that allow for unlimited Wordpress installations at very low prices, I use them for all of my hosting for both my dedicated servers and blog hosting for BruceMarler.com
Originally I was going to paste all pictures and info in one blog post but after seeing the length of the post I feel its best to offer it is a PDF document in a sort of informal E-Book format (for free of course).

To download the Wordpress News Aggregator in 15 Minutes Process click this link (its free) Wordpress Minisite News Aggregator in 15 Minutes

Yahoo Search Results Matter For My Minisites

I very seldom focus on checking my Yahoo search results for my various minisites and developed domains and spend the majority of my time verifying Google search results. I have found that recently Yahoo has been showing certain minsites of mine in the first page of their listings causing a measurable increase in traffic and revenue.

One example of this is my site PensacolaBeach.me . Pensacola Beach is a popular tourist destination in the Florida panhandle. I knew the SEO for anything related to it would be tough up front but have had some success with certain targeted terms but did not expect to rise to the front page of Google (or Yahoo for that matter) for quite some time for the term Pensacola Beach.

I had noticed that mid last week the traffic had went up and that revenue from Google Adsense was also increasing. I took a look through my Statpress statistics and also my Awstats details and figured out that the term Pensacola Beach had increased in the common keywords driving traffic. Looking at referrers Yahoo was now referring a solid amount of traffic. I then went to Yahoo (really cannot remember the last time I used Yahoo for a search) and found that indeed I was in the first page of listings for the term Pensacola Beach.

This is good news for a few reasons, the obvious is that the SEO work that has been done for long tail terms has also paid off for the primary term I expected to wait longer for results on (I just started the development in January).  Also, for you .ME fans, with the results I have had so far I cannot complain about developing this on the .ME extension (more details coming on .ME and SEO in the interview I am posting Monday).

I know that it comes to no surprise to anyone that Yahoo matters, but as much time as I spend focusing on Google search results and placement I really found the amount of revenue and traffic increase I received interesting and actually worth spending sometime researching in future developments. For those that fall into the same camp as I have in checking Google only, you may find it worth the time to spend a portion of your effort verifying placement in Yahoo results as well.

On a side note, I am now only 2 sites away from having all my minisites moved over to my HostGator account. After much pain at my previous hosting provider (outages, changed configurations, DNS issues) all while paying for a VPS I have successfully moved to a HostGator reseller account and have had better performance and the support has been great.

Yes, anything ad you see on this site for HostGator is an affiliate but when it comes to hosting its gotta be right. If you are looking for a good provider or just starting from scratch you really cannot go wrong with them.

Minisite Development Domain Selection Tips

I have had several (dozens...) of emails in the past week asking various questions about developing minisites, using wordpress for minisites, revenue on my minisites, and how-to create minisites.

As most people will tell you, I do respond to each and every email rather quickly most of the time, if I miss one its because Outlook may of been a little aggressive filtering it to junk mail.

That said, I thought I would do a few posts this week about various minisite development topics and how I choose between doing the Minisite development myself or if I outsource and also what names I choose and why.

First things first, when do I choose to build compared to outsourcing to someone else?  This comes down to a couple factors, the largest one being time to be quite honest. I have a very demanding sales job that I do along with my Domaining. People ask why do both? Well I actually like the field I am in and the job I do so I use outsourcing based on using my time more effectively (if you really want to get an idea of how to work effectively read 4 Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferris).  I would expect the majority of domainers work a full-time position while domaining part time, outsourcing is the key if you plan to develop any of your domains if that is the case.

The second big one is the type of site I want built, I have zero graphic skills or  graphic creativity, I admit that freely, if I want a simple minisite with simple text content that can be SEO'ed I have that process down to minutes for the site creation. I create those on my own, if it is a site I think could use more of a designers touch and a nice logo then I outsource.

That said, one thing I have learned from experience is make sure the minsite focuses on keywords that have a decent PPC.

I will give a really good example of this, I like to use certain domains for testing various SEO work and Google Adsense optimization.  A few months back I purchased KingCobras.org. I recognized ahead of time that the site would not have high PPC values but it was a name that receives quite a few searches per month (approximately 22,000 for exact match) and would be perfect for what I was testing (SEO on images).  The site is not pretty by any means but I was able within a month to go from a couple visitors a day to 200 to 300 a day (pageviews are higher obviously), it has leveled now in the 100 range due to lack of attention but can easily be rasied back up to that level.  I was able to get a reasonable CTR but the earning per click was a measley 3 to 6 cents. Once again, expected, but it just goes to show to anyone just picking terms to grab traffic if you are looking for dollars and not cents per day pick your content and terms. Thats the point right, to make money:)

Now as far as that site goes, it gets good traffic, I now have a base to build revenue from, there are revenue models that I know will actually make some money off that site and they will be implemented in the near future and I will report on this.

Now, lets go the opposite direction, a site that gets much smaller search volume but pay per click is much higher. WomensBikeShorts.com. Exact match searches are around 2,900 a month which is much lower than the KingCobras.org site so traffic is lower, BUT revenue is much better on a per day average. Why is that? Well its because it is a product people are looking to buy, when people search for a term like Womens Bike Shorts they are looking to buy a product, when they search for King Cobras they are researching. Big difference between what people will pay per click between those 2 intentions.

So, to circle back around to selecting outsourcing or for that matter minisite topics. Its about revenue, if you are looking for high pay per click terms look for services or products, develop your site to match the terms that bring the biggest payback. I would rather a site that gets 20 unique visitors a day getting 20 to 30 percent CTR with 30 cent clicks than a site getting 200 visitors  a day with 10 percent CTR getting 3 cent clicks. 

All those factors need to go into your decision process when choosing a name for development, deciding if the outsource cost is worth it, or if you want to do it yourself.

I will be posting later this week with an exact how to of how to launch simple Wordpress Minisites that have been proven to have solid CTR for those times when you cannot justify or just do not want to outsource your domain development.

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.