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.

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.

Buying Domains For Investment Vs Development

Something that has seemed to come up more than normal in conversations this week with various people is the difference in buying domain names for development versus buying domain names for investment. When I look at buying for development I have completely different metrics as well as intangibles that I think about as compared to when I buy a domain name for investment and gain.

I am sure many will say in either case you will always need the .COM, well as is obvious I do not necessarily agree with that. Although there will always be some level of direct type-ins for extremely high value two word or one word generic .COMs for anything below the absolute top in many cases the amount of type in traffic can easily be exceeded through proper SEO and marketing. I am sure people will disagree but I have enough evidence to the the contrary that makes it a simple fact for me. And enough people have talked about their keyword domains, even decent ones, not having traffic and that is why they develop.

The other argument heard frequently is that you will lose type in traffic to the .COM. Well, I have no doubt I lose some type in traffic from people typing in the .COM version of the domain I develop on a non .COM but it is a small amount, the amount of money spent on acquiring the .COM far exceeds the amount, in many cases, needed to brand and market the non .COM to a high enough traffic level to not worry about the traffic leakage. Once again, feel free to tell me I am crazy, does not bother me. When you are developing it is about the business not the name.

Now, all that said there is no way anyone can say that the best value for investing is not keyword generic .COMs and .NETs. But holding a name for something other than development changes the way you look at it. As an investment you look at the marketplace to either find opportunities (native cctlds) or names that inherently have value (.COMs and .NETs). I buy very few names outside of .COM and .NET for investment purposes.

I view buying a domain for development by looking at a business plan, now if I can fit in the acquisition of a high dollar .COM as part of the plan then well, that may be the best option. But if that acquisition would kill the business from the beginning so it can never make it off the ground then does it make sense to never start the business. No it does not, a good business plan is a good business plan, it is not about the name. As domainers sometimes we miss the point, I would venture to say that most who make comments like "I would never start without the .COM"  have never put together a full business plan (although there are people that have done very well, but they had the funds to start with the bigger names, they are the exception not the rule, do not ever forget that.).

I cringe everytime I hear people say that the .COM should of been bought, etc. Well if a company received 500K to start and the .COM would cost them 300K, does it really make sense to go after the .COM if you can show a successful path to growing a brand and traffic. No, once again buying for development is much different than buying a name for investment.

Long story short, if you can afford a large investment in your generic .COM without killing the business plan sure, go for the .COM but do not ever let the name keep you from starting your business.

Thoughts On The AEIOU.com Minisite Business Closure

I usually shy away from any sort of reporting that has been hit by several others but in this case I wanted to at least say a bit since I have had some level of success with some of my AEIOU.com sites.

First off I think people are missing what happened, no one said Minsites do not work as a way to add some added value and traffic to a domain as compared to parking. What Rick Latona said was that there was no money in selling them for 200 dollars. Big difference, if you think about the cost of having someone manually create the site, do the link building, write all the content and then manage the customer there was not much margin left in it.

What Rick did say is that they are continuing to use the resources to create sites for their in-house needs. I am not sure what Rick is finding, but I personally have had some really nice deals done after someone made an offer through one of my sites.

For me minisites are the first step to real development and in many cases can be used to augment a larger development.That is how I use them today, they are not the prime business, they augment and enhance a larger project.

I personally would not put a lot of time into manually creating a site step by step, I always look for ways to automate the process which drives cost out. There are somethings in the minisite process that can be automated but there are still a couple steps that are not automated (quality link building, quality content). But if you have the content then finding an automated creation system is the key. That is the only way to make it cost effective.

I have recently did a couple just for fun, just to test a few things, but in reality the time involved will only be profitable if the domain would sell through the site. If you value your time then you have to factor that in and PPC revenue for most minisites will not make up for time spent. Although, if you are using the minisite as part of a larger plan then the PPC is not a factor and the value can be judged differently.

It is no secret that my main focus is full scale development but there is a need for a smaller scale development option, but as Rick Latona found, it is not worth it if he has to sell them at 200 and make slim margins. This is a niche industry so making it up on volume is not an option.

My biggest problem is finding the affiliate links and taking them out now.....

Kudos to Rick for standing up and telling people the truth. Smart move.

Another Random Domaining Notes Post

Here goes another group of random domain investing and domain business development thoughts from the past week. It was a bit of a crazy week due to moving and the follow up meetings after last weeks seminar. Here we go:

Sometimes the newspapers figure it out pretty quick, Friday while heading out to the truck we used to move our office equipment a lady came up to ask us if we were launching a new business. I let her know that we had been in business but had been fortunate enough to outgrow our old space and were in the process of moving. After she asked what we did I gave her our elevator pitch. She looked at me and said, "I guess you would not be interested in an ad in the newspaper then?". I stated that the newspapers were not big fans of ours and then, knowing the answer, asked her if she was with the local paper. Obviously the answer was yes. I must say I missed the boat by not asking her if she would like to interview for one of our open sales positions....

We continue to be invited to new speaking opportunities, in the past week we have had two requests to come do the same seminar we did a couple weeks back to new groups of people and organizations. From a domaining standpoint it is really a pretty neat thing to have people actually start thinking about the proper name selection and send us questions and look for help in selecting the proper name for their move to promoting their business online.

While at the St. Louis Cardinals Vs. Los Angeles Dodgers playoff game (did the Cardinals ever show up) I met a nice couple who asked what kind of business I was in. After discussing it the first thing they asked about was consulting prices for Facebook and Twitter promotion. I am amazed on a daily basis on how many businesses we have asking us for support in those areas. These type of conversations happen everyday, at this point in the game if a business does not have a solid website and social marketing plan they are missing the boat.

Sometime back I did a post about the domain backorder and auction services needing a solid mobile interface (Snapnames and Namejet), this week with all time out of the office we had I yet again had issues with not being able to access the system properly, even on my iPhone. Top this off with ATT just totally lacking in stable Internet service in both my home and office this week and my week of drop catching was not good at all...

This is post #99 for me, it looks like, and I noticed this last week, my Alexa 3 month average ranking may break 100K on the same day I make my 100th post. I have been averaging around the 40 to 50K range daily lately but the 3 month ranking is the one they show by default so I been waiting to see it go below 100K. In reality it should drop rapidly based on the past month or two average this blog has had. Thanks to all for following this site, it is very much appreciated.

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.

Domain Development is Web Development is Business Development

OK, first off let me say I am guilty as much as the rest of us domain investors when it comes to calling the development of a domain "Domain Development". My question is why do we continue to do that, can I ask why is it any different for a domainer to develop a business on a domain name than it is for any other business owner to buy a domain name and build their business on their name? I can say for sure they do not call it domain development.

Short answer. There is no difference. We in the domain industry coined the term domain development when in reality there really is not a difference between a domain investor with a vision of growing a business on their key properties. The only difference is now you have become the end user of the property, you just got the name at wholesale value rather than end user value.

I am sure we as an industry will continue to call it domain development, but do not fool yourself. It will benefit us all to realize that we are just like anyone else with a domain name and realize that we move into business development (instead of domain development) as soon as a business plan is put in place and web development is complete on our properties.

I am sure I will slip up and call it domain development at times but I myself am going to make a conscious effort to move past the term domain development and start to use web development or more accurately business development when describing the building of a business on my own properties.

Also, we in the domain crowd need to start realizing the selling of a business that happened to have a great name is not the selling of a domain name, it is the selling of a business that happens to have a great domain name. Kudos to that business for having the vision to acquire a great name, but a company like Mint.com did not sell for the price they did purely on their name, it was done based on a business model.

Last thought, I watched with much interest all the discussions around minisites, their value, good or bad, etc during the past month. I have had success with minisites and will continue to use them in some cases. I know alot of people like to talk about the lack of value to the end user in them. I am a believer it is not the amount of pages on a site that matters, its the quality of the content. I am not saying all my minisites are the best of quality when it comes to content but my point is I believe their are times someone could have a one page site and if it has the data someone is looking for does it really matter to the end user if it does not have 100 more pages to look at. Now, I will say though that the real business model to make real money on one domain is not a minisite. To make real money on a domain it needs to have a business plan and full blown development behind it, but each business can have a different level of development required on the site, some one page, some one hundred pages, some just a form to take info. Every business is different.

All that said it is impossible to have a full plan on each an every name you own if you own one thousand names, it takes capital, time, and a lot of effort to get a business off the ground. Rick Schwartz got it write in this blog post. It is impossible to build one thousand businesses all at the same time. This is why I do think its unrealistic when every time people show support minisites people start to bash them and say the only answer is full development, it is just not realistic to think people can build a full business on everyone of their names.

One Blog or Many Blogs – Should the Network Begin

One of the things I have been noticing lately is there are quite a few topics I want to blog about but based on the domaining and domain development focus of my blog and the niche viewers I really do not want to alienate my typical readers by discussing other things in my life. Whether it be my renewed focus on training for a triathlon or marathon or topics that tend to be more gadget or even travel focused I am not sure they fit on my own personal blog anymore, kind of a weird situation to be in.

That said, I really like the fact I have branded my main site under my name, I think its important to standup and be seen under your name when doing business and really think the benefits have outweighed the negatives. Although the one thing I have noticed is that BruceMarler.com should really be treated as a business and I have not really been doing that too much at this point, yes there has been money made on it but that has not been a real focus.

All that said, I would like some thoughts from my readers, I have a few names that I think I would like to build into blogs about various topics with a combination of my own personal writing and outsourced writing. I think building a network of real blogs would be valuable, but I am having a hard time determining if it would be possible to combine all into the BruceMarler.com "brand". Also gotta make sure it does not distract from my main projects (hence the outsourced writing).  I am not sure if my domainer friends would want to hear me write about my training plans and swim/bike/run workouts I will be hitting hard over the next few months and think it may be better to put them on RunMarathons.com (gotta remember to make that a link when it launches:) )

Would like thoughts from my readers, to build a network or bore you guys with other topics. Yes this is all just me thinking outloud.....

The Value of Product Roadmaps when Developing Domains

As much as I try not to put to much structure in place and cause headaches when first launching this little thing called Missouri.me there are certain concepts and ideas that work well no matter how large or small your enterprise/product.

The one that I think is of the most value is the idea of having a product roadmap when developing your product, in this case a website. When developing any major site the first thing that you need to understand is that it will never be done, EVER. If you are dealing with people outside the tech world this may be a new concept to them. But if you think that you are going to wait to have every feature you will ever think of before you promote or sell product on your site you will NEVER make it to market because you will run out of money before you make it to revenue.

What we did was developed a phased approach, where phase 1 was based on core features, phase 2 on major core changes (speed, etc), and phase 3 on nice to haves.

Now within each of those phases we had a point by point description of what the feature would do, complexity, etc. Thats all fine and great but what happens next is once everyone involved starts seeing that their features are pushed out to later phases people start wanting to pull things into to phase one. Let me give you an example of this happening. Last year I was consulting for a group of doctors in the area I live in, they were starting a company and had a rather ambitious plan for a product they wanted to create. At one point in the process I stopped them and said ok, next meeting we have one item on the agenda, we are going to build a road map, I told them up front what would happen, they would all list features, they would agree to structure it in phases but then I let them know everyone was going to ask for their feature to be in phase one. So what happened, you can guess, out of all the post its we stuck on the wall (I used them to make a point), a total of 3 out of 50 or so were not in phase one. Hows that for making a visual impact of the problem.

So, how do you fix this, its natural to think your feature or idea is the most important, but you need to take the personal emotion out of it. Numbers work best. For the first few months of development I spent the largest portion of my time managing the expectations and requests from the sales side of what was being created (I was part of the sales side which makes it real interesting). I always laid out that if X feature was added then Y feature would slip and then did my best to show how revenue timelines or amounts would be impacted. So how do you balance when to add features and when to make a change in the road map, prove how many customers or how much more revenue could be added.

At some point you have to put a line in the sand though and say that phase one (launch product) is locked down, if you do not do that you will never get to revenue and your business will fail before it starts. That happened with that group of doctors, they never could get to launch because they wanted EVERYTHING day one. They could not prioritize features that were required vs nice to have.

At the end of the day your product should always be improving and growing, it should never be done, you need to have a plan and realize that you cannot have your developers changing course everyday, nothing will ever get done. Structure your development plan to get the most bang for your development buck and you will be successful.