Biggest Decision of My Life – Thanks to Domaining

OK, so the title may be a bit dramatic but I truly feel the decision I made a few weeks back and executed this morning may be the most important decision I have made outside of children and marriage.

Today I walked away from a six figure income at a leading technology company to focus on starting my own business. After 15 years in the corporate world it was time to take that leap and believe in the possiblities of what I can create and what has been created over the past several months. I could tell for sometime that I had really lost the passion for next generation telecommunication networks (I had been involved in carrier class VoIP networks all the way back in 1996 at ATT) and my heart just was not in that piece of the communication world.

As many of you know I am a big fan of Geo domains and believe now is the time to act to create a business to take advantage of the shift to "hyperlocal" search that we all have seen as part of the domaining community.  Back in December I had an idea for a business model that would allow for certain customer types to be targeted more effectively than they have in the past and along with some other services would create an online marketing solution for small businesses that could not be matched by other media and technology companies.

Initially I had planned to stay in the shadows a bit and let my business partner work the sales front and I would provide technology and marketing vision and drive the company from that side while I worked a rather demanding full time job. It would not be possible to provide much time to this endeavour and it was only fair to the company paying my paycheck that I gave them full effort on a daily , nightly, every minute of the day basis.

After the intial alpha launch of our site the intial reaction and success showed that we were onto something that would scale well and create a solid revenue stream for the company rather rapidly. But at the same time, once you see the possibilities you see that committing yourself fully could make the business much more than if you focused only part time.

So, after a few months of very deep soul searching I realized, do what I love. If you work on what you enjoy you will be successful, although there will be stress starting a business (Although strangely I feel none), at the end of the day the freedom and fullfillment you get from creating something and watching it grow is so much better than the daily corporate grind.  We have only been operational for a short time but the experience of watching customers react in such a positive manner is that much better when it is something you created (with a team, and never forget that).

Thanks to the domaining community for giving me the ability to create such a business. The support and advice I have received from the domaining and development community has been great.

Lesson learned here, develop, develop, develop, find an idea that is interesting and works from the business side AND that you will enjoy and good things will happen. Find a hole and fill it, provide solid service at a fair price. People will buy.

It is a GREAT DAY!

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.

Newspapers Closing While Localization Continues on the Web

If you came here after searching for Why Newspapers Are Closing On The Web you may also want to read the post about Print Media Moving Online.

As has been widely reported lately the old school newspapers continue to lose money and close up shop while online ad spending grows. Today I found an interesting story, ironically, in the paper version of USA Today. How did I find it, well because the paper was sitting outside my hotel room door this morning.

Rather than paging through the cumbersome, too large, flimsy paper copy I went online and read the same story. Hence the problem the newspapers are running headlong into.

Most papers have some online ad component at this point but most were using it to supplement their offline revenue rather than using it as their primary business model. This is catching up with them. As more and more people are going online to check everything from news to classifieds to weather they no longer need 6, 12, 24, 36 hour old info.

As I posted on twitter recently its all about local, local, local, social, social, social....

You can read the story here: USA Today Article

I think for the majority of the newspapers, although their online ad revenue has grown, it is too late to fix their core business models to make it through the era of real time, mashed up, and twitter size news.

I found it extremely disappointing that a group of people laid off from the Denver paper actually were petitioning to get 50,000 subs signed up for a subscription fee to start an online news site. Once again, old school models that just will not work for localized news.

These issues that the newspapers are facing are core to many legacy brick and mortar industries but are also the reason our domain names/web properties will continue to gain value even while the economy fights through this downturn.

Comment away!