They Just Don’t Care – Stop Thinking Like a Domainer
After my last blog post someone (anonymous of course) had submitted a comment asking a couple questions that I actually appreciated having the time to answer, although he/she must not of thought I answered fast enough but in reality I base my priorities on family and revenue so to be honest I do sometimes take awhile to respond to things that are not in direct relation to one of those. The person does not know our marketing and sales plan so I forgive them for the traffic question since there is no way for them to know the details of what we are doing and the packages we put together. Although I will say that we have had multiple customers already come to us to tell us that they are getting calls from people finding them online FOR THE FIRST TIME now that they are working with us.
But the more important thing that I want to hit on since I think it is important for us domainers to realize is that a small business owner in Arapaho, Nebraska (picked that out of nowhere) does not care that .TV is the cctld for Tuvalu or that .ME is the cctld for Montenegro, do you really think they are going to walk away from their cash register and search for Montenegro, no. Only domainers care.
We built our brand on Missouri.me, the businesses and communities we are working with appreciate the fact we are doing something for them and the advertisers only care that the traffic that our site gets is focused on consumers that are interested in their products or service. We bring them qualified, TARGETED traffic.
Now, understand, I believe in .COM so do not misunderstand the above comments, but I also know that with the right marketing efforts I can build a business on a solid cctld (like .ME).
I am sure many of you are ready to gripe now that I must be wrong, no way you are right, well I can say with absolute 100 percent confidence that there is actually one community that we have had such success with our efforts that we now get more traffic to their community portal than the newspaper site has. Think about that for a second...... I wish I could point out which one but for competitive reasons that would not make much sense would it:) There may be others that we have had that level of success but I have not checked on a community by community level yet.
Now to point out a could more sites that use cctlds that are from other countries/islands:
Do you think that either of them said, hmmmmm, people may not go to our site because its related to Tuvalu. Do you think that a cyclist watching Tour De France news thinks of that before watching the latest updates (as I do each day). Nope, they understood the branding potential of what they were doing.
Sorry to rant on this so much, but it is valuable to step back sometimes and think about how the people you are targeting think.
On a side note, I do not censor comments, but I will likely not let through any anonymous comments moving forward either positive or negative unless I see value in them. I use my name on everything I do so I feel people should either use their name or a user id people know them buy in the community.
Geo Domains Locked and Loaded – Watch Your Keywords
One thing I have always found interesting is watching what people are searching for that landed them on my site. My minisites are very keyword targeted and usually are pretty predictable but many times I have found that my sites have been "selected" by google to rank high for certain terms I did not necassarily expect and by using this data I can sometimes find solid hand registered domains that I may not of found otherwise.
With the recent launch of this blog I have found a very interesting search that has started to send traffic my way. Recently I posted about Newspapers Closing. I have been a fan of Geo domains for sometime but with the recent fall of old school media I really think the time is now for Geo domain owners to fully develop and take advantage of the opportunity at hand. One thing that really drove this point home has been a term that has been driving many visitors a day to this blog.
That term is Newspapers Closing, at first I did not think much of it but then started thinking, the public has changed mindset enough that they are searching online frequently enough that it would show up in my keyword results. A quick check of the google keyword tool shows small results for this term but in the past 3 days I have had more visitors for this term than the big G shows for average search volume on this term for a month.
As more and more newspapers close their doors people will be looking for alternatives online. If you own a Geo domain it would be a smart move to be that portal. I will be posting in the near future on content that is freely available to develop your Geo domain to provide the content that people are looking for each morning when they sip their coffee.
So, even though this post is focused on why I think a specific term is valuable for Geo domains, the point is to pay attention for trends in the data that you have in your keyword stats. It could be valuable....
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!