Domain Name Buying and Selling Do’s and Don’ts Part 3

OK, final installment of Domain Name Buying and Selling Do's and Don'ts. Some of the comments I have got through DM on twitter and in email from those that know me have been fun and actually have led to some fun ideas for future blog posts. Keep in mind these are mistakes that most domainers have made at sometime or another (myself included) and are meet to help not berate.

After todays installment I will leave this theme of posts for a bit:)

1) If you are selling a name based on traffic and revenue, DO make sure you test it at multiple parking providers first. Although I prefer Parked.com in most cases I find that certain names perform better at other parking providers (I do much better with adult names on SedoPro).   Now why it is important, I recently sold a name on 2 years revenue that at Parked.com was making approximately $20 a month. I tested this same name on SedoPro and it made $80 a month, thats a major difference if you are looking at a 2 year revenue multiple. $480 compared to $1920 just by taking the time to test on multiple parking companies.

2) Do NOT backorder domains at just one drop catcher. You will miss names you want guaranteed, it takes no more than 3 minutes to add the backorder on a second site (or even 3rd). I routinely use Snapnames and Namejet (to a lesser degree Pool) and have even on occasion use Godaddy backorders. If its a good name its worth the effort to cover your bases.

3) Do NOT ask for appraisals on forums, when I was a newbie I did this, its bad for 50 different reasons. Its not worth the effort.

4) If you are trying to move a traffic name be prepared to provide more details if its a name you are asking for more than $1XX on. I see people acting surprised when people want to see referrers, keywords, 3 months revenue, etc. If you cannot provide that is fine but do not expect to get the same revenue multiple that someone who can provide would get.

5) This one is more of an annoyance than anything, READ the forum rules before posting a for sale thread. The rules are there for a reason, the rest of us are abiding by them, you need to as well.

Thanks for reading once again. If you are into traffic names item #1 above is probably the most important one out of this 3 part series.

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.