Smartname Shops Adds Value To Undeveloped Product Domain Names
As I mentioned in my Smartname Content Site review the other day I had also been testing the Ecommerce templates from Smartname.com as well. As most people know the majority of their domains bring little traffic if any (Smartname, in their webinar, shows a 90/10 split), and it is impossible to fully develop hundreds (or even dozens) of sites without a large amount of capital.
Even at 200 to 400 dollars per site it becomes almost impossible for most domainers to justify developing more than a few sites to even a minimal level. Affiliate stores and other rapid development solutions are great, but if you have 1000 product names can you really develop them all?
So, if you cannot afford to develop all of your names but want traffic to them so you can justify holding them what is the answer?
Well, I must say, so far I am really happy with the Smartname Shop sites, although I just started working with them recently so I cannot speak to revenue over a long period of time, I can say that the potential is really good based on the results I am seeing.
Why? Well the sites are ranking extremely well in the search engines, not bad for something that takes less than a few minutes per site to turn up.
Here are four examples:
Yahoo is sending a nice amount of traffic to 3 of the sites now and I expect the same soon for the fourth. I am also seeing terms in Google sending traffic as well for long tail terms and the exact match terms are moving up as well.
Did I mention long tail? That is the trick here, by developing the site you are able to gather traffic from related product terms.
Although the revenue split will not be the same from doing an affiliate relationship direct with someone it is also not reasonable to think you could mass deploy either.
Now, I will say that if a domain name already has traffic I would likely not do this, but if it is minimal or is a product related name that would do well as a shop these sites are well worth considering.
As I said in my previous post, this is NOT A PAID post, this is my opinion and I really like where this is headed. Between this and the content sites I think there is real value being added to domains that previous received little or no traffic. And with the ability to insert your own Google Adsense ads you can also take full revenue from that while sharing the revenue on the products. Not a bad deal.
Looking For Traffic? Smartname Content Sites Work
While at DomainFEST last month I had the pleasure of sitting down with Ted Olson from NameMedia/Smartname.com. Ted took me through the new content site solution that Smartname has put together for domain names that currently do not have large amounts of type-in traffic but may still be great names.
After taking a look I was extremely excited to try it out as I could see that it really took automatically created sites to the next level, with just a few minutes of work per site a domain name could be taken from nothing but a domain name to a full fledged website. But until I had the chance to really get in there I wanted to be careful giving to many kudos to the system.
As someone who has developed several news aggregation sites in the past I was not concerned about the duplicate content issue that some people worry about with these type of content sites, I knew that even if a site cannot be ranked for all the leading terms, overall the long tail traffic you can pick up can still add more value to the site than just sitting there with no traffic. Dynamic sites seem to be given a green light by search engines.
Smartname.com has taken dynamic site development to the next level, after trying out the system I can say without a doubt that you can really create a site that has been SEO'ed to some degree in minutes. There was only one minor nitpick issue I came up with and it will be fixed in the next release.
When you first login and then select the domain name to manage you will see a few different options for the type of site you want to create: standard parked page, content site, or Ecomm (to be reviewed later). The site type I wanted to test first was this content site, Ted had shown me that they could get ranked, I wanted to see if they could get ranked as easily as doing so on Wordpress.
After selecting content site you can then select a theme (there are hundreds of selections ranging from Army to Finance), a color scheme, and even choose a header image. After doing this you can also manually selected keywords to be used on the site, this is very important for targeting sponsored links, etc. There are also tabs for modifying the header and footer text and images, all and all a nice setup for a quick site deployment. This also makes it easy to add text for SEO reasons as well.
When you get to advanced settings you actually get the option to add your own Adsense or affiliate ads in, thats right, along with the shared revenue from the sponsored ads you can also insert your own ads that gives you 100 percent revenue from each click or purchase. You also have the option of enabling things like social media links, etc as well from this page. When you put all this together you really have a full featured content/news aggregation site with true value to the user.
There is also a SEO configuration tab that has many useful options in it (titles, meta descriptions, etc) but what I really found useful was the fact I could add in Google Analytics and Google Webmaster info so I can manage these sites just like any other site development I have.
So, verdict on management and usefulness of the platform so far, very positive. These sites turn your non-traffic domains into real websites and bring traffic (and in most cases revenue) along. They are SEO friendly and with a few changes coming up soon this gets even better.
But, how do they rank, do they really get ranked in the search engines and bring traffic?
Well let me show you an example, a few weeks back the very first site I did was Deployed.net, even though I did the least amount of tweaking on this site (no tweaking of sponsored keywords, etc) it still ranks first page (number 6) Google based on having real content, it is a full fledged website, it also ranks very high on Yahoo as well (number 4). From working on news sites like these before I feel confident that the ranking will stay.
A couple more sites I turned up before leaving for DMG but have not had a chance to link build yet are: MedicalQuestions.us and GreenhouseEffect.us , both of these are newly turned up but look how great they look. Great job by the Smartname team. These are names that would receive very little of any type-in traffic but as real value added websites I have added value to the property as well as revenue.
I think part of the problem that many domainers will have is that they discount the value of doing this since they look at it as parking and they are afraid their sites will not rank, in this case many of these sites turn out better than professional sites I have seen done. These are real websites not parking pages.
If you are looking for a way to turn your non-traffic names into revenue producers with minor effort and ZERO cost I recommend taking a look at the Smartname.com solution.
And, as I have made clear in other posts, this is a NON PAID post, I tested the system and liked it. I am also testing their Ecomm platform and liking the rankings I am seeing so far, look for a review on it soon.
A few things in closing, this is phase one, they have phase two coming in the very near future that adds several new features (add your own posts, etc). Also, Ted sent the following as well:
SmartName continues to lead the industry with high payouts and the largest breadth of innovative monetization solutions (Enhanced PPC, Instant Shops and Full Content) allowing portfolio owners the opportunity to make more money from more of their portfolio - all managed from one simple dashboard. Moreover, unlike a pure-play parking company, we can link your parked pages to the industry’s leading domain marketplace where professional domain sales representatives can help sell your domain names 7 days a week. Adding a SmartName For Sale link that links directly to our Expanded Promotion network (AfternicDLS/BuyDomains) has proven to increase sales velocity by 225%. Our goal is simply to make our clients the most amount of money based on their portfolio objectives. In sum, SmartName provides domain owners monetization solutions that fit their unique financial objectives and domain portfolio. PS – if you missed our latest webinar: Discover the Top Domain Parking and Selling Strategies for 2010, view it
here @ https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/792040306
I highly recommend listening to the webinar to get a more indepth idea what I am talking about above.
If you have turned up any names on the content site system at Smartname.com shoot me a message, I would love to see them.
Smartname.com Domain Parking Strategies Webinar Thursday Feb 4th
For those that are not aware I thought I would do a quick post about a webinar that is coming up on Thursday the 4th of February.
Smartname is holding the webinar to show off their thoughts on domain parking and selling strategies for 2010 and after seeing a demo of their new content site solution I think it would be worth attending.
Although I am not quite ready to do the full review so far I have been impressed with the ease of use and the way the content sites are coming out, as many know if you do not have type-in traffic but want to generate revenue with your site it becomes all about getting traffic with content, their system looks good so far and I look forward to writing a full review in the near future.
In the mean time if you want to sign up for the webinar sign up here.
And to be clear, this is not a paid post, but I think we as domainers have to think about new, effective ways to monetize. I know there are some other companies working on new systems as well but so far Smartname is one of the only ones that I have been able to test myself and like what I am seeing but will hold out full judgment until I test further.
An example of a site that has been minimally tweaked is Deployed.net , this took less than 3 minutes.