Some Random Thoughts Before I Head Out
For the next week I will very likely not be doing many if any posts as I will be doing a week long, very intense road trip following the Tour of Missouri as mentioned yesterday. Most of my focus will be on reporting and blogging cycling news on our Tour.Missouri.me site which will start to have actual stories, videos and pictures starting tomorrow.
So here are a few random things before the week begins. First off there are a few bloggers and friends who will be doing guest posts throughout the week. I look forward to seeing what they have to say. I let them choose their own topics and find it rather fun to have other people posting as guests on a blog with my name on it, should be fun. The first one should go out on Monday.
Next topic - you never know who is reading, remember that, I got a bit of a surprise tonight after one of the communication directors for one of the elite cycling teams racing this week contacted me based on my blog post here and offered up behind the scenes access and help with communications, etc. Kudos goes out to the team at Team Type 1 , this team is based on riders who have Type 1 diabetes and still race at the top levels of the sport. Proves that with the right attitude you can overcome challenges when you are faced with them.
Congrats to my good friend Patrick Ruddell at ChefPatrick.com for being the first guest on Domainvestors.TV. Sounds like the first video will be completed sometime in November. Should be interesting, Morgan Linton has worked hard to build a true video studio in his office (interesting to say the least) and this will be a great start I am sure for many unique reports to come.
On the domain sales front, I had 3 deals go through this week, 2 smaller deals and 1 of reasonable size I hope to announce soon. It was a solid .NET that is a rather high priced product. I will hopefully be able to post details after next week.
Tour Of Missouri And Organizing Statewide Media Coverage and Marketing
Wow, what a day! This may of been the strangest day in my professional career, I am not sure ever in my life I have worked on such a diverse range of items. That said I gotta say I loved every minute of it and have appreciated the chance to learn new things as we prepare the logistics around covering an international sporting event such as the Tour of Missouri
After a slight snafu by the organizers of the event we were able to get back on track with our plans and are very (VERY) happy with the exposure we have on the Tour website, for an example of what we worked out with the sporting event organizers check out : Stage One Tour Of Missouri Details . We were able to get that on 4 stages that we are in the Health and Wellness expo that follows the Tour. The site received 330 million pageviews last year and indications are the stage detail pages are some of the highest trafficked pages. Great exposure!
The day started with a customer sales meeting, then a partner training session, then the day was more diverse by the minute, I had a great call with one of the people that was most inspiring as my interest in Geo domains developed, David Castello. If you ever have the chance to talk to him take it. Great insight and a good person to boot. I want to thank him publicly for taking the time today to discuss monetizing geo domains and domain investing in general. After that though the Missouri.me team did everything from shop at Lowes to get materials for the booth to having THOUSANDS of pamphlets printed up at Office Max, then separating our water bottles into groups for each of the stages we are in the expo handing them out at.
After all that was done we worked until 8:3o tonight working with the organizers of the press side of the Tour to prepare for the Press conference on Sunday that includes State Government officials and international cycling professionals, for those not familiar with the sport, the type of teams we are covering in this race are the same teams that race the Tour De France, half the team that Lance Armstrong rode with this year in the Tour will be racing. This is my first ever time managing the reporting of an event and to add coordinating a marketing event alongside it the stress has been a bit crazy but ever minute has put a smile on the face. To have the chance to do this is a great thing for any new website and especially one that is focused on a statewide portal such as ours.
The challenge is now making sure we have coverage during the stages, at the booth, in the press conferences post stage finish, and people doing interviews with the cyclists. Oh yeah, the stages normally start and finish 100 miles from each other going over back roads that you never see any other time.... And then it is quickly off to the next hotel and do it all over again the next day.
For us though its a chance to promote Missouri.me and create unique content that will help promote our community sites in the towns that the race goes through. We look forward to posting frequently on our Tour reporting site (to be launched tomorrow, late but still on time to do what is needed, and promoting the unique content to the cycling community that we also know well). We luckily were able to recruit some extra help and were able to get the press passes needed to give to a freelance writer that we will be working with that happen to know the sport.
I must say if a year ago you told me I would be getting ready to sit in a press conference REPORTING on an international event and covering cyclists that I watch year after year in events I would of said you were crazy. What a difference an idea and a year can make!
Press Passes, Free Water Bottles, and Offline Marketing for Missouri.me
The Missouri.me team are just about ready to go for our offline marketing promotions at the Tour Of Missouri international cycling event. Although this post may not be specifically domaining related it should help those of you that are launching geo domain related sites think creatively when looking at ways to target offline marketing efforts.
If you are not a cycling fan or really your experience with road biking is Lance Armstrong its pretty likely you are not familiar with the Tour of Missouri, the race is the second largest stage race in the USA only behind the Tour of California. Last year it drew somewhere around 400,000 fans and onlookers and many went on to attend the Health and Wellness Expo held at the end of each stage which allows sponsors to promote their business with a booth and free giveaways, etc just like any other tradeshow.
Well, with Missouri.me being a statewide community focused site we had been trying to determining what the best event would be to do a statewide "feet on the street" effort for offline marketing. With my operations manager and myself both being cyclists it did not take us long to figure out how to take advantage of the Tour of Missouri event. This event draws teams from around the world, these are not your average everyday cyclists you are griping at as you drive down the road, these are the same riders that ride the Tour De France. This event draws viewers from all over the world.
First off for the marketing and awareness side, we have purchased a booth at the expo at the end of the stages in:
If you are going to be in state you should come visit!!!
We purchased these specifically to give us statewide coverage so all of our efforts did not just hit one piece of the state. Now for the fun part, we ordered hundreds of water bottles with our logo on them to handout to fans and attendees. This is a brand awareness campaign for us and knowing how athletes like runners and cyclists use water bottles we know these will be in their bottle cages for a year to come, we like our free reusable water bottles. We also have some other handouts planned as well and will also be in the booth to discuss various cycling rides throughout the state in the communities we are in.
What is even better is that our logo will be on the Tour of Missouri website which had 330,000,000 pageviews last year based on the exposure the event gets. Thats right, you read it right. Plus our logo will be in the Tour guide which is distributed for the week prior to the event and also it will show up in a few other media kits that will be handed out. All in all, considering what we put together to do this its quite a value.
Now for the next fun part, based on the fact we are an online media company we also have obtained press/media passes to cover the event like any other media or news company would. We are in the process, it's not quite ready yet, of launching Tour.Missouri.Me where we will be posting videos from the stage route, providing interviews, and posting general stats, etc as we report on the event. For us this also allows us to promote our community sites with links from the cycling posts to our community sites. Once again, tying it all together is key. Having people actually in the press tents and press conferences will allow us to network with other media companies and grow awareness as well.
There is plenty more going on but as you can imagine there is still much work to do to pull it all together, exciting times and the work is well worth it to be able to go state wide with one event.
If you happen to be in Missouri during the race feel free to contact me and we could meet up during one of the stages at our booth or somewhere along the way. Now I am heading out for a ride, albeit at a much slower pace than these pros will be doing.