Why Do You Buy Domain Names?
Why do you buy Domain Names? That is a question I have asked myself before. Now to be clear, I buy them for one reason, to make money online. There are very few domains I buy without a purpose, it should either have keyword potential for minisites or immediate resell potential which is why I probably have always been so adamant against brandables with no immediate keyword value or generic potential.
After I read the post on Domain Name Wire yesterday concerning making For Sale a larger option on parked pages it made me think a bit about why people domain and the various models they use to make money (or attempt too). I think in many cases domainers are a mix of the various models below. Which model do you fit?
High End Speculator - This domainer model buys a name based on pure speculation of moving the domain at a higher price, normally at a significantly high ROI. This person does not focus on hand registration of domain names but rather on picking up premium names and moving them. This is the pure Domainer model as I see it. This model needs bigger For Sale signs:)
Hand Registration Flipper - This model works well for getting started, picking up domains on the cheap and flipping them for 2, 5, or 10 times the registration cost within a few hours, days or weeks. This is a great way for people to get started and move upmarket on domains. Normally these are sold on the forums.
Minisite Domain Flipper - Domainers doing this buy domains, put minisites on them, and then flip the domain based on revenue/traffic multiples. This works well for people looking to buy revenue names and do not want to necassarily develop them.
Passive Income Domainer - This domainer type buys domains not to sell but to create an income stream from the parking (or affiliate) income generated. This domainer really does not care about for sale signs and is more concerned about creating a stream of income that requires little upkeep or effort per day. If they happen to get an offer great, but their point is streams of income.
Site Developer - These domainers buy quality domains to develop into fully blown out websites, each domain purchase is for a specific purpose and has a specific business model associated to it. Some would say that this person is not a domainer although more and more you see people talking on the forums about this site being sold or that sold being sold, but if you look deeper it was not a domain it was as developed site. A crappy name that gets developed into a successful site and gets sold at a high price is not a DOMAIN being sold it is a BUSINESS being sold.
Domain Collector - This person just likes to pick up domains to acquire items and have them, in many cases they may not realize this (sorry if you realize this is you after reading). They really do not focus so much on the revenue or domain selling aspects as much as acquiring large quantities of domains.
Expired Traffic Domain Flipper - This person buys expired domains that have traffic from sources such as backlinks, may have Google Pagerank, and normally has revenue associated to it. They make money moving these names based on revenue multiples and do flips after a few months. They can use this money to reinvest in more revenue names or invest in quality generics.
What model are you?
I am sure there are many other models that could be defined. As much as I think bigger for sale signs are great for many domainers in some cases the focus may not be on getting the name in front of the buyer but may be on finding ways to increase CTR or PPC values.
I just put up a new poll, vote for what type of domainer you are.
On a separate note, I have a buyer looking for Blog name, should be something focused on training bloggers , blog webinars, how to make money with blogs, something that matches those topics. Needs to be a .COM and price range is in the $100 range. Please use my contact me form if you have something.
Minisite Development Domain Selection Tips
I have had several (dozens...) of emails in the past week asking various questions about developing minisites, using wordpress for minisites, revenue on my minisites, and how-to create minisites.
As most people will tell you, I do respond to each and every email rather quickly most of the time, if I miss one its because Outlook may of been a little aggressive filtering it to junk mail.
That said, I thought I would do a few posts this week about various minisite development topics and how I choose between doing the Minisite development myself or if I outsource and also what names I choose and why.
First things first, when do I choose to build compared to outsourcing to someone else? This comes down to a couple factors, the largest one being time to be quite honest. I have a very demanding sales job that I do along with my Domaining. People ask why do both? Well I actually like the field I am in and the job I do so I use outsourcing based on using my time more effectively (if you really want to get an idea of how to work effectively read 4 Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferris). I would expect the majority of domainers work a full-time position while domaining part time, outsourcing is the key if you plan to develop any of your domains if that is the case.
The second big one is the type of site I want built, I have zero graphic skills or graphic creativity, I admit that freely, if I want a simple minisite with simple text content that can be SEO'ed I have that process down to minutes for the site creation. I create those on my own, if it is a site I think could use more of a designers touch and a nice logo then I outsource.
That said, one thing I have learned from experience is make sure the minsite focuses on keywords that have a decent PPC.
I will give a really good example of this, I like to use certain domains for testing various SEO work and Google Adsense optimization. A few months back I purchased KingCobras.org. I recognized ahead of time that the site would not have high PPC values but it was a name that receives quite a few searches per month (approximately 22,000 for exact match) and would be perfect for what I was testing (SEO on images). The site is not pretty by any means but I was able within a month to go from a couple visitors a day to 200 to 300 a day (pageviews are higher obviously), it has leveled now in the 100 range due to lack of attention but can easily be rasied back up to that level. I was able to get a reasonable CTR but the earning per click was a measley 3 to 6 cents. Once again, expected, but it just goes to show to anyone just picking terms to grab traffic if you are looking for dollars and not cents per day pick your content and terms. Thats the point right, to make money:)
Now as far as that site goes, it gets good traffic, I now have a base to build revenue from, there are revenue models that I know will actually make some money off that site and they will be implemented in the near future and I will report on this.
Now, lets go the opposite direction, a site that gets much smaller search volume but pay per click is much higher. WomensBikeShorts.com. Exact match searches are around 2,900 a month which is much lower than the KingCobras.org site so traffic is lower, BUT revenue is much better on a per day average. Why is that? Well its because it is a product people are looking to buy, when people search for a term like Womens Bike Shorts they are looking to buy a product, when they search for King Cobras they are researching. Big difference between what people will pay per click between those 2 intentions.
So, to circle back around to selecting outsourcing or for that matter minisite topics. Its about revenue, if you are looking for high pay per click terms look for services or products, develop your site to match the terms that bring the biggest payback. I would rather a site that gets 20 unique visitors a day getting 20 to 30 percent CTR with 30 cent clicks than a site getting 200 visitors a day with 10 percent CTR getting 3 cent clicks.
All those factors need to go into your decision process when choosing a name for development, deciding if the outsource cost is worth it, or if you want to do it yourself.
I will be posting later this week with an exact how to of how to launch simple Wordpress Minisites that have been proven to have solid CTR for those times when you cannot justify or just do not want to outsource your domain development.
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.