Building A Website Is Not Building A Business

One of the frequent conversations I had at the domain conferences was about developing websites. Due to the Missouri.me launch and some of my other projects many people had questions about how to develop the sites, tools used, where we get content, etc. I am always happy to share as much as I can but there was something that I would preach to anyone who would listen and it seems to escape many.

There is a huge difference between building a website and building a business. In most cases people can have many great ideas about what they would like to do with their great domain name, they may even have all the technical abilities to create an amazing e-commerce site or content rich geo site but in so many cases there is no plan for what to do once the site is up.

If you put 50K into a wonderful website, do all the hard SEO work, if you do not have a plan on how to generate revenue after the site is up it is really just a website, not much different than a parked page, I can imagine if you spend 50K or even 10K on developing the perfect website you would want to have a plan for something more than Adsense for revenue.

So, when talking about domain development you need to think about taking it past the web development phase and how to get it into the business development phase.

To understand what I mean take a look at what the Castello Brothers have done, they understand business. With sites like Whisky.com and PalmSprings.com they have created businesses. I have really enjoyed my conversations with Michael and David and love the fact that they focus so much on the business rather than just the website. That is the difference between successful domain development compared to someone just building a website.

Now, everyone has different skills, I know many people much smarter than myself that can create amazing web sites but they lack the skills necessary on the sales and marketing side. This is where partnerships come in. If you have a great idea and have all the skills to implement the product and technical side then you may want to look for partners for the sales side. I know I could not of come close to creating everything my development team did on our state geo platform.

So, what is the point of this post?

Well I have heard so much talk of domain development, as we all have heard over the past year or so, I want to see people be successful. In most cases people will not be able to do it on their own, if you plan on building your domains into real businesses and not just websites you need to evaluate what you are good at and determine what pieces to build a business are missing from your skill set. Find people that you can team up with to fill those gaps. You may find that 1+1=3 when you do this.

New Logo for BruceMarler.com And Thanks to Others

I have been connectivity challenged the past day or so and have not got to post a few things I really wanted to so am saving them for later this week, but wanted to send a few shout outs to people that have thrown out some good info this past week.

Wanted to give a quick thanks to Theo at Acroplex for the new blog logo. He is also working on a twitter background and favicon for me.

Not that anyone probably wants to see me staring at them when opening up the site:) But since this site is my thoughts and rants I thought it made sense to use my likeness.

Also, Bill E. from Nameclerk.com and AvailableDomainNames.com gets a thank you for confirming that monetization options I had been contemplating for a few sites actually should work as planned and pointed out a good tool to implement them. Once tested I will be posting the details on addtional ways to monetize product related domain names.

Chef Patrick has also been helpful during the launch and as such deserves thanks as well!

I have a great interview you will not want to miss that will be out tomorrow AM. Look forward to sharing, the domainer interviewed is someone that has been pretty quiet in the domaining world but has started to make a bit of a splash with the launch of a recent site. More to come tomorrow.