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1 Part Developer, 1 Part Marketer, 1 Part Domainer-Shaken and Stirred

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

I rarely talk about the domaining part of my business, but it actually is a fairly large portion of what I do and what any busy online marketer or developer does, so I figured today was a good time to discuss it and see if I could offer anything of value for you from my experiences.

I have to preface this by saying I don’t buy domains purely as investments that I intend to resell later at a higher price.

I know that’s a business model for some who like to speculate on domains like they were stocks. That’s not my thing though, I’m a tinkerer and a builder, I like to create, even in the virtual space, so when I buy domains it’s because I believe they will have value to me on a project, not because I think someone else might want them later on down the road.

I rarely sell domains, in fact I don’t think I’ve sold a single one in the last 2 years. In-fact, I recently just listed a couple I’ve had unused for sale over at NamePros and after 2 days I realize that I have no clue what the domaining market really looks like these days.

These are “CityName”Pizza.com geo-service domains that I purchased last year for a marketing campaign I was launching to promote the CPA offer of a national pizza chain. Unfortunately, the pizza chain shut down their CPA offer really quickly and without warning, so I was stuck with these extra domains that hadn’t been used yet.

They’re great domains if you own a pizza shop in any of the cities. Imagine if you own a small pizza shop in a medium size city like Erie, PA, and you could have EriePizza.com as your domain…list yourself with Google local and you could literally own the online market there. So for domainers who know the ins-and-outs of selling domains like these to end users (like pizza shop owners in the named cities), these should hold some value.

Or if you’re a web developer, you could easily place some content about the cities and pizza on the domain and then monetize the traffic with advertising. Even just using AdSense I figure the domains would pull in a few dollars per month each, and since I’m offering the domains for just about registration fees I thought for sure they would be gobbled up quick. (If they don’t sell, this is likely what I’ll do with them at some point down the road, just because I don’t have the time to chase end user sales)

Yet, 2 days after listing them I haven’t had a single offer or even comment. I’m not sure if domainers are becoming too lazy to take domains like these and go after the end user sales or what. I did look through the listings that were generating offers and sales on the boards at NamePros and what strikes me is that a lot of names which have no true apparent value at all, other than a pointless Google pagerank of 1 or more, seem to get the most traction.

I understand that mentality on forums that are more about webmasters and developers, they often buy pagerank domains just to sell links from and make a quick profit until Google strips the ranking off of the domains for link selling, but I didn’t expect to see so much attention given to pagerank on a domaining forum. It just shows how little attention I pay to the domaining market even though I do a lot of domain buying.

My Domain Portfolio

I’m not sure of the actual number of domains I own right now off-hand, but it’s a lot. By a lot I mean I purchase anywhere from 1 to 4 dozen (and sometimes more) domains almost monthly, and I’ve been doing that for years.

Some I buy for new projects, but most I buy for marketing value with existing projects. And in these instances, it’s usually dropped domains (domains that somebody owned and then let expire without renewing the registration) that I buy, because they sometimes have an extra little value of some established backlinks or traffic associated with them.

A Purchasing Example

Here’s an example of how and why I do this. Let’s say that I have an ecommerce site where I’m selling Baby Strollers (I don’t have such a site, this is a hypothetical example). That’s bad for marketers because we want to get our pages ranked as high as possible. After all, better rankings means more traffic, and typically more revenue.

A lot of marketers (myself included at times) will simply put more efforts into link building, PPC and other whitehat methods to try and improve our product page listings in the search engines. And some will go over the line into the realm of blackhat link building, though I strongly urge everyone to avoid doing that.

So, here’s what I’m facing in my hypothetical situation: It’s hard to get my product sales pages to rank well against established retailers like Amazon and Wal-Mart, but I need more traffic if I want to earn a fair living from my site…

And that’s where dropped domains come in for me. Since my site is about Baby Strollers, I’ll watch the dropped domains listings for anything baby stroller related and that doesn’t violate any trademarks. Sure, it would be great if Baby.com opened up (but don’t hold your breath for such a find), but I’ll take any long-tail domain that comes along if the keyword phrase gets any sort of monthly search traffic and the term has little competition.

Playing Detective

So let’s say I see the domain FastFoldingStroller.com is available. I’ll go on over to Google and check the monthly search volume for “fast folding stroller”, “fast folding strollers”, “folding stroller” and “folding strollers”

If 1 or more of the terms is getting 200 searches per month or more I’m half way to deciding to purchase the domain.

Next, I’ll check Google for the amount of competition for those same terms, as well as check out the top listed sites for each to judge the strength of that competition.

There’s software out there that’s supposed to be able to do all of this for you, but I’m Old-School and like doing the investigative legwork manually. I told you I was a tinkerer.

After looking over the competition, if I believe that I can rank well for the term without too much investment, then I’ve got a winner and head straight to the nearest registrar to grab up the domain.

Then, depending on what I believe the “user intent” of people going to that domain would be, I’ll either put up an informational landing page on it with links directing any possible buying traffic to my ecommerce pages. Or, if it’s a phrase where I feel the user intent is already to make a purchase, as it would likely be with a domain like FastFoldingStroller.com – then I may simply point that domain to one of my ecommerce pages that offers fast folding strollers.

The Gamble And The Payoff

I look at the $10 registration fee this way, and this is especially true with high commercial intent phrases: if the term gets just 300 searches per month and I can put it in the top 3 spots on the search engines with minimal effort for the longtail, then it’s fair to assume I can pull an extra 2 to 3 dozen possible buyers to my ecommerce page each month.

Being uber-conservative, lets say I only grab 10 potential buyers per month though. If I were using PPC marketing, and paying $0.10 per click to get qualified buyers (which usually cost more than $0.10 each if they’re really qualified), then that same 10 visitors would cost me $1 per month, or $12 per year.

So, in reality I just saved $2 per year from my marketing budget by buying this domain.

And like all marketing, the best laid plans don’t always work out. Sometimes something will go wrong in the research of a term, or the traffic won’t have the intent that I believed it would, and so I’ll own a domain that doesn’t lead to any traffic or conversions. It happens, but not often because I’m pretty thorough in my investigative work.

But Is That Whitehat? Is it Cybersquatting?

The truth is everyone seems to have their own definitions for these terms, and some “purists” will even say that just owning more than 1 domain is breaking some unwritten rule or code,  so I can’t answer that in a way that won’t make someone cry foul. But, in my opinion my method is completely “above board” because it connects searchers with what they’re looking for. I’m not taking advantage of incorrect spellings or piggy-backing (leeching) off of brand names, I look for longtail keyword terms that match what I’m offering, so that I can give searchers exactly what they’re looking for.

Like in my example above, someone searching for “fast folding stroller” hasn’t identified a specific brand or even retailer in their search, they simply want to find a fast folding stroller, so if I can connect them with my sales page offering that product it’s a win-win for both of us.

In Conclusion

Anyway, that’s the why and how behind my huge collection of domains that most true domainers would consider low-value. And they’d be right from their perspective where the value is often in the “parked domain” revenue potential.

But if you’ve got some good product(s) to sell, and earn a decent commission from each sale, then using additional domains to attract qualified leads can be a highly lucrative way to spend your marketing dollars.


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A Few Banner Marketing Tips

Saturday, August 15th, 2009

Yesterday I posted what could be considered a mini-rant from the perspective of online publishing and advertising based revenue models.

Today, I thought I’d take a brief look at the other side of it to show how Internet marketers can find great deals for advertising their products or sites.

To preface this, there are some who claim banner ads are dead, that’s far from true. The problem most people have with banner advertising is A) they fail to be creative in the banners they make (both in design and sizes, stay away from 468×60 banners), and B) they target the wrong places based on traffic rather than market and visitor intent.

I also have to be fair here, the idea for today’s post came to me after reading a posting on the subject of online marketing from my friend Roberta over at BuildThe.com

Roberta and I have worked together on several projects over the years, in fact BuildThe.com is one of those collaborations; but that shouldn’t take anything away from the discussion.

Roberta went into this in far greater detail than I will (so I urge you to read her posting), but I did want to sum up a couple of the “take aways” here because they’re great tips and methods I’ve used myself over the years to find low-cost advertising opportunities where I could reach my target markets.

First, the blogosphere

Whenever I’m starting up a new marketing campaign, one of my first stops for finding advertising opportunities is Google’s blog search.

I just search for posts/blogs that are related to my campaign topic, and when I find one that looks like it probably attracts the demographics that I’m intending to target, I send off a quick email to the blogger and ask about advertising with them.

As Roberta pointed out in her posting, it’s usually better in these instances not to ask about PPC or CPM advertising, because the average blogger isn’t often involved with online advertising enough to feel comfortable with those terms.

It’s much better to simply ask if you can run your banner(s) on their blog, either site wide or maybe just on a single posting if that’s what you think is best for you, for a flat monthly rate.

I’ve found bloggers in the past who had old postings that were related to my topic, sitting at the top of the SERPs, who were willing to let me run a banner on the post for as little as $5 for a whole month.

Think about that, a posting with ranking that you know is getting constant search traffic, with your banner for a whole month for just a couple dollars.

Typically I try to get low-cost site wide deals from bloggers, and I’ve even gotten some of these for like $15 or $20 per month, but if I find a single post that ranks well I’ll sometimes just go after that 1 posting.

Next, article directories

There are tons of article directories out there, and I’m a big fan of publishing articles with them for traffic and backlinks, but there are also some that sell category based banner advertising, and if you don’t have time to write articles this is a great way to get targeted traffic.

To give an example of how beneficial this can be, I used to promote a particular web hosting offer that paid out $120 per signup. Those weren’t free signups, if you’ve ever promoted hosting offers then you know the customer has to signup for a year of hosting and you typically don’t get your commission until after they pass their 4 or 6 week money-back guarantee point with the account.

So, while hosting affiliate programs pay great money, they’re slow to pay off and can be hard to push when you have to sell the full year packages.

Anyway, there was one paying $120 per signup, which is a little more than the average with hosting, so I was pushing them pretty hard.

I found a lot of blogs to buy advertising on, but by far my best deal was a niche article site dedicated to ‘working from home’.

They ran their ads on a rotation basis, so I paid $35 per month to be 1 of the 8 banners in the rotation, and I averaged 3 signups per month from that single ad spot for the duration that I was promoting that offer.

That’s $360 in for every $35 I spent there. I wanted to buy more of the 8 positions, but they were all full so I could only run at the 1 of 8 in the rotations.

The bottom line is, small and niche article directories are great places to put up advertising and it’s easy to find low-cost rates when you look around.

Roberta mentions a few directories in her piece, but if there’s any interest in this I’ll be happy to list some of the ones I’ve worked with in the past. Some of them are very niche specific, but some are also general too, so there would be something in there for everyone. Just comment and let me know if you want more. I could also post some examples of the emails that I use when approaching bloggers about advertising with them.


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Lessons from Grandpa

Friday, February 27th, 2009

Even though he died when I was just 17, my Grandpa Irwin filled my head with plenty of what I call his Grandpa-isms that serve me well to this day.

For example, one of his favorites was “always watch where you’re looking“.

Now, just like my Grandpa himself, those 5 words are simple and profound in the same breath.

They mean you should always be focused on where you are going, but they also mean you need to be cautious of where you plan to go and careful not to try going where you don’t belong.

For example, they are great advice for someone who isn’t focused enough on their business–but equally great advice for a guy checking out another man’s wife.

5 little words that are sound advice which can be applied in a wide variety of situations. Simple and profound.

Another of Grandpa’s favorites, and this one has helped me more than anything else with my Internet marketing over the years, was “always mean what you say, and only say what you mean“.

In other words, speak the truth and refrain from the B.S. of hype and sensationalism.

I apply this rule in my sales copy and advertising all the time, and I believe it to be the main reason I’ve enjoyed success with online marketing.

First, it protects me from myself at times. More than once I’ve wanted to promote a product only because the commissions for it were high. It’s human nature, and regardless of how well intentioned we are, we all want to make more money.

But when I apply this rule to my promotional copy it forces the product to show its full value to me because once you strip away the hype what you’re left with is the true value of the product.

If it can’t stand on its own at this point, or doesn’t agree with the price tag you’re asking customers to pay, then it is not something you should be promoting.

The rule also helps me to deliver an honest marketing message every time. Without any hype or fluff what you have left to tell customers are the bottom line benefits they should expect from the product.

This leads to more satisfied customers, and more important, to less unsatisfied customers.

I’ve spoken before about under promising and over delivering in sales copy, and that’s what this rule helps to achieve.

Here’s how I break it down when writing sales copy or other advertising content for a product:

Always mean what you say

Only speak truth on the benefits of the product. Leave out unnecessary hype and superfluous fluff. I also call this the Dragnet rule, “Just the facts, Mam”.

If you can’t prove a claim, don’t include the claim in your promotional material. Always mean what you say.

And only say what you mean

Pick your words carefully. Think of your local news broadcast, how many times have you heard the anchor say something like “Passangers were startled when the plane accidentally rolled off the runway during the landing”?

Think about that statement, it implies that there are times when pilots will intentionally steer the plane off of the runway during a landing.

Sure, most of us understand that’s not what the broadcaster meant to imply, and we won’t give it much thought because we’ve become accustomed to such careless grammar… but words have meaning, and when you’re asking people to trust you and give you their money the least you can do is respect them enough to ask politely and correctly.

Another prime example which I’ve mentioned on this blog before is from when I worked for the U.S. Postal Service many years ago. A co-worker was fund raising in the office and handed me a brochure with this headline:

Support Breast Cancer

I nearly fell over. Several friends and family memebrs of mine have suffered through breast cancer, so I often support breast cancer research, awareness and survivors–but I will not support breast cancer itself.

Obviously the title was just poorly written and the funds were actually for research and awareness efforts, and since it was a charitable cause rather than a commercial sales pitch it probably had little negative impact (I hope), but I’m sure the title could have had a more positive impact on their fund raising efforts if it had simply said “Fight Breast Cancer” instead.

That would still be 3 words and would have fit on the brochure layout, but it would also have created an instant “call to action” with every person they handed the brochures to, instead of creating subconscious confusion with the phrase: Support Breast Cancer

So always think about what exactly you are trying to say in your sales copy, pick your words carefully and only say what you mean.


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Do You Understand Your Market?

Sunday, November 30th, 2008

I usually try not to post (or work) on Sundays because that’s my day for family and friends, but I have a few minutes to myself this morning and had an experience with a reader of the blog this week that I thought would make a great share for everyone involved in Internet Marketing.

James contacted me last week asking that I take a look at his web site and some of the various entry points to it that he had created (articles, a Squidoo Lens and etc.) because he wasn’t converting any sales, yet had high organic traffic coming in for his keywords.

Normally I decline requests like this simply because if I started reviewing the methods and copy of everyone who asked I’d never have time to do my own work, let alone write on the blog here.

But, the letter from James was compelling and I had a few minutes to spare when it arrived, so I had a look.

On first glance everything looked good. He has a solid “buying” related keyword that gets lots of daily search traffic and has a low competition level. His main site is in the top 10 SERPs and 3 of his entry points are also on the first page of results-meaning he has 4 of the top 10 results for his keyword right now and he’s getting the expected traffic from that.

Also, it appears that his copy and articles are well written. They pin-point a problem you would expect people in his niche to be having and guide readers to the solution–his sales links.

Nothing seemed out of place or wrong to me, except the fact that he hadn’t converted any sales in 2 weeks.

Then I realized something crucial, all of his copy on his main site as well as all of his entry point sites and articles were focused on the same problem. Which made me wonder, are people actually looking for help with that specific problem?

I asked James why he picked that problem to focus on since there are a number of related problems people in his niche might be facing and he said it was what he thought he would want help with if he were searching for the keyword term he picked.

That sounds good on the surface, but if you aren’t actually dealing with an issue that you’re marketing to then you can’t really walk in the same shoes that your target market are wearing, so there’s a chance that you’re viewing it from the wrong perspective.

So, I went out to a couple of forums related to the niche James is working and browsed around for a few minutes to see what kind of questions people were asking. Then I checked out Yahoo! Answers to see what was getting asked there.

What I found was that nobody was asking questions on the specific problem James had focused on with his content. There are several reasons why that might be, but they don’t matter. What matters is that James is targeting the right keyword, a good hungry market, but addressing the wrong needs with his copy.

I gave him some pointers on other problems he might want to focus on with his content, based on what I saw people were seeking help with in the forums and on Yahoo!

All of this took place between James and I on Thursday and Friday, and today (Sunday) I had an email from James telling me he had spent all day Saturday editing his main site copy and within a few hours had a sale.

I expect he will have many more sales to come now, especially if he revisits the content on his entry point sites and articles too.

The moral of this is simple, finding good keywords and a hungry market are just the first steps. The equally important next steps are to understand your market and target their specific needs.

The good news is that’s not hard to do at all. Between Q&A sites like Yahoo! Answers and niche related forums you can usually find exactly what people are the most desperate for help with in very little time. Use that knowledge to determine what product you promote and as a focus point for your content creation and you’ll get much better results from your efforts.


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Don’t Give Up Now

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

At the request of a friend I met today with a small group of young, aspiring webpreneurs. These are exactly the kind of people I hope to be connecting with here on the Leap blog, so I was excited about getting a more personal interaction and some instant feedback.

The meeting was very productive, the people were great and I learned a little about how the things I was talking about (the same things I write about here) were being received. Not all of it as I expected or intended, so that will help me do better here going forward.

Here are 2 things I took from it that I wanted to share right away here.

Where’s The Beef?

The big question all of them had for me was did I think now was a bad time to start a web business of any kind?

That’s a fair question and I had anticipated it might come up. Attempting a very poor Senator Ted Stevens impression, I coldly yelled “NO!” to the room. They laughed, but I’m not sure they really knew why.

Here is my reasoning as I explained it to them. Right now lots of small operations are going down. Heck, lots of big companies are dropping to. It’s a terrible time to be an established business with operational costs that were budgeted long before this current down turn hit.

It’s a fact of business that the bigger and more established you become, the more intricate and detailed everything gets, the more you have to operate on a projected budget and the harder it becomes to react to real time conditions.

So when things get tight they have to trim costs in areas other than where they really want to. So people lose jobs, service and support levels decrease, the company image takes hits… it just snowballs. And ultimately, some go completely under.

And while all of that is sad, remember that we’re talking about real people losing their jobs, but the flip side to that is these companies which go under leave a void in their marketplaces, and for the nimble startup who isn’t working on projections from numbers of last year yet that’s an opportunity to launch from.

This applies to companies and startups of all sizes, even the lone-ranger home based startup.

Right now, I assure you, there are a lot of people who have been struggling to make a go at Internet Marketing–maybe you’re one of them–and they are debating with themselves over giving up or plowing forward.

Some will quit. It’s sad to see someone give up their dreams but completely understandable. There are bills to pay, hungry mouths to feed. A steady paycheck from anywhere becomes very attractive when everything seems to be going against you.

But some will stay with it. Those who do will find new elbow room in their niches as others leave. Suddenly they go from being Guppies to Sharks in the same tank.

My point is that if you can afford to do it, then I believe this is a opportunistic time to start up.

It isn’t an easy time. Just because someone else left a void in the marketplace doesn’t mean customers who weren’t spending money with them will buy your products, they may still not spend money for a while and you’ll have to be ready for that.

But, with less crowded waters it is an opportunity for the noobie to really learn how to swim them. To become intimate with your market and get to know your customer’s needs and expectations, so you’ll be fully prepared for the inevitable economic upswing when it comes and they start spending again.

AdSense is great for site publishers! Except for most of the time when it’s the wrong choice…

I talked with the group today a little bit about adsense. And after a few minutes I realized that I was giving them the wrong impression (in my opinion) that adsense is always a reliable and safe revenue stream.

In-fact, I think it is when used on the right kind of web site. But I also think it’s a waste and counter-productive for a majority of web sites.

Here’s what I really think about it in-case I’ve given the wrong impression here on the blog in the past.

If you run a web site where visitors might be looking for a service oriented solution to some problem, then adsense is a fantastic way to monetize your pages.

Put yourself into the mind of the common visitor to your site. What problems are they going to be facing and seeking solutions for? Are the solutions to those problems typically process or product based?

If the answer is process based then you have a good site for running adsense on. Especially if the process is usually performed by some type of professional.

However, if the solution is typically product based, meaning any sort of tool or even a learning aid that would help your visitor eventually perform the process for themselves with no professional help required, then you would be foolish to put adsense on your pages and earn pennies for clicks where you could have earned dollars by putting an affiliate ad for the product in that same place.

I know adsense is easy to setup and start seeing fast money with, but it’s small potatoes compared to what you could earn with the same page real estate through an affiliate product.

So, when appropriate I love adsense, but most of the time I just don’t think it’s appropriate.


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