What's my problem?

This month, Utter Domain officially turns one year old. Hundreds of hours spent writing posts, creating back links, promoting my site via Twitter and in general building the Utter Domain brand, but over the past year, with over 70 posts at fairly regular intervals, this site really has gained no traction.

Except for the traffic spikes associated with my feed readers (I love you guys!) and Domaining.com whenever I post a new entry, this site gets practically 0 traffic (not exactly 0, but close enough to 0 to not be significant). While this site has been quite interesting to work on, in terms of readership, it's not succeeded to my expectations. So, I need your help to figure out what I'm doing wrong!

Let's look at some of the issues:

1. Blogger. Okay, I get it. Blogger sucks. I've had numerous people comment that commenting is frustrating, the fact it's hosted by blogger isn't good for SEO, the template is horrible. It's essentially a done deal that this site is moving off blogger, so let's just not even bother with that.

2. Page Rank 1. WTF!? I'm sure this is partially related to blogger, templates and traffic patterns (all you domaining.com readers bounce like nobody's business), but I've got a nice post history, plenty of back links (over 120 according to Yahoo's site explorer). I really fail to see how this site is only Page Rank 1.

3. Lack of recognition. I have no problem accepting that I'm nobody (one of my favorite poems!). But brand recognition is important. Maybe my domain name is too generic. Maybe my content sucks. Maybe what I have to say doesn't match with the accepted standards (I invest in other extensions besides .com - gasp!). Maybe I don't do enough shameless self promotion about my successes. Whatever the reason, Utter Domain is not a recognized brand. Don't believe me? Check to see how many times you see my name or my blog appear on a Blog Roll.

4. Search engine rankings are pathetic. Sure, Blogger's SEO is pretty awful, page rank is a huge factor, too, but I've worked on creating relevant page titles, keyword intensive posts, deep linking, internal link building. I've used a lot of tricks, and the site only seems to get search traffic from the longest of long tail terms.

5. Lack of growth. It didn't bother me when I was posting 3 times a week and still struggling to reach a thousand visitors a month, but the fact that the situation hasn't changed in a year... well, that tells me something is fundamentally busted... I just don't know what it is.

6. Post frequency. While the frequency has tapered off some from it's high, I've chosen to post unique content at a regular, but not an extremely frequent, interval. I've averaged at least post a week, but in many cases that post count seems to be antithetical to traffic volume (ie. the more I post, the less traffic I get).

So tell me. Brutal honesty. What I have I screwed up? Is the brand salvageable? Is the content useless? Maybe it would be easier to just list the things I've done right!? :) Let me have it!

Upselling with Domain Names

One thing I really want to do this year is bundle my domain names with additional products, services, hosting and more so that someone with no skills at webdesign or marketing can get up to speed really quickly on their new domain name. This adds value to the domain but it also means that I'm building a deeper connection to my customers. I've been looking around at products and services that I could bundle and figured I'd share some of my ideas.

Domain and Webhosting Reseller Programs

I'm planning to create a storefront that includes allowing my customers to register domains and sign up for hosting. I'm not going to create this from scratch myself, of course. I'll simply purchase a reseller plan like the one from GoDaddy or possibly use Directi's ResellerClub to manage the storefront, hosting and Credit Card processing for me.

Information Products

I'm not sure if you know what "Gravity" is when it refers to ClickBank, but it basically indicates how strong a seller a particular product is. The highest gravity product at ClickBank right now is right up domain alley - Niche Blueprint 2.0. It takes a lot of the guess work and grunt work out of building out an e-commerce site. Something I know from experience can be a time consuming and frustrating process.

Consulting

While this isn't the kind of service that every customer I sell a domain name to will require, there are many end users that I'll be contacting that already have a domain but they aren't making as much use of it as they should. This is really the core of my background and something I'm very good at. I'll be able to provide consulting services on a wide range of topics including SEO, website design, social networking and marketing (via Adwords, link building, etc.)

So have you upsold your domain customers with additional products and services? What seems to work best for you?

Development Plans for WirelessRouters Site

As the sale of WirelessRouters.us wasn't successful, I've moved on to development. I've had my hands full with several projects, but the ideas and plans I've put together for this new e-commerce site has really gotten my development juices flowing, so I figured I'd share a bit about my development plans here.

Scope of Work

First of all, in order to run an e-commerce site, you've got to have, well, a site... with e-commerce built in. Now, that may sound really obvious, but it it's not a simple problem to solve for minisites. While there are minisite solutions from using SmartNames.com's "e-commerce" templates, to using DevHub to quickly build up affiliate and PPC links to products in your niche, these are not really e-commerce solutions. Building an Amazon A-store is about as close as one can get to a free store front, but even Amazon A-stores have limitations.

But there are tons of e-commerce solutions out there, they just are not practical for minisites. Often they cost $30 or more a month to operate. Yahoo's Store, Shopify, etc. all have monthly costs associated with them, and when you consider running even a handful of stores, this cost structure just doesn't scale.

There are open source alternatives such as the shopping cart built in to Drupal. While I really like Drupal (or WordPress, or other CMS), there is a large overhead associated with running a full CMS site, and when dealing with minisites, there's usually little that is gained from that complexity. Also, in regards to scaling up the solution, there are caveats and issues with operating multiple sites that can cause quite a bit administraton for upgrades, security issues, etc.

In short, I think the only solution I'm going to be happy with is one of my own making. My work load has now significantly increased, but by freeing myself to design the system for exactly my own purposes, I'll have a much more narrowly focused, but easier to maintain system. I've sacrificed startup speed in order to minimize maintenance costs and I'll hopefully realize future productivity gains when I reuse the system for future minisites. In the end I think it's the right choice. I'm calling my handy little content management system MiniSiteMS.

Selling Widgets vs Selling Information

But what about the content of the site? While the MiniSiteMS system will have product pages and affiliate links, my revenue model for most of my sites is not going to rely solely on selling hardware. Part of the reason for that is hardware has such slim margins. For example I found a wholesaler who would Blind Dropship Wireless Routers, but while I could mark up the price as much as needed, I was really only getting about 3-5% off the cost. By the time you take out my expenses of operating the site, handling customer service and not to mention credit card transaction fees, there's no profit motive there. While my sales (and the percentage made for each sale) through a channel like Ebay or Amazon may not be nearly as high, they scale well for minisite development. And while owning an exact match domain helps with SEO work, driving traffic to the site through Adwords or similar marketing efforts would eat up any money I would make through my affiliate sales. So... what to do??

Sell information, that's what. While article marketing and keyword optimized content, link backs and various SEO techniques can drive relatively cheap traffic to the site, it's really a rat's race that you'll never win. What I'm looking for is a product that I can create once and sell a thousand times. While AdSense clicks make a few pennies, I want to have a product that I can promote for a few pennies via AdWords, and when it sells, I walk away with 90+ percent of the sale price in profit. I want to have a product that others can sell via affiliate links. And so if you haven't guessed yet, one of the main products that will be at WirelessRouters.us will be information products. I already have ideas for at least 3 ebooks and the topic is broad enough to scale to even more.

In terms of scaling up information products across dozens or even hundreds of minisites, there are hundreds and thousands of information products already ready already via affiliate offers at places like ClickBank. Alternatively, you can outsource the creation of the ebook by hiring a ghost writer using sources like Elance.

With a goal of $1250 in profit in 3 months (now about 10 weeks for me), and with that schedule compressed even further with the upfront development time of building my own MiniSiteMS, I'll likely have to resort to paid advertising for the site, but that'll be a subject of another post!

The Race to $1250 - WirelessRouters.us

Tomorrow I'll be starting a race between domain flipping and domain development to see which one will net me $1250 first. The domain in question: WirelessRouters.us.

Granted, the race is a little skewed towards flipping as the name is up for auction at Bido tomorrow with a Bido Price of $1250. Now, obviously a developed site will be much easier to flip, so if it doesn't sell tomorrow, then the race will be to see if my development, marketing and SEO skills, along with owning a great keyword domain, will result in not just a profitable minisite, but a full blown ecommerce site with a goal of earning $1250 in just it's first 90 days.

So let's set some ground rules:

The Rules of the Race

1. I would be happy with selling WirelessRouters.us at it's BidoPrice, but it's not really a "net gain" of $1250 as I have sunk costs in the name. That said, development must net $1250, not gross. However, I will not be counting my fixed hosting costs or my personal time against the gross. I think this is fair. Why? Because I think everyone would agree that a recurring revenue stream is better than a one time sale, but the sale is inherently "easier" from a labor perspective as well as capital outlay. But feel free to disagree in the comments.


2. I will not be marketing the name at $1250 once the site development begins, but I will still consider offers. They'll just need to take into consideration the work that's gone into the development. If a sale occurs at $1250 or greater prior to earning $1250 via development, then flipping "wins".


3. I will not use this blog to link directly to the site. Though honestly that would not be a major win for the site :)


4. There is essentially an inconsequential amount of type in/existing traffic so the development and marketing efforts will be entirely responsible for the success of the site.


5. Failure to reach the goal will result in public humiliation. Reaching the goal via either reselling or developing will hopefully get some much needed attention for the .US extension and product .US domains in particular.


6. Revenue from the site can be from "any means necessary", not just in sales. No, this isn't some trick to make development easier, but I want to be clear that I'll be counting all revenue sources as a part of the total earned from development.

I'd love to hear votes of encouragement, suggestions, etc... but if you think I'm doomed to failure, you can voice your opinion too. Direct the feedback to http://twitter.com/UtterDomain. Let the race begin!

My 5 Best Domain Purchases in 2009

This is kind of a scary post to write, because I'm shamefully behind on developing my portfolio (look for a New Year's Resolution post about that soon!) and I'm sure many people will get a good chuckle out of my purchases and my lack of production with these sites. But this post is for me. To document my results for the year, my feelings at this point about what I've picked up and to hopefully start a discussion of what other people are most proud of picking up this year themselves. Without further ado, here's my top 5 list of names acquired either via "the aftermarket". I'll not plug my amazing hand registering skills here, but I may do a separate post on my best hand registered names of the year if you all are interested.

5. .IN Geo's - This is a difficult one to put on the list as it's not just one deal that I'm proud of, but the total number of high quality names I've been able to acquire at really great prices. To sum up - I've got 25 US State .in's (Colorado.in, Tennessee.in, NorthCarolina.in, etc.), all the Canadian province's (and most territories), about 60% of the US cities with over 100k population and a huge number of popular destinations like Gatlinburg, Williamsburg, Gettysburg, Hilton Head, etc. etc., about 50% of the major cities in Canada and the UK along with major destinations around the world. Over 600 names in total. My total cash outlay has been in the low five figures with over 100 of those domains acquired in the aftermarket. My favorite? Atlanta.in for less than $1k. Expect to see a lot out of our Vocav.com platform in the next year as we start to power up these sites.

4. SpaGetaway.com - This was my highest single domain purchase at the time I picked up via a GoDaddy drop auction. The search numbers aren't amazing, but it has huge development potential. Spa listings, booking services and travel accommodations means this domain will be a big earner in the years to come. Total price paid was $893.

3. BirthdayCards.info - This isn't so much a purchase as a drop catch, but as this was a recent capture, it's fresh in my mind as a great value for the money. The keyword phrase "Birthday Cards" has huge exact search volume, and the monetization options are really broad. Yes, it's a low dollar transaction in most cases, but there are subscription services, bulk orders and related services such as flowers and gifts that go perfectly with this domain. I'm really excited about building this name out. The best part? I picked this up using GoDaddy's backordering service with essential no competition. Total outlay was less than $30 for this great domain.

2. FunnyVideos.TV - Again, the most recent transactions come to mind as this was yet another new acquisition. This highly searched keyword phrase fits the extension perfectly and there's plentiful content in this category. The real question I have is monetization, but that will come with traffic. FunnyVideos.TV was purchased using my favorite auction site - Bido.com - for a whopping $111. Oh, and there are no premium renewals fees for this great keyword .TV domain.

1. TechCritics.com - This is my "Crush it" project that will be monopolizing my time in 2010. You may have heard me drop hints as to my new blog site via Twitter - well, this is it. It'll be launching very soon and I'm really excited about the possibilities of this name. The purchase agreement won't let me disclose the purchase price, but it was a fair price considering it's potential, but more than most "domain investors" would have paid. There will be more posts about TechCritics.com in the future, so stay tuned.

Honorable mention: VideoEffects.com - This is still my single most expensive single domain purchase (just under $3,000), but I knew the domain was not a name I was going to flip for big profits. I was buying it as an end user and so I see the value in this transaction as a long term investment. It may well be that this turns out to be my best purchase of the year, but it will take time to capitalize on it. VideoEffects.com was also purchased via GoDaddy's Drop Auctions.

So now, you get to decide. Which one my purchases was best?

I'd love to hear from you about your favorite purchases this year. You can post them in comments, blog about them or just tweet them to http://twitter.com/UtterDomain.

The 1K Rule - Keyword Domain Investing

A couple of weeks ago, I posted up my Two Strikes, You're Out guidelines for domain investing. In those guidelines, I touched on Keywords, but now we are going to drill into what really makes a good keyword domain. And while you are free to draw the line as far as quality of the keywords you want to invest in anywhere you want, my rule of thumb is what I like to call the 1K Rule.

The 1K Rule is this: For an exact match .COM domain to be worth my time, the keywords must have at least 1000 exact searches per month and $1 Average CPC according to the Google Adwords Keyword tool. And by exact, I mean, changing the combobox for "Match Type" to exact. Now, this rule is more like a formula than an exact figure. So, a keyword that has, say, a CPC of $5, may interest me if it gets several hundred exact searches per month. Conversely, a keyword that only has an average CPC of 25 cents will need to have several thousand exact searches to grab my attention. The formula, as it were, would look something like this:

Number of Exact Searches X Average CPC >= $1,000

And the 1K Rule doesn't just apply to exact match .COM domains. When I look at, say, call to action names like "BuyMensWatches.com", I'll look at the keyword "Mens Watches" as well as exact searches on "Buy Mens Watches". If the exact phrase [Buy Mens Watches] doesn't reach my 1K limit, then I'll need to justify the purchase by looking at the searches on "Mens Watches". I tend to value brandables and alternative extensions at no more than 10% of the exact match and sometimes significantly less. So before I would register BuyMensWatches.com, the term "Mens Watches" would need at least 10,000 exact searches at an average CPC of $1 in order to interest me. In a similar fashion, exact match .TV and .info's generally don't interest me unless the keywords reach 50,000 exacts at $1 CPC. With .info, I may occasionally register a name with fewer exacts or lower CPC, but only because the cost of registration is so low.

One factor that I don't put much weight into is the number of pages found doing a Google Search on the term (either broad searches or with quotes). You'll often hear people promote their domains using something like "There are 100 million Google search results for the phrase Breakfast Sausages. So buy BreakfastSausages.com." Domain valuation services like Estibot also seem to put considerable weight on having lots of search results. But to me, I like knowing that there's less competition for a term as it makes it easier for me to rank. So if there are 20,000 exact global searches for "Nassua Flights", but less than 100,000 results in Google for "Nassau Flights", then I feel pretty good about my chances to rank "NassuaFlights.com".

Different extensions, different call to actions (for example, I favor "Buy" something, to "Get" something) and the relevance they have with the keyword (for example, I don't like product .TV's) all factor in to determining if the domain is a strong keyword domain. Exact searches matter most, and average CPC should be considered as well, but don't put too much weight into Google Search results for the term, as it can actually be a positive when you go to develop the domain.

I hope my 1K Rule helps you make better decisions about domain investing. If you think my numbers are way off or if you have any questions, feel free to fire me a tweet at http://twitter.com/UtterDomain

Alternate Extensions Strike Back

After our poll results from earlier in the week showed that .net is favored a full 3rd of the time by domainers looking to develop keyword domains, I did some searching to find how well alternative extensions are doing in search results. Now, I don't know of a scientific way of doing this as the percentage of developed and ranked alternative extensions are a small fraction of the .com base, so the results are sure to be skewed. I decided to just check anecdotally looking at both common search phrases and "trending topics" to see how well the various alternative extensions were representin'. I only looked at first page rankings and did a random sampling of terms from various "top search query" sites. I also focused on Google but future posts will discuss rankings on other search engines.

Let's start with some good news:

Cyber Monday

• CyberMonday.net is 3rd - really second as CyberMonday.com has the first two entries.


• CyberMonday.fm is 5th below wikipedia and also below the news results. Nice result for a .fm!

Mortgage Calculator

• MortgageCalculator.org is #2, but #3 mortgage-calc.com has two entries with the same meta data but two different pages. Impressive.


• MortgageCalculator.net is next, right after news results? Pushing news results a bit much aren't we?

Science Fair Project

• All-Science-Fair-Projects.com should get a special award for being #1 in ranking and in the number of dashes!


• A couple of .org's ranking in 2nd and 3rd place and another in 6th - likely due to educational slant of the term?


• ScienceFairProject.VirtualAve.net is 5th

Santa Claus

• SantaClaus.net is 4th right after the "business listings" for Santa Slaus. Classic


• NORADSanta.org is 5th for the official NORAD tracking site.

Now the bad apples:

• Tiger Woods: none


• Tom Brokaw Accident: zip


• What does my name mean: zilch


• Currency Converter: nada

Conclusions

• Well, the first conclusion is, .org and .net are by far the most represented in search results of all the alternative extensions, but they are also the most likely alternative extensions to be developed.


• Having names like BlackFriday.info and CyberMonday.fm show up on the first page of results for major keywords shows that it's possible to rank just about anything


• Trending topics and news stories tended to favor .com


• Similarly, keyword relevance in the domain name (even if it was a subdomain) seemed to play a large role, particularly for alternative extensions.

I found this exercise quite interesting and will be following up with more posts along these lines whether you like it or not, but I'd love to hear your feedback at @UtterDomain.