New Registration - SpaGetaway.com

I'm very proud to announce that we've acquired the domain SpaGetaway.com. This new domain fits very well into our Vocav.com plans as many of our sites are prime Spa and Resort destinations. The listings and ad revenue from SpaGetaway will also give us a nice income stream along with the cross promotional possibility that the Vocav.com platform provides. While I'm not going to go into as much detail yet about this site as I have with some of the other sites we've discussed in our New Registration series of posts, I do want to talk a bit about what we are doing and how the development is progressing.

Headings

Actually, the first thing I want to do is ask for your opinion - we've got a rough draft of the site header and I'd like some input. There is both a positive and negative version that we are playing with and we want to really focus on the Resort and Spa market (thinking skiing, golfing, ocean/beach, etc.) as most of our listings will be destination spas, though we will also list day spas and more. So here they are. Click the thumbnail image for the full size version:

Planning

Besides planning a couple of spa trips, we've actually got a pretty good plan for how we will develop and market SpaGetaway.com... partially because the site name is pretty clear. It's a brand that's already built for us, but we will be providing some unique services that I think will really set us apart and be quite profitable. We plan to go all out with marketing as this is a name we would be proud to advertise on the radio or produce TV commercials... so pay attention the next time you hear a commercial for a spa getaway as it may well be ours!

Evaluating the Market

One thing I haven't really talked about is evaluating your target market. For example, did you know that spa traffic is being hit pretty hard through this recession? It's understandable, but it's something you should consider both before, during and after you've purchased a domain. What's interesting is that there is a definite spike in searches online as spa goers are looking for the best deals... and that benefits us. You also want to evaluate what other web sites are providing similar services, how they provide those services, research traffic comparisons (not perfect, but something to note) and who is ranking for what search terms.

When creating your site, you should also plan out the structure of the site to maximize your ranking on popular keywords and check your competition to see which keywords they rank for. For example, it would be advantageous to rank for the terms "Resort and Spa" as well as "Spa & Resort", but "Resort and Spa" gets nearly twice the searches, so you better believe that's the one I'm going to go after first.

Link Building

Finally, while I still need to do a full out post on Link Building, I just wanted to touch on one popular way to get one-way links to your site: Giveaways! What do people love to get? Free stuff! How do spas increase their traffic? Promotions! We can really drive links to our site by partnering with our Spas and helping them with their promotions. This is harder to do with certain products/services, but there are a number of "free gifts" and discounts that the spa industry is willing to throw out in order to bring people into the spa and we can help them with those promotions and, in exchange, we will be driving traffic to our site.

But more important than all of that is the Vocav.com platform. Imagine dozens if not hundreds of local geo sites deep linking with unique link text back to SpaGetaway.com. There are certainly problems and issues to be aware of with a linking strategy like that, but with proper planning we should be able to properly promote our SpaGetaway.com site, drive traffic across our network of sites and increase search engine rankings all at the same time.

Be sure to leave a comment about the rough draft of the header graphics. Be brutally honest! Do you prefer the "black on white" or "white on black" look? Thanks!

DevHub for Geo Domains

Whether you have a generic city/state/region domain name, or if you have a City+something name, DevHub is a quick way to get a site up and running. Most of my geo domains use the .IN extension, but those will be running on our Vocav.com platform. I have a couple of geos using other extensions though and so I decided to experiment with DevHub for building out a site for StSimonsIsland.info (I also own StSimons.info). If you don't live in the Southeast (and even if you do), you may not have heard of this small resort community, but it's located in the Golden Isles of Georgia along with Sea Island and Jekyll Island and just a short distance from the more famous Hilton Head Island. It's a gorgeous little community and a popular destination for Georgians in that it's not as crowded or touristy as some of the other nearby beach resort towns. Anyway, this post is about the DevHub development experience for Geo Domains... so let's dig in!

Listings, Listings and more Listings

Job listings, Real Estate listings and Business Directory listings all come out of the box free and with revenue sharing built in with the DevHub site creator. Generally you only have to drag and drop the listing you want onto the page, provide some search criteria (or let the page try to come up with the search criteria by itself) and you are done. Unfortunately, there's really not a way to go beyond that basic setup so if you want to customize what you show or how it's shown you are mostly out of luck. A few things can be done though to make the listings more inline with what you want - for example you can drop multiple listings onto the same Page and that way you can show, say "Homes for sale" for two different Zip Codes on the same page. This is a nice feature but it's not really the level of customization I want. Hopefully this will be addressed in a future release of DevHub.

News you can't use

There is also a prebuilt "News" item you can drop onto your pages, but this news listing is very picky and the sites I've setup so far haven't found any useful news for the search phrases I've used. You would think *something* would show up for the search term "Georgia" at least. I mean, there has to be news in Georgia, right? If this feature gets fleshed out or the filter issue is addressed, then this could potentially be a very nice feature, but as it is, it's very hard to use.

What is very easy to setup however is RSS Feeds. So if you find a good feed (or build one yourself using aggregator tools like Yahoo Pipes - a post on this will be coming up in the future), then you are in business. Of course, I'd like more customization of how the RSS feeds are displayed (for example, showing a profile image next to each post would be nice), but it's functional as is.

The business listing for St. Simons Island is probably not typical of most cities due to the small size and seclusion of the island, but right now there's only one business listed, so I'll likely have to go out and get an additional data feed for this as ... well... there's more than one business on St. Simons Island. You're mileage may vary.

Finally, in regards to listings, I'd really like to have the option for monetizing the "Add your listing" for jobs, properties and businesses, but there would have to be a way in DevHub to ensure that whoever paid to be listed through my signup link got shown in my results. I think that would be an incredibly valuable feature though and one I may need to take into my own hands if DevHub doesn't provide it soon.

Monetization that's missing

Widgets for Hotel bookings, flights and car rentals are a dime a dozen... I've thrown a quick Priceline widget up on the Travel section, but ideally this is something that DevHub could already have worked out for those that don't have their own affiliate setup. It would make sense for DevHub as they could skim some more revenue from these types of sites and it would make sense for newbie publishers who don't know or don't want to know how to setup a 3rd party hotel affiliate. In fact, it would be nice for me too for sites I'm too lazy to do much with, though I will come back to this Travel section soon.

I'd also like to see general classifieds, and specifically autos, and maybe a "Rental Listing" feature as well, though these are more difficult to come by and more difficult to monetize. I'll probably add in my own 3rd party autos listing at some point, as DevHub does allow quite a bit of flexibility in that regard, but it's not ideal. Event calendars, weather widgets and forums would all be welcome additions though they are not really monetized widgets... they do add value to Geo domains.

Summary

I'm not abandoning Vocav.com in favor of DevHub, that's for sure, but for a free site, setup in a matter of an hour or so, it's really not bad. DevHub would make a nice placeholder while you worked on developing out a geo domain portfolio for example and can work well for City+Service or City+Profession sites that you want to setup quickly and not have to worry about again. There is certainly room for improvement but the monetization options of the built in listings are a big leg up for folks without much time or money to develop their geo domains.

Let me know what you think of the St. Simons Island site and the DevHub platform in the comments!

Available TV Geo Domains

If you have been paying attention to what I've been saying about geo domains, you would have found these already! Get the spreadsheet. Check the names. Register and build them in bulk! But I realize the spreadsheet doesn't list every possible Geo domain. It's conceivable even I've missed a few... Also, Go Daddy doesn't offer bulk registration of .TV's unfortunately, but that's okay, they don't have the best price for .TV anyway. No tricks. No affiliate links. Just head to Name.com and use the "Search Multiple Domains" option. Name.com has the best prices I've found on .TV domains - Just $19.99 right now and if you hurry you can grab these quick before someone else does:

Hinesville.TV (30k people in Georgia)
FortStewart.TV (near Hinesville)
USVirginIslands.TV (um, seriously)
SanGabrielValley.TV (no, really)
LynnHaven.TV (15k people in Florida)
Meadville.TV (county seat in Pennsylvania, near Erie)
Dingle.TV (trip advisor top 25 European destination)

Go! Register them now!

Attacking Domainers

So, you might be wondering how we picked up 600 prime geo domains using the .IN extension so quickly. I'm going to go over how we went about making the most with our funds by targeting and attacking domainers.

While a large number of those domains were drops, over 100 of the domains we bought were purchased through private negotiations over the span of just over a month. And these aren't the dregs. Those 100+ names include 23 states, all of the provinces in Canada, 5 of the top 30 cities in the US and 2 top 10 Canadian cities. In total, those names represent hundreds of millions of search queries a month.

When we first started investing in .IN geo domains, we were looking just for available reg fee names. We found hundreds of top names from the US, UK and Canada that had either never been reg'd or had been dropped. I personally felt like we were at the right place at the right time. All of the names we were registering were taken in every extension known to man. When the .ws and the .cc's are all taken, but the .IN isn't, that is an opportunity and we made the most of it. But once we started the planning process for developing out our .IN geos, it was clear we needed more than just dropped names in order to make our ideas work. .IN is very relevant for finding information, people, businesses and events IN your city. Way better than .ME, shorter and more commercial opportunities than .INFO, just as risky as .TV and yet .IN has the potential for a broader range of content. And with enough names, we had the opportunity to essentially turn .IN into our Geo domain brand. But in order to do that we needed a massive collection of top tier domain names.

You see, before we started, there was only 1 "developed" .IN geo domain across the entire US, UK and Canadian market. Not just 1 of the top 10 cities. Only 1 total in all of Canada, UK and the US. There were a few "one pagers" but they were the exception, not the rule. And that one "developed" site... well... it wasn't exactly making headlines about how great a site it was either. If 99.9% of the exact match geo domain names using the .IN extension are all undeveloped, even if we hold 10% or 25% of the market, we are in trouble. Dot coms are successful because people trust that when they type in Their City.com, there will be a developed, relevant site there. In order for .IN to be successful, in order for it to be a trusted "brand", we had to hold a majority of the .IN domains and make those sites great. As good if not better than the dotcom. We also had to ensure that the other stake holders in the .IN geo domain space were serious about developing content for their sites or else we would all suffer. And so we started our investigation into who held those undeveloped .IN domains. What we found was that there were really only a handful of people who mattered.

Domainers like buying up domains by the dozen. It's much more efficient to target those individuals then to try to negotiate one domain at a time from some bloke who lives in the city he owns and who thinks it's the most valuable domain ever. There are also some domain holders who have the ability to hold out and will likely never sell their entire portfolio of names. They know who they are, they know what they've got and they aren't selling for less than a small fortune per name. But then there are those domainers who are vulnerable. They need to sell some names in order to pay for their renewals. They need to sell because they lost their job. They need to sell and they will take whatever offer you give them. Those are the ones you target. You search those out and you attack them and you take every one of the names you care about with you.

This isn't easy. We spent many, many days researching, planning, making contacts and trying to get to know who we were dealing with. And then when we made contact, we made sure that we were taken seriously. There isn't a single person we contacted that we didn't get a response from. There were only two domainers we contacted that we threw out because they weren't willing to deal. In all, we made a half dozen deals or so, and the best deals we got were the ones where we purchased the greatest number of domains in one big batch. The bigger the portfolio, the cheaper the price per domain. When you buy one and two domains, you pay many times more per domain name than you would if you buy 10 or 20 at a time. Buy in bulk, develop in bulk. Ignore the little one and two domain deals and focus on the portfolio holders... the ones who have to sell. You can always scrape up the little guys later - heck, they'll probably come to you. And when you are big enough, the guys who aren't willing to deal, well... they'll realize they don't have a choice because you're the only game in town.

Announcing Vocav.com

Theoretical Games, LLC is proud to announce the launch of Vocav.com - the latest in technology for powering local websites. Theoretical Games has also recently acquired a massive collection of over 600 geo domains - exact match city names, states, provinces, and more from all over the global - exclusively using the .IN extension. This collection of domain names represents more than 50% of the top 250 cities in the US as well as over 50% of the top 50 names in both Canada and the UK. Domain names that will be launching as early as this summer include Indianapolis.in, Charlotte.in and Colorado.in.

By leveraging its large network of sites and the Vocav.com technology stack, Theoretical Games can produce high quality, unique, and locally relevant content and services, which will the propel the .IN extension forward as one of the premier Geo Domain extensions for countries around the globe.

.IN will be soon be synonymous with discovering and connecting to people, places and businesses in your local neighborhood and Vocav.com will be the technology that makes it possible.

If you'd like to get the inside scoop on this major development in the Geo Domain space, you can check out the free online chat tomorrow with Andrew Douglas - President and Founder of Theoretical Games - which will be taking place at Bido.com starting at 1pm EST during the live auction of Misconception.com.

For more information about the Vocav.com technology, advertising and partner opportunities, please contact admin@vocav.com or visit Vocav.com and sign up now for the newsletter.

Appearing on the Bido Show!

I've been asked to be the Guest Speaker for this Thursday's Bido Live Auction chat. If you haven't participated in a Bido chat before, this is not only a great chance to get to know yours truly but also to meet some of the most influential and successful domainers in the industry. The 1 hour Live Auction of Misconception.com will take place this Thursday, June 2nd at 1pm EST. Log in to Bido.com, click the Chat tab for the Misconception.com auction and then click to Join the Chat. You can sign up now for free so you are all set for Thursday and that way you can even get a friendly email reminder when the auction is about to start.

So what is it that I'm going to be talking about? Besides detailing my life story in excruciating detail, we'll be covering two of the biggest things to happen on the internet in our lifetime! First, the newly announced Google Wave and how to capitalize on it... That means we'll be talking about the impending launch of our website, Collaborative-Tools.com, as well. Google Wave is going to change the way we communicate online.

Second, and only slightly less life altering, is the announcement of our Geo Domain project. I'll make the official announcement tomorrow and then we'll have a chance to go into the meaty details about it in the Bido chat on Thursday. So stay tuned! Ugh.. I hate that line. And be sure to join the free live chat this Thursday at 1pm EST.

This is not an UP review!

I was sitting in the theater, waiting for UP to start (it turned out to be an excellent movie... one of my favorite Pixar's) and watched the local ads play out on screen. I had a couple of thoughts roll by my head as I sat there in the dark.

• I noticed at least one ad... a random eye doctor, who didn't advertise a URL. Considering how much they paid for that spot, I can only assume they either don't have a website or don't like to advertise that they do. How many small businesses are in the same boat?


• A captive audience is great, but if there's no call to action, the ad will have a very low conversion into new customers. What would be really cool is to have a number people are asked to text or a poll question or something while they are waiting. Then you've got them hooked.


• Wow, there are a lot of local businesses advertising. I live in a fairly small suburb of Tampa, so I figured I'd see mostly Tampa ads. Nope. They were all local to the suburb. I've got to tap that market!


• It's really sad how pathetically bad most people's website URLs are. There's absolutely no chance anyone will remember their abbreviations, their .net extension or their 30 character .com because that's all that was available to register. Seeing ad after ad of local businesses with impossible to remember URLs puts ideas in one's head about how to service those businesses with better URLs and how to get users to my geo domains. Hmmm....


• Showing ad after ad after ad starts to lead to viewer fatigue. Websites (this one included) are horrible about that. Sure, we look at heat maps and monitor click-thru rates. We swap ads and we get some conversions... but where's the innovation in ad display online? How big of a splash can you make to get the user's attention without making them annoyed? Is a little annoyed a bad thing?

I know there's a code of domainers that says "If it's working don't tell anyone else", but if you know of anything cool in the ad space, I'd be all ears.

Develop Domains in Bulk

For those just joining us, I've recently covered how to find available domain names in bulk. The links and spreadsheet I provided work best for Geo domains, but you can bulk register products and services, too. I've also shown you some great available .tel domains that I found using my spreadsheet and searching in bulk, so it's proof that premium names can be found! But how do you go about developing your sites in a way that is cost effective? That's what we'll cover in this post. It's not a complete reference but it will provide some direction for at least where to get started.

Don't Develop Your Sites

Parking is a valid use of a domain that already has traffic, but I'm not just talking about parking. Unless you were buying single keyword .com domains back in the 90's or you buy dropped domains with traffic, chances are your parking traffic won't cover your registration fees since Search Engines hate parked sites. So what do I mean? Well, one option that doesn't require development is .tel. You don't develop websites on .tel domains. The .tel registry runs the website for you. That's why domainers who park their sites, don't like them... because they can't park them. But it also frees you from having to do hosting and development. All you have to do is put content and affiliate links, build back links, advertise the site and get your site listed in search engines and you're making money without a single dollar spent on hosting, design or development. Dot Tel requires new thinking and new approaches to monetization, but it can be done. But that's "non-traditional" so let's look at more traditional services.

Why Park

You can point your domains to WhyPark.com and set them up in bulk in a matter of minutes. Now that WhyPark offers a free level of service now, you can even try it out without any cost, but they've hooked me. I just upgraded to their Enhanced Service and I'm really impressed with what you get for just $10 a month. You can't get shared hosting for that kind of price per domain, that's for certain. The downside to WhyPark is that their features are going to be limited compared to what you could do with your own web server, but for non-developers, and for developers who have way too many things on their todo list, WhyPark is a great solution.

Custom Development

I'm not going to lie. This option is not for everyone. It's a lot of work if you're a developer (I know, I'm in the middle of a large scale project myself!) and it can be quite costly. But the advantage is you have full control. If you are going to be running more than a handful of sites, then you'll need to step up to at least a VPS Hosting Solution which start at around $19 a month. Once you have a web server, you can choose one of the many Content Management Solutions out there such as Drupal, Joomla or even WordPress. These systems are fairly complicated to set up in such a way where they handle multiple domains, and most require third party components/add-ons to do it well. Once configured though, you can generally push content across multiple sites, pick and choose themes as appropriate, install and manage addons such as shopping carts or whatever features your sites need, and do administrative functions such as backups, restores and provisioning of new sites fairly easily. What you won't get with this solution is any hand-holding, any help with keeping the software up to date, your websites secure, your data feeds preloaded, your ad system installed or any other feature for free. It's all up to you. With great power comes great responsibility.

So is there a better solution?

Mass Domain Development Services

There have been a number of companies offering mini-site creation for anywhere from $99 to several hundred dollars per domain. You give them a domain name, some information about what you want on the site and a chunk of change and you get a hosted website with a few web pages, a template based design and some rotating Google ads. That's all well and good, but if you have any idea about what it takes to go from a mini-site to a really profitable web site, there's still a lot left to be desired here. That's where DomainMassDevelopment.com comes in. They create sites in bulk and are focused on providing exactly the kinds of services you need to get profitable quickly. And because they are taking advantage of the economies of scale that other mini site offerings don't have (at least not yet), they can do it for a very, very good price. At the lowest volumes, you get 10 domains for $999, and their bulk discounts can save you as much as %25 from there.
While I've chosen the custom development route for my largest project, I'm considering using them for at least two other networks of sites. If you only have a couple of sites but want more than what most mini-sites offer, they also have plans for you, too... including a WordPress based site with 30 custom created articles and 5 video posts for just $2499. If you looked at my cost estimates for developing GreenTips.TV, you can see that I can't really even do that much development myself at that kind of price. And I'm pretty cheap!

... Profit

So you've gotten your domain names, you've chosen how you want to develop them, how do you profit from them?!? Well, if you consider your registration costs, development costs, maintenance costs and renewal fees, if you developed just a single website, then that site has to recoup thousands of dollars a year in advertising, listing fees, affiliate links or whatever your monetization strategy is. But let's say you own and operate 200 sites. How much do you have to make per site, per day before you can retire? Well, okay... not retire, but how about not have to work full time at a day job? So, at 200 sites X 365 days a year, all you have to do is earn about $2 a site per day to make nearly $150,000 a year. $2 a day. $2. Per day. If you operate 500 sites, at 365 days a year, all you have to do is earn about 75 cents a day per site to be making 6 figures in profits a year!

It's a big freaking leap to go the mass development route. I'm 5 figures deep already. But now I've got 600 geo domains in my pocket... guess what I'm gonna do with them?

.Tel Geo Domains still available

It's amazing to me, but the .Tel registry has already rung up over 200,000 registrations and several of the auctions I've seen at sedo for .tel domains have gone for 4 figures. I mean, I like the dot tel extension, and I've invested in some names myself, but it's a geek thing at least for right now. Hopefully geeks will inherit the earth and the .tel registry will solve people's communication/contact management issues once and for all... but for now it is quite surprising how quickly the .tel extension is growing.

The good news is that there are still prime names available and if you hurry, you can get the "early registration" discounts from places like Dotster that has .tel domains on sale for just $11.95 a year. Of course, this post wouldn't be all that informative if I didn't tell you what names were actually available to register though, right??

So using my handy, dandy bulk registration spread sheet I did some searching for .tel domains. Guess what!? There are some great geo domains still available for .tel. At the time of this writing, the following domains were all available:

FtWayne.tel
FtCollins.tel
FortHood.tel
BayCity.tel
Bremerton.tel
Carbondale.tel
Dubuque.tel
ElizabethTown.tel
StLucie.tel
Corvallis.tel
SaintCatharines.tel
Chambersburg.tel
WestLafayette.tel
Boardman.tel

There are others! Just build out your bulk registration list and do some searching. Don't be afraid to add keywords like hotels, doctors and other businesses as .tel makes great business directory listings as well. Good luck!

Bulk Registration

I'm going to tell you a secret. The easiest and cheapest way to find, register and profit from geo domains is by searching in bulk. If you don't search in bulk, buy in bulk and develop in bulk, you will not make much money in geo domains. It's the efficiencies inherent in designing and building a site once, and reselling it a dozen or two dozen or three hundred times that is where you make profits.

So the first step is to find names and to register them cheaply, and that's what this post is about. I've created a helpful, but "basic" spreadsheet you can download here that is a good 450 geo names in multiple countries that you can start with. Don't expect this to include everything, but it gives you a basic idea of what to look for. Add to it and make it your own proprietary list of names that you use to find the best possible geos. One thing it does not include are "destinations" like Palm Springs... oops. My bad!

The next step is pretty simple - plug in the keyword you want to search for. In the sample, it's GolfCourses. Don't be afraid to try it out, but also come up with your own list of killer keywords and definitely try singular versions of keywords as well. Once you've entered your super special keyword, the spreadsheet should do all the work and make a list of 450 domain names to check. Now, how do you check to see if they are available?

Go Daddy Bulk Domain Registration


Just select the text in the second column and paste it into the link above. GoDaddy will search up to 500 domains in a number of common extensions in a matter of seconds and provide you with a list of all the available domains. Generally, bulk registration is the cheapest you can find, but GoDaddy is running a special. For at least this weekend you can use the coupon code cjc749t2 and you can reg them for just $7.49 a piece! When bulk registering domains, every dollar saved per domain registered really starts to add up. And at that kind of bulk pricing, and with ICANN fees going up all the time, it may not hurt to reg them for a couple of years out either.

One last word of caution - be smart! Don't just reg the names because they matched. Do your homework. If there aren't any golf courses in Timbuktu, but TimbuktuGolfCourses.com is available, it's still not worth the reg fee! But don't be upset if Estibot or some other tools says the domain isn't worth anything either. The point of buying these domains is to develop them in mass, and so each individual domain doesn't have to have huge search results or be worth thousands of dollars according to some automated domain estimation tool. But do buy smart!

Taking risks in Geo domains

Just as a reminder - a Geo domain is a website that is either the name of a city/state/location or the name of a city/state/location + a service. So for example Miami.com is a Geo domain, and so is MiamiDentists.com. Okay, so now that we've cleared that up, I think one of the largest untapped reservoirs of domain names exists in the Geo space. Oh, it's incredibly difficult to find a good .com geo just laying around. I'm not saying you can just go out there and get great names for reg fees (okay, well, you can if my bank account statement for the last month for go daddy or name.com indicates anything) but rather the potential is in the development and monetization of geo domains.

Most domainers out there think that the best way to monetize Geo domains is through selling clicks to hoteliers. That's certainly the low hanging fruit. Business directories of lawyers and dentists and restaurants and such are also quite profitable if done properly. Everyone likes a nice weather gadget on their home page, but don't expect to make anything from it. If you happen to own a bigger city (or a town near a big city), you can sell tickets to shows or baseball games. And then there are the classifieds, job postings and the like which you can also net a small commission from. These are all very straightforward and don't require much except the proper domain name, some unique, keyword intensive articles, etc, and maybe some local advertising work (both in terms of getting advertisers and in advertising that your site exists). But I think there's a huge untapped potential outside of hotels and ticket sales. I think the .com's are largely wasting their branding opportunities.

You see, a brand is more than just a pretty logo - a brand is the connection you make with your customers. Yes, revenues for certain destinations like Myrtle Beach are largely driven by tourists and so catering to the just passing through or just providing a directory service to someone looking up the local pizza place's phone number is fine for the one offs. There's money in it as the guy who owns MyrtleBeach.com can attest. But these static, brochure sites and cold directory listings are entirely without emotional attachment with the customer. You haven't really established a significant relationship with anyone if all you do is provide a list of links. Yes, you get higher conversions (almost as good as parking, if not better if done properly) if you're just a directory of links, but people don't connect with links.

Why do people love using google? It's not because of the links, it's because google's brand is so powerful that people actually *LOVE* google. No one loves TampaDentists.com. It may be profitable but it's certainly not building relationships.

So here's the challenge - do I think I can do a better job at building a brand around Geo domains then anyone else? I don't know. But I've put my money where my mouth is and I've purchased hundreds of names, many hand-reg'd, some via auctions, some via forums and even some via cold calling/emailing. I don't want to reveal everything just yet, but I'm doing something that many of the .com guys can't do or at least haven't done very well - I'm building networks of sites.

When it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single prime Geo domain, it takes a lot of capital to build networks of sites. If you're lucky and got in early or bought up a new extension (or prefix like the I Am/We Are guy), then you may have gotten a nice portfolio, but does .me really work as a geo extension? How much of a brand can you build around sites like Denver.info? A lot of people say that buying VisitSeattle.com does nothing but drive traffic to Seattle.com. Many companies think they can register one domain and hope that search engines will give them love (I'm looking at you citysearch, local and topix). That doesn't work, either.

So how do you build networks of geos in a cost efficient way? First of all you have to be creative. You have to think about the brand first and then figure out how to get a great network of sites around that brand. Name acquisition is a huge part of the game. If company XYZ owned 50% of the top 100 US cities using the VisitXXXXX.com's brand, they could develop the platform once, build a single team and have a brand that people would recognize and search engines would rank well. But very few companies have done a good job of acquiring quality names like that - Boulevards and maybe a handful of others. It's expensive and time consuming. But it's what I've just done. So now that I have the brand and the names, it's down to development and marketing. It's not gonna be easy and it hasn't exactly been cheap (although it hasn't been as expensive as it could have been). But now it's time to put the nose to the grind stone and get 'er done. Hopefully the risks will pay off.