Recently i have had the pleasure of talking with Bruce Marler of Missouri.me and LocalTek.com. I had asked him if he was up for an interview and share some of his knowledge with my readers. Obviously he said yes and what i got was simply an amazing in site on domaining.

Bruce Marler had been working in the Tech sector for years until recently when he decided to peruse his own company. This was the start of LocalTek, LLC which has developed Missouri.me. Taking all of that is strides Bruce has overcome many obstacles to get to the point his is at today. Take a look at what Bruce has to say about domaining and his business.

missouri.me

What got you in to the domain business?

Well, my first domain purchase was back in 96 or 97. I was working at ATT in their Internet group at the time and had developed a website about the St. Louis Blues hockey team on Geocities I believe, if you searched Yahoo at the time I was first on the list of sites and I was quite surprised at the traffic I was receiving. Based on this I had a few ideas of businesses I could start online and bought some domains based on that. I never did really do much with them based on my various jobs but always had a few names in the back, but in 2002 I started focusing quite a bit more on domaining and that led to my focus today.

Great question, there is no specific moment, I have always worked in the technology field and was at ATT during their Internet backbone build out then at Lucent Technologies during their boom so I had always been around the web and it just made sense to me that the domain was a key factor in building a brand. If I had to pick one moment though I would say it was in 2002 when I could see Lucent would have to cut the division I was in at some point and I started trying to pick up a name for a company I would want to start if my position was eliminated. It was a very new field at the time (VoIP) and still all the good names were taken. At that point I realized that I really messed up when I did not stick with it back in the mid to late 90s when I bought names.

Localtek was formed to really provide online marketing, web development and advertising to businesses and communities that have not had the chance to move their business online in a cost effective manner. Although a lot of the press has been on Missouri.me that is just one part of what we do. We really try to work with the businesses by having feet on the street sales people throughout the region to make sure we understand the needs of the small business customer. My partner has a very strong small business background and brings knowledge to the table that is more than just slide decks and marketing materials but real honest to goodness information that helps us take the vision and marketing model we have and make it useful to real customers.

How is it taking shape?  We could not be happier, we are in the process of bringing quite a few sales people on and already have our next 2 states planned. From a customer perspective we have had several proactively contact us to let us know they have already seen results. That’s all the validation needed. What we are doing for our customers works.

What has been really nice is the type of partners we have been able to work with already, we have a couple in the works this week that really brings together the solution even more (more details to come) and we have already announced Big River Telephone as a technology partner throughout the Midwest region.

With the success and the management of your business how has this affected you as a domainer?

It has definitely taken sometime away from various aspects of what I did before. That said, its caused me to be much more productive with time spent domaining. We have acquired several dozen domains over the past month or two outside of our state and city names but they have all been laser targeted. I like to play the drop game and I have been out of that for about a month and a half, expect that to change soon.

That said, I was having a conversation with another domainer lately who I have a lot of respect for, we were discussing how much time spent on the laptop domaining is actually productive time, we both said the same thing, probably 2 hours a day. People can argue that, but with my focus on building my business rather than buying domains lately I have found that by focusing on productive time I can get just as much done as before when I had more time.

It’s no secret that I like geo names but a lot of what I have been focused on is long tail and two word product names. I also have had some success with single word keyword targeted .nets. As much as we all love .com I have had some very nice returns as of late on .nets.

There absolutely is. I am big on road mapping our business though and we focus hard on trying to not get distracted by opportunities we know will still be there once we get going 100 percent. We have a development team and we know what we can do with that but we also do not want to be the kid in the candy store eating too much at once because it all looks so good and then getting sick (weird analogy I know).

The great thing is we learn from our customers, we learn what types of services they need online and we can take that knowledge and build additional services around that based on our knowledge of domains and the needs of small business. Luckily we own several domains that can be used to provide products and services to business sectors we are familiar with today.

Expect to see some expansion in the future outside of the pure geo plays. But it will be a bit before it happens.

I can tell that you are passionate about what you are doing and seeing it taking off brings a joy to your soul. Was there a point that you thought that it would not happen and to just go back to domaining? If so how was it overcome?

You are right, that is the one word that once people meet me I always hear, passion. I do not really think about it though. But if you cannot be passionate about what you are building then you do not believe in what you are doing. As I have spent more and more time talking to real business owners both large and small it has made the passion get even stronger. Amazing to see it has come through in my blog, emails, and chats but also glad to hear it has.

There really has not been a point that I said: “Oh Crap I better turnaround”, luckily the business we have built allows me to do both. Now I just have the ability to turn some of those business models I had put together to make a decision on some decent sized domain purchases into a reality.

Remember that this is domain investing, otherwise you are collecting. Each name is a business unto itself but as a whole your portfolio is your business. If you do not look at it that way it is just a hobby and a rather expensive one at that

To add to that, although the large majority of my domains are .COM and .NET if you are willing to build a business from it you can use an alternative extension to build a business but do not expect to sit back and get offers or traffic or revenue from those names as easy as you do from .COMs. You must work to build your business but it is possible.

Do you have anything else you would like to add about yourself, domaining, or your business?

I would say that I have been humbled as of late at the overwhelmingly positive response I have had from people as I have become more active in the community. Although my .ME development may not be the norm for someone in our industry I have continued to get support from organizations that I would not of expected in our domaining business world.

And one last thing, focus on what you love to do and you will be successful.

I would like to thank Bruce for answering my questions and hope all the best for him and his company.

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