Posts Tagged ‘domains’

We have all had experience with writing to end users. Whether it be a constructed well thought out sales letter or a generic template you personalize for each email or snail mail it is all for the same goal, sell your domain names. I have been asked quite a bit about how to not sound like a domainer and more like a professional looking to liquidate domain names.

I have picked up some great tips in the past months from Josh over at NameFlipper.com. I have analyzed how he writes his emails and to be honest they are genius compared to standard templates i see floating around the forums. The emails are always super short and straight to the point with out providing to much information. Kind like of setting a lure for a fish, you want them to bite but you do not want to start reeling in until you have them on the hook.

So that brings us to what type of tone you want to set in your emails. Well first off you do not want to sound like a domainer but rather as a professional in the technology sector. Whether this means saying you are a software developer or website creator they all sound better than the title “Domainer”. Just like everyone has seen around the community and it has been discussed a million times, the general population frowns upon domainers as a whole. No matter what you do we are not getting away from that stereotype in the near future. So projecting yourself as a professional in the technology industry gives you points right away and shows that you are willing to do business.

Bringing out the professional tone means that overloading with information is really just going to turn people off. You want to be able to give them a piece of what you are offering and then put the pressure on them to make the next move. For instance let them know you are trying to liquidate your domain for a fair price and if they do not respond in a certain amount of time that you will move on to the next candidate. If they are truly interested they will respond. Writing out details and trying to explain why the domain would be good for their business makes you sound desperate. Like i said if they are interested they will ask, no reason in writing a 5 paragraph email that is likely to be looked at as spam.

Now that you have the tone of the email set and the lure has been placed its time to cast the line. The signature part of your email is extremely important. This is where everything ties together and shows that you really mean business. Always include a business like salutation, i.e. regards or thanks. Up next include your full name. Under that your title, i.e. Software Developer. After the title put your company or website, try to make this a non-domaining website. Last but not least include your PHONE NUMBER. I can not tell you how many times i get calls over emails when an interested party wants the domain right away. Also do not forget to send the email from the email address that corresponds with the company listed in your signature, i.e. ExpandHosting.com – ross@expandhosting.com would be appropriate.

Selling to end users is not easy and is a very daunting task. It is something that i have been pushing quite a bit the past couple weeks and i do not average TONS of sales. Though when i do get a sale it is well worth my time compared to the payout. Sounding professional for me has changed quite a few things when it comes to end user sales. I see quite a bit more response, increase in amount of sales and an increase in the size of the sale.

If you have something to add feel free to do so.

There are many many different ways to create a ministe or a website in general. Some people go the extra mile and complete code a CMS(Content Management System). There are always pros and cons when it comes to how you develop a website. You have to look at your end game you want to achieve with the website itself.

Trying to figure out what type of minisite you want to develop really comes from the name itself. Will you be selling a product? Will you be pitching a product? Will it be an informational site? Will it be a blog? Yes those are questions you must ask yourself when starting the creation part of the website itself.

There are a couple of common ways pay develop they ministes. The most common way is to use a CMS. Using a CMS is probably, IMO, the best way to create a ministe. You can use any of the major CMS like Joomla, Wordpress, or Drupal. Those are just a few of the more popular ones but there are TONS of them out there. My favorite is Wordpress.

You can do pretty much anything you want with Wordpress. Yes it is generally looked at as blogging software but you can do pretty much anything with it that you want with ease. Everything from a simple blog to an eCommerce site can be achieve with wordpress with ease. Not to mention the amount of help and extensions of the product is insane. On top of being able to pretty much create anything you want it is extremely easy to update. This alone is a huge plus for most people because you do not have to know or deal with any type of coding. Just log in and update what you want through the control panel. Minisites.com uses wordpress to create their minisites for their clients. Just have a look at what they have done and that is only the surface of what can be achieved.

The next most common way to see people develop minisites is with coding of HTML/CSS design. This is more of a technical approach to things. The cool thing about this method is that it gives you complete control of EVERYTHING that is involved with the website itself. If you know how to write scripts design HTML/CSS then you might want to try and develop sites this way. There are two things about this method that hold people that back. The first is simply the technical aspect of trying to create the site, something that wordpress or another CMS is packaged with. The other being that updating the sites can somewhat of a headache because you have to do all the formatting and inserting straight in to the code.

So if you are just getting in to developing your domains as ministes i highly recommend using wordpress. Not only is it easy to create the site itself but it allows you do what other tasks other than worry about coding one page at a time. On top of that you can create just about any type of site you need. If you do not feel like creating the sites yourself go ahead and give Minisites.com or DomainMassDevelopment.com an email. They both use wordpress as the CMS and offer great support to their customers.

I had done a poll asking How Would You Spend $100? in the past week. The results really did not surprise me at all. It went along with what i have heard in the past of what most people do and what i had actually done when i started and still do today.

Not to anyone’s surprise Hand Registrations topped the list. I can totally understand this consider you get the most bang for your buck in this situation. Though in today’s day and age its more like trading pennies. For instance if you can hand reg 14 .nets and then turn around and sell those at at double the price you are looking at $100 profit. Not bad considering you made a profit and it allows you to either buy better quality domain names or invest in better domain names.

Now look at it this way. To be able to sell 14 domains at such a low price, not to mention .nets. You would be looking at a great deal of time to sell these domains unless you have a specific method of liquidating domain names. Lets assume that is not the case since you would only have $100 to spend to get in the industry. Now the time and effort put in to that $100 would generally not be worth your time.

Lets say that you take that $100 do some research on some expiring domains through the big drop houses. You find a decent name that you could easily resell for a $100 or sell to an end user as the first option. Lets say its a .com and you manage to pick the name up for $69. You have $31 left over at this point that we will not even use at all.

As soon as you get that domain in your account you start pitching the domain to end users. Chances are that if it is truly a decent name you will get a bite or two and most likely make a sale. Seeing as you want to make a sale fast and the end user offers you $170 and you accept right away. You have just made the exact same amount of money off of one domain that took your 14 low quality domains to make.

Quality is always better than quantity when it comes to domain names. Not saying that hand registering is bad at all, just giving a bit of in site on what is possible out there. I think one of the most underrated things for most domainers is the domain aftermarket market places such as NameJet.com and Pool.com. They always offer quality domain names and most of the time you can get this super cheap compared to the profits you can make with them. I highly suggest that you do research and learn how the drop houses work and what types of names to pick up to flip for a profit. I know this method works because i have been doing it for a long time.

Also do not forget to check out GoDaddy.com Auctions. They have some decent domains that you can litterally pick up for $13 that are just as high quality as the large drop houses out there. Check out this post for more info. You can also see that not every domain will sell for a lot of money and sometimes you take a loss or a small profit. Just do your research.

If you have any questions feel free to ask. I know this is all hypothetical but all i am doing is giving another point of view and stating that quality research can pay off better than rushing in and buying a bunch of domain names that either make no sense or are low in quality.

Its no secret that people in the domain industry are turning to domain development to earn a bit of extra cash over the parking alternative. Not only does development allow you more control over your property but it also can increase the value of your domain name. This is usually done in the form of a minisite that is optimized to receive natural traffic from search engines.

In reality you can develop whatever domain name you want and then hope and pray that it gets traffic. Well there are a couple of things that you can look for in a domain name to better your chances at getting the traffic that you want.

1. Domain keywords. You want to check out the keywords in your domain name and find out the search volume for the exact keywords in your domain name. You can easily do this with the Google Keyword Tool. Anything over 5k exact global search is probably worth your while. Though i can tell you that domains with less than that can usually receive just enough traffic if developed correctly. Why is this important? Ultimately the keywords are what is going to help you in the search engines. Now by providing information on what those keywords are on your site, it will allow the site to gain ground as an authority in the searches eyes.

2. Related Keywords. I think this is something quite a few people over look when they are developing their minisites. I can not tell you how many times i visit a basic minisite and they have tabs that say “Home, Books, Information”. Well those tabs to other pages can be your best friend. Instead of naming the tab “books” name it “Miniature Horse Books”. That in return will let search engines know what is on that page along with making that tab more appealing to the user of the site. Just like in the first paragraph you need look up the searches for these keywords to make sure they are worthwhile keywords.

3. Search Results. In my opinion this will tell you how populated the niche is. There are two things i check in this area to make sure i can do what i want to do. First thing i will do is type in my keywords with quotes around them. This will give me EXACT results to what i looking for. If it returns less that 100,000 results in google, you can be almost certain that you can dominate this area. Especially if you have the exact match. The next thing is i do the search without the quotes. This will allow me to see a broad competition along with more advertisers, if any.

4. PPC and Affiliate Programs. I always check in to the PPC for the exact term to make sure that it is worth my while to put the time and money in to creating a profitable site. This will show you the amount of competition in the area along with allowing you to gauge the amount of ROI you can expect from PPC alone. Affiliate programs are a must to check in to if you are going to monetize your sites in more than one way. Picking a domain name that is targeted with affiliate programs is usually a good sign because it means that there is money to be made.

5. Extension. I really do not think this is a HUGE thing at all but there are some rules that i have made for myself. I generally do not develop any ccTLD besides .us. The only gTLDs that i do develop are .com, .org, and .net. I avoid developing .infos simply because i really do not like them. Though i have in the past and had great results, they really have little resell value beside the fact of the site itself. These are just my preferences but i want everyone to know that extension has very little to do with the success of your ministe.

There are more things to look out for but if you have a good domain that fits these things you should be all set and ready to go. There are people that more in to detail and selective about what domains the develop and there are people that look for less. If you have anything to add go ahead or if you have a question feel free to ask.

I always here about people complaining that their newly developed minisites get no traffic. Well there are a couple of reasons why a minisite built on a domain that had no previous traffic gets no traffic. The main reason is that the domain itself completely sucks, i.e. Schools4You.com is not a great domain to make a minisite on and will require TONS of work to actually get traffic.

link-building

Some things you want to look at before you start developing a minisite on a domain names is to actually look at the domain itself. Look for the potential in search volume of the exact term and related terms. This in return will tell you the potential of what can be built on the site and what people are searching for.

For instance, i recently picked up MiniatureHorse.org. Yeah i know not the best domain in the world but i laughed when i saw it and i had to have it. Anyways by looking at the Google Keyword tool i typed in “Miniature Horse” and it gave me the exact result plus many other related searches. The exact term “Miniature Horse” gave me 14,800 EXACT global searches a month. Not bad, now compare that with “Miniature Horses” at 18,100. You can see where i am going with this. For SEO purposes check out other highly searched terms similar to what you domain is and that is what you should be writing about on the site along with those being your title tags. Judging by what i see and looking at my competition in the SERPS, with this domain name i can dominate the niche by producing a content rich and interactive minisite.

Now what i have said in the previous paragraph is just the foundation for a successful ministe. Its much more than just producing a great looking  and a content rich website. There are a couple things you have to do on a regular basis to get the site in to the eyes of the people looking for it. Just letting things go organic is not the way to go, you do not expect to walk in to the store and find a PS3 in the food isle, you look at signs to get to the electronics section.

First thing you need to look at is link building. Link building is a “sign” to let the search engines know that you are there and you are the authority in the niche of your site. Building up your links on other authority sites is a must. Check out your competitions link building strategies and match then plus going the extra mile. You can easily higher people to do this for you over a period of time or you can do this yourself.

Find similar sites or forums that you can leave comments or give informative posts about the niche your site is in. Make sure you leave a link back to your site to let people know where to find you. This builds trust up with people that frequent those types of sites and plants a seed in peoples minds.

Also do not forget to submit to directories. This allows your site to get crawled by search engines in more than one place. Not a highly effective strategy but gets your site out there in the beginning.

Next thing for link building and the minisite train of excitement is social bookmarking. I can not tell you how much traffic i get on my sites from just social bookmarking alone. Again just like directory submissions they do not help your rankings out much but they get your site out there. They allow other people the opportunity to SEE your site and possibly even bookmark the site themselves.

I think the most important thing besides letting the world know your site is alive is keeping fresh content up and going. I am not talking about RSS feeds but actual unique content that you write yourself or hire someone to do so. This way again you are building trust with the readers and showing the search engines that you are not a one hit wonder. This is what your site will give to people and search engines to feed on.

You do not need to keep your site updated everyday but go in once a week or at the very least and add something new. Make it a destination for people to come and get new information about whats going on in the niche. Along with that add a forum so people can make a place to converse. This in return can give you an idea of what you need on your site to keep the content fresh.

This is just the surface of what needs to be done to make sure you launch your ministie successfully. Check out this post by Darren at Problogger.net. There is a lot of great info in there that can help you get your site in the eyes of readers. I know it has to do with blog posts but the same can be done with minisites.