Enlytend Solutions

ALast time we took a look at some general things to consider when choosing a domain name, along with some specifics for anyone trying to pick a new name for a business website. In part 2, we look at some additional considerations for the beginning domain investor aka “domainer”.

Despite the headline sales, domaining is not a route to easy money. For every 6-figure sale, there are thousands of domains that are dropped, never having earne a penny for the registrant. Like any other investment, managing a portfolio of domains requires common sense, planning and discipline. A crystal ball and a good understanding of marketing wouldn’t hurt either!

The Basics, reviewed

In choosing names as investments, the basic principles still apply: Shorter names with fewer words are usually better. Typos, misspells, incorrect grammar or word order, hyphens, numbers (especially embedded numbers) all decrease value. The name should match ( or at least not clash with) the extension, and you should avoid names which contain the names of companies, celebrities and brands (unless they’re yours).

For the investor, domain renewal fees become crucial in managing your portfolio. Unless you want to lose money on this venture, your goal should be to have your domain portfolio at least pay for itself (and preferably earn a profit) - much easier to do when your average annual renewal fees are around $7.50 apiece than if they are $35 or more! Not only is a portfolio consisting primarily of .com’s, .net’s and .orgs more saleable, but from a financial standpoint the names stand a better chance of being assets vs liabilities.

Here are some other things for a domainer to consider before adding those names to your shopping cart:

The Competitive Landscape

These items give you an idea as to the amount and quality of competition your name will have as a parked page OR a developed site:

• How much competition exists for the term and the topic in general? The number of Google search results indicates popularity but don’t forget: it also indicates the amount of competition.
• How good (i.e. effective) is the competition? How focused ? - Are your competitors SEO savvy? Are the results focused on one area or a diverse range of topics?
• If the domain is not a .com, what is the status of the .com and other 2nd tier extensions? - Is it a developed site or sitting idle? If it is parked, is it effectively parked or does it suffer from poor or irrelevant keywords and landing page?
• If the domain is hyphenated, what’s the status of the un-hyphenated version? (Same as above).
  

The Advertising Landscape

These items help predict the revenue potential of the name:

• How many advertisers are there for this term (and closely related words and phrases)? Advertising dollars = end user interest.
• What are the PPC bid prices? This indicates the value of the term to the advertisers.
• How focused is the term? Are the ads for one particular thing or a broader variety of items? If the ads are varied it becomes harder to target your visitors

A lot of advertisers and/or high bid prices bodes well for revenue. If there are few/no advertisers or if the term lacks focus (the keyword brings up ads for a variety of goods and services) expect to have a more difficult time finding effective parking keywords for your domain.

Development Potential

Since I develop a lot of my domains, I classify all new acquisitions into one of 3 categories:

• I am going to develop this domain (it may not be my top priority, but the intent is there)
• I could develop this domain (it’s a topic I feel I could develop successfully)
• I will never develop this domain

I won’t bore you with all the details about how I make those decisions, but my criteria include the commercial and competitive potential of the market and the anticipated development costs, including time spent on development and maintenance. Never forget that time spent is a real cost!

Parking potential

Parking is a great source of passive domain income and a good way to fund your renewals. However, unless you have solid, diversified type-in traffic it isn’t something to rely on. Changing search engine policies and algorithms along with fluctuations in bids can send your parked income on some wild roller-coaster rides! Don’t just diversify your names, diversify your income sources as well.

Here are some ways to gauge a domain’s parking potential:

• Advertising - bid prices and # of advertisers
• Can I get relevant links for this phrase? - No matter how much traffic you have, it doesn’t mean a thing unless someone clicks on the ads. Your ads must match what visitors are seeking.
• Search frequency - not to be confused with search results, though the latter will give you some idea if/how the phrase is used.

Here’s a tip: When evaluating search frequency and advertisers on a multi-word keyphrase, look at phrase and exact match numbers, not just broad searches. Phrase matches show usage of the phrase in that particular word order, exact matches show searches for only the given phrase (i.e. no addditional words). Broad match results (searches that include those words in any order, with or without accompanying words) can be misleading.

• Long term revenue vs “one-hit wonder” - News events or fads tend to yield only short-term income.
• If not a .com, what’s the status of the .com and other 2nd tier extensions? A blank page or poorly-parked site on the .com improves your chances of getting traffic on a different extension.
• If hyphenated, what’s the status of the un-hyphenated version? Blank pages, garbage sites or irrelevant parking pages or links on the unhyphenated variation are helpful.

Reselling potential (end user)

• Is the name spelled properly? Is it gramatically correct? - A business is not going to use a name with poor spelling or grammar for their primary domain. However, if the name gets natural traffic, it could be purchased to redirect to a primary domain.
• Is is appropriate for the extension?
• Advertising (see above) - If someone’s bidding $20/click for a particular phrase, it might make sense for them long term to purchase a name which gets type-in traffic for that same term.
• Real potential to bring leads to a business - Aside from advertising, is it a perfectly generic description of some particular business? Does it get traffic? Revenue?
• Extremely popular phrase? Popular phrases (i.e. “Happy Birthday”) are memorable and often have wide appeal.

It’s possible that someone will come along who just HAS to have some name not fitting any of these criteria for whatever reason and are prepared to pay big for it. The odds of that happening are like winning a lottery. You may be thinking “well, what about those 3-4 word names I see companies use to promote a product or give out information?” Sorry, but unless it’s a KILLER name, that’s not how it works. I’ve seen marketing departments of companies who can well afford a 3-5 figure .com go with a .info or other variation of their first choice because it was available for reg. fees!

Reselling potential (to other domainers)

Fellow domainers will be your pickiest customers. However, some names may be of more interest to a domainer than an end user:

• Is it a hot “collectible” name? (i.e. 3 letter names, 4 letter .com’s - whatever is the trend du-jour)
• Names with traffic and revenue - Be prepared to prove it!

Additionally good names in “hot” extensions and shorter names with fewer words are likely to be of interest to other domainers.

When registering a domain name, there are good choices and bad. While some criteria separating them differ according to the buyer’s intent (i.e. are you registering the name as a web address for your business or as an investment), some basic criteria are the same for all.

General Considerations:

Character Length and number of words - Although there are exceptions, USUALLY shorter names with fewer words are preferable.

Does the name contain abbreviations? hyphens? numbers? embedded numbers? - Common abbreviations are usually OK, but the other factors lower the value of a name because they make it more difficult to accurately remember it or type it in.

Are the spelling and grammar correct? - If you are purchasing the name for a business, misspellings and incorrect grammar make for a bad first impression!

Does the name make sense with the extension? - Like basic black, .com goes with everything. So do commonly used cctld’s (country code domains) like .co.uk or .de. However some extensions suggest a certain purpose which may not fit with your name:

• .org - organizations, associations, education, health, nonprofits, helping others
• .net - networks, the internet, a common “second choice” to .com, but expect a percentage of your visitors to accidently type in .com instead of .net!
• .info - informational sites
• .biz - for-profit businesses (not frequently used)
• .tv - things you see on tv
• .us, .es, .asia - something pertaining to those particular countries
• .mobi - something you would access from a mobile phone

Familiarity of the term - Is this word or phrase familiar and commonly used?

Renewal Fees - How much will it cost annually to renew the name? While prices for .com, .net and .org are reasonable, certain “exotic” extensions can have high renewal fees.

Buying a domain for your business

If you’re registering a domain to use as the primary web address for your business, obviously the first choice would be your business’ name .com (outside of the USA cctld’s such as .co.uk might be preferred).

Other good choices for a domain name include:

• A “Brandable” name - something clever and memorable (but make sure it isn’t or doesn’t contain someone else’s tm!)
• Generic names that describe your business or profession (unless you have a very unique line of business these will probably already be registered, but its worth a try)
• Generic names with your location - i.e., WestPodunkOpthamologist, LousianaWidgetmaker

Finders keepers ?

But what if the name you want is not available? Depending on if or how it is being used, you may be able to purchase the name from its current registrant. Expect to pay from $50-$200 on up, depending on the type and quality of the name and how attached to it the current owner is. If it is making revenue for its owner, don’t expect them to give it up cheap! Single and double word generics will be the priciest, especially if they are .com’s! Browse through historical domain sales data on names similar to the one you want in places like dnjournal (lists domain sales over $2000) or namebio (includes info on more modest sales) for a better understanding of the market.

If your name is a registered or common-law trademark you may be entitled to acquire the name by legal means IF AND ONLY IF the current owner registered it in “bad faith” as defined by law … AND you can prove it. I strongly recommend consulting with a lawyer who specializes in domain law before pursuing this route. Lists of domain lawers can be found here (free registation at the Namepros forum required for access) and here. This is not an endorsement of any of these attorneys so please do your homework before retaining someone.

Tempeted to play dirty? Think again! If you try to wrest a name from its owner without legal justification you WILL lose and may end up with a “reverse cybersquatting” judgement against you - NOT something you want tied to your business’ reputation! Also, don’t think that registering a trademark will give you the right take a name you want AWAY from someone registered it prior to your mark - it doesn’t work that way and will only make you look like a bullying jerk. Play the game clean or not at all.

Final thoughts

Some other important things to consider before you click the “buy” button:

• The “phone test” - how easy is it to communicate the domain name to someone over the phone? (Hyphented names and names with numbers substituted for letters, such as using number “2: for the word “two”, often fail this test).
• How easy is the name to remember and spell correctly?
• How does it look in print? - Your new domain name will appear on your business cards, stationary and advertising copy. If you have a long or multi-word name, you may want to get into the habit of capitalizing the starting letter of each word for clarity.
• Last but not least: be sure the words run together don’t inadvertantly make up some unfortunate combination like (these 2 examples were actually registered by businesses - much to their later embarassment) PenIsland or ExpertsExchange. Don’t see the problem with those? Un-capitalize the middle letters!
  

Next time: some considerations for beginning domain investors.

Its finally official - as of mid-June, landing page load times will be factored into your Adwords quality score.

To help advertisers prepare for this, the  adwords control panel has been updated to include loadtime evaluations - this can be found on the Keyword Analysis page.

Folks “in the know” have been hinting for some time now that this was coming down the pike.  I see it as a Good Thing overall - especially for your visitors and your conversion rates!

So bag the gratuitious Flash, Javascript and what-not - get those landing pages lean and mean!

Just when you thought it was safe to blend your ads with your website, along comes this post on the Adsense blog warning us otherwise..

If you’re too lazy to read it, section 1 says:

1. Ads shouldn’t be placed under a title or section heading in a way that implies that the ads are not ads.
For example, ads shouldn’t be placed under titles such as “Dallas Business Opportunities” or “Today’s Hot Deals”.

For a long time, adsense publishers were forbidden to use labels other than “Advertisers” or “Sponsored Links” over adsense blocks. Sounds to me like Google is having second thoughts about lifting that restriction!

The second point is:

2. Ads should be easily distinguishable from surrounding content.
Similarly, you should not place an ad unit by a group of links that has identical colors and line spacing. Doing so may cause users to think the ad unit is content created by you.

So blend your ads - just don’t blend them too well!

This comes on the heels of the February Adsense Policies update which states (among other things) that all sites running Adsense must now have and abide by a privacy policy…

Tags: adsense, google, web development

As an affiliate, one of the most profitable ways to promote a merchant is by directing your visitors to individual products which they are looking to buy.

If you just have a handful of items, you can get by with individual product links. But lets say you have a larger number of products to promote - for example, something with frequent changes in availability such as fine jewelry. In this case, individual links would be cumbersome to maintain and keeping track of new and out-of-stock merchandise would be particularly labor-intensive.

Which brings us to the datafeed - a product catalog which you can download directly from the merchant (or from affiliate aggregators, such as CJ or SAS). Using a datafeed implies the need for some programming ability, as you typically load the data into a database and have dynamic pages on your site which query and display the data. “Easy to use” feed generators and datafeed scripts have been available for years, but most of them come up a little short compared to “DIY” solutions and fail to handle data in different formats from multiple merchants.

I recently took a test drive of a promising solution called Pop Shops - a little gem that debuted in mid 2007. Pop shops lets you build product pages featuring data from merchants from Commission Junction, Linkshare, Shareasale, LinkConnector, Performics and several independent affiliate programs. It solves the multiple-merchant issues by creating interface code to the data on their own servers, which is also updated frequently to reflect in-stock and out-of-stock status.

For a beginner, PopShops is a no brainer to use. It does not however build entire web pages for you, but if you know enough HTML to build a simple page you’re golden. Just click your way through to select products, configure the layout, then “pop” the product display code - in your choice of Javascript, ASP/VBScript, ASP.net, HTML or PHP - into your page! The look and feel of your site remains entirely up to you. Pop Shops also can create widgets for TypePad, Blogger and WordPress.

More advanced users can define their own styles and take advantage of options to automatically display additional pages similar to the first. For a point and click solution, the result is not too shabby - you can see the result of my testing at Aquamarines.us.

What’s missing? The ability to sort or select items by price range tops my wish list, followed by the ability to manually create more than one page per shop. It would also be nice to be able to specify a different url for the product links - I cringe a little at having a page of outbound links all going to the same place! (Note: This feature is now available for Enterprise plan subscribers)

Pop Shops has 3 levels of service - Basic, Pro and Enterprise. The Basic plan is free, but you are limited to creating 10 shops. I’d recommend stepping up to at least the Pro version at a modest $5/month.

Tags: affiliate marketing, datafeeds, web development