It’s Saturday again!!

Over the past few weeks or months, to be more accurate, my blogging efforts have been reduced to these weekly domainer musings. These musings started in the summer with me wanting to just offload a few thoughts and then going to bask in all the fun that London has to offer.

Then as the work and projects got more demanded, these musings were simply used as a means of keeping the blog alive.

These musing focused on what was happening in the domain industry. As usual, I know I have pissed a few people off week in, week out. However people shouldn’t take it personal. I just see things differently.

Now, today is the last day of October, and that leaves only 2 more months in 2009. I believe 2010 will be huge for business, for most sectors. Domaining will be no different.

I have been treating 2009 as the year to prepare for the big bang.  It’s all about repositioning your business for even more success. Getting ready for the spotlight.

With eBusinessDomains.com, my focus has always been on the end-user. Not much is being done in the domain industry to educate the wider world about the potential of domain names. This leaves people to believe what they hear, in the absence of compelling facts. And, most likely, they will hear that domainers are all squatters.

With eBusinessDomains.com I have always focused on having a design, setup, articles and supporting sites that will provide some sort of instant education for any newbies or clueless end-users that may just happen to reach eBusinessDomains.com.

I have been preparing this site to present it to end-users from all sectors. The key thing is to let the website do the talking.

I am a bit mindful about how I present my domaining business to end-users. The very first time I heard about domain names was in business meting many years ago, when someone somehow started talking about the domain squatters who registered the domain names of major companies, and then proceeded to contact these companies demanding exorbitant prices for the domains.

I believe that even today, even if a domainer contacts a company regarding the most generic of domain names, he will be seen as some form of squatter. In business, image and presentation is absolutely important.

This is something that the loud mouth domain “superstars” don’t seem to get. Here in London you see billboards advertising all sorts of conferences and tradeshows - religious, property, cars, guns, aeroplanes, you name it. Why is that not one of these domain conference organisers could ever muster the confidence to market the domain industry in business magazines, newspapers, billboards etc.?

So, what I’m trying to say is that these domain musings were about domainers and were for the most part, written for a domaining audience.

From a business perspective, that is wrong, and it has to change, NOW. As we prepare to enter a new year, and a new season, it is time to focus solely on efforts that will pull the attention of non-domainers and end-users. It’s time to engage the wider world. It’s time to take domaining to end-users.

As I have said, I have been focusing on getting eBusinessDomains.com ready for the end-user spotlight. I will be advertising in business magazines, newspapers, and all outlets where I can be assured to get the eyeballs of CEO’s, business executives, business leaders, brand specialists  and entrepreneurs.

Now we can confidently take this step. eBusinessDomains.com now has the inventory. With over 500,000 quality aftermarket domain names, I am now confident that we have a domain name for every business sector and industry.

So, with immediate effect, I will be tuning out the domainer noise, and turning up the volume from the business world. I will not be blogging about domainers, to domainers, or even be mindful if domainers understand what I’m blogging about.

My focus will now be solely on educating the business world about how to use domains to enhance their business and to share any news that will help draw end-users to the ebusiness domaining world.

By the way, those trigger-happy domaining aggregators better get ready to censor my blog posts, as a few of them will have nothing to do with domaining. I’m well aware of their zeal to censor my posts more than anyone else’s, and as I normally don’t get a reply, don’t expect another email from me asking why. As a matter of fact, I won’t even be taking notice, as I no longer visit certain websites. Funny enough, the excessive and biased consorship inspired a lot of positive marketing initiatives here at eBusinessDomains.com. So in the end you did me a favor. Not having thin skin or anything, but while I’m on it, I did accidentally notice that I’m no longer being followed on Twitter. Hmmm. We are competitors, but come on now. Anyway, enough of that politics. Don’t worry if you as the reader is a bit confused .

So, unless you are an entrepreneur interested in advancing your ebusiness, then you may not find my future posts useful. After all, domainers are all about stats and minisites, and you should by now know where I stand with those.

It’s time to mix business blogging, Internet marketing, SEO and all thing ebusiness with domains.

Have a great weekend!

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Greetings!

It is Saturday again!! A cold and wet day here in London, but the parties must go on .

Earlier in the week we heard the news of a minisite service provider closing shop. Well I’m not in any celebratory mood, though many of you may think that I would have reasons to be, neither am I in any “I told you so” mood.

I tried my best not to follow the tide by focusing on mini sites this week, but I guess the currents were too strong.

I personally only started reading domain blogs after I launched this one here at eBuinessDomains.com in September last year. And well, thank God I didn’t, because somehow, even till this day, I believe you read more nonsense than anything else. I will leave it up to you to judge my blog. The ignorance surrounding web development is no exception.

Lose the Mini Site Mentality
The domain industry is the industry in which we say “its all in the name”. Sadly when it comes to web development, domainers got it wrong.

With mini sites, the term alone creates a psychological death to the business model. Why “mini”? If we say that content is king, why do we focus on keeping these sites “mini”?

Another mistake that domainers made was to refer to the development of websites as domain development. That again, creates some sort of mental block to whatever success that could be acheived.

I won’t waste time expanding on the above, as most people would still not get it even after 10,000 words.

The Problems With Mini Sites
Mini sites themselves are not the problem. It’s like the Internet. Some people use the Internet to conduct business, stay in touch with friends and do online banking, while some use it to commit fraud, watch porn and incite hatred. The problem is not the thing, but rather how one goes about using it.

Where domainers are concerned, their business concept/model where mini sites are concerned is severely flawed. Well, in my opinion, that’s not even the case, as most domainers developing mini sites don’t even have a business plan as such.

Problem Number One – Mini Sites CANNOT Be A Replacement Model for Domain Parking
Domainers are trying to use mini sites to replace the domain parking model. Over the past three weeks I wrote a series on the domain parking model. You can click to read Parts One, Two and Three.

Domain parking is a numbers game. The more domains you have, the more money you could make, potentially. Domain parking is a set and a forget technology. Simply register the domain, park it and make money.

With web development, it is not a numbers game. It is a game of passion, persistence, determination, resilience, creativity, originality, and the list goes on.

You would not have passion and determination with mini sites. If a domainer makes an attempt at a mini site today and it fails, he would simply move on to the next. where is the passion or determination for success? However, if you were building a brand, you would have a more die-hard attitude to ensure that the one project succeeds, no matter what.

Websites, just like children, need tender loving care. If you wouldn’t be able to raise 10 kids, then you wouldn’t be able to develop and manage 10 websites unless you are running a fully resourced media company.

Problem Number Two – Enslavement to Domain Parking Mentality
Almost all of the problems will stem from the fact that domainers are enslaved to the domain parking mentality (model).

So, problem number two is their addiction to stats. Almost every time you see a domainer discussing mini sites, they spend more time quoting those little useless stats. They will say, oh, the domain is the exact match of X term that gets X amount of searches in Google.

No one is entitled to organic search traffic. No one. And as such, no matter what tricks you try, organic search traffic is never guaranteed. If you are depending on organic search traffic for success, then you have effectively thrown yourself at the mercies of something that you have no control over. Your business plan is flawed, as you have zero control over any form of success.

Problem Number Three – Lack of Business Acumen
Domainers who develop mini sites based on stats are not businesspersons. This is the clearest sign that they have no business acumen.

In business, you need to have control, over everything. You need to have control over the direction your business takes, the revenues, the costs, the growth, etc., etc.

Building a mini site and inserting a few Google Adsense spots is not taking control. If don’t see yourself advertising and actively promoting your business then you are simply trying to feed a dead cat.

Also, If you decide to grow traffic through advertising, what would you be advertising? What would you be selling? Google Adsense? If Google closes your account, the only thing that would be left standing is a bunch of senseless articles. The World Wide Web doesn’t need another mini site. It needs another web destination.

Problem Number Four – Domainers Don’t How To Monetize Websites Beyond PPC
Domainers notoriously have a lack of confidence. I am amazed at how people spend so much time, and money to build websites that will make them an average of $2 per month. Why, why, why? God only knows.

What is so funny is how they go around shouting and dancing when their revenues increase from $1.50 a month to $1.75. I really don’t get it. A typical example would be a blogger writing a post regarding one of their mini sites. If you are lucky he will admit that revenue is jut at $1.75; then you get a whole bunch of idiots saying things like:

”Wow, the site is looking good!”
”Thanks for sharing, you are genius.”
”How did you manage to increase your revenue from $1.50 to $1.75 in just 30 days?”

One word: Pathetic!

Don’t they realise that one single website can earn them as much as $2 million, or even $20 million a month, if it is branded properly? Focus on the big picture.

Problem Number Five  - Content is Not King, Passion is
I read earlier this week where a blogger was criticising a mini site service provider for the “poor content” (article) and the lack of promotion of the mini site after it was created.

I was just laughing. That is where the mistake is, where domainers expect a set and forget auto-pilot road to riches from mini site providers. Well, to be fair, some of these mini site service providers are pretending to provide these services in a bid to fleece ignorant domainers out of their monies. So they should take some of the blame. The reality is, there can be no automated roads to riches with web development.

If you are developing a website and you can’t write the content yourself, then you will have serious problems. That is why you should not focus on the volume of content, but rather your passion for the subject or niche. If you are passionate about a topic, it will be only natural for you to write compelling content.

Website visitors are not stupid. They will become your biggest fans when they see that you have a passion for the subject matter.

A web designer or developer should only provide the website. If you are not prepared to maintain the website, add content regular and actively promote the website then you are better off applying for a job at McDonalds.

I could go on, and on, and on. However here are a few other articles that you might find interesting (most recent first):

Domain Development - What Will You Build Today?

Mini Sites - Domains Dressed For Success?

Domain Development: How to Make Money From Your Website

The Art of Domain Development

With that been said, we will be launching our own web development services in the near future. We will share more on that in due course.

Have a great weekend!

Need an affordable premium domain for your eBusiness?
Choose from over 500,000 quality aftermarket domains at eBusinessDomains.com!
Simply enter your keyword and click search in the Domain Search Box.
Instant domain transfer with most domains!

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Over the past few weeks I have been analysing the domain parking model in these domainer musings posts, in a bid to illustrate why so many domainers are hooked in domain parking land.

This series was inspired by a seemingly unwillingness of the masses to accept that domain parking and web development are two extremely different models.

Anyway, you can click to read Part One and Part Two. I am writing these posts solely from my point of view, so please do not accept anything as fact.

Last week I touched a bit on Arbitrage in the domain space. Domainers profited heavily from arbitrage by buying cheap traffic and selling it at a higher price. They would open up PPC campaigns with cheap search engines, send the traffic to parked domains serving ads from the likes of Google and Yahoo who would normally compensate the domainer with higher Revenue Per Clicks.

Some took it a bit further by buying traffic on cheap keywords, only to send the said traffic to landing pages populated with ads for unrelated but more financially rewarding keywords.

To understand the potential of this form of arbitrage (domain) you have to realise the more traffic you bought, the more money you could make, you could use unlimited domains and use just about any domain name despite the quality and/or domain extension.

This was happening in the heyday of domain drops, when all domain registrars were still dropping great domains. So for many domainers, they were in the right place, at the right time.

If any thing can be said about the domain industry is that domainers will do whatever makes them money, for as long as they can. One such act is the registration and selling/parking of typo and trademark domains.

Now in the case of arbitrage, it was a licence to print money for many. The more money they made, the more domains they acquired, and the more traffic they bought. It also meant that more and more domainers were getting in on the action.

Now, to understand where I’m going with this, the only thing you have to do is to look at arbitrage from the advertisers point of view. Then everything else will become clear.

Imagine what would happen when advertisers realise that they are spending the bulk of their search marketing dollars buying “recycled” traffic? It is recycled in the sense that it is not original. The domainer bought it from a cheaper search engine and then sold it to them via Google, Yahoo etc.

The key thing here is that the advertiser would ask is, why buy recycled traffic, when I can go straight to the cheaper source?

The other thing as well is that if a domainer buys traffic for “horse shoes” (keyword) and sells it to an advertiser marketing their mortgage products, then chances are, that traffic will be useless. Useless traffic in this case would simply be a waste of money to the advertiser, but enrichment to the domainer. Getting the picture?

If advertisers had no way of guaranteeing the quality of traffic, and/or continued to receive less value for money, then they would abandon search marketing and advertise elsewhere.

This could render search marketing as an unreliable advertising channel. This would not be good for Google and Yahoo.

As for Google and Yahoo, there were 2 main threats.

Firstly, if advertisers discovered the cheaper source of traffic, then Google and Yahoo would lose money.

The other threat is that if search market is compromised by arbitrage, then the main source of income for Google and Yahoo would become very uncertain.

So, the plug was pulled, and tighter search marketing rules were introduced. These include the rules where advertisers can only purchase ads for keywords relevant to their sites, the destination of the ad has to be domain shown in the ad, and well of course arbitrage was outlawed.

An email I receive from Yahoo earlier this week was of perfect timing. The email was regarding a Notice of Class Action Settlement. This email which you can read here (PDF) will help to legitimise my opinion that arbitrage posed a very severe threat not only to domain parking, but also to search marketing as a whole.

As I have taken the time to provide a copy of the email in PDF, I won’t be describing or discussing the email. It is fairly easy for the average mind to understand it.

However, for the purpose of this article, here is a quote:

”This class action was brought in 2006 by several Yahoo! pay-per-click search advertising customers. They allege that customers contracted for targeted ad placements through two products, “Sponsored Search” and “Content Match” (and predecessor products provided by Overture Services, Inc. and GoTo.com, Inc.) and that Yahoo! breached its contract with its customers by allowing Yahoo! ads to be displayed in spyware, domain name parking sites (also known as bulk registration sites), pop-ups, pop-unders, and typosquatting sites. Plaintiffs brought claims for breach of contract, unjust enrichment, misrepresentation, civil conspiracy, and unfair business practices.”

In a nutshell, what you need to get here is that regardless of all the domaining trumpets and megaphones been blown and sounded, domaining is still viewed as shady business by the masses.

As a matter of fact, the only people that seem to have respect for domaining are domainers themselves. Yes, we have had the million dollar sales, lavish conferences, a robust domain aftermarket and a few respectable players, but at the end of the day, the domain industry’s reputation is still far being credible and acceptable to many.

So a lot of advertisers would squeal at the idea of their ads showing up on parked pages. As per the Yahoo Notice of Class Action Settlement email, advertisers seem to have a general mistrust of the domain space.

I am going to end here. Would love to hear your thoughts.

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Simply enter your keyword and click search in the Domain Search Box.
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At the time of reading this it should be Saturday again!!

At the time of writing, it’s Tuesday night. I am quickly writing a post to be auto-published for this week’s domain musings as I have an all-week conference to attend that will also last all weekend.

So these are not necessarily musings, but rather a follow-up on last week’s post.

Domain Parking
Last week I presented a simple illustration as to how one could easily generate serious revenues via domain parking. Domain parking perhaps, is single-handedly responsible for the survival and growth of the domain industry.

Domain parking gave the domain aftermarket a lifeline, by providing the basis on which a lot of domains got traded between domainers. Very few domains are sold to end-users based on their branding potential. This means that the bulk of domains are sold based on their domain parking earnings potential.

In some cases, domains were been sold for as much as 6 times their annual domain parking revenue.

I am going to present 2 scenarios here. Firstly I will look into the reasons why selling domains based on domain parking revenues makes sense, and then the reason why it is just risky business.

Selling Domains Based on PPC Revenue
What makes the domain name extremely attractive is that for successful investors, it is normally a case of a very low initial outlay (start up capital) producing massive returns.

With domains, you earn money by parking them and/or selling them. Now if a domain name makes $0.20 (20 cents) a day, it would be an average of $6 per month, $72 per year in revenue.

If you were buying the domain name at 6 times yearly revenue, then the selling price would be $432.

Now paying for 6 years worth of revenue means that you would have to wait 6 years to recoup your investment. However, if you then sell the domain name after a year, you can recoup your original investment easily. How?

Well you would collect $72 in the first year in domain parking revenues. If you sell the domain name on the same terms of 6 years’ revenue for $432, then you your profit would be $72.

If you are good at selling domains, then you might even earn more by adding a value for the domain branding potential.

The Risks of The Domain Parking Model
However, when I came across this method of domaining, alarm bells went off immediately. IMMEDIATELY.

This is high-risk investment. Seriously. How do you guarantee that the traffic stats are genuine and that the domain will maintain that level of earnings? Traffic can be easily faked. Click fraud was predominant a few years ago (and still is).

So almost nothing was credible when it comes to domain stats.. A lot of people tried to overcome this by asking the seller to give them a chance to test the domain on their servers/domain parking accounts. As a seller, this is something that I would never do. Waste of time.

Now, if the traffic was genuine, how do I guarantee that the traffic will remain high? This is where the source of the traffic becomes extremely important.

If the traffic is generated from back-links, then the links could be removed by the website owners as soon as they realise that the previous website no longer exists.

If the traffic is from search engines that had indexed the pages of the previous website, then the search engines will drop the pages as soon as they realise that the domain name is now parked.

The only domain name that would stand the test of time are those that users type directly into the browser. Domainers refer to this process as direct navigation. Personally, I have never bought into this direct navigation theory. I think it was just a term and theory invented by domainers to add value to domains.

Yes, I do believe domains like shoes.com would get natural type-in traffic. But anyone selling a domain like shoes.com based on its type-in traffic would be leaving lots of money on the table. Such names should be sold based on their branding potential and the credibility that they could offer to the end-user.

There are quite a few other reasons why I don’t sell or buy domains based on the domain parking model. I like to have a degree of control over my businesses. I like flexibility and the ability to introduce creativity and originality. Domain parking notoriously lacks any degree of transparency.

No man can serve 2 masters. Either you choose the “lazy” life of domain parking by choosing to become obsessed with stats or you use your intelligence, or common sense rather,  to market domains based on their branding power.

Now that domain  parking revenues have taken a nose-dive, the whole domain industry is scrambling to find end-users. But guess what? Most of the domainers hold crappy domains. They weren’t focusing on quality, but quantity. Thanks to domain parking.

Arbitrage
This is getting a bit long, after just 5 minutes of typing. However, let me mention arbitrage quickly.

A lot of domain investors who invested in domains based on their domain parking revenues did not mind paying 6 years revenue, as they could pump unlimited revenues out of the domain name through what is called arbitrage.

Arbitrage, in a nutshell exists in every form of business. However in the domain space, this is where one would buys cheap traffic and resell it at a higher price.

So, for example, someone would open a PPC campaign with a smaller search engine, buy the traffic for let’s say $0.10 per click and sell it for anywhere between $0.50 and $3. They would send the PPC traffic to their domain parking page.

This is how a lot of domain investors managed to amass large domain portfolios in a very short period of time.

However arbitrage is now outlawed in domain parking. People still do it, but if caught their domain parking accounts would be terminated.

Arbitrage had to go. Arbitrage in the domain space posed a very, very severe threat to the existence of not only domain parking, but to search marketing as a whole! I will expand on the dangers of arbitrage next time.

Have a great weekend!!

Need an affordable premium domain for your eBusiness?
Choose from over 500,000 quality aftermarket domains at eBusinessDomains.com!
Simply enter your keyword and click search in the Domain Search Box.
Instant domain transfer with most domains!

Domains | Domain Auctions | Premium Domains | Domain Newsletter | Domain Forum | Skull

There seem to be two sets of minds operating in the domain industry: those who get the concept of branding, and those who flatly refused to be weaned from domain parking.

Those who get branding are normally the ones who understand the importance of quality domain names, and possess the wisdom of choosing quality over quantity when doing domain investments.

I have been preaching the gospels of quality domains and branding form day one. But lets look at the reason why some domainers will never get it, or flatly refuse to accept it.

Domain parking provided a lot o people with a bottomless revenue source in its heyday. Lets look at some numbers.

Let’s say you had a $10,000 credit card, or better yet, that amount of money at your disposal for domain investing.

At the average $10 cost per domain registration, you could pick up 1,000 domains. Lets say you did the research and employ the right tools and resources to acquire domains that do get a bit of traffic.

Let’s further assume that this traffic was sufficient enough to earn you $6 per month per domain name, an average of $0.20 per day, per domain.

With 1,000 domains, that would be $6,000 in revenue each month, or $72,000 annually. Are you excited yet? You should be.

Remember that you are only earning 20 cents from each domain name on a daily basis. Pay attention. With $6,000 in monthly revenue, you have almost earned all of the monies invested in the very first month. You can repay your credit card fully after just 2 months.

That would be 720% annual return ($72,000 on a $10,000 investment).

Stocks hardly do that, and the banks couldn’t match that. Even real estate would struggle to come close.

Now if you were smart, you would reinvest part or all of your earnings into more traffic domains.

This is going to get complex now.

Lets say you reinvested 50% of your earnings each month.

Month One - 1000 domains  =  $6000 revenue

Month Two – 1,000 + 300 domains x $6 = $7,800
(300 domains = $6,000 revenue x 50% = $3,000 divided by $10 registration  fee = 300 domains)

I won’t bore you, but if you do the maths, you should get something similar to what the following table illustrates:

Please be aware that these are just assumptions, and there is a degree of impracticality in that domain parking revenues are not paid out until the middle of the following month, and domain research does take time.

At the end of the first year, you would have accumulated 17,922 domain names costing $179,216 in domain registration fees.

You would have earned  $445,962 in domain parking revenues by the end of the year, which would result in a profit of $266,746, before any interest and taxes.

That is based on the following:
- An initial investment of $10,000
- An estimated $6 monthly domain parking revenue
- An assumption that 50% of each month’s revenue is reinvested immediately to acquire new domains at the basic $10 registration fee
- An assumption that each new domain name acquired earns the same average amount in domain parking revenues ($6 per month or 20 cents per day)

Either you are excited or you are confused. The reality is, it is possible. But in order to consistently earn an average of $6 each month in domain parking revenues, you have to acquire the “right” domains.

The “right” domains are those with the right keywords, search volumes and Cost Per Click (advertiser) or Revenue Per Click (domain owner).

To obtain the right domains, you need to fully understand statistics, know how to research keywords and be able to decipher search statistics and analytics.

You wouldn’t need to focus on domain quality and branding potential. You would only need to focus on domains with traffic (by analysing stats) and the more traffic domains you have, the more money you earn.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the reason why so many domainers focus on quantity instead of quality and fail so miserably in grasping the concept of branding.

With the above illustrations, you could avoid the complicity by simply investing $100, 000 in new domain registrations. If each domain name earns an average of $6, then you will earn $60,000 per month.

That would be annual revenue of $720,000, and at $100,000 in annual expenditure (domain registration initially, and subsequent yearly renewals); your annual profit would be $620,000 in profits before any interest and taxes.

You would collect $620,000 yearly by living the lazy life. Hmmm. Not bad, is it? And to think that you wouldn’t even have to sell a single domain name!

That’s how the “legends” could famously declare that they don’t sell domains.

I could go even further and complicate things a bit more by adding arbitrage to the calculations and assumptions, but I will save that for another day.

Oh how things have changed, eh?

I may write a part 2 to this blog post. However, without an explanation, I would advise you not to base your domain investments on speculations of what your domain parking revenues will be.

Have a great weekend!!

Need an affordable premium domain for your eBusiness?
Choose from over 500,000 quality aftermarket domains at eBusinessDomains.com!
Simply enter your keyword and click search in the Domain Search Box.
Instant domain transfer with most domains!

Domains | Domain Auctions | Premium Domains | Domain Newsletter | Domain Forum | Skull