NYC Domainer’s Blog

Interesting article from NYtimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/technology/10privacy.html

Another interesting article about web advertising.

Interesting article about weather.com

This Petition comes from Domainnews.com

If this bill passes we are all in some serious trouble. Please be so kind and sign the petition.

Also if you have not done so yet, please join the ICA

As the day comes to a close there seems to be a lot of talk about what should domain owners do with their portfolios. IMO I believe that each domain owner should take a long hard look at what they have and decide where the money really is. Sure you can park your domain at one of the many parking sites, and earn 5 or even 10 cents a click, but are you really monetizing your investment to the fullest potential?

I feel that to get the most out of your investment is to develop. As the saying goes from the classic movie Field of Dreams, “If you build it they will come”, that is web visitors. You are not looking for that one time visitor who comes and hopefully clicks on a link to earn you money, but the returning visitor who comes to the site over and over, and finds the content on your site relevant to what he/she is looking for.

As recent articles describe PPC revenue is down and I feel that it will just continue to go down over the next year. Sure some of us have had great years, but all good things must come to an end.

With that said, sure it costs money in the beginning to develop a site and to go through the steps of making that site look just the way you want, but I feel that domain owners will get a new sense of appreciation for those prize domains that they own. Plus, again IMO, going through the steps of developing and then seeing the end product can push the industry into a whole new level.

So lets think about it this way, lets say you have a domain that is parked, and sees a couple of sense a day, which to some of us is great. Now take it a step further, and you have a developed site which makes say $5-$10/day and attracts returning visitors. To me this is a no brainer.

Now lets talk about resell value, if you can show that you have a loyal base of customers, the resell potential can be enormous,. compared to a parked site. One great example of this is the website hotornot.com. This site is perfect, I remember looking at this site about 5 years ago and thinking, wow this is a cool site you get to check out some hot women and rate them. Lets be honest does anyone really care what you rate these women? Probably not, but they have such a huge loyal following that advertising on this site was incredible. Now I haven’t looked at this site in years until a couple of weeks ago when I read that it sold for $20 million, that is unbelievable. A site that just rates people. No that wasn’t it it’s a site with a loyal subscribition base that was bought. The advertising potetional of this site is huge. Another great example of this is perezhilton.com, a site dedicated to Hollywood gossip, from what I read he rakes in about $800,000 a year in advertising revenue, and for what someone who basically has a blog about gossip. Again returning visitors.

Well I think I have ranted long enough, what do you think?

So as I left off yesterday, I am was in the process of explaining how I narrowed it down to 3 service providers. The three I decided to choose were based on how responsive they were with questions I had, and the answers that they gave, and of course the price they gave for development. The choices were a firm from France, a firm from Russia, and another firm from Texas. I really liked the firm from Russia, they were very professional, and sent me a business plan with all the steps outlined during the development of the site. The one from France, would not do that and also they were not experienced with SEO, which took them out if the race. So ultimately the firm that I decided to go with was the firm from Texas. The reason I decided to go with this firm was they were extremely responsive to all questions I had, and they offered to lower their initial bid price to fit my budget.

So now that I picked a service provider for my project, it was time to put together a set of milestones set for the project. With using Elance, you are able to document all communications regarding milestones, payments, and anything else that has to do with the project, which is something I really like, so neither me nor the service provider can go back on what we agreed on.

As the first milestones approach I am starting to see some progress, as soon as I have a first round draft of the site I will post it.

This week I am going to start writing about my adventure into a website that I have in development. Let me first explain why I decided to pick this domain in the first place. The domain I am talking about is an airport parking site. Sure sounds like a nothing domain, and believe me I thought it was too, but then I placed it at Sedo and within the first month I was able to get about 906 unique and 537 clicks, not bad!! And it made me some money. Finally, I thought, a domain that has the potential to make some money. Now the next think I had to do was to decide how I was going to develop this “Gem” of a site I have. I starting looking at other site with similar concepts, and some I found to be real borrowing with not much appeal and others I found to be exactly what I wanted. So after looking at these sites I knew what I did and did not want my site to include.

The next thing was how to find a developer/web designer to help me put my plan into effect. I first called on a friend who is a web developer for a big cable network that I knew did some freelance work. So I gave him a buzz and asked for a quick quote. To my surprise his quote was not even in the ballpark of what I was looking for, maybe I was kidding myself about how much I can develop this site for. Trying to tell him politely that he wasn’t in the same area I was thinking, I decided to see what else was out there.

After researching some more on other domainer blog sites, I came across a company called Elance.com. A little skeptical about outsourcing a project to place like India, and Russia, I decided to post my project up and see what happens. Now this was actually really easy to do, create a login and then post a description of what you are looking for. Once this is done you post it and you start receiving bids. Well within minutes I had bids flowing in. Looking at the bids you can see that they were very generic responses, such as we have looked at what you want and we can do it. So after looking through about 12 bids I was able to narrow it down to 3 companies that I felt had what I was looking for. One nice thing about elance, is that you can look at the companies portfolios and see feedback from other clients who have worked with each company.

I think that is enough info for now. Will write some more later.

Interesting article regarding Domain name Wikileaks.org

Hello and welcome..

I figured everyone else has a blog about domaining and their success and failures throughout the year that I figured what the hell. I am going to try to write about things that are going on in the industry, and about the development of one of my sites that I just started. So sit back and enjoy, and please all comments are welcomed.

NYCDomainer