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We have just starting to
review Revenue Direct and WhyPark and will provide
more information when we see how they do over time.
Revenue Direct is a division of the registrar Dotster which has a long
history as a discount registrar, dating back to the era when Network Solutions
dominated the industry. They report that their new custom lander service "gives
you the flexibility to customize and add content to your landing pages quickly
and easily". I've found this to be true. They do allow a choice of one-click or two-click
landers, suggesting that Google, rather than Yahoo, is the primary feed
provider. An investment of a few minutes created the following
landers:
WhyPark is a little different. They advertise themselves as
an alternative to parking services. They will create sites full of content and
allow you to place your own ads on the site. We are just checking out their
services - but they appear to be a good flexible alternative to domain parking -
less trouble than fully developing your domains, but with much more potential
than single-page parking services. Why Park started life as a site called
"AdSenseReady.com" which sold a set of templates that you could use with AdSense
ads. Google has begun to crack down on "made for adsense" sites, and the new
Why Park system allows you to create useful sites with real content. It also
provides the hosting for you.
For around $100 you can create full-blown
content-filled sites for 100 of your domains, and keep all of the ad revenue.
Their templates are becoming more flexible and more attractive as the system
matures, and they offer custiomization options and built-in Google site map
creation. Examples include
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Learn Domaining face-to-face - If you are new to domain names, or if
you know someone who is you may want to consider learning about domains in a
small group setting. Joel Gilgoff is offering the opportunity to do this in
Sedona, Arizona on Saturday July 21. With
the real estate market in the doldrums and having been burnt in the stock market
during the tech stock crash of 2000, Joel looked for a new more controllable
investment vehicle. A few years ago a friend of his introduced him to the
business of buying, monetizing and selling domain names.
Through much reading and lots of
trial and error he learned how to buy names, including expired domain names with
traffic, monetize his portfolio of names and how to sell off some of the
portfolio and increase the income of those domains that he chose to keep in his
portfolio.
As a result of this experience he
designed a class to teach anyone how to find names that have both income
potential and sales potential, how to buy them, where to register them. How to
make money with the names that you purchase and how to sell the ones that you no
longer want to own (including how to price the names you chose to sell).
According to Joel, You will learn which domain registrars have the best prices,
the best management software, and the best lists of expired domain names
available for purchase. He will also teach how to use Domain Research Tool (DRT) to
maximize your future income potential.
His class will be limited to just
12 people to will allow each individual to get the maximum class benefit. The
class fee is $995. For a class outline and signup form please see his website at
www.DomainClasses.info.
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News from the
Parking Services - June saw a record-setting TRAFFIC auction with
some high domain prices, such as Seniors.com selling for 1.8 million dollars. It
also saw Yahoo implementing their own version of "traffic quality" throughout
their system. Several Yahoo-based services sent statements such as the following
to domainers:
Quality-based pricing is designed to adjust advertiser
pricing based on the quality of traffic coming from our distribution network.
Traffic is intended to be priced in a manner that is consistent with the quality
delivered to advertisers, based on conversion rates and other proprietary
factors.
Under this new system, the traffic that you drive to the
advertiser will be priced commensurate with the value that advertisers receive,
i.e., clients with superior traffic quality should receive higher CPC rates than
those with lower traffic quality. This calculation will be conducted on a daily
basis and verified traffic and revenue data will be accurately updated during
our nightly sync-up with our upstream provider.
We were also promised a number that would tell us our
traffic quality, but these numbers never materialized. That said, income from
Yahoo-based services (TrafficZ, Parked, Active
Audience, GoldKey,
and probably Revenue Direct)
did not decrease, and actually increased for my domains.
The Australian domain company Fabulous has announced the pending
release of their new Fabulous Plus that includes a "dynamic generator" that
reportedly will allow you to change templates, color options, images and
keywords and create on-the-fly previews of domains that you customize using ajax
technology. Systems like this are great for the high-traffic domains in your
portfolio that get the most traffic, or earn the most income.
NameDrive is more than a
domain parking service. When the service first launched it
promoted a “Park & Sell”, concept which allowed domainers to park domains
and then receive offers to purchase the domains, but the number of buyers was
limited. Now
NameDrive
is opening up the Park & Sell
service to let any NameDrive member buy domains free-of-charge.
Sedo announced in June that it has purchased GreatDomains from
VeriSign. The official announcement was made at the SedoPro Partner Forum in New
York. Sedo will turn
GreatDomains into a premium domain auction site. A seven day premium domain
auction will be held each month, with the first auction taking place on July
19th. The commission for auction sales will be 10%, the same as on
Sedo.
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NameMedia Tips for Landing Pages - NameMedia, the parent company of
Active Audience and GoldKey, announced the
results of some of their extensive landing page split-testing at the June
TRAFFIC New York. These tests were performed on their own domains - presumably
domains for sale at BuyDomains.com. Some of their findings:
- Changing 6,000 domains from a generic
"shopping" theme to themes that are relevant to the category of the domain
resulted in a 16% increase in CTR
- Changing 1,000+ domains from single click
links alone to single clicks plus related links resulted in 19% higher
click-throughs.
- Adding a logo to a small group of domains
increased click-throughs by 2%.
- Landing pages colored blue had slightly higher
click-rates than other color themes.
-
Slightly larger fonts increased
click-throughs. Pages with 14pt and 12pt fonts has an 11% lift in clickthroughs
over pages with 12 and 11 point fonts.
-
Beware of adding content to landing pages -
especially if it gives people something else to click on. On an A/B test on select group of domains where 50% of
test are shown a content-rich results page and 50% are shown a plain
direct-to-results page, the CTR Was 77 percent higher on non-content results
page.
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The 95/5 Rule
of Domains - Most of you have probably heard of the "80/20 rule"
which suggests that 80 percent of your traffic probably goes to the top 20% of
your domains, while the other 80% of your domains get only 20% of the traffic
combined. For many domainers it is really more like a 95/5 rule (95 percent of
your traffic probably goes to the top 5% of your domains). Services like the
upcoming Fabulous dynamic generator are great for the 5% of your domains that
get a lot of traffic. DomainSponsor, Active Audience, GoldKey. Sedo, and
TrafficZ also have programs that will allow you to highly customize landing
pages – but the interfaces are sometimes cumbersome and difficult-to-use.
What do you do with the other 95%?
I recommend parking them at a service that creates polished pages and good stats
with little extra effort on your part. If the stats for some of the domains
start looking especially good, then you can put more effort into customizing the
landing page for that domain and maybe try it with a different service. I
personally use TrafficZ for this, and I set the page to default to Tiles | Black
or Website 2.0. They usually generate a great-looking site with appropriate
keywords and graphics with no input from me.
German Domain Get-Together - German domainers are planning a
September get-together in Hamburg. The event, DomainvermarkterForum 2007 (or
DF2007) will be held at the Courtyard by Marriott Hamburg Airport September
11-14. This is actually the third in their series which included an event in
Duesseldorf and an event in Munich. The fee ranges from 199 euros to 299 euros
depending on when you sign-up. Find more information at Domainvermarkterforum.de.
I will send this newsletter out
monthly or when there have been significant changes in the domain
name
monetization industry. An extra issue may be sent when there is a major change
in a service that warrants your immediate attention. Back issues are
available at NameMonetizer.com.
Leonard Holmes,
Ph.D.CEO, Healing Sites Network, LLC
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