Posts Tagged ‘Domain name’

Domainers are getting more inventive with their marketing, but strangely, their inventiveness uses old technology, like the mail service in order to get their message across.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve received two postcards and a letter offering me the opportunity to invest in different domain names.

So far, the domains in question have all been what are usually referred to as “brandables”. In domainer terms, this means names that someone has made up and registered in the hope that somebody else comes along with a product or service marketing idea to fit the name.

Personally, I call names like that “lottery tickets” – and the chances of winning with that approach are probably just as good – around 14 million to 1 against!

I hope that the person sending me the invitation today doesn’t mind me showing the card he sent, maybe a reader will take an interest and give him his $45,000 discounted asking price. We all live in hope for those kinds of breaks. Anyway, purely because it was interesting to get a few of these, I thought I’d share this one with you. I even linked to the site out of fairness.

The postcard is quite good actually and came printed on both sides, so here’s a domainer who’s at least willing to invest some money in their name – that in itself is unusual in this sector.

I suppose there is some benefit in identifying a potential market for the name. Personally, I’m not sure I’d try and limit it to Apple’s Touchpad market place. Just because 300,000 of those sold on the release day, doesn’t suddenly equate to a name with the word “pad” in it being worth $45,000 in my mind.

Could there be other uses for a name like this? What about in the bedding industry? They have more use for feathers and mattress toppers and the like are sometimes called pads (or could be).

When this type of material lands on my doormat, it’s usually confined straight to the bin. It’s of no interest – I’m a domainer and marketer of services on-line.

As such, I’m not interested in speculative approaches for second rate domain names. Or top quality ones for that matter.

And this is why this type of marketing is doomed for most domainers. It’s not about how fancy the marketing material is, it’s about targeting the right audience for it.

I’ve tried selling some superb quality names to domainers in the past and almost without exception, they never want to pay the asking price. Because they’ve been in the market for a while, they expect a “wholesale price”. What the hell is that on a one-off domain name? A name is either worth the price or it’s not, but the only people who can tell you, are the end users of that domain name.

In this particular case, I wonder what type of company (especially in the high-tech field), would respond the this approach. Surely, if they were developing a product to compete with Apple, they’d already have a name. They’d have a big marketing department and a massive advertising budget. Would they then throw everything away to start again and rename their new product the “Featherpad”, just because somebody else thought of the name first?

It’s one of the reasons why I only buy generic, keyword-rich names that have a definite end user market. In most cases, those names are for my own development into revenue streams. It just seems a safer and less speculative approach for me – I’m pretty risk-averse if the truth be told. I’m beginning to recognise and embrace the fears I have about failure, but to all those involved in registering and marketing “brandables”, good luck.

For a number of years now, I’ve been a user and fan of XSitePro.

The program is a domainer’s dream and could have been made specifically with domainers in mind. It was certainly built with the affiliate marketer in mind and that’s it’s real strength.

Using the in-built templates, it takes just a few minutes to get the skeleton of a web site up and running with XSitePro and adding content isn’t that difficult if you can use the copy and paste function on your keyboard.

The real attraction for me though, was the ease of adding affiliate links and Adsense to any site or any page on a site with the click of a button, Xsitepro storing affiliate links and banners with ease, for re-use again and again.

But times are moving on and although the team behind XsitePro are doing their best to keep up, I think there are now better options for the domainer, whose main job these days is to keep content fresh and appealing.

For that reason, I started developing my new sites with WordPress around last summer.

At first, I thought it was a bit daunting and also mistakenly believed that WordPress sites had to be blogs.

The biggest thing to put me off was that it looked incredibly difficult to get a WordPress site to look anything like what I thought it should look like. That’s when I discovered a program called Artisteer, which offers virtually limitless possibilities design-wise and is so easy to use.

Best of all, you can also use Artisteer to create templates for other content management systems and blogs like Drupal, Blogger and normal HTML sites.

Now I can get a site up and running using WordPress as I can using XsitePro.

The main advantage in using WordPress is that it allows me to add, edit or delete content from a web browser, meaning tat I don’t have to be sat at my own computer.

The number of plugins that extend the basic WordPress functionality is incredible and I already have a strong list of favourites that I include on every installation.

It was only recently that I discovered WordPress MU, which allows multiple WordPress sites, each with their own theme or layout, to be run from a single WordPress installation. I haven’t tried it yet, because I wasn’t sure about the SEO implications of doing so, but I’m pretty sure that it’s only the database and the physical server that have to be common, the IP addresses can be unique, at least I think that’s right!

In any event, WordPress has now taken over as my favoured development tool. The published result just looks sleeker and more professional than those I made using XSitePro.

As far as adding affiliate links and Adsense code, that’s easy too – there are plugins that enable you to do all of that.

The other difference between WordPress and XSitePro is that WordPress is free and so are many of the plugins.

Personally, I like to make a contribution for the plugins I like and use a lot because it keeps the whole development process going.

So all said and done, which is the better development tool for a domainer?

It’s an easy choice for me. I like XSitePro, but WordPress wins hands-down for its overall flexibility. It’s a little more difficult to get to understand initially, but there are plenty of places to get support, including the excellent forums.

Selling domain names from your portfolio always creates mixed emotions.

I only sell a few each year since my business is development not domain flipping.

But, last month I sold TaxRebate.co.uk to an end user.

Having spoken with him on the phone, I could tell that this guy totally “gets it” when it comes to marketing his business.

The service he offers is based around getting people tax rebates here in the UK. It’s a nice niche market and, if you catch the right visitor on the right day, there’s a quite a bit of money to be made.

Take a visitor to a domain name like “taxrebate.co.uk” and you’ll make money easier than if you’re using “Bob’sTaxAccountancyFirm.co.uk”.

Well, today I took a look at the new site and I must say, that there are things on there  that I wouldn’t have considered.

My blinkered vision only saw income tax rebates.

I’m delighted to see things on there like council tax rebates (a hot issue) and something I’ve never heard of, “mechanics tax rebates”.

When my buyer suggested to his friends that he was going to buy the name, they all told him that he’d be mad to spend the kind of money I was asking and that it wasn’t worth anywhere near the price.

Well, after seeing what he’s doing with it, I’d say it was a bargain and I hope he goes on to make a fortune – especially since I originally bought the name a few years ago on behalf of a tax rebate specialist who’d asked me to do some SEO stuff for him.

I wonder how he’ll feel when he sees that his business will be wiped out by taxrebate.co.uk?

Those amongst you who have similar names, please don’t take this post as your invitation to make offers to my buyer. Instead, look at the opportunity for introducers instead.

I do like people who get it.