Barack Obama/US Government: Best Domaining Portfolio?
I read these 2 posts a while back and I really enjoyed them but for some reason I just never got around to mentioning them. Aaron Wall from SEO Book makes some veeerrry interesting observations about Barack Obama’s use of domain names and the effect that it is having on certain niches in the SEO space. Highly recommended that you check them out:
Barack Obama Earns 2009 Domainer of the Year Award
The US Government is Getting into Domain Names (Cars.gov = Domaining on Steroids)
What kind of implications does this have for your domaining or domain development strategy?
Strong Domain + Niche Expertise = $$$
Are you an expert? Are you an expert in something? Anything? Chances are that many domainers are leaving money on the table by not putting their niche expertise to work.
What do I mean by “niche expertise”? It has been said that almost everyone has some area of specialized knowledge where they know more than the average person. Some areas of knowledge are more marketable (i.e. finance, law, health, etc.), others are more sexy (i.e. fashion, celebrity gossip, etc.), and some can be quite boring (i.e. plumbing, organizing, etc.). However, I would venture that almost every piece of niche expertise, if properly packaged, can result in a nice chunk of change.
If you are in a rut and can’t seem to get the recurring revenue that you are looking for or maybe you are just waiting for a new stroke of creative genius I would challenge you to get back to basics. Choose a subject that you know and know well and then launch a website on that topic.
Maybe you have a college degree in an area that you could come up with more than enough material to keep a blog or website busy churning out unique content. Maybe you work at a job or have worked at a job that has allowed you to gain a very specialized skill set. Why not put this knowledge to good use by helping provide quality information to people and make some money at the same time?
I would challenge you to these 3 steps:
1. Determine Your Area of Expertise
2. Register a Strong Domain Name (shoot for an Exact Match Keyword Domain if possible)
3. Develop the Website with the Goal of Publishing 2+ Pages of High Quality Content Daily
Even without heavy marketing you will be surprised at the type of traffic that your site will begin to get almost immediately. Why? With an exact match keyword domain then half of your battle is already won but one of the biggest benefits to being an expert is that you talk about things naturally in your articles in the exact way that many other people interested in that niche are in fact searching for them. If you are a plumber then mentioning plumbing lingo in your articles is second nature to you. That being the case guess who is going to start to rank almost immediately for those long tail low competition keywords that involve plumbing lingo? That’s right – you are.
There you have it. Find some great domain names using our tools and then put your niche expertise to work making you some money!
Afternic = Worst Interface Ever
UPDATE: Afternic was very proactive and quick to fix the below issue. I have recently found some very nice domains to buy at Afternic and in fact I just started the escrow process to buy one of them just a few moments ago. Nice job Afternic on quickly correcting a problem.
Afternic just relaunched and so I decided to check it out and start searching for some domain names to buy. A recent press release announced a “new and improved user interface” so I was quite unhappy to see that whoever designed their interface somehow thinks that I do not want to see the entire domain name but rather just the first 14 characters of the domain name followed by “…” and then the TLD!
Here is what I see when I use their advanced search feature and put in the keyword “insurance”, exclude dashes, exclude numbers, and select only the .com TLD:
Absolutely unbelievable. Apparently out of all of the data that they choose to present they think that the least important thing for me to see in its entirety is the actual domain name! What is sad is that the rest of their interface actually looks quite nice and well laid out but just by choosing to only show the first 14 characters of the domain name makes their interface the absolute worst that I have ever seen.
If I am missing a setting somewhere that allows me to show more than just the first 14 characters then I apologize because I do not see one. However, even if there is a setting to show more than the first 14 characters it is still pretty sad that this is the default option.
I am unsure why they would choose to display their results this way. My guess would be that maybe they are hoping to entice click throughs to the domain name but probably it is just a clueless developer that doesn’t ever bother to use the interface to search (or even fake search) for domain names in the first place.
Either way, this is not a criticism of Afternic or Name Media as a company because I actually really respect both of them and love their domain name platforms BUT letting something like this make it to public release is very unfortunate. Hopefully, they will fix it soon as they are no doubt losing a lot of interest in their domains when even people like me that have 3 30″ monitors have to mouse over the domains one by one just to even see what the domains are as if there is not enough room on my screen to display the most important piece of information (the domain!).
Google for Advertisers: Is Your Branding Better than “Pet Stick”?
I was just reading a post over on SmashingMagazine.com and I saw a Google AdSense image ad run BY Google directing people to check out their various “Google for Advertisers” services. Nothing unusual so far as Google often advertises using their own ad network. What was interesting to see was the creative way that Google used a “pet stick” case study to sell their services.
The ad reads, “What can Google do to help your advertising? Well, find out what we could do for a stick.”
Here is an image of the Google “pet stick” ad that also links off to their landing page:
The question is: in what ways can you bring some creativity to your domain development and website marketing efforts? Make a change. Get out of your rut. Look for ways to distinguish yourself from the competition.
In this particular marketing campaign by Google – do you like it? Do you think that it will be effective? If someone were to do a case study of one of your domains would it more closely resemble a boring pet stick or a creative Google ad?
