Case Study Friday: Versailles.com
For the third installment of Case Study Friday, we’re going to look at one of Joel and my newer acquisitions, Versailles.com. Weeks one and two focused on CreditCardChaser.com, one of Joel’s finance-related sites. The posts generated a lot of discussion.
Versailles.com is in the early stages of development, but we’re very excited about the possibilities the site offers. Neither Joel nor I have a lot of experience developing geos, but we both thought this would be a good domain to dip into the geo market with.
Domain Strengths
We grabbed this domain for a variety of reasons, but here’s some of the strengths we see in the domain:
- 301,000 exact monthly searches (strong type-in potential)
- Huge tourist destination – over 2 million visitors to Versailles, France a year.
- TON of potential advertisers between hotels, tours companies, restaurants, etc.
- I’m a huge francophile
Potential Drawbacks
Although we obviously think Versailles.com is a great domain, there are a couple potential drawbacks or risks that we are attempting to solve.
- English or French? – Only 60,000 of the 301,000 monthly searches are from the US. Many are from tourist across the world, and many others are from French citizens. Should we concentrate our initial development efforts in English or French? Either way we could be losing some potential traffic.
- Tourist Location vs Local Portal – Many geos are developed as portals for a specific location and the content of the site is geared towards getting repeat visitors from people in a particular city. Since Versailles is a huge tourist destination, we need to appeal to tourist as well as locals.
Current Development
Versailles.com is using a modified WooThemes theme. Since Versailles is such a huge tourist destination, we tried to pick a theme that can really showcase a lot of pictures. Flickr has been a great resource, where we’ve found thousands of free Versailles pictures available for commercial use
Our plan is to initially concentrate on cranking out very high quality original content for Versailles tours and Versailles hotels, then to move on to other content, keeping an eye on our traffic to see what sources are bringing in most of our traffic. Once we’ve built up out traffic, our monetization strategy is advertising on a yet-to-be-determined platform.
So that’s our plan in a nutshell. How would you develop it? What are your thoughts on the domain? Feel free to unload with both barrels…all feedback is welcome!
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I own versailles.in as part of our .in geo portfolio and our plans for destinations like this is still kind of in flux (our plans for most of our cities is to go the social networking route… community blogs, etc – look for WesleyChapel.in coming soon!
). But for tourist/travel destinations I think the quickest route to revenue is to really put the information behind the scenes – letting search engines do their job, and instead have a very attractive but direct front page that leads the user to your sponsors/affiliate/reservation system/etc.
Biltmore.com is a good example of keeping the “above the fold” section of the front page simple and directing people to where they can spend some money without getting distracted by loads of pictures. From the front page, you wouldn’t guess that google has 1,800+ pages indexed at Biltmore.com
Great name, best of luck.
One more comment on language issues – I think for major international tourist destinations using .com, it makes sense to build out translated versions of the site. But for a new site just getting started, it’s easier to just “plan” for future translations and worry about getting translation done down the road, hopefully once revenue starts coming in. See Paris.com versus London.com (which is down right now). Paris only has two languages but London has, as I recall, something close to a half dozen translations.
“How would you develop it? What are your thoughts on the domain? Feel free to unload with both barrels…all feedback is welcome!”
OK, I am taking this literally. This is taken from your site…
“Forbes Travel has ranked the Palace of Versailles the 45th most visited tourist attraction in the world. How many visitors a year does that translate to? 3,450,000 people a year! To put those numbers in perspective, the Palace is more visited than Yosemite National Park (3.44 million visitors), the Pyramids of Giza (3 million…”
You have a category killer domain for an area that is visited by almost 3.5 million travelers a year and you put up a WooTheme? That is even worse than owning a domain like LasVegas.com and paying AEIOU to build your website.
You need to drop $5000-$10000 on a great designer and get something put there to be proud of. This is the kind of site that you could pay for your entire life with. You could be bringing in well over $10,000 per month (in my opinion) off our local advertising, travel and tour affiliates and other things but the method that you used screams cheap.
It is like having a great piece of property in downtown New York and putting up a snow cone stand.
Put up a website worthy of the domain.
I think you have a GREAT opportunity before you.
Troy
FreeDomainNewsletter.com
Troy – I’m not defending their design, and I agree the site has great potential (or else I wouldn’t own it in an off extension like .IN), but your solution is “throw money at it”, which doesn’t help. Yes, the current theme is cheap, but look at Paris.com or any number of other geo sites and the quality level is low (which is why we are investing in building geo sites because we see great potential in competing against stale and cheaply designed sites). But throwing money at it (especially in the low quantities you’ve described – and yes, $10k is a low quantity), is just throwing money away without answering the questions at hand – *HOW* would you design it. *WHAT* content and language to focus on (at least at first).
Some constructive criticism would be nice
What else is there to say? They know the things that they should do. Some examples could be:
1. Get local advertisers
2. Set up Affiliate programs for travel, hotel and tours
3. Perhaps set up a “things to do in Versailles” page and sell advertising there.
The monetazation is fairly simple and nothing new or ground shaking. It just needs to be done on a professional and functional site, Versailles.com is not currently very professional looking at all. It looks just like a template.
I am not recommend to “Throw money” at it. I simply think that $5000-$10000 in the hands of a quality designer would more than pay for itself and be much more profitable then a $70 WooTheme. WooThemes and ThemeForrest.net are great for small to medium sites, but it is not what should be used on a domain like this.
“Yes, the current theme is cheap, but look at Paris.com or any number of other geo sites and the quality level is low ”
Are you saying this is justification for a cheap looking site? Yes, Paris.com does things very wrong, they have a crappy design and they simply forward Paris.com to ParisGuide.com.
Just because others are screwing up does not mean that I have an excuse to.
Free Domain Newsletter,
You make some very valid points, and one of your comments really peaked my ears up. Can you shoot me an email, would like you to quickly pick at one of my sites.
grant(at)vegascoupons.com
Thanks!
Quote
“It is like having a great piece of property in downtown New York…”
Maybe one day a great piece of property will be this hotel domain name, DowntownNewYorkCityHotels.com
It is very large, indeed…but thanks much for remembering
Regards
Sure Grant but take my advice for waht it is worth, and that is probably not much at all=) I will send you an email.
Troy
FreeDomainNewsletter.com
You need a week to see this palace. But it’s worthed. Like other tourist attractions in France, it’s full of history and culture- really fascinating.
I wont even mention several Icann under-the-water moves at present geared towards geodomains. Instead, I would like to add few comments : concerning domain weaknesses, you forgot one major drawback when investing in a domain name like Versailles Dotcom : French regulation.
Owner of several French geodomains myself, I can tell you there is more and more legal pressure to force us surrender our properties, even developed. Only a matter of time they will knock on your door.
Sad but true. You can lose a $$,$$$ domain just because of lousy laws/ panelists.
I hope future will prove me wrong, all the best with Versailles