Domainers, developing, minisites

[dmi]

This is really getting silly. Almost every day a new site that offers domain development / mass domain development services is born. They advertise like crazy on domainers' venues, they promise that you'll make a fortune... All it takes is to pay them to make a minisite on your domain name.

I don't know when will domainers open their eyes and understand that paying someone to make them a minisite or mass develop all their domains is NOT the way to go. By making a 5-10-20 minisite on a domain name that doesn't have any type-in traffic (or has little traffic) just won't do it. Do you think that by making a minisite you will rank in Google and get all the traffic from there? Yes, you wish. It's not about making a minisite, it's about working on it AFTER it's made. That's what matters. And those "We will develop all your domains and you will make a lot of money" sites don't offer you that -- they'll just make you a minisite and that's it. Ask them to guarantee that you'll earn more than you do when parking. They won't. Ask them to guarantee that you will rank high in Google with that site. They won't.

I am really sick and tired of all the sites that offer mass development services. They are nothing but "let's suck some money from domainers". I read somewhere that a domainer recently paid $2500 to one of the guys who offers development services to make one site which contains like 25-30 articles and a couple of videos. This is a complete waste of money. It's simply not the way to do these kinds of things -- you won't earn a dime from that. It's better to make a smaller (and a lot cheaper website) and invest the rest of the money elsewhere. "Elsewhere" will bring in traffic, and therefore revenue, eventually.

People love money, I understand that. But don't let anybody trick you. And everyone who says that you have to pay $2500 to someone who will develop a minisite on your domain and that you'll earn a lot of money from that, is tricking you. The funniest thing about that is that these "developers" call themselves SEO experts... Any real SEO expert will tell you that creating just the minisite and hope for traffic/revenue simply won't do it.

I know that the parking revenue has been down lately, but PLEASE don't think that by making just a minisite on your domain will make you more money than when you park it. It won't. And PLEASE don't pay these crazy amounts of money for a minisite.

If you really want to go the development route, then read everything you can find about properly developing a website, and everything that comes after. Do your research about it. Don't just blindly pay someone to do it.

</rant>

 

[Tia Wood]

Alright. Who needs a hug?

:ghost:

 

[DnEbook]

me ..... have you seen my minisites !!! ha ha

 

[dmi]

Some of you missed the point.

I wasn't trying to "attack" the companies who offer minisite creation services. At least not all of them. I'm sure there are good sites with great web designers, content writers, etc that will make you a good minisite that might succeed. It's just that there have been A WHOLE LOT of those companies lately -- and many domainers, not knowing what is what, end up paying a fortune for nothing.

The term "development" has been so popular lately in the domaining world, that many domainers, without a clue about developing, pay someone to do it just to sit on the "development train", because everyone's talking about it.

Domainers, beware.

 

[DotWeekly]

Minisites should just be the Start of a site, not the whole site.

Adding 5 pages of content and a couple pretty pictures and a bunch of Google adsense ads to me is really not a "Minisite". It's a domain owner pleaser.. see, I'm developing or look at this etc.

SERP's are great, Revenue is Awesome!

If you hear more talk about SERP's from a service then talks of revenue you should question if your investment is a wise one. Every domain name is different and will rank different for different keywords.

Examples are examples for a reason.

If your "minisite" doesn't hold a dynamic function that can make you revenue, you should reconsider IMO. An RSS reader popping up "new" content isn't what I am talking about either, because it by itself is not going to make you money.

In the end, can somebody spend $250 on a "Basic Site" and out power 90% of the general minisites with Revenue? You bet your ass but you have to have a dynamic revenue function to go with your content and pretty images!

 

[Alex]

It all depends on keywords to get a decent traffic. One of my sites in the siggy, which I made up from scratch (did not pay anybody) made this month $35 from adsense ... and it is just the middle of June.

It made 0 parking. And I will continue working on them (but all of them will be customized, with unique design and more importantly with well researched content done by me).

Some big players might also benefit from putting up some decent content on their domains because that way the domains have less chance to be taken away through WIPO. But that is just a small amount.

I think we should clearly distinguish between minisite solutions, companies that will put up content on hundreds of sites, and handmade, well researched minisites. I have even a one page site on a small niche that without any promotion (no inbound links yet) is #5 for its keyword in Google (and nowhere in Y and MSN), and is making me $2-$3 a month (will be much more once I work on promoting it).

$2500 for a well researched and well optimized site is a bit steep, but it depends on the keyword and on the SEO work (if any).

 

[DubDubDubDot]

Quality, SEO friendly, web development isn't cheap.

The problem is amateur designers are charging legit designer prices, and the bundled text content they provide is terribly written. That's pretty much what this thread boils down to.

 

[harkster]

It all depends on keywords to get a decent traffic. One of my sites in the siggy, which I made up from scratch (did not pay anybody) made this month $35 from adsense ... and it is just the middle of June.

It made 0 parking. And I will continue working on them (but all of them will be customized, with unique design and more importantly with well researched content done by me).

Some big players might also benefit from putting up some decent content on their domains because that way the domains have less chance to be taken away through WIPO. But that is just a small amount.

I think we should clearly distinguish between minisite solutions, companies that will put up content on hundreds of sites, and handmade, well researched minisites. I have even a one page site on a small niche that without any promotion (no inbound links yet) is #5 for its keyword in Google (and nowhere in Y and MSN), and is making me $2-$3 a month (will be much more once I work on promoting it).

$2500 for a well researched and well optimized site is a bit steep, but it depends on the keyword and on the SEO work (if any).

Nice sites in your sig. I been putting together mini-sites for a long time and anyone who thinks it is an easy way to big money better think again. I have my successes and failures. My overall average monthly revenue is down big time and I am dumping marginal sites in favor of trying some new things.

I am quite proud of Elbert Hubbard and The Roycroft Contribution to The Arts & Crafts Movement In America. which I bought when it expired. It has paid out many times over so I changed the design and paid a good writer to write the content from my notes. More content coming (scanning and cleaning the images ain't fun)

For a while I was getting 50 or so aeiou type sites submitted to my directory. Can't remember the last time I had one to review.

I have gotten where I copyscape 'funny' looking submissions to (hopefully) catch those damn auto updating things. They seem to be the new 'mini-site' rage.

 

[Dotplanners]

domain content development

You asked a question and I answered it, I didn't realize I needed a direct invitation from you to give my opinion. I'm not calling you out, you gave an example of a site you made on WhyPark comparing it to actual mini site development, and I was simply saying why it is apples and oranges. Lets not start any drama please.

Not every domain is a good candidate for a mini site, especially not a handful of fresh regs. If WhyPark makes you happy and works better for you than parking, good for you. I don't think you should compare it to an actual mini site though, because it isn't an accurate comparison at all.

Hi Mike (last name unknown),

First, I just want to shoot down your comment that a "handful of fresh regs" can't make money. Wow, that statement is reeking of a copout. I buy OOTB domains and have immediately started making money on them, so I don't know why you made that statement.

I am playing dumb about who you are, just to show you how I am pushing for transparency in the domain industry. You are posting here as "MICHAEL". You are promoting Minisites.com. You are a part of DNMedia.com and Telepathy, Inc. (I assume from quick research).

All the info I could dig up on your own website "MINISITES.COM" is the following listed under "CONTACT":

"MiniSites.com was founded by a group of seasoned domainers and website developers who understand what it takes to transform your domain into a profitable mini site. We offer several affordable, yet robust, packages which allow you to leverage our decades of experience to earn you more money. A mini site is an investment, and it is our mission to get you the best return possible. We look forward to working with you!"


Yeah? A group of "seasoned domainers and website developers who...yah da ya da ya da?"

Your own website, or whoever owns this site, NOT ONE NAME OF AN EXECUTIVE, EMPLOYEE, CONTACT NAME, OR RECEPTIONIST. (I don't know, and I don't care. I'm not going to spend more than 5 minutes trying to get IDENTIFICATION on people who are asking me to give them money to build out my websites).

Why do you post any opinion here as a rep of this website, and then make "professional comments" about other companies' website development or content development when nobody in your company is brave enough to identify themselves?

So, let's come back to Whypark. Whypark provides many more content development services, design layouts and allows its users to do what everyone here recommends... which is "WORK ON CONTINUING TO BUILD CONTENT ON YOUR SITE" to move it from that "minisite' label. They start you out for free...

Just as important: Whypark identified all the executives responsible for a customer's investment and patronage on their site. That makes it look legit.

So my campaign to get domain industry players to become transparent is reaching you now. If you can't identify who you are, where you are, who your "team" is, then when you post on domain forums and make comments comparing competitors to "apples and oranges", I'm calling you out.

I'm sick of seeing comments from domainers and domain company "voices" who don't reveal who they really are. It's bad for the domain industry image. It's not as important for individual domain investors, but for domain industry companies, here's the message: "WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?"

(example: Tia Wood - domain developer, experienced, forthright, dependable. She uses her full name. I trust her to handle my business because she stands behind her name)

So Mike, even though you and I have already probably have met and talked, chowed and drank together, I'm showing you some tough domainer love.... how about you respond with placing at least three names of executives at Minisites.com on the website CONTACT link. If you can't do that, can you explain why?

 

[Premiere]

A E I owe you, and sometimes WHY?

Seriously, upsell on minisites is astounding. Basically all it takes is lots of backlinks and cool friends and you make your share of the nickel.

I have just started some whypark campaigns. I have no idea if they will turn out to be a good way to avoid developing every domain I buy (and I buy a lot!), but I am hoping for just a little relief.

If anyone has better suggestions for domainers will the typical small pockets I would love to hear them!

 

[Michael]

Stephen, I gotta love your diatribes on random points. I guess you never read our press release when we launched, or looked at the first post of our Twitter account, or read the DNJournal article about us... all of our full names are in a number of places. Our whois is public and has the correct information. We're not hiding, we're just not so in love with the sound of our names that we have to plaster it everywhere.

Do you find out who the CEO of Deer Park is before you buy a bottle of water? Do you find out who the CTO of Dell is before buying a laptop? The truth is, most people only care about the product, and I think both of our products speak for themselves. If I know you or Craig is behind WhyPark, that is going to have zero effect on my decision to use it. I'm going to use it because it is a quick and easy way to at least have something up, even if it isn't unique. Our names are on our business cards, email signatures, and everywhere else it needs to be for our potential and current clients to reach us. I don't see any need to plaster it on our web site with a nice headshot, in a forum signature, etc. I don't think anyone needs to know that the company was founded by Michael Sumner, Bogdan Nastea, and Nat Cohen to know that our product is great, they just need to look at the examples or check the search engines.

I wasn't saying fresh regs can't make money, I was just saying most wouldn't make enough money to make a $250 investment in a site worth it. We've said it a million times, not every domain is an ideal candidate for actual development, sometimes it is better to put it on a scraper site and roll the dice.

 

[enlytend]

I wasn't saying fresh regs can't make money, I was just saying they wouldn't make enough money to make a $250 investment in a site worth it.

Are you saying that a small site on a fresh reg can't earn back $250+ within, let's say, 6 mos to a year?

IME, it totally depends upon the commercial potential and competitive landscape of the site's topic and on how that $250 was spent. Smart development choices can make revenue regardless of the domain.

Do some domains "suggest' development more than others? Sure, Does starting with a good keyword domain help? Of course it does, but with effective development, the domain becomes less and less important.

 

[mntor]

Alright. Who needs a hug?

Who wouldn't? :tu:

 

[Michael]

Are you saying that a small site on a fresh reg can't earn back $250+ within, let's say, 6 mos to a year?

IME, it totally depends upon the commercial potential and competitive landscape of the site's topic and on how that $250 was spent. Smart development choices can make revenue regardless of the domain.

Do some domains "suggest' development more than others? Sure, Does starting with a good keyword domain help? Of course it does, but with effective development, the domain becomes less and less important.

I'm not saying it is impossible, but it is definitely the exception and not the rule. Sure, if you're lucky enough to find a fresh reg with reasonably high exact search volume, high CPC, some decent affiliate programs, reasonably low competition from other pages in the index, etc. you could make your money back in a short period. However, that is not how I would generally characterize a fresh reg. Most of them have single or double digit monthly search volume, low advertiser competition, etc. so even if you rank well, you're not going to see a lot of traffic or high revenue clicks. In that situation, I would definitely choose WhyPark, DevHub, Noomle, etc. instead of doing a mini site with unique content and design.

Also, the domain is very important for short-term SEO success, especially in Yahoo and Bing which put a tremendous amount of emphasis on the domain. It gets exponentially harder to rank for a term the farther away you get from an exact match of the commonly searched keywords. If you put up a mini site on zwyg.com for car insurance, you're not going to rank in the top 20 for car insurance terms without a year or two of effort adding more content and building backlinks. If you have CarInsuranceQuotes.com, you could probably rank in a few months with little effort. Not saying it couldn't be done, but I'm talking about normal situations and how a mini site could perform out of the box.

 

[enlytend]

Actually, Google is putting more emphasis on domain than Yahoo these days. Given low competition, an exact match 2-3 word domain is a quick and dirty way to decent rankings ... IF the site content supports it in a non-spammy way (otherwise it will tank pretty fast.)

FWIW, with that approach I've done vey wellll with hand-regged domains for marketable keyphrases in the 1000 exact search range - they're still out there. but you do have to look...

But who targets only one keyphrase? If you have a-list "category killer" domains, more power to you, but if you don't does that mean you're a lost cause for anything in that vertical?

No, because in reality people who are ready to BUY search for things like "buy car insurance in west podunk" or "lowest rates insure SUV in Rhode Islahd". Get the "ready to buy" searchers and there are your conversions, and you pick up those searchers with rich content, not a domain name.

I say all that with the caveat that I focus on affiliate marketing (CPA) not PPC, so your mileage may vary. But even on the few sites where I do monetize with PPC, my logs show that it's searches on phrases in my content that attract the bulk of the traffic. Actually, it's interesting because on one site the bulk of my content is only minimally related to the domain.

If you put up a mini site on zwyg.com for car insurance, you're not going to rank in the top 20 for car insurance terms without a year or two of effort adding more content and building backlinks.

Realistically, with the amount and quality of competition in that vertical, you'd have to put in a similar amount of effort to rank top 20 for "car insurance" if you were starting out fresh with a highly relevant domain !

To me, "zwyg" has other issues, like memorability (was that zwyg? zywg? zgwy?) and the unfortunate resemblance to things I see in my spambox, which evokes trust issues. So we're in agreement there - unless it's a word or a commonly used acronym, I'm not a big fan of that type of domain for anything except resale.

 

[Michael]

Hmm, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on that one. I've seen plenty of sites do well in Yahoo and Bing that were either parked, or had scraped content, just because the domain was good. Google is a little more sophisticated and doesn't give a site authority just based on the domain, it still expects unique, useful content and tends to put the most weight on the inbound links. Yahoo and Bing seem to derive a lot more of a site's authority from the domain from what I've seen.

Anyway, it is interesting to hear that you're having success picking up fresh regs and having them earn $250-$500 a year or more with minimal development, that is very impressive. You can scale that model and make some good money. If you don't rank in the top 3, you're only picking up less than what, 20% of search volume? If you're starting with a domain whose keywords only get <100 exact searches per month, and clicks only pay a few cents, you're not going to be sitting pretty. I agree that 1,000 exact searches is probably a good minimum for being profitable in a reasonable amount of time, especially if there are good affiliate programs available in that specific niche.

 

[SeanPreston]

Hmm, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on that one. I've seen plenty of sites do well in Yahoo and Bing that were either parked, or had scraped content, just because the domain was good. Google is a little more sophisticated and doesn't give a site authority just based on the domain, it still expects unique, useful content and tends to put the most weight on the inbound links. Yahoo and Bing seem to derive a lot more of a site's authority from the domain from what I've seen.

Anyway, it is interesting to hear that you're having success picking up fresh regs and having them earn $250-$500 a year or more with minimal development, that is very impressive. You can scale that model and make some good money. If you don't rank in the top 3, you're only picking up less than what, 20% of search volume? If you're starting with a domain whose keywords only get <100 exact searches per month, and clicks only pay a few cents, you're not going to be sitting pretty. I agree that 1,000 exact searches is probably a good minimum for being profitable in a reasonable amount of time, especially if there are good affiliate programs available in that specific niche.

I think this thread has got a little out of control.

At the end of the day Michael offers a service that many have loved ("Mini Site Development by MiniSites.com" - Google Search) and of course if he is faced with views against the service he provides he is going to stand up for himself and his company.

Michael sounds like a nice guy that is passionate about what he does, however I feel that you can reply very sharp. This may have been the reason for you getting the sharp replies back.

In my opinion the domain needs to be good to start of with and if you have a domain that is parked, getting a lot of traffic and revenue, then I think Michaels service would be a great way to have a site setup with little work. I do feel however if the domain is not so good and you basically want to get a few bucks a month out of it then maybe it's best to do it yourself because you won't get the money you paid back in revenue).

At the end of the day its down the situation and the domain.

Sean

 

[enlytend]

I've seen plenty of sites do well in Yahoo and Bing that were either parked, or had scraped content, just because the domain was good.

Parked is another matter. Google has pretty much fingerprinted all the parking pages out of their index and they're no fan of scraped content either.

Anyway, it is interesting to hear that you're having success picking up fresh regs and having them earn $250-$500 a year or more with minimal development, that is very impressive. You can scale that model and make some good money

I do. We may have different definitions of "minimal development" though .

. If you don't rank in the top 3, you're only picking up less than what, 20% of search volume? If you're starting with a domain whose keywords only get <100 exact searches per month, and clicks only pay a few cents, you're not going to be sitting pretty.

Not if you also rank for a broad and deep set of topic-related keywords. That's where putting the effort into content comes into play - once you develop you should be able rank for a lot more than just the domain keyphrase and with a little planning, bring in quality traffic with it. There are also some strategic considerations to getting decent CPC in Adsense - a lot of people unknowingly "smart price" their own accounts.

Again, I don't focus on PPC, I focus on CPA and it's not unusual for commissions in some of the verticals I work in to run up to $100 per order . Doesn't take too many orders to crack $250.

(If you don't believe you can make those kind of numbers from affiliate marketing I'd be happy to post a CJ screenshot somewhere for you).

(We did wander a bit off topic, didn't we? My apologies if I was the one out of line...just throwing another viewpoint into the mix. To each their own, your mileage may vary and best of luck to ALL in monetizing their domains however they best see fit )

 

[seeker]

how do you protect your custom content from others using it in their own ministes?
its sad to work hours on content and have it become duplicate material because of others copying it...

 

[-REECE-]

There isn't a way unfortunately. You can send them a C&D or DMCA... Other than that, not much you can do. Many of them scrape RSS feeds, so it might help by not having an RSS feed. There is some programs like Anti-Leech that will help with that. You can code your website to prevent right clicking but that still does't restrict anyone from taking a screenshot of your content and uploading it to their site or retyping what you wrote.

how do you protect your custom content from others using it in their own ministes?
its sad to work hours on content and have it become duplicate material because of others copying it...

 

[NetOctave]

There isn't a way unfortunately. You can send them a C&D or DMCA... Other than that, not much you can do. Many of them scrape RSS feeds, so it might help by not having an RSS feed. There is some programs like Anti-Leech that will help with that. You can code your website to prevent right clicking but that still does't restrict anyone from taking a screenshot of your content and uploading it to their site or retyping what you wrote.

Even disabling right click may not work as they can view the page source and copy the contents.

I had success in one case so far where I told the website that this content copying will be reported to adsense and they would get banned from the program altogether. This made them remove the content as their advertisements were all from adsense.

I think this is an easier way than C&D. Check out who their advertisers are and tell the site owner that you will report it to their advertisers.

The tough part is keeping track of all your contents and responding as soon as some one copies.