Holy Cow! .Net Counterpart is Driving Some Substantial Traffic to My .Com Domain

[Grrilla]

A while back, one of my parked .com names had a significant increase in traffic, to the tune of over 10x, almost overnight. The spike in traffic occured shortly after someone registered the .net version of the name and put a site up. The name is a good one that was taking off on it's own, prior to the .net site going up- traffic had more than tripled over the past 4 mos and the click thru rate has consistently been at a remarkable 40%-50% as a parked page w/o additional promotion.

I'd be interested in hearing from someone who has a .com domain and has been the beneficiary of of a .net site driving a large amount of traffic to it. Click thrus at the landing page increased from 20 clicks/da to 200 clicks/da and have stayed there. This month the click rate has gotten better, and has actually shot up to 60%. Whoever is behind the .net domain must have a powerhouse operation and, frankly, seeing this does give me the feeling that I have been twiddling my thumbs w/ my own optimization, but, believe me, I'm not complaining.

Any analysis or light that you could shed on the dynamics that are at work here, as well as, any suggestions for a course of action, would also be greatly appreciated. It looks like my original plan to set up a site w/ Adsense and some affiliate partners, just got sped up a notch.

At this time, I feel compelled to hold back the identity of the name, but will fill you in later, once I've done some additional research and have my ducks in order. Tx

 

[Shorty]

First of all Grrilla, congrats on getting 200 clicks a day, that is more than i've got in a week on several domains! What sort of revenue is that generating for you?

If it was me, i'd do nothing for now. There isn't much else you can do to optimise your income, anything you do to tamper with it will probably be detrimental. I might be wrong since I don't know all the facts, there might be an agreement you could make with the other guy to put a link up to his site for a small fee...

I'm surprised the owner of the .net hasn't contact you about buying your .com yet. If he does, I would only sell it if he offers a hell of a lot of money and your traffic is starting to decrease (because they're finally beginning to learn to remember the extension?).

As long as the domain has paid for itself you've got nothing to lose!

 

[Badger]

well, seeing as though youve made some nice ppl rev Mike, suppose the honourable thing to do now would be to give it to the .net owner yes?? Surely...???

 

[scrsteven]

If it's doing so well with clicks right now... I don't think I'd mess with changing it unless you have a pretty good site set up with Adsense.

 

[alex_d]

I think you should maybe try to knock up a basic 3-4 page site, optimizing with the main keywords that the .net site is working with. Add some adsense, and hopefully, you might a little more income coming in from the PPC programs.

Good luck with it

Alex

 

[snoop]

great example of why it is inefficient to develop .net, .org, .biz, .info, .us etc, a % of the traffic (your marketing expense) goes elsewhere.

 

[mole]

The question remains, what % bleeds to .COM?

Type-ins are estimated to comprise 10%-15% of total web traffic.

 

[Grrilla]

First of all Grrilla, congrats on getting 200 clicks a day, that is more than i've got in a week on several domains! What sort of revenue is that generating for you?

If it was me, i'd do nothing for now. There isn't much else you can do to optimise your income, anything you do to tamper with it will probably be detrimental. I might be wrong since I don't know all the facts, there might be an agreement you could make with the other guy to put a link up to his site for a small fee...

I'm surprised the owner of the .net hasn't contact you about buying your .com yet. If he does, I would only sell it if he offers a hell of a lot of money and your traffic is starting to decrease (because they're finally beginning to learn to remember the extension?).

As long as the domain has paid for itself you've got nothing to lose!

Tx everyone for the input. You've helped me come up w/ a strategy. I'm going to put a small 3-4 page site together for this domain, (A), as well as, another parallell site using a similar domain that supports the same content and keywords, (B). I'll set up the affiliates and Adsense for B, and use it as a pilot site that A can be cloned from- content, styles and even graphics can be virtually the same. That way, I can tweak and refine w/o tampering with a good thing and I'll have a site in waiting, ready to step up, should conditions change or as I see fit. And heck, I'll already have, at least, one backlink working for it. :hehe:

The page has been generating only .10 / click. However, It dropped to .07 after the traffic spike and drifted down to .06. It, actually, is avereging 230 click thrus/da so each .01 factors in @ $2.30/da or roughly $60/mo. The drop from .10 -> .07 cost me $180/mo and -> .06 cut income an additional $60. Right now, I'm sitting @ right around $415/mo. I'll continue to monitor this and my research should give some indication as to what the income potential would be from operating an independent site and when to bail from ppc/ should the amt/click continue to decrease.

Again, thankyou for the very helpful and useful input.