- Impact
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I have posted on another thread the fact that I have developed one of my HDNs (Hacked Domain Names), www.JesusChri.st, into a fully fledged site and thought it may be helpful to others to see the process of just how the development process was carried out, the steps involved, and future plans for the site. I am not advocating this is the ‘cast in stone’ approach that should be used, in fact I sincerely doubt that it is as there are now several things I would now do somewhat differently (only a fool does not learn by their mistakes).
I acquired www.JesusChri.st about a year ago, it was a drop, as a drop on www.nic.st it cost two credits instead of the normal single credit when registering a new name. (Credits can be pre-purchased through the nic.st ‘partner program’ and range from 15-25 Euros {~ US$23-US$39) depending on the quantity of credits purchased.)
From the start I knew I had a winner, one of those unbelievable purchases that come along so rarely, this I was sure was buying money. I immediately put the domain up for sale, but surprisingly little real interest was shown by domainers! My best offer ($x,xxx) actually came from a potential buyer who apparently planned to put an adult site on the domain. I even contacted several tele-evangelists and Christian missions (all US based) who, if I could get past the tele-sales operative asking me for a donation, showed no interest unless of course I wanted to donate the domain to them (I remained pleasant and said ‘No’). So this left me with a quandary, I had this great HDN but nobody was willing to offer anywhere near what it was realistically worth in the end-user market.
So the question is what do you do?
I am no developer, yet development was the only way I could see to go with this domain. But the lack of interest in JesusChri.st had made me start wondering if I was the one who was wrong, perhaps I had just over-valued the domain and in reality it really did not have the kind of value I thought it had?
I had to make the commitment to develop the domain, after all developed websites are worth more than just domain names anyway. I considered many options for development, from an adult site to a comedy news site, but in the end decided that the only real way was to develop the domain into a website that the HDN clearly identified with.
The first thing I had therefore to do was find out about domains and sites in the same category, these would be the keywords ‘Bible’, ‘God’, ‘Jesus’, ‘Christ’, and of course ‘Jesus Christ’. The domain suffixes of .com, .net, .org, and .info would be of significance as well as the two other HDNs possible with these keywords Jes.us and Chri.st. The main measures of success of any domain/website would of course be monetary value, Overture for keyword, and Alexa ranking.
Monetary value was and remains the most arbitrary measure, I could find no records of sales of the 23 possible domains (including JesusChri.st), though it would seem that a general consensus among domainers was that the .com domain of each of the keywords was worth $xxx,xxx - $x,xxx,xxx, the other suffixes being worth a proportion of the .com.
Overture results were also revealing, Jesus (175k), Bible (166k), God (88k), Jesus Christ (38k), and Christ (20k) gave a total of ~490,000 monthly searches (it should be remembered that these are only a percentage of the overall searches carried out for each word per month). Alexa rankings also showed surprising variations, only Bible.com and Bible.org were in the top 100,000, with God.com, Jesus.com, Christ.com and JesusChrist.com in the 100,000 – 1,000,000 ranks, this meant that there was an opening for another site that was specifically targeted (visiting the sites it soon became apparent why such low rankings were achieved by such sites).
Having found the market was amenable to another site the question was what should the main body of the site. Here the question boiled down to either an information site or a forum, the choice was easy, a forum would involve constant work and would run against a myriad of other religious forums, whereas an information site (in this case initially containing the Bible) would be both relevant and usable. The choice was made and I started to input the Gospels of Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John. I then decided to delay making the site live until I had actually completed the whole of the New Testament.
Having made the site live at the beginning of last week the butterflies of course started. It was now simply a case of either I was right about HDNs or I was wrong. Almost immediately though I started seeing a few visitors, the relief was almost tangible! Then I awaited the first Alexa rankings, last week they came up and it showed a 3 month rank of 19,962,646, and a weekly rank of 3,962,100. The latest results (today) give a weekly rank of 1,694,092. In the grand scheme of things I guess this is not earth shattering to those who have a top 500 Alexa site, but considering that this simple hacked domain name with a simple site on it has jumped to 7th place in the list of the 23 relevant domains/sites and is now only behind the keyword .com’s and Bible.org on the relevant charts I think is amazing.
I opened an Adbrite.com campaign late yesterday advertising www.JesusChri.st, and this week I plan to initiate other advertising campaigns. But most importantly now I need to find out about SEO and to get my site listed on Google and other search engines and hopefully soon get page ranking that will enable the sites traffic to grow and get it into the top 100,000 within the next 6 months.
Other plans currently are to expand the site to include the Old Testament and in the future to launch a forum on the site.
So what mistakes did I make, and yes looking back I did make a few.
1) I initially valued the domain as I saw its value as a completed web site. I think many domainers do this.
2) I underestimated the resistance in valuing a domain at its potential by domainers, who in reality generally work from comparisons of sales of similar domains, and with HDNs there are few if any comparable sales.
3) I dithered in my decision to develop the site. This was perhaps my worst mistake because I ignored my worldly experience and allowed myself to be influenced by the domaining industry rather than having the conviction I should have had in my own experience with regard to advertising, the internet, and human psychology.
4) I did not have the site monetized with Adsense immediately, this may have only cost me financially a little but it cost me time to monetize the site page by page after it was developed.
I hope this post will inspire others to take on board the value that HDNs can have and also inspire at least some HDN owners to develop their domains into sites. It really can be worth it.
I acquired www.JesusChri.st about a year ago, it was a drop, as a drop on www.nic.st it cost two credits instead of the normal single credit when registering a new name. (Credits can be pre-purchased through the nic.st ‘partner program’ and range from 15-25 Euros {~ US$23-US$39) depending on the quantity of credits purchased.)
From the start I knew I had a winner, one of those unbelievable purchases that come along so rarely, this I was sure was buying money. I immediately put the domain up for sale, but surprisingly little real interest was shown by domainers! My best offer ($x,xxx) actually came from a potential buyer who apparently planned to put an adult site on the domain. I even contacted several tele-evangelists and Christian missions (all US based) who, if I could get past the tele-sales operative asking me for a donation, showed no interest unless of course I wanted to donate the domain to them (I remained pleasant and said ‘No’). So this left me with a quandary, I had this great HDN but nobody was willing to offer anywhere near what it was realistically worth in the end-user market.
So the question is what do you do?
I am no developer, yet development was the only way I could see to go with this domain. But the lack of interest in JesusChri.st had made me start wondering if I was the one who was wrong, perhaps I had just over-valued the domain and in reality it really did not have the kind of value I thought it had?
I had to make the commitment to develop the domain, after all developed websites are worth more than just domain names anyway. I considered many options for development, from an adult site to a comedy news site, but in the end decided that the only real way was to develop the domain into a website that the HDN clearly identified with.
The first thing I had therefore to do was find out about domains and sites in the same category, these would be the keywords ‘Bible’, ‘God’, ‘Jesus’, ‘Christ’, and of course ‘Jesus Christ’. The domain suffixes of .com, .net, .org, and .info would be of significance as well as the two other HDNs possible with these keywords Jes.us and Chri.st. The main measures of success of any domain/website would of course be monetary value, Overture for keyword, and Alexa ranking.
Monetary value was and remains the most arbitrary measure, I could find no records of sales of the 23 possible domains (including JesusChri.st), though it would seem that a general consensus among domainers was that the .com domain of each of the keywords was worth $xxx,xxx - $x,xxx,xxx, the other suffixes being worth a proportion of the .com.
Overture results were also revealing, Jesus (175k), Bible (166k), God (88k), Jesus Christ (38k), and Christ (20k) gave a total of ~490,000 monthly searches (it should be remembered that these are only a percentage of the overall searches carried out for each word per month). Alexa rankings also showed surprising variations, only Bible.com and Bible.org were in the top 100,000, with God.com, Jesus.com, Christ.com and JesusChrist.com in the 100,000 – 1,000,000 ranks, this meant that there was an opening for another site that was specifically targeted (visiting the sites it soon became apparent why such low rankings were achieved by such sites).
Having found the market was amenable to another site the question was what should the main body of the site. Here the question boiled down to either an information site or a forum, the choice was easy, a forum would involve constant work and would run against a myriad of other religious forums, whereas an information site (in this case initially containing the Bible) would be both relevant and usable. The choice was made and I started to input the Gospels of Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John. I then decided to delay making the site live until I had actually completed the whole of the New Testament.
Having made the site live at the beginning of last week the butterflies of course started. It was now simply a case of either I was right about HDNs or I was wrong. Almost immediately though I started seeing a few visitors, the relief was almost tangible! Then I awaited the first Alexa rankings, last week they came up and it showed a 3 month rank of 19,962,646, and a weekly rank of 3,962,100. The latest results (today) give a weekly rank of 1,694,092. In the grand scheme of things I guess this is not earth shattering to those who have a top 500 Alexa site, but considering that this simple hacked domain name with a simple site on it has jumped to 7th place in the list of the 23 relevant domains/sites and is now only behind the keyword .com’s and Bible.org on the relevant charts I think is amazing.
I opened an Adbrite.com campaign late yesterday advertising www.JesusChri.st, and this week I plan to initiate other advertising campaigns. But most importantly now I need to find out about SEO and to get my site listed on Google and other search engines and hopefully soon get page ranking that will enable the sites traffic to grow and get it into the top 100,000 within the next 6 months.
Other plans currently are to expand the site to include the Old Testament and in the future to launch a forum on the site.
So what mistakes did I make, and yes looking back I did make a few.
1) I initially valued the domain as I saw its value as a completed web site. I think many domainers do this.
2) I underestimated the resistance in valuing a domain at its potential by domainers, who in reality generally work from comparisons of sales of similar domains, and with HDNs there are few if any comparable sales.
3) I dithered in my decision to develop the site. This was perhaps my worst mistake because I ignored my worldly experience and allowed myself to be influenced by the domaining industry rather than having the conviction I should have had in my own experience with regard to advertising, the internet, and human psychology.
4) I did not have the site monetized with Adsense immediately, this may have only cost me financially a little but it cost me time to monetize the site page by page after it was developed.
I hope this post will inspire others to take on board the value that HDNs can have and also inspire at least some HDN owners to develop their domains into sites. It really can be worth it.
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