Poor Job with PPC Keyword Optmization

It’s hard to understand why a well known and large domain name parking firm like DomainSponsor.com appears unable to do a consistently good job with its keyword targeting of their PPC ads. Making money from the parked domain being discussed below would be extremely difficult, unless a better jon was done.

For example, the domain CausesOfMeningitis.com, which has these two important keywords in it “causes” and “meningitis” is clearly about spinal meningitis and obviously about nothing else but meningitis disease. So why in the world would just 1 of the 18 PPC ads on the page be related to meningitis?

In fact, out of the 18 pay-per-click ads only 2 are health and disease related. Ironically, domainsponsor.com in the past has been widely recognized by domainers as doing a better than average job with good automatic optimization of parked domains based on the keywords in the domain name.

meningitis
chrons disease
email marketing
online checking account
view credit report
medicare
auto accident lawyer
time warner cable
phone service
used truck
fashion design school
car insurance
cheap flights
used cars for sale
high speed internet service
satellite television
suv
cell phone register

Eric Borgos Interview by Michael Cyger

We can highly recommend this interesting and educational interview with Eric Borgos conducted by DomainSherpa.com and expert interviewer Michael Cyger: Eric Borgos interview

Phone Calls can be an Affiliate Program Negative

For some odd reason the potential phone call which in all likelihood can end-up losing your affiliate referral revenue has rarely been talked about in the past. Not sure why since it’s believed to be a big negative.

I believe a good percentage of potential buyers will pick up the phone and call the sellers toll-free number for more information and when they do that your chance of getting credit for the sale becomes very low. That is especially true with higher priced products and services, where the prospective buyer is much more inclined to call before spending significant money.

He or she may be wondering if it’s a legitimate business and curious to see if a live person answers the phone. Your potential buyer may also be thinking they can get a better deal by calling, and there are other reasons they are likely to pick up the phone instead of using the online contact form or order form (which contains a cookie and tracking ID), such as a desire to authenticate the company, product or service, including frequently wanting to ask questions about the product or offer before ordering it.

When potential buyers call the sellers number, orders are often taken right away over the phone. Or a little later the buyer may be sent an email with an ordering link (not related to you as the publisher), so credit to you as the referral source can easily be lost, thus preventing you from getting credit for the sale.

As a side note, some years ago we believed we had far more referrals than our reports indicated. Therefore, we called seller ourselves and asked how they handled phone calls as far as credit to us as the referral source is concerned. We were told “don’t worry, we always ask how they got our number – so you get credited for the sale.”

Not surprisingly, that turned-out to be false since the next day we called the 800 number on the sellers website and said we wanted to place an order. We actually placed the phone order and at no time during the entire process did anyone ask how we got the number, so receiving credit was impossible.

In fact, the phone call issue is a major reason we have always been somewhat negative about joining affiliate programs. Unless someone can figure out a way to get around this negative issue we will stay negative on affiliate programs (at least regarding higher priced products). I see no good way to avoid this issue beyond getting your own assigned phone number but seriously doubt the product/service provider will agree to assign a special phone number to a new affiliate to better track the referrals.

Product Authentication

What This Site is About: The Categories & Subjects

Some of our site visitors may be wondering or asking what this website is about? We try to cover as many categories as possible instead of concentrating on just one subject as many blogs often do. Even though the categories we write about and cover are very broad we still manage to keep it within our own experience and knowledge base too.

At this time, there may not necessarily be targeted articles or comments about some of these subjects found within this blog, but with that said, we do run a diverse number of websites which are highly targeted to every keyword subject in each broad category. To locate the relevant sites with well targeted content about all the subjects, you can do a Webtrading Network search…

These are the 8 broad keyword categories covered by this blog and the sites in our Webtrading Network, with a widely covered and featured subject in each category highlighted in bold:

1. Health and Wellness, Medical Conditions, Illness, Disease Prevention & Cures;
2. Commodity Trading, Forex, Daytrading, Futures Markets, Options, Stocks & Investing;
3. Female Beauty & Personal Care, Body and Skin Care, Female Names & Accessories;
4. Site Development, SEO, Domains, Featured Sites, Domain/Website Buying & Selling;
5. Internet Marketing, Online Products and Services, Blogs & Making Money on the Web;
6. Real Estate, Realtor, FSBO, Flat-Fee Multiple Listing Service & Flat-Rate MLS Listings;
7. Business, Communications, Financial Service, Certificates, Gov, Geo & Uncategorized;
8. Foods, Diet, Exercise, Sports, Entertainment, Lifestyle, Live Apps & Social Networks;

Please contact us with any questions you may have or submit a short article (and get a free link to you) for publication if you have knowledge about any of the specific subjects within the eight general categories.

How Erica Became Millioniare & Retired at age 26

For several years we had our web-hosting with Erica Douglass at her old hosting firm. We were one of her first hosting customers. After she sold the hosting business (for I believe over a million dollars) we moved on to a new webhost and later learned Erica started a consulting business at a new website erica.biz.

We normally do not promote other websites here but since we feel Erica has lots of knowledge on making online-money we are posting a few YouTube videos she has made about achieving online success.

Erica Douglass of erica.biz talks about how she became a millioniare and retired at age 26:

Exclusive consulting offer from Erica Douglass of erica.biz:

Erica Douglass picture:

Your Own Advertising Network & Keep All Income

Of course, we badly need good alternatives to Google® and Yahoo!® with the best and possibly the only viable option at this time being selling ad space yourself via your our own in-house Advertising Network. A major benefit from running your own advertising network is you keep 100% of the revenue.

Frank Schilling had a very nice Advertising Network of his own running on his domain names but I believe it was deactivated last year for some odd reason. I can only guess as to why.

We would like to install an ad network almost exactly the way Frank’s network worked on all our sites but having lots of difficulty getting it programmed after considerable time and effort.

The problem is the programmers we were trying to hire for the work were simply not capable of doing the job. Therefore, we would really appreciate finding out who the programmer was who programmed Frank’s old advertising network? We have spent considerable time in search of Frank’s Ad Network programmer, including a number of posts about it on Twitter and Facebook but no success. Does anyone know the programmers name or contact information?

P.S. As an interesting side note to demonstrate the major players are trying to improve their own domains and traffic (as small site developers and domain owners are too) we just noticed Fabulous.com (who is a major player with the PPC firms) is both surprisingly and mysteriously using a competitors platform and ad feed on a domain (I imagine far more names than just the one we stumbled on today).

Fabulous is using WhyPark.com (at least with the domain name we noticed today) which is owned by an arch-rival of Fabulous named Parked.com. Isn’t it interesting that Fabulous would use a competitors program instead of their own system!

FYI, the Fabulous.com domain name we are reporting on (which as of today’s date was on the WhyPark.com platform) is registered to FABULOUS.COM PTY LTD.

Any comments you have about website advertising and ad serving networks will be appreciated. Thank you.

Do Websites & Traffic Add Major Value to Prices?

There has been discussion on domain-name forums and blogs about developed websites adding significant value to domain names, and also making the domains easier to sell plus sell for a higher price. Agree to a degree, a developed web site with traffic is of high overall value. However, with that said, based on hands-on experience, I can say end-users rarely if ever care about the traffic your domain or its website gets, and in fact don’t ask for any statistics. Even if you offer them your stats, they don’t want to see it.

In view if the above I am unfortunately somewhat dubious about a developed website (with good traffic and typeins too) being more appealing to end-user buyers and the price they will pay for the domain, at least much beyond intrinsic value. Potential end-user buyers may actually be a bit negative about an existing web site and as a result its pre-branding.

Please note that my comments do not indicate I am negative about developed websites, or do not greatly value traffic. The exact opposite is true, since I have a number of developed sites which I am very happy with, most of which get good search-engine traffic, enjoy the benefits of high SEO rankings, plus receive natural typeins (from Internet users like President Barack Obama, pictured below, likely looking at a health website)…

Is It Still Possible to Register Domains with Value?

Is it possible to freshly register domain names of value (which may not necessarily make you rich) but have some value, and can make you at least a bit of money?

Rarely a week passes where we do not stumble upon at least a few unreg’d names which I am sure would get natural traffic plus search traffic too. We can’t possibly register them all (there are simply too many good ones) but when we do register the available domains there are often typein visitors to the temporary webpage right away.

Anyone else run across good targeted keyword unregistered domains lately?

Newly Developed Family Child Center Website

This week we completed a new small web site about child-care and family child care centers. Getting good and responsible child care for your kids is very important to both the children and parents.

By the way, we need more content for this new website. Do you have anything to contribute about child care, kids, rasing kids, children’s entertainmen, etc, (possibly family experience with childcare) that we could publish on the site for everyone’s benefit?

A content contribution would be greatly appreciated. If you choose to contribute some general knowledge to the site it does not need to be professionally written. Either long or short is ok. You name may be used or not published if you wish.

You can review the new site by clicking-on the image:

Real-Time Example of Page Title Keyword Value

There has been an ongoing discussion for years about the SEO value of having important keywords in the webpage title. Some SEO experts tend to downplay its value to a degree, while many others say it is of high value. Personally, I have always talked about its great value.

As an experiment I picked a more or less randomly chosen basic word, the word is ‘make’ and then did a Google search for “make.” The search shows out of 100 top search results the keyword was in the web-page title 95 times (95% of the total).

I think that is pretty strong evidence of its significant SEO value. In fact, it would appear the keyword in page title may even be of equal or greater value than the website content (at least on some of the search-result sites I looked at). This is all quite interesting if this seo research is in fact valid.

Here is the search: click-here for Google Search

Wondering About the Knowledge of Domainers?

There are a lot of mysteries with domaining such as how often expired names sell at places like Snapnames for $60 or more but no sale for $20 before expiration at forums, etc.

However, the oddity which really has me wondering about the knowledge many domainers really have is why I keep on running into health and medical related domains available in .org but already reg’d in other extensions which have far less likelihood of traffic vs dot-org?

I can say based on lots of experience the only 2 tld’s which work nicely with health names are .com and .org. In fact, depending on the name .org can sometimes do as well or even better vs .com in health/disease related names. All the others are poor with very rare typeins.

Just this afternoon I was doing research using Google’s Insights For Search and discovered a real nice 3 word health term which seems like it would get both search and typein traffic.

I figured it would be taken in dot-com and dot-org for sure and maybe even other extensions but upon checking was surprised to see it unregistered in .org but taken in .com .net .biz .info .us and even .eu so I quickly registered the dot-org.

Why is it not better known that dot-org works so well in the health, wellness and disease category? Just one of life’s many mysteries I guess.

Why Develop Someone Else’s Domains Free?

Recently a forum member posted on one of the domain name boards he was looking for a reliable partner to develop his (no traffic) domain names into developed websites, including adding site content and making money from the site. He also wants the free developer to pay 50% of future expenses (such as web-hosting) in return for a 50% split of potential revenue.

Getting someone else to develop his no traffic and dubious value names (which also adds good value to them) and even pay 50% of future costs is a fabulous business plan for HIM. However, he needs to seriously ask himself why in the world would anyone do that when they can develop their own names and get 100% of the site ownership and future revenue for themselves (or develop for others receivung up-front compensation for the job)?

Pros & Cons Site Development vs Parked Domain

Many domain name owners are now saying the smart money in 2010 is on website development.

It appears most everyone is saying development is best but the fact is it can be much tougher to get revenue vs a ppc parked page.

Several reasons for that including the fact Click-thru-rates (CTR) is often 4 or 5 times better on a parked page which means the developed site will need 4 or 5 time more traffic to earn the same revenue, assuming the Earnings-per-click (EPC) is about the same comparing say Adsense/YPN vs the major parking firms.

With that said, a nice advantage the developed site has is the ability for site traffic to increase (but that can easily take many months or even years), whereas the parked domain is unlikely to ever get more traffic.

I have more developed sites vs parked domains so I also believe strongly in development but the strength of the keyword name is a big factor, imo. In addition, development involves vast amounts of time and work, including the site/domain server setup, content, hosting, seo work, site maintenance and monitoring, not to mention the hosting cost and time involved and many months or years of waiting for traffic to slowly build-up over time.

Keep the following example in mind if you are developing a good keyword name which gets say 100 typein visits/mo and earns say $2.80/mo at parking (based on 20% CTR and .14c EPC). Once you make it a developed site you will start-out with approx the same 100 typein visits but more often than not your CTR will drop to roughly 4% (or even lower) which means your revenue will decline to just .56c vs $2.80 on parking.

That typical example scenario in-effect means your traffic will need to skyrocket to 500 visits/mo to equal the same $2.80/mo revenue when parked. Can you imagine the time and work involved increasing your traffic from 100/mo to 500/mo!

Jets.com was a great bargain at only $375,000

To someone who may not be experienced with domain name values the internet domain name Jets.com recently selling for 375k must seem like a ton of money. If it was purchased to try and take advantage of the New York Jets football team as was once commonly believed (until the actual buyer became known) and maybe to run some sports advertising on it and make a few bucks from running PPC ads (and taking a chance on a big trademark lawsuit or WIPO case), then I agree that 375k is a lot to pay.

However, the name was purchased by an end-user firm who rents jets and other airplanes according to what I see on the website today. Since jets both rent and sell for big and small fortunes the price was incredbly low. I believe just one sale or a few 25-hour rentals of a corporate jet would probably recover the domain purchase price in profit or commissions. After the first few transactions take place from the website traffic (and its typeins) it will be all gravy for a lifetime for the lucky owner and and 100% profit with every future airplane transaction. So the price was in actuality a tremendous bargain.

The new jets.com web site offers these prices: U.S. 2009 Pricing: 25 HOURS CARD MEMBERSHIP. Aircraft Price. Hawker 400 XP $114,500; Hawker 800 $125,000; Hawker 1000 $149,000; Gulfstream III $189,000; Citation X $189,000; Challenger 601/604 $199,000; Gulfstream IV $279,000.

This is what Yahoo! Answers says about the costs of jets: “Best Answer – Chosen by Voters: (buying and owning a jet) is very expensive considering all the FAA rules on rebuilding engines every so many hours whether they need it or not and a pilot is gonna cost you in excess of $100,000.00 per year and then you have the hangar charges which are like $3,000 a month, and then jet fuel which was $3.79 a gallon and then the insurance is expensive . There is an old saying at my rolls royce dealership – if you need to ask the price or the gas mileage you can’t afford it and I have found over the years how true !!!!! Byy the way cheap starter jets can be bought used for like $300,000.00 and up whereas the new ones like a 4 seater are probably going to run 1.5 million dollars or higher to start.”

Next Big Thing in Your Cell Phone, PC & The Web

Regarding the next big thing on the near horizon, in my opinion I feel that Live Apps are going to be a real big wave.

I thought I would post about Live Apps and Apple Computer. There are also several other large live app corporate players in addition to Apple.

There are already over 100,000 Live Apps with more than 65,000 worldwide Live App developers and programmers.

Apple now owns Appstore.com which domain registration information appears to have changed last month (it seems the domain name was previously owned by SalesForce.com)

Click for AppStore.com Domain Name Whois

Click for Live App Store Google results

Click for Apps Store Google results

Click for App Store Google (an amazing 34 million search results)

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