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

Domain Sales; Numbers Game with Timing & Luck

You can judge very little if any significance to value based on the number or frequency of sales inquiries.

Assuming you have good keyword names it involves mostly a matter of timing and luck to get end-user offers and sales. Depends on if a business is in need of a name at a particular moment in time and somehow stumbles across your domain which would benefit from its keyword match.

You can own excellent keyword names which are niche dominating and category killer names but never get an offer over many years or possibly get occasional lowball offers (which lowballs come mostly from domainers or non-serious end-users).

When you read dnjournal.com you may think the vast majority of names had sold for far more than what they are worth. In fact, many names which sold for high amounts may look like reg fee names or domains you would not pay anything more than $100 for but they sold for $1000s.

End-user (non-domainer) sales is little more than a numbers game involving timing and luck.

20k visits but revenue so low can’t buy a Starbucks!

Since the start of the major decline in parking page revenue over the past 4 years or so there have been several examples of poor performance from some major players. However, the current performance of a relatively obscure provider with a big company behind them is almost impossible to believe the stats could be true!

For example, look at the stats in the screenshot below, keeping in mind the incredibly bad stats are coming from several high quality websites, with more than 70% direct navigation (typeins), from mostly US traffic. The traffic was from ads placed on several high value websites, including a few health and wellness sites with very valuable well targeted domains, plus a popular social media site which gets substantial typein traffic.

With substantial and nicely targeted quality traffic of almost 20,000 visitors over the past 6-days the ads on those websites did not even earn enough money to buy a single cup of Starbucks coffee. Isn’t that amazing! Needless to say, of course the ads have now all been removed.

Major Dilution to Existing .tld extensions i.e. .net

We have been writing for some time about the massive dilution to the current major domain name extensions which will be caused by the anticipated vast number of new gtld’s expected to be introduced starting in 2012.

As an example of dilution, we will discuss the long-time well known dot-net extension. It’s always played 2nd fiddle to the vastly superior dot-com however .net will soon have lots of competitors competing with it and causing general overall dilution to all extensions and to dot-net in particular.

The initial high Icann cost of $185k to buy your own extension will no doubt result in mostly the top brands or keywords being purchased at this time. However, we are sure the cost will drop a lot and more and more mid-size or non-famous brands and keywords will eventually have their own extension.

Using dot-net direct competition as an example it’s likely extentions such as .met (dating?), .let (EU rentals?), .pet (pets?), .wet (water/pools?), .bet (gambling?), .get (search?), .jet (jet sales?), .vet (veterans?), plus longer ones like .mynet .enet .inet .netgear and the real obvious .network will be taken in the future.

With so many similar potential domain name extensions all competing for Internet traffic and marketing themselves it would seem after a few years the direct dilution just to the old dot-net extension will result in many people saying ‘dot-who’ about dot-net. Therefore, we can predict the already low value .net domains will decline even more in general value.

Massive Dilution caused by New Domain Extensions

We have been saying for years (starting when the new extension plan was first announced a long time ago) the new domain-name extensions will bring about massive dilution in the name space and overall negativity to the value of the current major domain extensions.

In a few years the cost of buying your own extension could easily decline significantly belowr the current high cost of almost 200k, possibly all the way down to the 3 figure range where most individuals and small businesses could also afford to buy their own domain extension.

A huge benefit to owning your own domain name extension is only the extension could be typed-in (depending on how the DNS is setup) and the visitor would go right to that website based on the extension only. A few examples are by typing in Ebay you would not need to typein Ebay.com, or typein FreeMLSlisting and no need to typein FreeMLSlisting.com (and potentially zillions of others too).

Many Websurfers & Users Are Not Internet Savvy

An actual example of how many people are not very internet savvy occurred a few days ago when I asked someone (in-person) to go to a website named Example-Example.com but she typed-in ExampleHyphenExample.com and then announced the website did not work.

Quite surprisingly, she actually spelled and typed the word hyphen instead of using a (-) dash character. Even after I explained that a ‘hyphen’ was a ‘dash’ she seemed a bit confused and still did not understand it.

At another time and involving a different person (on phone) I used the word ‘dash’ meaning Example-Example.com but he typed in ExampleDashExample.com, typing-in the word ‘dash’ instead of the keyboard (-) character.

On a somewhat different subject, it’s also true even today there are lots of people who don’t really know the difference between a browser address box and a search-engine box, especially as far as actual use is concered.

I have several family members who always type the website URL including its domain extension in the Google search box, and do not use the Internet Explorer or Safari browser address window (which is of course where the URL should go). When I told them about it they were not aware they should (or even could for that matter) use the browser window.

On a side-note to our readers who run their own websites and study site visitor data, we believe URL’s typed-in the search box do not count as valuable so called Direct Navigation (a.k.a. typeins) but are considered to be (less valuable) search visitors.

We suspect most website owners (even including some experienced domainers) do not understand or realize their actual direct navigation (typein) numbers are a better percentage than their stats program indicates, something many site owners are overlooking that positive aspect with their website stats software data analysis.

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Overstock.com is rebranding itself as O.CO

Found this on the Overstock.com website this morning. It’s also Super Bowl Sunday, so perhaps not just a coincidence since the .CO extension domain names will be strongly marketed in today’s Super Bowl commercials, making Overstock.com’s announcement real good timing in that regard.

“Shopping at Overstock.com internationally is about to get easier with the O.co domain. Since the company acquired the O.co domain name in July 2010, Overstock.com has been simpler to access by mobile Internet users. Now, to minimize confusion and hassle while translating the word “Overstock” into other languages, Overstock.com is rebranding internationally and will be known as O.co as of Jan. 2011. This guide will address any concerns you may have about Overstock.com’s new domain.

Q. Why will Overstock.com be known as O.co internationally?

A. In July 2010, .co domain names became available for general purchase, and Overstock.com acquired the O.co domain name in order to reinforce the “O” of the Overstock brand and capture customers’ attention with a short, memorable web address. The short .co domain will also solve translation issues and allow Overstock.com to create a universal logo, brand and web domain name that will be recognizable internationally…”

Click the Overtstock.com® woman on the couch picture below to visit the new O.co® website:

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

Negativity by Paying Domain Broker Upfront Money

Sometimes domain name and website owners may wish to hire a domain brokerage to sell their names or websites. I can give you some good advice (gained via my personal hands-on experience) about that, including a warning about paying any upfront fees to the broker.

Keep in mind, once the domain-broker has your money a good degree of the incentive to work hard and sell your domain or website may be lost since the broker already has his/her money, regardless of the name selling or not selling.

One more potential negative occurrence is the once friendly relationship you had with the broker may quicky go away if there are any business or personal issues involved. That can easily happen as a result of the broker already having your paid in advance monies so he may decline to issue a refund if you are later unhappy with his work and perfomance.

More information about why you should never even think about paying a fee in advance to a broker (which we published over a year ago) as part of a post about the category defining premium domain names LiveApp.com plus LiveApps.com both being available for purchase, located here: About Domain Broker and Live App domains for sale .

A good article about domain brokers was recently published in Elliotsblog.com in which Elliot lists domain name brokers. I know several of the same domainers/brokers and can suggest the following domain brokers, which Elliot listed in his post:

• BigTicketDomains.com – Kevin Leto
• DifferentInvestments.com – Justin Godfrey
• DomainBroker.com – Rob Sequin
• DomainsForMedia.com – Eric Rice
• MediaOptions.com – Andrew Roesner
• NameConnect.com – John Daly

By the way, Webtrading also offers a domain brokerage service (mosty for our own websites but the brokerage service can also be used to buy domains belonging to other parties), which you can learn more about by clicking-on the image below. In addition, any comments you may have about selling domains and websites, or regarding domain brokers will be appreciated.