blogging about UK tourist resorts
UK visitors social networking site
Travel forum

Not particlulary new – still thinking though
Not sure how to progress and I will write up what I have decided shortly, hopefully.

I’m slowly forming a geo network of sites targetting major English cities. ManchesterWide.com was the first. Over the last few months sites for Birmingham and Leeds have been added to the network. Bristol, Newcastle, Liverpool and Nottingham will follow in due course.

In addition, I added Manchester Breaks to the network some time ago.

Except for my Manchester site, they are all basically pages that need to be made into robust sites.

I think a mistake that many geonetwork developers make is to fail fully build out their network before moving on to the next site. There are lots of reasons why this is a good strategy. However, I believe the money is in development, so I want to build out the existing nine sites before moving on to the next ones.

The revenue goal I have set for myself is $1 per day, per site. Is this achievable? The way I look at it, if a $1 a day is achievable, so is $5 and $10. How easy that is, and whether I think its worth the effort, is something I will discuss in future posts.

The drive to develop is a powerful one. Developed domains will always earn more, compared with simple domain parking, and even a domain that does not receive parking revenue may be able to pay for itself many times over with only a modest amount of development. Even mini sites consisting of up to 20 pages can be set up using free templates and can pay for themselves quickly.

The problem for many domainers is that they would like to develop some or all of the domains in their portfolio – but they are not sure how to do so. They have heard of free templates, Wordpress and so on but don’t always know exactly what the available choices are.

For those domainers with limited development skills, free template driven sites or Wordpress driven sites will be sufficient in a majority of cases. By contrast, Joomla and Drupal allow the development of more sophisticated websites with advanced functions such as forums ecommerce and so on.

Domainers have avoided development for a number of reasons.

Many people became domainers, lured by the dream of living off domain name parking revenue alone for the rest of their life like industry leaders, Frank, Rick and Sahar. The days when you could buy these ‘traffic domain names’ cheaply are long gone and the money is now in a.) development of sites a market niche or become leading ‘authority websites’ or b.) through the development of a mini sites (of no more than 5 – 10 pages, or less) on each domain.

Many domainers are not web developers and one way round this is to get someone else to do the work. Domainers with sufficient funds to contract out the development process to others may never have to worry too much about whats going on ‘under the hood’. However, web site building knowledge and skills are still important simply to understand what you need and to convey that to your developer.

I also think that if you understand what is involved in building different types of website you understand more about the market for that domain name and the potential for that domain name.

The good news is that you don’t have to be able to hand code your website from start to finish. There are lots of packages out there that do the hard work for you. And best of all – they are mostly free.

Free / low cost templates make development straight forward. Packages like Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal allow complex sites to be developed fairly quickly. They do take time to learn, however, but they make developing multiple sites straightforward and are well worth the effort.

In Part 2 we look at the development options in a little more detail.

The development of geodomains is also reasonably straightforward, with many development aids available. The process is not that different to development of domains in general. However, there are some things to think about before embarking on the development of city, town or location based website. I have been working on a city site of my own – ManchesterWide.com – so I thought I would share some of my thoughts, based on my experience of developing ManchesterWide.com

All the pure geodomains are gone?

Yes – no surprises here – unless you have substantial money to invest. For those readers who are not domainers, domain names relating to specific locations are particularly sought after and regularly change hands for relatively large sums of money. Of those, .com domains are the most sought after. Dot coms are particularly sought after as they receive what is called “type-in” traffic. This comes from people typing the place name into their browsers address bar, followed by “.com”.

To make matters worse, it is important to realise the advantage pure .com place names have compared with domains that simply include the place name. London.com will receive high numbers of type in traffic but EveryoneLovesLondon.com, or LetsGoToLondon.com, for example, will receive comparatively little of this free traffic. If you choose to develop a .net or a .org domain , say London.net, you will bleed traffic and customers to the .com of that domain because people frequently type in the dot com version of the domain, in error.

Most of the larger city .com domain names in the US are in the hands of a few big players and are developed into travel sites and city guide sites. The interesting thing is that the success of geo .com city sites has revealed / confirmed that there is demand for such sites and proves that there is a market out there for city related information.

Is it worth it? Given the massive advantage of having a city dot com should you abandon any ideas of competing against the big players altogether?

There are opportunities for domainers who realise that they cannot simply copy pure geo domin websites. They also need to realise that without the type-in traffic that pure .com geos have, they will need to work much, much harder to generate traffic.

Have you missed the boat? If you are starting now, you are probably up against established sites and if you are thinking of developing a site related to a town or city of any significant size you are probably going to find some sort of competition. You have missed the boat if you want a .com version of the domain, unless you have between $xx,xxx and $xxx,xxx or more to buy a .com domain. You will also need the resources to develop it effectively. In all other respects the game is still wide open.

What about the competition? Type in the name of any reasonably large city into Google.com and the results you will get demonstrate that there are some big hitters in the top 7 – 10 results.

On the first page of Google search results you can expect to find the .com of the city, the city government site, the local University website, the government funded tourist information website, the website of the local newspaper and probably the websites of a lot of other big budget organisations.

For example, when typing in the word “SanFrancisco” into Google.com the first page of web results included:-

• Official tourists website
• The Wikipedia article relating to that city
• The .com website
• The city/ county Government ’s official website
• Two media sites (a radio station and a newspaper) for the area
• The local airport website
• The University website

I can only say that the competition is tough. However, there are lots of different ways to generate traffic, including optimizing your site for a number of keywords, using sites like Digg, Stumble Upon, Twitter and MySpace to get the word out. Regularly updated compelling, keyword rich content, will help, as will word of mouth and paid for online and offline media advertising.

I am still unsure what strategy will be best for ManchesterWide.com and I will update my progress here as I develop the site further.

Unfortunately, there are relatively few pure generic geo domains and many/ most of the best ones are being developed. The .com version of these place names are particularly valuable due to the ‘type in’ traffic these domains have and the marketing potential of generic dotcom domains.

This means that if you want to develop city/region websites you have only two choices. Pay significant sums for the .com version of the town/region of your choice, or buy a alternative domain that is cheaper.

That might be the place name along with a non .com extension, such as .net, .org, .tv and so on. Alternatively, you might want to buy a domain name containing the town/ city/ region name and a supplementary generic word such as SeattleGuide.com, TexasOnline.com or GoFrance.com. No one will be typing in these domain names directly into the address bar like they would with “Texas.com”, for example, but these domains have branding possibilities. Such domains are worth a tiny fraction of their equivalent one word place name .coms and unless they relate to larger cities and larger tourist resorts, I think they make poor investments.

I recently decided to build a city guide for my hometown of Manchester, England. As I had no budget to invest in a generic domain name I registered the domain ManchesterWide.com. Starting a new site has been quite a challenge and this will be my biggest project to date. It is also a web development project rather than a domaining project. Any payoff is probably years away and I am approaching things with the attitude that I am doing this for pleasure rather than profit.

ManchesterWide.com and the sites Manchester Wide forum are really in their earliest stages of development but if you are from Manchester or interested in finding more about the city, please feel free to visit the site and say hello on the Manchester Wide forum.

A post on Rick’s Blog really got me thinking. Rick shares his thoughts about the value of generic dot coms. Read all about it here………

Next, do you have a bobblehead? Elliot’s Blog has an interesting interview with Warren Royal, owner and developer of Bobbleheads.com.

There are lots of interesting domaining articles on SelfMadeMinds.com. Scott’s latest post about obtaining domains from dissolved companies is the must read article of the week.

Two useful blogs for domainers who are developing or thinking about developing forum domains, or who are wanting to add forums to their sites. Community Spark is a blog by community development expert Martin Reed. Angela Connor’s blog provides a great deal of information relevant to online community management. Both are excellent sources of advice for domainers who want to build successful websites that include an online forum community.

Finally, in July I wrote about the great work that Steve Morales was doing in promoting the Geodomain name sector of the domain name industry.  He was involved in the SimplyGeo.net forum, the SimplyGeo blog and a geodomains social networking site. The forum and social networking site seems largely abandoned at present and the last post on the blog was on the 3rd October. This is a shame. I enjoyed Steve’s blog and enjoyed participating on the social networking site. I hope he gives it another try. If anyone knows what happened and if there are any plans start things up again please share what you know below.

Pure domaining usually involves buying quality domains and parking them with one of a number of parking companies such as NameDrive.com and Sedo.com. The problem is that domaining world is changing – in fact it always has been changing – and its clear that domainers who fail to adapt will be left behind.

The solution is simple – goodbye pure domaining and hello domain developing.

There are many changes that could influence domaining in quite significant ways but my main concern is ‘more difficult trading conditions’ predicted by financial experts. I am old enough to remember the economic problems of the 1980 s and 1990s. Whether we are headed for a world recession or a 1930s style depression is far from clear at this point of time. What is clear is that we are going to be hearing a lot more about ‘problems with the economy’ over the next 2 – 5 years, and very little of it is going to be good news! Just about everyone,  who thought that they could buy quality domains and live off the parking revenue for the rest of their lives is probably in for a big shock.

What the domaining industry will look like after 3 or 4 years of economic recession is anyones guess. In a recession we would see lots of things happening that have not happened for a long time – increased unemployment, falling financial markets, people having less disposable income and lots of bankruptcies. Domainers should expect domains to take longer to sell and lower sales prices when they do sell (only good news if you are buying, not selling). PPC revenue is likely to be affected as companies attempt to save money by cutting back on advertising costs.  If people are generally spending less then affiliate ad revenue is likely to be affected too. On the positive side buyers will see more quality domains dropping and cheaper domain sales prices.

If ever there was a time for domainers to become domainer-developers, that time is now. Even basic websites will make more revenue than domain parking. Developing out domains just makes good business sense.

Basic web development skills are reasonably easy to acquire and there are many shortcuts and templates to make things easier for you. A simple minisite or niche site consisting of no more that 5 – 25 pages can be set up quickly using free templates or by using Wordpress (Wordpress.org). I am not saying the domain parking industry is finished – far from it – but developing sites is just such a better option.  In times of economic difficulty the pressure to maximize revenue is even greater than it used to be – goodbye pure domaining and hello domain developing!