Leland Hardy, owner of NewYork.com shares some of his experiences developing this premium geo.

http://www.chefpatrick.com/developing-a-geo-domain-part-1/

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.

Here are a few domain name related links to explore over the holiday period.

To start off here is one for people interested in geo domains. This is an interesting story of how geodomains are being used in the US online dating industry. Next, Predictive Domaining outlines the risks to Geo-domains, in an interesting article that covers many of the likely risks.

Now I’ve been visiting DNJournal.com for years but rarely ventured further than their domain sales listings and occasionally their headline article. Recently I noticed that they have a section called “The Lowdown”, that I had not noticed before. The Lowdown section is worth visiting as it contains lots of news articles about the domain name industry you don’t find elsewhere.

Here are two interesting articles from the Online Journalism Review website. They are slightly out of date but have plenty to offer domainers. the first is a 2006 article City dot-coms still waiting to strike it rich, which will be of particluar interest to anyone wanting to understand Geodomains.   This article from OJR, How to make money on your news content website, is aimed at journalists, but has lots to offer domain developers.

Happy reading!

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.

It might be best to start with some definitions. GeoDomains fall into two categories:-

Pure geodomains – for example Seattle.com, London.com and Birmingham.co.uk

Geo generics – for example SeattlePlumbers.com, LondonDentists.com and BirminghamBars.co.uk

I would like to discuss Geogeneric domains at a later date. So, the rest of this article concerns pure geo domains.

It is not hard to see the value in pure geo domains. The business model is, on the face of it, fairly straightforward. If people are typing the geodomain of a large city, say Ontario, its quite clear they want information about that city. If someone types the word ‘Seattle vacations’ into Google and the results include say, Seattle.com or Seattle.us or even Seattle.info then you know they are likely to look at these three as a priority.

Perhaps the most important thing domainers need to know about GeoDomains is that all the best ones have gone and are in the hands of domainers/ end users. So, you are going to pay decent money to get your hands on the best ones! (This week DNJournal.com reported that LasVegas.asia sold for $30,000 and VisitPanamaCityBeach.com for $25,000.) By best ones I mean pure domains that are the names of towns, cities, counties and regions of any significance.

Dot com geodomains are highly sought after. Place names with the related country codes are also highly prized, examples of which include Boston.us and London.co.uk. Many of the most highly prized pure geo dot com domains are in the hands of three players who between them own hundreds of the biggest city names in the world. These are:-

Boulevards New Media  owned by Dan Pulcrano (e.g. Seattle.com, Los Angeles.com)

Castello Cities Internet Network Inc owned by David and Michael Castello (e.g. LongBeach.com, Nashville.com)

Geo Domain New Media owned by Skip Hoagland (Atlanta.com, MyrtleBeach.com)

The rest are owned by mainstream media organisations, domainers and a wide variety of internet entrepreneurs.

There are various approaches to the development of these domains. Some go for a basic consistent approach when developing out their domains while others go for more of a complex ‘visitor guide’ approach perhaps with more interactive elements such as small ads, job vacancies and, occasionally, a small amount of visitor generated content. Some have news and perhaps employ journalists. Some seem to be for local residents while others are aimed at tourists and business visitors.

Domainers interested in finding out more about geodomains could start their research at the geodomain website owners trade association website AssociatedCities.com. Here you will find links to the association’s 110 members sites. Mostly, but not exclusively, these sites relate to towns and cities in the US. There are also a great many UK geodomains that are well developed and certainly worth a look – Glasgow.com, LondonTown.com and Manchester.com are my favourites.

There is an interesting article about Skip Hoagland of Geo Domain New Media in DNJournal.com, this week, that is worth reading. Skip together with Steven Morales have built up a series of Geo domain related websites:-

GeoDomainer.com (social networking site)
GeoDomain.com (a premium geo domain auction site)
GeoDomains.com (a media company)
GeoBusiness.com (business tools/ services for the geo industry)
GeoAuction.com (an auction site)

Steve also writes the GeoDomainers blog SimplyGeo.com, which is a well produced and well written information source. Finally, there are two dedicated geo domain name discusion forums SimplyGeo.net  and GeoOwners.com. Both have potential and are definitely worth a visit.

What do you think of geoDomains? Do you own any geo domains or any geo generic domain names? What does the future hold for such domains? Have ‘ordinary’ domainers missed the boat or are there hidden gems still out there waiting to be found?

Why not share your thoughts below.