Diorex

I have recently gone nuts buying up domain names. Everything from short brandable names to keyword rich generic domains with search traffic for that exact phrase. I keep thinking “this name has got to be worth more than the $6 bucks it costs me to register it”. I am probably not the only one with this habit - starting to think drugs might be a cheaper habit with more positive side effects.

I am not getting much traffic from any of the domains, but I am surprisingly getting a trickle on almost all of them. They probably will average 30-50 visitors in a year per domain, which I know is not impressive, but most of these are for fairly high value services so even a few relevant clicks a year is probably profitable.

The challenge is that most of my domains are getting decent search traffic in Google for people searching my exact domain name as a keyword search, just without the dot.com. I have tried parking them at a variety of places and am getting paid a pittance compared to the potential value of the click and the targeting on these pages is terrible. Not to mention that I have almost zero chance at ranking in Google for any of the terms I own while they are parked.

So I have been thinking outside the box and trying to find a few services that can auto-gen content that will get the domains indexed, which in turn will probably lead to me being at least somewhat relevant for the search terms I own. My thinking is that if I can point a prospective buyer at a domain and it shows up on the first page of results for the generic search term that is the domain name, then the value to the buyer is higher than just a relevant domain name for their business would be since it already is ranking. My buyers would not be SEOs or internet marketers or domainers, they would be Dentists and Lawyers etc…

I have tried Domain Name Ager which is fairly reasonably priced ($37) if you have more than a few domains you want to seed with some age. It looks like dog breath - Forth Worth Divorces - and it is probably something a decent web developer could throw together pretty quick. The price was such that it was not worth my time to even try to figure it out - I just bought it figuring I would buy 6 less domains that day. So I have two domains testing this to see if they get indexed and can rank at all. (I am using this post to test giving one a link and not giving a link to the other to see if that matters)

The other thing I have tried, is called Domain Embarking. This free website takes some keywords you provide and fills up an 8 page website with youtube videos and flickr photos and rss news feeds on topics derived from those keywords. The pages are not unattractive, but they are stuffed full of ads, both adsense and otherwise. The way this program works is that the website creation is free and you share in Adsense revenues evenly with all other websites using the program (after the owners of the site take their share of course) usually seems to be around $.30 a click (so dont bring your mesothelioma websites). The other revenues from ads and product sales are thrown into a pot and divided evenly based upon premium shares which you can earn any number of ways. Since the sites are all linked to each other, Google indexes them pretty quickly. I created North Las Vegas Condo on Tuesday and it was indexed on Thursday. It remains to be seen if Google will rank this for what I consider to be a fairly uncompetitive term.

Once again, I am not trying to make serious money from either of these services, rather I am trying to help unlock the value of the underlying domain name by getting it where it ranks decently in Google, and I am trying to do it in an automated fashion. I have tens of thousands of keyword rich domains I could do this on, so I am trying to test a way to get them indexed without having to send lots of links or even time to do so. Something where I (and by I, I mean I pay someone to do it) spend 5 minutes and a few weeks or months later I have a decent shot at ranking for a decent percentage of the sites I try it on.

If the above names can get to the first page of Google for the phrase that is the domain name then I think they might be worth a few thousand dollars to a local divorce attorney or real estate salesperson who can both make that amount back in a single transaction, I just need to show the buyer that the possibility of a transaction is there just because it ranks in Google. Until then, the sales process of just a naked domain with no ranking is too unwieldy and time consuming for me to pay someone to do it in an efficient manner.

Anyone have any ideas? Other services I should test? Am I barking up the wrong tree? Does anyone even understand what I am trying to do?

Oh yeah, the links to the services here are affiliate links - I figure if you go make some other guy some money by testing one of these services, then they ought to pay me a few bucks for sending you their way. The purpose of this post and this experiment is to figure out how to take $50,000 in domains and make them worth $5 million+. If I make $37.23 in the interim from affiliate offers, I will cash the check, but it is not why the post was written…

I am headed to ad:tech next week. I do not normally like to spend time at conferences, in general I do not receive a ton of value from them.

Regardless, I am headed out to New York next week for a few days.

Anyone else headed that way? Would love to meet a few new people. Drop me a comment if you will be around and maybe we can talk shop.

Hey guys, wondering if any of you have ever worked with a really good SEO consultant. We have few sites that are doing ok on Google for really competitive terms we would like to rank higher for, but we have no real time or SEO expertise.

Looking for SEO’s on the web is dicey at best. Too many experts who are little more than an adwords campaign and a junk website. It is difficult to separate the good from the bad. Talked with a few “name brands” who were difficult at best and wanted to charge the star guys price but not have the star guy work on the account…

A few criteria:
1. Must use only White Hat tactics - does not mean you cannot do Blackhat elsewhere but we are not risking our core business
2. Must have some sort of track record with references of current or past clients
3. Must know what their time is worth - I dont want to ask the question how much is this going to cost and get “well what is it worth to you”
4. Would prefer to work with someone confident enough to work on a contingency basis, but will consider hybrid or straight fee for right person/company
5. Will want sign off approval on all changes to website. We have a small but growing brand and we are not relinquishing control of that entirely.

So anyone know (or is) a good SEO consultant? Drop me a line.

Thanks.

I don’t post for 4-5 days (over a weekend and a holiday no less…) and get a number of different people asking if I have stopped blogging again.

My recent policy has been to use this blog to vent frustration or to address issues or just to ramble about something that interests me - over the last few days I just have not had anything interesting to share.

Here is your chance to make requests for topics you would like for me to write about. No promise I will have any insight into your request, but if I have anything to say I will try and put it into a future post.

A few caveats - I am not the person to listen to for SEO or scripting or anything terribly technical. I am fairly knowledgeable about PPC, landing pages, ad copy, white labels, Google, Yahoo, MSN, display ads, testing of everything, why affiliate networks are a bad thing for affiliates or just about anything dealing with paid ads on the internet.

So what would you like me to talk about?

In a recent IBM Study, they show that management skills can be learned from playing online games like World of Warcraft.

I could not agree more. I had a dead phase after I closed my hedgefund, but before I found online marketing, where I played way too many MMORPG’s. I no longer play any of them (although I am itching to try the Lord of the Rings game), but that is much a reflection of having better things to do with my time than anything else.

Some skills that could be learned in such a game:
Leadership/management - If you can keep 60-80 online characters happy (and full of loot) then you can probably manage people who are being paid to do a job. In an online guild, people have lots of choices, none of them are there to earn a living. They are probably sacrificing something to be there. If you can motivate someone who has lots of other alternatives to do something for the greater good then motivating someone who will get fired if they dont listen to you seems relatively easy.

Use of Scarce resources - Part of how a guild works is that everyone improves equipment over time so that they can then take on more powerful creatures which then drops better equipment which allows the group to then take down even more powerful creatures wash, rinse, repeat. Being able to allocate these scarce resources in a way that everyone benefits without playing favorites is tricky. Often times your main tank will need better equipment than offtanks, your main healer might need a special wand or some such to keep that tank alive etc. Learning to allocate that piece of equipment that everyone wants, but only one can have in a thoughtful and fair manner is paramount. Trust me the number one reasons guilds collapse is over loot allocation.

The sum is greater than individual parts - sure maybe that personal assistant or IT guy cannot nuke or heal or bring in any extra revenues, but without the person who can do crowd control, the CEO would always been in the wrong meeting or miss out on important calls. The IT guy is the warlock who can allow your salesforce to go out and mine the red mountains for new customers, but still never miss the important product meetings…. Bad examples maybe, but you soon realize that 2 big dogs and a money guy is not everything you need to run a successful enterprise.

Market Cycles - In every game there is some scarce commodity item that is required to be consumed by high level players. Be it potions or armor plating or special magics. Those who specialize in a market will learn that Tuesday night is raid night and the components of these items can sell for 10-20x right before the raid starts and trade at normal value the next day. Buy low - sell high and make a tidy profit. The real world can be very similar to those who specialize enough to look for those differences.

Testing & Research - Until you figure out how to kill the Google dragon, you dont know how to do it. Cannot even begin to think of how many times it took to kill certain monsters that once you understood how to do it, it was a walk in the park. Unlike in MMORPGS - an ebook or forum is not the place to go to get the answers. Answers are only found by spending time and effort researching the problem.

I could probably draw 10 other stupid conclusions, but some of the best managers I know spent many hours honing those management skills playing “that stupid game” as my wife likes to call them. In the real world there is no substitute for experience. In the virtual world you can actually get that experience at a pace far accelerated.

We are growing really fast (1500% increase in revenue last year) and are always looking for great people.

We are currently looking for:
Senior .Net Developer
Test, Build & Release Engineer
Paid Search Analyst (multiple positions)
Business Operations Analyst

Must be willing to work out of our offices in Dallas, Texas. Send me a resume at diorex at gmail dot com and I will put you in touch with our HR person.

In case you have not heard, the mortgage industry is in a free fall, basically causing the stock market to have a black eye today.

Here is some of the potential fall out for affiliates.

1. If you are promoting US mortgage leads, every broker I know (just a few) is saying that credit quality is becoming more and more of an issue. You cannot sell any “Liar Loans” , No documentation, Stated income loans. Those loans are as much as 40% of the volume in the business. It is frankly amazing that those loans were ever available. If brokers cannot sell the loans, then they are unlikely to continue to buy leads.
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJuNgBkloFE]

This video is amusing and intended to make fun of Americans, but as marketers we can also take a lesson from this. Just about everyone of these people is on the internet, they search Google and they buy products you are selling.

Are your ads and landing pages written to the lowest common denominator?

I just StumbledUpon - Squidoo today.

I had heard about it at some conference 6 months ago and never even looked at it. I was amazed at how many really good high value keywords were available for it. I just started messing around on some products I knew a little bit about and the next thing I knew I had 10-15 really high value keywords and will probably go back and grab more, I was so busy grabbing keywords, I did not even build any content.

Now I am not sure how Google treats these keywords, but I can already envision doing strong anchor text keyword links to some of my websites, plus affiliate links, plus maybe even a little adsense income from Squidoo. From the little research I have done, Squidoo appears to have a fairly decent authoritative rank.

If anyone knows of any tools to automate the grabbing of the sites, I can see some awesome possibilities for marketing. If you can build a tool like this, I will cut you in on the action. This seems very much like something that can generate a little bit of money and if you can automate the process you can make a little bit of money a lot of times.

Might be totally wrong, but this seems exploitable.

I Stumbledupon this while bored. Really surprised I was the Hulk. I have a big temper and am something of a scientist but I am not green, not too nerdy and I have never in my life worn purple pants… If asked to choose I would have picked Captain America as my superhero.

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