case study | Cross-Country-Skis.com

Domain at Hand: Cross-Country-Skis.com

What’s Going On?
Cross-Country-Skis.com came to us by way of Chris Brooks.  We felt it was a great time to ramp up this site that was doing very little parked.  Since a hyphenated domain works well in the search game we felt we would give it a go with our Rapid Mini Site process.

Speaking of hyphenated names – I will probably follow this up with a post, but they make excellent development domains!

So we got to work and analyzed the popular areas of cross country skiing and what people are generally looking for.  We came up with a nice and simple layout that would perform well both with the click throughs and the search engines.

Chris decided he wanted to use Yahoo Publisher Network instead of Google AdSense, which is always fine with us.  We will work with whomever you wish to advertise with.  We finished up development and started into our marketing process.

And the Results Are…
We have been doing extremely well marketing to MSN – and it showed in this project!  Here is what Chris had to say about us:

“I’ve been looking for alternative monetization techniques for 2nd-tier domain names — generic commercial keyword-driven names that don’t get much type-in traffic.  AEIOU.com is an excellent starting point — the $250 price point is very reasonable given the initial setup, 5 pages of content, and a unique design.  As proof of concept, cross-country-skis.com ranked first for the term “cross country skis” in MSN within a couple of weeks of AEIOU’s initial work, with no additional work on my part.” Chris Brooks | cross-country-skis.com

At the End of the Day
With the winter season right around the corner from us here in the states, Chris is entering the season with a great position on the search engines.  Traffic should pick up nicely as well as earnings.

Chris – We appreciate your kind words and look forward working with you on future projects.

case study | BahamasAccounting.com

Domain at Hand: BahamasAccounting.com

What’s Going On?
Keith Ferrier came to us looking for a better solution for his domain bahamasaccounting.com – he believed their was more to this name then what it was doing parked and felt that the aeiou.com Rapid Mini Site process would do the trick to break out of it’s current mold.

After reviewing the potential of this name – we agreed and began development.

BahamasAccounting.com is an excellent use of cross marketing geo domains.  Just because you do not own Bahamas.com does not mean that you cannot come to the table and have a great product.  When you put together an industry + a geographic location you can come up with a real winning combination.

Our goal with the development process was to create a site that offered general information on accounting in the Bahamas while making sure that we are capitalizing on the high EPC nature of the keyword “accounting”.  This is very important for establishing a strong foundation for the site and helping with preliminary earnings.

The real strengths of our development are starting to show – we have increased the site traffic nicely and held a strong CTR that is monetizing very well.  The great thing about this whole development is that now Keith has a real product with BahamasAccounting.com.  Not only is he able to capitalize on the current ad placements, he can now start doing business directly with accounting firms in the Bahamas and start earning those ever so valuable outside advertising dollars.

And the Results Are . . .
Here it from the man himself!

“I am more than pleased with the results of the rapid mini site for bahamasaccounting.com. Traffic has increased rapidly in the first month. And the ctr has dramatically improved! I am sending you my list of other potential sites for development.” Keith Ferrier – bahamasaccounting.com

BahamasAccounting.com is now #1 in MSN for “Bahamas Accounting” and traffic is continuing to grow daily.

At the End of the Day
It has been a real pleasure working with Keith and we are happy that the site is performing well for him.  As the search engines continue to take into account the rest of our marketing process bahamasaccounting.com will only continue to grow.

We broke the mold, and you can to.  If you are interested in seeing results like this on your domains, please feel free to contact us – we would be glad to discuss the potential development of your domains!

What Domains Domainers Should be Developing

This is a pretty common question for us over here at aeiou.com – “Which domains should I develop?”  Since this is a pretty complicated answer I feel that it would be best if we laid it out in the big picture format.

The simple answer is, every domain should be developed.  With development comes the fruits of your labor.  When dealing with strictly type in traffic you are limiting yourself to direct navigation only with a very low chance of capturing an audience. Parking companies have done a fantastic job of creating sticky landing pages, however with the lack of content I feel that it is all dead end traffic in the end.

At the end of the day though we are all domainers.  We buy premium domains and want to turn a profit on them whether it is in day to day revenue or on the resale market.  This is what fuels the growth of our industry and is why we are continuing to do well in a unstable business arena.

Development costs money – and if one is not careful you can easily get upside down quickly in heavy labor and marketing costs.  Our approach to domain development is to analyze the possibilities of a domain for immediate advantages in the Development vs. Parked battle.  Here are the 3 main criteria we look for when looking for great candidates for development

High Search Availability
This is the big winner of them all.  If your domain is composed of a keyword or keyword combination that is actively searched for, you are missing out on a great source of traffic.  Search traffic is here to stay and only improving.

Just yesterday Google announced the launch of their new web browser Chrome that is going to definitely increase traffic to the top search results.  In a sense taking away from the direct navigation market and giving it to the top ranked sites.

In general I have seen that for every 1 type-in you see on your site there is 1.5 searches being done on the search engines.  That is more than double the number of type ins.  Domain development provides the foundation for your site to gain traction in the search engines and earn some of that organic search traffic.  Who’s domain could benefit from a doubling in traffic?!

Previously Developed
This is a very big point that is often overlooked.  If you pick names up off of drop lists or previous owners that were already developed you are ahead of the development game.  With these purchase comes the chance of deep backlinks that the previous owners had worked hard for.

Normally domainers would just point this to a parking page and milk the additional traffic till it runs dry.  The flaw in this is that it will eventually run dry.  The search engines will penalize the domain for parking.  The sites owners of the deep link pages will remove your links.  In the end it all falls down.  It does not have to be that way.

When you develop a domain you open your opportunities for capitilizing on the previous owners efforts.  You do not need to have the old website to do this.  Using one of our Rapid Mini Site developments we are able to develop a site along the same lines of the old site.  However the trick in this is that we are able to put in search engine friendly redirects for any old links to link them to the front page or any other relative page we develop for the new domain.  This has a few great added benefits:

• Instant targeted backlinks to your new site which will help the ranking immediately
• Site owners of the backlinks have nothing to complain about and no reason to remove your links
• Prevents the loss of bookmarkers

Some domains when you pick them up are still even indexed in Google and the other search engines.  These are also shoe ins for our rapid development service.  Once again using search engine friendly methods of manipulating what was there to what is there now there is no reason to take a penalty from the search engines on these.

High EPC Earners
I am not going to get into what niches are great earners – most of this is very common knowledge.  What I do want to touch on is when you have a domain with low traffic but high epc.  We see this very often and there is a point to developing these names.  We keep our rapid development service low in price so that our clients are able to monetize their investments quickly.  When you are earning $5 per click it only takes 50 clicks to earn back your invesment.  This is reasonable on any level.  With the increase of traffic that you will receive to your domain and the aggressive ad placement we have been able to maintain competitive click thru rates of 16%-22%.  So lets break this down for a low traffic situation.

• Currently Parked and receiving 10 uniques a day
• Lets say you have a 50% CTR on your parking page that is fetching you $5 per click.  This is a total of $10 a day
• After development you are receiving 30 uniques a day
• Now we have a CTR of 20% with the same average EPC.  This is a total of $30 per day.  The development process will be paid off in a total of 2 weeks and you are off to the races with your new and improved earnings and internet property.

aeiou.com offers domainers the ability to enter the development market without getting in over their head.  We believe in the “Walk before you Run” mentality and have had great success in increasing our domains daily and overall value by taking the right marketing approach.  If you have domains that you feel fit one of the three categories above and would like to discuss the opportunities with them please use the Contact Us page to shoot us a note.  We are happy to discuss any development with you.