Successclick, Domain Monetization

WHAT IS A “MINISITE” AND WHY DO YOU LOVE/HATE THEM?

Hi Gang,

I went retro to review some notes I had written last year when a lot of bluster and fluster was being whipped around attacking “minisites”. (I was also inspired by Elliot’s excellent domain site buildout articles lately). Several smart domainers asked the detractors: “Just WHAT is a MINISITE?” Remarkably, after reading 20 blog articles and over a hundred comments, nobody, including myself, has defined what a “MINISITE” is. I still don’t know what that is.

Why doesn’t someone DEFINE what a minisite is, in detail, once and for all?

I’ve seen some “on target” comments from some domainers saying there are those domainers who create limited developed sites in preparation or anticipation of building out larger sites that establish a solid presence on the net.  So how can you “rate” an unfinished project? Is it a “minisite”? Does anyone want to call a website they’re building a “minisite”?

This brings us to the breakdown of the monetization pieces that form the puzzle of a good generic domain that doesn’t get profitable typeins.

Here’s the facts:

1) You parked your domain at a Parking Service (PS) and watched it for a month or two. If you didn’t get more than 100 unique monthly visitors and $.75 a month in PPC revenue, did you realize immediately that you have a domain that needs to be re-evaluated for its worth, because you have a domain that isn’t “self-supporting”? (A quick way to determine if PPC parking your domains is [temporarily] financially smart is to check the monthly rev performers in your report down to $.75. Simply multiply $.75 by 12 months and you have $9.00 a year in revenue – enough to renew the domain if you’re at the right registrar).

2) Most domainers portfolios have 90% of their domains NOT PERFORMING through PPC (PS) landing pages. That means hundreds of thousands of domains owned by domainers need to be evaluated on something different than PPC income. The most glaring change that has occured in domain investing since 2007 is:

Very few domainers actually asks for “multiples” on a domain they want to purchase anymore. Nobody with a knowledge of this business today decides on a domain based on non-transparent PPC revenue. It’s fairly common knowledge that basing your purchasing interest solely on PPC income means you don’t know the domain business. I would confidently state that most successful PPC domainers have lost over half their monthly income since 2008. Because of that, it’s all about potential brands, end-user sales, CPA’s or serious buildouts by the domainer. A domain at a parking page depending on PPC’s is really just losing a lot of money by not expanding into other monetization areas, regardless of how much PPC they’re earning.

3) There are about 300 lucky domainers with one word popular domains who can rest easy (temporarily) because they’ll always know that their domain has great value on several different monetization platforms, including the “top” rev choice, the true “lazy man’s” way to riches – PPC.  However, they rest on the PPC income until they decide when and how to pull the monetization level up for the domain. However, for most domainers, it’s a tight squeeze for their domains to find the monetization bulls-eye because they don’t get that typein traffic that makes it all “so easy”.

4) IMPORTANT FACT THAT MANY DOMAINERS WISH TO OVERLOOK LIKE THEIR DADDY’S CHEATING WAYS: Today’s reality for domainers is that we need to find another source of monetization for those non-performers because PPC has revealed its non-transparency, and their overall control over you and your domains. It’s a unilateral agreement for anyone parking their domain looking for PPC. You don’t even know what you SHOULD be earning, you just have to take what they give you. Personally, I don’t base my domain purchasing investments this way, and neither should you.

5) BOTTOM LINE: The only true way to get the absolute best value from your clearly generic keyword domains is to develop or sell them to an end user. Period. This has been my rant since 2004, and still is.

Look at #5 above:  If you want to enhance these two major options for domainers wanting to make money from their domains, you can’t do this by parking your domain at a landing page hoping for PPC. If you aren’t getting the typeins, then you need to build the domain out with content. Whether you build it small, medium, or huge — anything you do with content that’s relevant for your domain name will be better than letting it rot on a parking page getting no uniques.

Here’s the mistake made by many domainers: Thinking that a “minisite” is an auto-generated website system with identical content that will destroy their domain names by being “blacklisted” by Google or some other SEs. What the detractors of so-called “minisites’ fail to point out is the caveat of “Oh yeah, ummm… this domain would never be SE-indexed anyway if you kept it at a PS with a landing page (PPC).” All those who attack sites that offer auto-content don’t discuss that on most content-development sites, you can make just a few simple changes in your content, including the graphics and the page design, to bypass the “mass produced” tag. It takes less than five minutes to do this for one site.

Putting just five pages of original content on your longtail generic will bring you more value than if you parked it. I had a domain I just sold for five figures that I had parked for 9 years of its 11 year existence. At the PS, it never appeared in SE results. What a waste of 9 years on this domain being parked at a PPC landing page, even though it made enough money to renew itself and a 20 other domains each year. Once I put it up on Whypark and created some custom pages with original content… the buyer appeared and made an offer I couldn’t refuse (no, there wasn’t a head of a horse in my bed).

My favorite site for brand/generic domains that don’t get typeins is WhyPark.com. Many people think that WhyPark.com is a minisite generator. It isn’t. You can use WhyPark to make small to large niche content websites. You can also use WhyPark to develop full-blown websites that most likely will get SE indexed within 90 days.

From my own experience, the 275 domains I have slowly parked at WP are now making about $100 a month revenue. Not a lot of money, except these are also reseller domains that have lured in buyers (whose purchase prices for the domains they’ve bought already weren’t factored in these monthlies), scared competitors in the relevant prodserv market enough to inquire about buying, and the domains weren’t making squat when I had them parked at PS’s.

Do you see my advantage? The longer I have these domains with SOME content on them up on the net, the better chance I have to push them up the SEO hill and impress potential buyers.

My Whypark domains are a sweet deal for me mainly because from experience, I’ve seen many end users who are impressed by a website with content. Most every internet user today can easily spot a parking page, and click away from it just as fast as they came in.  Here’s something for my fellow domain flippers to consider: I can ask a higher price for my domains at WhyPark because the end user sees their competitors’ content on the site, (or even the potential content they might compete against if their competitor buys the domain) and my buyer feels good “taking that visibility” away from their competitors.

FOR COMPANIES WANTING THE ULTIMATE ONLINE ADVANTAGE: A company that controls the generic descriptive domain name/phrase that their competitor MUST use in their advertising for their prodserv, is the death knell for that competitor’s ability to promote that same phrase in their ad copy. Why? Because every time a competitor uses the exact word/phrase of a (.com) domain, the owner of that domain instead gets the promotion to that domain website, so their competitor is promoting the domain name. EX: If you sell “baked green oranges” and own “bakedgreenoranges.com”, each time your competitor uses the phrase “baked green oranges” to sell THEIR “baked green oranges”, they are actually promoting your domain name.  Nice!

But back to the subject at hand — just what is a “minisite” to someone who hates them?