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Over
the past four months I have
been giving the new ecommerce
platform at SmartName.com
a thorough test to see if their quick development
system could breath some life into
domains that weren't producing anything
parked. Over that time span I have
moved |
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about 500
domains into SmartName, virtually all of
which have been names with keywords that
are exact matches for the kinds
of commercial products featured by the
company's feed provider - Shopping.com. |
The
vast majority of domains I have been testing are
non .com domains (mostly .us) with
minimal type-in traffic. The whole point of the
exercise has been to see if a mass development
system could make those domains more
attractive to search engines and random visitors
who, finding something more interesting than a
standard parked page, might be persuaded to
stick around and click on some of the product
offerings that catch their eye.
Some
examples of domains I moved into the SmartName
system are IceMachines.us,
Fins.us,
SwimmingPools.us,
PictureFrames.us,
Barrels.us,
LicensePlates.us,
Canes.us,
FoosballTables.us,
MotorScooters.us
and BirdCages.us.
I have seen dramatically improved revenue from
those domains since turning them into SmartName
stores. In their system you have at least two
ways to earn income - from PPC rates paid
by Shopping.com (you get a share of that
revenue) and from AdSense ads that you
can plug into your SmartName pages (you keep 100%
of the AdSense revenue and in my case those
earnings have boosted my total revenue from
SmartName pages considerably ( under Google's
TOS, the exact Adsense numbers cannot be
released and Adsense revenue is not included
in the SmartName earnings in the chart below).
For
the names I noted above (which are my top 10
earners thus far at SmartName) here is the
amount earned from SmartName (in 4 months or
less) vs. the amount earned over an entire
year with a parking company (If you want to
do the simple math, I think it would be fair to
multiply the 4-month SmartName earnings by
three to get a more accurate view of how
they are likely to compare versus the year they
spent on parking pages :
|
Domain |
Parking
earnings (for previous 12 months) |
SmartName
store earnings (there 4 mos. or less) |
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IceMachines.us |
.01 |
$40.91 |
|
Fins.us |
.00 |
$30.97 |
|
SwimmingPools.us |
.04 |
$26.55 |
|
PictureFrames.us |
.00 |
$18.37 |
|
Barrels.us |
.00 |
$13.15 |
|
LicensePlates.us |
.09 |
$12.79 |
|
Canes.us |
.09 |
$11.06 |
|
FoosballTables.us |
.00 |
$10.72 |
|
MotorScooters.us |
.09 |
8.76 |
|
BirdCages.us |
.15 |
$8.44 |
|
Totals |
.47 |
$181.72 |
The
difference for the top ten domains has been
dramatic - $181.72 total for 4 months or
less at SmartName (not even counting the
additional revenue from AdSense) vs. 47 cents
total parked for an entire year. If SN earnings
holds up for 12 months that would make their
total $545.16 vs. 47 cents parked. Certainly
there are many names that I moved to SmartName
that made nothing - or next to it (just as they
had parked) but for the entire group of
about 500 domains moved to the SN eCommerce
platform I've seen about a 5X increase in
total revenue. Depending on the domains you have
your results could be considerably better or
worse.
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A lot of
that increase came from the fact that Yahoo
was giving these domains a lot of love.
Many of them ranked on page 1
(with many others on page 2 or 3) in
their search results for the exact term
the domain represented. Unfortunately,
as is |
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always the
case with search engines - we did hit a major
bump around the July 4th
weekend when Yahoo changed their search
algorithm. The high ranking for most
(but not all) of those domains was lost
and earnings have come down accordingly
(though still easily outpacing what they
were parked). Yahoo is in for another
big change as they are now turning to Bing
to provide their search results, so
there is plenty of search engine
uncertainty ahead. |
I
would imagine the primary reason for my SN sites
falling from their initial high rankings
is that no content was added to or changed on
the sites (other than Shopping.com changing some
products shown). The SmartName system has many
search engine optimization features - I just
never took the time to use them - preferring to
see how a mostly hands off approach would
compare to parking (with SmartName you do need
to enter some keywords relevant to your domain to
generate pages that feature related products -
but it is no more time consuming than optimizing a
parking page). SmartName execs said they have
seen similar disruptions from past algorithm
changes that they have largely been able to
overcome by tweaking titles and content. I will
likely spend some time doing that since it looks
like it could be worth the effort. If you have
stronger domains than I do that are bigger
earners I'm sure their staffers would do some of
that work for you.
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Like
houses, domains can
benefit from curb appeal. |
While
it has been nice to have an alternate
feed (Shopping.com) to turn to now that
revenue from Google and Yahoo parking
feeds has almost completely evaporated,
the search engines are still important
for helping drive traffic to SmartName
stores. So far, it looks like they will
treat them like any other developed site
if you put a little extra work
into them. I think the stores also have
considerably more "curb appeal"
as they show visitors actual products
they are likely to be interested in
(that more polished look can also make
them more appealing to potential
buyers). |
I
should add that the eCommerce platform is just
one of three options SmartNames has for domains.
They also have an auto-generated content
platform for domains that are suitable for
information rich sites, as well as a parking
platform. As
people continue to search for parking
alternatives it looks as though companies that
specialize in specific sectors may
benefit. SmartName has their eCommerce and
content platforms, companies like Octane360
help you build directory sites, DomainAdvertising.com
has a new graphics rich approach that produces
fabulous looking sites, etc. You also have WhyPark,
Epik,
DevHub
and others that allow you to easily
customize a large volume of sites to your
own taste with various plug ins. These are all
encouraging developments that are offering
viable alternatives to people looking to reverse
the disappearing revenue trend. The only way to
see how well they will work with your specific
domains is to give some of them a test run for a
few months to see how they perform over time. I plan to try more of these platforms
myself.
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I
still believe that the best chance for a
home run is to take a step beyond
pure domaining and fully develop
at least one site on a subject that you
are really passionate about and
make that your prime focus (if it
doesn't take off, try another one and
put your heart and soul into it |
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- rinse and
repeat as necessary until you come up
with a hit). In the meantime, look for
the best possible solution for
monetizing the hundreds or thousands of
domains you may have that you will never
have time to develop. My personal goal
is just to have those domains pay for
themselves so I have no carrying costs
for my sales inventory.
For many
(including me) who do not have a lot of
killer type-in domains, end user sales
to small to medium sized businesses is by
far the biggest revenue producer from domains
they |
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don't expect to develop. However,
since only 1-2% of the average
portfolio will sell in any given year,
that still leaves you with a lot of
domains you need to get some production
from. These days it looks more and more
like that requires picking the platforms
that give you the best match
between your keywords and the strengths
of their particular systems. |
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