by Domain Nitro on December 4, 2011 1 Comment

Domain Name Website Case Study Number – beta

This is the first Domain Name I will be developing for the 99 Domains in 99 Days challenge I started recently. Take a look back at that post if you are wondering why I am building this site…

This is my test/beta domain so I can get the timing and tasks down plus it will be a bit more extensive than a minisite.

The Domain Name…

ClickHereDomains.com is the domain and site I will be building first.

The website and traffic analysis

The reason may not be clear because most of the domains I am doing for this challenge will be some sort of product related domain name where there are lots of exact searches for the keywords in the domain name. In this case I am building it to start a new brand and company so I’m not as concerned about having exact matches as much(I did make sure the word domains was in there though).

Click Here Domains will be a flagship site for a services company that will build sites on domains to get people to “Click Here”

Maybe not as funny, ironic or clever to you as it was to me, but when I got the idea for this challenge it was while I was listening to a podcast and they mentioned you should never put the words “Home” on your link back navigation and almost every site you see has that. They also mentioned you should never put “Click Here” on your button links which is another thing you see all the time.

I looked at HomeDomains and the .com was parked and for sale with BuyDomains which is one of the larger players in the domain name reseller arena. I knew they would want a decent amount for the domain so I moved on and I’m really glad I did.

Then I looked at ClickHereDomains.com and it was expiring on GoDaddy THAT DAY! I liked it immediately when I thought of it anyway because it would be easy to make a cool logo and it was simple, memorable and descriptive… everything you would want for a new business name and web brand. Having it available for 16 bucks including expiring auction fee and domain renewal cost made it a no brainer.

Building the site in 99 minutes

Since I bought the domain on auction it never expired which is good since it had been registered on 9/11/09… There are those 9’s and 11’s again… odd isn’t it. I’m not going to count that time on this domain so we’ll start with…

Minute 1
(Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with the exact details of each minute – I am tracking it though for those of you who might want to know and I’ll put it on another page at some point)
Change the DNS to point to my HostGator hosting where I’m going to build the site. I already have a couple hosting accounts so I’m not going to count that time either, but I will say I really like two hosts after having tried several and I can recommend them for their stability and ease of site management. Try these hosting companies.

I have to go finish the other 98 minutes now so I’ll update this page when I’m done so you can go take a look! Leave a comment if you like this domain, hate it or have an opinion on what I am doing here…

*** update *** The site is now live, but not quite complete – still ironing out details, but it will never be “done” so go take a look and let me know what you think in the comments below. Here is a quick screenshot of the site as it stands today:

Filed Under: Domain Names, Make Money Online, Website Tagged With: 99 Domains, Buildin Web Brands, Domain Names, Website Hosting

by Domain Nitro on May 10, 2011 1 Comment

Stop throwing away money! Easy as a, b and better yet, c!

Do you have a website that you want people to visit? If not, what are you doing reading this blog entry?

Since you are still reading I assume you do.

Now, when you start getting that magical traffic, are you throwing away money? Probably! Most people assume if they do one of the following the traffic will come and they are right…

Write great, original content frequently
Get links from sites to your site
Comment on other blogs hoping people will click back to your site
Build a list of visitors emails and email them information and offers
Build page rank in results pages so Google will show some love and give your page even higher in their search results
Buy traffic with PPC, CPA, etc

Now what if I told you that you had to immediately pay 2X or 3X more in time or money to get the same traffic? Would you do it – maybe, maybe not! If you have a good idea of your costs to get a visitor you might find that it wasn’t worth it. The problem is you are doing EXACTLY that!

No, you’re not you say? Ok, if you can answer this question honestly and the answer is yes then you can stop reading this because you are in the vast minority…

Do you run a/b tests on your pages including your home page, sales funnel pages and squeeze pages?

Didn’t think so. Why not? Do you enjoy throwing away money?

A/B testing really is simple and it can increase your conversions and thus visitors who stick around by 2x or even more. Now who doesn’t want twice the page views and potentially revenues? The first time I did this I couldn’t believe how glaring my results were – literally a background color and position of one squeeze form performed over 300% better than the original one I had put up that came as a template form. The crazy thing is you can test really quickly and easily with the tools available today – for free even. Google has a great set of testing tools and there are many more available that add varying degrees of automation to your testing.

Recently I ran across a blog series from Cameron Chapman over at KissMetrics.com that includes the following articles:

Take 15 minutes and read over these great tips on testing and then take 15 minutes more to implement your very first test – if it doesn’t show you any differences then please contact me so I can hire you ASAP for my site!

Make sure you look at the third one on emails that convert as Cameron actually gives some examples of what you might use as a test… Start with the big impact ones such as the subject line (ie, the headline of an email) – I really like the idea of varying it by something like “Product X on sale – 10% off NOW” vs “10% Discount on Product X – Today ONLY!”. If you have any examples or anything you want to share please leave a comment below! Good luck!

Filed Under: Development, Internet Marketing, Website

by Domain Nitro on April 5, 2011 Leave a Comment

Is it a FAQ or something better?

Recently I was trying to find the answer to a question I KNEW I had before that I had researched and resolved. Took a little while to find the answer again so I decided to start my own personal FAQ where I knew I could get to it.

FAQ site logo - FAAAQ.com

This isn’t just any old FAQ – mainly because FAQ was already taken :). In addition to that little problem I also didn’t want just a traditional FAQ area without the answer to the question so I have started Frequently Asked, And Answered, Questions – FAAAQ.com. Catchy huh?

Initially I will be using it as a repository for my own needs, but I’m sure I’ll expand it later if more people want to use it and have similar interests! Take a look and see if there is anything there you find interesting. If you would like to participate please contact me and we can discuss.

Filed Under: Development, Domain Names, Website, WordPress

by Domain Nitro on March 31, 2011 1 Comment

How many hands does Google have?

There is an old saying that sometimes a company or entity is so big that its left hand doesn’t even know what the right hand is doing…

Google Places a spam farm? Nah.

Evidently the Googleplex has a couple of extra appendages since they classified their own places results as spam according to an article on TechCrunch.
Personally, I think they are just blowing it out of proportion, but when a company gets the size and power of Google, there are always power struggles. Matt Cutts seems like he is pretty straight forward – don’t know him, but his blog and videos are generally blunt and honest.

Either way, if you run a content farm you will get punished and this was just a side effect of the spammer purge that is going on with useless content.

Filed Under: Make Money Online, Website

by Domain Nitro on March 31, 2011 1 Comment

You allowed Google, Microsoft, and others to track your location and pass it along…

Not domaining related, but if you browse the web using any modern browser and you don’t explicitly turn off the “Geo” feature of your browser then you “consented” to the EULA of your browser and they are tracking not only the sites you visit, but also from WHERE you are currently… plus they pass it along to any site that asks for it.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I am in IT and I know a bit about domains and websites – did you REALLY intend to tell all those companies about all the sites you visit, when and where you are physically, etc? Didn’t think so. You can do a simple search of how to turn that so called feature off, but here is a link to make it easier to turn of the Geo tracking.

BTW, this isn’t just an evil empire thing – they all do it. Another thought while I’m at it… if you have a smart phone you might want to do a simple search on what you AGREED to as well… iphone, droid, win… take 2 minutes and come back and tell me that isn’t frightening… Now go to some of my sites and buy something

Filed Under: Website

by Domain Nitro on March 31, 2011 9 Comments

7 Website Copywriting Rules,7 Copywriting Mistakes and a Template for free

If you are writing your own content for a website, online store or even a blog you need to be aware of the basics of copywriting. This goes equally well if you are outsourcing your content as you’ll need to make sure they follow these tips so you will get the most content bang for your money!

The following is the list of copywriting tips and mistakes(rips) I use. If you like them and want the template I use, I’ll give it to you free and you can use them to ensure you or your staff follow the rules for online copywriting.

Copywriting Tip/Rip #1:

Start your content with (Tip) a great headline or (Rip)just some random irrelevant title.

You do want people to read your content after you spent time writing it, correct? What most people don’t realize is that if you have a boring headline 80% of people will NEVER read any further. It shouldn’t, but the title matters… a lot!

My template has some great sample titles you can use.

Copywriting Tip/Rip #2:

(Tip)Provide good, quality content, but (Rip)don’t waste people’s time or bore them.

Write your content with a goal and get to the point. You don’t need a 1000 word article to get good results when 200 or 300 would do and cover the topic well. Let’s face it – people get bored and distracted very easily in the age of IM, Twitter, FB, Texting so don’t give them a reason to be distracted. Less is more most of the time. You will probably find it difficult to write fewer words at first. I know I do. All the time.

Copywriting Tip/Rip #3:

(Tip)Use keywords in the right places or (Rip) use some cute title or saying or quote you love.

This is all about letting the search engines find you and then letting them help you out by indexing you for the keywords you really want indexed. In your first sentence, preferably the first words, need to be the keywords and phrases you want to rank with in search engines. Don’t use some cute quote, saying or random intro sentence. If you can, also use the keyword in your headline, meta titles, meta descriptions, anchor text for links and in any of your images alt tags.

Copywriting Tip/Rip #4:

(Tip)Use keywords in the body of your text and (Rip) use keywords all over your text and repeat them excessively.

You’ve all seen the proverbial web page with keywords reeking out of it and thought, that is stupid, and immediately left. It may work for a short time because the engines won’t pick up on it initially unless you are truly blatant. But, in the long run, readers will leave immediately and your ranking will drop. What you really want is people to come AND STAY on your site so write your content for PEOPLE, not search engines.

Copywriting Tip/Rip #5:

(Tip)Use varying titles, meta titles and meta descriptions or (Rip) use the default or same one for everything.

Always use a keyword or phrase in your titles and meta information, but make sure to change them up some and try to make it relevant to the content as well. By default many CMS’s like WordPress use a fairly poor SEO default title. You can vary it yourself or you can set up the post structure where it shows the post title. Better yet, use a free plugin that will do even more for you by default and help propel your content to the next level of search!

Copywriting Tip/Rip #6:

(Tip)Mention benefits of your site, service or product or (Rip) mention just features, facts and figures.

Features, facts and figures have their place in content, but people really only want to know WIIFM, what’s in it for me. Do you want to have 58% less plaque on your teeth or do you want to have a dazzling smile that all the hottest people will notice and love? Thought so!

Copywriting Tip/Rip #7:

(Tip)Tell people what you want them to do or (Rip) let them guess based on your site content or jedi mind tricks.

This is a call to action and you must have one or people will wander aimlessly and probably leave your site. Tell them to order this now, or contact me now, or sign up for the free newsletter, or even read this other article.

P.S. Bonus Tip… Buttons, links and graphics help – especially ugly red flashy ones. So please

to sign up for my domain name and website RSS feed

Almost forgot, if you want my free content template just contact me and I’ll give you the link.

Filed Under: Development, Internet Marketing, Make Money Online, Website

by Domain Nitro on February 3, 2011 5 Comments

Common SEO mistakes

I know, I know… Two days in a row, but Neil Patel has a great post on “5 SEO Mistakes that Crush Rankings” over at QuickSprout.com. If you are building sites or are wondering why your current sites aren’t ranking well this could help. There is also a link to the SEOMoz SEO Beginner Guide which is well worth the time to read.

I know I am guilty of one or more of these on each site I build Let me know where you fall and any tips you might have in the comments!

Also, John Chow has an innovative idea for link building today - check it out if you use WordPress.

Filed Under: Development, Internet Marketing, Website

by Domain Nitro on February 2, 2011 2 Comments

Domain Name Marketing

Neil Patel has a great post on Marketing Tactics over at QuickSprout.com. If you are selling domain names or anything else online it is worth a quick read.

Especially relevant is the long tail discussion because you can relate it to domain name long tails pretty easily. Let me know what you think of his ideas and which ones you already follow in the comments!

Filed Under: Development, Domain Names, Internet Marketing, Website

by Domain Nitro on December 28, 2010 3 Comments

Hey buddy, could you spare a .com?

Domain Names - cheaper is better?

If .com domains were computer hardware, they’d be the hard drive. Wait, before your eyes glaze over, keep reading for some domain name truth. In all honesty the rest of this article can be summed up with buy .com’s and life will be good.

If you are still reading then imagine a scenario like this:

Hey buddy, could you spare a nickel? I’ll work for it and store 1,073,741,824 bytes of data for you and give you a penny back.

I got a new camera and took a lot of pictures over the holidays and with each picture about 7MB I need to find a bigger drive to store them. I headed over to Amazon to get an idea of how much I was going to lay out for a 500GB or maybe a 1TB (a TB is 1,099,511,627,776 bytes or roughly 4.5 million books) drive and was I ever surprised? To put this in perspective, when I started in the tech industry almost 20 years ago I worked for a company that was the posterchild for collecting massive amounts of data and they had news agencies and press releases and industry pundits clamoring when they hit 1TB of data stored!

Have you seen the price of computer hard drives lately? Seriously, I figured it up and for well under a nickel, yes $0.05, you can a GB of drive space… For less than $100 you can get a 2TB hard drive. I don’t have any hard drive domains, but I seriously don’t see how the manufacturers are making money on these drives… I’m glad they’re building them though as they will probably hold about 350,000 pictures I take – maybe a couple of them will actually be good.

The point of this post isn’t to push hard drives, but to consider trends. I know, took a while to get there, but what are the trends driving your industry, domain developments, websites, etc? If I were looking at hard drives and storage you would think solid state drives were the trend a few years ago and possibly memory cards, or even RAM drives, but even that seems to not matter because the mainstay hard drive is the standard and until something can topple it or render it obsolete don’t count on them going away anytime soon. Even with the advent of online storage, online backups or whatever the online story of the day is today I can’t see bigger and better hard drives going anywhere!

Now, where does that bring me? Domain names, of course!

Everyone knows that .com is THE domain to have. There are alternatives, pun intended Morgan, and you can buy any of these and be successful; However, the .com is the cheapest per MU (New term, MegaUsers that I just made up).

You can develop out a .net, .org, .us, .co, .tv, .biz, .mobi, .cc or whatever you want and the trend is that there are a LOT more extensions coming soon and even more over the next few years and you can use them as well and get a good user base, but the second the person forgets the domain name or just gets in a hurry they’ll type it in with .com and you’ll have lost that MegaUser, maybe for good if the .com is developed!

The point of the story is that you can, and should, buy and develop other domain extensions because you can get them for cheap, but you should probably flip/sell the site and use the proceeds to buy the .com and bank some or use it to develop more domains. Or you can buy the .com in the first place if you have the cash because their typo/typein traffic will increase as you develop your domain and once that happens they will want more for the .com domain. Either way, the .com needs to be recognized for what it is – the biggest, badest domain on the block with the most MU potential for the least amount of money. I’m personally looking for a PU, but that is a story for another day.

Now get out there and develop some .us’s, sell them and buy some .com domains!

~~ DomainNitro ~~

Filed Under: Development, Domain Names, Make Money Online, Website

by Domain Nitro on December 21, 2010 4 Comments

You are a salesman, but is your marketing any good?

AKA, do you love domains and making money online?

Every person with a job, a small business, a 16 year old’s lawn mowing service, the lady calling for donations whose caller id you hate to see pop up, the bum on the corner… everyone, is in sales. If you are reading this, more than likely you are selling yourself! Wait, you know what I meant – get your mind out of the gutter!

Anyway, you are either selling your time and knowledge to a company in exchange for a paycheck or you are trying to sell a product or better yet, domain names or internet based products . Most people never make the connection that they are selling themselves – if you can let that sink in, you can immediately apply some insight to your online business.

You are a salesman!

Think about it like this – if you are selling things like information products (ebooks, articles, etc), SEO guides, Websites or domain names then you have a product to sell. True salesmen can sell anything – ie, icecubes to eskimos, but that is not me and it probably isn’t you. Knowing that is key to your success!

Why is that important you ask? Well, most people have a really hard time selling face to face or even online, but bear with me for a second…

What was your last conversation where you were carrying on without thinking about it at all – spouting off facts, figures, trivia and insight? Was it related to some hobby or sport or family member? Think about it. Do you LOVE to talk about or participate in anything? It could easily be cycling, running, working out, dieting, flirting, politics, stocks, bonds, corporations, insurance (you are just wierd), blogging, ipad, iphone, laptops, hdtv, bluray, movies, music, kids, parents, sports teams, gardening, sports cars, yoga, dogs, cats, hair, recycling… the list can go on forever, but the point is the conversation you had was about something you LOVE and are passionate about!

Selling online is tough, it takes time and commitment, but if you love what you are doing it doesn’t even seem like work – it is actually fun!

For me, it is domain names, websites and related products. For you it might be aquariums and products like fish food, lights, plants, floaty thingies like miniature treasure chests and ships or whatever you put in aquariums – the point is that if you love aquariums you immediately thought I was stupid and thought of 17 other things that would make more sense to sell… so why don’t you sell those? Don’t want to sell physical products? Easy, go to clickbank or one of the other info product middlemen and search for aquariums – you’ll get more than you would expect to find. On a side note, you don’t have to really sell physical products per se – many companies will drop ship or have a reseller affiliate id and you can leverage their infrastructure and never even see a product nevertheless touch it.

It is as simple as this – every day I like to look for domains – either dropping domains, online auctions, domain markets and even hand registering domains. I would be doing this anyway, even if I didn’t want to sell the domains as I think they are valuable in ways stocks and bonds can never be… But that is just me – maybe you are a great salesman or you just enjoy pimping your time to someone else.

Can’t come up with any ideas? Contact me and I can help you out in under 5 minutes I bet. I have a stack of hand written notes and ideas for my own stuff that I can’t get done in 20 years and I have a knack for coming up with ideas and I like this stuff so feel free to email me or call me up.

Now get out there and sell some stuff!!!

~~ DomainNitro ~~

Filed Under: Domain Names, Internet Marketing, Make Money Online, Website

The Domain Name…

The website and traffic analysis

Building the site in 99 minutes

AKA, do you love domains and making money online?

Search DomainNitro.com