In this series of articles, we are looking at how to optimise your domain portfolio across the different business models of sales (big and small), traffic and development. The first model I have been unpacking is development, not the technical aspects but the business aspects of domain development.

We’ve explored why people return to websites and how to earn money from advertisers. In this article I will be discussing how to build an online business selling services and products.

The first thing we need to separate out is the different between building a business and conducting a transaction. Building a business is all about repeatable revenue that ideally grows over time while transactions are the big deal you hope to get one day.

My wife has a great saying, “Like clockwork.” What she means by this is that she would much rather have twenty dollars each month coming in from a customer than the big deal that may happen one day.

After attending a domain conference and hearing all about the great big things people are doing (most are not true btw) it’s easy to lose sight of what is really driving your business in the quest for the big deal. This is particularly appropriate for selling services and products. Don’t get me wrong, I love the big deals but they just take up so much time and have about a one percent chance of coming off.

So why am I a big fan of my wife’s saying? It proves a number of things about your new online business:

1. You have traffic.
2. The traffic is the correct type because it’s purchasing your service/products.
3. Each month the revenue has the potential to grow with more subscribers.

Once you have these items in place all you need to do is repeat as many times as possible and ensure that the backdoor is closed. If two things happen, your business will then have no choice but to grow:

1. You get more of the same type of people to your website.
2. Your existing customers continue to keep their subscription/buying habits in place. This is the ultimate endorsement of your product/service.

Of course, I’m working under the assumption that you have your pricing right and that your customer acquisition costs don’t put you into a loss making situation.

People will subscribe to services/products for a variety of reason but generally speaking it’s because they can’t get the service/product from elsewhere. Associated with this is whether the new customers trust you enough to part with their cash. One of the problems that many news websites are experiencing is there is always another website where the same content is for free.

Let’s imagine that I decided to charge for access to my articles here on my blog. My guess is a few people would subscribe while the vast majority would write horrible things about me in the forums. My advertisers would abandon me and whizzbangsblog would become a shadow of its former self…..so I’m not too excited about this idea.

This raises an important issue that newspapers from around the world are wrestling with. When you’ve given something online away for free it’s really hard to then start charging for it. So going free is great as long as it’s in line with your overall business strategy.

In my case, I’m happy to write articles and share my experience with people because I believe in giving back to my industry and my sponsors like it. Although, if you have quality unique content that isn’t just a regurgitation of everyone else’s then you may get away with a paywall.....but it had better be really good content!

So let’s imagine I’m wanting to increase my revenue through some sort of subscription basis. What I may do is have premium content that is behind a paywall and leave the blog articles as they are. This strategy is used a lot in the software industry where you can have the free version of some software which has a few features or pay an annual subscription for the full version.

Another thing I could do is provide something completely different from my blog posts. For example, for twenty dollars a quarter I’ll automatically send you an awesome T-shirt with a really funny domain related statement on it or a domaining mini e-book/newsletter to help provoke your thinking about your business.

Better yet, why don’t I put together an online training course that takes a person from a novice domainer right through to a masterclass level. The course will include videos, notes and assessment so that it has some standing in the domaining community. There’s many different ideas you can adopt for your online business but my advice is you should test the market prior to investing a huge amount of money.

Two really interesting areas of subscription earnings that are only recently being exploited are subscriptions to highly targeted educational courses and products. For example, if I shaved with a blade I know that would love the concept of receiving new blades each month via a subscription service.

A couple of years ago I was listening to a radio show about guys and clothing. I couldn’t resist calling up the show and explaining to the presenter that I would love to subscribe to clothes. I hate going out to buy clothes and most of the time I just want to buy the same pair of jeans…..why not have a subscription for jeans?

I hope that you get the sense that all of these ideas are examples of subscription services. Just for the record, I have no desire to do anything with whizzbangsblog in that area…..I have enough on my plate!

I just received a great email from Jeff Sass from .CLUB. He just finished reading my first science fiction book, “Battleframe” and I thought that I’d wet everyone’s appetite with the first chapter from book two.

Just as a warning…..this may end up not being chapter one or it may not even make the cut. It’s unedited so it may be a little rough but it should provide some insight into the exciting world of Battleframe.

For those of you that were wondering, you can buy either the physical copy of book one on Amazon, either as an ebook or physical copy. Here is the link.

I hope you enjoy it!

Book Two of The Mindwars

Esther cried out in alarm as her body spun out of control through the air. The roaring wind assaulted her ears as she plummeted through the air. With a sudden snap of glowing blue wings, everything righted itself and her descent slowed. She tried to look around but it was if someone else was controlling her body. Flashes of purple hued lightning leapt with a crack of thunder and revealed a solid bank of clouds far below.

“Where was she?”

Her head turned on its own accord and she looked back at five other pilots forming up on her left and right. Each of them wore a unique battleframe that she recognized from her recent study of Concord technology. A trim lightly armoured recon Raven looked tiny against the massive Rex next to it and the Bio was completely different again.

“Why were their five? Who are these people?”

Something in the back of her mind suggested that she should know each person but an impenetrable fog clouded her mind. Like in a dream, she could not quite focus on what was happening around her. The previously distant clouds suddenly rushed towards her just as she lost sight of the others in a purple pyrotechnic crackle of electricity. She seemed to know what to do and with a press of a button, a display appeared before her vision that penetrated the clouds surrounding her.

A sudden wind shift buffeted her from the left side and a quick adjustment of her weight kept her gliding on the path forward. She instinctively knew what to do and how to fly through the twisting air currents.

“Was she doing this? Who was she?”

As quickly, as they had entered the cloud top Esther and the five pilots punched their way through the bottom, revealing a spectacular mountain landscape far below. Giant snow-capped peaks raised their sharp jagged edges towards her. Looking down she could make out a river cascading off a cliff face and plummeting thousands of feet to the valley floor below.

Her arm passed across her vision as she pulled a Charge rifle out of its back harness. She was wearing a Raven battleframe like the pilot next to her. “Why was this important?” Esther knew that she should know what she was looking at but she still could not puzzle it out.

Looking forward, the Charge riflescope appeared before her eyes and she peered through the augmented lens into the distance. The scope revealed a huge fortress nestled against a cliff face

“What is this place?”

Her fingered squeezed the guns trigger and a beam of blue energy lanced out and dropped her target. Silently as death, she glided over the fortress’s outer wall and landed with a few quick steps. Her head turned to the left and for the first time she saw her own reflection in a window. For a second, Russell’s kind eyes stared back at her and then moved on.

Esther’s dream world suddenly swirled around her and everything collapsed into place. She knew that somehow this was really happening and that her loved ones were attacking a massive Scourge base. Somehow, she was seeing through Russell’s eyes and she knew that he was in mortal danger. Even as her view of the dream world clouded, she tried to reach out to her husband to offer her support. Anything to help him see the enemies surrounding them. He was her love, her life.

Her head turned towards one of the other men and she recognized James incased in his enormous Rex battleframe. Her mother’s heart cried out towards her son that was thrust into a war at such a young age. He smiled back at her and deep within she felt Russell’s pride for their son.

The dream faded and in desperation, Esther cried out, “Russell, Russell, Russell!”

And then it was gone.

Esther sat bolt upright in bed, panting heavily with the impact of what she had witnessed in the dream. Now that she was upright, the sweat that beaded her brow ran down into her eyes, stinging them with its saltiness. She wiped her face on a corner of the sheet and was just about to step out of bed when there was a knock at the door just before it flew open.

Marie stood in the doorway dressed in her pajamas and her red hair in a complete riot. She took one look at Esther and said, “You had it too.”

Esther nodded in reply.

Closing the door behind her Marie walked over and sat on the edge of the bed. Her eyes looked haunted, almost gaunt from the experience. “I was inside Mihaley’s head and saw everything through his eyes. And you?”

Esther whispered back, “I was with Russell.”

“How is this possible?”

“I don’t know.”

“How could we both dream the same dream?”

“Marie, it’s impossible and we both know that it wasn’t a dream. We were really there.”

“Have you read anything about this sort of thing with Concord technology? Maybe we’ve been exposed to something.”

Esther shook her head. “No, I’ve read a lot since our husbands left and this isn’t something that the Concord has done.”

“So what do we do now?”

Before Esther could reply, a knock sounded at the door. Esther cocked a questioning eyebrow at Marie who responded with a shrug.

Her voice was firmer by now and Esther called out, “Who’s there?”

A female voice replied, “Sergeant Eltivia. I was doing my rounds and saw your light on. Is there anything that I can get for you?”

“No, I’m fine thank you Sergeant.”

Despite her reply to the negative, the door opened to reveal the Sergeant dressed in a standard issue Concord grey uniform. Her blond hair was perched in a bun atop her head but what struck Esther and Marie was the Sergeant’s radiant blue eyes.

Esther was a little annoyed at the intrusion as she said, “Sergeant, I said that I did not require your help.”

Sergeant Eltivia smiled warmly to both women opposite her. “Of course you both need my help. You’ve just experienced your first synaptic co-joining. It goes far beyond mental rapport and it can’t really be controlled. We were concerned this would happen.”

Her previous annoyance gone, Esther felt strangely at peace and relaxed in the presence of this stranger in her private quarters. She thought that she should be alarmed but it really did not seem appropriate. Stumbling across her words she said, “Synaptic what?”

“Synaptic co-joining.”

“What’s that? Who are you?”

The Sergeant pulled a couple of clips out of her hair and let it cascade perfectly down her back. As if smiling sweetly to a child she said, “I can’t stand putting my hair up. I don’t know what woman on this planet see in it.”

In the deep recesses of her mind, Esther felt an alarm going off. There was something wrong here. She should be concerned about the sergeant not relaxed and at ease. Like building blocks that form the foundation of a house Esther unknowingly began to construct a mental barrier between her and the Sergeant. The woman’s blue eyes looked deeply into her own and became all encompassing.

“Don’t do that dear. I’m not here to hurt you. Quite to the contrary. I needed to make sure the link didn’t expand and start broadcasting your presence to the entire galaxy.”

Like a child dismantling a house built from a plastic toy, Esther felt her mental wall disintegrate under the other woman’s scrutiny.

“Who are you?”

The Sergeant looked at Esther and then Marie. A look of concern reflected in her blue eyes, “It doesn’t matter who I am. What does matter is that you must return to Australia. There are things happening right now that are going to change the balance in the galaxy and it all hinges on you being home.”

“We can’t”

“And why not?”

“Our husbands asked us to work with the Concord team here.”

“Don’t worry about that I’ve already dealt with them.” The Sergeant strode forward and before the two women could react she placed one hand on each of their foreheads and half mumbled to herself, “I just need to erase a few things from your memory and enhance a little bit of desire. That seems to have it.”

Dropping her hands, she took one look at Esther and Marie as they stared blankly into space. Just one last thing to do. Taking out a clear vial from her pocket Creativity, masquerading as the Sergeant, dropped it into a pocket in Esther’s suitcase before she vanished from the room to report back to Wisdom.

Esther yawned as if she’d just woken from a deep sleep and blearily looked across at Marie. “What was I saying again? That’s right, I suddenly feel like we need to get the girls and head home.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more. We need to get going straight away.”

Obviously there are a great multitude of business models that you can apply to your development project. Remember that we are looking at developing one of our domains into a business as part of our portfolio optimisation. The first business model that we will examine is advertising.

In this business model you are trying to ramp your traffic so that it becomes worthwhile for advertisers to spend their money to reach your audience. A couple of things about audience, you can either provide mass numbers or the right people to advertisers. For instance, Whizzbangsblog doesn’t have millions of people visiting it every day but it does have the right people in the domain industry. This is valuable for sponsors.

With your new development you need to choose your approach and go mass volume of advertisers or a select few. If you have a mass of advertisers on your pages, then readers may revolt and advertisers won’t pay the big dollars. Less advertisers will potentially allow you to charge a higher rate and keep the readers onside. It’s a balancing act and it really depends upon your market vertical.

Remember that one person’s advertising can also be another person’s content. This is often the case in hobby publications where the advertising is just as valuable as the articles to the readers.

Unless you have huge volumes of traffic then I would recommend staying clear of selling on a cost per view basis. Likewise, any other performance based advertising (eg. Pay per click) may not be suitable for a business you’re launching out of the gate. A reasonable charge per month is often palatable for advertisers as well as provide some necessary initial cashflow for your venture.

As you write your content what you really want to do is provide value to your sponsors/advertisers. For instance, I use both Escrow.com and Epik and I wouldn’t have a problem recommending them to readers. You need to be careful that you’re not writing advertorial pieces but sharing your own experiences of using their products and services.

You can add a lot of value beyond a banner on a webpage. For instance, earlier this year I conducted a video interview with Jackson Elsegood from Escrow.com about some of the developments that he’s introducing at Escrow.com. Likewise, I will be interviewing Rob Monster from Epik about what he is working on at Epik. If you are looking at adopting this strategy, then the number one issue that you should be focused on is whether this is providing value to readers. There’s no point in conducting an interview that’s merely a sales pitch.

On the flipside of the coin, the ultimate mass volume model is a directory. Once again the biggest challenge for anyone building a directory isn’t the actual building (there’s lots of directory software available) but getting the high volume of traffic to the directory so that advertisers get a return on their investment. As an aside, as a directory grows they can often morph into market vertical or hyper-local search engines…..hence why Google is very interested in this market.

So there are a lot of decisions that need to be made with the advertising business model but they all tend to boil down to providing value in the form of highly qualified traffic. The only way you will keep your traffic is if you are providing reasons (see the previous article) for people to return to your new business. So be really careful in looking after your audience....they have a lot of demands on their time and for them to spend some of it with your new venture is a privilege and should be respected.

In the next article we will look at products, services and how building one of these businesses isn’t actually as hard as you may think.

When we reflect on the last hundred years of history innovation has been rampant as one breakthrough after another has succumbed to the creative talents of people who think differently.

Think about it, just over a hundred years ago the Wright brothers flew for the first time at Kittyhawk and now humanity has been to the outer reaches of the solar system. The rate of change an innovation is simply staggering.

I found myself reflecting a lot about innovation this week because on Monday I took delivery of an Oculus Rift Virtual Reality head set. I’ve been waiting for over five months for the Oculus and it’s been twenty-two years since I first experienced VR at the Walt Disney Imagineering labs in Florida. You could say that my expectations were pretty high!

It only took a couple of minutes to setup and then I put on the head-mounted display unit for the first time. To say the experience was staggering is an understatement. The sense of being in a virtual world was completely engrossing, including feeling vertigo in a demonstration which involved standing on the edge of a skyscraper.

I fired up a futuristic star fighter flight simulator that involved being launched out of a space-carrier and into the middle of a space battle. I can look behind me, above me and forward as enemies’ wheel around my ship and try and get a missile lock. Flying behind asteroids and other structures for cover is entirely real as they swoosh past my left and right. I was really there!

An interesting thing happened to me when I left VR. I began to think about the computer generated world as being all around me. Staring at a flat monitor as I write this blog just seems so old hat now. There is one thing for sure we are on the brink of a VR revolution that will change the way we interact with computers forever.

So after my bit of playing around I downloaded Unity 3D to start to learn how to program the Oculus myself. With a bit of help from an Amazon book it wasn’t long before I donned the headset to explore a world that I had created. This was a lot more fun than flying spaceships!

I’m a firm believer that if you want to really be innovative then you need to be learning about technological advances when they are in their infancy. When the Internet was first commercialised in the early 90s I founded an ISP because I wanted to learn all there was about the Net. Likewise, I did the same thing with a broadcast technology that I developed back in early 2000.

Before founding ParkLogic I learnt a lot about domain names by being a domain investor myself. This innovative philosophy is at the heart of why ParkLogic is so successful with domain investors all across the world. We are constantly looking for new innovative ways to extract greater value from domain traffic. The reason why we never stop is we have a mantra of “Innovate or Die”.

I had a discussion with one of our team this week and he was asking why we were testing out a new monetisation opportunity. I replied by saying, “We are charged by our clients to constantly find better ways of monetising their traffic. We can’t just rely on a single source of revenue; we need to innovate for our customer’s sake or we should stop right now.”

Every day I read a synopsis of the latest innovations in technology and science from around the world. For example, quantum entanglement will not impact the domain industry in the short-term but in the long-term it’s going to change everything. Behind the scenes Artificial intelligence is now changing the way we interact with the web. How it will change the domain industry is anyone’s guess.

So the question I have for you is what have you done in your business that was different today compared to a few years ago? If you’ve been doing the same thing with your domain traffic as you’ve always done, then don’t be disappointed with poor results. Give me a call, do something different and be amazed at the outcomes at little innovation can generate.

Have a great weekend…..I know that I will because I’ve got a world to build!

In this article I will be further expanding on how to develop a domain into a business. This is the first business model that can be applied to domains, the other three are monetising traffic, treating domains as stock-items and the last selling domains at high values.

The first issue for me with any developmental project is working out how the domain is going to make money. This seems like an obvious question but many people approach developing a domain from an aesthetic perspective (ie. pretty website) rather than being focused on the business outcomes.

Generally speaking, all business models hinge on getting not just new traffic to your website but repeat visitors. A repeat visitor is gold as they perceived a value in your site enough that they returned for a second look. It shows that there is something about your business offering that they want.

So here are some reasons why people will return to your website.

Information
Users want to get access to information that you provide. This could be anything from technical documentation right through to an online training course or even an online newspaper.

Opinion
You and your business has developed a significant enough reputation that people are interested in what you have to say on issues, products and services. Before I buy anything I like to do my research by reading reviews on the product I’m interested in.

For example, when I write an article on the domain industry I try and not just report the news but understand what is happening and provide an opinion.

Useful
Google is the ultimate useful tool that allows us to effectively find things on the Internet but there are many, many other tools. How about domain tools, whatsmyipaddress.com or geoipview.com. These are all tools that I personally regularly use.

With the introduction of cloud computing there has been a blurring of the line between a site being useful and one that provides a service….which is our next item.

Services
Users will return to a website because that website provides a great service that they are willing to pay for. A website that is useful is one that often gives their service away for free because they earn money in other ways (eg. Advertising). Salesforce.com is an example of a massive company that provides CRM solutions to businesses all around the world. Businesses can subscribe to their base offering and pay more for additional features. Will your new venture offer a billable service?

Products
Put simply, I’m Amazon and I want to ship you as many physical or digital products as I possibly can. Gaming platform Steam saw the transition to pure downloads and built a whole ecosystem around selling software to gamers. If you have an exclusive product that people want, then they will return to your website to get it.

Funny
In many respects a website that is funny is a subset of the information category but it’s so big a segment then it’s worthwhile commenting on it. Websites that are genuinely funny provide content that you find irresistible to pass onto your friends. The good ones often have massive traffic and drive large amounts of cash from being paid pennies per visitor by advertisers. The challenge here is to ensure your website remains funny and not just become old-hat.

Social
A social website is centred on a community where the individual members can share their knowledge and expertise with the wider group. The first social communities were built using forums and Internet Relay Chat. This has quickly expanded to fully functional Facebook like applications that you can instantly install on any Joomla/Wordpress website. Beware, since Facebook is the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in this space, this segment is often a difficult one to crack but if you can then there can be some really big dividends.

There are a lot of other different methods to encourage users to return to your new venture but the above list should kickstart your thinking prior to you spending a whole lot of money. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a bit of a SEO cynic and believe that if you give people what they want then Google will love you for it as well. So really think about why a person should return to your new venture.

I should mention that when I build an online business, I’ll often do combinations of the above. For example, I may have a social website backed up with regular blogging on topics that people find informative….so don’t think that each of the above items are completely separate from one another.

Whatever you do, pay attention to your statistics and interpret what they are telling you. It’s rare that growth is the answer you want. What most new businesses need is the right type of growth. If at all possible, do whatever you can to engage with real readers/customers as soon as you can as they will tell you so much about your business that you never even thought of.