For quite some time now I’ve been digging through the different domain development platforms to determine which one is best. Is it Joomla? Wordpress? Or how about Weebly or Wix? What I’ve found is that they all fall short for domain investors.
Developing a domain into a business is one of the four principle business models that domain investors use to extract value from their assets. The other three are monetising domain traffic, selling domains as stock items and selling domains as high value items.
Each of the development platforms are excellent for building a single website but what I've continued to find is they still fall down is when a person tries to build more than one. Although it’s quite simple to spin up another instance in any of the platforms it takes a long time to set them all up…..and time is money.
Anyone that has embarked down the development path learns that building a single domain into a business is a challenging task…let alone many domains. Once you get over the hurdle of building a few websites you quickly discover that there isn’t a simple way to view how each of them are performing in their various business models.
Although Google Analytics provides some insight into your traffic the cost of using it for domain investors can be prohibitive. What are the costs on this “free” product? Do you honestly think that by providing Google end-to-end visibility on your traffic that they won’t take advantage of the data? Let me give you a hint, at its heart Google is an analytics company….. I think Google has enough of my businesses information without handing over the crown jewels for free.
So let’s imagine there is a magic centralised interface for all of your domains that allows you to manage the analytics the next challenge will be to provide a mechanism for making meaningful decisions in a short space of time. Think about it. With only one hundred domains a full-time manager can spend a maximum of about 20 minutes per website per week. If you scale from there, then the numbers get even worse.
To date, I’m unaware of any platform that is capable of providing the data that I require to manage mass scale developments….let alone the ability to make management decisions. The challenge for domain investors is to keep on plodding along and build one domain into a business and then move on. This will require the one thing that domain investors loathe…..and that’s staff.
If you've found the magic bullet for development then please don't hesitate to let me know. Either that or it's about time I start writing some code. Cheers!