Archive for the 'Case Studies' Category
A few services were a tremendous help in launching my new site, SiteViper.com. You can read all about the new site and how it improves the process of buying websites in my previous post. I thought that it would be worthwhile to talk through the key services I used.
vWorker.com – During development, I was stuck on writing a regular expression to extract a domain name from a block of text. After some futile searching, I posted the project on vWorker (formerly Rent a Coder) to have a regexp guru solve my problem. Within a few hours, I had over 20 developers bidding on the project. One of the developers knocked out the project in no time, and I avoided coding frustration and focused on moving the project forward. It costs me $15, and it was worth every penny.
A long time ago, I expressed an interest in the potential of the .CM namespace. I figured that a significant number of users accidentally entered whatever.cm into their browser instead of whatever.com and that there may be an opportunity to monetize the typo traffic.
In the .CM initial landrush domain bidding, I bid on five domain names. My 
criteria for bidding was
1.) The .com version of the domain name had at least one million unique visitors per month from the US, based on Comscore data.
One of the sites that I work with just implemented a feature on their site that allows members to invite their friends to the site by importing their address books from Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail, and other email providers. This is a common feature on most social networks these days, and there are many scripts available with this functionality.
As soon as they implemented the feature, they were sending tens of thousands of email messages per day. Some of the big email providers did not take kindly to their email practices (which were completely legitimate) and they were blocked from both Yahoo! and Hotmail within a week.
While doing some research on renting out my condo in Charlotte, I found a novel technique for making money from Craigslist. About once a week, someone posts links for a condo for rent. The person’s posts have pictures and a very reasonable price listed. Instead of providing a phone number or email address, he encourages people to contact him through his website. The site is a domain parking page at Sedo with PPC ads for condos in downtown Charlotte. The condo market is pretty hot here, and related keywords are going for over $1.00 per click on Adwords. Even after Sedo takes their cut, he is still doing pretty well. I am curious how much traffic this could generate.
Over the last few weeks, I have been working on a new site to make buying existing websites and domains easier. Tonight, I can proudly say that SiteViper 1.0 is now up and ready for action. I was spending a lot of time scanning forums that listed websites for sale. The process is terribly inefficient, and I am not a big fan of the tools that are already out there to help aggregate listings.
So why is SiteViper worth using?
- SiteViper aggregates for sale listings from around the web so that you don’t have to spend time wading through forums. Listings are refreshed every 15 minutes, so you will not miss anything.
The recent posting of Facebook’s allegedly non-existent advertising rate card provides insight into the company’s monetization strategy.
Some of my doubts about Facebook’s ability to monetize their platform were fueled by recent reports of abysmal performance for bulletin advertising (0.04% click through rate). Facebook users are relatively sophisticated, and they just don’t click on conventional advertisements, or even the Facebook specific bulletins. So how will Facebook generate revenue to justify the lofty valuations being tossed around by the media?
I was signing up for a Photobucket account the other day, and I was quite surprised by their aggresive attempt to monetize new signups. On the registration screen, you are asked to provide your cell phone number. If you enter your cell phone number, a pre-checked bx appears which reads “
Some of the details of the .cm domain name monetization scheme have been revealed since my last post on .cm domain names. Business 2.0 ran a great article about what is going on with the .cm domain space. In my initial post, I detailed how nearly all .cm domain names were being redirected to a landing page on agoga.com that features ppc links from yahoo. The redirects and landing pages are managed by uber-domainer Kevin Ham. He has worked out an agreement with the government of Cameroon to share the revenues derived from the landing pages.
Social Networking site Tagged is going through explosive growth, and they have an interesting growth and monetization strategy. Last week, a techcrunch profile mentioned that they are signing up 350,000 new users per day and generating 1 billion page views per month. The site’s monthly revenue is $600k per month.
The first thing that sparked my interest was how on earth they could maintain such a rapid rate of new user acquisition. During their signup process, they slyly ask users to import their address book to invite friends to the site. The friend invitations are some of the slickest that I have seen. You can see some screenshots and a full writeup of the process here. I have read that they send out the invite multiple times. Apparently, this strategy has been very effective for them.
In my post about about how to monetize unused domains, I mentioned that I was experimenting with redirecting a typo domain. The domain is blinkco.com which is a typo for the ringtone company blinko.
I have seen a drastic improvement by redirecting the traffic to the blinko affiliate program on azoogle. The previous owner was using Sedo to monetize the domain. This earned him approximately $0.13 per visitor. The affiliate program redirect has earned my over $0.40 per visitor over the first month and a half. This equates to $430 CPM. The traffic volume is not huge, but it is a nice additional revenue stream. I will keep my eyes open to apply this technique to more domain names.
