Andrew Allemann & Adam Glazer Join Monte Tonight
06/21/2006 - Monte Cahn
Monte provides an update on what is happening in the industry and interviews two great guests. Monte’s first guest tonight will be Andrew Allemann, editor of Domain Name Wire. Andrew Allemann has been active in the domain name industry since the late 90s. He has bought, sold, traded, and developed hundreds of domain names. Andrew is active in secondary domain name markets and up-to-date with domain policy. Montes second guest is Adam Glazer founder of Glazer Enterprises. Adams 10+ years of experience spans public relations, reputation management, search marketing, affiliate marketing and online media/advertising. Having been in the trenches of online marketing since 1997, Adam is a frequent speaker at a range of leading industry conferences, including AdTech, PRSA, and Jupiters Search Engine Strategies.
[Commercials]
Monte: Hey, folks, welcome to Domain Masters. This is Monte Cahn, your host. I’ve got another great week. Looking forward to a trip to Chicago tomorrow with my son for his 5th birthday; I’m going to take him to all the museums and should be a lot of fun. So I’ll be out, ah, out of the office Thursday and Friday. I’m looking forward to a nice little trip with my boy.
Today on Domain Masters, we have two great guests. Sorry for the late start, by the way, but Andrew Allemann is the editor-in-chief in Domain Name Wire. If you remember last week, we had the editor-in-chief and creator of Domain Name Journal, which was a great show and Andrew has a different type of website that covers the domain name industry and we’re going to cover some of those items, which is more of a blog, kind of an open blog and forum type domain related news site and a very good site that’s gaining in popularity as well. And get his opinion about where the industry is and where the risks in the market are. He’s also had a lot of experience in buying and selling domain names and virtual property. And then the second half of the show, I have Adam Glazer on. Adam is a online marketing and Internet marketing expert and we’re going to learn a lot about his experience in the online media advertising field and get some tips and some pointers on how to do a better job affiliate marketing, online marketing and how he’s been successful building his business. He’s a frequent speaker at Search Engine Strategies and look forward to having him on as well. So, with that we’re going to break for a commercial or a few commercials, pay some bills and be back on with Andrew Allemann.
[Commercials]
Monte: Hello, welcome back to Domain Masters. This is Monte Cahn, your host. I’m going to introduce our first guest, Andrew Allemann, who’s been active in the domain industry since the late nineties. He has bought, sold, traded and developed hundreds of domain names. Andrew is active in the secondary domain market and is up to date with domain name policy. He has a site called Domain Name Wire; its kinda of a blog type set up and very nice articles; I’ve been looking at it over the last two days myself and Andrew, welcome to the show.
Andrew: Thank you. Thank you, Monte.
Monte: Hey, Andrew, sorry about the time confusion. I guess my guys here don’t know the difference between Central Time and Eastern Time – adds up in reverse hours [laughs].
Andrew: That’s fine [laughs], that’s fine, no problem.
Monte: So, I hear you had to rush back. But anyway, appreciate having you on.
Andrew: Absolutely.
Monte: Real interested in getting a kind of brief, 30,000 foot history of how you got into the market, what you’re . . . you know, how you got into the Internet in general and then how you got into the domain names.
Andrew: Sure, absolutely. I was actually in college back in the late nineties when I started getting involved in it, you know, back in the days of dial up. And really, got into the domain business by wanting to start a website; bought a domain back in about ’98 and set up a website and it started to get some traffic and I put it on eBay and got a lot of interest from people wanting to purchase the site. And at the time, I thought that was a big deal and in retrospect, not so much but it really just got me into it and at that point in the game I started registering domain names. But as you can imagine, as a college student, you know, paying $70 per registration, you couldn’t load up on thousands like you can today, if you want to. But, registered, you know, 20, 30 domain names that first year and it’s kind of grown from there. And that’s kind of how I got involved.
Monte: And, uhm, when did you create Domain Name Wire?
Andrew: Domain Name Wire is a little over a year old. You know, its something that, you know, having been involved in the domain industry since the late nineties, I’ve seen it grow a lot and there’s some excellent news sources out there right now, including DNJournal; Ron Jackson does an excellent job on that. But, what I couldn’t find out was I couldn’t find a good place to get aggregate news and information. Lots of publications have started writing about domain names, obviously, but its not easy to track down all of that information so I decided I’d create a centralized source, updated daily, of information not only about news, you know, that’s on say, News.com or Business 2.0 about domain names, but also editorial information and opinions; recommendations to people getting involved in the industry; reviews of various services, that sort of thing.
Monte: Right, right. And, do you have any idea of your readership or the people that come online, any kind of traffic stats on how its gained in popularity?
Andrew: Yes. It’s really, having started just over a year ago, its grown immensely popular. You know, right now its [inaudible] in the top 50,000. Over a hundred thousand page users a month – it varies between 100,000 and 200,000. So its . . . it obviously doesn’t attract the same readership as, say, DNJournal but it’s a different type of news outlet. One of the things I encourage people to do to get involved with it as far as you can comment (regardless of your opinion) on anything I write. Also, people that are in a particular field, whether that be on the legal side of the issues or you know . . . Park Quick actually submits. But anyone, if they’re an expert or an authority in the field, are welcome to be sort of guest contributors, so long as they’re not, obviously, advertising for themselves the whole time. So I encourage people to get involved in the community through the site.
Monte: Right, right. Now, in your experience with domain names, you’ve obviously been successful in selling domain names. You’ve sold actually several hundred domain names and actually have been involved, I guess, in creating websites in general . . .
Andrew: Hm-huh.
Monte: Tell me about your experience in the past and how its changed today. Are you still an active seller?
Andrew: Yes, I am. I’m more trying to buy because I’m bullish on the market. At the same, I think a lot of people are very bullish and I’m finding it harder and harder to find what I would consider attractive deals, you know, whereas in the past you could find good deals and you know, just on even AfterNick or Sedo; now its one of those things where you could spend a lot of time emailing people, you know, trying to domains from them. The expired domains used to be a great place to get domains. Now it’s the hubris of the average, typical domainer when it comes to auctions. A lot of times I think they get bid up above reasonable values. But I’m definitely still active. You know, it’s a matter of finding good deals out there. In the late nineties, of course, people were . . . even though I’d say the market’s in better shape now than it was then, you’ve got a lot of crazy things going on there as far as people offering ridiculous multiples and sums for domain names, websites, that sort of thing. So, certainly changed but I think now the metrics are there to back up the market as it stands right now.
Monte: And, where do you personally see the most opportunity is and where the biggest risk in where the market is today?
Andrew: Sure. Generics, obviously. Generics dot com are the safest bets. I know people are getting into the International domain names. A lot of questions about that because domains aren’t fully international characters until you can have, say, a dot com in different characters, but obviously there’s a lot of opportunity there. I think a lot of people don’t realize some of the risks, however, in the market. People are expecting to get, say, a 30x multiple on a small portfolio. They’re at extreme risk. You have, you know, Yahoo! and Google owning the majority of the advertising markets. Expect domain traffic to increase but will direct navigation increase in parallel? I’m not so sure about that. So I certainly think there’s a lot of risk in there. One of the key things is its one of those industries a few people can make a bad name for the entire industry. And if big name advertisers start pulling their money out of Google and Yahoo! for ads that are on, say, parked domain pages, that could certainly create some problems.
Monte: Right, right. And the . . . now I understand that you’re also active in monetizing your domain names currently?
Andrew: Yes. I, you know, like everyone else I park domains. I use mostly Traffic Club, which of course is a Moniker product but I’ve used a number of different parking sources but really I think the real money is in developing sites and even if it’s a small, you know, three-page site, over time I think you’ll find that you can get a lot more revenue from that through from going through traditional parking. Obviously, it depends very much of your share of revenue rates and that sort of thing but I’ve had domains that were earning a dollar or two a day just parked somewhere that I’ve into $25 or $35 a day through actually creating, actually taking the time to create mini-sites around them. And you see all the major domain name investment companies talking about how their trying to create actual products around these domain names. I know the guys behind IREIT.com have proven that you can do a lot more by actually developing a site than parking it. But, that said, if you have tens of thousands of domains, you obviously can’t develop all of them.
Monte: Right. Ironically, the folks behind IREIT.com is a parking company. [laughs]
Andrew: Right, right, right. ParkingDots [inaudible].
Monte: ParkingDots which is Walnut Ventures and they own ParkingDots, which is a big parking system; which actually is inside Parking Club, by the way.
Andrew: Oh, oh, is it now?
Monte: Yeah, it is. It’s a separate channel to get into it, because you have to be preapproved but you can get there through Traffic Club.
Andrew: Yeah, and, I mean, I’ve found Traffic Club to be a godsend, because before I’d have to go park it at one place, wait a couple weeks for it to optimize and then try it somewhere else and you’re always scared to move it to a different parking company ‘cause it might perform worse. So what I like about Traffic Club is how, you know, it pretty much auto-optimizes across all the different services; one check a month and, you know, that sort of thing and the RPMs I’ve found to be phenomenal. If you read Domain Name Wire once a month, you’ll hear . . . read me, my kind of rave reviews about it.
Monte: Great. Well, I didn’t really expect you to rave about it on the air but its good that you’re a believer in it; that’s certainly not why we had you on but I’m glad that you’ve had a successful experience with Traffic Club; that’s the whole is to let multiple feeds compete for your domain traffic and then continuously manage and monitor what the best feed is for your domain name on a domain basis so you don’t have to guess at it; the system does.
Andrew: Right, right.
Monte: Now, you . . . just a couple minutes ago you said how you believe that creating mini-sites (and I don’t disagree with you at all) that you can actually generate more money than of course parking domain names, depending on what the name is and the industry, of course. Walk us through some of the successful techniques from brings the site from a parked page to a mini-site of 2 or 3 pages and where you’re generating revenue on them. What are you doing and implementing, and how are you going about that process of selecting what sites you want to develop into mini-sites? And what you mentioned is that you’ve increased your revenue ten-fold by doing that. So gives us the tricks and the traits of doing that so some of the listeners can apply some of the same examples to their business.
Andrew: Sure. Sure. There are two things to keep in mind. First is, you know, you can’t spend 10 hours per mini-site creating it, otherwise it won’t be worth your time. So the first key is to find an easily repeatable system or template to use. And I found a product called XSitePro (X-S-I-T-E Pro)an excellent piece of software; its similar to FrontPage except its made with the idea of creating sites rapidly and easily with search engine optimization built in.
Monte: Spell that out again?
Andrew: X-S-I-T-E Pro.com (XSitePro.com).
Monte: Okay; I’m just putting it up in the chat room so people can look it up.
Andrew: Okay.
Monte: So this is a cool tool to quickly and easily create a mini website.
Andrew: Right. It costs a couple hundred bucks and basically what it does is you enter information about the site. It has ready made templates or you can make your own templates but it really automates a lot of the search engine optimization process around keywords, structure of pages, using CSS, that sort of thing; makes it really easy to add in your Google AdSense ads or Yahoo! or whatever you want to use there. So, that would be the first key. You know, I used to do it in FrontPage and it would take me way too long to set up templates. Second thing is you have to have some content. Now, whether or not you’re writing that content yourself; it doesn’t need to be, like, something you read in the newspaper but you know, just four- to six-hundred word articles about particular topics. So, one example I like to use: nutrition, which isn’t the most heavily competed for search engine word. If you go to nutritionist. info, that’s a site I created with XSitePro. Your going to look at it and say, well, that’s not a very attractive site but its well search engine optimized. If you go to MSN for example, it comes up #1, so it gets some traffic from that. The articles on there (right now is has seven or eight articles of about three- to six-hundred words in length) it doesn’t take long to write an article like that. You don’t need a lot research around it but if you don’t want to write them (and I outsource at this), its easy to outsource article writing on a site like Elance.com. You can go to Elance, you can post that you want 20 keyword based articles written and people will bid to do the work for you. And typically, you can pay between $5 and $10 per article for someone to write. So, say you had a keyword of “cable modem;” they would just write a short article. Again, no more than five hundred or six hundred words about cable modems. They would repeat that key word over and over to get kind of the search engine side. So, two keys – one, something you can easily create and that’s a repeatable process; and then the other thing is getting content and you know, if you would have asked me a year ago I would have said the best way to do content is to do like the search engine scraping systems, which, you know, a lot of people made a lot of money creating these massive sites through but then Google caught on, cut them all out and now, you know . . . it was fun while it lasted but really, if you want to look at it from the long term, creating actual sites with content that’s usable and can get you into the search engines is definitely the way to go.
Monte: Well, that sounds great. And, how many sites do you have up and running right now that are mini-sites versus parked sites versus sites that are stagnant and doing nothing.
Andrew: Sure. You know, to put it in perspective, my domain portfolio is fairly small – it’s under 1,000 domains. I have about 100 of them that have some sort of website up on them and the rest are parked. And so you had asked earlier how I decide which domains to park. There are a couple things. One . . . I’m sorry, but which domains are parked to develop. One of the things I look for is if I have something that’s performing really low on an RPM basis on a parked page and I think there’s a reason for that . . . I had one, it was a Spanish language domain and the parking services, or most of the people showing up to it spoke Spanish; most of the parking services have difficulty monetizing those types of domains, so I was able to create kind of a one-page site, taking, you know, just using an English/Spanish translator to create the content . . .
Monte: Oh, great.
Andrew: And another thing I look for is just domains that are getting a lot of traffic; it doesn’t seem like they’re being targeted correctly. You know, a lot of times you’ll know more about a domain than a parking service or a computer can figure and if you can’t pinpoint the key words, you know, through the parking service then you can certainly do it creating your own website.
Monte: Now, are you self-educated on creating websites on getting into this? Did you take some classes? Did you graduate in the field?
Andrew: [inaudible] self-educated and again, I don’t pretend to be able to create the most attractive websites in the world, but its really just reading online when I was in college. I got a copy of FrontPage and made some horrible sites at first and got a little bit better, not much, but yeah, so basically there’s so many tutorials on line and really if you compare, the FrontPage is ten times more difficult than XSitePro and FrontPage is considered very easy to learn, so, there’s no reason someone can’t (and I sound like I’m getting paid to plug XSitePro, I have nothing to do with them) its just that a great program and its very easy to use. And I think one of the keys is that a lot of people obsess over how attractive their web pages look; its not necessarily the most important thing. I think that if you have good content on there, you can get good search rankings which gets people to the site and gets them to click on your ads. [inaudible]
Monte: Right. Well, the big controversy (and we’ve talked about it many times on this show) is that when you compare these (and I was on a nine panel at the last TRAFFIC conference about, you know, parking programs, just an example) no one can really guess at what human behavior is on the other end and what they’re looking for. Even the web analytic software tracking people through websites and through conversion, it’s hard to guess whether somebody wants to see link ads, some content to get them to stick there for awhile; but the ultimate or the bottom line result is to how you drive revenue. You know, if your goal is to drive revenue from generating some kind of event at the end of that experience for a customer, you have to be able to do that, whether its sticking them on the site for a little while and then throwing them something that’s relevant – or – maybe they’re just looking for three or four links with a one-click solution – or – maybe they’re looking for beautiful, great colors or more of a webpage type look and feel before they do something. But to be honest with you, its (and I’m sure everyone is realizing this now) is that is varies during different times of the day, different seasons, different countries and you can’t . . . and something may be on your mind at one instant when you’re going on the web and something may be on your mind at another instant so you never can really guess it.
Andrew: Right. That’s very true and I think that’s probably one of the reasons why you need to take a portfolio approach to this, which is you can’t have all your eggs in one basket. You know, if you develop multiple sites, you know, have a diverse portfolio of domains, taking that approach allows you to not have the risk of a changing season change your entire revenue stream. I would also say one of the keys is not to focus just on these Pay Per Click ads from Google and Yahoo! I think affiliate ads, such as Commission Junction, can be extremely valuable. In fact, I would say that I’m making more money from affiliate programs right than Pay Per Click ads and if you can target those appropriately, they can pay off extremely well.
Monte: Yeah, definitely. So before we close up, what other sites are you developing that are in the domain industry and what role do you think they’ll play in our marketplace?
Andrew: Sure. One site I recently created is called FreeDN.com – F-R-E-E-D-N.com – and what it is, is just a site . . . you know, you see those sites where you can get a free iPod and that sort of thing; this is similar but for domains. People earn points by taking advantage of offers, whether it be free trials, that sort of thing. And then they can redeem those points for domain names. Right now, you can redeem them for names at one registrar; I’m working at adding more. But I’ve noticed in a lot of domain name forums, a lot of people would get interested in the industry but can’t necessarily afford to get all the domain names that they want, so this was kind of my answer to that, which was allow people to do free trials and that sort of thing on the web and earn free points to get free domain registrations. You know, as far as other plans to expand, say, the news type sites and that sort of thing, right now, Domain Name Wire takes a lot of time; its not a major . . . if I compare it to the time I spend researching and buying domain names, it doesn’t pay off very well but its . . . you know, to me I look at this industry as a hobby not just a way to make money, so I plan on continuing to update Domain Name Wire daily and take it seriously in the future.
Monte: Yeah, definitely. And, any last tips and tricks that people can get from your experience and your success on the Web that they can utilize for their business?
Andrew: I guess I just . . . my last thought would be: don’t shy away from things that sound too good to be true. A lot of times you’ll read about a new method to make money from domain names and other ways, and you’ll think it just can’t be true. Give it a shot. As long as you don’t have to put yourself completely out there, try it and you’ll be surprised at where it leads you to.
Monte: Good. Well, we really appreciate your time, Andrew and your experience and your tips on helping folks create websites using some of the same tools that you’ve listed out on the program and those of you that want another little perspective on some of the news and information on the industry, go to DomainNameWire – its kind of a different format from DNJournal; I think they’re both valuable, obviously, because they take different perspectives and in the way that they present content. I would say, Domain Name Wire gets updated a little bit more often with some of the relevant news and information that’s going on in the industry and you know, so it’s a good perspective to get both different perspective from both articles . . . or both medias. So, Andrew thanks a lot for being on the show and we’d like to have you back at some point.
Andrew: Great. Thank you very much.
Monte: Okay, take care.
Andrew: Bye.
Monte: Alright. Alright, we’re going to take a commercial break and then be on with Adam Glazer and learn some online marketing and advertising tips. Stay tuned.
[Commercials]
Monte: Hello, welcome back to Domain Masters and thank you to my first guest, Adrew Allemann of DomainNameWire. My next guest, who I’m excited to have on the show, is Adam Glazer. Adam founded Glazer Enterprises in 2004 to help companies meet their business objectives in an ever-changing digital environment. Glazer Enterprises is recognized as a rapidly growing innovative web design and online marketing services company with a stable of top clients, including Coach.com; IDT; and the Democratic National Committee – just a few of them. Adam’s ten-plus years of experience in public relations, reputation in management, search engine marketing, affiliate marketing and online media advertising. He’s been in the trenches as one of the online marketing experts since 1997 and he’s a frequent speaker on several of the online marketing topics, including such forums and conferences as AdTech, PRSA and Jupiter’s Search Engine Strategies. Adam, welcome to the show.
Adam: Hey, Monte, thanks for having me.
Monte: Thanks for being on Domain Masters. I’m really interested in having you walk us through your background a little bit and really giving some good, helpful hints to everyone listening who have websites and the webmasters and the domainers that are present to help them be better at their everyday business and help them be more successful on the Web.
Adam: Right on. Well, sort of. A little bit about me. I’ll do a quick “411.” I started out actually in public relations at an agency called Middleburg and Associates. They were scooped up by URSEG and folded into Magnets; I don’t even think the brand’s around anymore but in their heyday they were really the top Internet PR firm. We launched some of the first dot com brands, like CDNow, TheStreet.com, Britannica; and I started up, really, the online marketing division there. This is back in ’97, so we were running some . . . you know, trying to carve out the space for public relations on the online marketing arena, where ad agencies were really focusing on banner advertising, we were looking for what is PR’s ground in online marketing, so we were focusing on very early things like linking campaigns, message board seating and what at the time we called search engine optimization, which is really just, you know, GoTo.com. I remember actually we had Dave Sullivan come when he . . . before the pre-SES years, when he was Telefia Consulting and talk about “organic SEO” which was kind of the new thing at the time. So, anyway, I left there, I got pushed by Y and R and built out a global practice group there, which was really one of their first online marketing divisions. And then, you know, a few years later spun that out, built out a sub-brand there and then branched out on my own to start Glazer.
Monte: Wow. So you got a lot of experience, and even back in the heyday when these were just concepts, huh?
Adam: Yeah. I would say the primordial soup years.
Monte: So, give us an idea of some of the work that you’re doing for Coach and IDT, specifically and then lets talk about how smaller players, smaller individuals in terms of their development needs can benefit from services such as the ones that you offer at your company.
Adam: Sure. Yeah. Well, these days we seem to be running a lot of paid search campaigns. And I don’t know if that’s because we do it well and just because it seems to be that’s what people want. But it is definitely proven and an immediate response and very measurable and in my experience its driven, you know, the best performing ROI across the other available channels.
Monte: But why is that? Because you’re paying for what you’re getting right on the spot?
Adam: Yeah. Its optimizable. Organic is not guaranteed but it does work and it works really well. But, you know, it’s a bit investment to really own some of the most competitive keywords and so for a lot of companies I think that they’d prefer to sort of have you know, investment in something where the return is more forecast-able, if you will.
Monte: Right.
Adam: You know, that’s how some of the big brands, you know, I think approach it. We take a very unique approach to Pay Per Click; really taking more of what you call a portfolio approach than a keyword driven approach. So kind of looking at keywords across an entire portfolio instead of just keyword by keyword and deciding, you know, which keywords to eliminate from the campaign and which keywords to heavy up against, and using technology to sort of get some scalability there.
Monte: Now, this is always a tough discussion and a tough thing to evaluate. We actually valuate [inaudible] companies as well, especially in a very competitive marketplace. Coach, I would assume, is in a very competitive marketplace . . .
Adam: Yeah.
Monte: How . . . what kind of tools and techniques do you use to help them, you know, manager their ROI on that expenditure? Are they . . . you know, some companies with large budgets aren’t looking necessarily to get that return right away and then I would say that probably 80% or 90% of the folks listening on the show today would want to see that return in some reasonable amount of time so that they know that they’re spending the money in the right place and getting the benefit and reward from that expenditure.
Adam: Right, yeah. It’s definitely that sort of thing, to really test it right. You do need to give it some time. There is, obviously, some risk and waste in testing. But I would say with a reasonable budget, you can ramp up pretty quick, I’d say, within 6 – 8 weeks, you can start to see a lot of the opportunities to get a lot of the efficiencies in a campaign.
Monte: And, when you’re setting aside a budget – well, first of all, who’s you’re biggest client; is it Coach or IDT?
Adam: Yeah, I mean, those are the two marquee brands that we have.
Monte: And just give us an idea of what kind of expenditure that they spend with you guys on a monthly basis, if you can share it.
Adam: Well. Yeah, well, I’m not going to speak about those guys in particular but there are other clients, certainly, that we have where its not unusual to spend, you know, $50,000 to $100,000 in a month.
Monte: Okay. And then, what are some of the smaller clients or the smaller expenditures that you work on? You know, where’s your limit? Where’s your cut off point?
Adam: Yeah, we don’t really have a cut off point. But I would say that unless a client is really spending $10K and up, it probably doesn’t make sense for them to use, you know, an agency to manage it for them, because, you know, even if we can get, you know, 30% to 40% lift in performance on a campaign, I mean, the fees are going to kind of cut into the ROI for them, so, you know, the efficiency is there when they’ve got a big budget.
Monte: So, so, about $10K a month in order to see that.
Adam: Yeah, I would say so. You know, sometimes though, as you said before, they’re not even concerned so much with ROI; sometimes there’s other things you can get from paid search. For instance, you know, if you really haven’t tested into the channel before and you’re thinking of doing organic SEO, what you may want to do is run some Pay Per Click to kind of see what keywords are actually performing and you know, because it is measurable and you can really find out what keywords are actually driving good ROI. And then use those learnings to kind of go back to the organic SEO and focus your campaign on those keywords.
Monte: Right. That’s a good . . . that’s a good pointer.
Adam: Yeah, definitely. I mean, and As a matter of fact, that’s pretty much the approach we take. You know, we’re working with clients and we’re doing more than just Pay Per Click for them. You know, we’ll start out with Pay Per Click to get those learnings and obviously to try to steal the campaign efficiently on a cost per basis. But, you know, really try to leverage those learnings for organic.
Monte: Now, give us take on keyword buying and covering yourself on the domain name side. You know, how much experience do you and your organization put an emphasis on that, ‘cause its obviously is a real important emphasis now – the direct navigation piece matching up against the keyword buying and trying to cover yourself and trying to get as much traffic as you can from all aspects when you’re making that kind of investment. Give us your take and the best strategy to use there.
Adam: Definitely. Well, I would say, you know, try to buy as many logical keyword combinations as you can. I think at some point I think there’s diminishing returns. But, you know, for the obvious ones – for Coach, obviously, you know, someone typing in “CoachHandbags.com” thinking that that’s Coach.com, you know, they want to own that and get the type in traffic from that. You know, but long four-word combinations, I don’t know really, you know, how much . . . I guess its arguable but some of the domain issues that we’ve kind of been bumping up against is not so much in acquiring portfolios of domains for clients; but more about, you know, sandboxing issues, DNS resolution, canonical issues. Those are kind of the ways that we’re looking at domains for clients.
Monte: Okay. Well, lets talk about that a little bit, because the mysterious sandbox is ever-changing, and of course, when I first had Matt Cutts on the air about a year and a half ago, the sandbox was just a rumor and not reality, according to them. But now we know that’s not the case.
Adam: Yeah.
Monte: Talk us through what you know about the sandbox now and what it means and then how one gets around the sandbox restrictions and hurdles from those criteria.
Adam: Definitely. It’s absolutely real. I think the easiest way to explain it is kind of like a penalty box that Google puts all new domains into before it can sort of establish their authority on a certain topic. So to kind of put a new domain in this temporary holding pen until, you know, a certain amount of time has expired and also it sees other sort of gestures to suggest how . . . how much of an authority to set its meaning [inaudible]. So, what we normally recommend for new sites that we’re working with that we’re launching is, you know, at the very beginning of the development process, get some placeholder content out there early on your domain and start getting links on it as you’re building your domain, so this way, in three months’ time, when you’re ready to launch, Google’s already spidered the site, indexed it, started to return some results. Maybe even got some page rank. And this way, when you really roll out your content and you’re ready to start to get going, you don’t have to wait 3 – 6 months, you know, to get out of the sandbox.
Monte: Now, now, do you also put an emphasis with your clients – ‘cause one of the big pushes that we’re starting to hear about and also starting to recommend to our clients is to not register names for single year increments but for multiple years and also if you’re going to go buy a domain name in the aftermarket, try to buy domain names that are at least two years or older, so that the original creation date carries forward – do you see value in that and are you recommending that to your clients?
Adam: You stole my next point. [laughs]
Monte: Oh, okay. Good.
Adam: That is exactly it. Yeah. Find a domain, obviously, that isn’t sandboxed and you know, try to buy it, you know. Especially if you can find one that’s actually related to your topic. So, you know, look back at how that domain was being used, look at if they have any sort of relevant incoming back links that you can leverage. You know, try to find a domain that is already established and use that. You know, also, make sure that you’re not buying anything that was used sort of . . . that might have a spam penalty on it or could potentially hurt you. Look at who their back links are, make sure they’re not coming from porn sites. Look at the “Way-back Machine” and try to find out what they were doing with the domain before you acquired. Maybe even run a reverse IP look up and see, you know, who else is on that class block.
Monte: Good. Now, do you guys use a particular set of tools that you can share with the audience that are the best ways to check to make sure some domain names are good before buying them, either in the aftermarket or you know, getting them through expired name services and drops.
Adam: Yeah. WhoIs.SC is my favorite. You know, I use them all the time, even just to get ideas for good domains to buy and see what’s available for auction. Kind of see, you know, who else is on that IP address. Things like that.
Monte: Okay. Now, on some of the topics – you’re a frequent speaker at the various conferences . . .
Adam: Yeah.
Monte: . . . correct? Now, what’s changing in the industry from the online marketing standpoint, from what we were talking about a year ago. You know, some of the complaints that we heard, or some of the criticisms that we heard from SES shows and WebMaster World shows is that no one’s learning anything new. Is there some new things to talk about, like at the upconming SES conference and things that are going on in our industry that can be exciting and relevant to those that are just starting out or those that have been in business for awhile?
Adam: Yeah. Yeah, I know what you’re saying. It definitely seems like more of the same every time you go to these shows.
Monte: Well, you know, kind of stagnated information spun ten different ways, you know. I think what people are really interested in is, you know, tell me something new now, tell me something that gives me a good marketing advantage to my business and helps me be more successful on the Web. What are you sharing with your clients that’s different today than it was a year ago.
Adam: I’ve got a couple of SEO tips that, you know, might relate to some domain issues that your listeners might be interested in.
Monte: Great.
Adam: Another thing that I don’t know if people are aware about is just like DNS resolution. So if you . . . a lot of my clients have big portfolios of domains that all resolve to the same IP address. You know, and what happens is the search engines, if you’re resolving that domain, can still get into, you know, can find an alternate path to that content, you end up with duplicate content in the index and so, you know, one of the things we tell our clients to do is, you know, if you are using those domains, if you’re seeing good type in traffic from them, then [inaudible] to the actual, you know, domain that you’re using. Otherwise, just park it. Or, if you’re trying . . . if there’s a lot of incoming back links for some of those other domains that you’ve got, then, you know, try to maybe redirect it but also try to go directly to those sites and try to get them to link to your master domain.
Monte: Yeah. That’s a great tip as well.
Adam: [inaudible] And another I thought about, actually, listening to Andrew speak before – you mentioned Nutritionist. info. I just kind of poked around there. One of the things I noticed is the canonical bug – I don’t know if that’s something that if you’ve heard a lot of talk about . . .
Monte: I have not, actually. I’m not even familiar with that. Why don’t you share it with us.
Adam: Yes. Sure. What you’ll notice is, on a lot of sites oftentimes, you know, you’ll be able to get to the domain by typing the URL without the “www;” and Google actually has a problem distinguishing between www.yourdomain.com and you know, “http\\yourdomain.com” without the www;” as well as other issues where if you’ve got an index page, like index html, that can actually be viewed as a completely different URL from without the index html. So what happens is that number one, you’re creating duplicate versions of your root, your penanical[?] root of your site, which is splitting the page right between them . . .
Monte: Oh, really.
Adam: Yeah. And, so actually, if you do . . . like I just noticed this before, if you do a quick, you know, site “:” search in Google for Nutritionist.info (which is one of the sites mentioned earlier in the program), you’ll see that they actually have both versions of their home page indexed. So you can see that there’s Nutritionist.info without the “www” and then “www”Nutritionist.info and its actually getting – it’s in the omitted results, so its already . . . kind of realized that there’s duplicate content and so omitted one. So if there are any links pointing to the “www” version, which is probably where most of the links are going, they’re probably not getting the page rank credit for those links. So what would be better to do is to take, you know, to pick one version and 301 Redirect one version to the other.
Monte: Right, right.
Adam: You know and make sure that all internal links to your home page are pointing to that version ending with the trailing forward slash, not the . . .
Monte: Does it matter which version to go on, whether it’s the “www” versus . . . I mean, what do you recommend – going without the “www” or with.
Adam: I’d go with the www. Just seems to me if someone’s going to create a link to your site they’re probably going to do it with the “www,” so I would default to that one. But I don’t think it really matters. Just pick one and stick with it and make sure that whenever someone types in to get to your homepage, that’s what the URL bar is going to resolve, because that’s where they’re going to grab your URL when creating a link to your site. And so you want to make sure they’re grabbing the preferred version and linking directly to that. Probably also want to take a look back, you know, if you’ve had a live site for a long time. Do a search of your incoming back links. You can go to Yahoo! Site Explorer tool and put in your domain there and it’ll show you . . . give you a really good view of all the sites that are linking back to you. And go through them one by one and just find out, you know, what you and other people are linking to and make sure it’s the correct version.
Monte: Yeah, those are great points. Great points. How . . . any other things that you can share with us?
Adam: Well, as far as tactical stuff, I think those are pretty good things. If you’re focusing on those, you know, alone, that should give you a nice boost. But, as far as . . .
Monte: How about something that people really don’t know about yet that you’re . . . what I like to do in the show is have somebody share some secrets so that everybody can benefit from them without giving away your, you know, real secrets that may give you a strategic advantage but can you share anything with the audience that really . . . people don’t really know yet that can really help them out.
Adam: Ah, slow down. I thought I just gave you a good one . . . [laughs]
Monte: [laughs]
Adam: But you can . . .
Monte: Give me some love. Give me some love, Adam.
Adam: Yeah, I hear you. You know, you asked me before about some of the trends, things that I’m seeing, maybe things that people aren’t talking about. I think one issue that’s really been overlooked and hasn’t gotten its fair amount of discussion as it relates to SEO, is, you know, there’s been a lot of buzz about Web 2.0. Web 2.0 design; Web 2.0 sort of philosophies. And, you know, there’s not been a lot of discussion about the impact on SEO and you know, it concerns me with SEO because, you know, sort of, the, as I understand it, the benefit of Web 2.0 tools like Ajax and Ruby, you know, are things that, you know, things are actually happening on the server side not on the . . . on the client’s side, rather. So, you know, the URLs not changing as people are now been getting around to different content. And if that’s the case, I’m curious as to how the spiders are supposed to index content if that content isn’t on a different URL and so I think those are sort of . . . as people start to use these new technologies to develop their sites, how are they going to be, you know, taking into consideration these issues.
Monte: Yeah, that’s a good point. Hey, now, are those some of the things that . . . are you going to be speaking at the coming SES Strategies show in San Jose.
Adam: Ah, I’m actually going to be in San Jose. You know, kind of these days, I haven’t really been doing as much traveling or speaking on the circuit. I’ve been pretty focused on client stuff these days.
Monte: Yeah. I know how hard it is to try to balance both; trust me. [laughs] It’s a hard balancing act.
Adam: Yeah, it is. Trying to focus on your business to keep growing at the same time is a challenge but that’s why I appreciate being on your show.
Monte: Oh, and we appreciate having you as well and what’s the best way for people to get a hold of you and engage you for services and to ping you for extra information?
Adam: You can go to my website, GlazerEnterprises.com; or, you know, shoot me an email, adam@glazerenterprises (Glazer with a “Z”, Enterprises with an “S”) . . .
Monte: Yeah, I’m going to put it up on the chat board as well, so . . . enterprises.com. Alright, well, great Adam, great having you on the show and look forward to working with you in the future and those helpful hints will definitely help everybody be more successful on the web with their domain names.
Adam: Right, and I’ll go ahead post what I said, some of the links I put, I mentioned, to the chat room, too.
Monte: Oh, that’d be great. That’d be great.
Adam: You got it.
Monte: Alright, thanks, Adam, thanks for being on the show.
Adam: Thank you.
Monte: Alright, take care. Alright, thanks again to Adam Glazer for being a great guest. He gave some good helpful hints there. He’s going to post some of those links up on chat room for us as well and we’ll make sure they’re in the archives as well. Next week on Domain Masters I’m going to have Bruce Clay, from BruceClay.com, a top ranked SEO firm. I had Bruce on at WebMaster World in Vegas about a year ago and there’s been some changes in terms of some of the work they’re doing on websites and working with Flash and some of the other things and some of their new techniques can be more SEO friendly than they were a couple years ago when people didn’t know how to go through those challenges. And, we’re also going to have Shawn Collins on from the Affiliate Summit. Affiliate Summit is going on in Orlando the second week in July. Moniker will be there with bells on. Affiliate Summit is a great place for anybody that’s making money with affiliate programs and it’s a great networking event; there’s going to be about 600 people there and we’re going to talk to him about the show and some of the great affiliate techniques that he’s been preaching through his membership and through everything that they’re doing on the Web, as well.
So with that, I will let everybody go. Have a great week. I’ll be on next week live with Domain Masters. Be the master of your domain. I’ll talk to you next week. Bye bye.
[Commercials]
| Back to Index |