Kyle Widner of Tivoli USA, plus the dot mobi landrush!
09/27/2006 - Monte Cahn
Kyle Widner is the Owner of Tivoli USA, the largest independent Home & Garden retailer on the internet. Kyle founded his original home and garden import company in 1996 as a predominantly brick and mortar business. He registered his first domain in 1996. When orders on his single internet page began to grow, he saw the opportunity and decided it was time to investigate the Web’s potential. He began learning Search Engine Optimization strategies through his own Internet research and soon discovered WebMasterWorld and Search Engine Watch. In 2002, he shifted the focus of his business strategy from a primary brick & mortar arrangement to a fully integrated online network. Since that move, Tivoli’s revenue has doubled every year, and the network has become a search engine success story, all with just two employees: his mother and himself. Pinky also checks in from the dot mobi land rush!
[Commercials]
Monte: Hello, folks, welcome to another great week of Domain Masters. I’m Monte Cahn, your host. This week we are going to speak with two folks – Kyle Widner, who is the CEO and owner of the largest independent home and garden retailer on the Internet. The name of the organization is Tivoli USA. And the reason why I though Kyle should be a great guest is that he has had taken a brick and mortar store, home and garden related (mostly fountains and things like that) and turned it into quite a success story using the Internet and domain names. And a lot of his strategy around domain names, his domain acquisitions, uses about 40 of them in this particular vertical, around his home and garden business. Should be . . . his points and tips and tricks and some of his success should be very helpful for all those that are listening. My second half of the show, or actually last 15 or 20 minutes, we’re going to hook up with the folks at dot mobi, Pinky Alan, who’s been on the show, I guess, a couple months ago. They’re going to give us some of the stats on the land rush that occurred yesterday. Moniker had a really successful land rush. We acquired about 15% of all of our pre-registrations that people put in and so given the fact that there’s 120 registrars competing for all the same names, we did pretty damn good. But, dot mobi did well on their land rush and we’re going to get some “heard it here first” on Domain Masters, stats on the dot mobi land rush. So we’re going to break for a couple commercials, be back on with Kyle and then we’ll have Pinky on after that. Stay tuned.
[Commercials]
Monte: Master of my domain. As I mentioned in the show opener, I have as my first guest, Kyle Widner. Kyle is the owner and janitor for Ti vo’ li USA. Is that how you pronounce it, Kyle?
Kyle: It’s Ti’ vo li USA.
Monte: Ti’ vo li USA; I’m sorry. And it happens to be the largest independent home and garden retailer on the Internet. Kyle founded his original home and garden import company in 1996 as predominantly a brick and mortar business and then registered his first domain name in 1996. Saw a bunch of orders coming in through a single website . . . webpage . . . website and then grew his domain portfolio and strategy on the Web to become very, very successful at what he does. Coincidently, I was with Kyle last week at WebMasterRadio Search Bash in Jamaica and so we got to know each other a little bit and I got to know Kyle’s story and thought it would be a great idea to have him on the show. So, Kyle, welcome to Domain Masters.
Kyle: Thank you.
Monte: So, I understand you’re out at the Bruce Clay training session right now and getting certified on the Bruce Clay School of SEO; is that correct?
Kyle: That’s correct. Just finished up the basics for the course today and then tomorrow we have one day of advanced stuff and we’re all done.
Monte: Yep. And Bruce Clay was out at the WebMasterRadio Search Bash as well and his crew – I think he had six or seven folks out there and we sent our director of marketing, Jeannie White, out to the conference and to the show as well and she says its just a great course and people were learning a lot. So, those of you who are interested in attending Bruce Clay’s onsite classes, I suggest you go to BruceClay.com and sign up, because you’ll learn a lot about how to be better at your business. So, Kyle, let’s talk a little bit about you and your story a little bit. Give us a little background about where you came from, how you got on the Internet, how you got into the home and garden business, that kind of stuff and then we’ll roll into the nitty-gritty on your domain name success.
Kyle: Sure. Ah, I was in grad school in a place called Thunderbird in Phoenix, Amercian Graduate School of International Management, and I was on this . . . I was going to be in marketing, a brand manager for Proctor & Gamble or somebody and one of the semesters there I spent down in Guadalajara in Mexico. And when I was down there, I was sitting on the beach in Porto Vijarta, thinking about my “future” at the time and decided I did not . . .
Monte: With how many beers in your hand?
Kyle: [laughs]
Monte: [laughs]
Kyle: Margaritas.
Monte: With a shot of Tequila to help you get your mind clear?
Kyle: [laughs] It’s amazing how that helps clarify things in a hurry.
Monte: Yeah, well, Tequila will help do that for you.
Kyle: [laughs] So, I just finally decided that I needed to find something to do besides work in the Corporate world. I had been in the military for 6 years and just started looking around and was San Diego, California where I had seen a bunch of Mexican import stuff. I knew pretty much what it sold for and started looking around Mexico and found out what it really cost to make it and how little you could buy it in Mexico and import it. So I graduated and cashed in all my credit card advances and took a bunch of money down to Guadalajara, Mexico and bought a truckload of stuff (and literally, it was “stuff”), brought it into San Diego, rented a public storage unit and started selling it wholesale through the old, traditional channels. Uhm, soon, thereafter, we did find we were doing well and I ended up having to move to Mexico to make sure we could get the supply. Two years of that was enough. 2001, you know, right after the dot com bust, went ahead and started doing some little bit on the Internet and saw the potential with search and basically, shut down all the analog distribution systems and started concentrating solely on building a portfolio of domains and content and selling online.
Monte: That’s great. That’s great. So, uhm, you shifted from brick and mortar in 2002 onto online and I understand your business has doubled in size every year since, correct?
Kyle: Every year since 2004 we have doubled each year and it . . . you know, growth in the Web plus additional traffic, we expanded our product line and it seems like as long as we keep doing that, it just naturally grows about twice each year.
Monte: That’s great. And, uhm, I understand you have a portfolio of names, how many names do you have?
Kyle: About 110, 120 total right now.
Monte: So not a huge portfolio but obviously one that does the trick and I understand that . . . what portion of those are dedicated to the home and garden vertical?
Kyle: About 44 of them are completely operational, up and driving traffic; the other ones basically sitting there kind of on slow simmer. They’ve got some content. Got some links and they’re just kind of percolating there. I haven’t really had a lot of time to work on them, but just slowly trying to build up a very targeted, small but very targeted, portfolio of domains that hopefully within, you know, three or four years (kind of a long term view of the whole thing) with the right content, the right domain names and it’ll just keep building on itself.
Monte: So . . so, you, uhm, you started registering . . . you registered your first domain name in 1996 – what was that domain name?
Kyle: [inaudible]
Monte: Is that your key brand?
Kyle: No; not at all. That was just our company name at that time and that . . . we don’t even really use that too much anymore. My wife actually lends that one. But the key domains that we developed over time – we actually at one time had 12 e-commerce sites; we whittled that down to about half now, and then we used the balance of all the rest of them are simply informational sites that rank high in their particular area, psycho-graphic areas and then when users arrive there, we give them the opportunity to go to the e-commerce site and help support out business.
Monte: Okay. So this is an interesting strategy. So, this is a good SEO strategy. So, you have a couple main . . . it sounds like you have about 6 main e-commerce sites where you generate your revenue from and then the rest are feeder sites and lead sites into the business through good content and links and everything into, hey, how do I buy, how do I do business once I like what I’m reading. Right?
Kyle: Absolutely.
Monte: So lets walk through that strategy a little bit. How did you figure that all out? What did you do? What were the first sites that you did? How did you link them together? What kind of things did you worry about with SEO and not having, you know, duplicate content and all that other stuff? What was the main train of thought and strategy here?
Kyle: In 2001, when I first came in contact, it was with a company up in Oceanside, California (and I’ll save them the embarrassment of mentioning their name), but they had about 400 domains all interlinked together and they were doing extremely well in Google. And, of course, we know that today as domain spamming and link farming and all the other bad words we know now; back then it just seemed like a great way to make money. So, they woke up one morning and all their entire network was wiped out. Gone. Just . . . could not even find their domain names in Google. So I had that as an example of what not to do. So, when I started collecting the domain names and I was just finding targeted terms around my vertical and I went to start adding content to them, and I just realized that this was going to be a bottleneck. I can’t write that much content. You hire people to do it and it costs a fortune to build 200 pages and to try to get somebody to do it right and then how long it takes to do it. So that led me down a path of looking for large sources of targeted content. And stumbled across some information about books and other information in the public domain, which is that which was either never copyright or the copyright has expired or is no longer in force for whatever reason. And once I found that and I got a hold of an old librarian that kind of taught me how to search for this information and where to find it and hook up with a law firm that can verify that it’s in the public domain, it became pretty easy. And I don’t mind sharing that at all. It’s . . . if you can find a public domain book in your vertical, it’s perfect for creating a content rich website. And every one of those chapters in a book makes for a perfect navigational netting. Every one of those chapters makes for another layer; it’s very well organized for a search engine. So if you can find a 200 page book on how-to in your industry, that’s in the public domain, and you can convert that into a website, what do you have? A 200 page website, basically, that you were able to get done in 2 months; a professionally written, proofread, edited, high quality content that is just eaten up by spiders.
Monte: Right. Right. And so, it sounds like that you’ve gotten pretty successful at linking these things together and in the ways that you’ve been doing it. So, walk us through, uhm, some of the key parts of doing this with a set of domain names in a certain vertical that won’t get yourself in trouble . . .
Kyle: [laughs]
Monte: . . . and will help others that have their related verticals up and running.
Kyle: I’ll give you an example of somebody that I helped with this that it worked out pretty well. He does digital cameras and digital camera reviews, which of course is a very competitive sector.
Monte: Yeah, definitely.
Kyle: He was having trouble getting content. He was paying people to write pages of content and blah, blah, blah and just the normal way, you know, most of us learn to do it early on. But what he did is he found some public domain resources – I mean a lot of them – on photography and composition; the history of photography; civil war photography; how they work; how they did it – all the how-to and history of information. I mean thousands of pages. He was able to get that stuff scanned, converted into word docs; he hired a team of Romanians and they just created distilled templates with all this information. He ended up with a ton of good related content around photography. Now, of course, some of this stuff is arcane because it can be older but he went through and just picked out certain areas where he could change it into modern key terms that fit – not, you know, not key word stuffing it but change it around, writing good titles and descriptions, feeding it to the spiders and he noticed a dramatic increase in his ranking. That’s one way to do it on your own site. Another way to do it would be to create a separate site on just that information using that hook. Allow that to get its own links that rank high in search engines and then the user will go there, present them an opportunity to link through to your e-commerce site or to your review site, your action site, whatever it is, so that if you create 40 of those, they all rank to different key phrases and each user that goes to one of those is then presented with an opportunity to go to one of your action sites. Your main action site doesn’t even have to rank for these . . . for other vertical areas that might not quite fit with you, if that makes any sense.
Monte: Yeah, yeah. That does make sense.
Kyle: All the links are one way from the information site to the action site.
Monte: Right, right. So, so, uhm, so, for example, in your particular vertical, give us some examples of some of these feeder sites that you have that are working well feeding into the main site. What’s your main website again?
Kyle: GardenFountains.com.
Monte: GardenFountains.com. So, the main site is GardenFountain; so its not only home and garden, but you’re really focused on fountains, garden fountains. So those would be the fountains that you see, like, in foyers and stuff, outside of people’s houses and . . . is it for inside, outside? What’s the primary product?
Kyle: Both. We actually include sections for indoor fountains, wall fountains, floor fountains; and using the Google Toolbar Search for different types of fountains. I make sure they’re all represented in there. So we rank very well for even the generic key words, not just [inaudible] . . .
Monte: So you’re just kicking ass . . . you’re kicking ass selling fountains.
Kyle: Yeah.
Monte: Basically. And what portion of the revenue that you generate on manual basis would you say is the fountain side of the business and what’s everything else?
Kyle: Probably about 70% is fountains and water feature related. It’s pretty evenly distributed through everything else that we sell. Now, the majority of the products that we sell that we really try to push (and we don’t concentrate too much on the topline) but what we really concentrate on is our margin. So we actually design and manufacture and import our own products. About half the products on our websites are our own products; the others are dropshipped for us.
Monte: I see.
Kyle: It doesn’t make sense for us to create large concrete fountains when they can be done in Pennsylvania and shipped directly to the end consumer.
Monte: Right. And import a lot of your products from China or something now, right?
Kyle: That’s right. Just about . . . as a matter of fact, we don’t do Mexico at all anymore; it’s all China now.
Monte: Yeah; because Mexico, you may get what you order and you may not, right?
Kyle: [laughs] Yeah, and you might get it today; you might get it next week. You might not get it at all. It might cost you a friend. The list goes on and on.
Monte: Yeah, yeah. Definitely. So GardenFountains.com and then so give me an example of some of the feeder sites that you have.
Kyle: Okay. Like GardeningWithKids – so, what we do is try to psycho-graphically filter out people that are searching online. So, if somebody’s searching for, say, Gardening with Kids, that means that, A) have a garden of some sort . . .
Monte: Did you say “Gardening with Kids?”
Kyle: Yes, Gardening with Kids.
Monte: Oh, okay.
Kyle: By the way, these are all hyphens. I use hyphens with everything. So if I say “Garden Fountains” it’s Garden-Fountains.com is the primary domain.
Monte: Really?
Kyle: Yeah.
Monte: Really, so here’s another unique thing. As a domain company, you know, a domain owner, you know, a lot of people have questions about the success of having a dash in your name. So you’ve not only made success on a very key vertical strategy with domains and then this linking strategy but also with names that actually have dashes in them.
Kyle: Yeah and I just bought GardenFountains without the dash, so I need to get that; as a matter of fact, its my first registered name with you guys.
Monte: Oh, great.
Kyle: So what I’m doing now is I’m trying to go back and buy the non-hyphen domains as well and just 301 those to the hyphen ones and I just . . . I know it goes kind of against common wisdom out there but I just think that hyphenated domains are easier to read for users that look at search lists. It just kind of pops out to me. And I don’t use multiples hyphens, like, 2 – yes; 3 – hardly ever. So key terms, you know, key-phrase.us, ..com, .info, whatever I can get. But, yeah, part of my domain portfolio strategy, I am going back and trying where I can to buy the non-hyphenated domains to add to what I do.
Monte: Right. Right. And so give me an idea of where some of these things rank on Google and you know, are they page ranked? Are they well up in the first couple pages when you’re doing a search on one of the search terms?
Kyle: Some of them, yeah. Some of them do very well; especially the ones that were, like, pre-sandbox era. I deployed a whole bunch (and this is back, of course, in 2003, early 2004); did a bunch of reciprocal links that used to work very well and all of a sudden, these sites aren’t ranking at all. And I started learning about the sandbox and ah, that was not a good idea. But those are starting to filter up now. By the way, this strategy of using a public domain book works extremely well in MSN when combined with a hyphenated domain, for some reason. It’s like the one link in and it bounces right to the pop. I’ve been very pleased; I wish MSN had more searchers, because we do very well . . .
Monte: Well, they will soon. They’re about to just jump into the business head first, so they will.
Kyle: Yes, some of them do very, very well. I get a lot of traffic. Of course, I try to filter out people that are not really candidates to buy what we call hardscape home and garden goods, which is what we’re looking for. So I’m really constantly trying to create landing pages for people that are looking to improve or landscape or do stuff outside. We do provide indoor stuff but that’s a fairly small percentage of our business. So if somebody has, uhm, you know, home and garden test is another one. What I’m trying to do is find people online doing searches that have gardens, that have yards, that like to be outside, that are interested in improving their homes. If I can find those people, get enough of them, get them a picture of a nice looking garden fountain and get them to click through, you know, every one of those users is pretty much gold. And its extremely low cost way to generate that kind of traffic.
Monte: Yeah, that’s a great idea. And, uhm, at what point do you . . . are you covering, like, the misspells of your other words and the variations and what kind of extensions are you concentrating on and why?
Kyle: I have not done any of the misspelling stuff yet; that is one of the things that’s on a list for this winter when its our slow period and we typically do most of our “work.” I have not but I’m definitely looking into it. There’s a couple out there that I think would be good. As a matter of fact, garden is commonly misspelled without the “r” – gaden – so I want to look at all these . . .
Monte: Boy, I would do that right when you get off the . . . as you’re talking to me, actually. [laughs]
Kyle: [laughs]
Monte: ‘Cause probably some other folks are doing it now [laughs].
Kyle: [laughs]
Monte: But you should definitely try to cover yourself, that’s for sure.
Kyle: [inaudible]
Monte: Are you able to share, like, this particular network of names, are you able to share what kind of revenue it generates and you know, annual, year, whatever, because some people on the board are asking.
Kyle: Uhm, right now I’m in the process of being acquired; I have a letter of intent and I really would prefer we not quite go into that yet. As soon as the deal is done, which should be early November, I can come back and I’ll lay it all out.
Monte: Alright, well, great. Well, obviously it’s working if you’re in an acquisition and I assume the acquisition is a favorable one.
Kyle: Yes, it is.
Monte: Okay; well, good for you and congratulations on that. So, talk to me a little bit about, uhm, the other – now are you starting to branch out into other little niches at all? What are some of the other niches you’re looking to work?
Kyle: Uhm, I considered travel because (and this is going to be great for any travel affiliates out there) is that there is so much public domain information out there about travel destinations that there’s almost an unlimited amount of content. You could build, with just a small investment per page, you could build a huge travel inventory of information about destinations. That’s one I considered and I decided against it because its just not . . . it’s like a shiny object. You know, I find when I stray from my focus and my little area, I run off after a shiny object; I end up getting smacked upside the head. So I kind of try to hunker down and stay focused. But one area we are looking at strong is home improvement; that’s uhm, the leads in the home improvement area are getting more and more expensive for the providers. So that’s one that’s sort of related to what we’re doing that looks like it has potential to it. We’ve got one more but I’m not going to talk about that right now.
Monte: Right, right, right.
Kyle: But I think the travel guys are the ones that could benefit from this more than anything else.
Monte: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And, you know, one of the terms that you used before was the “psycho-graphics” which is . . .
Kyle: [inaudible] . . .
Monte: . . . which is, so, go into that a little bit more. When you go into the psycho . . . target the psycho-graphics, what do you mean by that?
Kyle: Uhm, you know, demographics typically would be a woman, between 40 and 50 and lives in Des Moines, Iowa. I don’t care how old somebody is; I don’t care about their race; I don’t about their geographical location. What I want is somebody who is psycho-graphically filtered to want to improve their backyard; to drill it down as far as possible. That person could be white, black or Hispanic. They could be old or young. They could be . . . any of the demographic factors are all taken out. So there are psycho-graphic filters; psychologically in tune with what I want to present to them. Does that make sense?
Monte: Yes. And now, describe a couple ways that you’re doing that again?
Kyle: Uhm, for instance, common . . . websites basically around landscaping and gardening. So if somebody is looking for information to eliminate a pest from their garden, a common garden pest; that means that A) they have a garden so they have an outdoor area. So I’ve eliminated, basically, apartment dwellers from the visitors that are coming through. If they’re concerned about the appearance of their trees or landscaping that means they probably would be concerned about the other aspects of their home and garden areas that I might have products that they can improve. So I stay away from things like, ah, apartment dwellers would be interested in. I just want homeowners or renters with large, well, not large, but lawns and gardens that they’re interested in improving. I try to stick to things where people have problems in those areas and I help them fix those problems and I also get an opportunity to get them to click through and buy something from me.
Monte: That’s great. So you’re really analyzing who you want to go after, who you’re buyers are. And then how are you measuring your conversion. What are some of the tools that you use on the website to really measure that you’re doing the right thing, that you’re targeting the right audience? Besides just looking at the bank.
Kyle: It’s ClickTracks. Basically, I follow through; I use a combination of banners and text ads on the sites where people can click through and I kind of check and see which ones are converting. And if a banner’s not converting, I change it to something else. And just . . . and quite frankly, I don’t do as good a job in this area as I should. I just watch it on a cursory basis. I don’t do any Pay-Per-Click, which we’re going to start doing this coming year. And we don’t do any affiliate program, which I want to start doing as well. But the tracking users coming through, I use the Click Tracks, uhm, consulting products for all of our sites and I can go through one by one and see what search terms people are arriving for to the feeder sites, follow them through to the e-commerce sites and find out which ones are buying. And once I have somebody come through with some arcane key phrase that clicks through to a feeder site and ends up buying form the e-commerce site, I’ll go back to that feeder site, create a specialized landing page to make sure that site has the best possible rank for that key phrase that ended up converting for me way down at the end.
Monte: Wow, that’s great. That’s great. Now, something else that’s really cool about you, that you kind of self-taught yourself the SEO stuff. Uhm, you didn’t hire anybody or anything? You just kind of learned on your own and learned as you go? What motivated you to do it yourself rather than to employ others?
Kyle: I was sitting at home and on a Saturday an email came in from that original company website – this is back ’98 – and I got on the phone with the person and they ended up placing a very large order. And I’m, like, you know what? This would be very cool if I could find more customers like this. So I just started looking around and talked to people and I actually went to my hosting company at the time and of course, you know, they didn’t really know anything, oh, you got to have key word tags. Oh, key word tags, great. So, I, well, I was like, what do I put in these key word tags, you know, And went online, started searching around, found an old, first-generation e-book kind of thing, talking about title and description and meta tags. And that kind of led towards, oh, you need to put the words in your body text. And then the linking algorithms started and I bought, what is it? Arailis, the linking program management program thing. And spent two months doing nothing but sending out link exchange requests to everybody in the DMOS and Yahoo! directories and that kind of sped that. And then, of course, that kind of died off. And then after the Florida update debacle in 2003, I went looking online for real information. I found WebMasterWorld; joined that and then of course kind of followed Google guys post through that era. I went to PubCon.com and just kind of very . . . very kind of settling gradually kind of grew up to where I’m sitting here talking to Bruce Clay and I actually understand what he says.
Monte: That’s great. That’s great. So you’re a big proponent of attending the conferences, getting out and making sure you’re learning at every change you get. What are some of the best places that you go to that really enhance your education since you’re so reliant on your strategy and your SEO initiative as well as your domain initiative to have a successful business?
Kyle: I love the RSS feeds from the blogs. You can create a single page with all the SEO blogs. And most of the SEOs that I trust are people that I met through WebMasterWorld at PubCon. You know, you get there and you get talking to them and you realize they really know what they’re talking about, what their area of expertise is and you know, especially in Vegas, it seems like everyone’s very open and very helpful and I just start, you know, picking up their following, picking up the blogs, reading through and now I’ve developed some good relationships in the industry, I can pick up the phone and say, Hey, this is happening. Do you have any idea why? And, I can usually get an answer pretty quick. So for me the value in Vegas, going, is because the seminars are great; I always learn something. But its those relationships you build with other people, with other SEOs all across the country – across the world – that you can kind of rely on and network with and help each other out, is to me invaluable.
Monte: Yeah, definitely. And so, you go to SES and WebMasterWorld . . .
Kyle: I haven’t been to an SES. I’ve always been kind of under the impression that SES was more of the agency types and I pretty much, you know, through WebMasterWorld and the PubCon, I kind of have pretty much a fill of what I wanted to get done.
Monte: And, what’s your plan in terms of . . . well, I guess you’re going through this possible acquisition. What’s going to happen after this? Is this something that you’re still going to be staying in? Or are you going to be weeding yourself out and then onto something new? Give us an idea of what the future looks like.
Kyle: The company actually owns 18 other companies, of which about half are sort of in my vertical, so what they want to do is kind of merge me together with a couple of their brands, really big known brands, and try to take my methodology and what I’ve done here and apply it across the different verticals in the industries where they own companies. So I stay on as an unknown title but I would still be involved for the foreseeable future as kind of employee #08444.
Monte: [laughs] Oh, boy, that’s great. So, anything else that the audience should know about that is just like, you’re wealth of knowledge and your experience and that not too many people know about but that people can be successful about the business? Like, what’s the top 3 things that you would recommend that’s not common knowledge to everybody that has made you successful that people should really concentrate on. Even if its sweatin’ the small stuff? What are a couple of key things that’s made you successful that isn’t known out there to everyone but you saw it as a key advantage to your business?
Kyle: Uhm, number one, content. I’m a firm believer that content conquers all and there is no greater concentration of low cost, high quality content than there is in the public domains. And you can . . . copyright.gov gives you information on the basics of it. You can use resources like Alibri.com, which is a meta-book search engine you can find in just about any area. There’s just a wealth of information about your particular topic. And if you can build out a lot of content about a particular subject that naturally will get links and makes it easier for you to go out and solicit quality links, you’ll rank high and you’ll do well.
Monte: Right.
Kyle: For me, that’s what it all comes down to. Content and links.
Monte: Well, that’s great. That’s great. Well, if people want to do business with you or get to know you better or have you help them with their strategy and stuff, what’s the best way to have people contact you or buy fountains from you?
Kyle: Ridgeway is my Nick on WebmasterWorld.
Monte: And, what about email?
Kyle: Email, use Kyle@garden-fountains.com.
Monte: Alright. I’m just putting that in the board here. Alright, great. Well, Kyle, it was a real pleasure having you on board and I know you’re busy out there in Cali at the Bruce Clay SEO crunch session and I really appreciate it and it’s great to have you on and some of the things you definitely revealed tonight will help others be very successful at their business, that’s for sure.
Kyle: Great. Thanks a lot, Monte.
Monte: Great. Thanks for being on the show. Thanks for being on WebMasterWorld, I mean, WebMasterRadio [laughs].
Kyle: [laughs]
Monte: And Domain Masters. [laughs] I’ve got WebMasterWorld on my brain.
Kyle: [laughs]
Monte: Alright, take care.
Kyle: Take care, Monte. Bye-bye.
Monte: Alright. Well, thanks to Kyle Widner and again his website is Garden-Fountains.com. And so here’s somebody that’s been successful with a domain name, a key brand, with a dash in his name. And he’s been very, very successful in the middle of getting acquired and has a great strategy and focus on his business. So we’re going to do a commercial break. We’re going to get on with Pinky Brandt from dot mobi, talk about the great land rush that happened yesterday and get some of the first, first stats about how successful dot mobi was. Stay tuned and we’ll be on right after commercial.
[Commercials]
Monte: Hello, welcome back to Domain Masters. And thanks again to Kyle; some great feedback there, some great tips and pointers for being successful on the Web. And another great, successful person and company we’re going to have on real quick is Pinky Brand from dot mobi. And dot mobi had their land rush yesterday and you’re going to get “heard it hear first” stats from the land rush and talk about what’s been going on ever since yesterday. Pinky, welcome to Domain Masters.
Pinky: Hey, Monte, glad to be here again. Thanks.
Monte: Yeah. Again is the word. I think we had you on in April and I had Neil on before as well. And dot mobi is on fire, I hear.
Pinky: Yeah. Yeah, we had a really good day. Really strong. We’re just ecstatic.
Monte: So give us a little bit, you know, just for those of the listeners that aren’t really familiar with what exactly dot mobi is. Let’s just do a little recap of why dot mobi is a domain name that got approved by ICANN, what its intent is and then we can talk about yesterday and the land rush and then what’s next over the next several weeks and we can touch on some exciting things that are coming up.
Pinky: Sure, Monte; thanks. Uhm, well, dot mobi is the domain extension for the mobile Internet. It’s the first and only Internet address that’s been tailor made for mobile. It was approved by ICANN back in July 2005 and what’s unique about us is we’re backed by an interesting cast of characters and companies that are somewhat competitors with each other and these are some of the folks that are some of the largest consortium of the world’s leading mobile Internet companies, which includes Google and Microsoft, TeamMobile, Vodaphone, Nokia, Samsung, Hutchinson, Telefonica and the list goes on and really, a lot of them got together because, what was going on is there’s been a big problem with the mobile Internet and in terms of browsing out there, the contents been cored and appropriated in expense to the download. It just hasn’t been working. Consumers really just don’t know where to go; access can be difficult. The navigation scheme has been really difficult, so, you know, some folks might know that, you know, ESPN has a mobile website but you have to go to, you know, proxy.domain.otherdomain.com/wireless or something like that to get to their content while for AOL you might go to mobile.aol.com or for Yahoo!, go to wap.oa.yahoo.com and so forth. So consumers are kind of confused about where they should be going and so mobi gives basically [inaudible] URL that everyone can guess easily and know when they use it on their phone that its going to work, such as google.mobi or bmw.mobi or buisnessweek.mobi, which actually went online this week, if you want to read Businessweek’s content online. The same goes with BMW as well. So, the navigation has a lot to do with it, uh, in improving the user experience. That’s really a lot of what we’re about. And, we had our trademark sunrise period which began back in June and ended last week actually, just before our land rush began this week. And then we had our land rush, which started yesterday.
Monte: So, in the sunrise period that opened up, which was intended for all the corporations to protect their brands and make sure that they were covered, how many dot mobi domain names were actually registered at that time.
Pinky: Uhm, we had a little bit over 13,000 domain names that were registered during the trademark sunrise period. Uhm, the, ah, trademark sunrise restrictions were a little bit more restrictive, especially since your listeners were familiar with .EU and how all that worked and how all that ended up. Uhm, our particular dates for the trademark registration was July 11th, 2005; so that happened to be the date that we did our deal with ICANN. So, uhm, it would be . . . it would be . . . would have been difficult for someone to apply, say, a [inaudible] trademark, say a little quick on the fly and get a registration, you know, shoehorn their way in our trademark sunrise period. So, we felt that we had good quality during the trademark sunrise period and that the folks that wanted to protect themselves certainly did come to the table and it represented quite a cross section of industries, you know, out there, especially entertainment, finance and insurance, fast moving consumer goods.
Monte: Okay, and then give us the first . . . has it been announced anywhere yet? . . . What were the counts from the land rush?
Pinky: The only place I’m aware its been announced is in The Wall Street Journal, but you guys will be getting the first, sort of, updates here. So your listeners . . . basically, on the first day, at least by the time I left last night, uh, 75,000 domain names.
Monte: Oh, great. Great.
Pinky: And that was over . . . about 90 registrars competing for that . . . for those registrations on behalf of their clients. Uhm, I think by the end of the entire day, it was about 85,000 in total. So when you add up the trademark sunrise on top of that, we’ve got . . . actually at this time I’m fairly confident we have over 100,000 registrations in the database.
Monte: Right, right. And people need to understand and of course, you guys realize this, but unlike the .EU land rush where there was, you know, hundreds of thousands registered, this is a sponsored TLD. It does have restrictions although it does have a lot of flexibility; and most people are covering their main brands and not just only speculating but trying to cover key initiatives and key online ideas of bringing up something that’s portable and mobile on their PDAs and mobiles from a business standpoint, correct?
Pinky: Yeah, that’s true. The . . . without a doubt. You know, if you’re interested in mobile than I think there’s this whole generation that’s growing up here that’s used to using their mobile devices to communicate and to access information. You know, where definitely moving into a computing cycle I think that’s going to impact the name space in a way people interact with brands and common words; you know, the speed and compacity of mobile networks is rising, handhelds can be very powerful and you know, and that sort of thing. Plus, the mobile operators of a lot major brands are beginning to invest here seriously, especially mobile marketing and advertising, so for folks out there that want to invest in domain name assets, especially you want to learn about the mobile Internet. I think dot mobi, you know, represents sort of raw mobile real estate for taking at the moment. Uhm, the . . . its true we have restrictions. It’s unrestricted in the sense that we’re first-come, first-serve just like dot com. Anyone can register. There are no restrictions in terms of where you’re located or what kind of company that you are. You don’t have to be in mobile business. You can be in any business and register a dot mobi. Uhm, like the first five names yesterday that were registered, I think this is the first time we’ve ever shared this information . . . e-pag.mobi, was the first name registered, virtually within the first nanosecond. Uhm, call.mobi; banking.mobi; kandis and mp3s.mobi were the first 5 names registered. Also, noticed a couple names already up for sale on some of the bulletin boards. Uhm, 654.mobi; 963.mobi; asking prices of $150,000 each for those names right now.
Monte: And some folks are asking about the restrictions. So, basically, one of the . . . the main restriction is that if you are going to bring up a website is that it has to be .mobi compliant. So, explain what that means to people so people know what it means . . .
Pinky: Sure.
Monte: And then we’ll go across . . . we’ll talk a little bit about, you know, some of the myths or some of the things you can or what people think you can and can’t do with it, and we’ll get those flushed out, because you can actually, you know, have a PPC site; you can actually have a content site; you can actually do lots of things. You can actually link to other sites and there’s some examples of some businesses out there already that are up and running; like you mentioned BMW.mobi is up and running; RollsRoyce is up and running and maybe we can go over some of those key sites so people can take a look and see what it looks like.
Pinky: Oh, yeah. Sure. Uhm, we do have a very simple policy which is what we call sort of our domain compliant policy. Uhm, this is essentially requirements that once your site becomes live, there are three very simple and mandatory rules for when you have an active name. I’d like to stress right off the bat that there is no requirement that your domain name actually be attached to any kind of live content when you first register the domain name. That is not required, nor do you ever have to do that. However, once you do have content up and running and we certainly encourage you to do so, uhm, basic things, like no frames. You know a frame on a 2 – 3 inch screen would not be a very good user experience. Ah, the domain must be used . . . must use XHTML coding, which is essentially WAP 2.0, and this is something we developed with the W3C initiative, in terms of coding. And, the domains must resolve. In other words, domains operate at a site, such as www.example.mobi must also be able to resolve it at example.mobi.
Monte: Right. So if you have www and the main site needs to resolve at the main domain dot mobi.
Pinky: Yeah, yeah. You should be able to type into the browser the second level domain dot mobi and it should be able to resolve. I mean, it works almost 99.9% of the time when I try it. Our switch on . . . we have guide actually, it’s called the “Switch On Guide” which can be downloaded on our website at NTLD.mobi and that provides the details on those three simple rules and then also additional best practices. And anyone that might be new to the mobile Internet, you know, probably needs to understand that some folks out there will say, oh, well, why can’t I just take my dot com site and just emulate that somehow, you know, using some sort of software that might be out there. And while you might be able to do that in some situations, I think what we’re finding and what I’ve been learning and getting into the mobile business is that the kinds of content that people want to look and how much time they have to deal with that content is quite different on a home on a 2 or 3 inch screen versus what they might be doing in the comfort of their office or their home while browsing on a, you know, 15 or 17 or giant screen; that sort of thing.
Monte: Right.
Pinky: So sort of keep those things in mind.
Monte: So, its putting things within the right context when you’re looking at a small screen, so things that are more textural based, you may not be doing total e-commerce but getting information to someone and then shifting them over to a way to do business, those types of things.
Pinky: Yeah. Which I think might work pretty well for Pay-Per-Click type situations, actually.
Monte: Right. And so that was some of the other myths. You know, like, can I put up a PPC page on my dot mobi domain name and the answer is yes.
Pinky: Yeah, absolutely. You can put up a Pay-Per-Click site. It’s very important to note that we do not control content or police content. That is not our interest with domain names that you register on the free and open market. Uhm, our interest is in making sure that the user experience is consistent and that when they do navigate to a site, when they type in whatever.mobi, that it actually does, you know, go to some content and that content is compliant with those three simple rules. And that’s what it boils down to. So, basically, a registrant can forward a mobi name, you know, to a dot mobi compliant landing page; they can do that. Uhm, they are not able to forward to a standard or non-compliant page. In other words, if you – or actually, you can do this but it does not need to be dot mobi compliant. In other words, someone comes to your page, your dot mobi page on the mobile phone and then one of the clicks is to another site dot com, for instance; or another . . . yes, another site, dot com or dot info or whatever. That site does not have to be compliant. However, I think because it’s not a dot mobi domain. However, I think it would be in the site owners best interest to make sure that their links are optimized to work with dot mobi and therefore work better with mobile search; that is going to be a big thing. You know, Google just actually added ad words for mobile just in the last couple of weeks.
Monte: Yeah, so that’s pretty cool. And how are the . . . how’s the search going to be . . . like Google’s one of the investors in dot mobi also, so how are they progressing with, you know, a search friendly .mobi site or a page or are they working on that?
Pinky: Yeah. I don’t know all the details exactly yet, exactly how they’ll do it. But, you know, one of things that has been thrown about is, at least when someone’s actually on their own PC and they’re searching for information and the results would actually show with level dot mobi truss mark on the site of the page, indicating that particular, uh, result, in your search would actually work on a mobile site, on dot mobi. And then by clicking on that, you would subscribe to a service that would push that URL straight to your mobile phone, so you wouldn’t even have to type it in. And then you’ll be able to use that later on. Which I think is actually quite useful. I think we’ll probably see a lot of interesting search models pop up out there. Starting to hear about it more and more.
Monte: Right, right. Now, one of the other exciting things that’s coming up is that we’re going . . . you guys have a list of premium domain names that are being held back by the registry that you’re going to be releasing in diiferent stages. Is that correct?
Pinky: Yeah, that’s true. We do have premium names, it’s about 5,700 sort of commonly used and phrases that we set aside, rather on a first come, first serve basis. Those we’re going to do some live auctions of those names and some other types of auctions. And some of the names will be put through on a RSP process. And that we’re looking forward to that happening real soon.
Monte: And what other news do we have? How long does land rush go? And then, what happens with general release or, you know, open to the public or whatever? I guess land rush is in a sense open to the public but . . .
Pinky: Yeah. Land rush is open to the public. It started yesterday and it will continue through October 10th; October 11th is when general registration begins. The only difference between the two periods is the pricing that the end user, the registrant, may be paying when they’re registering the domain when they’re working through their registrar. You know, our wholesale pricing is higher during the first couple of weeks. But that’s the only difference when general registration starts.
Monte: Got it. Got it. And anything else we need to know that’s important for dot mobi or the upcoming time and events that are scheduled?
Pinky: Uhm, actually, if you’re listening and you feel . . . first off, if you want to know where are the premium names, how can I get them and how can I find out what names are available, you can go, again, to NTLD.mobi and download the complete list on Excel spreadsheet and check it out. If you feel that some of those names are your trademark, you can actually apply to have a name removed and be assigned to you, in certain kinds of situations. Uhm, I don’t know if we have enough time here to go into all the details on how that might work. And then, you know, we are looking forward to actually doing a live auction beginning late . . . next month, actually. And we’ll probably be auctioning off some pretty good value names out there to the general public.
Monte: Great. Great. Well, it sounds like it was a successful launch and obviously, it continues through October the 10th, correct?
Pinky: Uhm, yes. Again, the land rush runs through October 10th and then general registration with lower pricing for most people will begin on the 11th of October.
Monte: Well, Pinky, it was a pleasure having you on and also to get the “heard it first” news on the success of the dot mobi launch and those of you that are looking to get dot mobi domain names, of course, Moniker is one of the lead registrars offering that and so some of the key . . . most of the key brand registrars are offering dot mobi registrations as well. So if you’re interested in possibly bringing your domain and you business up on the mobile platform in this environment, I suggest that you go get your dot mobi’s as soon as possible since there are about 100,000 domain names registered so far. There’s lots to go. Just to put that in perspective, there’s about 40 million to go that are all registered in dot com.
Pinky: [laughs]
Monte: If you look at it that way. So get busy and start registering those domain names.
Pinky: Thanks a lot, Monte.
Monte: Hey, thanks Pinky. And thanks for being on the show and I guess I’ll see you in the near future.
Pinky: Yes. See you real soon.
Monte: Okay, thanks again.
Pinky: Thank you.
Monte: Alright. Well, folks, I want to thank again my guests, uhm, Kyle Widner from Garden-Fountains.com and also Pinky Brandt from dot mobi. Just some little news just in case anybody missed it from the past couple weeks. If you are serious about domaining and monetizing your traffic, you’re going to want to attend the TRAFFIC East Conference in Hollywood/Miami, Florida. The dates of that conference are the 24th through the 28th of October. You can go to TargetedTraffic.com and sign up. We are holding the world’s largest live and silent auction of domain names at that event. We’re predicted to sell over $5 million worth of domain names. If anybody’s listening or anybody is in board and then the forum, I’m interested in submitting domain names for sale. We are accepting premium domain names and integrating all that stuff into our Traffic Club System and making sure that people have the chance to sell their domain names at these events. But definitely sign up for Targeted Traffic and the TRAFFIC conferences that run throughout the year and we’ll also be at AdTECH and WebMasterWorld and SES in Chicago. I will have booths at all the events, including the big gaming conference that’s running at the same time as the WebMasterWorld Conference in November. And so definitely, look us up, hunt us down. We’ll definitely help you monetize your domain names and we’ll continue to bring great guests and content on Domain Masters every single week, every single Wednesday and help you Be the master of your domain like we are the master of our domain. With that, I will let everybody go and have a great week and we’ll see you next week live on Domain Masters. Take care. Bye-bye.
| Back to Index |