Quality Nonsense

To clarify, I say: “Tools you don’t use”. But I mean: “Tools I’ve only just cottoned on to months after everybody else”. Without further ado…

I’ve said a lot of rude things about Chitika eMiniMalls over the years. Here’s why:

• They are ugly. That fact can be proven with any home computer.
• No one clicks them, surely…
• Did I mention they’re ugly?

Guess what? I was wrong. Well, wrong about the ‘nobody clicking’ bit. I’ve been running Chitika’s new Premium ads for the last two months. eCPMs are 24% higher vs AdSense on my test site.

For the uninitiated, Chitika eMiniMalls are/were cost-per-click ad blocks widely touted as an alternative to AdSense.

Chitika’s new Premium ads match to keywords from referring URLs. Got that? Say a user Googles ‘magic tricks‘ and clicks on your site in the SERPs, they see ads for ‘magic tricks‘ on your site.

On the downside:

• Chitika Premium ads are US/Canada only.
• They only display for search engine traffic – worth remembering when comparing eCPM figures. You can choose ads for backfill
• They’re still ugly, albeit less so than the old layouts.

Where’s my referral link, you ask? Aw, you guys! Go sign up here.

Dear reader, I’ve a confession to make.

I’ve never bothered using content units. I know they’re massively popular, doubtless with good reason. But the hassle of setting them up, managing them and updating was enough to put me off.

ECU solves those problems, offering managed and self-managed content units for 1000s of programmes across the major UK affiliate networks. I understand the big US networks are coming soon.

ECU lets you create quick ‘n’ easy content units for affiliate sites. That means you can display blocks of best-selling products (with pictures, pricing etc) that automatically update.

The downside? This leaves me no excuses for not testing content units myself.

Try ECU for youself at EasyContentUnits.com.

Here’s what Buyagift’s managed content unit looks like:

Feedback Army promises “Simple, Cheap Usability Testing for Your Website”. $10 gets you feedback from ten real-life users to 5-6 usablity questions.

A dollar per user review? My expectations were rock bottom.

Again, I was wrong. I’ve paid for feedback on three sites in the last week, and received a metric tonne of ideas from it. Here are some excerpts from their feedback on my Domain Lookup Firefox extension.

This is about 10% of the feedback I got for $23 (25 reviews). I asked for “no-holds-barred” feedback and got it. There’s more sample feedback over at FeedbackArmy.com.

Know more webmaster tools I should take for a test drive? Let me know in the comments.

Is it really three and a half months since I last posted? While I haven’t been blogging, I have:

1. Relaunched Domain Lookup.
2. Redesigned WhoIsHostingThis.com [live later this year]
3. Overhauled 3 or 4 more smaller website purchases
4. Procratinated about PubCon. Who’s going?
5. Bought an authority finance site in need of TLC
6. Discussed buying URL shortener Cli.gs
7. Recruited a couple of ace new freelancers to my roster.
8. Bought too many domains at Sedo
9. Visited Bilbao, Munich and Edinburgh
10. Answered the question “Why don’t you blog more often…” at least once/week.

Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Desperate times make people do desperate things.

I’m looking for a new flat in central London. I was pretty damn surprised to get spam email promoting Time Out’s new flat finder site.

Here’s the email I received to the unique, anonymous email address used in my Craigslist ‘flat wanted’ ad:

Does this read like an email from a real user? The the low-rent sales copy, bolding of features and promo code scream ‘no’.

Time Out have contacted me to deny that it is from them. Which begs the question: who is responsible?

Update: Time Out’s Charlie Sefi has provided this statement:

Time Out is absolutely committed to protecting the privacy of our users and wider audience. We strive to operate with integrity and independence, and if we ever learnt that one of our third party suppliers was sending out communications like this on our behalf we would act swiftly to ensure that any such activity is immediately stopped.

Obviously I too would be really keen to find out the source of the email, and will continue to try and find out its origin from our end.

I’ve always believed that ‘type-in traffic’ for undeveloped keyword domains was vastly over-exagerated. Now I have the figures to prove it.

For the unitiated, Wikipedia explains ‘type-in traffic’ as

…visitors landing at a web site by entering a keyword or phrase … in the web browser’s address bar (and adding .com or in a mobile browser address bar … rather than following a hyperlink from another web page, using a browser bookmark, or a search-box search.

Given some success stories, you’d be forgiven for concluding that premium, keyword domains are worth buying for the tsunami of type-in traffic they’ll unleash on your site.

Why would the domain industry perpetuate the myth of type-in traffic? It’s one of the pillars on which domainers regularly price domains, ergo it helps inflate prices.

While I’m not saying for a moment that there’s no such thing as type-in traffic. But I am saying that the volumes we are talking about for a typical keyword domain (.com or ccTLD) are laughable.

How Many Domains Get Type-In Traffic?

1,822,377 domains are parked with Sedo, says DomainTools.com as of 8 July 2009.

Sedo’s list of ‘high traffic’ domains parked with them shows Sedo parkings top performers.

What percentage of parked domains get serious traffic? Here’s a clue: think of your favourite very small number… and then halve it.

Nope, not even close.

Sedo’s most recent stats show a mere 25 domains get traffic in double digit per day. By the time we hit domain number 26 in their rankings, we’re in single digits. See for yourself:

(Source: Sedo.com)

So 0.001% of domains parked with Sedo get double digit per day traffic. Or to put it another way, 99.999% of domains parked with Sedo don’t hit double digits daily.

It gets worse. The traffic figures in this table are not exclusively type-in traffic:

The “Hits” indicate the average number of times per day the domain’s parking page was viewed through direct browser type in, from an old external link, or from a search engine query.

Is Type-In Traffic Laser-Targeted?

For developed websites, that is often the case. In 2005, WebSideStory research found the conversion rates for different sources of traffic to be:

• Direct Navigation (Including bookmarks) - 4.23%
• Search Engines – 2.30%
• Links – 0.96%

Users typing in domains for established sites are more likely to be repeat visitors, for example, so more likely to convert to a sale.

But is the same true of type-intraffic to undeveloped domains? I’ll wager not. Let’s examine some of the domains in Sedo’s High Traffic Domains list and make an educted guess why they get traffic.

Here are the first five traffic domains I checked out:

• Teach.co.uk: Users mistyping Teach.gov.uk, the UK government teachers’ portal.
• RSS.com: Former corporate brochure site with 1000s of backlinks.
• Jewel.com: Users looking for the huge US singer-songwriters official site
• Belly.com: Users looking for the Canadian rapper’s official site
• CX.com: Users looking for ConsumerXchange at CX.org

Does this sound like the tightly-qualified traffic we hear so much from domainers? Nope, it sounds like junk traffic.

Even some domain industry insiders don’t drink the ‘highly targeted traffic’ kool aid. A senior staff member from a major domain company recently admitted to me that the golden age of domain parking was long gone. Another was recently quoted (on condition of anonymity) saying…

“The amount of traffic across the industry would be roughly 70% typo and the remainder from generic.”(Link)

My theory? Domain parking revenues are on the slide is advertisers are wising up to measuring the performance of traffic from different sources.

I love premium domain names, and there are lots of reasons to buy them – for branding, investments, avoiding Google’s sandbox etc.

But type-ins traffic? Let’s get some perspective, people.

How To Earn A Living From Domain Parking

Domains (.COMs) cost around $7 per year to register in bulk, so need to earn $0.02 per day to cover costs. Anything extra is profit.

Clickthrough rates on parking pages are high – up to 30% are reported – so let’s say you get 31 visits/month earning $0.10 per click at a 30% clickthrough.

Our hypothetical domain grosses $11.16/year parking, less our $7 registration fees = $4.16 profit/year.

You either need:

• 3275 domains getting low-level traffic (eg, earning $4.16/year profit) to meet the US Federal minimum wage (on a 40 hour/52 week basis)
• Domains in high value niches (eg, real estate) to squeeze dollars from a trickle of traffic
• Super-premium one word .COMs or country-specific domains (eg, Cameras.com)

But X Earns $1000s From Type-In Traffic…

Is it possible to make a living this way? Yes.

I have one friend who could live off the type-in traffic he gets from one domain.

Jeff Libert – AKA WebmasterWorld moderator WebWork – gave a stellar talk at PubCon once on the topic of generating high-value legal leads from generic keyword domains.

And I don’t doubt for a moment that Rick Schwartz might earns $300/day parking candy.com.

Marchex, a public company, have based their entire business model around owning premium domains with direct-navigation traffic.

But are these results typical for keyword domains? The answer is no. Joe Schmo’s two word keyword domains are going to struggle to cover their registration fees – let alone lunch! – with the money earned from type-in traffic plus domain parking.

The figures aren’t much better if we develop our hypothetical domain into a site. 31 type-ins per month = 372 visits per year. Unless you are operating in super-competitive niches you can probably buy 372 visits via AdWords for less than a keyword domain priced at 5-10x annual parking revenues.

Why Parking Revenues Are A Meaningless Metric

Parking revenue figures are regularly trotted out by domain owners to justify pricing. And yet they are utterly meaningless for retail domain buyers.

Even a premium domain like Jet.co.uk – perhaps one of the top UK travel domains for sale today? – fares little better for traffic. Let’s assume make a few assumptions:

• Jet.co.uk gets c. 8,400 visits/year on the figures published by Sedo.
• Jet.co.uk could sell for $100k in a down market (a similar 3 letter .co.uk travel domain, Fly.co.uk, sold for $175,000 to Doug Scott’s ASAP Ventures last year).
• We want to recoup an investment over five years.

Let’s crunch the numbers:

• 8400 visits a year = 42,000 visits over five years.
• $100k for the domain = $2.39 per visitor.

Bottom line: the cost of most keyword domains in most industries cannot be justified by the traffic the naked domains get.

Are Generic Domains Massively Overvalued?

I own hundreds of domains, and have just spent $XXXX on a one word generic domain a few days ago.

Keyword domains are unbeatable for many reasons: branding, user trust, search rankings (users link with the domain as the anchor text), existing backlinks, exact match ranking…

But I hear the ‘type-in traffic’ myth pedaled time and again to prop up la-la-land pricing. Domain owners peddling these lines calculate prices using two variables: ‘wishful thinking’ and ‘herd mentality’.

British and American readers will spot similiarties with the housing market, while students of economics may recall the concept of ‘manias and bubbles’ in market psychology.

Don’t get hoodwinked with the fools gold of type-in traffic. For most keyword domains, it’s all but invisible to the human eye.

Hate mail to the usual address.

PS. Buy lots of fresh domains? Check out my Firefox extension, Domain Lookup. It helps you find keyword domains while browsing the web, and integrates with 60+ top domain registrars.

Futher Reading

• More about Sedo Parking
• High Traffic Domains at Sedo
• How To Buy Domains Like a Pro
• Business 2.0: Masters of Their Domain
• Is type in traffic really all it’s cracked up to be?
• The Death of Domain Parking
• Use Direct Navigation for Affiliate Marketing
• Top 4 Lies Domainers Tell Themselves
• Domain Parking Traffic Conversion Myth

Let me get this straight…

We’re told that Microsoft’s adCenter paid search platform can target advertising by age, gender and location (it uses MS Passport data from Hotmail, Messenger etc).

Yet Microsoft can’t get the names of customers correct…?

Are Reddit’s editors asleep at the wheel or is this an inspired piece of linkbait?

Like free stuff? Like domain names? We need to talk.

We’re running a promotion with Go Daddy over at Who Is Hosting This.

We think our hosting reviews are the best out there – and we want more of them. So we’re giving away a $10 Go Daddy gift card if you write a review that we decide to publish.

As you’d expect, there are a few firm-but-fair T+Cs, but I hope you’ll agree it’s a pretty damn exciting offer.

Here’s where to submit your review…

There are dozens of books about the dot.com boom and bust in Silicon Valley. But I know only one about similar events in the UK: Bringing Nothing To The Party by Paul Carr.

The book tells tales of now-legendary internet entrepreneurs, like Alex Tew (of the MillionDollarHomepage.com) and Firebox.com founder Michael Smith, as well as the disasterous IPO of Carr’s own dot.com flameout, KudoCities.

If you enjoyed Boo Hoo et al, I highly recommended it.

‘Ubiquitous capture’ is one of the central ideas behind cult productivity book Getting Things Done.

David Allen disciples believe the first step to productivity is to first capture all ideas and tasks.

Sounds beyond obvious, no? Yet I – and I suspect many others – forget without regular reminders.

The challenge with ubiquitous capture is to find a a tool that works for you.

A quick audit of my jeans pockets presents a motley selection of newspaper cuttings, receipts, to do lists, reminders…. you get the idea.

As of this week, that changes c/o Evernote. The software is a year old, so I might well be the last geek in the world to hear about it. But in case it has also passed you by, here’s why you need it in your arsenal of productivity tools.

Evernote is a note-taking tool designed to capture, store and organise ‘to do’ items in one place: typed messages, scribbled notes, snapshots, photos, web pages, voice recordings.

You can file all these scraps of data and information you store day-to-day in one place, as you go, and Evernote files and sorts them in a logical, highly usable way.

For example, all images are scanned by OCR to make any text searchable in your archive. So if you take a snapshot of your shopping list, Evernote will read the text and archive it.

Evernote comes in web, desktop and iPhone flavours, so there’s no excuse for ubiquitous capture not being, er, ubiquitous. In short, it seems like the ultimate ubiquitous capture tool.

See Evernote in action below.

PS. Seasoned Evernote user? I’d love to hear any tips and tricks in the comments.

I was talking about my baby steps in affiliate marketing last week.

It were nowt but fields at Affiliates4u.com, you could get 10 AdWords clicks to the dollar and still have change left over to buy a hyphenated .info domain.

[Apologies to readers outside the UK for the laboured Brit-centric gag].

Joking aside – it was tough to know where to begin.

It’s not that I couldn’t find advice online. Quite the opposite – I found more forums, blogs, ebooks, PDFs and autoresponders than I could read in a lifetime.

Plus precisely zero quality control – and there was no shortage of shonky rich quick schemes.

Bottom line: it was next-to-impossible to know which sources could be trusted.

I was chatting to a new affiliate earlier this year, and it sounds like not much has changed.

That’s why I think Affiliate Window Academy – a training day for newbies – is a great idea:

February saw the first ever AW affiliate training day take place, we received some great feedback from participants and so, as planned, the course will now run every eight weeks. We are pleased to announce that the next event will take place on Monday 20th April, at our offices in Tower Hill.

The half-day training course has been specifically created for ‘novice’ affiliates; to be eligible to attend you must have generated a minimum of £25 in commission since joining the network. The course consists of five seminar sessions introducing techniques to help you increase your earning potential through Affiliate Window.

Contact hayley [dot] short [at] affiliatewindow [dot] com to put your name down.

PS. Nickycakes’ newbie guide to affiliate marketing looks like a good starting point for affiliates outside London/UK.