Jan 01 2008
The Lowell.com Project
Elliot Silver is going to document his journey with the development of his Lowell.com geo domain thru his blog elliotsblog.com. This is a great way for others to learn, but geopreneurs have to keep an open mind and understand, what works for one geo domain, may not work for another, due to demographics, populations, and tourists attractions, etc.(Professional Geopreneurs Chime in Here please) Use this study and others to come as an outline to your geo domain(s) development. Overall, it should be fun to see Elliot take on this project and share his experiences, the good, the bad and the ugly with Lowell.com. We will see alot of this type of teaching and mentoring thru blogging in 2008 to help domainers get a visual of what it takes to do it right or wrong. I will be covering SouthCongress.com and AtlantaYellowpages.com in the same fashion in near future, and I encourage others to do the same and share your journey to development of your geo domains.
Like many domain investors, I’ve never developed a complete website. I know I should develop all of my names, but development is difficult and it takes quite a bit of time and money. For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on the development of Lowell.com off line. After careful consideration, I have decided to blog about my ongoing experiences to give other domain investors insight into this development project.
While I hope this will give others the opportunity to witness a successful (or unsuccessful) development undertaking, selfishly, I want to document my progress so I can emulate and/or make improvements on my next project. I hope to be able to provide full details about various aspects of the development process, and I welcome any comments or advice.
So begins the journey into “The Lowell Project.” (more here)
Since I first entered this space in 1994 I envisioned a virtual world that mirrors our real world. Maybe the term World Wide Web is what first motivated me. Those that own geodomains have an opportunity and a responsibility when developing a city site. It really is simple and should never cost too much money at the beginning. Let your traffic dictate your expenses.
What would you want to find on that site? It is most likely what your potential visitor is looking for. Take an hour a day placing pictures and content on a tree of pages and interlink them all. Think of your pages as a pyramid that reaches down and back up. The top of the pyramid being your homepage then hotels, real estate, dining etc. on down to the obscure pages like demographics.
Over time you will have a vast array of pages and topics. Meta tags and keywords will also help those that use search engines to find what I call the satellite pages. An example is the Star Walk in Palm Springs. I took the time in 1996 to place a separate page for each of the stars that adorned this walk along Palm Canyon Drive. Each of those pages were pulled up in searches for names like Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra etc. and many visitors found PalmSprings.com when they were actually looking for the actors and not the city. Many found so much interesting information on Palm Springs that they decided to visit. Most places also have what I call a signature appeal. Zero in on that and promote it.
Most of all make it simple and make the pictures inviting. You may just get some of them to visit that town and that is where you will be able to prove your revenue streams in the future. My brother David found techniques to make money once the traffic grew. And the rest is replicated history. Much of what we first learned we still use today.
I like your mention of “responsibility”. Within a few day of buying my city.com it crossed my mind that I have a bit of power within that community now and I felt a rush of responsibility…it’s also in the best interest of the domain owner to put responsible info on the site.
[…] a cool idea from Michael Castello who posted his creation in the comment section of a post on SimplyGeo.com. On PalmSprings.com, a website owned by Castello Cities Internet Network, Michael created a […]