Found a good topic to write about in the forum today.  There are always great starter topics published in the forum that make for good main stream conversation.  Michael Castello published the importance of developing your destination geo domains a week or so ago in reply to a post.  This is what he had to say:   

We are stronger in numbers. If we all took the time to build out geodomains with the flavor and look of the destination there is no way a Google could touch us. Most people want to feel like they are virtually visiting a place. Would you rather get a hotel room from hotels.com which is basically a database or go directly to the virtual city hotel in that town? Information is one thing but passion and emotion are another.

Google is making it easier for people to find what they want because many generic sites have yet to get online and give the visitor what they want. The visitor wants to virtually travel to that destination and interact with the people and businesses and plan their vacations or buy their products. That is the optimum need but visitors will settle for a Google, Hotels.com, Travelocity etc. if that is all that is available. It is time to take market share from these giants. Answer this question. Do the inhabitants of Laguna Beach have local passion and emotion with Google.com or LagunaBeach.com? They will choose LagunaBeach.com because that is virtually where they live, do business and socialize. You just have to make the connection and build it out.

Additionally, Skip Hoagland stated the following:

Like any product, the more you develop it, the better it becomes. Parking domains is a business for people who do not want to work or do not have the ability to build a real company. Honestly, Parking domains to me helps to destroy the Internet, not build it. It helps send more traffic to Google.com and other sources of information for what people are looking for.If people want to build real value for their brand and company they have to run it like a real business, with real offices, people, phones, sales, marketing etc etc etc. Isn’t it funny the harder you work the luckier you get. Don’t get me wrong, I also do some parking and consider myself a Google monetizer at times. I don’t like it, but with almost 2000 names to develop we have no choice. Unlike many others however, we have about 400 websites launched and 5 making a nice profit for us. I see this getting much better for us this year as we launch 30 more mostly Geo names.

It is no coincidence that these two smart professionals think alike.  Their bottom line upfront is to develop your online destinations.  While parking domains is profitable, it does nothing to bring value to the domain name over time or to the consumer visiting.  As PPC continues to drop in payouts, many domain portfolio owners are realizing that the only way to generate consistent revenue is to develop domains into sites that consumers will use daily.  Michael and Skip speak from experience and have proven it over and over again that development is the key to unleashing multiple streams of revenue.  I think the time has come to LISTEN to what the experts have been saying all these years.  Here is an article from Ricksblog written last month that covers why development is essential for building online revenue steams titled “PPC or development? Kevin Leto has an interesting viewpoint”. 

Trackback URI | Comments RSS