Dec 19 2007
About
My name is Steven Morales and I entered the domain industry back in 1999. I started out in the greatdomains.com chatroom under the nickname ”texmex”. I have been in and out of the industry and have sold several of domain names over the years. I decided to join the blogging community and share my thoughts on the Geodomain niche along with the experts. When I came back into domaining this year, I realized there was plenty of opportunity in this niche to become successful at this stage of the industry. Currently, there is no blog focusing on this niche and I figured I could gather information for those seeking knowledge in this niche. I understand the domain industry very well and have a variety of experiences, but do not claim to be an expert.
I believe in helping people reach their goals through networking. Blogging is the ultimate tool to accomplish this task that is so hard to do when you are on your own. This blog will be designed to be a user generated content blog to ensure individuals can share their knowledge that will assist those in the Geodomain niche and domaining in general. Through a collective effort, I believe the SimplyGeo.com blog will help exploit the geodomain niche and assist individuals with reaching their goals.
BackGround
I am a Texas boy that grew up in Houston and San Antonio, Texas. I have been in the United States Army for quite a while now and have had the opportunity to tour the World. I am in the top 5% of the Noncommissioned Officers (NCOs) Corps in the Army and a member of the Elite Sergeant Audie Murphy and Sergeant Morales Clubs. I recently returned from Iraq on 8 November 2007. That was my 5th combat tour since enlisting in the U.S. Army. My tours include; Kosovo, Bosnia, Iraq x 2, and Afghanistan. I have a Bachelors Degree in Intermodal Logistics and working on completing my Masters. I am married to my wife Nelly, and have 2 kids, Jasmine 11yrs, and Jiovanni 8 yrs. I currently reside at Fort Bragg, NC with the mighty 82nd Airborne Division.
Steven,
SanAntonio.com and Houston.com welcome you and your new blog to the industry. Thanks for your service to our country, and now to the this emerging industry.
Dan
Once certain members of our industry find out about this, you’ll have plenty of free lively copy. Just post something about dot travel or CVBs and see what happens.
**SMO**
Pik, I do not know enough about the the dot travel extention. Please feel free to organize an educational article and I will post it on the blog.
Thanks for visiting!
Thanks for visiting the blog Dan and Pik.
Your welcome Dan. Great names you got there, as well as great cities to live in!
Steve
Hi Steve
I have seen you name posted in some of the forums of the years
my domain handle is Domainscot
**SMO**
Hi Tommy,
I think I remember your handle from the past. Thanks for visiting the blog.
Steve
Nice blog Steve…a great niche and a needed blog…keep up the good work!
**SMO**
Tim,
Thanks for the kind words, welcome to SimplyGeo.com!
I just found this site by searching on the domain I just purchased. It is an interesting coincidence as I also recently got more interested in geodomains. I am trying to put together a Joomla based site for thephilippines.net. Joomla has a lot of great components that suit a geodomain. I have a couple of other travel guide sites and they perform fairly well for me, so it is a good area to get into. Hopefully the site will do well enough for met to acquire the .coms. Perhaps I can write an article on Joomla at some point.
**SMO**
Mike,
Thank you for visiting the blog. There has been an influx of people finding their way to the blog thru search engines. You will find a variety of readers and geopreneurs that frequent the blog. Feel free to interact with postings and comments.
Thanks!
Great blog - sounds like you are doing great things for our country too. Thank you for your service.
***SMO***
Steve,
Thank you for your kinds words. Doing my best at both. Go Army!
Hi Steve
Thought would let some of your readers know.
There is still some Geo Names Available to register,
even in this day and age to get yourself some small geo names look at a map of the world or some tourist books and run checks.
will give you a sample of a small name i picked up a couple of months agao at reg fee.
ok a town in Crete called Agios Nikolaos has search of of 3.000.000 in google for reg fee i picked up Agios.com nice little name as most folk cant spell Nikolaos.
so do a search in google
so there is still some small geo names about
***SMO***
Tommy,
You are correct, there are lots of good geo names for registration costs out there that can be developed into small cash machines. I registered a few at reg costs a couple of days ago after reading this article. http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/stories/realestate/01/10/0110travis.html
Vizcaya is a city in spain that alot of U.S. Realestate Developers like to name their luxury developments. Vizcaya has 19 million search in google.
The .US extention was the only one available, and defintely has some value with so many U.S. developments using the name. I put a quick site up to see how it will do in a few months in search engines. Will add more to all of them. All you have to do is take sometime to search and you will find small gems. The key you have to remember is GeoDomains are meant for development, not parking. Look at the full revenue streams a name can generate before registering a name. If there are only a few streams, don’t register it, unless those streams pay handsomely. These names listed below are no brainers for realestate.
Vizcaya.us
Vizcayas.com
VizcayaHouses.com
T B…also even if a name is taken you can sometimes buy it from the owner for a few thousand bucks…still a good investment IMO
hi latest geo article is great reading! just found this blog nice job !! iv been bloging a few years now about geo targeting the US at mister.us .
hope to see more goodluck with simplygeo!
***SMO***
Z,
Thank you for your kind words and welcome to the blog.
Steve Thank you for your service to our country
I really like this forum I am New to Forums most I don’t care for
I find a lot of narrow minded domainers trying to follow a over crowded sector of the market everybody wants that 1 or 2 word .com heck I own Thousands of Names and half are .Infos
They pay the same as a dot.com if your parking infact last summer my dot info’s out performed my dot.com’s I am selling most of all my names and going Geo I personally Like simple Niche Geo’s for me a geo domain does not really have to have the city name. and I don’t buy every niche ether the would delute the brands and confuse the end user. I have fun with names. 1-800-CityInfo.com BigTexasRealEstate.com
***SMO***
Jay,
Welcome to the Blog. I hope you enjoy reading the articles on the Geo Domain Niche. In the future, please do not spam on my blog posts by entering links to PPC sites. I have taken out the links you entered. You are welcomed here, but do not abuse this service or you will be banned.
Thank you for visiting the blog and I look forward to your interaction with blog readers.
Hey Steve, greetings from all of us @ DNHour.com. As you probably know, we are the first Social Networking Website for Domainers. Your blog has been very informative and thanks for sharing your experience with us. Looking forward for more great posts from you.
- Michael Cheok -
CTO of DNHour.com
***SMO***
Michael,
Thank you for your kind words. I am glad that you enjoy the posts. I really love the layout of DNHour.com. You guys have done an outstanding job with the look and feel. Thank you for posting. Please send me an email.
hi steve,
i remember you as texmex! wow, time flies.
the plans for a geonetwork you have mapped out look promising.
will try to stop by now and again.
***SMO***
Marcia,
Thanks for stopping by! It is always good to run into a old friend. Time has flown by.
Steve,
I think a topic concerning protection of a geo domain would be a great discussion with the threat of the Snowe Bill. How can you protect a pure “City.com” name? Business entities (LLC, Inc., etc.)? Trademarks?
If you spend a bunch of money to acquire a name and you put the time in necessary to develop the site, you don’t want it to be taken away from you in the future.
What do you think?
Your blog and forum have been a great resource. Thank you!
Jeremy
***SMO***
Yes, I will take your advice as well others and cover this topic. I have been holding off for a while because alot already has been said on many other blogs. But we will cover it from the geo angle.
Thanks Jeremy.
Hi Steve,
Nice work and a useful blog.
Just came across this earlier today, so I can’t claim to have read it in much depth, but prima facie, I liked your straight-forward presentation of self-introduction.
I’ll keep looking in here from time to time and all the best.
Vic
***SMO***
Thank you Vic. I am glad that you came across the blog. Thank you for visiting.
After following many of the pure *domainers* for the past year I’m thrilled to have found this site. I have some Geo domains that are currently parked and would like to develop them. A recent post of yours said
….”There are a variety of templates available that can get you started on the right path….”
My question is which templates are they. I’d like to put up templates and start adding content rather than having them sitting there with PPC. Please email me or post link.
ps Yes, the future is local marketing. Just think about the location based buzz that’s occurring for wireless devices…..ALL GEO TARGETED. Any additional strategies for building out GEO domains is greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
***SMO***
Bob,
Sorry for the delay. I may have been a little misleading with this statement. Just in case, let me clarify. There are no geo domain templates developed at this time publicly that I know of. We are working with a development company who is developing these for the geo domain industry. There are a variety of templates available that you can add content to and start developing on the low end. All you have to do is do a search on google.com for templates. Really, anyone of them will work. Just pick one that presents a professional setting or fits with your geo domain location/culture. Bulkregister.com has many available as well if you have an account. Templates will help you discover effective ways to improve your site and content useful to consumers. This will also allow you to start generating revenue from adsense (Which will be much more than if you parked your geo domain) because of the targeted content found on the site. If you do it good enough, you will even get advertisers once you build the traffic. It really is not that hard, on the low end to get something up and functioning the way geo domains are intended to be used. The more content, the more traffic, which leads to revenue. Geo domains are intimate brands consumers know.
The best part about getting your site up is it will get indexed into search engines and rank with effective SEO (some templates help you with this). And this delivers free traffic.
I experimented with the template process recently to prove it works on http://www.vizcaya.us (put it up early February). This is a very poor example for a geo site with no revenue possibilities built in because of borrowed content for the experiment, but it was done just to prove consumers find geo domains regardless of the extention, even if it is done poorly. This name had zero traffic and you can see people are finding it, regardless of the extention(3 hits are from me) so a total of 13 unique visitors have visited this site. It is probally more since most people do not like sites with Flash Media and leave. The visit does not get logged until they hit the main page with the template I am using.
All I did was put a bunch of generic content. Probally not very useful once they get there. But they are getting there from this content. I put this up in 10-15 minutes, imagine if you put some real effort and time into your geo domains with targeted content that visitors find useful.
Anything is possible. Geo domains are great because you can do this over and over again. Of course you will have to tweak things depending on the demographics of your area from site to site.
Templates allow you to start with the basics, especially if you are on a budget. There is no need to wait until you have the money to develop a key domain. Consumers could care less about the bells and whistles. They want useful content. All you really need is time and a vision of how you want to develop your geo.
Craigslist.org proves this theory that consumers do not care about the beauty of a site, they only care if it meets their needs.
Learn the process first, then move up in stages until you have a professional site established. Too many people want to run starting off. The Crawl, Walk, Run process works best for long term profits and education.
I hope this helps clear some things up for you. If not, ask away.
Steve,
Great site, really enjoy the topics and the progress of geo names. Keep up the excellent work, I am sure that you will be successful in your venture.
My favourite (weird) geo name is Upotipotpon - a district not far from where we live. Might use it to promote toilet seats ! cheers