A Week in Beijing

Kids in the Forbidden City

After the chaos of leaving Bangkok, we caught an easy flight to Kuala Lumpur. Two hours later, we arrived in a very new airport, and rented a hotel room in the terminal for 7 hours. The next morning we visited the airport Starbucks -- don't judge us, we were in a Muslim country, and we really wanted coffee. Addiction is rarely pretty.

Wendy and kids in the Forbidden City

The flight from Malaysia to Beijing was uneventful, and, after haggling with two taxi drivers, we managed to get a ride to our hostel at only twice the price we had anticipated. One thing struck us immediately -- Beijing in mid-April is cold! But, what is cold but an excuse to hit Silk Street? (A hagglers' paradise, full of knock-off brand name jackets, watches and clothes.) The sellers have perfected the art of haggling, reducing Charlie to tears at one point, and dragging Aidan to the floor as he attempted to resist their efforts to spread Capitalism. Well armed with 6 new intellectual property-infringing jackets, we hit the Streets to see the great sites of China.

Brooks kids on the Great Wall

The high point of our week in Beijing was walking a 10 kilometer section of the Great Wall. We caught a bus at 6:00 am and took a 3-hour ride to Jinshanling. The kids were real troopers -- parts of the wall were very rough, and extremely hilly. 4.5 hours later, we reached Simatai, where we dismounted the wall the way the Chinese did 1,000 years -- by zipline. Okay, in reality the zipline is not actually on the wall, but close.

Chinese Soldier kidnaps small child

The next day, we went to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. The Forbidden City was the imperial palace for the Ming and Qing dynasties for about 500 years, and it was amazing. Apparently some members of the royal families lived their entire lives without leaving the palace grounds. The funniest part of the day was that probably 30 different Chinese tourists wanted to have their pictures taken with our children. They would literally stand in line, and have their pictures taken one after another. The kids were quite patient with it, at least in the beginning.

Another cultural experience was a visit to the Chinese Acrobats in Beijing. Actually, we tried to go our first night, and kept having travel difficulties. It wasn't until our 4th attempt that we made it successfully. The acrobats did all the tricks that any self-respecting gravity-defying pretzel might do. Except that they did them in groups, stacked on top of each other, occasionally using spears and motorcycles. Needless to say, the kids were impressed, and my neck was sore.

Brooks kids invade Tiananmen Square

In a nutshell, we really liked Beijing. It was a very comfortable city, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that few people spoke English. Nobody approached us on the street and tried to sell us anything. In fact, people would come up to us and start talking full-speed in Chinese, assuming that -- of course -- we understood them. I can't tell you how many people counted the number of children that we have on their fingers and then gave us a big thumbs-up.

Alternative Transportation	Charlie eating Snake
Tea Ceremony at our Guesthouse

Missing images

Careful readers (as of course, all of you are) will have noticed a couple of cryptic messages in that last post where you might have expected images. Here are the two missing images:

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Wrapping up our first month in Northern Thailand

So, we're back in Bangkok at our favorite guesthouse, all of us camped out in our room which has wifi and air conditioning. We arrived here at about 1:30 am this morning, after a day of travel, and tomorrow night we head to Beijing. So, it seems like a good time to talk about the last two weeks.

When I last wrote, we were a few days into our time in Chiang Mai, and getting ready to head to the Elephant Nature Park. Monday morning, we packed up our gear, scrambled to find some bug spray and a couple of towels, and hopped into a minivan to spend a week volunteering to help elephants. Wow, is all I can say. It was a really interesting experience.

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The elephants all had crazy stories. The one that Mae was touching in this picture was blinded in both eyes by it's handler (its "mahout"). As a result, it was a little bit dangerous to be around. Not because it was aggressive, but because it used its trunk to "feel" its way through life, and you could get whacked accidentally.

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After getting introduced and feeding a few elephants, we gave them a bath. Luckily for us, elephants really like the water. Unluckily for me, my kids enjoyed splashing me as much as the critters.



Wendy then decided to make out with an elephant named "Hope". Hope's mother had died when he was a few months old, and local villagers found him wedged between two trees.

Speaking of baby elephants, they're really cute, given that they weigh almost as much as our minivan. There were "only" two babies at the elephant park. Here they're wrestling together.


The kids did a wonderful job -- the other volunteers repeatedly complimented them on their behavior and how hard they worked. On the last day during the wrap-up, one of the volunteers stood up and said to the whole group that she had volunteered for years all around the world and that she had never seen... (at this point I was expecting her to say that she had never seen such a well-organized animal refuge or volunteer program...) such well-behaved and hard-working children.

While at the camp we saw several videos about how elephants are trained. It's a very abusive process, that starts with something called "Phajaan". Young elephants of 3 to 4 years old are strapped into a small pen for days, and beaten, stabbed, and kept off balance to break their spirit. Later, as they learn more specialized skills, they are hit with hooks in their ears and skin to train them.

This made programs like the Elephant Nature Park more amazing -- they also work to train elephants, but only through rewards. (Unfortunately, this also meant that we probably aren't going to ride elephants -- something we had been excited to do.) On the other hand, we spent hours bathing the elephants in the river -- not to mention swimming and tubing.

Further North into Thailand

After returning from the Elephant Camp, we went three hours North to the town of Pai. (It was supposed to be three hours North. However, we rented a car without a map, and accepted directions from an extremely helpful -- and even more clueless -- person, who sent us on a seven hour drive along the scenic dirt road (pictured to the right) in the golden triangle. Wendy was convinced that we were going to be "disappeared" by gun-toting opium farmers. It took a mango smoothy in Pai to get life back to normal.)


We stayed in a treehouse (cleverly named the Pai Treehouse) situated about 30 feet up an amazingly healthy tree. We rented a couple of motorbikes, and scooted to a natural hot springs about 8km outside of Pai (taking care to drive around the clumsy farang (foreigners) that had crashed their motorbikes, leaving them with odd limps, and larger bandages.)

Saying a temporary Goodbye to Thailand

Things got ugly in Bangkok around April 10th (ironically the day we were scheduled to fly to China). 21 people were killed that day in clashes between soldiers and red shirts. It was crazy: the area we were in was in complete gridlock, there were helicopters circling around, and you could here gunshots. Everyone was glued to their televisions.

We had a 7:40 pm flight out of the city last night and had hired a driver who was supposed to arrive at 5:00 to drive us to the airport. At 4:00, he called and said that he couldn't get through the traffic. So we loaded up our backpacks and hiked to the river. From there we took a boat about 2 miles south, where we flagged down a taxi, and made it to our flight with about 20 minutes to spare. In the end it worked out fine, but we weren't sure we were going to make the flight for a while!

But, then the flight was easy. We stayed overnight in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia -- we rented a room for 7 hours, so we got some sleep. And the next morning we flew to Beijing.

Had a hilarious time trying to eat in China for the first time. No one here seems to speak English (at least in the restaurants, unlike in Thailand.) And we had no idea how to eat! They gave us chopsticks on these tiny 3-inch round plates, then brought out central platters of rice, veggies, meat, etc. We sort of scooped it onto the little plates, but we felt completely over our heads. Other people were stopping at our table and laughing (nicely) at us. Eventually we figured out that we should just eat directly from the communal bowls.

And that's it for now! Our computer battery is almost dead, and it's pushing 11:00 pm, so bedtime!

Update from Thailand

Hi from Thailand,

Thailand is so beautiful and friendly. I can't say enough how friendly the people are here. The folks at our guesthouse love our kids and it's so peaceful in the sitting and garden area. They have two gentle rabbits that hop around the garden that the kids play with constantly when we are here. Except for one day when we stayed here all day, we have been sight seeing during the afternoon and at our guest house in the late afternoon. We stayed here all day one day because of the "red shirt" demonstrations (an anti-govt group wanting to change the ruling party. We all took a Thai cooking class and it was so cool because the kids were as involved, if not more involved than we were- grating coconuts, cutting veggies, making coconut milk for the curry.... They dressed Mae and Charlie and Sam up in traditional Thai clothes for fun that day too. (Aidan would have none of it.) So cute.

..... (About a week later....) Since the above was written, we have moved on to a few more places- Lopburi, Sukathai and Chiang Mai in the north. Lopburi is a regular,not particularly touristy Thai town that has monkeys EVERYWHERE- all over the telephone polls,in the middle of the road, all over the sidewalk, sitting in wait on top of a phone booth outside a little store ready to steal your bag of food...

We next went to amazing Buddhist and some old Hindu ruins, biking around them one day. We have met and got to talk with a Buddhist monk at a temple and today we saw elephants, beautiful waterfalls and poisonous snakes. (We all held a python!)

Next week we have signed on to volunteer at an elephant protection center for the week. We will stay there and all help take care of the elephants. As I understand it, about 2000 elephants in Thailand have been "domesticated" having worked in the logging industry. But now because less forests are being deforested (: the elephants and their handlers don't have work and some animals go to these rescue centers.

After the elephant preserve it's back to Bangkok and April 10th we fly to Beijing!!!!

Sorry for the long note. I am trying to be a better emailer.

I hope spring is beautifully green in Durham (and elsewhere!)

Sa wa di kaa,
Wendy

Just a quick update from the "bald is beautiful" side of the family. (Actually, I'm not as bald as I'd like to be. The 3rd day in Thailand, I plugged in my hair clippers, and shaved half my head before the clippers decided that they really were designed for 120 volts of electricity instead of the 220 volt stuff they use here. I then tried to find a replacement, but only managed to find a guy that re-wound the coil in the center of the clippers, so that I could continue to use them. However, in the absence of a voltage converter, I've been afraid to try again.)

I should mention the food, seeing as that was one of the main reasons for coming. The Thai food here is quite good, but they make it a bit spicy for my taste. Green curry seems to be the spiciest, with red curry and Panang curry being more palatable (with sugar). The pad thai is consistently good, and tom kha gai has been inconsistent, but I've had some of the best I've ever eaten.

Chiang Mai -- where we currently are -- has a wonderful variety of food, which is particularly convenient because after 10 days of nothing but Thai food, I have gotten a wee bit -- err -- sick of it. We found a great tex-mex place (eaten there twice) and an excellent Mediterranean place as well. Lest you think we do nothing but eat, we have also managed to stay pretty faithful to working / homeschooling twice a week.

We haven't met many Americans here -- which seems surprising. There are lots of Japanese and European tourists around. We haven't really met many friendly tourists though, not sure if that's because many of them are here for "illicit" activities and the kids make them feel guilty, or if the friendly folks just hang out in the South of Thailand. We shall see!

That's it for now. I hope Spring is treating you well, and we'll talk with you soon!

And now, I've gotten lazy about embedding images, so I'm just going to import the rest of them here.

Beginning to experiment with Video

So, the word is out, video consumption online tripled in 2009, Google says video is "where it's at", ad revenues begin to creep up. What's a text guy to do? Starting small, trying to grok video.

Here's one of my early attempts: Sh*t Happens.

Investing in Assets to Boost Organic SEO

Frequent reader of this blog (Hi Mom!) will know that I place a lot of value on domain names. In Decembers past, I have made end-of-tax-year "big-ticket" (ie low 4-figure) domain name purchases. This year is different. That's partly because 3 sales I pursued fell through (1 person wanted $200k for a domain that I was willing to pay $1500 for; Sedo had another domain listed, but it turned out that the person listing it had already to sold it to someone else; and Rick Latona advertised a name in "Daily Domains", but it turns out that they didn't bother to check whether the person selling it actually owned it.)

But there's a bigger trend going on. Despite some really large domain sales this year, domains as an asset class have substantially declined in value. The biggest factor is Google's decision to dramatically cut payments for parked traffic. Perhaps that was a strategic decision on Google's part -- they certainly have no interest in propping up the business models of (competing) type-in traffic or spammy "made-for-adsense" companies. Perhaps it simply reflects advertisers taking advantage of the ability to segment parked traffic out from search traffic, and deciding that search traffic is more valuable. Either way, it's harder to justify buying domains when the opportunity to earn parking revenue has evaporated.

A second factor is that (at least from the tests that I've run) "mini-sites" are a complete and utter failure. I purchased 3 mini-sites from AEIOU in 2008 (Ski-Hats.com, Cross-Country-Skis.com and Landscape-Designer.com), promoted them for several months in 2009, and then watched to see what happened. The answer, unfortunately, was "nothing". When AEIOU announced that they were no longer supporting this business, I gave the Ski-Hats.com domain to SkiHats.com, moved Cross-Country-Skis.com to my own server, and I still haven't figured out what to do with Landscape-Designer.com.

Where does that leave domain investing? It seems to me that there are really only two options left -- "buying to flip" (at which I have failed repeatedly and miserably) and building domains into real businesses. While I am a big fan of the latter strategy, it doesn't scale! Buying a new domain name makes your job harder instead of easier -- you now have to develop content, functionality and links for more sites! So, at least in the short term, you're worse off than you were before you bought the latest domain.

Domain owners: wake up! Unless you have a truly premium domain, it lost half of its value in 2009, and will lose more in 2010. End users have less money to spend, and fewer ways to make money on the domains that they do buy.

Domain buyers: wake up! There are higher value assets to buy for organic SEO than domains. Invest your money in real content, real functionality, better business relationships, and assets that make it easier to attract editorially-chosen links. Although these assets are more difficult to manage than domains, they are (much!) more valuable.

More signals from Google that Page Load time will affect SERPs

Just a quick note -- there are a couple of recent signals that Google will start to use site response times to affect how well you rank in their search results in 2010.

The first is found in a summary of a recent PubCon session with Matt Cutts:

He [Matt Cutts] hints that people at Google really want to use site speed as a factor in rankings. They’re not using it right now, but they want to be. They want search to be like a magazine. Google wants to make the Web fast. 2010 is a great time to pay attention to speeding up your site. HINT. HINT.

Source

The second is that Google Webmaster Tools now offers a page called "Site performance" which gives you feedback on how fast your site loads relative to other sites on the web. (Announcement is here.)

Have you thought about how quickly your site loads? Probably a good time to take it seriously.

Bad experience with 99Designs -- my takeaways

I'm coming off an unhappy website redesign with 99Designs.com -- only 2 or 3 of the 13 designers submitted designs that seemed worthy of iterating on. This contrasted sharply with my previous experience having a logo designed at 99Designs when I had nearly 350 designs submitted (compared to 37), and 4 of them were very good. This time around I have 1 design that I'm pretty happy with (and the overall hit to my wallet is twice as high).

Part of the explanation appears to be that many more designers submit designs for logos -- they're probably much less work -- and payouts tend to be about half the payout for a website design, so designers opt for the logo projects.

One approach to designing a successful project:
If you sort the webpage designs by the number of designs that were submitted, you can find projects that received more designs than projects that offered to pay more. Sometimes these high-marketing / low-cost projects beat out projects offering to pay nearly 3x as much! These disproportionately successful projects suggest a few takeaways:

• Tell designers that there's a possibility of ongoing work in the 2nd line of the project description


• Projects that get lots of designs often offer a high payout but don't guarantee the project. Some of the projects that do guarantee a payout didn't get many designs. There doesn't seem to be a clear association between guaranteeing a project payout and the number of designs submitted.


• Making the project "blind" -- ie designers can't see what other designers have submitted -- doesn't appear to be correlated with the number of design submissions.
  

Here's what I'm going to do in the future:

1. Make an effort to "sell" the project, both by describing how tricky a project it is, and by approaching designers directly and asking them to take a crack at it (see the tips in the links at the bottom of this post).


2. Don't buy separate logo and webpage design projects for the same website.


3. Give feedback to everyone, even if you only give personalized feedback to the folks whose designs you like. My guess is that designers look at whether or not a contest-buyer gives feedback to everyone before they decide which sites to design


4. Avoid the "blind contest" option like the plague. I understand that designers love it, because it prevents less talented designers from stealing their best ideas. However, as the buyer, I kind of like designers riffing on other peoples designs. You probably get more designs overall, and more of them are going to be appealing. Plus, (granted with only two data points) I had about 1/10th the number of designs submitted in my "blind" contest.

Other tips for 99Designs Contests:

1. 10 Tips for Obtaining a Stellar Graphic Design via 99Designs.com


2. tips: crowdsourcing a design project


3. 4 tips to hosting a fun design competition

Using "Outposts" in your SEO Strategy

I attended the Cambridge SEO Meetup again tonight, and was once again reminded why I go: there are some great people that attend. Props to Derek Edmond for giving me a great link-building idea, and thanks to CentersAndSquares.com for bringing food!

Tonight's speaker was Stuart Foster. He has an interesting resume and it sounds like he's done some genuine legwork to create a meaningful following on Twitter. However, I'm iffy on his SEO recommendations, and I disagree pretty strongly with one of them. He recommended that people follow a strategy that he credited to Chris Brogan: that you "syndicate" the articles that you write to 5 or 6 "outposts", like Facebook, a blog, etc, and that you then funnel links from those "outposts" back to your main money-making site.

Now, I first heard the name "Chris Brogan" about two or three years ago when he came to speak at one of the Cambridge SEO meetups. I later heard him speak at Affiliate Summit in Boston after his star had ascended a bit, and I have to say that he came across as a genuinely decent human being. And further, he does appear to have written a post titled: "Using Outposts in Your Media Strategy" which uses a lot of the same words and concepts that Stuart used. But, for Chris' sake, I'm going to assume that this strategy makes more sense for personal branding than it does for SEO -- because it's a really bad idea for SEO.

Here's the idea behind using "outposts": if you set up 5 or 6 mini-sites on different hosts (maybe a Facebook page, a MySpace page, your LinkedIn account, etc) then you can point all of those sites to your main (money-making) site, and Presto! -- instant inbound links | PageRank | link juice. You'll have the magic of Facebook's PageRank 11 site to push your money-making site up in Google's rankings.

Here's the problem: If you want this to actually work, you now have 5 mini-sites plus your money-making site that you need to update. Let me say that differently: instead of simplifying the work it takes to get inbound links, you have multiplied it six-fold!

Let's say that your brand-spanking new Facebook page has exactly one article on it, plus a link to your money-making site. Guess how many visitors it will get per month if you don't promote it? 3,000? 1,200? 8? Nope. Zero. The only way to get people to visit your Facebook page is to go out and promote the page.

Make no mistake -- getting editorially chosen links is really, really hard. Why in the world would you want to increase your link-building workload by a factor of six? Especially when the link juice passed from 5 of those 6 sites doesn't flow directly to your money-making site? Insanity!

Take all that hard-earned content and publish it on your money-making site. Spend all the time you would tell your friends and acquaintances about your MySpace page, and tell them about your money-making site instead. Stop tweeting. Stop retweeting. Write more content; promote that content. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

The NOLO Consultant & Independent Contractor Agreements book rocks

Just a quick note to folks out there that hire independent contractors. You should run, not walk, to your nearest web browser and order a copy of Nolo's Consultant and Independent Contractor Agreements book. It comes with a CD with stock contracts, and excellent explanations of each of the clauses within the contracts. I use it at least monthly.

(Those of you who know me know that I had a situation back in the Spring where I thought an independent contractor was trying to get their contracting work for me re-classified as an employee to get benefits after losing his full-time job. In the end, it just turned out to a mistake on his part, and he cleaned everything up. However, I now use this book with every new contractor I hire to be sure that I have good contracts in place up-front. $34.99 well spent!

What Great Long-Tail Organic Pages Look Like

I attended tonight's Cambridge SEO Meetup, and left the meeting somewhat frustrated. The speaker, Chris Baggott presented blogging software from his company, Compendium Blogware. Chris was articulate and well-informed, and dealt gracefully and with humor while being challenged by several people who seemed intent on proving that he isn't a Linux sysadmin -- which he's not.

That aside, here's what frustrated me: Chris was presenting a solution that really bothered me. He was recommending that clients use his company's blogging software to build web pages that target long tail keywords. That in-and-of-itself is laudable. It's relatively easy to rank for long-tail keywords, and a lot of high-volume "fat-head" keywords don't convert that well. His software has some proprietary sauce that helps to categorize those posts in several different categories, and post them with keyword-enhanced titles and using keyword-enhanced directory names. So, for example, the page might be:

CrazyToasters.com/four-slice-cuisinart-toaster/

And the resulting page would have the title "Four Slice Cuisinart Toaster". Aside from these basic SEO optimization techniques, he encourages his clients to write a 100-word blog post on what they're doing that day that relates to four-slice cuisinart toasters. I'm imagining posts that say something like: "My family ate four slices of sourdough toast this morning from our new Cuisinart toaster."

Compendium will then also helpfully categorize that post under:

CrazyToasters.com/four-slice-toaster/ and
CrazyToasters.com/cuisinart-toasters/

The result is made for Google psuedo-spam that takes very little effort by the end user, is easy to update on a regular basis, and probably ranks pretty well for queries involving these keywords. (Indeed, just several weeks after registering a $10 domain and pushing 150 posts live, he claims that they have sold 20 toasters.)

Why does psuedo-spam like this work?

It seems to me that when Google visualizes the web, it sees a vast topographical map. At the center of the map are commercial terms like "mortgage", "gambling", "viagra" and "insurance". And surrounding these keywords are vast mountains of pages that are attempting to optimize for those keywords. The 10 pages that make up the very peak of this mountain are displayed to the end user when they type the query "mortgage". Surrounding that peak are lesser peaks, such as "online mortgage", "second mortgage", "quick mortgage", and foothills such as "san diego mortgage", "interest-only mortgage new york". Within each of those lesser peaks and foothills there are 10 pages that fit the Google algorythm well enough to become local maxima.



Compendium's brand of psuedo-spam works because out beyond the mountains of high-volume, highly-commercial keywords, there are vast plains, with 4 and 5 word keywords that very few people search for. Because so few people search for them, few marketers optimize for them. And because few marketers optimize for them, it takes little work to create the sub-surface geology that gives these pages a moderately higher peak than the plains around them. By choosing a domain name with the "toasters" keyword, highly-targeted sub-directory names and titles, and a bit of text that hasn't been translated from English to Russian and back again, Compendium's clients gain enough altitude to rank for their long-tail keywords.

So, what's wrong with that? I guess nothing. It's certainly better than the true spam that's out there -- stuff scraped from RSS feeds, and then churned through an automated content re-writer and spewed onto the web. Stuff that almost reads as English, until you realized that the last few sentences you processed don't actually make sense. I mean, from one perspective, I'm glad that Compendium's software works. Certainly reading about what toaster people used for their breakfast is better than reading true spam. However, the problem is that it doesn't take that much additional work to create truly useful long-tail organic pages. In fact (in volume), it may even be easier.

Start by asking yourself: When someone types 'Four Slice Cuisinart Toaster' into Google, what are they hoping to find? What are the implicit questions that they're asking?

1. They probably want to know what models are available, how much they cost, and where they can buy them


2. They probably want to know what product features they have


3. They probably want to see pictures


4. They might want to know where the user manual is, or troubleshooting tips


5. They might want to see user reviews

Why not create that page for these users? If you're going to create 250 pages (which Chris recommended), it's probably faster to collect the data in a spreadsheet, and then have someone spit out that data into a web page. Include a link to a "Consumer Review" page, and then roll those reviews back into the page. The upside of this approach is that you have a page that genuinely ought to rank #1 in Google. The better it ranks, the more people will come and submit reviews, which creates a virtuous cycle.

Now, over time perhaps Chris's clients will create these higher-value pages that offer more substance to their readers. Or maybe domainers will adopt Compendium (or one of the the other similar CMSs) to monetize their middling domains. And maybe that shouldn't bother me -- I've certainly got one or two projects out there that I'm not really proud of. But my personal bias is that two-or-three years out you'll reap the rewards of building a platform that results in great pages, rather than pseudo-spam.

Update: Here's the danger of writing blog posts at 2:00 am. I slept on this and decided that I was being an idiot. Compendium is a much better solution than just ignoring your long-tail keywords, and clients certainly have the option to make those pages genuinely useful. The "pseudo-spam" aspect of it has nothing to do with Compendium's product -- just what I imagine most people would enter as blog posts.

PoliticalCalculations just did an excellent Cavalcade of Risk

Just a quick pointer. Ironman from Political Calculations just did an excellent job rating and ranking the 30 submissions to this week's Cavalcade of Risk. (Of course, I may be biased -- my submission on home insurance and hurricanes was tied for the highest rating that he handed out).

Favorite Techniques for Buying Domain Names

I've written in the past about the value of domain names. I thought I'd write a brief summary of some of the methods of buying domain names that I've found to be most successful.

1. Approaching domain owners directly

The best names I've ever bought I found by approaching the owners directly. FixItYourself.com and SepticSystem.com are 2 examples. Here's the story of a 3rd:

I recently decided that I wanted to buy a better domain name for my life insurance website. The old name was TermLifeOptions.com, and I felt like it detracted from the site's credibility. I generated a list of what I thought were the 20 best generic keyword names related to life insurance. (ie: Insurance.com, LifeInsurance.com, TermLife.com, InsurancePolicy.com, TermLifePolicy.com, etc.) I then checked each domain, and contacted all of the owners that hadn't built actual sites on their domain. Contacting the owner is often as simple as checking the record domain name at Whois.sc and sending an email to the administrative contact.

Given that life insurance is such a competitive niche, many of the names were unavailable. Prices on some of the available names were as high as $100,000. However, the owner of TermLifePolicy.com was willing to talk in a couple of months, if the deal he was working on at the time fell through. Luckily for me, it did, and we were able to agree on a price.

2. NameJet.com

NameJet is a drop-catching service. That is, when a domain owner allows a domain to expire the name "drops", and a number of services (such as NameJet, Pool.com and SnapNames.com) compete to register the name and then resell it. However, NameJet also has exclusive relationships with a number of registrars that guarantees that Pool and SnapNames can't compete to catch names. That means that many of the best names are only available through NameJet. I've purchased 8 names through NameJet in the last 2 years, including RoofingEstimate.com, AccessRamp.com and a third excellent name that I'm not going to mention here.

The trick with NameJet, I think, is to be patient and selective. Spend 10 minutes every day checking the service, and don't buy names of marginal value. (For example, one of the 8 names I bought was xShoe.com -- what in the world was I thinking?) If you want to buy names of marginal value, I'd recommend a different method.

3. Buying names for Reg Fee

"Reg fee" means that you pay only the registration cost of a name -- somewhere around $7 - $8. The trick for buying names for reg fee is simply to generate a large number of names (either via scripts or just through keyword munging in Excel). Then run 10,000 names through a Bulk Registration tool (like GoDaddy's bulk reg tool).

The advantage of this approach is that you can develop a relatively large portfolio at low cost. I've sold three "reg fee" names in the past few months for between $300 - $450 apiece.

However, the disadvantage is that you may be paying reg fee on 200 names a year to sell 3 or 4 names. If you don't have a repeatable method of selling names, then you may have a hard time making a profit, even if you bought the names for cheap.

The trick for all three of these approaches is not to fall in love with a particular domain name. If you must own a particular name, you're going to pay a premium for it. If you simply need a good name in a particular vertical, you can generally find one that represents good value. (If you simply want a good commercial name, and you don't care what niche it's in you can probably get a steal!)

New Look and Feel for WashingMachines.net

Just launched a new look and feel for WashingMachines.net. I'd love to hear feedback or suggestions!

Renaming TermLifeOptions.com to TermLifePolicy.com

I have been developing a life insurance site called TermLifeOptions.com since 2006. I'm excited to announce that I have now renamed the site TermLifePolicy.com to more accurately reflect the site's focus on helping consumers choose the most appropriate term life insurance policy.

We've done some really interesting consumer-related research on life insurance, including topics such as:

• Should you request multiple life insurance quotes? (link)


• Why do insurance quotes from different companies vary so dramatically? (link)


• What to do if you have given inaccurate information to your Life Insurance Company (link)

The site also profiles more than 60 life insurance companies, policies in each state and more. If you're in the market for life insurance, please take a look (and let me know if we're missing anything!)

ApplianceRepair.com -- great end-user domain

I always like to see great domain names put to use by end users (as opposed to domainers), so I wanted to give a shout out to John Sowden. John works for RepairClinic.com (an online appliance parts retailer) as their VP of something, and he's been really helpful with a couple of articles that we've published.

He pinged me last month to say that he had launched a site for his appliance repair show called (appropriately enough): ApplianceRepair.com. John's been working in the appliance industry for more than 2 decades and he really knows his stuff. If you're interested in radio along the lines of "Car Talk for Appliances" check it out.

By the way, from a domainer's point of view ApplianceRepair.com is a fantastic name. My stats show that people are much more likely to type-in a domain name that's "NounVerb.com" than one that's "VerbNoun.com" (ie RepairAppliances.com), and my guess is that that gives "NounVerb" domains a bit of a boost in search engine results as well (the domain name is one of the few bits of data that the user gets to see before they click).

Affiliate Sites in Highly Competitive Niches

One of the things that I've "learned" in the past couple of years of building websites is that some niches have a hell of a lot more competition than others. Life Insurance, for example, is just a tough niche to break into. My takeaway from that is that it probably makes more sense to be a big fish in a small pond that a small fish in a big pond.

However, this article makes a couple of interesting points while encouraging people to just into "big niches":

• More offers to split-test
  
• Higher payout due to more competition
  
• Longevity -- these niches aren't going anywhere
  

Interesting thoughts.

Domain Names as Force Multipliers for Websites

My day job involves developing and promoting my own small stable of online businesses. However, on a daily basis I devote time to domaining -- finding good domain names to buy. One thing that I have banged my head against in the domaining community on a regular basis is (what I believe to be) a substantial misunderstanding of what makes domain names valuable to online businesses. A domain name's true value lies in its value as a force multiplier. Independent of a domain owner applying substantial force to the domain, it has relatively little value at all.

First, I should make a few caveats:

• I buy a handful of domain names each month, so I believe domain names are both useful and valuable.


• There are a couple of classes of domain names that are valuable independent of their value as force multipliers. For example, misspellings of popular generic domain names aren't really useful to develop a site on, but they may generate substantial and valuable traffic. Alternately, short commercial .com names (Toys.com, Candy.com and various adult-themed names have been in the news this year) attract substantial easy-to-convert type-in traffic. And there are all sorts of stories about domainers building 5-6 figure a month revenue streams on these sorts of domains.

Here's an example of the misunderstanding that I see often:
"The domain name itself takes care of something like 50% of the SEO work" (from a comment on ElliotsBlog.com). I've had other conversations with domainers who have argued that "the domain is the biggest piece of the puzzle" when it comes to building sites.

I don't buy it -- and more importantly, I've never seen a result remotely similar to that. Building websites into effective businesses takes a tremendous amount of work, experimentation, time, patience and risk. Good domains are a useful starting point, but it takes a lot of work to grow a site from "registration fee" money (which the vast majority of domains that people buy and sell every day never make), to "car payment" money to "work for yourself" money. In fact, what strikes me most about the domains that I own is how little type-in traffic there is out there relative to the traffic available from search engines.

(As one data point, I own a single-word commercial .com domain that I have been developing for a bit less than 1 year. Type-in traffic represents less than 5% of the site's traffic; search engine traffic > 90%. And true type-in traffic -- navigation to the site from folks that have never heard of it -- will continue to decline as a percentage of total traffic.)

Domains as Force Multipliers

A "force multiplier" in military speak is a factor that makes a group of soldiers dramatically more effective: for example, the ability of precision-guided bombs to dramatically change the outcome of a war. (thanks Wikipedia) I think that's a good analogy for the utility of most premium domain names.

A domain name is useful for several things:
1. You'll get a small amount of type-in traffic -- people that think "Hey, I want to buy some candy -- I bet there's a website at Candy.com that sells candy."
2. Search Engines give a bump to sites that have content related to the generic terms in their domain name. I don’t think they do this because it makes it easier for search engines to categorize the site — I think it’s because end users are more likely to trust the “brand”.
3. If you’re building a site, it’s easier to get on the phone and explain to someone that you own “Laptops.com” than “Best-Laptops-Around.com”. The person on the other end of the line is more likely to believe that you’re serious with the former domain than with the latter, whether you’re trying to get a link, become an affiliate, sell them something, etc.
4. The domain name — along with your title tag and some text the search engine scraped from your site — appears in the search results. End users trust good generic domain names, so all else held constant, they’re more likely to click on your link.

But, with the exception of type-in traffic, none of these benefits help you unless you help yourself. That is, if you do a lot of work, a good domain name can amplify your efforts. But if you don't do the work, don't expect the domain name to do it for you.

How big of a force multiplier is a good domain?

Tough question, and one that I can't do more than speculate on. However, I think there's a good case to be made that the more competitive the niche you're trying to break into the less useful premium domain names are.

1. In competitive areas, where much of your competition has a good domain name (perhaps a branded domain name), don't expect to see much of a bump because of your domain name. (One industry that comes to mind is life insurance.) There's lots of great content out there and people have been consistently building links for a decade. There's a lot of offline advertising and people trust brands that they know more than generic names. In this scenario, the search engines have lots and lots of trusted content for the most profitable queries. My guess is that the multiplier effect is minimal -- low single-digit percentile. Given that domain names in these niches are expensive, you may be better off coming up with a brandable $7 domain name (ie Insurabilious.com)

2. In areas with middling competition, I think a good generic name can be quite useful. I'm guessing that it can give your efforts as much as a 20% bump. Maybe it becomes easier to attract links than it otherwise would have been; Maybe it's easier to find partners, or to negotiate a better payout from those partners because they took you more seriously; Maybe a higher percentage of people clicked on your links in the search results because they assumed that such a great domain name would be coupled with useful content and features.

Other Force Multipliers that You Can Buy

There are, of course, other force multipliers for your business that you could buy instead of a domain name.

• Editorially-chose inbound links are probably the single most powerful force multiplier. While I don't buy (or recommend buying) links directly, I certainly invest in techniques and assets that increase my chances of acquiring such links. It's hard to overestimate the degree to which a single good link can multiply the rest of your work.


• A technology platform that makes it easier for you to develop content and features that help your end users.


• Analytics tools and consulting that help you understand what your users want.


• Increased traffic can itself be used as a force multiplier if it helps you better understand how to convert your users.

Names matter, not least for the simple reason that humans seem to be wired to remember them (present company excluded). But before you go out and spend 5 figures for a domain name do some deep thinking about whether that name will pay back your investment within a reasonable time horizon. And whether it will multiply your efforts more than some of the other assets mentioned above.

Airlines for Travelling within Mexico

List of airlines you can take within Mexico:

• Aviacsa.com


• Mexicana.com


• Aeromexico.com


• Aeromar.com.mx


• Volaris.com.mx


• Interjet.com.mx

Almost caught by a clever domaining scam

Kudos to the folks at Sedo.com -- they just helped me avoid getting caught in a clever domaining scam. Someone wrote me (email reproduced below) and said that they wanted to buy Bath-Cabinets.com, and that they would pay 65% of the appraised value of the domain name. Then they recommended 3 companies whose appraisals they would accept: Sedo, Podzz or AccurateDomains.com.

I forked over $29 to Sedo to do an appraisal of the name, and wrote the folks back saying "Sure, I'm happy to try it".

Sedo contacted me the next day saying "We believe the email is an attempt to get people to order an appraisal from nameorange.com. After purchasing an appraisal, the domain holder will not receive a response from the person again."

Anyway, Sedo then offered to refund my appraisal price, which I think is tremendously good customer service. Thanks Sedo!

Here's the original email expressing interest in the domain name:

Dear Sir or Madam,

We are interested to buy your domain name BATH-CABINET.COM and offer to buy it from you for 65% of the appraised market value.

As of now we accept appraisals from either one of the following leading appraisal companies:

sedo.com
podzz.com
accuratedomains.com


If you already have an appraisal please forward it to us.

As soon as we have received your appraisal we will send you our payment (we use Paypal for amounts less than $2,000 and escrow.com for amounts above $2,000) as well as further instructions on how to complete the transfer of the domain name.

We appreciate your business,

Yours truly,

J. Harris