Think Visibility was a good break, many thanks to Al for the ticket, good to meet some new & old faces – sorry if I wasn’t overly enthusiastic if I met you on Saturday as Al did keep me out till 6am on the first night Some good talks and I certainly took away a few ideas. What was interesting was listening to the types of sites other people run, amazing diversity in every room & bar.

Domain Leasing: Current income is around £1300 per month from this, the only way for me to really ramp this up is to get a larger inventory but I don’t want a pile of crap so I think it’s a slow burner with the odd addition and still something I’d like to build on. Certainly a nice option to offer someone who can’t afford to outright buy a prime generic.

Geo’s: My collection of geo’s has grown a little and this is where I have invested money & time this year, a few more domains and some new sites on them every few months.

Ullapool.co.uk with only a 1500 population was an existing site already ranking at the top, I have contacted B&B’s & hotels offering a paid listing/advertising, it’s a port and popular area for tourism and breaks away. It now has a yearly income of £1100 from listings and £2k from adsense – the site was bought for £4500 a few months ago.

Ayr.co.uk is the main site in the group as it’s the largest of the small towns around the 50k population mark, it was just a blank domain but has now been built out and ranks in the top 5, happy with it’s progress.

What’s pretty apparent to me now is that with it being off-season the B&B’s are closed down and they have next to no interest in spending money on advertising right now, I think a lot of the geo sites will come into their own next year from February onwards especially if they are visible near the top of Google so that’s really the aim, get the group of domains, build them and get them indexed and get ready for early 2010 when businesses will be spending on advertising.

Other stuff: I have bought a few smaller sites this year, some for myself, some in partnership with a friend, still looking through lists of traffic sites looking for neglected gems of which I am sure there are plenty out there. Every now and again I can spend a day doing detective work for it to end up nowhere chasing my own tail but that’s the thrill of the chase, one such expedition I’ll detail to show how time can pass!

Last week I was doing some product keyword research, check the keyword and found a site at no.1 in Google with a single holding page saying they were no longer taking orders, checked the html and no tracking code or analytics so my gut says they may not realise they own a site getting hundreds of visitors per day.

The domain was a .co.uk , no address in the whois, domain name as registrant.
Archive.org shows their old address & phone number in a contact page which is handy, a bit more digging shows there is a physical shop there with the same phone number but today it’s selling something completely different so I had hoped/presumed a change of direction. I contacted the shop owner but she nothing to do with the old shop or domain I am after. She did manage to give me a name of the old trading company which I had not heard of that used to trade from the shop.

Researching this trading name took me to other sites in the same kind of genre which were still live and finding their contact details I asked if they still owned the domain I was chasing and wanted.

Nope, but he used to, he had sold the site & domain in 2008 but did have the buyers name and mobile phone number which he was happy to pass on to me.

I contacted the buyer who had since resigned as director of the company who bought the domain I am after, but gave me the name of the limited company that he had setup. So I paid £4 at companies house for all the details on this limited company and could see no trading has been done or filed but did get the home address of the existing director of the limited company who owns the domain. I can’t see any trace of this guy online (handy weird surname) so have sent him a snail mail to ask if he would sell the domain.

Will any of this come off? who knows, but it can be fun and when these things do work out you can win big, an excellent tip from Edwin is to take a high ranking site and put it in the Adwords Tool under website content to generate a list of popular keywords to start your research from.

Matt: As reading his comments I think he’d really benefit from attending

Richard: Comment made me laugh and I’ve met Richard before and I’m sure he’ll make the most of the opportunity

Abdul: Another gentleman I’ve known online for a long time that and who I think needs to talk and listen to people that are already somewhat successful in the industry

I’ll also be providing tickets to two of my business partners (as I’m a speaker I get an extra free ticket):

Scott Jones: If you don’t know who Scott is you’re on the wrong site, totally awesome smartest somewhat technophobe I know in the industry and have the pleasure to work with.

Marc Evans: I run the Coolest Gadgets UK site with Marc, he’s a expert .Net coder (I don’t know if that’s what he’d call himself) and a total brainiac on gadgets and technology.

If for any reason anybody listed cannot make it (you’ll need to sort out your own travel and accommodation), please let me know and I’ll give the ticket to somebody else.

If you weren’t lucky enough to win a ticket I would strongly advise taking advantage of the 30% discount code confcal, even before the discount it’s one of the most best value and friendliest conferences in town.

Finally the first 5 people at Think Visibility that tell me in person they read Self Made Minds and use Conference Calendar I’ll buy a beer on the Saturday evening (and I’m sure Scott will match that ).

Occasionally I managed to pick up something I felt under priced and occasionally I have had to pay more than I would have liked. When targeting towns & villages my preference so far has been to go for the .co.uk first, usually with no existing site in the case of Ayr & Arran. If that was a no go I have looked at the .org.uk which happened for Kilmarnock. If that was a no go then I google the town and looked at the top 10 to see if there was something suitable & established to buy which was the case for Kilwinning (.org) And in some cases so far I have not been able to get anything.

You can see a local map of my progress here, although there is another acquisition which isn’t shown there which is going through just now. Overall I like the way it’s turned out, some sites like Ullapool.co.uk rank no.1 and get a few hundred visitors per day (in the middle of a re-design), other brand new sites like Kilmarnock, Ayr & Stevenston are in the top 20 and starting to get a little bit of traffic, it gives me a nice mix of new & established sites which can help each other and offer value to advertisers. I have to say that there seems to be a LOT of established geo sites that rank and are sitting there forgotten about offering real opportunity for those of you with the vision to buy on the cheap and monetise.

I am going to have a main automated directory which is almost ready and will also have featured listings, the last week or so has been deciding my pricing & overall strategy. My buying domains is coming to an end, developing is well under way and the monetisation is fast approaching, all of this in the last two months from a standing start, it’s been fun fun fun and very refreshing as I have mentioned before.

I have not reached out at all to ask for advertising so far, I have some laterooms banners on the sites which have already had 7 bookings making commission which is nice but what is really nice is that I am starting to get asked by local B&B’s & Guesthouses for advertising. For new sites like Arran & Ayr I have a couple of advertisers wanting to go ahead, for established sites like Ullapool I have 3 advertisers waiting for me to finish the re-design and want to part with their cash, where else does that happen? within 2 months they are coming to me asking if they can give me money! It wouldn’t take that many enquiries once the sites are all established to increase overall income by £xxx’s every month. I still have no real idea what the potential out there is, I know small towns ranking well can make £5-£10k per year once established with no real effort, passively growing through enquiries. If my main sites averaged that it would make a pretty good set.

I get the feeling next spring (if everything is as I would like) these sites will really come on. My main targets are B&B’s/Guest houses. I’m not going to let it passively grow though, I shall be working through the winter to build up a base by contacting local businesses so that come spring they can really generate a good collective income with very little maintenance. From there any fallout should be replaced naturally with new enquiries.

There is a real geo land grab been going on this summer, whether it’s the prime generic co.uk or the established no.1 site I would say there is a real period of opportunity to strike and carve out a piece for yourself, I know some of you already have and it’s good to hear. I’ll be at ThinkVisibility so if your going I’ll see you there!

Think Visibility Conference – Saturday 12 September 2009

I was speaking to my friend Dom AKA @TheHodge a few days ago about the next Think Visibility conference that he’s organising. I thoroughly enjoyed and benefited from the first one and for the one next month I am lined up on some mystery panel alongside Chris Garrett, Patrick Altoft and Kieron Donoghue (I’ve no idea what the panel is about but knowing Hodge it will be fun).

Anyway it turned out that Think Visibilty still didn’t have a primary sponsor and as it’s pretty related to my latest site Conference Calendar, I thought it would be a good marketing experiment to offer sponsorship, so that’s what we’ve done (I will report back after the event about the ROI).

I was able to talk Dom into giving our readers an awesome discount code of 30% (details on the Conference Calendar Think Visibility page), so if you haven’t booked your ticket yet now is the time (it was good value before, now it’s a must see).

I’ve also got a few tickets I can give away, the first of which will be to a SMM reader. Simply leave a comment on this post explaining why you would like to attend and we’ll choose a winner that we think has the best reason.

Good luck and if you don’t win at least you’ll be able to benefit from the 30% discount.

site: Lumens.co.uk

Category: Lighting

Current traffic: 100-250 visitors per day

Improvements made, after installing the software I had someone make the url’s more seo friendly and created my own categories using the search function along with some unique text/description at the top for some of the categories.

I also bought a template from templatemonster I think for a basic design to make the front of the site look better and less like an aff site.

Over the last month the site made the following sales;

All-up-and-on: 407 clicks, generating 7 sales, £644.65 in sales
Haysom lighting:  265 clicks, 2 sales,  £228.94 in sales
DIY Tools: 60 clicks, 2 sales, £276.47 in sales
Screwfix: 59 clicks, 3 sales, £225.51 in sales
Pricerighthome.com: 47 clicks, 3 sales, £34.57 in sales
Rapid electronics: 31 clicks, 1 sale, £6.28 in sales
Expert Verdict: 21 clicks, 1 sale, £1.50 in sales

So around 890 clicks through to a merchant from the site generating 19 sales of just over £1400. Not exactly massive or overly impressive but again it’s a zero maintenance site, I don’t think it’s worth pumping out sites like this though, not real value so could disappear overnight unless you really worked on it to build new content & information in the way of reviews or ran alongside a blog.

1. You don’t need the same traffic numbers, if trying to appeal to local B&B’s/Guesthouses & businesses for advertising you don’t need to be aiming for 10,000 visitors per day, getting 100-300 visitors per day can suffice. That makes the return on investment and time spent much quicker and more appealing. From the few sites I have up that are around a month or so old they all get around 50 visitors per day just based on the few articles each site has. Almost time to start looking for advertising, that’s not the way it usually works.

2. Huge advertiser base – with geographical areas you can target offline and online businesses, there are often databases available giving you full contact details. Unlike a generic product site you can target 10,000 individual advertisers with only a hundred visitors per day, instead of aiming for a hundred advertisers on 10,000 visitors, if you can make the argument to advertise convincing this can mean a great income based on small numbers. For Ayr I bought a database of 1200 local businesses names & addresses to work from.

3. Repeat residual income – the holy grail, once established your less reliant on search engine listings, traffic numbers, CTR’s, Adsense or affiliate income. You invoice the local advertisers yearly and build a steady repeat income which is just the best feeling.

4. Stability – Lot’s of small steady income streams from advertisers locally gives better stability without the huge swings chasing organic serps can bring, each year you’ll lose some and gain some, overall aiming to grow a bit. One established geo site I bought currently earns around £7000 per year from local advertisers, rising around £1000 per year over the last few years.

5. Credibility & Cost of entry – If you want to work from the townname.co.uk or .com domain then it’s a pretty low barrier to entry for the best name, if you want to sell phones from phones.co.uk online that domain rocks but costs 6 figures, however if you want to run a website for Largs on Largs.co.uk that domain cost £800 is would seem to me the most suitable name which should add credibility & desirability to potential advertisers. It’s a cheap way to be the best.

6. Links – Not being product based and aiming more for info/tourism & attractions seems to be less competitive and easier to get links, there are usually lots of other town sites and many of the webmasters on them seem content to link to other info sites as long as your site looks good and does a decent job of promoting the area/town.

Initially I bought Arran, Ayr and Largs – I then remembered I own westofscotland.co.uk so decided to use that as the umbrella domain to link to them all from. I also picked up a few others all beside each other and all small but touristy kind of places on the coastline to make a little set of 7.

Minisites: I have seen a lot written and said about minisites which strikes me as sweeping statements, if you look at www.largs.co.uk that’s a minisite. Minisites are evolving, Largs cost me under £200 and for that I get a theme on Wordpress, research is done and around 7 to 10 articles are created without my input. It’s then all put together with work on descriptions, tags and keywords, after which I added some feeds for extra pages, but it pretty much ticks all the minisite boxes.

To say minisites are not worthwhile, useless or will not give you a return on your investment is like saying “websites” are not worthwhile. Websites like minisites come in a variety of flavours and if done well can be very worthwhile, but they can be crap and a waste of virtual space if done poorly.

I am negotiation for an established but tiny tourist location in Scotland with a population of 1500! the owner has had the domain/site for 12 years, it makes £3000 per year. He hasn’t updated it in years but wants it to go to a good home, I offered £2700 and was rejected no surprise, he wants £5500 which is a fair price, after showing him Ayr.co.uk & Arran.co.uk he has agreed to sell the site to me below his £5500 valuation as he wants it to go to a good home and likes what I am doing. So these new minisites have value that other’s can see.

Feeds: I know pulling in feeds doesn’t add traffic/real content but from a user experience it makes the site more appealing and complete, adding twitter, pictures, video, jobs, weather, property, events and games gives a better user experience from the off. I have tested this on people who work offline and have had good feedback. I am however looking down the line a bit to find a local estate agent to offer their feed exclusively for a fee.

Links: One thing I have noticed is asking for links for the generic place name .co.uk seems very easy with positive replies. I even emailed the local council and asked for a link on their .gov.uk which was up and live within 30 minutes. Emailing others sites who do info on the places often gets a quick “Hi Scott, that’s been done now” which is very different from dealing with product related sites, the exact match generic domain maybe helps or maybe geo sites are much nicer to work in when it comes to sharing links.

Some local hotels & resorts have link & info pages, I decided to make sure when asking for a link from them I email the PR & Marketing person, not the webmaster. Not only did I get a link from them I also got a typical reponse from the marketing person asking about the site, “is it new and how much for a homepage advert?”, much better than me asking them to advertise.

Twitter: I created a twitter account and followed quite a few people who mentioned the areas, in some cases people mention they are about to or have just been to the town. This seems a good opportunity to ask for user submitted content and I have a couple of people who have agreed to write reviews based on me contacting and posting on Twitter.

I have to say I am enjoying these sites, some are in development or live but under month old, they are starting to bring in around 50 visitors per day each. All in all a good excercise and a good set of info minisites that I feel have good potential to generate income. If someone can make £3k a year from a population of 1500 then the towns with 10k or 40k I also have should offer opportunity once established to earn their keep.

Analytics360 – This nifty little WordPress plugin lets you view your Google Analytics data in your WP dashboard (found via BlogStorm).

Introducing Rich Snippets – Google are rolling out some changes to how certain SERPS are displayed (namely reviews and people). If you have a review site, you can now provide Google with extra information to display in the snippet. (via Rishil on twitter).

Sometimes Quitting Is The Only Way to Win – Interesting read on why it may be a smart move to quit.

Think Visibility – Tickets are now on sale for this excellent mini conference and I am certain it’ll sell out. If you can get to Leeds on September 12th I’d strongly recommend it.

Bing using DMOZ Description – For those of you living under a rock Bing is Microsoft’s new(ish) search offering. This article demonstrates how the SERP snippets are extracted from DMOZ and more importantly how to ensure they are not.

Call to action experiment – Great post showing the results on how changing the wording on a call to action statement increased actions from 4.7 to 12.81%, nice (via ChrisG).

Even found a game for you to waste a few minutes with, Neon Maze.

This is just a heads up that tickets for Elite Retreat New York are now available. It’s on 1-2nd October 2009 and if you’re in the position where you can afford the $5,000 admission fee it is well worth attending.

It is aimed at entrepreneurs that are already successful and to help them take their business to the next level. I attended last year and gained heaps from the experience. Due to a packed schedule I won’t be attending this one unfortunately.

As a side note there’s is a good chance of there being one in London next year, so if you’re in the UK and not quite at that level yet make it something to aim for.

More info over on Conference Calendar (Yeah yeah I’m plugging CC).

The product that he’s been working on is called Cloud living:

Which is basically my way of saying ‘making money online.’ Cloud being the term people
are using more and more these days to reference the internet. I also believe it invokes images of freedom and that kind of thing.

Anyways, the product is:

* A 177 page eBook
* 6 Tutorial Videos
* Free Affiliate Site Template
* 8 Page eBook on How to Tweak the Theme

The eBook is pretty meaty and Glen goes into details on exactly what he has done to achieve 5 figures of revenue per month. He uses two different approaches, blogs and mini affiliate sites and the eBook is split between the two methods (there is a bit of duplication between the 2 parts). It makes an interesting read and is aimed at people just starting their online careers.

One of the features I particularly like is there are check lists of actions to take and the tools to use. Glen managed to create his business in the space of 12 months so he certainly knows what he’s doing and the examples he gives are what has worked for him. Oh and he’s only 20 years old, the young git.

The book is also jam packed full of screen shots and accompanying videos which really help spell out the exact actions that you need to take.

You can buy Cloud Living from eJunkies for $37, to be totally open this is an affiliate link. I lose trust in a lot of blogs (often very popular ones) that purely promote review products for the commissions, this is not the case here I think the book is worthwhile to people starting out and I also want to help Glen out (I ‘may’ have other sites where I do review products purely for commissions).

Congratulations Glen on a good product and I wish you the best of luck with sales.