For the unitiated, Wikipedia explains ‘type-in traffic’ as

…visitors landing at a web site by entering a keyword or phrase … in the web browser’s address bar (and adding .com or in a mobile browser address bar … rather than following a hyperlink from another web page, using a browser bookmark, or a search-box search.

Given some success stories, you’d be forgiven for concluding that premium, keyword domains are worth buying for the tsunami of type-in traffic they’ll unleash on your site.

Why would the domain industry perpetuate the myth of type-in traffic? It’s one of the pillars on which domainers regularly price domains, ergo it helps inflate prices.

While I’m not saying for a moment that there’s no such thing as type-in traffic. But I am saying that the volumes we are talking about for a typical keyword domain (.com or ccTLD) are laughable.

How Many Domains Get Type-In Traffic?

1,822,377 domains are parked with Sedo, says DomainTools.com as of 8 July 2009.

Sedo’s list of ‘high traffic’ domains parked with them shows Sedo parkings top performers.

What percentage of parked domains get serious traffic? Here’s a clue: think of your favourite very small number… and then halve it.

Nope, not even close.

Sedo’s most recent stats show a mere 25 domains get traffic in double digit per day. By the time we hit domain number 26 in their rankings, we’re in single digits. See for yourself:

(Source: Sedo.com)

So 0.001% of domains parked with Sedo get double digit per day traffic. Or to put it another way, 99.999% of domains parked with Sedo don’t hit double digits daily.

It gets worse. The traffic figures in this table are not exclusively type-in traffic:

The “Hits” indicate the average number of times per day the domain’s parking page was viewed through direct browser type in, from an old external link, or from a search engine query.

Is Type-In Traffic Laser-Targeted?

For developed websites, that is often the case. In 2005, WebSideStory research found the conversion rates for different sources of traffic to be:

• Direct Navigation (Including bookmarks) - 4.23%
• Search Engines – 2.30%
• Links – 0.96%

Users typing in domains for established sites are more likely to be repeat visitors, for example, so more likely to convert to a sale.

But is the same true of type-intraffic to undeveloped domains? I’ll wager not. Let’s examine some of the domains in Sedo’s High Traffic Domains list and make an educted guess why they get traffic.

Here are the first five traffic domains I checked out:

• Teach.co.uk: Users mistyping Teach.gov.uk, the UK government teachers’ portal.
• RSS.com: Former corporate brochure site with 1000s of backlinks.
• Jewel.com: Users looking for the huge US singer-songwriters official site
• Belly.com: Users looking for the Canadian rapper’s official site
• CX.com: Users looking for ConsumerXchange at CX.org

Does this sound like the tightly-qualified traffic we hear so much from domainers? Nope, it sounds like junk traffic.

Even some domain industry insiders don’t drink the ‘highly targeted traffic’ kool aid. A senior staff member from a major domain company recently admitted to me that the golden age of domain parking was long gone. Another was recently quoted (on condition of anonymity) saying…

“The amount of traffic across the industry would be roughly 70% typo and the remainder from generic.”(Link)

My theory? Domain parking revenues are on the slide is advertisers are wising up to measuring the performance of traffic from different sources.

I love premium domain names, and there are lots of reasons to buy them – for branding, investments, avoiding Google’s sandbox etc.

But type-ins traffic? Let’s get some perspective, people.

How To Earn A Living From Domain Parking

Domains (.COMs) cost around $7 per year to register in bulk, so need to earn $0.02 per day to cover costs. Anything extra is profit.

Clickthrough rates on parking pages are high – up to 30% are reported – so let’s say you get 31 visits/month earning $0.10 per click at a 30% clickthrough.

Our hypothetical domain grosses $11.16/year parking, less our $7 registration fees = $4.16 profit/year.

You either need:

• 3275 domains getting low-level traffic (eg, earning $4.16/year profit) to meet the US Federal minimum wage (on a 40 hour/52 week basis)
• Domains in high value niches (eg, real estate) to squeeze dollars from a trickle of traffic
• Super-premium one word .COMs or country-specific domains (eg, Cameras.com)

But X Earns $1000s From Type-In Traffic…

Is it possible to make a living this way? Yes.

I have one friend who could live off the type-in traffic he gets from one domain.

Jeff Libert – AKA WebmasterWorld moderator WebWork – gave a stellar talk at PubCon once on the topic of generating high-value legal leads from generic keyword domains.

And I don’t doubt for a moment that Rick Schwartz might earns $300/day parking candy.com.

Marchex, a public company, have based their entire business model around owning premium domains with direct-navigation traffic.

But are these results typical for keyword domains? The answer is no. Joe Schmo’s two word keyword domains are going to struggle to cover their registration fees – let alone lunch! – with the money earned from type-in traffic plus domain parking.

The figures aren’t much better if we develop our hypothetical domain into a site. 31 type-ins per month = 372 visits per year. Unless you are operating in super-competitive niches you can probably buy 372 visits via AdWords for less than a keyword domain priced at 5-10x annual parking revenues.

Why Parking Revenues Are A Meaningless Metric

Parking revenue figures are regularly trotted out by domain owners to justify pricing. And yet they are utterly meaningless for retail domain buyers.

Even a premium domain like Jet.co.uk – perhaps one of the top UK travel domains for sale today? – fares little better for traffic. Let’s assume make a few assumptions:

• Jet.co.uk gets c. 8,400 visits/year on the figures published by Sedo.
• Jet.co.uk could sell for $100k in a down market (a similar 3 letter .co.uk travel domain, Fly.co.uk, sold for $175,000 to Doug Scott’s ASAP Ventures last year).
• We want to recoup an investment over five years.

Let’s crunch the numbers:

• 8400 visits a year = 42,000 visits over five years.
• $100k for the domain = $2.39 per visitor.

Bottom line: the cost of most keyword domains in most industries cannot be justified by the traffic the naked domains get.

Are Generic Domains Massively Overvalued?

I own hundreds of domains, and have just spent $XXXX on a one word generic domain a few days ago.

Keyword domains are unbeatable for many reasons: branding, user trust, search rankings (users link with the domain as the anchor text), existing backlinks, exact match ranking…

But I hear the ‘type-in traffic’ myth pedaled time and again to prop up la-la-land pricing. Domain owners peddling these lines calculate prices using two variables: ‘wishful thinking’ and ‘herd mentality’.

British and American readers will spot similiarties with the housing market, while students of economics may recall the concept of ‘manias and bubbles’ in market psychology.

Don’t get hoodwinked with the fools gold of type-in traffic. For most keyword domains, it’s all but invisible to the human eye.

Hate mail to the usual address.

PS. Buy lots of fresh domains? Check out my Firefox extension, Domain Lookup. It helps you find keyword domains while browsing the web, and integrates with 60+ top domain registrars.

Futher Reading

• More about Sedo Parking
• High Traffic Domains at Sedo
• How To Buy Domains Like a Pro
• Business 2.0: Masters of Their Domain
• Is type in traffic really all it’s cracked up to be?
• The Death of Domain Parking
• Use Direct Navigation for Affiliate Marketing
• Top 4 Lies Domainers Tell Themselves
• Domain Parking Traffic Conversion Myth

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The Dangerous Myth of Domain Type-In Traffic

We’re told that Microsoft’s adCenter paid search platform can target advertising by age, gender and location (it uses MS Passport data from Hotmail, Messenger etc).

Yet Microsoft can’t get the names of customers correct…?

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How Microsoft Keeps Customers Happy

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Reddit’s Freudian Fail

We’re running a promotion with Go Daddy over at Who Is Hosting This.

We think our hosting reviews are the best out there – and we want more of them. So we’re giving away a $10 Go Daddy gift card if you write a review that we decide to publish.

As you’d expect, there are a few firm-but-fair T+Cs, but I hope you’ll agree it’s a pretty damn exciting offer.

Here’s where to submit your review…

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Free Domain Names at Go Daddy

The book tells tales of now-legendary internet entrepreneurs, like Alex Tew (of the MillionDollarHomepage.com) and Firebox.com founder Michael Smith, as well as the disasterous IPO of Carr’s own dot.com flameout, KudoCities.

If you enjoyed Boo Hoo et al, I highly recommended it.

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Bringing Nothing to the Party

‘Ubiquitous capture’ is one of the central ideas behind cult productivity book Getting Things Done.

David Allen disciples believe the first step to productivity is to first capture all ideas and tasks.

Sounds beyond obvious, no? Yet I – and I suspect many others – forget without regular reminders.

The challenge with ubiquitous capture is to find a a tool that works for you.

A quick audit of my jeans pockets presents a motley selection of newspaper cuttings, receipts, to do lists, reminders…. you get the idea.

As of this week, that changes c/o Evernote. The software is a year old, so I might well be the last geek in the world to hear about it. But in case it has also passed you by, here’s why you need it in your arsenal of productivity tools.

Evernote is a note-taking tool designed to capture, store and organise ‘to do’ items in one place: typed messages, scribbled notes, snapshots, photos, web pages, voice recordings.

You can file all these scraps of data and information you store day-to-day in one place, as you go, and Evernote files and sorts them in a logical, highly usable way.

For example, all images are scanned by OCR to make any text searchable in your archive. So if you take a snapshot of your shopping list, Evernote will read the text and archive it.

Evernote comes in web, desktop and iPhone flavours, so there’s no excuse for ubiquitous capture not being, er, ubiquitous. In short, it seems like the ultimate ubiquitous capture tool.

See Evernote in action below.

PS. Seasoned Evernote user? I’d love to hear any tips and tricks in the comments.

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The Zen and Art of Ubiquitous Capture

I was talking about my baby steps in affiliate marketing last week.

It were nowt but fields at Affiliates4u.com, you could get 10 AdWords clicks to the dollar and still have change left over to buy a hyphenated .info domain.

[Apologies to readers outside the UK for the laboured Brit-centric gag].

Joking aside – it was tough to know where to begin.

It’s not that I couldn’t find advice online. Quite the opposite – I found more forums, blogs, ebooks, PDFs and autoresponders than I could read in a lifetime.

Plus precisely zero quality control – and there was no shortage of shonky rich quick schemes.

Bottom line: it was next-to-impossible to know which sources could be trusted.

I was chatting to a new affiliate earlier this year, and it sounds like not much has changed.

That’s why I think Affiliate Window Academy – a training day for newbies – is a great idea:

February saw the first ever AW affiliate training day take place, we received some great feedback from participants and so, as planned, the course will now run every eight weeks. We are pleased to announce that the next event will take place on Monday 20th April, at our offices in Tower Hill.

The half-day training course has been specifically created for ‘novice’ affiliates; to be eligible to attend you must have generated a minimum of £25 in commission since joining the network. The course consists of five seminar sessions introducing techniques to help you increase your earning potential through Affiliate Window.

Contact hayley [dot] short [at] affiliatewindow [dot] com to put your name down.

PS. Nickycakes’ newbie guide to affiliate marketing looks like a good starting point for affiliates outside London/UK.

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Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

Most don’t fit my portfolio of sites. Maybe they have too little traffic, are too niche, not niche enough, out of my budget etc. You get the idea. I turn down high-quality sites for a million and one reasons.

But many webmasters ask if I’ll forward details of their websites for sale to other potential buyers. So I’ve started a mailing list for interested buyers: We Buy Websites.

You can read the full story or simply signup here:

Your personal details will not be sold, rented or other misused (see the privacy policy).

NB. This mailing list is separate from my blog mailing list. You’ll need to subscribe to each individually. Of course, you can unsubscribe at any time (there’s a link in the footer of each email).

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“We Buy Websites” Open For Business

Speaking of WordPress themes, the DIY Themes affiliate program is offering a fantastic incentive until late June. Affiliates can earn a free pass to Affiliate Summit in New York for making a few sales.

Three sales gets a Gold Pass. Make 10 sales, and it’s upgraded to Platinum. I promote DIY Themes myself – making one sale/month is simple. Go sign up!

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Where to Buy Custom WordPress Themes

Liam at OnlineSales.co.uk invited me, and my vanity has overtaken my usual reluctance to post about myself. Behold – seven things you don’t know about me:

1. Billy Ocean used to be my landlord.

2. Last year I flew a dogfight over Nevada c/o the fabulous Buyagift.

3. I once met Queen drummer Roger Taylor. Encouraged by gratis champagne, I exclaimed: “Yes, Roger, I have all your albums… Greatest Hits One *and* Two.”.

Tumbleweed blew.

4. I got run over by a rusty BMW age 18. Cue: three months on crutches (I couldn’t get on with the wheelchair).

5. I had dozens of low-rent jobs before starting my own business. The nadir: getting caught sleeping in the stationery cupboard at Camden Council.

Or suggesting during a job interview that the Big Issue rebrand as ‘The Small Issue’ if money was tight… (Blame super-strong coffee and a severe case of nerves).

6. I was briefly a TV extra and once doubled for the murderer in Silent Witness.

7. My ex-office was raided by police shortly after I moved out. I’m told the ‘beauty salon’ upstairs was really a front for a high-class knocking shop…

Next Up

• Rob Berrisford
• Stephen Pavlovich
• Ciaran Norris
• Rob Powell
• Kieren Donohue
• Marcus Tandler

The Rules

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged.

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Seven Things You Don’t Know About Me

“Loa incorporates phrases and lyrics from the German techno band Scooter…”

WTF? For those unfamiliar with Scooter, think ‘2 Unlimited on a budget’.

“…which Oehlen appropriated in order to evoke atmosphere rather than to offer a specific message.”

Huh? But words have meaning! That’s what they do!

…a Spanish text referring to chinaware suggest advertising imagery and product design.

I fear we’re clutching at straws here.

You decide!

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I Don’t Know Much About Art…

Dead trees are in trouble.

Budgets are being slashed and new projects canned in print media.

So several freelance writer friends are now accepting new clients for web work.

If you need top-quality web content – ie. not merely looking to fill empty space with random words – these people are perfect.

Between them, they have written for:

Dear reader, I’m sure I don’t need to spell it out: we’re talking the cream of the crop.

If you’d like to be introduced, please contact me.

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Need Premium Web Content?

Yesterday TechCrunch broke the news that Skimlinks has secured first round investment.

Co-founder Joe Stepniewski told me about Skimlinks at PubCon Vegas. This, I thought, was a million dollar idea.

Skimlinks makes monetizing any site simple. It makes ‘normal’ links into affiliate links instantly, automatically and discreetly.

If you have a site with plenty of content but poor monetization (think forums, user-generated content sites), Skimlinks could answer a lot of your problems.

QN: Introduce Skimlinks in a few sentences.

JS: Skimlinks is a simplified affiliate marketing service for publishers. We are the ‘Adsense of affiliate marketing’, providing a solution that automates the creation of affiliate links in editorial content.

Editors continue creating content as they normally do, including links to retailer sites. When a visitor clicks on the retailer link, Skimlinks automatically converts this link into its affiliate link equivalent on-the-fly, without affecting the user experience.

We are integrated with over 7000 international merchants, and 16 affiliate networks, with more being added all the time.

QN: I know you already have some major publishers on board. Where can readers see it in use in the wild?

JS: Any of the Shiny Media sites (catwalkqueen.tv, shinyshiny.tv, techdigest.tv); Retrotogo.com, Greenmystyle.com, T3.com, g35driver.com and many more.

QN: Why would established affiliates use Skimlinks over direct relationships with networks?

JS: As every business person knows, time is money. Affiliates could spend their time signing up for networks and programs, working out the deeplinking syntax for each merchant, creating links, and updating them when merchants close or change their programs.

However, this is time they can spend on content creation, SEO, community management, site design and development, and other core parts of their business. By outsourcing their affiliate marketing management to Skimlinks, we do a better overall job than they could do, and give them more time to focus on what is fundamental to their business.

Plus, Skimlinks has unique support for non-deeplinking merchants, and keeps links in their natural state until the user clicks on them, leading to higher click-throughs.

QN: In the current climate, financial stability is a key question for affiliates. How do they know their earnings are safe with Skimlinks? Are affiliate commissions ringfenced from operating expenses etc?

JS: Yes, all incoming commissions are escrowed in a separate account, and never mixed with our operating expenses.

We have also just closed one of the only seed funding deals happening in the UK in this climate, and our backers are some of the top VCs and government funds in the country, so we have enough money to keep us protected throughout throughout this financial crisis.

QN: What is Skimlinks’ cut for providing the service?

JS: We retain 25% of whatever the affiliate networks pay us, and pay the rest to affiliates. We pay when the minimum threshold across our entire network of merchants is reached, which means affiliates could be paid sooner than if they had to wait to reach the threshold of each individual network.

Also, we can negotiate better deals with merchants and networks due to our scale. That means affiliates can sometimes the same commission through Skimlinks as if they went direct.

QN: Can you explain the setup process for Skimlinks?

JS: Setup takes minutes at most. It is a similar installation process to Google Analytics: once you are approved to Skimlinks, you can login to the service, where you can copy and past the Skimlinks code to your site’s footer. Your whole site is fully enabled straight away.

QN: Where will Skimlinks be in a year’s time?

JS: We are planning on launching a series of tools that help publishers monetise their site’s content in a simple, ethical way. We feel strongly about giving publishers the tools to help them to survive in these troubled times, and to reward them for the value they bring to both users and merchants.

Interested? Signup to Skimlinks now.

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Skimlinks: Interview With Joe Stepniewski

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Twitter Icons

SEO Toolbar offers one-click analysis of a site’s SEO efforts, from backlink profiles to traffic volumes to HTTP headers.

Watch Aaron’s video for a full introduction or install it now.

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The SEO Toolbar: A Must Have

He spoke at A4U Expo last year on SEO tweaks for WordPress and WP themes. Watch the video below, or follow his ‘SEO for Wordpress’ presentation online.

I came away with a stack of ideas. Highly recommended.

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Killer WordPress SEO Tips

Want to lose friends and alienate people in affiliate marketing?

Simply tell your peers that discount vouchers – the bedrock of monster affiliate sites, like My Voucher Codes – are BAD FOR BUSINESS.

Advertising guru David Ogilvy summed up why I think discounting to win business is a mistake:

A steady diet of price-off promotions lowers the esteem in which the consumer holds the product: can anything which is always sold at a discount be desirable?

Ogilvy’s Confessions of An Advertising Man – essential reading for any marketer – was published in 1963. But in an age when consumers can price compare any product in real time, I believe it is more true now than ever before.

People search for vouchers or cashback deals at the point of sale. Not while researching retailers: while they are a heartbeat away from entering their credit card details.

Question: Why discount goods that consumers are about to pay full whack for?

Voucher codes mean slashing margins to appease fickle, unfaithful consumers. The same shoppers who’ll likely buy elsewhere in future. Or return voucher-in-hand if they do come back.

“I cut prices harder and for longer!” sounds like a rather desperate customer acquisition strategy.

Discounting is a race to the bottom, just like cashback sites (witness GreasyPalm vs Quidco) and newspaper price wars. Sell at the market price and be done with it.

If you want proof, spend a little time reading the extraordinarily popular Money Saving Expert forums. The site can send a metric tonne of traffic, and presumably sales to match. But the clue is in the strapline: “consumer revenge”.

Skip the war stories like “the time I saved 50p on dented tinned goods”. Instead, read carefully what MSE users have to say about discount vouchers and how they use them. Here are some quotes from the first few threads I checked:

• “Good timing. Need to spend a couple of hunded pound there [at Homebase].”
• “Going [to a comedy club] for a couple of birthdays on 21/2/09 trying to find cheaper tickets….”
• “I know…I put 145.00 worth of stuff in my basket [at ASOS], expecting free delivery…not a sausage and then I tried about 4 different codes”

These don’t sound like incremental sales to me.

(Incidentally, MSE is what Arthur Daley would call a ‘nice little earner’. It’s seldom discussed – although disclosed on the site – that MSE is an affiliate and earns generous commissions on many finance products).

So why do so many retailers offer discount codes? For some, voucher codes work. But for the rest:

1. “Everyone else is doing it”. A weak justification for everything from teenage delinquicy to fascism. Next!

2. “Consumers love them”. I, too, am fond of free money. Vouchers make goods punters are about to buy anyway cost less.

3. Voucher sites earn a fortune for the industry. Big voucher sites earn millions of pounds a year in affiliate commission. The affiliate networks earn 30% override, the management agencies get their taste too. Could their loyalties possibly lie with their pocketbooks?

Retailers: Price competitively, cut out voucher affiliates who add no value and add 10-15% to your bottom line on these sales. You can thank me later.

The sorry state of credit crunch Britain (© Daily Mail) has already made some major retailers rethink their policy on voucher codes.

DRL Ltd – who operate kitchen appliance sites for the likes of Sainsburys, Boots and Next – have canned vouchers. Comet are testing a three month pause.

Expect more to follow suit.

After all this, I have a confession to make. Yes, dear reader, in spite of my distaste for voucher codes, I still promote them on a couple of sites.

The justification is simple: because my competitors do. How can I compete if rival affiliates swipe commission last second using ‘click to reveal‘ at checkout?

At the risk of sounding like the odious Richard Littlejohn: am I merely saying what everyone else is thinking? Your thoughts, please, in the comments. Hate mail to the usual address.

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Why Discount Vouchers Will Destroy Affiliate Marketing

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Domain Lookup: Feedback Wanted

It seems they’ve got a *touch* over-zealous this weekend. Today every site on Google UK was carrying the warning. Including, um, all Google sites…

StopBadware.org, the non-profit organisation that provides Google with the blacklist, is also offline.

Tech Corner and TechCrunch have more detail. Thanks to Stephen from Bony Toad for the screenshot.

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“This Site May Harm Your Computer”

Everyone knows Who’s Who: it’s “the definitive directory of everyone who’s anyone in Britain, and beyond, today”.

So imagine my surprise to receive a letter from Who’s Who. Why, they want to include me in Who’s Who of Britain’s Youngest Directors! Imagine!

Not that Who’s Who, obviously. How could one possibly make that mistake, eh?

No, this Who’s Who is published by Who’s Who Publications, not Oxford University Press.

Their strapline is “ad honorem de excellentia”. My rusty schoolboy latin understands this to translate approximately as “excellent ad revenue”.

And at £39 per copy, who can disagree? Their rigorous selection criteria include…

“[Young directors of businesses] where there has been an increase in net worth over the previous two years by at least £1,000.”

Read the letter and enjoy the full sales patter. Alas, the silver-embossed headed paper didn’t scan well.

The moral of this story? Splash out on the domains for your key products. WhosWho.co.uk is owned by Who’s Who Publications, not Oxford University Press.

Update: Some of *cough* “Britain’s business elite” are so delighted to be included in a prestigious Who’s Who Publications, er, publication that they brag about it.

Step forward…

• Labour councillor Nick Forbes
• Roger Black of Blacksmith Freight
• Perry Mills of Oaktree Office

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Which Who’s Who & Why?