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I invite everyone to check out www.kansascity.com A Kansas city newspaper that has been put online.  Its ranked around 4,100 by Alexa which is stunning for a Geo domain. I think this shows the true potential of GEO domains. While us regular Geo domain owners could not possibly write so much content to have a news service like that, we could potentially set up enough RSS feeds (for sports, local news, international news, breaking news, etc) for a geographical place that it would have a similar look and feel to KansasCity.com

I believe there is a huge opportunity coming up with putting news on our sites. Google News has achieved big success with their news aggregator and we can aim for small successes too. Take advantage of all of the available RSS feeds available on line and design and implement your own aggregator into your sites. You can even structure the site so it looks just like a news service, similar to KansasCity.com  Another example of a Geo domainer who is also big on news, and has apparently hired his own writing team to write the content is Shaun Pilfold and his Kelowna.com Check it out if you haven’t already.

I have decided to start selling tea online to make extra money. Lately I registered the domain SlimmingChineseTea.com to do just this. Winterwind’s office is based in Shanghai so I decided we may as well sell Chinese tea. We will build a Chinese version first, then English. I could not think of anything else to sell that was good, but I believe this will be. While it will take some time to send overseas, buyers from Europe and North America can rest assured they are getting authentic Chinese tea. The website has a focus on selling weight loss teas, but the reality is all teas can help with weight loss. Its just a healthy substitute as opposed to most other drinks, including coffee.

We will sell 9 different kinds of tea, and likely three different choices for each category. So in total we will sell about 27 different tea products. We will use JIT (just in time) inventory and order tea from the wholesalers here when we get an order. This way there is no financial investment into the venture. Orders will be sent by express the day after payment is received. I have a network of more than 60 websites now, and I intend on putting a small banner advertisement on all of them. This will help the new website very much as right off the bat it will have links coming in from more than 60 websites (unfortunately they are all on the same IP, I guess it won’t get much weight from Google) But then its not all about search ranking and PR juice, its about letting people know about your product and getting some orders.

The reason I chose this venture is because I think there’s a lot of upside with minimal time investment. Let’s see how it goes!

I’m very pleased with my latest venture of mass developing USA towns and counties in mostly .org extensions but also .com   Some of the sites have only been online for one week, and they only have a single link to them (coming from this blog – with zero page rank) and I can already find many of them on the first and second page of Google. Some are in the top five positions. The websites are extremely thin right now, just a main page with very limited content. We have an RSS feed for the town/counties news and jobs feed. Today I begin monetizing them with a horizontal banner with Google Adsense. I don’t think its the best way to monetize them in the long run but it works for now. Also I have no time to check Google Analytics for all the sites, so I prefer to use Adsense as my Analytics replacement. It will generally tell me how many impressions each page is getting and how many clicks. Adsense is nor as good as Analytics for what it does, but its a really quick way to get your basic analytics about traffic because anything with Adsense is checking it everyday anyways.

Another thing that has been talked about with these geo domains is when they are searched in Google, users are more likely to click the sites that have the keyword in the domain name rather in the subdomain or after the domain. I.E. If you are searching for information on “Haiku Pauwela” one of my towns which I own the .com  which listing would you be most likely to click in Google?

www.city-data.com/city/Haiku-Pauwela-Hawaii.html

haikupauwela.com/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku-Pauwela,_Hawaii

Well if yu are a big Wiki fan just go and click that, but I think HaikuPauwela.com would be much more interesting to click on. You know what you’re going to get from Wiki, and unpersonal but informative diatribe on the place. But if you want to knows what’s really happening in the place recently, or see some big pictures of HP, or connect with locals or simply find a hotel in the area, you know you are not going to get any of that from Wiki, so you’re better off having a go with HaikuPauwela.com   Other extensions like HaikuPauwela.net or .org have the same effect in my mind, and that’s why I intend to purchase more Geo’s in .com .net and .org extensions.

A basic layout has been finished for NorthAtlanta.org, a domain that I hand registered a week ago. I got some inspiration from Burbank.com, PalmSprings.com, Missouri.me and others. You may have seen some companies offering to mass develop your domains, up to 100 or 1000 for a certain price. The way they can do this quickly and effectively is by borrowing code from previous projects. This works extremely well for GEO domains. I know whatever place I am developing (provided the city is not super-small (ie. less than 5,000 pop) that I can use the same categories for each domain. Every city should have hotels (at least motels), restaurants, a shopping center, some form of entertainment whether its a cinema, bowling alley, horsetrack, or whatnot.

It will also have some local news. I have used the website Topix.com to get an RSS feed for the specific geographic area. If the town is too small to be found on topix.com (perhaps less than 10,000 pop) and does not have its own topix RSS feed, I simply choose the RSS feed for the county it is in and use that. At least they are receiving the local news from their county so it is still ultra relevant to the residents there. Another thing I know about each city is that a lot of people there are looking for a job. I have found a great website called SimplyHired.com which has job opening RSS feeds for each geographical area. You can see the result of both of these on NorthAtlanta.org

Now that this much is done, creating similar websites for the other 53 geo domains I bought was pretty easy. I switched the header photo for each domain to something that was from that city. I replaced the two RSS feeds I just mentioned to ones that were from the area in question. And voila! 54 different geo domains all with unique content. However, the work is far from over, as only the main page is done. But as the saying goes; “The man who moves a mountain begins by first moving a single stone” and then another and another!

Lately I’ve registered a ton of Geo domains in .com but mostly .org  You can see them on the right side of this blog under “Works in Progress (GEO)”  But since I made one design for of the geo domains (MontrealIsland.com not yet online) I decided to reuse the code again for many other geos (ie. HaikuPauwela.com) I got a lot of inspiration from Elliot Silver but was careful not to copy him too closely in things he did with sites such as Burbank.com out of respect I have for the guy.  I also borrowed something from Bruce Marler’s Missouri.me which was using the website Topix.com to create a completely automated newsfeed on the geo sites main page. This is great because it keeps your homepage endlessly having fresh content, which is something that I have heard big G likes to see.

I have a few other ideas for the sites, one is install a discussion forum in them, and perhaps a sort of Facebook style “wall” which acts as a guest book. It may even be possible to offer email addresses to people, such as xxx@haikupauwela.com  (I’m sure the local residents would like to have that) and if they email their friends with that email address its like free advertising for your site. Go.com was rolling this out a few months ago I believe. That will be hard to set up and code but not impossible. Another idea I have is offering free blog space and a domain for the locals of said area. Such as they can register for their own blog domain john.haikupauwela.com  and after logging in they are sent into a wordpress specifically for their subdomain.

Another thing people will notice about the geos I registered is how many .org there is. But I am one of the believers that .org is really suitable for geo domains as it is non-biased and has a little bit of a “townhall” community feel to it. What do you think?

Recently I have been hand-registering a bunch of neglected census designated places from the US.  As some of you may know I purchased MontrealIsland.com for a modest amount around a month ago. This site is currently under construction on our local server and should be up around 5-6 weeks later. GoDaddy.com will not let me transfer it within 60 days from the day it was transfered to me, so that is very frustrating.

In the mean time I’ve been purchasing some Census Designated Places in a .com  The population of these places range from 6000 to 30,000 according to the 2000 US census data. What I have so far as follows:

• Dewey-Humboldt.com
• EastHillMeridian.com
• EgyptLakeLeto.com
• HaikuPauwela.com
• Lanham-Seabrook.com
• MontrealIsland.com
• OxonHillGlassManor.com
• Savage-Guilford.com
• SecurityWidefield.com

A couple of these were already registered in .us  .net  or .uk

Some of you may be thinking, well, why buy the domain for a city with a population of only 6000. But I think Geo domains need to take a more long term approach. Who is to say that population will stay at 6000. Its not unheard of for the population of a city to double or triple or even more over a course of ten years. Who knows how much population these places will have in 20 years? No one knows. Haiku Pauwela is a place in Maui along the ocean, and as of the year 2000 had only 6,000 residents. Well, what if someone decides to build a five star hotel in that place. Now it is a major tourist attraction and being heavily searched in Google. If someone types Haiku Pauwela Vacations, then I just make a section on the site haikupauwela.com/vacations  and my site is definitely on the first page of Google for that keyword. My investment in this is extremely low as I’ve hand-registered the domain.

I can also control how much time I’ve invested by borrowing lots of code previous Geo sites. In my case its MontrealIsland.com which is currently under construction. Some changes will need to be made such as logo, pictures, and the written content inside, but the code of the site, the files, categories and database can all be copied over.

Some main ideas I have for each site is a discussion forum and an open blog, where anyone from the city could make a blog post to a single community blog. There’s no guarantee these will make money but one thing is for sure though, Geo development really is fun! I have made many different kinds of sites before and I can’t explain why! But its true!

While most people think of Facebook as a popular and addictive website for connecting with our friends and family from around the world, which it is, I believe it poses the biggest threat to the world’s most popular website; Google. Yahoo! is on the way down and has lost all touch with the current audience of web users. Alexa ranked Facebook is now an industry veteran but far from being stale.

To begin, I’ll show you why Facebook is doing daily damage to Google already. Facebook could have been monitized with Adsense, as PlentyofFish was, and the website would have been extremely profitable for its owners. They could sell banner and ad button space to advertisers for extremely high amounts and sold out all their inventory. Instead, they embarrassed Google by creating their own ad system which is far more visually attractive than Google’s tiny text ads. Facebook includes a thumbnail uploaded by their advertiser in each ad, and does not use an ugly watermark as Google does in their text ads. Facebook ads are more original and better looking and for sure have much lower “ad blindness” than Google’s do, which have been referred to by some as Internet litter.

For such a big website, it is interesting to see that Facebook seems to have no connection to Google whatsoever anywhere in its massive site.  Facebook now has 250 million users (I guess around 80-90%) are active users. While this is much less than the amount of users that use Google’s search around the world, Facebook is used heavily by its users. The time on the site is for certain much longer than Google and while these users are using Facebook, they are not interacting with any of Google’s products during this time (Adsense or Adwords, etc.) cannot be found in Facebook. Google makes money from thousands of sites that are not theirs through their Adsense program, which also provides free advertising for Google. However, Facebook is a blackhole for Google, devoid of anything Google inside it.

Facebook is also an annoyance to Google as it is very difficult for Google to index much of its content. User profiles as well as many groups are protected by logins and passwords, something Google’s spiders cannot have access to.

If Facebook does not start its own search, it will promote Microsoft’s Bing in its stead. Bing is a fresh new product from a company that’s not so fresh, however with a well-respected Facebook’s backing Bing can continue to gain market share. Google’s super clean style of a search engine and search listings, may begin to lose favor to a more visually attractive search engine like Bing, which will incorporate style while maintaining neatness. Google’s simple layout became a big hit 8 or so years ago when websites were incredibly messy and giving their users a sensory overload with flashing banners, hit counters, etc. But it’s not the case anymore, most websites understand to keep things clean and neat now. So Google’s site is starting to appear stale, bland, boring, and gone too long without a change. It’s like we’ve been wearing the same white t-shirt for ten years now.

Facebook has shown they are not weaker than Google in technology, perhaps just a bit less ambitious than Google, who wants to be a leader in everything. However, Facebook has the ability to take Google on in search or any other product, whether they choose to flex these muscles or not remains to be seen.

Ok, Ok! I have surrended to all the hype and picked up a GEO domain name off of DN Forums. After  reading blog posts from people like Elliot Silver, Bruce Marler, Patrick Ruddell and countless more, I am going to try to put something up on MontrealIsland.com and see what all this hype is about.

There’s a few reasons why I decided I wanted this domain when I saw it. Probably the main reason is because it looks good, it has no hyphen in it and its in a dot com. To be straight, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the other extensions. I’ve always liked .org and think .me and .tv  are really cool too and will be good in the future. I especially think .tv will be good in the future as I believe the television and computer will eventually converge into one single entity; the teleputer! I guess 5-10 years later we’ll be watching Ellen Degeneres on our laptops and checking our email in the family room television. The name we give these devices is not relevent, what they can do is. Ok losing focus…

The second reason I chose it is because its from the country I am from. I live in Shanghai now but I will be moving back to my hometown of Surrey, BC next year. Montreal is a long ways from BC, but its all Canada. If I want to visit there in the future I don’t need to get a visa, clear customs, and be forced to go back to my own country in two weeks. It’s a suburb of a major Canadian city and I’m Canadian too. While the people of Montreal are fluent in French, they are equally fluent in English, so whatever I put up there in English will be legible to those who live there. If you purchase a major city in Russia for example, like StPetersburg.com, do you think you will be able to make a successful site there? Can you read or write Russian? Do you know anything about the Russian culture? Have you ever been there before or have any plans to visit? The answer is no for me, and I guess for you too. We should have some emotional attachment to our websites, if not, I don’t think they have the ingredients for success. The competition is too fierce out there.

The third reason – I’m no expert in developing GEO domains but the population of the geographic area you are targeting must be big enough, and bigger must be better. After all these is a new focus for your target user, its the residents of that area, and to a lesser extent those who will be travelling there and looking for more information.

The Wikipedia page for this big suburb is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_Montreal As of 2006 it had 1,854,442 residents, so I guess it is around 1.9 million now. Not bad.  However we can not only consider the population, but also what percentage of that population is online. I won’t investigate it because it must be good, a suburb (or maybe I should say Island) of a major Canadian city should be up with things technologically.

The island of Montreal is the major component of the territory of the city of Montreal, along with Île Bizard, Saint Helen’s Island, Île Notre-Dame, Nuns’ Island, and some 69 smaller islands. With a population of 1,861,900 inhabitants (25% of the population of Quebec), it is by far the most populous island in Canadamost populous island of the Americas and the 37th most populated island on Earth, outranking Manhattan Island in New York City.

Seeing as it’s often refered to the “Island of Montreal” as well, I have bought islandmontreal.com to protect the investment. Unfortunately IslandofMontreal.com is taken, which if I owned could further protect myself from competition creating a similar site with an equally good domain.

What will I put there? I don’t know yet. I would like a lot of information on the city broken down into different sections for quick retrieval by the visitors. I would also like to install a phpBB messageboard and hopefully get some discussion going between the local residents. A classified section might be a great addition too, after all, they all live pretty close together

This post will cover how to monetize an RSS feed. Without getting too technical, an RSS feed is a method of delivering information live via the XML file format. If you have a wordpress blog, this XML is automatically generated so your RSS feed is ready to go as soon as your wordpress blog has been installed. Other websites such as blogger and blogspot also create your blog’s RSS feed for you automatically.

Creating a “Feedburner” Feed

What I will recommend you to do is to first convert this feed to a “Google Feedburner Feed” it doesn’t change much about the feed, but Google’s feedburner product provides many tools which will help you to manage the feed and also offers you a lot of statistics about its viewership demographics, subscriber count, etc. Knowledge is power, so convert your feeds to Feedburner.

How to do this depends on whether your Wordpress blog is self-hosted, or a part of Wordpress.org’s site. Review the following information that is specific for you:

• Creating your WordPress feed (self-hosted WordPress)
• Creating your WordPress feed (WordPress.com)

The plugin for your Wordpress blog can be downloaded here. It was created by Steve Smith and is the plugin recommended by Google as well for using with Wordpress. If you don’t know how to install Wordpress plugins, please do a search on that first as I won’t cover that in this entry. Once you have installed the plugin, go into Wordpress “Settings” then click on “Feedburner” link and input the address they ask for. Save, now that part is done.

If your RSS feed is not with Wordpress, just copy your original RSS feed URL and go directly to Feedburner and login with your Google account, and follow the simple steps of creating the feed. What this does it get you a new address from Google for that RSS feed, but once you give the Feedburner one to your readers, Feedburner will be able to track many stats about your feed which will give you a lot of clarity into the readership of your feed.

Monetizing the Feed with Adsense

If you don’t have a Google Adsense account already, register one. Even if you are not a big fan of Adsense, and prefer making money through affiliate marketing or direct marketing, there are times you will be able to use Adsense.  It’s a flexible product and quick to implement. If you have both a Feedburner and Adsense account with Google, you have an option to monetize your Feedburner feed with Adsense. Simply click on the “Monetize” link in Feedburner and you should be prompted to login into your Adsense account. You will then get redirected to your Adsense account. Click on “Adsense Setup” then “Adsense for Feeds”. Select the options how you want your Adsense ads to be displayed in the feed, at the top, on the bottom, picture or text, etc. Create a channel for each monetized RSS feed so you can track them seperately if you have multiple feeds in the future. This goes for any Google Adsense product, always create channels for each different section. (I actually create a seperate channel for each different ad code, let alone section) The reason I do this I not only want to know which pages are performing in my sites, but which ads are performing better than others on any given page.

After you have finished the above, your feed has now been monetized. But Adsense is not the only way to monetize an RSS feed. If you put some affiliate link at the bottom of each blog post for example, and it would be visible in both the blog post and RSS feed. But the advantage with Feedburner is it can make Adsense viewable only in the RSS feed, not in the blog post, where you might not want to have advertising inside.

Creating share links in your Feed

I have discovered an excellent share tool for Wordpress posts which is called “Sexy Bookmarks“  They look great, as the title might suggest, you can judge by yourself by looking at the Share buttons on this blog. However, inside an RSS feed, they appear as text links, but have clear, concise action-requesting links that offer your RSS followers the ability to share the content through various websites on the net, which can also be customized by you. Below is an example of how “Sexy bookmarks” links appeared in the RSS feed:

• Share this on Facebook
• Tweet This!
• Share this on Linkedin
• Post this to MySpace
• Subscribe to the comments for this post?
• Digg this!
• Add this to Google Bookmarks
• Share this on Technorati
• Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon
• Buzz up!
• Share this on del.icio.us
• Share this on Reddit

Not bad!

Automating your Feedburner feed to automatically tweet new posts to your Twitter account

You can do this using “Twitterfeed” Sign up an account there and follow the steps to do this. You will need to give Twitterfeed your Twitter username and password to do this, however, when you input the data it is encrypted, so Twitterfeed webmasters will not be able to know  your Twitter password, it will only be stored in their database in an encrypted fashion to allow their website access to drop your feed into your Twitter account.

Sharing your RSS further into Facebook!

Now that your RSS has been posted into your Twitter account, you can have your Twitter “tweets” also appear in your Facebook account as well. Twitter has an app in Facebook which enables your tweets to get automatically fed into your Facebook. For a detailed explanation on how to do this, please visit Mashable’s article.

I hope this entry has provided you with some helpful tips on how to promote your RSS feed, as well give yourself a chance to earn a little at the same time!