DL Sale: paydaylender.co.uk (300 GBP)

[denchomsky]

Monkey's previous post is one of the best I have read on here for a while, great summary of how it was before Google got clever, and great advice for domainers old and new.

 

[woffer]

Really good advice but i still think EMD done right, not your 5 word domains that are clearly spammy but as you have given the example of CarInsurance is valuable. It is easier for a customer to remember when it comes round to renewal again if all advertising was equal and they were only looking for that product or service. I have a few EMD that do pretty well in their niches. It still tells the search engines what is likely to be on the site they are browsing, if you tick the other boxes that Monkey has already mentioned then i do believe that it still offers some small benefit. Not the benefit of old but it certainly doesnt harm a website.

Would i rather carinsurance.co.uk or some generic brandable - i would go carinsurance every time. Does what it says on the tin, just dont mess it up with low value content, low value links and focus on the customer

 

[woffer]

We are domainers not end users and with all the updates and the fact that only websites with quality are surviving it will go full circle

 

[Retired_Member38]

I think the message that Monkey is giving (the way I read it) is evolve or die.

Yup, if I had to condense my post down into a few words it would be 'evolve or die'

There's still good money to be made buying and selling domains but thin affiliates are dead and along with them a big chunk of the domain market.

Absolutely. Its a shame that some portfolio owners are continuing to rip off their customers rather than just get off that sinking ship and drop the worthless ones though.

I still agree with some of what Edwin has written in the past with regard to using exact match domains for an Adwords campaign but building a business on an exact match domain makes no sense to me, it never has.

Sure it can make sense for PPC but the domain needs to be at least semi decent. You can't run ppc campaigns on every single 1,000 search a month 5 word EMD phrase you can pick up - thats lunacy. Moreso when the sellers asking for 4 figures for it You'd need 100's of years to make your time/money back on that, if at all.

Like Monkey, I've essentially blown tens of thousands of Pounds.

I wouldn't even say I've blown 10's of thousands as overall I'm up significantly on the whole 'EMD abuse' carry on. It just didn't feel that way when you wake up one day to see that you've lost several hundred thousand pounds overnight, thankfully the razor blades were inaccessible when I realised :lol: I lost a quarter million or so on car insurance emd (org.uk) but then i made 7 figures with a 10 grand purchase (payday loans, same extension) so you do need to look at the bigger picture. If i couldn't, I'd have killed myself several times over I think :lol:

 

[Retired_Member38]

That'd be me then



You're lucky. My business model was buying EMD's and selling them to you thin affiliate mugs but greed/delusion and Google have left me with egg all over my face

Still, onwards and upwards!

Look at the state of this :

https://web.archive.org/web/20111005002346/http://www.paydayloans.org.uk/

This could have been built in an hour or two, with zero cost. £10k for the domain, probably £1000 for links and you were in the money. Anything else taken to improve it (i.e. more and more links, better designs) was then coming out of profit.

£11k should have been easily doable for anyone here - it genuinely was an 'impossible to lose' scenario at that time. Take out a couple of credit cards, use some equity from your home, sell your car temporarily, borrow from family. There isn't really any excuse for people who could see what was happening at the time, not to get involved.

Its not even like I was always buying from people who were clueless - I bought several payday loans related domains from people who are members here, so people who should have known better were offloading them for pennies on the dollar really.

I appreciate some people hate payday loans and don't want to work in the industry, but the above is just a tactic. Anyone here could have applied it to any niche they wanted, with the same ranking results.

 

[Retired_Member38]

I was thinking more for end users rather than affiliates. Using Edwin's example of electric bikes, I'd never call my business Electric Bikes or use ElectricBikes.uk as my primary domain but I can see the value and benefits of buying the domain for an Adwords campaign that used ElectricBikes.uk to 301 to my brand domain.

Thats the thing though - that line of thought is just not good for you in 2014. You need to try and be seen as a brand yourself. If you go register

electricbikes.uk
buyelectricbikes.co.uk
electricpoweredbike.uk
etc etc etc

Then you're missing out on chances for your brand name to be shown in ads. Even when they aren't clicking it, they're seeing it and its registering in their brain. All of this helps you... maybe it'll encourage them to click your ads later, or maybe they'll come visit your site directly.

If your business is selling electric bikes and nothing else than electricbikes.uk could be a great domain to build your business on, it does what it says on the tin after all. But to 301 it elsewhere is just stupidity at this point in time.

But a product domain like 10yearmortgagesonline or whatever is just ridiculous. Nobody would possibly sell that product only, they'd be a mortgage broker and they'd offer every type of mortgage. That domain is absolutely worthless. Anyone trying to sell it for over a grand, is a wanker.


Carinsurance is obviously far higher end but it kinda suffers the same fate. I don't believe there is a single major insurer who only offers car insurance. So its a single product they offer.... making it far more interesting to them to send any ppc clicks / seo budget to theirbrand.com/car-insurance. They can't get any value out of spending half a million quid on a domain name for one product, and harming their own brand building efforts in the process. Its just stupidity.

 

[bensd]

Thats the thing though - that line of thought is just not good for you in 2014. You need to try and be seen as a brand yourself. If you go register

electricbikes.uk
buyelectricbikes.co.uk
electricpoweredbike.uk
etc etc etc

Then you're missing out on chances for your brand name to be shown in ads. Even when they aren't clicking it, they're seeing it and its registering in their brain. All of this helps you... maybe it'll encourage them to click your ads later, or maybe they'll come visit your site directly.

If your business is selling electric bikes and nothing else than electricbikes.uk could be a great domain to build your business on, it does what it says on the tin after all. But to 301 it elsewhere is just stupidity at this point in time.

But a product domain like 10yearmortgagesonline or whatever is just ridiculous. Nobody would possibly sell that product only, they'd be a mortgage broker and they'd offer every type of mortgage. That domain is absolutely worthless. Anyone trying to sell it for over a grand, is a wanker.


Carinsurance is obviously far higher end but it kinda suffers the same fate. I don't believe there is a single major insurer who only offers car insurance. So its a single product they offer.... making it far more interesting to them to send any ppc clicks / seo budget to theirbrand.com/car-insurance. They can't get any value out of spending half a million quid on a domain name for one product, and harming their own brand building efforts in the process. Its just stupidity.

So if you had the choice would you purchase an EMD like electricbikes/co/uk or reg monkeybikes/co/uk and turn into a brand?

 

[Murray]

Have you ever seen this interview Monkey and if so what did you think?

http://www.domainsherpa.com/shaun-mcgowan-carloans-interview/

a change in business and domain name from brandable Beep.com.au to exact-match CarLoans.com.au produced a 66 percent increase in sales turnover, driving their business from a $60 million company to $100 million in only five months.

It's fairly recent, November 11, 2013

 

[bu06nne]

So if you had the choice would you purchase an EMD like electricbikes/co/uk or reg monkeybikes/co/uk and turn into a brand?

From what I have experienced, there is still some weight given to EMDs provided they aren't ludicrous in terms of length i.e 4+ words.

With regards to Google looking at brand indicators - how do they differentiate between a brand search and a 'normal' search. For example, would they count someone typing in 'payday uk' as a 'normal' or brand search for this site paydayuk.co.uk ?

 

[Retired_Member42]

If the idea of an Adwords campaign is to get as many quality clicks as possible and if having an EMD tempts the customer to click your ad over your competitors (that's what Edwin's research suggested) then surely it's worth using the EMD over the brand?

To me you have all the opportunity to create brand awareness once you've got them to your site.

AdWords advertisers target lots of keywords to drive traffic to their site. Often hundreds. To utilise EMD's in this fashion you'd need to setup campaigns for each keyword, build 100's of landing/squeeze pages and spend your entire day managing each campaign individually. The £ you'd gain in quality scoring because of the EMD would be lost and then some because of the bounce rate of your lander.

If you're only selling a highly specific product and bidding on one keyword then sure, the EMD might save you a few £ here and there on the click price. Will it save enough to justify the domain purchase? Who knows?

People don't sell one product, they sell lots of related products.

 

[Retired_Member42]

I was generalising and fact is, I have no experience of managing an Adwords campaign so I can't really argue with what you're saying. I was seeing it through the eyes of Edwin's research which made sense but perhaps like you say it has limited scope?

Yes, limited scope is how I'd describe it. The fact is, Edwin is correct. If you're promoting a product called "Keyword One" via AdWords and this is the ONLY thing you're selling then sure, putting your site on KeywordOne.co.uk will increase your quality score meaning the cost per click on that specific keyword would be cheaper. But who does this? Even the highly specific "Electric Bike" niche has 100+ keywords. Nobody bids on one keyword.

 

[boxfish]

Why is that? If I sell Electric Bikes, why would I want to bid on 100 possible search terms rather than just "Electric Bikes" or "Electric Cycles"? As a layman that sounds like a recipe to blow a whole heap of money?

Quite the opposite.

I don't bid on my 'main keyword' as it is too broad.

I'd rather bid on stuff like

electric bike for commuting
three speed electric bike
21" frame electric bike
manufacturer electric bike
model name electric bike

as they convert a lot better and you can send them to a more specific landing page.

The best converting phrases are usually 3+ words long as they are more specific, ergo, the page you send them to will be more tailored to their search.

 

[Retired_Member42]

Why is that? If I sell Electric Bikes, why would I want to bid on 100 possible search terms rather than just "Electric Bikes" or "Electric Cycles"? As a layman that sounds like a recipe to blow a whole heap of money?

When it comes to keyword bidding, sometimes the biggest / most searched / category defining keywords are not the best keywords to target. Take something like laptops. Sure, it's got lots of people searching for it but bidding on that with so much competition and such a high click price would leave you spending thousands and losing a large chunk of your audience to people who are just browsing, looking for laptops without intending to buy. On the other hand, if you were targeting long tail phrases such as "buy a laptop" or "buy a macbook pro" etc then your chance of sale is much higher than just paying for anyone and everyone who searches for laptops.

 

[Retired_Member38]

Thanks for the replies. That's interesting and makes sense but does it not end up with everyone neglecting the main keyword in favour of the long tail phrases, pushing up the click rate on the latter?

No because there will always be people who fall into one (or more) of the following categories

• Large brands willing to lose money to buy market share
• People who're too stupid to realise they're losing money
• People who are using free adwords vouchers
• People who hired a PPC agency who are paid a % of the total spend (incentive to blow money on things that don't neccesarily make financial sense for the client)
• People who don't understand the concept of broad and exact match
• People who're desperate to make more sales to hit new affiliate commission bands and can technically lose money on these ones to make more overall

The main phrase is always going to be more expensive, and like others are saying it often won't convert as well too.

 

[Retired_Member38]

So if you had the choice would you purchase an EMD like electricbikes/co/uk or reg monkeybikes/co/uk and turn into a brand?

It would depend, I've done zero keyword or ranking search in the niche. Electricbikes isn't a bad one if you're 100% sure you're only going to sell electric bikes, and never expand out of that in the future.

electricbikes.uk = can only sell electric bikes
monkeybikes.uk = can sell a broader range of bikes, pedal bikes, motorbikes, etc
monkey.uk = can sell anything you like. expand to golf carts or Smart cars if you want.

 

[Retired_Member38]

Have you ever seen this interview Monkey and if so what did you think?

http://www.domainsherpa.com/shaun-mcgowan-carloans-interview/



It's fairly recent, November 11, 2013

No real thoughts on it, as I'm not going to watch an hour long interview :lol:

I still think true category killer emd's have a great value - what I'm saying is an utter scam today is the 4 and 5 word turds being flung around.

There is a world of difference between swapping your actual site to a paydayloans.co.uk or carloans.com.au, and suggesting someone set up 100's of landers on every single shit emd they can get their hands on.

 

[boxfish]

Thanks for the replies. That's interesting and makes sense but does it not end up with everyone neglecting the main keyword in favour of the long tail phrases, pushing up the click rate on the latter?

I think while you have website owners who are obsessed with 'traffic' and PPC companies who charge a percentage of ad spend (crazy model) you will always get people bidding on the big stuff.

There are so many variables in PPC (keywords/ad title/ad copy/destination url/landing page) that two companies could both be paying £1 for a click, one may only average out to bring back in 80p per click (unprofitable) while the other may bring back £1.20 (profitable). The price will only get pushed up when there are an abundance of profitable campaigns.

I think a lot of PPC campaigns either break even or lose money but the owner classes it as 'marketing' and a necessary expense (when really it's just poor setup and management). I think that is why PPC is seen as 'paying' for advertising, whereas when properly set up it shouldn't really cost anything as you will always make your money back plus more.

*What Monkey said earlier - I started typing then got stuck on the phone.

 

[domainseller200]

In the past, it was easy to buy an EMD on a non premium domain extension, throw a quick site on it and then buy links like they were going out of fashion and easily rank. The quality of links didn't even matter - blogroll links, homepage links, footer links, links on dropped domains, links on off topic sites. All you needed was an account on a few spammy webmaster forums and you were sorted.

Back then, Google wasn't placing any real weight on preferring 'brands' in their rankings. They were also not really penalising people for crappy linking. Sure you'd see some penalties, but they were few and far between. They also weren't using any user metrics in their ranking algorithms. Or if they were it was so insignificant that they might as well not have bothered. And the exact match benefit was massive. Buying links was extremely simple and very very easy to scale up with a budget.... all of these things combined meant that it was now childs play to get a site ranking for a phrase of your choice. You just needed to get your hands on the exact match domain. Or rather 'an' exact match domain, you certainly didn't need the .com or the .co.uk. Picking up the .org.uk or .net for buttons worked equally well.

If you had the budget, it would have been relatively simple for 1 or 2 people to rank 20 different EMD's in completely different niches, all unrelated and chosen solely because they were high traffic and/or well paying affiliate programs. Anyone who's been online and in this biz between say 2009 - 2012 and that didn't have 100's of thousands of pounds in affiliate earnings passing through their hands is either an idiot, or wasn't taking it seriously at all. It was just so easy to rank one site, profit, roll the proceeds up into a slightly better emd, and rinse and repeat. You literally couldn't fail with an exact match domain and a link buying budget.

Today, that business model is completely finished. The days of 1 bloke sitting in his pants at home alone and ranking in 20 different high value niches is long gone, and its never coming back. All of the things like Branding, EMD benefit being slaughtered, WMT penalties flying all over the place, etc simply destroyed the business model of ranking crap sites on EMD's. Panda and Penguin were the final nails in the coffin of the sloppy, no value add web master.

I was as guilty as anyone else of abusing all of the above, probably more so. But what can you do... if you'd built a high quality site in 2011 and tried to win on content quality alone you'd have bankrupted yourself as all your rankings and income would have been taken by the 16 year old living down the street, with a site built on a free WP template, content written by an Indian, and giving himself RSI clicking stuff in his text link ads account.

So now, the game has moved on.

If google wants to rank brands, then the obvious answer is become a brand. I'm not suggesting you need to become a multi million pound entity, but you do need to at least be generating type in traffic, brand searches, loyal users, etc.

If Google want to penalise people for shit links, then the obvious answer is to stop building them and build quality links instead. The guy who wanted to build a great site in 2011 but kept getting overtaken by spammers, actually has a chance to thrive today.

If Google want to penalise people for building 100's or 1000's of auto generated spam pages, then the obvious answer is stop doing it. In the past there was money to be made spamming up loads of pages with 'xxxx voucher codes' from the one website. Now if you don't have the link equity you're extremely unlikely to pull that off. You're going to get wiped out very quickly. Today, if an individual page isn't adding much/anything of value then you need to do one of two things... add value or delete the page.

Right now, I think the only real way to succeed is to build a small number (maybe even 1) of high quality sites that have a legitimate use to end users. Work on generating very good user metrics. Does your site offer any real reason for users to repeatedly come back? If not, fix that asap. You need to look at stuff like offline advertising, which can inflate the number of people searching for your brand or typing in your url. Run competitions, give stuff away, work on link baits, etc.

Obviously none of the above is cheap, easy or quick. I think a lot of people who made money in years past are now going to be forced out of the game as they don’t have the skills or the resources to compete any more. It seems some people don’t want to evolve though. Anyone trying to develop a 5 word product name EMD today is retarded. Anyone trying to sell a 5 word product name EMD to some other sucker for 4 figures is bordering on being a scammer. They’re basically doing the online equivalent of charging an old lady 20 grand to clean her gutters. Yes, technically the victim agreed to the sale but they’ve been fucked in the ass because the seller knows full well the ‘customer’ is going to lose their shirt on the deal… they’re just having them over to line their own pockets. You only need to scan down the for sale sub forums in Acorn and you can see dozens that are completely undevelopable as you simply can’t do so without losing a pile of cash in the proceeds. The sellers all know this but they’re just choosing to dump then on someone else.

Look at the amount of great domains that could have been developed years ago and weren’t. Carinsurance.co.uk is a great example… the owners greed got in the way and now he’s stuck with a big massive turd that he can do nothing with. If an end user wanted it they’d have bought it years ago. They obviously didn’t, and won’t. Yet it can’t be ranked as an affiliate now. If it had been developed in 2007 I reckon the owner would have made 10 million or more in affiliate commissions. The site would have been penalised last year, but he’d have made so much more money than he could ever have sold the domain for, that that wouldn’t actually matter. Now its in a weird situation of no end users want it, and no affiliates can develop it. Its effectively worthless, unless you consider the ponzi / greater fool aspect of flipping it on to some other mug. The transition period of emd’s no longer working like they did was particularly painful for me, I lost a quarter million quid in one single transaction because of that.

Anyway I’ve sort of strayed from the original question :lol: Feel free to ask any questions but if they’re like the one above of what I’m working on now, I’m going to pass on those.

This is the best and most refreshing post I have read ANYWHERE since October 2012 (I actually blogged something similar to what Monkey said above in April 2012 too http://www.fwitter.co.uk/why-i-think-the-google-penguin-update-is-a-good-thing/).

The game has changed so much over the past couple of years and whilst I am still involved online, it is in a totally different way to how I was two years ago and I am still evolving now.

Evolve or die is exactly it. Read Monkey's post, bookmark it, then read it again and again, because as harsh as it may be for some to admit - it is reality.

 

[pugyrob]

In the past, it was easy to buy an EMD on a non premium domain extension, throw a quick site on it and then buy links like they were going out of fashion and easily rank. The quality of links didn't even matter - blogroll links, homepage links, footer links, links on dropped domains, links on off topic sites. All you needed was an account on a few spammy webmaster forums and you were sorted.

Back then, Google wasn't placing any real weight on preferring 'brands' in their rankings. They were also not really penalising people for crappy linking. Sure you'd see some penalties, but they were few and far between. They also weren't using any user metrics in their ranking algorithms. Or if they were it was so insignificant that they might as well not have bothered. And the exact match benefit was massive. Buying links was extremely simple and very very easy to scale up with a budget.... all of these things combined meant that it was now childs play to get a site ranking for a phrase of your choice. You just needed to get your hands on the exact match domain. Or rather 'an' exact match domain, you certainly didn't need the .com or the .co.uk. Picking up the .org.uk or .net for buttons worked equally well.

If you had the budget, it would have been relatively simple for 1 or 2 people to rank 20 different EMD's in completely different niches, all unrelated and chosen solely because they were high traffic and/or well paying affiliate programs. Anyone who's been online and in this biz between say 2009 - 2012 and that didn't have 100's of thousands of pounds in affiliate earnings passing through their hands is either an idiot, or wasn't taking it seriously at all. It was just so easy to rank one site, profit, roll the proceeds up into a slightly better emd, and rinse and repeat. You literally couldn't fail with an exact match domain and a link buying budget.

Today, that business model is completely finished. The days of 1 bloke sitting in his pants at home alone and ranking in 20 different high value niches is long gone, and its never coming back. All of the things like Branding, EMD benefit being slaughtered, WMT penalties flying all over the place, etc simply destroyed the business model of ranking crap sites on EMD's. Panda and Penguin were the final nails in the coffin of the sloppy, no value add web master.

I was as guilty as anyone else of abusing all of the above, probably more so. But what can you do... if you'd built a high quality site in 2011 and tried to win on content quality alone you'd have bankrupted yourself as all your rankings and income would have been taken by the 16 year old living down the street, with a site built on a free WP template, content written by an Indian, and giving himself RSI clicking stuff in his text link ads account.

So now, the game has moved on.

If google wants to rank brands, then the obvious answer is become a brand. I'm not suggesting you need to become a multi million pound entity, but you do need to at least be generating type in traffic, brand searches, loyal users, etc.

If Google want to penalise people for shit links, then the obvious answer is to stop building them and build quality links instead. The guy who wanted to build a great site in 2011 but kept getting overtaken by spammers, actually has a chance to thrive today.

If Google want to penalise people for building 100's or 1000's of auto generated spam pages, then the obvious answer is stop doing it. In the past there was money to be made spamming up loads of pages with 'xxxx voucher codes' from the one website. Now if you don't have the link equity you're extremely unlikely to pull that off. You're going to get wiped out very quickly. Today, if an individual page isn't adding much/anything of value then you need to do one of two things... add value or delete the page.

Right now, I think the only real way to succeed is to build a small number (maybe even 1) of high quality sites that have a legitimate use to end users. Work on generating very good user metrics. Does your site offer any real reason for users to repeatedly come back? If not, fix that asap. You need to look at stuff like offline advertising, which can inflate the number of people searching for your brand or typing in your url. Run competitions, give stuff away, work on link baits, etc.

Obviously none of the above is cheap, easy or quick. I think a lot of people who made money in years past are now going to be forced out of the game as they don’t have the skills or the resources to compete any more. It seems some people don’t want to evolve though. Anyone trying to develop a 5 word product name EMD today is retarded. Anyone trying to sell a 5 word product name EMD to some other sucker for 4 figures is bordering on being a scammer. They’re basically doing the online equivalent of charging an old lady 20 grand to clean her gutters. Yes, technically the victim agreed to the sale but they’ve been fucked in the ass because the seller knows full well the ‘customer’ is going to lose their shirt on the deal… they’re just having them over to line their own pockets. You only need to scan down the for sale sub forums in Acorn and you can see dozens that are completely undevelopable as you simply can’t do so without losing a pile of cash in the proceeds. The sellers all know this but they’re just choosing to dump then on someone else.

Look at the amount of great domains that could have been developed years ago and weren’t. Carinsurance.co.uk is a great example… the owners greed got in the way and now he’s stuck with a big massive turd that he can do nothing with. If an end user wanted it they’d have bought it years ago. They obviously didn’t, and won’t. Yet it can’t be ranked as an affiliate now. If it had been developed in 2007 I reckon the owner would have made 10 million or more in affiliate commissions. The site would have been penalised last year, but he’d have made so much more money than he could ever have sold the domain for, that that wouldn’t actually matter. Now its in a weird situation of no end users want it, and no affiliates can develop it. Its effectively worthless, unless you consider the ponzi / greater fool aspect of flipping it on to some other mug. The transition period of emd’s no longer working like they did was particularly painful for me, I lost a quarter million quid in one single transaction because of that.

Anyway I’ve sort of strayed from the original question :lol: Feel free to ask any questions but if they’re like the one above of what I’m working on now, I’m going to pass on those.

Unfortunately true for most big niches, there are still opportunities but they take a lot longer to come to fruition and you need the budget to make do in the meantime until they do and the faith to see them through.

 

[retired_member34]

Best thread I have read in ages. It should be made a sticky for all those tempted to buy an EMD, and for all those domain investors who still think there is value in their keyword domains.

Strangely I started out, in 2003, with creating niche online "brands" (they really don't need to be "household names" to be a brand in a niche). It's only after being hammered by crappy sites that I discovered Acorn, drank some of the kool aid, and joined the game.

Overall I am much happier Google has ended it.