Isn't a mini site better than parking?

[mistermix]

I'm not a domainer, i'm an end user.

From my point of view if I'm buying a domain it would be easier for me to see its potential if it had a mini site with 5-10 pages compared to a holding page or parking page.

That way it would get indexed by goog and if its an exact match domain, it would potentially have a good ranking.

This will create more interest in the domain and a possible higher sale price for you sellers.

But I almost always see domains parked, totally blank or with a single page with no keyword related content.

Why don't domainers put up minisites?

 

[DomainManagement]

this one does

and this one will for you also


regards steve

 

[Bailey]

1. Of course it's better than parking - But, time is also money. To me thats akin to asking why don't estate agents build houses. Skills base ! expertise ! business model - I could go on and on.

2. Easier to see it's potential with a mini-site ? - And I thought website builders had imagination, Better nothing than something that looks like it was thrown together by an amateur.


If your argument is why dosen't every domain holder learn webdesign - Yep valid point, help to get some perspective etc - but thats back to Estate agents building houses argument -

 

[Sussexite]

Maybe a better estate agent related analogy is trying to sell

• a real live house; v
• selling a house off plan from a brochure?

 

[crabfoot]

2. Easier to see it's potential with a mini-site ? - And I thought website builders had imagination, Better nothing than something that looks like it was thrown together by an amateur.

I have some rubbish sites that were thrown together by an amateur (me). They were badly chosen domain names in the first place. The age on them gives them some authority with Gargl, and although they make pennies and get visited once a month, they provide me with links that are valuable.

Can't get that from a standard "parked site", but my domain host provides rudimentary DIY parking with a 3 page minisite. Unfortunately I can't get Adsense to run on there, the templates obstruct it somehow ... any clues as to why would be welcomed. Some ads run, some don't, and the problem is not as simple as "Java is obstructed".

 

[mistermix]

But these days you don't need to know web design to put up a simple, elegant looking mini site.

The estate agents analogy isn't really valid.

You can simply pay a freelance web designer to create a css template from around £50-£100. You will then own that design and can simply upload it to whichever domains you'd like a mini site for. Articles can be written from £2 upwards too.

There isn't a huge cost involved or a huge amount of skill needed.

If you own the domain bluewidgets.co.uk and manage to get it ranking position 60 or better on google.co.uk then it certainly will get noticed by businesses competing for "blue widgets". Surely this will get the domain noticed by the right people.


Obviously the mini site will show that the domain is for sale by the owner etc.

I can understand why its not possible for a whole portfolio but surely for your best domains its much better than parking.

 

[mistermix]

Actually, does anyone here fancy giving it a try? Just to see what's possible etc. I'd be happy to help.

 

[Frog]

I have never understood why more domainers don't put sites up and point a few links at them.

As an end user rather than a domainer, I would rather buy a domain that had a small, indexed and aged site on it every single time, rather than a parked domain.

At times they can be absolute nightmare to rank if they've been parked. It seems completely random. debtmanagementplan.org ranks page 2 for "debt management plan" right now with a little site on it, but since I bought it parked it took me months to get it even in the top 100.

When I bought that domain, I'd happily have paid more for a similar domain with site on it. For example Dougs Payday-loans.co.uk wasn't worth the price I paid under normal circumstances, but small site, age, partially ranking = worth over paying as it shaves months off the time till profit.

It would be extremely easy and cheap to build lots of your domains out with small informational blogs... and if someone like me is sniffing about looking to buy, that might end up being the difference of a sale or not.

 

[johnnyboy]

You have to remember that some domainers have hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of domains. It would be impractical and almost impossible to have mini-sites on every single domain they own, either because or lack of time, skill or cash required to get a site up. Those that do develop their domains will be working on their best ones a handful at a time. So for some, it isn't either easy or cheap to put something up on many of their domains.

 

[Frog]

You have to remember that some domainers have hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of domains. It would be impractical and almost impossible to have mini-sites on every single domain they own, either because or lack of time, skill or cash required to get a site up. Those that do develop their domains will be working on their best ones a handful at a time. So for some, it isn't either easy or cheap to put something up on many of their domains.

I honestly can't see how it won't be easy or cheap for everyone. I realise people buying £20 .org.uk's can't put sites on a domain, but for a domain you expect to sell for £1000 or more its crazy not to put something on it at all.

I think anyone not taking that approach, is seriously underestimating what customers are looking for when they want to buy to develop. Sure, not having a site won't hinder you selling to another domainer, but its the end users who are willing to pay more money.

You could throw up hundreds of minisites in a week at £30 a go, with nothing more than a philipinno/indian worker and a textbroker account. Doesn't take any real money, time or skill at all.

 

[johnnyboy]

I agree about developing the best domains to give it better sales potential but throwing up hundreds of mini-sites at £30 a pop, not everyone is made of money. You could be talking about £6k for 200 mini-sites.

 

[Frog]

I agree about developing the best domains to give it better sales potential but throwing up hundreds of mini-sites at £30 a pop, not everyone is made of money. You could be talking about £6k for 200 mini-sites.

Sure but the aim would be for it generate more cash over all. payday-loans.co.uk = worth a couple of thousand less if it hadn't had a £20 site on it. Debtmanagementplan.org I paid a couple of thousand for, I'd have paid 5 if it had a garbage site on it and ranked in the top 100.

Surely any domains that would be worth mid 4 figures should have small sites on them to appeal to end users? When you compare the cost of developing a small site, against the potential difference in payoff (and more than likely the difference if someone like me buys at all), it looks an easy choice to me. I'd definitely be taking that approach if I was a domainer.

 

[johnnyboy]

I think we're just going to go round in circles with this debate.

 

[Domainate]

Sure but the aim would be for it generate more cash over all. payday-loans.co.uk = worth a couple of thousand less if it hadn't had a £20 site on it. Debtmanagementplan.org I paid a couple of thousand for, I'd have paid 5 if it had a garbage site on it and ranked in the top 100.

Surely any domains that would be worth mid 4 figures should have small sites on them to appeal to end users? When you compare the cost of developing a small site, against the potential difference in payoff (and more than likely the difference if someone like me buys at all), it looks an easy choice to me. I'd definitely be taking that approach if I was a domainer.

There are the 2 valid sides of the debate - the "thousands of domains" owner based on cost of minisite, and the "quality name" owner based on relatively low cost for potentially high returns and increased value. The real debate is the "thousands of quality domains" owner. I think ultimately, if you don't have high quality domains, you're having to work more for a steady stream of income. If you had thousands of quality names (undeniably $x,xxx+ valued domains), then you probably DON'T need to work as hard for the income and can probably afford to spend time and/or money putting up minisites on them.

The only concern I have with minisites is that I think Google is getting a little wiser about them and realizing what people are doing...slapping up a bunch of more or less not-that-unique content with affiliate offers, and while many of these minisites are unique enough, looking at the grand picture, minisites are hardly unique and more often than not hardly helpful to the visitor. So again, Google goes to its trusty ranking method of looking at links.

So then it's not just putting up minisites but getting links to the site to increase value, and that's what I think puts a lot of people off to minisites. Ultimately, if you're going to have to do SEO to get any meaningful traffic to it, you might as well do a serious development and work at building an asset with a strong steady source of income. The money cost and work involved has to bring returns or it's wasted money/time which could have been spent building the portfolio more.

All that said, I'm pretty sure some of my buyers are buying names primarily to put minisites on them, but I don't know if they go beyond that and do SEO as well. I'm assuming so based on the names they get from me - many are high search terms and while exact match domains can easily kill the competition in some cases, for higher search I'd imagine some SEO is necessary.

 

[mistermix]

I agree about developing the best domains to give it better sales potential but throwing up hundreds of mini-sites at £30 a pop, not everyone is made of money. You could be talking about £6k for 200 mini-sites.

Can't see where you got £30 from. The only expense is getting content written + maybe paying someone to do the technical stuff of uploading the site.

The money barrier is really not an issue - the issue is that you may not have the knowledge of how to get it done for the lowest possible cost. Paying £6000 to create 200 mini-sites would be a big mistake.

There are the 2 valid sides of the debate - the "thousands of domains" owner based on cost of minisite, and the "quality name" owner based on relatively low cost for potentially high returns and increased value. The real debate is the "thousands of quality domains" owner. I think ultimately, if you don't have high quality domains, you're having to work more for a steady stream of income. If you had thousands of quality names (undeniably $x,xxx+ valued domains), then you probably DON'T need to work as hard for the income and can probably afford to spend time and/or money putting up minisites on them.

The only concern I have with minisites is that I think Google is getting a little wiser about them and realizing what people are doing...slapping up a bunch of more or less not-that-unique content with affiliate offers, and while many of these minisites are unique enough, looking at the grand picture, minisites are hardly unique and more often than not hardly helpful to the visitor. So again, Google goes to its trusty ranking method of looking at links.

So then it's not just putting up minisites but getting links to the site to increase value, and that's what I think puts a lot of people off to minisites. Ultimately, if you're going to have to do SEO to get any meaningful traffic to it, you might as well do a serious development and work at building an asset with a strong steady source of income. The money cost and work involved has to bring returns or it's wasted money/time which could have been spent building the portfolio more.

All that said, I'm pretty sure some of my buyers are buying names primarily to put minisites on them, but I don't know if they go beyond that and do SEO as well. I'm assuming so based on the names they get from me - many are high search terms and while exact match domains can easily kill the competition in some cases, for higher search I'd imagine some SEO is necessary.

Yes I agree that it depends on the domainers portfolio. But I also think most domainer are greatly overestimating the cost of creating simple 5 page websites in bulk.

As for seo, it will simply be a few social bookmarks to get the site indexed. Just to make it an improvement compared to have parked page or blank site.

I think there is a strong case for trying it for at least a few domains, to test the potential.

 

[monaghan]

As for seo, it will simply be a few social bookmarks to get the site indexed.

Explain social bookmarks for those of us who don't get facebook or other social networks. What do we need to do to use it for SEO?

 

[Bailey]

Hopefully I'm not detracting from this debate, and I'll be the first to admit that some of this discussion has helped me to see the potential of minisites, whereas I hadn't even considered it before

But In following a lot of the development, seo and page rank discussions I am surpised that Google and others haven't taken firmer steps as they did with 'domain parking' Sure I agree you are adding some value both to the domain name and the casual visitor that may actually get to what their looking for. BUT I have two major questions that have been sitting at the back of my mind ever since I became active at Acorn.

1. How would/could Google impliment a mechanism to give preferencial placement to sites with either substantial content or represent a bona-fide Business or entity ?

2. How would this effect the current "minisite PPC model" that after all is really only an expansion of the original static parking model. (I accept this is not the case in every instance )

My final and have to say for me 'A mind blowing revelation' was a members admission of not only paying for content and links but having pre-ordered and prepaid for '600 Blog entries' to his newly built site.

Now don't get me wrong I am as much impressed as anything in the audacity of this - what may be standard practice model. But equally IF it's common practice then only blind-man is not going to see the inevitable changes (however they are implimented) that are comming.

I have heard and read the discussions about the difficulty of Search engines implimenting such a selective ranking system and how it would be apparently almost impossible to impliment - but big money usually finds solutions to just about everything and we do know Google are working on it.

To me this question is only a mirror of the same question posed in around 2004/5 when the same question was asked about the inevitable end to the static PPC page. And of course this then starts to revisit the value of all those long and not so long-tail descriptives in the future..

You don't have to be a Rocket sicentist to realise just the propensity towards targeting just the .org.uk usage will have some impact on the UK page rank garnering

 

[Domain User]

Of course the best thing to do is to turn your domain names into minisites.However,time also means money.And it will take you some time to develop your domain name into minisites.

 

[websaway]

Hopefully I'm not detracting from this debate, and I'll be the first to admit that some of this discussion has helped me to see the potential of minisites, whereas I hadn't even considered it before

But In following a lot of the development, seo and page rank discussions I am surpised that Google and others haven't taken firmer steps as they did with 'domain parking' Sure I agree you are adding some value both to the domain name and the casual visitor that may actually get to what their looking for. BUT I have two major questions that have been sitting at the back of my mind ever since I became active at Acorn.

1. How would/could Google impliment a mechanism to give preferencial placement to sites with either substantial content or represent a bona-fide Business or entity ?

2. How would this effect the current "minisite PPC model" that after all is really only an expansion of the original static parking model. (I accept this is not the case in every instance )

My final and have to say for me 'A mind blowing revelation' was a members admission of not only paying for content and links but having pre-ordered and prepaid for '600 Blog entries' to his newly built site.

Now don't get me wrong I am as much impressed as anything in the audacity of this - what may be standard practice model. But equally IF it's common practice then only blind-man is not going to see the inevitable changes (however they are implimented) that are comming.

I have heard and read the discussions about the difficulty of Search engines implimenting such a selective ranking system and how it would be apparently almost impossible to impliment - but big money usually finds solutions to just about everything and we do know Google are working on it.

To me this question is only a mirror of the same question posed in around 2004/5 when the same question was asked about the inevitable end to the static PPC page. And of course this then starts to revisit the value of all those long and not so long-tail descriptives in the future..

You don't have to be a Rocket sicentist to realise just the propensity towards targeting just the .org.uk usage will have some impact on the UK page rank garnering

good post, clear merit in the points you make.

 

[oka7domain]

uhmm, which is better.. having domain name developed with minisite with less visitors or parked name with huge visitors/traffics -Generic names are best for that-? if a domain name gains a lot of visitors then It might be easier to earn some bucks [and It saved more money for domainers with tons of domain names in Their Porto]. :mrgreen:

That's just in my seller's opinion but for some potential names in big industries category or If You're willing to sell It in >x,xxx range, thought It should be better to build an attractive site and do better SEO strategies. Enduser's views can be different. sellers and buyers have Their own path