IDN Domains Talk

I’m going to take a small break from domain related blogging.

I need to set up a new server soon & want to concentrate a little more time over at my SEM related blog. I will be answering direct contacts questions like usual for anyone that contacts me. I also want to concentrate on a bigger partnership service that will be launching soon.

In the meantime please realize to business owners, consumers etc Domain registration numbers mean absolutely nothing. How much you earn per click off parking means nothing. With domains they will get familiar with the extensions & domain types they use in their daily life. No one repeatedly comes back to a parked domain. No consumer will think about .co or even .日本 if there isn’t anything developed there. This is what I’m preparing for.

Also final tip I read online that Google will stop URL forwarding for Domain parking. This will make it completely easy for them to deindex your domains from their index. My best performing domains I’ll 100% admit I moved the domain to their own servers wrote unique related titles, descriptions, & keywords & even added analytics trackings to make sure I can see where the traffic is coming from. By doing this Google or Yahoo hasn’t deindexed the domains & the performance was great. I don’t mind Parking as a what to do with extra domains but Google is really making parking as “you make money if someone comes to your domain by mistake only”. Please realize that.

also my work schedule is getting a bit more hectic. International Digital Advertising is just getting so much more demanding compared to last year. My work title is Senior Search Specialist but I’ve been doing more of total digital strategic planning for the last few months. Because of my role in this I truly see domains are just one part of the digital plan.

See yall (yeah I use yall)

I realize there are a few wordpress sites gone up on Japanese IDNs lately. Maybe they went up before I started writing about my development. I’d just like to admit there are actually easier ways to do what I’m doing if you look hard enough. Actually even without WordPress especially. I want to come clean & fully say that just because WordPress is a free too the rest of what goes into the backend isn’t.

I do want my blog readers to test & develop & hopefully not overlap in my exact space.  I’ve paid for themes, I’ve paid for modifications & just want my readers to know what to expect if you want to get the same results as me. You might see one part of my site realize what I used then get disappointed that it doesn’t work the same way for you.

I haven’t used them yet there are some solutions that you can buy a all in one solution. To make things better these might be better than what I’m using. Also in Japan Japanese blogs will put scripts on them & recommend you buy them without ever actually putting up a single site or even owning a license. Do your research ask the sales team plenty of questions. I remember recently having to return an email subscription program because I asked them plenty of questions about Japanese compatibility. Everything seemed fine until I bout the software & the email text wasn’t able to be translated in Japanese. There was no option. It would have ended up in user’s spam box.

Anyway keep striving. I’m digging my results & even bought 2 new domains to test out. Data is important guys.

It’s been a bit over three weeks since I started my new set of sites. I really would advice people developing to start with 2 or 3 three sites at the same time if you are developing yourself. My first 3 sites & settings were a little bit different. I noticed one site in particular took off well. After three weeks & now 7 sites I duplicated the settings for the best site to the others.

I’ve been busy so this weekend I have no time to create new sites. I am seeing orders come in & my sites being added to search engine results.

This week during the week I
1. fixed my mobile analytics
2. fixed my mobile version of the sites (still working on that)
3. Put in ValueCommerce instead of Adsense in one site.
4. Added new products to a few of the sites
5. Fixed my PC sitemap

One of the reasons why I keep writing that it’s good to start off small with development is because most of my changes that took time you’d never notice them.
Also sometimes you use new versions of code that might not work. Just take the code from an older site that works & see what was the difference.

Now I’m up to 7 sites, few products being sold already.

The biggest thing I observed was that adsense doesn’t make sense anymore when starting a site. I’m taking all adsense ads off of my new sites. It actually slows the pages down, & I might be penalized for that.

Goals for next month:
1. at least 7 new sites
2. Test a new system with a few sites
3. Get a new server (Dreamhost sucks it’s big but it’s not too good) before getting this I only used Verio servers at over $100 a month for a VPS. I’m thinking about what hosting company I want to use.
4. Buy one of the SEO gerls at work lunch to give me some tips on getting into Yahoo or what I can improve on. Long terms my sites are OK but I do want to get them in a bit quicker & have a bit of advice.
5. Tweak my Japan mobile & iPhone versions a bit more.

The current sites I have up are OK but next month I want to use some better domains. I purposely didn’t use the best premium domains. September, October, November, December. I have 4 months till Christmas. During one of these months I have to work solely on the design. Probably in November. September & October will be about creating new sites. I want to see if I can have at least 30 – 40 up by end of October with new products being added daily.

I’m up to about 6 of these new shopping sites. I might put up 2 more today. I put up 2 yesterday while suffering with a bad cold. There’s no way I can say it but development isn’t easy. I don’t want to make it look easy either. When I ran the IDN Forum I really wanted to get people starting to think about development if you start small your knowledge expands greatly. I started creating these shopping sites not knowing which would really get the most traffic. I’ve discovered a lot in the tweaking of these sites & looking through the stats.

I’m not sure which site it’s from yet but I’m surprised to get a few conversions already.

If you do create sites like mine please resist the urge to put products that don’t relate to the domain name. The design on my sites suck right now. I’ll admit it. The sites do have a few hundred pages indexed in Google already each though. Yahoo is not going to be so easy I think right now.

It’s Summer holiday right now so overall web surfing is down a bit. The sites are doing well as far as traffic still growing each day.

Recently since July 31st I started to implement a few IDN shopping sites. It’s only less than two weeks but I’ll share some traffic stats.

I created 4 sites close to the same week. 2 dot coms & 2 dot jp sites. The extension didn’t really make much of a difference it’s content is more important. The last site I put up gets the most traffic so far. Content is important & looking at the competitor space.

I compare my traffic stats to what I would have gotten if it was just parked. My best of these sites gets 30 uniques a day. Even though you may think this isn’t much it’s only been built less than 2 weeks ago. Currently there is no traffic from Yahoo. Yahoo Japan’s Site explorer is currently down & has been down for like over a week so there is no fast indexing in Yahoo for these sites.

The 4 sites all have different amounts of posted content. I would recommend having at least a plan to have 1,000 pages of content in your site to start getting good traffic.

The traffic is too low to analyze clicks to conversions. The top site has just gotten to the 30 uniques a day. I clearly see as more pages get indexed the more users are coming to the site. Maybe over the weekend I’ll clean up the design a bit. Either that or I’ll test out putting up 2 more sites but I want to use a different platform next time.

These sites are in the shopping category. I’ve been also working months on a travel solution & might have one site up over the long holiday weekend here in Tokyo.

I can add more ads later mainly at first I want the traffic.