IDN Domains Talk

I’ve been having good results on developing & wanted to share some tips on wordpress.

I’ve used so many CMS systems since 1999 I can’t count. Currently I primarily use wordpress even the first version of IDN Forums had a wordpress blog in 2005. At the time there were only a few domain bloggers. My other sites at the time ran on Drupal, Mambo, or even on phpbb at the time. Anyhoot with the latest buzz on WordPress like it’s something new I’d like to share a few tips to ease you from plenty of frustration.

1. Buy a membership to a Theme site like Studio Press or Elegant Themes or even Graph Paper Press. One Price & get all their themes will save you in the long run. I used Studio Press since the month it originally came out. Truthfully I’ve made my money back tenfold. The Genesis themes are not as easy to modify as non Framework themes but they have really great support.

2. Custom Post Types – These things suck. Really they do. There are regular posts & Custom Post Types. Before all plugins attached themselves to regular post. Now Plugin makers want their plugins to be attached to Custom Post Types. The problem with that is that you have to modify every aspect of your site to get the Custom Post Type to act like a regular post. Custom Post Type Plugins don’t always show up on the front page of your site or even are selectable in lots of style options you want to make. You’ll know what I’m talking about when you get there.

3. Keep your installation up to date. I actually do it for several other blogs but the IDN readership is low so I haven’t exactly kept up with the Jones here. Keeping it up to date will have a benefit to search as Google does look at version numbers in their algorithm it seems.

4. Don’t use the same plugins you used 3 years ago. Test out new plugins. You might surprise yourself that some new plugin developer has made a better SEO or Analytics Plugin. Test Test Test.

5. Buy Good Plugins. Go to a site like CodeCanyon & but plugins. If you use those is sites to dominate non English markets you can pretty much create some great sites. Also try to test out Free versions that have an upsell you might find a few great plugins that way.

6. Blogging is about being social. Another thing I don’t really stick to on this blog but do for others. Give credit to others & they will write about you. One of my sites I’ve pretty much has a over 80% rate of having Japanese give me a link back.

7. IDN compatible plugins. There used to be like 2, then about 3, 2 to 3 years ago. There’s about 10 plugins on WordPress that enhance IDN Compatibility.

A little bit busy this week, still the beginning of the year, but wanted to feed yall with knowledge. (Hopefully) I’ll post one of the sites after I create about 4 of them.

I’ve been doing this blog I feel like forever. This is my 200th post & well it’s just going to be new 2012 development ramblings.

1. Traffic from shortening services is displayed in Google Analytics as Direct traffic even though it isn’t. You have to make a plan to anylize referers seperatedly.
2. BITLY shortners have an issue with IDNs this needs to be fixed. Only one person so far has contacted support about it. Support notices are public & people vote on it. If you use the API it’s no problem but if you paste in an IDN punycode or not it doesn’t go to the link.
3.  Traffic from Social Facebook & Twitter mobile devices. I was surprised to find that one of my sites the bounce rate from links on Social Media are an incredible 7%. Yeah no mistype. I’ve never had a segment of referrals anywhere near that low.
4. I spoke to one of my former coworkers who heads a major ad technology in Tokyo. He told me currently it’s good to revisit Adsense. I’ve taken adsense off my sites but he told me that the quality of inventory matching has improved since years back. He also accredited to introduction of remarketing by Google. I’m not advising anyone to create cheap looking sites at all. I do recommend starting small at first & growing your site. Try to create quality.
5. Buying traffic. A lot of people believe buying advertisements is just trying to buy clicks to ads. It’s not. For example later I’ll launch a Facebook campaign for one of my domains. I will pay for users to join the Facebook page. The reason being is that I want to grow the audience. That page is updated with content from the site. If I pay $3 to capture that user to my page & they frequent that site for a year or more, share the info with their friends etc. Isn’t this worth it? Advertising for publishers is about expanding your user base.
6. Ads are not just Clicks.
Seems like many forget with advertising you don’t just get paid per click. There’s also CPM( Cost per Impression) . I’m trying to hire 2 writers by April on a weekly basis. Increase the content, increase revenue even if no one clicks.
7. Dot Com in katakana
Lately I’ve had a few referrals come to my site with searches with dot com in katakana. As some are reading this I know you are thinking “We told You”. I want to explain to you WHY this is happening. I started testing strong Twitter marketing. Twitter doesn’t allow you to put .com in your username. As a result with strong Twitter marketing I’ve started to get Japanese users searching for the name I put on the Twitter account. I’ve ONLY gotten search referrals like that AFTER I started Twitter marketing. My point is users will search for dot com in native languages for existing sites. Especially for sites that has been branded that way.
8. Traffic Origins
Some may say that I’m wrong about where traffic comes from or basically about anything I would say in general. I’m making assumptions based on doing testing of the traffic. If I’m wrong about redirects, traffic being mostly mobile, etc do the research to prove it invalid. I’m not doing the testing to be right. I do the research because I hope others would too so we can have accurate information about IDN domains. If you truly believe that the average educated Chinese, or Arabic parked domain user gets to the site because they append dot com to any keyword they are search for, & will do so for dot com in their language in the future do proper research & display the results. Even if you loose revenue for a week place your parking page in an iframe & put Google Analytics in the code. This will give you 100% insights to exactly where your traffic is coming from. Imagine if we had at least a sample of 5 domains from each language that would do this test. We don’t need exact traffic numbers just the percentages.

In ending I’ll make it firm that I like developing with IDN Domains. If they are not selling why not invest in developing your property.  Times are hard I realize many people have invested in IDNs because of something I created in 2005. We would all be stunned if Apple’s Safari browser changes that redirect. Other browsers have.