I really like Epik. I think the concept was really brilliant. Even though they do have some issues with Google & indexing I think the concept is great.

Even though I develop myself I do look at the Epik blog often & noticed that at one point all you had to do was add “/stats” to any Epik site & the stats was public. Most of the sites they had actually had very little traffic. I used this to compare my own product network. I can’t say I have a better product but I can say I’m one of the only ones mass generating Shopping sites like this. This way it’s more under the radar & my sites rank better. Now this has disappeared from about every epik site I saw.

Anyway if you are into developing using their stats as a benchmark was great. You realizing people are paying $299 for a site that got less than 50 unique users in a week. If you have 10 sites or more with high search volume IDNs you can spend $3,000 & get a programmer to create you your own system & most likely get more traffic.

I don’t think the epik product is perfect but I think they made decisions to try to create revenue for even their users with low traffic. I like that thinking too. When I was part of the IDN community (more than just writing this blog) I really wanted to share more & make sure all of you had your chances to profit from your investments. I realize not everyone thinks this way. I believe there’s lots of IDNs investors wondering when are these big sales going to trickle down to me? Control your own investment guys.

***Update****
Even though their stats are gone here’s a blog posts with 1 week snapshot of their networks traffic
Compare this with your IDN portfolio.
http://www.domainstryker.com/epik/epik_visitors.html

I started thinking that the mindset for domain investment to sell & domain investment to develop has differences. I came into IDNs with the intent to develop so I bought with that in mind. Then later I started to think about selling & changed strategies a bit. Lately I’m really back on track only thinking about development.

One difference I notice is the power of having a network.  I like have sites that can feed off of each other’s links. I don’t have a really strong site anymore like IDNF but I think that if I created at least 2 sites like that before I can do it again (of course not the same topic). With developing also I am thinking about trending too.

What I am looking at & what others are looking at may be different. I am finding even if I have strong keywords .nets aren’t generating the same amount of traffic as my developed .coms or .jps. I purposely put up a few to test. I may try later with some stronger keywords.

I’ll give a good example of how to take advantage of having a network. I have about 20 different shopping sites currently. I took a chance to test an IDN.jp that wasn’t registered after the drop in the middle of the month. I also bought the ASCII version of the domain. I developed both & put backlinks on both. In less than 3 weeks the IDN is now at 300 unique users a day via PC & mobile. It would not have done this by parking the domain.

Having a network also lets you target keywords that are bringing conversions on your sites. I have one site that this week traffic rose 30% just because of the keywords in the link of another domain. These are some of the things you can’t do with the “traffic will just come theory”.

Anyway for all of you that just keep buying buying buying. Use some of it to develop. I read one article on Frager’s blog about the Castello brothers. These guys are brutally honest. They say hey we just bought dreamweaver & kept putting up content on our sites.

http://fragerfactor.blogspot.com/2010/12/castello-brothers-well-im-new-do-i-have.html

Look at what they have: A site network. Not all of the sites are the prettiest but they can control their investment.

I was just looking at Yahoo Japan search volume stats.

These are the top 5 Career terms in dot com in terms of Yahoo search volume last month (September 2010)

Term – Translation – Search Volume last Month (Rounded off)

求人 – Job Vacancy – 7,400,000
転職 – Job Change – 3,000,000
アルバイト – Part Time Job – 690,000
派遣 – Temp Job – 560,000
就職 – Find Employment – 440,000

DigiRocks owns the top 3 I own #4 & another Japanese person owns #5 in dot com.
In dot jp GMO owns #1 求人.jp
While #3 & #4 are reserved.

I’d like to clearly say a dot jp Reserved does not mean it will never be used. Before .mobi & all others reserved domains I think JPRS reserved these big keywords with plans to auction them off later. IDN Investors need to realize they will be used at some point.

The domain registration companies here in Japan generously made sure they offered as little information as possible to customers about the IDN.jp price increase. I had a feeling it was going to be any domain renewed before the 25th will have the lower fee. So I renewed all the IDN.jp domains I had for the rest of the year.

I send money by bank transfer & it’s usually posted in my account the same day during the week by about 6pm. If I didn’t email them twice I have a feeling they weren’t going to post the credit to my account. I had asked earlier in the week if Value Domain could tell me details about the price increase. They’re response was “Wait for the announcement”. Now you know why I usually don’t post companies links on my sites.

The new prices for IDN.jp’s in Japan is now officially between 1260 to 1300 yen. Ah 660 yen was a great price but since I get a salary in yen, with the US dollar being so weak my dot com costs has gone down about 25%.

Hopefully we’ll see .日本 soon. The way I figure it the price increase only makes sense if .日本 is coming out & it pays for extra marketing.

****** UPDATE******* 11:30pm
Seems someone at Value Domain may have been jumping the gun
New price showed up & the registration fee for IDN.jp will be 1240 (or around that). They changed it back already to 640.
It’s not 100% sure if the discount will continue for old registrations.

****** UPDATE 2******* 8:30am (26th)
Domains that were registered BEFORE September 25th also have the new rate for renewals.
Renewing Before September 25th would have saved everyone money.

I finally launched my top traffic domain アニメ.com (anime). After reviewing the results of my shopping sites I decided that a site like this is going to take a while to complete. My goal is to finish sites like this & have thousands of my pages & products indexed by Christmas.

These are a few points

• In August my sites generated close to 5,000 unique visits. I think this is pretty good for the first month & most were created throughout the month.
• I’m up to 12 Shopping sites now
• I also had a good month in parking because the Japanese yen is 25% higher than the dollar compared to 2 years ago.
• My Shopping sites mainly 2 that get lots of traffic came close to beating my parking revenue
• September sales on my shopping sites already beat my Parking stats
• I’m going to revisit putting adsense on the sites but only in one location. I’ll see if this doesn’t affect ranking.
• Over the weekend I created a new template myself for the newer sites. The Anime site has this template it’s better but unfortunately it still sucks.
• I did try a new system for products & realize most commercial scripts just don’t work with Japan. Somethings always left out that you have to have an external programmer fix. Even though the programmer told me that it does work with Japan it didn’t perform well. They might fix it in the future so I won’t mention any brands.
• Development is not easy & I’m not trying to make it look that way. I started reading the Epik blog lately & if you put “/stats” you can actually publicly see how much any of their sites made last week. This is great for you to compare your sites & revenue to. Even though I can’t use it Epik is a game changer can’t say this enough.
• Also this week we launched 安泊.JP an online travel service in Japan. This is my first time owning part of a such a potentially great service in Japan. Hats off to the team working hard to put this together.

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.