I have stumbled my way around affiliate marketing making a little money for the past year writing a ton of articles. I want to move into the big money category so many of you are in. I have an idea for a Clickbank product that would sell for $49 that there is already quite a bit of competition for. No real winners in the space, the highest grav. is 23.94. There is also not much PPC done in this field. The product is searched for many different ways by the users of the search engines. All of the searches are looking for the same product, but just using different search terms. I could easily repackage and rename the product so the title will be the EXACTLY the same as the search terms. I would only need to create ONE product, which is the time consuming issue. I believe it would take me a month to research and write the material. I am confident that I could produce as good of an item that is presently being sold, if not better. The product name would be EXACTLY the same as the following URL's I can purchase. URL #1 – 18,000 Searches Monthly – Cost of URL $1,500.00 URL #2 – 5,400 Searches Monthly – Cost of URL $9.95 URL #3 – 3,600 Searches Monthly – Cost of URL $1,000.00 Even though I have been only doing this a short time I have learned the importance of the URL's name and getting it to show up in the search engines and receiving traffic from it. So, with one product I would need three websites which I would contract out to be done. Question #1 – Would you buy all three URL's? Question #2 – How long would it take to get the URL's to rank in the search engines if I was to write an article daily for each one of them as well as start a banklinking program taking into consideration the searches done and the URL's would be an EXACT match? Question #3 – Does this sound like a good business plan? Question #4 – What's wrong with this business plan? Question #5- Would you pursue this? Question #6 – What other advice would you give?
There is no way in hell I would pay that much money for domains. What happens if the product just doesn't convert no matter what you do? You could be 1K down the drain before you even start if you contemplate buying one of those domains. Just grab your top keyword phrase and add a word to the end of it if need be. The domain isn't the be all and end all, there are far more important factors, just try to grab one with your target keyword phrase. No one here can tell you how long it will take for your potential site to rank simply because we don't know what phrase you are targeting. Could be days, could be never, depends on who your competition is.
+1 Just try putting your keyword in your domain that is good enough. Having your keyword in the domain does not mean you will rank number one guarantee. Yes it does give you an advantage but if SEO is done properly you can rank on first page.
I totally agree with terryd and jokez_guy. and also 5400 search is a great niche, I would go for the #2 option. but yet again, if you have enouf affiliates then traffic and sales will come naturally remember affiliates also want to create targeted niche urls, if they get sales you get sales!
Start with #2. If it goes well, you can consider haggling for #3, then #1. Your URL is just part of a bigger puzzle of SEO. It helps, but it's rarely worth spending $1k up front until you've got a proven product and a buying market.
I'm a domainer more than an affiliate so have a different outlook that the majority of people here. I would absolutely pay for URL1 (provided it is a dot com and doesn't have any dashes). You'd have all of your affiliates linking to you with your keyphrase pushing you to the top of the serps. 18,000 potential visitors a month purely on SEO is a huge advantage. No affiliate commission to pay for those visitors, no monthly PPC fees. I would actually pay $1,500 for a good keyword phrase that had 18,000 searches a month without a business plan (and you have a good business plan). Firstly double check on estibot that it really does have that amount of searches, and that will give you a good indication of whether the domain name is really worth anything too. If it is, haggle. Offer $500. If they refuse it say that you'd love to pay more but you only have $750 and tell them that your offer is open for a week then don't reply to them again if they still come back asking for more. Chances are they will give in during that week. If they don't, then you have to decide whether or not to pay the full price. If it is a dot com without any dashes I wouldn't get any other domains, "with my affiliate hat on" I wouldn't promote a product if I couldn't get exactly the same domain name with a different extension. Good luck Janie x
If it was the target keyphrase domain with no dashes then yes it would be a good investment simply because of the type in traffic it would receive. I'm assuming it's not as I thought all those sweet domains were taken up years ago Not quite, if they plan to use clickbank then the majority of the keyphrases will be linked to clickbank hoplinks and not the domain itself, so no realy SEO juice for the domain. You can however use a script so the affiliates will link to and extension of your domain which will redirect to clickbank so you can get a bit of link love Good post though, always good to have more quality information!
Well, as a publisher, I would have to say, not to look for expensive domains. Don't look for a name and domain name for your product which contains two or three generic words. You need to brand it properly. You need to choose a unique name. Which can be hard to do. If you say earth4energy, it's an established brand for renewable energy, same goes for fatloss4idiots . There's nothing with a similar name, it's unique and helps you create a brand. If on the other hand, your product is named 'Fast Weight Loss' which has many searches on google, the name is not brandable, it's just a few generic words. Look at the bigger corporations, microsoft, google, youtube, all are unique memorable names. Look at the top clickbank products, most of them have a unique name and have established a brand. If you're serious about making your product work, than the affiliates would do the selling of the product, not you, so you won't have to worry about ranking on google, Just my two cents.
Ahh yes, you are quite right of course, having not been a vendor in Clickbank you can tell I really didn't think that one through properly! I'd still go for the searched keyword phrase over a brandable though, just for the added SEO, and if it is cheap enough, obviously you wouldn't want to spend $xx,xxx's. At least, if the whole business plan fails miserably you should still have a valuable domain name hopefully with some backlinks and rankings so it should be worth more than when you purchased it. Ripped also makes a great argument for a brandable. Janie x
Thanks everybody for the excellent advice. Let me answer some of the questions and ask a few more. The domains are all dot.coms with no slashes. The domains are all word for word, letter for letter what I could name the product and be 100% completely accurate with the title of the product. These are just different ways people search for the same information. My thought was to make one of the domains a Clickbank product to get the affiliates and then just rename and repackage the other two as use Paypal for the payment method. The sales price would be the same for all of the products. Then I would write an article a day and submit them to quite a few sites to build up the backlinks.
Hello janecompersnews, I took your advice and went to estibot to get an appraisal. It looks like the traffic to both of these sites is much lower than Google is showing. But the appraised value of these domains is $85,000 for the 1st one and $4,100 for the 3rd one. I sure if that was the real value they would already been sold for that. I placed the other information estibot provided below. All though I understand most of it, I am certainly not an expert at interpreting the importance of the data that was provided. What do you think? It does not look like I can go wrong purchasing these domains even if the product is a flop. I should be able to get my money back from selling the domains eventually, I think or I should say I hope. What about the rest of the information? Do you see anything that stands out or is important? Domain #1 Appraisal Frequency (Google) 69200 in Anchor Text 15400 in Title 734 in URL 2280 Backlinks 3 PageRank 0 Alexa Rank Not Ranked Traffic (Visits / Day) N/A PPC Ads # 54 Max PPC Bid $7.61 Overture/mo 8107 Wordtracker/day 139 New! Estibot TotalSearchâ„¢ Data: TotalSearchesâ„¢ 7610 /moRead More! TotalCompetitionâ„¢ 10/10 adsRead More! TotalCPCâ„¢ $5.00 MaxBidRead More! http://EstiBot.com Domain Appraisal USD 85,000 Domain #3 Appraisal Frequency (Google) 27800 in Anchor Text 705 in Title 516 in URL 920 Backlinks 1 PageRank 0 Alexa Rank Not Ranked Traffic (Visits / Day) 0 PPC Ads # 26 Max PPC Bid $16.5 Overture/mo 403 Wordtracker/day 17 New! Estibot TotalSearchâ„¢ Data: TotalSearchesâ„¢ 820 /moRead More! TotalCompetitionâ„¢ 9/10 adsRead More! TotalCPCâ„¢ $4.00 MaxBidRead More! http://EstiBot.com Domain Appraisal USD 4,100
I would say 100% that URL1 is an excellent domain name. My personal budget would probably be around the $2,000 mark for those stats PROVIDED THAT it really is www.keywordkeyword.com. (not www.keywordkeywordkeyword.com or .net or with dashes). Estibot isn't correct in value but it does give a very good indication of a valuable domain name. Actually URL3 is pretty good too, the PPC click figure is very nice indeed but you only need one domain. URL1 is only one and a half times the price for 8 times the potential traffic. Still, there is no rush, you are not going to get this to rank in 5 minutes unfortunately. Make a low offer as suggested above and hold your ground. You never know. The argument 'I'd love to pay you more but I only have $XXX' is always a good one Good luck Janie x
I have to say, if your goal is to have a successful product, than come up with your own brandable name. Paying a 1000$ for a domain name for a CB product is not worth it, unless the name is brandable and your really like it. For 1000$ you could have a quality ebook and a whole website done. Just get a nice new 10$ domain. Again, it depends on what your goals are. IMO, You should focus on making a high converting product with a nice sales page, and getting affiliates, instead of focusing on ranking your domain high on google, so that you can get 3-4 sales from it. The affiliates will do all the ranking for you, and will make you tons of sales. Just look at the top clickbank products, none of them is targeting keywords in the domain, so that they could rank high for those keywords. They're just focusing on having a great selling page, and getting a lot of affiliates do to all the selling.