Beyond Parking: Understanding Search Traffic Supply & Demand

Understanding search traffic and just how competitive a niche is will affect how easily your able to tap into search traffic here are some thoughts on choosing domain names, niches, and driving FREE traffic to a site.

Today I received an email from a reader of the site, who had some question about two of the three domain names I listed for sale yesterday. I thought the information might be of value to those here on the site. Here is the email with my reply …

ChristmasOrnaments.be and ChristmasTrees.net.cn have a lot of searches on them but I’ve often read that any domain other than com doesn’t have anywhere near the value that a com would. What has been your experience? 

Yes, both of these domain names are based on some of the most popular search terms used around the holidays. If you look at any registrar like Goodady or Moniker you will notice that it is hard to find any domain with any extension for these search phrases. I believe this is a good thing when speaking about the “pure domain value” … supply and demand if you will. Their are not that many of these domains available any more. Also note that the two domains I have for sale are cheaper than most of the other extensions that are available. 

Are these names as valuable as a .com, .net or .org per say. Probably not, however it is hard to put a value on anything that is unique, were not talking about thousands of these names that are available were talking about a handful - and as I mentioned already many of these are already taken. 

I know that the be extension is for Belgium. Does having a foreign extension have any effect on what you are doing as far as getting traffic there and monetizing it?

A very good question indeed, let me share my experience with getting traffic to another domain I own that is also a .be extension domain. I launched the site about three weeks ago using my tweaked out wordpress theme, I also made sure I had several incoming links from social networking sites. I posted about twenty posts to the site (again blog based wordpress custom install - similar to this site but a different color scheme) that were based on searches via wordtracker.com

I opened each page with a 100 word into and pulled in ebay rss results, important to note that these results from ebay are not regular affiliate links but are are php redirects or cloaked links. I also use a plugin for wordpress that adds a meta description to each post. All these small minor tweaks can add up when all used together.
 
I also created 5 or 6 pages with full articles that I wrote based again on Christmas search terms - mostly Christmas craft terms and pulled in youtube.com videos based on the subject.

Lastly I linked out using regular links to other very popular Christmas sites - I believe outbound links to relevant sites helps with establishing trust with Google which can result in a rankings boost. I also believe in creating websites that are user friends - helping people find what their looking for. I figure if they can not find it on my site I will provide links to other similar resources online. 

Within one week I was getting traffic to the site, earning with AdSense as well as ebay. Yesterday the site had close to 200 ad impressions for AdSense and I made around a $1.5 … I am sure I will have some winning bids in the coming days from ebay as well.
 
Bottom line is that I do believe these sites can get traffic, mine is right now. Of course not everyone will create a site in the same manner -

Lastly - Google decided it did not like the site for a period of four days or so and the traffic dropped and then return several days later. This does not worry me as I have seen this happen to other sites as well. If the site is not black hat and is user friendly over time the traffic will grow. 

So if you were looking to sell this domain who would you be pitching it to? If you were looking to develop it who would your target market be? If you were looking to park it what relevant ad would you like to see on the page? 

Selling the domain names to anyone that see’s the value in the high traffic search term domain names -

As mentioned above I am developing a very similar domain and my target is US - nobody has made mention (say this is a Belgium’s domain extension). I think many people probably don’t even notice.

Christmas Ornaments and Christmas trees get lots of searches. However there is also lots of competition. When I did a Google search it came up with 2.1 million other sites offering the Christmas ornaments or Christmas trees. Some of them are obviously much better funded than I and have much more money for promotion. So how would this qualify as a niche site that someone like us could monetize? 

While 2.1 million might seam like a lot of sites for those niches I feel the demand (thousands of searches daily for a 6 week period) far out weights the supply (the amount of sites that target these niches. 

So lets do a bit of research, it will be fun ok  Wordtracker is a great way to find other terms that have as many daily searches … lets find out how many terms we can come up with that enjoy such high search traffic / versus how many Google results they provide: 

Christmas Trees, 2,529 searches daily estimate - Results 1 - 10 of about 5,900,000

Christmas Ornaments, 2,529 searches daily estimate - Results 1 - 10 of about 2,130,000 

Other terms with similar search numbers:

free online movies, 2800 searches daily estimate - Results 1 - 10 of about 120,000,000 (note the term free, yuk for making money)

wii games, 2600 searches daily estimate - Results 1 - 10 of about 178,000,000 (great commercial term, huge competition however)

pc games, 2300 searches daily estimate - Results 1 - 10 of about 313,000,000

So all in all two million results is fantastic with such a large amount of traffic, also note there are thousands and thousands of “long tail seo search terms” that stem from these popular two terms. As mentioned above I am already monetizing a domain that is based on a two phrase “Christmas” search term that is also a .be extension. 

Getting A Domain Name With Exact ally The Term Your Trying To Rank For
I also feel it is easier to rank online when your trying to rank for the exact search phrase as your domain. As an example I registered a three word domain name targeting the very same term in google. During the search phrase was “horror movie xxx” Google returns more than 14 million results for this phrase, I spent about 4 days marketing the site. On the last Google update the site was in the top 30 results for that phrase – without quotes.

It is now getting traffic and should be a monster next Halloween. Or maybe I will sell?

To give you an example I looked at the pulse and set up two BANS sites. I for XBOX and one for Wii. I was ready to start counting the cash coming in. I followed the same promotional scheme that I do with other sites and that does generate income. I was really surprised to see nothing on the stat counters and of course no money. Since I have some autorotators I know it was set up correctly since it was counting those hits. So I went to the sites and what I found was a TREMENDOUS level of completion. I was really surprised at how many sites were selling these popular video games. So my listing was really buried in the deluge. 

I think my example above answers this clearly, the amount of competition for this “gaming” traffic is some where between 50 and 100 times more competitive. Of course if you were able to rank for these terms you would enjoy this level of traffic year around. However my thought is why not create a handful of sites that target these types of niches with huge traffic spikes and little competition. 

• Halloween
• Christmas
• Tour de France
• Think of your own niches and profit!

All in all these are really great domain names with low yearly reg fee’s. They are short, descriptive and brand able - and they are based on commercial items people buy each year! Ah …. the holidays! Learn more about domain parking by visiting the homepage.

To Your Success,
Brian

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