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Refine Final Concept and
Register Domain Name
| Earlier in the discussion, we chose “fashion” as a Site
Concept for our primary example. We also looked at other concept examples
like “Botticelli” and “pricing.”
These Site Concepts were mere starting points. As you worked your way through chapters 2, 3, and 4, you built your master keyword list for the “fashion” Site Concept. This list is literally your site blueprint, for each of your keywords, it
I once asked you, how big should you grow your Site Concept? How much should you change it? Only you can decide. Now let’s use the info in your master keyword list to refine your concept. Here are the factors to consider before finalizing your Site Concept
Perhaps “fashion” is just too broad, too open-ended. After all, can a single person ever fill a site about “fashion”? Don’t paint yourself into a corner, choose a niche that you can broaden. Remember the future, you can always broaden your concept if you fill your niche. You’ll be much more effective if you stick to what you know and love. If time is a limiting factor, stay narrow. Review your supply and demand data. Choose a niche Site Concept that would appear to have the greatest profit potential, that has loads of high-profitability keywords associated with it. Read what others are writing about, and any ideas that you have had. Do you want to cover similar topics (nothing wrong with that, especially if you do it better!), or do you see a niche or approach that has not yet been done? How many solid affiliate programs are a good fit? Every success story starts small, then builds. And if you’re like most people, you don’t have the time to flesh out a huge concept all at once. And it will actually hurt you at the engines if your concept is too broad. Better to start narrow, but with enough profit potential, as determined by considering the above factors and then grow the concept. Let’s use our earlier examples to illustrate how to finalize a narrow Site Concept. We’ll also develop your domain name at the same time, since the two go hand in hand. EXAMPLE: Pricing
Here’s the problem, though, if you developed many Keyword-Focused Content Pages about fulfillment within your pricing site, you’d dilute that site’s Search Engine effectiveness for pricing issues. So “concept-level” keywords like “fulfillment” really deserve their own sites. The more you keep your theme “pure,” the better you will do. And a site dedicated to pricing is also much more credible to your readers, too! We saw before that business people who are interested in fulfillment will also be interested in pricing. Well, the reverse is true, also. So your pricing pages can also refer people to a good fulfillment company, not to mention a company with a good solution for customer support! Since “pricing” is wide enough to be profitable and narrow enough to be winnable, make “pricing” your Concept Keyword for your new Theme-Based Content Site. Now let’s develop your Concept Keyword into a VPP (Valuable Preselling Proposition). What’s a VPP? It’s the affiliate equivalent of a merchant’s “Unique Selling Proposition.” A merchant sells goods or services. An affiliate presells by offering high-value information. Your VPP answers, in very few words and hopefully with just a touch of character, the two critical questions about your Site Concept
There’s no room for cleverness or subtlety here. Leave that to the moneylosing
dotcoms. Include your Concept Keyword in your VPP and add a marketing angle
/ theme to it. That way, your concept is clear to your visitor, and your
Concept Keyword is clear to the Search Engines. The engines will rank your
site a touch higher for your Concept Keyword if it is included in your
domain name.
VPP = pricing advisor. It says that you are delivering pricing information, your Concept Keyword must, of course, be included in your domain. And the “advisor” part establishes you as the expert, it tells your visitor that you’ll be delivering some great pricing advice! VPP = pricing on the Net. Again, it’s clear that you are delivering pricing info. The “on the Net” part says that you are specializing in pricing info specifically on the Internet. Since there is not much info about pricing on the Net and since your potential visitor is certainly there looking for Net-specific info, this is a good approach. Same idea for “netpricing.com” and “cyberpricing.com.” Which of the above approaches is best? You know your prospective visitor best. Which approach do you think works best? Before we go through the next two examples, here’s how to brainstorm and register your domain. A good domain name is
Before you register, think about expandability and brand. Generally, you should start narrow-niche and then expand when all goes well. And, as said earlier, when the time does come to grow beyond “pricing,” you should not add “fulfillment” or “customer support” to your “pricing” site. You’ll dilute its Search Engine effectiveness, not to mention cloud the message to your visitors. Give some thought to expansion now. Suppose that you decide upon “THEpricingadvisor.com.” Why not register “THEfulfillmentadvisor.com” and “THEsupportadvisor.com,” etc., now. Eventually, you’ll link them together through a master site called “THEmarketingadvisor.com.” Registering domains is cheap. Why not lock them all in right now? That way, your expansion path won’t have potholes when the time comes for you to grow. Registration
By the way, Site Build It! automatically takes care of registration for you. The cost is included in the annual fee. So your very best bet is simply to take care of it at the time you start building income through content with Site Build It!. Now let’s look at a few possibilities for our second Concept Keyword example, “Botticelli”. Remember, you were a huge Botticelli fan. Only one problem, you find yourself in a bit of a bind. Now that you’ve done chapters 3 and 4, you can’t find enough profit potential to make a pure “Botticelli site” sufficiently profitable. What to do? You have three options
Options 2 and 3 are pretty clear. Let’s examine option 1 a bit. Use the breakout window to expand your Site Concept, or even to find a new, better direction. Or the expansion route may seem perfectly obvious to you, even without doing the breakout brainstorming. For example, remember this progressively wider concept?
Keep doing chapters 2 and 3 on progressively broader concepts until you find enough profit potential to proceed. How broad should you go? Remember the single best recommendation: as narrow as possible, yet still with lots of profit potential!
In other words, work your way up from Botticelli, to Renaissance art, to all artists, to everything art. Stop as soon as you find a level that has solid profit potential. Keep your niche as narrow as possible, so that you can build a site to fill that glass, yet still make good profits. Nowadays, I would not start artchive.com as a global art mini-portal. First of all, I’d go nuts trying to fill this wonderful site with so much info. And it would look rather amateurish with just a little content. More importantly, though, is that each section would dilute the other. For example, since Search Engines will increasingly evaluate the overall theme of an entire site, my renaissance art section will dilute my ancient art section, etc., etc. And anyone who puts up a site which focuses purely on the theme of ancient art will have an edge over that section of my mega-site. So here’s what I would do. As I broaden the concept, I find that I have solid profit potential for the Site Concept of “Renaissance Art” and other Concept Keywords at this level (ex., ancient art, cubism, impressionism, etc.). So I register renaissance-artchive, ancient-artchive.com, cubism-artchive.com, impressionism-artchive.com, etc., etc. And I also register artchive.com and artchives.com. I add the dash in the longer names for easy reading, and I take artchives.com to protect myself from low-lifes who want to take advantage of my success. Once I establish renaissance-artchive, and then ancient-artchive.com, and then cubism-artchive.com, I’ll launch my Master home page, artchive.com, to tie it all together as the place to come for all things art. This home page will contain a global “what's in it for you” message and then provide links to all my other domains that are already up and running and successful. One more domain, I’ll register store-artchive.com. Once I establish artchive.com the way that Mark Harden (the real owner of artchive.com) has done, I’d be nuts not to think about adding an entire “museum store”. This could either be an affiliate-based store where I’d presell the products of my merchant partners (including a bust of Boticelli!). Or it could be a true online store. Or both. Before we move on to our last example (“fashion”), let’s review our artchive.com domains to make sure that they meet our VPP needs. Your VPP answers, in very few words and hopefully with a touch of character, the two critical questions about your Site Concept
Bottom line? What started with Botticelli now has a clear do-able step-at-a-time plan to become an art mini-portal. And you start at a level that you know will be profitable. EXAMPLE: Fashion
fashion magazineLet’s focus on what excites you, designing and publishing.You decide to publish an online magazine about fashion design and designers. fashion-designers-magazine.comThe domain contains your VPP. It says exactly what your site delivers, and that you’ll be delivering it through the format of an online magazine/Web site. No, the name is not particularly clever. Using words like Herald or Express would sound and look much slicker (FashionDesignExpress.com). But using “magazine” gives you a better edge with the Search Engines, for two reasons
Your magazine format gives you the flexibility to cover a wide range of topics related to fashion design and designers. Use the breakout techniques described in chapter 3 to generate more and more topics related to fashion design and designers, jewelry topics, famous designer bios, etc. You’re off and running with a great concept like this. Just one more thought. Let’s say that fashion-designers-magazine.com succeeds really well. It will be too late to register related domains later. Do it now, with an eye to expanding your concept in a few months.
Research like this may even point you towards changing your concept away from the “concept-level” keyword of “fashion,” perhaps aiming more toward “discount” and “outlets” -- run these two keywords through the Overture Suggestion Tool, and then see how many competitors those words have. Your best Concept Keyword may actually be. supply-demandOf course, you also have to consider
With this in mind, think about this possible new direction. People searching for outlet malls are certainly doing so for a reason... to save by buying! And you find lots of good online malls and other merchants that fit with your Site Concept. And you can still marry your concept of fashion to “factory outlet stores” like this Worldsbest-FashionFactory-outlet-stores.comGeez, if this goes as big as you think it could, you could expand this concept, too! So you also register Worldsbest-SportsFactory-outlet-stores.comAnd you’ll register a strong Master Domain to tie all your successful niche sites up into one big mini-portal. So what if that’s a year or two down the road? Worldsbest-Factory-outlet-stores.comVPP = world's best factory outlet stores. It says that you have done all the research for your cost-conscious reader and will be delivering only the cream. And think of all the creamy topics! Articles on shoes, fur, dresses, etc. leading to great outlet links (and other affiliate links, of course). Then you do the same for basketball, football, golf, etc. You’ve found a motherlode. Bye-bye fashion magazine. Hello world of discount malls! Here’s the whole point of chapter 5 Take your time on the domain name and the concept, the choice you make here will literally make or break your results (remember what Danny De Vito said in The Renaissance Man “The choices we make dictate the lives we lead.” If I had to summarize the entire Affiliate Masters Course into just two lines, it would be
And sure, you could just say fooey with what people will pay for, I want to do what turns me on and that would be OK. You might even luck into a winner of a concept. But it would be luck. On the other hand, if your payoff is the sheer enjoyment of doing a hobby, that’s great, too. It takes a cold-hearted business person to make money at something that he does not particularly like. Few of us qualify. Of course, if you do, don’t hesitate to go where the profitability seems to be, first and foremost! Pick something you know and love and that has excellent profitability! |
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