We already know where the scanty-clad playmates are and we like it. But imagine if we could leave this week's investment taking home some innovation that will grow or change or businesses with tremendous impact?For example, imagine how many long-term clicks could you generate if you were able to keep in constant contact with only 10% of the visitors to your domains for months and years into the future?
Opt-in email lists and direct mail can both be automated to follow up with your customers again and again. Just the way the advertisers you pass your clicks through to have been using them to build lifetime relationships and balance sheets for THEMSELVES that are meaningful to the financial markets in away Alexa scores aren't.
The amount of demographic data that can be collected and culled into massive databases of prospects by properly leveraging direct navigation traffic is simply astounding — and it’s virtually all being left on the table right now.
Don’t let your customers click away once, never to be heard from again.
By building lists and databases, you own the customer relationship and you can market products and services to that customer for life.
This is not hard technology to implement on a mass scale!"
This is what Elliot Silver was referring to when I said PPC costs domain moguls billions.
The domaining industry has historically been very cloistered from the rest of the web economy. This has resulted in a situation whereby the industry is woefully behind in taking advantage of the advances that have taken place in web technology over the past five years.
The idea of customer retention seems to be paying off in Flippa sales, yet have been utterly lost in this industry. Marketing 101: build a list. Market, re-market, and re-market to your prospects. How can you wonder where the end-users are if you live in a domain ca-coon?
Bridging the dichotomy between the owners of the traffic and those with the technical know-how to truly leverage it and build value through it has never been more important.
We all know that parking pages reach almost every single user on the Internet. Think about that for a moment. Think about the power this represents.
Can’t we serve our visitors better? I think we should stop settling for mediocre and step up to the task of providing real, obvious value to our visitors.
Let’s stop pretending that PPC is the end-all be-all. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of viable business models on the Internet that need to be explored with direct navigation traffic.
What’s interesting is that everything I’ve discussed above could apply just as easily to registrars as to parking companies. On the whole, those who control the DNS servers are the ones who need to wake up — whether they be parking companies, registrars, web hosts, or anything in between.
Oversee could be the next Facebook or the next Kodak. This week you can shape that outcome.
1 comments:
Interesting article. I wrote a quick piece for Flippa on this last year which sparked some related discussion (where discussion could mean controversy depending on how you looked at it ;-)).
To this end, my own views on this are pretty clear in that domainers desperately need to make the leap from domains into websites - maybe not for every domain in a portfolio but at least a few so as to dip the toe in the provervial waters.
Growing an email list and getting some stats on your visitors is one good step in this direction ... but then again so are things as understanding SEO, social media, branding etc
In defence of events such as domainFEST, I do think they are tweaking to the industry shift - agenda items such as PITCHfest as well as the strong lineup of non-domain focussed experts/speakers this year are a good step in this direction (to the point that I'm now wishing I was there!).
As such, I do hope attendees have a great week but take home some web learnings outside of the usual babe-pics and domainer war stories from a by-gone era ...
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