2008 March | Convert Offline

March 2008

Local Domain Names… Still An Opportunity?

Checking out a domain auction recently, I noticed anyonebuthillary.com is on the block. Asking price? $25,000. So, far no takers, but it got me thinking about local domains. Have these started to take off in price too? You bet… check it out:

If you click on the link above it will take you to the auction (new window). Then you can enter a town or city in the box next to ‘begins with’ to check out the prices of local domains near you. With newyorkrealtors.com going for a cool $10grand, who knows?, maybe you’ll get lucky.

Some other interesting domain names I found on the auctioneer’s block:

bergencountypsychologists.com - $1,850
westchesterflorist.com - $4,088
nyfurniture.com - $48,000

I went in and snagged a couple hotties, despite seeing no actual bids beside any of the above terms.

Other Local Notes

I corrected the local internet advertising matrix. Local.com gets their first 3 ads from the Yahoo content match… not Google, as I had written. I apologize for any inconvenience that may have caused.

Both of the local sites I wrote about last week have returned to their original position on Yahoo!. From #1 to gone… back to #1… strange, but I’m happy they’re back.

Subscribe | Submit

Add 'Local Domain Names… Still An Opportunity?' To Del.icio.us

Add 'Local Domain Names… Still An Opportunity?' To digg

Add 'Local Domain Names… Still An Opportunity?' To FURL

Add 'Local Domain Names… Still An Opportunity?' To reddit

Add 'Local Domain Names… Still An Opportunity?' To Technorati

Add 'Local Domain Names… Still An Opportunity?' To Yahoo My Web

Add 'Local Domain Names… Still An Opportunity?' To Stumble Upon

Add 'Local Domain Names… Still An Opportunity?' To Google Bookmarks

Add 'Local Domain Names… Still An Opportunity?' To Spurl

Add 'Local Domain Names… Still An Opportunity?' To Bloglines

Add 'Local Domain Names… Still An Opportunity?' To Netscape

Add 'Local Domain Names… Still An Opportunity?' To Sphinn

2008 03 20

Local Domaining

Comments (3)

Permalink

Phone Numbers In PPC Ads Show Promise

With the upcoming change to Google’s display URL policy on redirects, I have been rewriting my PPC ads. I have had a difficult time defeating the click-through rates of the display url: www.geocategory.com, that is re-directing to the website. I got a number of good ideas from a question I asked on Gooruze, including:

geography.domain.com

domain.com/geography

Both of these suggestion helped maintain a good quality score and .04 cent minimum bids, but in limited testing I was not able to beat the CTR of the redirected URL. I will continue to experiment with them.

But if at first you don’t succeed… try, try, again. I finally found an ad that has showed some promise and early in the test is defeating the www.geocategory.com set up… and it uses the original domain, which is even better. What I did was add the geography and the telephone number to the 3rd line of the ad. I tried to make it look like an in-column yellow page ad. The 3rd line reads: Fillintheblank County… (123)456-7890. I was surprised that Google allowed telephone numbers in their ads but I now understand why they do… they are good for click-thru rates! Google will allow 3 consecutive periods but not 4… between the geography and the number.

Subscribe | Submit