Wow – what a week! A lot has happened this week and a lot is happening this weekend, in fact right now I’m sitting on a plane cruising along at 35,000 feet. This week has been exciting with some major appraiso announcements on the horizon, one nice five-figure sale, and two end-user sales that look like their going to close next week!

Yesterday I was in a kayak on Big Bear Lake, a lake at the top of  a mountain less than two hours from LA. Now we’re on our way to Sonoma for a wedding and followed by a weekend of wine tasting.

Since this weekend really is all about spending time with Daina and my family I’m going to keep this particularly short and sweet, okay maybe it won’t be sweet, alright, I’m really bad at short too, here we go!

• We launched a new kayak store on Kayaking.org that is run by our partner, Outdoor Play, the first website on the Internet to sell kayaks! This has been one of the top requests from our visitors and I am very excited with how it all turned-out.

• BlogAboutWine.com crossed the 3,000th fan mark on Facebook. This feels good, we’ve turned something that we love into a resource that other people truly enjoy, and we’re still at the very beginning. This weekend we will be doing some great coverage of what Sonoma has to offer.
• The top story in the Domaining world this week was .CO and some statements made by Juan in a video. I have stayed-out of this one but will say that like many of you I was not a fan of what was said. Still I like .CO and think that they are doing some very innovative things to build their brand.
• I’ve been getting a lot of questions from readers about the Google Penguin update. If you haven’t had a chance to read my post about 3 ways to rank better after the Penguin update, make sure to check it out.
• I am blown-away by how fast WPEngine is, seriously, it’s insanely fast. Next week MorganLinton.com will be moving over to WPEngine so get ready for a much faster experience with my blog!

Last, but certainly not least, Happy Mother’s Day to all the incredible Moms out there! Have a great weekend, now back to the flight!

(Photo Credit)

As you all know I’ve been a big fan of Protrada. What I like the most about this company is that they listen to their customers. Before launching I spent quite a while with them giving feedback and seeing different iterations of the platform. They are not set in their ways but instead are set in making something that people enjoy using.

The website-builder tool in Protrada builds great-looking sites that look absolutely nothing like a parked page. Couple in the ability to add your own ads with zero rev share, and easy options for adding unique content and I’m officially impressed. So I thought it would be fun to do a three-part video series showing people the process, step-by-step in developing a domain with Protrada.

Like any platform development system I believe you get out what you put in. If you just want to have 1,000 domains built-out and you don’t want to add any content, or make any tweaks yourself, I wouldn’t expect much results. It takes a LOT more than this to rank in Google and if you think clicking a button will get you ranked, think again. If however you customize a site, add high-quality unique content, build-up backlinks with valued partners, and promote through social media, there is absolutely the potential to build a real income-generating asset.

Enjoy the first video and as always feel free to share you comments below. Also make sure to bump this up to HD so you can get the best quality possible!

I don’t think that I’ve ever written a post about one specific WordPress theme before, but I think this one really does warrant a post. The theme is called Vantage and it’s from popular WordPress theme developers AppThemes. I have been following this theme for over a year now, ever since they put a preview of it on their site. So what is Vantage and why am I so excited about it?

Vantage is a Directory theme, and in typical AppThemes form it really is more than a theme, it’s a full featured Directory Platform that you can get up and running in minutes using WordPress. I have been using WooThemes Listings in the past but have found some limitations to this and after my previous experiences with AppThemes, I think they probably are the best to deliver the goods in this department.

Here’s a look at what the basic UI of the theme looks like:

As you can see the look-and-feel is top-notch and since AppThemes specializes specifically in themes that are full-featured apps the backend really is as perfect as you could get. I will be using this theme to run Kayaking.org v4 and my developer is going to start porting our directory over this week. I’ll let you all know once it’s up and running so you can take it for a spin, or paddle!

I have been using PHPMyDirectory for years but find that it is incredibly clunky and impossible for me or my users to use efficiently. So goodbye PHPMyDirectory and hello Vantage. I can’t wait to get this up and running!

This week I discovered something very interesting through my post about buying a domain name from one of my readers. In the post I asked for people to submit domains with over 1,000 exact-match local searches, most people clearly had no clue what I meant. What I discovered is that many (and by many I mean most) Domainers don’t seem to know the difference between broad and exact-match. This is incredibly dangerous for investors who think they are buying domains with lots of search volume, when really there is little or in many cases, none.

So what’s the big deal? I’ll tell you.

First let’s talk about the tool that you need to use if you want to understand search volume, there’s only one and it’s the gold standard, it’s called the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and it uses real data from Google. This is the only tool you should be using to get this data, many other tools on the web claim to estimate this but often they are just using Bing data and applying a random multiplier which doesn’t quite work.

Okay, now that you know the tool you should be using, what the heck is the difference between exact-match and broad-match, and why does it matter so much?

Exact-match search volume will show you how many people are searching for the keywords you enter. So if I input “buy insurance” it will show me how many people are searching for the words “buy insurance” on Google. Simple enough right?

Broad-match search volume does something completely different. It shows how many people are searching for the keywords I enter, and other “relevant variations”. So if I enter “buy insurance” it’s going to show me the aggregate search volume for “buy car insurance” “best insurance to buy” and the list goes on, and on, and on. This is why broad match is so much higher than exact match in so many cases because it is a zillion different combinations of words, only one of which is the exact keyword phrase you entered.

When it comes to Domain Development broad match doesn’t give you the slightest clue as to how much traffic you would get if you ranked well for the keywords in your domain. Instead broad match tells you how you’d rank for hundreds or thousands of other terms, all aggregated together. Getting on the first page of Google for all the gazillion different terms that broad-match takes into account really is impossible, you might be able to get on the first page for a handful of them, but that means you’re only getting a small percentage of that traffic.

So why is broad match checked by default?

The Google Adwords Keyword Tool was built for advertisers, and advertisers want to see big numbers because they want their campaigns to reach a larger audience. If I’m a big car insurance company I don’t just want to appear on the first page for “buy insurance” I want to be on the first page for anything slightly related to the concept of buying car insurance, and thus broad match is a great fit.

Sadly, what I found from my post this week as that so many new Domainers have names that match keywords with absolutely no search volume at all, but think they have names with tons of search volume. Chances are they’re trying to sell these names and not finding any buyers and then scratching their heads because they think the search volume is high…when it’s not.

You can get a domain that has a broad search volume of 100,000 on the first page of Google, heck let’s say the #1 spot and only get 10 visitors/month. This could happen because the exact match is only 20.

I don’t mean to burst anyone’s bubble here, but I know that I probably am. Better to learn this now rather than later when you’ve acquired an entire portfolio of junk right? So next time you go to buy a domain and you’re basing your decision on search volume, make sure you’re looking at exact-match otherwise you could be growing your collection, rather than your investments.

Rick Latona is one of those people that isn’t afraid to try new things and innovate in spaces that few people have entered. From building one of the top brokerage companies in the domain space to creating a number of successful businesses in other niches, Rick is always looking for great opportunities. Now, Rick has embarked on a new adventure that is seeing some incredible success.

Rick left the world of domain sales behind and has pioneered a service that truly is the first of it’s kind. Latonas has turned-into a full-scale platform for buying and selling web properties. Of course when Rick does something, he goes big, these aren’t mini-sites brining in a few bucks a month, these are real businesses bringing in passive income.

Last week Rick and I had a quick call to catch-up and after a few minutes I realized that I had to interview him for the blog. Since so many of my readers are interested in developing their own names or buying income-generating property themselves this seemed like a perfect fit. As you know, I don’t do interviews on here often so when I do I make sure they are highly valuable and relevant to you, my readers! And with that let’s take a step-into Rick’s world:

(Morgan) How does selling websites differ from selling domains?

(Rick)They have little in common. The differences are so many that they would be impossible to list but I’ll highlight the biggest ones.

Most domain brokers would agree that there are a few buyers that make up a majority of their business. It isn’t even fair to say there’s an 80:20 rule. It’s more like a 98:2 rule where 2 percent of the buyers make up 98% of the sales.

With developed revenue generating websites, it’s the other way around. We deal with new buyers on a daily basis. This makes the management of relationships more intricate but it’s a wonderful problem to have. I get so excited when over and over again we sell a site to a “new” customer. That rarely happens in domains.

The closing cycles are long. Due diligence is everything. Latona’s offers a dedicated broker service and we walk the buyers and sellers through every step of the process. Sometimes coming to agreement on price and terms is easy, often it can be very complicated. The offers are rarely straightforward (e.g. I’ll pay $x for the site). More often than not, there are terms and conditions that both parties have to agree to (e.g. seller providing support for x months).

Likewise, sometimes it’s easy to transfer and move the sites, affiliate accounts and other assets but other times it can be a long and drawn out affair.

In summary, the reason I’m telling you about the closing cycles and the large pool of active buyers is that it all comes down to high quality salespeople and sales management.

With domains, anyone can have a newsletter. Just send out an email and people reply saying they’ll buy the domains. With websites, it’s much more complicated.

Our brokers have to use every tool available to them and be very organized and efficient. We use salesforce.com’s enterprise edition as well as Chatter which is sort of an internal facebook which is used to keep track of deals and activities. So, when someone is talking to a buyer or seller, it updates their “wall” and the other brokers as well as management can “like” the activity to follow the progress.

(Morgan) Is your typical buyer also a Domain Investor or someone completely different?

(Rick) More often than not it’s someone completely different but I hope to bring more domain investors over to our side. There’s a lot of opportunity. Buy cash flow!

I understand that most domain investors are worried about the risks associated with buying a developed site that relies on Google search results. I have mathematical formulas that can help them make the right decisions on what to offer to mitigate that risk. I encourage both the curious and the interested to contact us. I’d be happy to do a one on one conference call with any one of your readers to explain our spreadsheets that we use to calculate values.

To give you a little more insight into our pool of buyers I can share this list. Internally, we classify buyers into three categories:

• Strategic
• These are what domainers would call “end-users”. They are the companies in the Insurance business that would be interested in buying sites in the Insurance vertical. The sites are a “strategic” fit.
• Cash Flow Investors
• These buyers are assembling cash flow. They are focused primarily on their internal rate of return and the ease of management of the website.
• Network Players
• These are primarily SEO firms but can take on many different personalities. They are companies that have huge networks of sites that all support each other. So they’ll have an insurance site, a mortgage site, a weight-loss site, etc.

(Morgan) What category/niche are you finding to sell the best?

(Rick) You’ve just identified another difference between domains and websites. There are two ways to look at categories. Is Insurance a category or is lead gen?

At Latona’s we break them down by revenue streams or verticals. The latter is what you are used to in the domain business. For example, insurance is a vertical. Mortgages are a vertical.

Most of our buyers are focused on the nature of the revenue stream. For instance, cash flow investors are often looking for AdSense sites or sites that operate on clicks alone. There are many companies besides Google in the space. Insurance sites use SureHits, etc. Network sites are often looking for ecommerce or lead generation sites, etc.

If you go to Latona’s, you can filter by both revenue stream and vertical. This image below shows the active filters as both “insurance” and “lead gen”:

(Morgan) How do your sale prices compare to Flippa sales?

(Rick) Flippa is a great company and we work closely with them. I have nothing bad to say about them but we are in two different businesses. They are a marketplace, much like eBay. Latona’s is a brokerage firm. We provide dedicated brokers, we review and verify stats, we ensure a secure transaction and we provide transfer guidance.

Our total sales numbers are probably very similar but they do far more deals. We prefer to do fewer deals but bigger deals.

The only other thing I’ll say on the matter is that Latona’s has an average sales price of $87,600. We feel that is high.

(Morgan) What is the best piece of advice you have for someone that wants to build a revenue-generating site?

(Rick) Don’t build. Buy. Ha! I know that sounds self serving but honestly, if you don’t know what you are doing already or how to build a site, it’s probably better to buy one. More than anything, it takes time for a site to get established. Buy an established site and arrange for the seller to stay on as a consultant if necessary.

(Morgan) You’re always on the cutting-edge, anything to share as far as trends we should all look for in 2012?

(Rick) Thank you for what I will take as a compliment. Unfortunately, I don’t have all the answers. Sometimes I’m on the bleeding edge which is worse than being on the cutting edge. I’ve been wrong often but with the trend towards buyer, selling and trading in developed sites, it looks so far like I was right on this one. Being that it’s all still in its infancy, it’s hard for me to say the trend is any different than what I’m currently focused on.

(Photo Credit: DNJournal)

Whether you are a seasoned SEO Pro or just getting started in the world of search, link-building tools are critical to your success. The days of gaming search engines has come to an end, all those advantages that geeks have had for years, is gone, in the new era of SEO the playing field is level, as long as you have the right tools.

At the core of SEO is link-building, getting links from high-quality sources on the web. Search engines like Google and Bing use these links back to your site as a key determinant of rank. The more high-quality sources linking back to you the better you will rank.

This is great for some people that are doing big things and getting coverage in major online new sources, but what about everyone else? Link research is all about understanding your market and what links are the most valuable to you. It’s not just about looking at your own links, but looking at where links to your top competitors are coming from as well.

Link research tools give you a window into the top-ranking sites in your niche so you can see what links  are giving them the most juice. You can also see how your link profile grows and evolves and make sure you’re maximizing every opportunity.

Okay, so now you understand why link research tools are important, so let me share my three favorites:

1. Majestic SEO – this is in the #1 spot for a reason. Majestic really has become a mainstay in the SEO world. You can view your link profile along with a velocity that shows how long it takes you to build backlinks for a site. The best part is you can start using it for free and then move up to one of the paid premium packages later on.

2. Raven – when it comes to managing all your links Raven takes the cake. You can easily identify opportunities and assign tasks to team members making this great for businesses that have more than one person working on their SEO efforts. Also the people at Raven are pretty cool too so I give them bonus points for that as well!

3. Open Site Explorer – this was the first link resource tool I ever used and it will always have a special place in my heart. Too sappy? Don’t forget I’ve been doing this since the mid-90s so I used many of these tools when they first hit the market! Open Site Explorer is an awesome tool that is fantastic for competitive analysis and really understanding which links are giving the most juice to your competitors.

If you’ve been procrastinating on your SEO strategy take the time to get started with one of these tools today. You can start for free with all three of these and by just identifying a few good links you could see the kind of progress you’ve been looking for.

Affiliate Programs are a great way to generate more revenue per visitor than PPC while delivering products that your customers want. There are two ways to go about adding affiliate products to your site, you can do it manually or you can use something called a Data Feed. Most people start-out in the affiliate space by copying and pasting code over and over, and over again. It can be tedious and if a product gets updated or removed you have no way of knowing.

Then there’s Data Feeds, the Holy Grail of the Affiliate Marketing world, okay maybe I’m being a bit dramatic so let’s just say that Data Feeds are a big deal.

What Is A Data Feed?

A Data Feed is a way for website owners to access and receive updates to data sources. In this case, the data source is the inventory of products that a company is selling through their affiliate program. Here’s an example, let’s suppose you run a site that sell widgets, yes I know, we all love widgets. So you find an affiliate program that offers thousands of widgets and you start spending thousands of hours adding these widgets to your site…stop right there, this is where Data Feeds come in.

Rather than copying and pasting the code to add each widget to your site one-by-0ne, Data Feeds allow you to import hundreds or thousands of products and easily add them to your site. Then, if the company providing the products makes changes to their product offerings, this will automatically update on your site.

If you go to a show like Affiliate Summit you will hear the term Data Feed like it’s going out of style, and for good reason, many super affiliates use Data Feeds as a core part of their monetization strategy. Just think about it, if you have a site that sells digital cameras and you’re using the affiliate program for an online camera store, you are likely to find thousands of cameras, which could means hundreds of hours of copying and pasting code. Then a few cameras are removed from their inventory and your site is suddenly out of date with no real way of knowing.

Data Feeds save time but also give affiliate marketers the chance to build more than just a few pages of products, they can build entire custom affiliate stores tailored to their specific customers.

How Can You Add Data Feeds To Your Site?

There are really two ways to add Data Feeds to your site; if you’re a developer you can write some code to add the Data Feeds, there are ways to do this with PHP that should be a snap for any web coding gurus. Of course many people aren’t programmers themselves and lucky for all of you there are some very cool tools out there that will allow you to build an affiliate store using Data Feeds without writing a single line of code.

The two options that I recommend are: PopShops and Datafeedr. PopShops is great for anyone that wants to integrate an affiliate store directly into an existing site. It allows you to easily add products to your store and then just copy and paste a code snippet onto your site. Datafeedr on the other hand is a plugin for WordPress so is great for anyone that is running their affiliate store on WordPress. Like PopShops you create your store using Datafeedr and then integrate it into your site using their plugin.

Both of these options are easy to get started with and integrate with just about every affiliate program under the sun. If you are currently offering a handful of affiliate products on your store and have been waiting to launch a full-scale store, Data Feeds are the way to do it. While they may seem intimidating at first, the amount of time they save you in the long-run is huge. Couple this with the fact that you can offer your visitors a wider range of products and update and remove products automatically and you can see why Data Feeds are so powerful.

So there you have it, and introduction to Data Feeds. As always I always love to hear from you, my reader. If you have a question, ask it! If you have experience with Data Feeds and want to share some of your own advice, do it! Comment and let your voice be heard!

As a Domain Investor there are many different ways to make money. I started-out completely focused on development and monetization, and have seen my business grown layering things like domain sales and consulting. On the development-side of the house my team focuses on building-out 3-5 sites/month, while managing our core brands that make up a majority of our monthly revenue.

While we typically stay-away from trend domains, sometimes we get lucky or find something that we think might be worth the investment. We learned a long time ago that while trends may peak and die out, they never go away completely. We have sites comfortably making $xxx/month on trends that went away more than four years ago! Still that being said we have also built-out plenty of trend domains that haven’t made a dime, but you don’t know if you don’t try. These are a gamble for us and represent less than 5% of the investments we make, but it’s a small investment and has been well worth it over the years.

Yesterday I found that the #1 trending topic related to Apple – Flashback Virus was available in .COM. This is the exact keyword phrase talked about on CNN, Fox News, The Huffington Post, and many many more. The trend domains we’ve done the best with in the past are those that exactly match the main trending term that is used in all the news headlines and on TV. Like I said, even when the trend goes away, we’ve had some great names continue to make money for years and years. Of course don’t expect all your trend domains to hit, and don’t build a business around trend domains, but building out a small percentage can be a great way to generate passive income.

You can see the site in the screenshot above and of course visit it by going to FlashbackVirus.com. I spent a total of $58 on the development of this site thanks to my awesome team and a very tight end-to-end process we’ve developed. The total amount of time I spent on this project was about five minutes when I actually bought the domain and sent my team leader the email. The team had this site up and running by the evening along with the corresponding Twitter account, Twitter.com/FlashbackVirus.

Will this site make a fortune? Maybe it will, if not, no big deal, it’s a total of $66 if you count the registration itself. Like I said, don’t make trend domains your main business, but it only takes $66 in revenue to make this baby profitable and from that point on it’s all profit. These aren’t nearly as fun as the larger brands that we build but it’s all part of building a diverse portfolio.

As always I’ll keep all of you updated as time goes. Feel free to ask any questions or share any comments you have. Comment and let your voice be heard!

One of the most critical pieces of an SEO campaign is rank monitoring, looking at how changes you make to your site impact it in search. The problem I’ve always found is that even some of my favorite tools like SEOMoz only provide updates once a week. Ranking change more than once a week so if you’re only looking weekly, you are missing-out on some very valuable data.

That’s where Authority Labs comes in. They have build a very slick tool that allows you to monitor your website rankings on a daily basis. All you have to do is enter your domain and then provide the keywords you want to track, the tool takes it from there. Below is a sample of what your account might look like once you’re up and running and have a good number of names sites loaded in:

(Click image for full size)

As you can see, the platform will keep track of your rankings in Google, Yahoo, and Bing (although Yahoo and Bing are really the same) and report daily how your overall ranking across the terms you picked to monitor. Once you click on a specific site you can see the rankings for each individual term and the change day over day:

(Click image for full size)

Whether you are running one site, or one hundred sites monitoring your placement in search engines is critical. Authority Labs takes it to the next level by offering rank monitoring on a daily basis. The interface is nice and easy to use and the setup is a snap. Also I was pretty excited to be able to get morgan.authoritylabs.com, but maybe that’s just the Domainer inside me!

If you haven’t checked-out Authority Labs yet, you should, this is an SEO tool you should know about.

So you’ve built a site, you think it’s perfect, and you release it for all the world to see. You’re getting traffic, rankings are growing, but people just aren’t going to the places on your site you expect them to go. As I’ve said many times before, there’s a lot more to running a brand than simply having an operational website, that’s really just step one (or step two if you went through a process to get the domain).

Your brand is a business so you should always be doing everything you can to understand what visitors do when they come to your site, and how you can optimize the experience to increase conversions. I’ve been using Heatmaps and Overlays for years to better understand how users interact with my site and improve conversion rates.

Kayaking.org is a brand we’ve been doing a lot of tuning on over the last year and CrazyEgg has been a good friend of ours. One of the items we have been working hard to optimize is the image in the very center of our site. As you can see from the Heatmap below we still don’t have it right, people are clicking, but we want to find something that makes people go nuts and turn that center graphic into our most-clicked location. Of course these means a lot of experimentation and taking the time to test something out for a month to see how users respond.

One item we have optimized is that top link. We found-out what was most important to our visitors, namely, choosing a kayak, and we put it at the very top. As you can see from the Heatmap, it is getting the attention we expected, but our poor little image ni the center isn’t getting enough love, so we’ll continue to tweak, tune, and test, using Heatmaps and Overlays to help us interpret the data.

If you are building a brand conversion rate is something that should be going through your head at all times. The higher your conversion rate the better job you’re doing of delivering what your customers want, and of course a nice fringe benefit to that is, more revenue, which is always good. CrazyEgg is not a sponsor of my blog and I don’t know a soul over there, I do use their product just about every single day and highly recommend it for anyone looking to better understand how their visitors interact with their site.