Rick Latona announced AEIOU 2.0 this week and I think the shockwaves from this news are still resonating through the Domaining community. First I’d like to say this is an absolutely brilliant move by a incredible mind and leader in the Domaining world. While to some this may just look like the second edition of his development company – the fundamental change he is making will impact the Domaining world forever – and at a great point in time too!
With AEIOU 2.0 Rick now offers much more than a Minisite – he offers clients the chance to build a web directory, Amazon or eBay commerce site, squeeze page, geo site, or info site. Rather than creating the simple informational minisite Rick allows investors to finally create a site that can monetize from more than just Adsense.
For those who are familiar with my company, Linton Investments, you know that we spend a lot of time developing sites. While some of the sites we build are minisites, many are full-scale websites and we have seen that these sites can monetize very very well.
Over the past few months I’ve started to focus more and more on developing full-scale websites rather than minisites – and the ROI is already evident. This month I have been building Translate.co.in as a major translation website for the Indian market. I launched Tweetn.net last month – a new blog about Twitter. In May I also launched TweetCourse.com – a four part course that teaches beginners how to use Twitter. Not only have I found these projects to be more rewarding than building minisites – they have been more lucrative as well.
As many of you know – blogs can rank well in search engines very quickly. Tweetn is already receiving a nice steady stream of traffic and TweetCourse is selling well in its first month on the market. Yes – these projects take time, but at the end of the day if you believe in your domain then you can do much more with it than a simple minisite.
Rick has very reasonable price-points and offers investors a way to turn their domains into online destinations that can rank well in search engines and grow much faster than a minisite ever could.
So save the date folks because you just might remember June 16th as the day the MiniSite died. In the end this is a huge benefit to web users and domain investors alike and it takes a real pioneer like Rick to make a move like this!
Let me know what you think! Is the minisite dead?
Everything is evolving and this is the natural evolution. Rick is leading the way and others will follow. Prices will drop as competition grows into this newer market.
When domain parking revenue died off, mini-sites were step one in this evolution. This is step two and a real advancement.
Now we need to fully develop, to their potential, our geo sites, our niche product domains, our affiliate domains, etc.
Looks like very exciting development times ahead!
Paul