Trend Domaining: EconomicStimulus.tv

With 2009 in full swing and our goals set we are moving quickly to start on the multitude of projects for the year. This week with Obama entering office there have been a number of trends that have been getting hotter. One trend we have actively followed is Stimulus Checks and Economic Stimulus Checks. The term "economic stimulus" started to get used more and more after the inauguration and now on Google there are over seven million results for "economic stimulus."

Google search popularity is one of the major ways we gauge the popularity of a trend. In general we look for domains that return over 1 million results on Google for the domain name (or keywords) in quotes. Thus if your domain name is "happysticks.com" we would look for the popularity of "happy sticks" in Google. "Economic Stimulus" returned around 2 million results when we first purchased the domain EconomicStimulus.tv, now it returns over 4.5 million results – this is a good indicator that this trend is getting hot. Another important thing to look for is sponsored ads on the side. If people are willing to pay money for your search terms then good search engine placement is definitely valuable for your domain. "Economic Stimulus" has active Google ads on the side and many prominent sites on the first page like CNN and Wikipedia. Think of these powerful websites as your main opstacles. These will be the hardest to outrank, let's be honest, impossible to outrank within your wildest dreams. Remember, thought, if you can't beat them – join them! When CNN reports a story on the economic stimulus plan we'll add a link to it – it creates more content for our visitors which is always the goal of our flips. Once we've verified that a trend has been identified we start work on the flip. This is what we like to call a v1 flip and is the first version of our flipped site. The goal of a v1 flip is to test the waters, see what kind of organic traffic the site gets, and how much revenue it can generate. Domain Flipping is a lot like fishing. You need to throw your line in the water a few times and make sure there's fish before settling down for the day. Our v1 flip allows us to get a good feel for the available market without having to spend weeks developing a full-scale website. Instead our v1 flips focus on providing a concise useful content that a majority of our visitors are most likely to be looking for. This is a very different concept from parking where the goal is to simply provide your visitor with links to click on. Our v1 flips usually provide exactly what our users are looking for along with Google Adsense and oftentimes other forms of monetization. With EconomicStimulus.tv we knew that our visitors would be looking for one of two things; how to claim a stimulus check from 2008, and what is Obama planning for 2009. Once we know the main information a visitor is looking for we begin the research stage of our flip. We scour the net reading as many resources as possible and becomming "instant" experts on our category. There is a lot of information about the economic stimulus plan in 2008 as well as plenty of new stories about Obama's plans for 2009. Turn on CNBC, every five minutes someone mentions "economic stimulus" – these two words are Hot.With a good understanding of what our visitors are looking for we write the content for the site focusing on the two main reasons a visitor will come to the site. Quality content is key to ranking well on Google and frequent use of high-volume keywords will help you rank better across multiple search queries. It took a total of one hour to write the content for the site – there are lots of eager content writers you can hire on services like DNForum if you aren't too keen on writing the content yourself. Next I wrote the HTML (yes I'm old-school and still code by hand) and created the color scheme and graphics for the site. Once everything is complete we rigorously test the site to make sure that all links are active, adsense working, and email forum functioning properly. Now to cast our line. We don't try to list the domain in every search engine under the sun. In fact if you're on Google, Yahoo, and MSN then you are on what over 90% of web visitors use to search. We focus on listing our domains in Google and Yahoo – Google is and should always be the main focus as it accounts for over 70% of online search traffic. I will report back in a few weeks and let you know how things develop. The line is in the water – let's see how many fish are there!

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Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton