Weekend Musings + One Nugget From WEBfest

It has been an incredibly busy week with WEBfest in town and I have lots of reflections to share with you over the coming week. Altogether another great year for the conference and quite possibly the busiest I’ve been at a conference yet. I was only able to make it to a few talks otherwise I was in meetings pretty much non-stop all three days.

Oversee did a great job getting together a solid group of people and I think it is so valuable to get together with the whole industry in the beginning of the year. That being said, I do think this year did show me the importance of going to both TRAFFIC and WEBfest as not all people attend both conferences. I think TRAFFIC in October was a great way to end 2012 and WEBfest is a great way to start2013. Many people ask me which they should attend and I usually answer – both.

One of the highlights of the week was Water Night which was a huge success bringing over 250 people together and raising a very nice donation for The Water School. Richard Lau, the Executive Director fo the Water School lost his hair that night with GGG manning the clippers as per usual.

RichardLau_Headshave

The shot above is one of the last photos taken while Richard still had his hair, as you can see from the shot below I’m proud to introduce Lau v2 🙂

MorganLinton_RichardLau_WaterNight

Like most people at the show I’m still playing catch-up as conferences do tend to take up morning, afternoon, night, and then some! I have already seen a few emails asking me for highlights and tips/tricks from the conference so I thought it would only be fair to share one nice nugget from the show.

As you all know I like to talk, a lot, and I end up talking with a lot of people. I also love to spot trends, to see how people are changing or adapting their business to changes in the dynamics of the industry. This is one of the best things about a conference, you can openly discuss your business and learn from others running similar businesses. Through these conversations you get a lot of nice nuggets, using even a few of these could transform your business in the year to come…of course learning something is one thing, putting it into practice is something very different.

GoldNugget

So here’s your nugget. One of the big trends I noticed was an increased focus on doing a great job of developing and monetizing one to two domains rather than one hundred, two hundred or more as many investors have been trying to do for years. Many people have realized that one or two solid money makers can often be much more lucrative and easy to manage than trying to effectively run hundreds of websites. Google certainly has had an impact here but it is clear that Domainers know that exact match domains are still a good bet, but low quality content will no longer fly.

The nugget that you should take away from this is that if you currently have an endlessly long list of names you plan to develop this year think long and hard about what you are doing. Is there one site in there that you could make a champion? Would you feel a bit less overwhelmed if you weren’t trying to do 10,000 things at once? Sometimes less is more, and in Domaining I think that is frequently true.

More to come but right now it’s Saturday night and time for a movie! I hope you are all enjoying your weekend, stay tuned next week for my reflections on WEBfest and my usual adventures in Domaining!

Photo Credit: frau-Vogel via Compfight cc

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton