One year ago today, I was working as a Direct Marketing Manager at AIG in the Domestic Brokerage Group, while managing my domain investment business in the evening. I had a great job where I learned quite a bit about direct marketing, but my heart wasn’t into what I was doing. I wanted to pursue my domain investment business full time, and I wasn’t my happy self.

A little over a month later, on October 17, 2007, I tendered my resignation. On that day in October, AIG stock closed at $65.80/share on the New York Stock Exchange – which was up from the $49/share range it had been a few months before, during the tumultous times when AIG was being investigated by New York AG Eliot Spitzer.  People believed that the company was strong and getting stronger. The investigation had made AIG more of a transparent company, which was good for everyone – so they thought and said.

Thankfully, I made what turned out to be a smart decision when I resigned. With the current fate of AIG still unknown (and some even suggesting they may face failure tomorrow), I am very thankful to have had the great opportunity to work for AIG for 2 and a half years, but I am even more thankful to have left.  I am still feeling the pain of the plummeting stock price as I hold some shares, but I am not worried about losing my job. I feel badly for my colleagues at AIG, some who spent tens of years at the company.

I think Americans and corporate America became greedy these last few years. With banks and financial instutions giving loans and credit lines to anyone with a pulse, many Americans took advantage of this and now can hardly afford the overpriced homes where they live.  “Bigger is better” is certainly the motto of many who bought the biggest homes and cars they couldn’t afford. “Real estate never loses value” is another mantra that people had in their heads when signing huge mortgage papers that ballooned in a couple years and required little money down.  Financial instutions aren’t being reimbursed for these ugly mortgages, loans and lines of credit, and they too are now suffering.

Even those smart enough to not mortgage themselves to the hilt or put themselves in debt are facing problems or will face problems. The Federal Reserve will probably deflate the value of the dollar by helping to bail these companies out, or the federal government will raise taxes, impacting those who are doing well financially because they were smart.

All in all, this is a pretty bad day for everyone, but I am just glad I made the decision I did almost a year ago.

Full-scale development like PalmSprings.com or PigeonForge.com can be very rewarding, but it is also time consuming. These are full businesses, and they should be treated like full businesses with developers, marketing specialists, sales staff and office staff – either on the payroll or in a freelance position depending on the website and management company. These sites are difficult to develop and grow, but they are certainly rewarding once the strong foundation is built.

Some people don’t want to have those responsibilities even though they have good domain names, and there are opportunities for geodomain development on a smaller scale. If you have a strong geodomain name (.com, .net, .info…etc) but an actual city name, I would like to recommend a few steps to launching a scaled down version of a geowebsite that will have less upfront costs, and it will be similar to what I did for Secaucus.com – which I continue to build out every day.

1) Do keyword research to see what people are looking for in the city (directions, weather, hotels, restaurants, homes…etc)
2) Contact a domain development service, find a nice free template, or create your own design template
3) Find photos of the city using a royalty-free stock photo site or Creative Commons site like Wikipedia
4) Write several articles targeting the keywords you found for your research
5) Place your articles in your template and add meta description, keywords, and titles to target those keywords and keyword variations
6) Add Adsense or other monetization option if desired
7) Add Google webmaster tools tag to your site and make sure it’s included in Google, Yahoo, MSN…etc.
Contact related websites asking for link exchanges
9) Contact local businesses offering inexpensive advertising placement

I’ve found that one of the biggest drivers to my geowebsites is mentioning local businesses. For example, if you add free listings for lawyers in the area, some people will find your site when searching for that lawyer. As I’ve been told, however, it’s much more difficult to get an advertiser to pay for a listing once they’ve received it for free. If you plan to build your site into a larger site down the road, this might not be a good option.

While I believe a fully developed site is of much more value, some smaller towns or non-touristy towns may not bring a huge return if they are fully developed. Building a mini-site can be a better option to build traffic to the site and bring a nice return – especially if you have a non-.com that wasn’t as expensive as the crown jewel .com. By adding pages daily, you are increasing the reach of your site at a convenient pace. Sometimes building a huge website can sound daunting, but if you do it slowly, it may be more rewarding.

When people are selling domain names, I frequently see them quoting the Wordtracker daily searches for the domain’s keyword phrase as well as the number of pages there are in Google that have that keyword or keyword phrase. It’s often thought that the higher the number of daily searches and the higher number of Google results, the more valuable that keyword domain name is. This is just theory here, but I think the ratio of daily searches to # of Google results is a better indicator of value for someone that wants to develop the domain name.

The more daily searches a keyword phrase (“painting contractor” for example), the more value a name like PaintingContractor.com is.  If people are searching for that term, not only are some of them probably typing  PaintingContractor.com into their browser bar, but the greater chance this domain name will be relevant to more people.  A generic domain name is valuable because there are people who want to find that generic term. Some will type the term into their browser (with a .com) while many others will search Google for that term, and hopefully your site will come up in the top 5 or 10 results to attract the attention of the searcher.

I would argue that the old way of thinking – the more Google results for the phrase the better – is actually not really that great for the value of the domain name. Sure, the more results there are usually means that more people are interested in that topic – and that more people are writing about it and covering it on their websites. With more interest in the topic, the value should be higher.  However, to a developer, the more interest in the topic usually also means the more difficult it will be to rank in Google. The lower a website ranks, the less traffic it will receive, making it more difficult to generate revenue.

That said, I believe the ratio of daily searches to Google results is important to consider.  “Painting Contractor” has a WordTracker count of 367, and there are 896,000 Google results for “painting contractor,” which would be strong compared to “Flooring Contractor” which boasts a WordTracker count of 19 and has 309,000 Google results. The more searches with less results in Google means a website will likely have an easier time ranking at the top of the results, meaning more traffic.

I don’t think this will become a commonly quoted ratio due to the actual size of the result (.000405), but I do think people should at least consider this when researching a domain name. It’s great that people are searching for a particular keyword or keyword phrase, but if the SE competition will relegate your developed domain name to the second page of Google or lower, it’s probably worth less than a similar domain name in a less competitive category (assuming PPC values are similar).

This post will be reevaluated once the weekend haze wears off.  I spent the weekend at a friend’s wedding, which is where I thought about this   More time needs to be spent analyzing this theory, but I think I am onto something.