I read a Tech Crunch article about Anna Chapman, a woman who was recently arrested for allegedly being a Russian spy in the United States. The Tech Crunch article writes that Chapman is the founder of the New York real estate search engine website, NYCRentals.com. She is shown in the embedded video discussing her company, and TC reports that the video was filmed during New York Entrepreneur Week, which was held April 12th-16th, 2010.

When I saw this domain name mentioned, my eyes grew bigger because I recognized the name. According to a Whois history search, the domain name was transferred to Moniker Privacy Service sometime around June 22, 2010. I don’t want to mention who the previous owner was because it’s very likely he had nothing to do with the buyer.

Perhaps a telling line from the video was when Chapman mentioned, “we are trying to do NYCRentals.com” in response to the interviewer’s mention of her corporate entity known as Property Finder. When the video was filmed in April, the domain name had not yet changed hands.

Interestingly, the domain name was just listed in Ron Jackson’s recent domain sales report, which was published a couple of weeks ago. The domain name sold through Moniker for a reported $25,350, good enough to place #11 on the weekly sales list, and probably good enough to rank as one of the highest yearly domain sales.

It appears that this business hadn’t been around very long, and Chapman certainly didn’t own the domain name until recently.

Hope you’re having a nice Sunday. I am off for a long bike ride today… just a couple weeks until my 5 Boro Bike Tour, and my wife and I are just a few hundred dollars away from our goal for the Ronald McDonald House.

Lowell.com was finally relaunched a few days ago, and a number of bugs have been fixed and/or are being fixed. One thing I did to find errors was put out a request on Twitter and Facebook. I got quite a lot of feedback from people who are interested in the site (including the information that my current logo was liked and another logo wasn’t favored). In addition, a number of people have signed up to post articles.

Here is some information about the new Lowell.com website so you can be inspired or be helped with your own development projects:

• People can sign up and post articles, events, and/or comments. This will add content to the site and hopefully increase traffic and pageviews. It’s also helpful to people in the community who are now more easily able to promote their news and events to an audience of over 10,000 visitors per month.

• My developer used a plugin called “The Events Calendar” which is fantastic! The only issue I am having now is that events seem to fall off the home page before they start. I’ve checked the server clock and WordPress clock on site, and all are working fine. This is something I need to fix.

• I also need to fix the Yet Another Related Post Plugin, as it’s not showing up on Pages.

• Advertisers will be able to sign up for business listings in the same way dog walkers can on DogWalker.com. Listings will automatically renew in a year, and their Paypal account will auto-pay in a year. This is so I don’t need a representative in the area.

• Banners, hotel listings, and restaurant listings will all be manually managed by me. The Lowell Courtyard by Marriott. has agreed to continue with a monthly banner, and the Radisson Hotel signed up last week, so things are off to a pretty good start (no, I didn’t offer them a discount rate or freebie to get them on site).

• I am using Adsense in the top banner spot and one of the side banners, although these can easily be replaced by local advertisers if/when they are interested. The Adsense banners are earning somewhere around $5/day right now despite the fact that traffic has gone done in the last few weeks.

• This is obvious, but make sure you test your newly developed websites with all commonly used Internet browsers. Make sure you test all parts of the site, especially if you use different plugins.

• One of the nicest thing about this site is that I can now basically replicate the platform on Newburyport.com for relatively little expense since I paid for the foundation with Lowell.com’s development. Since Newburyport is about 45 minutes from Lowell and is a tourist locale in the summer, I think these two sites will work well together. The only issue is the time commitment required to run another site like this… I might finally have to relent and hire someone full time to work with me.

• I ran into some major issues with hosting, the htaccess file, and assorted other related bugs. Ultimately, things worked out after quite a bit of time troubleshooting with Liquid Web and my developer, but it was still a challenge none the less. I think this is probably the biggest hurdle I faced since I am not really knowledgeable about these technical issues.

• As with most of my other development projects, I used Six One Five Design for the development work. Mike is still working on a few things, but I think it’s nearly finished.

As you may or may not be aware, my designer and I are in the middle of re-designing Lowell.com. The new website will be on a much better content management system, and that will allow visitors to submit news and calendar events, create advertisements manually, and post comments on articles. The new site will be much more user friendly.

Well… what’s a new website without a new logo?  Please have a look at the 5 logo typefaces below and let me know which you like best. The site is nearly ready to be re-launched, and this is one of the final elements I saved for last. The color will change (of course), but this is just the base font choices.

Although I believe a great domain name can help catapult a company’s website over others in search engine rankings, I believe the content on the site is as important when a person develops it. Owning Lowell.com and having the Lowell Spinners section at Lowell.com/lowell-spinners.php probably helps my website’s rankings (although the second “lowell” may be overkill”), it’s the good and fresh content that continues to drive people to the site during the season.

If your content isn’t accurate, some people may not even notice, and it’s just a bit of a disservice to them which they won’t realize until they bet a friend at a party and turn out to be wrong. Others who are experts on the topic, the people who might want to advertise on the site for example, will think it’s unprofessional if there are many errors. At best, they will send you a small email to point out your inaccuracies. At worst, they won’t return to your site and won’t contact you about advertising.

It’s also imperative that the content is unique to your site. Sure, a city’s history doesn’t change, but they way it’s presented should be unique to your website. Facts are facts, but oftentimes, one site leaves off some facts and each site’s information is different. Research is important to get facts correct, and that can mean researching a variety of trusted websites and offline sources for the correct information. Oftentimes, it can be as easy as calling on an expert to get the information. This is time consuming and expensive, but it’s well worth it.

Tomorrow, I will provide some insight in to hiring a good copywriter and preventing plagiarism/content theft. A domain name, cool web design, and great SEO are all very helpful to driving traffic, but good and unique content will keep visitors returning for a long time.

Most companies and their brand managers prefer their brand name over a generic domain name, after all, they are called BRAND MANAGERS!  The brand helps them stand out from their competitors, and they know (well, hope) their customers will remember the brand name when walking the aisles at Walmart or searching the shelves at Best Buy, or some other retail shop.

Many of the world’s large brands can afford to spend billions or millions on marketing to ensure everyone remembers their company name. They buy television commercials, sponsor the biggest sporting and other televised events, pay for stadium and building naming rights, send billions of direct mail pieces, rent billboards along the highway, have extensive Internet marketing campaigns, and do a whole host of other things to make sure customers and potential customers know who they are – maybe even more than what they actually do.

When a company chooses a unique brand name over a generic domain name, they are missing a big piece of the puzzle – Google/Bing/Yahoo/Ask searches. Sure, a company can pay for search engine marketing campaigns, but organic search results are much less expensive, and they don’t require the same amount of money for constant upkeep, although a great website is costly. SEM costs a lot of money, and if you stop, the traffic will stop coming as well.

Keyword domain names generally perform better than non-keyword domain names when it comes to search engine results for the searched keyword, especially with Bing. When people search for a specific product, and they either don’t know the brand they want or simply want a comparison of brands, they would probably type the product name in Google or search engine of choice.

In fact, have a look at some Google search comparisons of brands names vs the generic name (Global Monthly Search Volume, exact match). You’ll see that although the brands sometimes to get more search volume, there is still a significant number of people that don’t look for brands – they look for products.

Candy: 1,220,000
Hershey: 90,500

Cell Phones: 1,500,000
Verizon Wireless: 3,350,000

Mountain Bikes: 301,000
Trek: 368,000

Vodka: 368,000
Grey Goose: 74,000

This isn’t scientific at all, but it shows that many people either aren’t satisfied with a particular brand or they would like to see some sort of comparison, to get an idea of their options (ie Bing is “the decision engine”). If a generic domain name is well-developed, it will rank right up there organically, allowing the company to capture a significant amount of that search traffic (at no incremental cost). They can compete with the big brands at much less ongoing cost, aside from website upkeep.

With Lowell.com, about 20% of my traffic is type-in traffic. I am sure this percentage is much higher on an established brand like Verizon or Apple. However, there will always be a significant percentage of people who find the website via Google, and many of them are searching for generic search terms, as witnessed above. If a company owns top rankings for a well-searched generic term, they might not need to spend millions on brand marketing, since the consumer might find what they want simply by seeing the meta tags and trusting the generic brand.

If a company owns the generic term, they can build a site on that domain name ala Toys.com, and either brand the generic domain name or make sure there is easy access to get to the main brand. Doing this can help both websites rank for the generic term, rather than just taking one out of commission by forwarding the type in traffic, since a forward rather than a stand alone website will probably remove it from Google and other search engines.

In my opinion, when it comes to Internet marketing, a generic domain name can handily beat a known brand at a fraction of the cost.