David Beckham - Not worth making a site about

As soon as something becomes news worthy, all domains related to it quickly gets registered. When David Beckham signed for a US soccer team, it didn’t take long before every LA Galaxy or Beckham related domain got registered. For the ones claiming good domains, this might be a lucrative business, but for most webmasters, it will only add to the expenses. If you are going to target a big event, a big news story or certain areas of the movie and music industry, be sure to register your domain(s) well ahead of time, don’t be the one ending up with www.DavidBeckhamGoestoLA-WithHisFamily.ws or anything similar.

Those who can profit on crappy domain names are almost always highly experienced affiliate marketers, or just darn lucky. It takes a fair amount of knowledge in SEO to gain a good position in the search engines BEFORE the story is old news, and nobody will search for it. The other way of profiting on a site like this is by contextual advertising, such as adwords and the like. But, just as in SEO, the competition you are facing is almost always fierce.

If you are one of the thousands of webmasters always finding yourself with a good idea a little too late, and keep finding your excellent websites on google’s fifth page at best, it might be time to ask yourself; What should I do to get ahead?

To use the soccer analogy, you could try to look ahead; What event do you KNOW is coming? When Beckham transferred to LA, very few knew about it, and when it became news all good domains sold out in 5 minutes. If you know of an event of this nature taking place, you could easily target clever keywords ahead of time, perhaps with a good domain to back it up, thus making it far more possible to actually gain that precious top-page-placement on google. All while the event is still current, and not yesterday’s news.

One problem faced is that if you know about an event, odds are others will know about it as well. To get around this problem you can either start earlier or work harder (or smarter) than the competition. Everyone knows that in 2008, the European Championship of Soccer – Euro2008 - will take place. It’s just over a year left until people will do a lot of searches on this – and other soccer related – terms. Even though many webmasters already have sites somewhat optimized for this event, if you start now, you will stand a great chance of finding your site on top in a year.

For sites designed for just one occasion, you have to decide if you are to choose a domain for only that event (i.e. www.euro2008hotel.com) or a domain you can use after the tournament as well. This depends on how the site is to be designed; if you plan on targeting hotels as keywords, and to promote the hotels in the area of the tournament with affiliate links, this would be perfect for a specific domain. The region of Euro2008 will loose much of its appeal (and searches on google) after the tournament is over, people who look for old tournaments – and visiting the regions of them – are limited in numbers.

If you do target your keywords correctly – and add many inbound links – the pagerank alone may be enough to sell advertising space, even after the tourney. People buying ads based on pagerank are rarely looking at the domain name, but only on the quality of the link and its surrounding context.

If you choose a domain not specific for one occasion, it’s much easier to alter its content to fit a more general niche, or to target the next large soccer tournament.

Article Source: http://publisherscloninghouse.com

Theo Swan is writing about online business, affiliate program marketing and how to get started online. Read more - or find a new affiliate program - at Affiliate Ranker's dynamic directory.

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