Domain names don't really matter at all anymore. Google is even phasing out exact match for domains in their algorithm. Once you find a website once and can remember the first 3 letters your search history is going to fill in the domain anyway.

I don't see how someone is willing to pay 250k for bitcoinwallet.com, whoever paid that money is probably totally clueless and got lucky to load up on bitcoin when they were like .10 and now has millions of dollars with no idea what to do with it so might as well start losing it back.

Branding and authority.

bitcoinwallet.com is a lot easier to remember and inspires a lot more trust than jjbittradingwhatever.mx.

Yea, but there are millions of slightly different variations of bitcoinwallet.com that you could use

bitcoinwallets.com, btcwallet(s).com, btcsecurewallet.com, etc.

I just really dont see a lot of value in one specific domain.

Bitcoinwallets going for 200k

are you saying I shouldn't be using these guys?

Right, and you can line all these domains on a quality ladder. Some are a lot better than others. Depending on how much better they are, a certain premium is to be expected. You can argue that X domain is only worth 100K and not 500K, but you can't really argue that they're all worth $12.95 Godaddy registration fee.

I always thought this interview was pretty fascinating in a couple of ways. This guy represents the countless faceless businessmen out there driving the domain market. They have deep pockets and they're willing to risk money. They don't buy 100K domains so they can put their Amazon affiliate code on their new website.

Btcsecurewallet.com is available for $12.95. I just dont see how it will make much of a difference if you want a descriptive url to have the word "secure" in there.

Ill watch that interview tho and see what I think.

Figured I should post in this thread since Ive lurked this forum for some years.

My experience:

I own Nutblocker and did try to get it done with different developers over the year but it was mostly a mess that cost time and money. Partly because I was inexperienced about hiring, and potensially some run bad as well.

I bought the current Wordpress design on Nutblocker, and built the site myself trough Wordpress. I cant speak highly enough of it, easy to learn and get up and running. Lots of free plugins on Wordpress, if I cant get one to work, I find a similar doing the same.

Two of my fav pluginns are tweet my post and tweet old post. Our Twitter exemplify how it works. Basically I like that thing get automated (not only for my own post, but also any blogger etc). The Newsletter plugin is also neat.

Ill be the first to admit there is flaws in the design but overall Im satisified with the look/feel and functionality of the site. And I would have no chance to do this trough coding or something with the time I want to spend on it, but it was relatively smooth and simple trough Wordpress.

Ill obvs appreciate any feedback on the site, but this was mostly a praise to Wordpress.

Does anybody know how to get "remaining funds" refunded from a Facebook ad campaign.

I started a few ad campaigns on facebook which they charged my paypal account. I stopped the ads, leaving "remaining balances" in all my ads. I want to get this money refunded to me, but there is no information anywhere on facebook, or on the internet that can tell me how. I see I am not the only one with this issue, but not one answer. Help!

Maybe best to try posting here: https://www.facebook.com/help/community

Thanks D. I looked there first only to see several people post there about the same issue, and no answers by fb support. There was a support answer in a second FB community thread about this problem, but the answer was not relevant to the question.

I just saw I can email them directly and should get an answer within 3 days. But figured maybe someone who posts in this thread went through same experience.

Yeah - I too searched for a while, to no avail. Good luck...

I said it before (and got yelled at) but I'll say it again. If you are new to building websites and can't afford to hire a coder, WordPress can do basically everything you want through plugins and premium themes.

Pro tip about handling domain names, if you're starting a business you will be building a brand around (most serious businesses...) do a basic trademark search for the name to ensure it isn't registered in your industry or easily mistaken related industry.

Then buy the .net, .co, .org, cc TLD version while you get your business up and running for an infinitely smaller amount than the .com cost (if you're clever/flexible you can usually get this down to the cost of a basic domain registration like Hipmunk, Fiverr, etc. etc.). As soon as feasible after your business is operational register the trademark for your business and now you've effectively blocked all value from the cybersquatting. They should never be able to sell the domain name for a significant amount for commercial purposes in your industry and even completely different industries becomes a very challenging legal question (extremely unappealing to a potential buyer/holder). Some cybersquatting laws may even let you take the URL or compensation if you can prove it's squatting (I believe this can include just listing the URL for sale which a simple Google alert will handle). At this point you have all the leverage and they will basically be forced into taking a reasonable offer or hoping you go out of business.

I've also found there is very minimal value lost between ".com" and say ".net" for the majority of companies (pretty anything below $100mil market cap), I remember watching a presentation by the guys who started Wish.co.uk about how much credibility their 10k pound domain name purchase gave them when reaching out to the press (compared to $1m+ for the .com). Lots of notable examples of this (Moz.com started on SEOmoz.org), is it worse? Yes but you shouldn't be trying to build a business primarily off the back of a domain name in my experience.

This only works if the "squatter" did not have a commercialized website at the time of purchase. Take all this with a grain of salt, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

I like some of the points you're making. But I also think a lot of people overestimate how much a decent domain will cost them in the aftermarket.

Sure, a super-premium will run into millions. But most of the market is around $500 mark. That's not bad. Plenty of very decent domains in this 500-1K price range. If you are starting a real business, this is the way to go. This is almost what the USPO trademark filing fees are going to be anyway.

I am also starting to think it's a mistake to 'defensively' register other extensions. People naturally go to .com, even if you try to beat it into their brains that you're something else. I wonder if it makes sense to leave the rest of the domains out there. You don't waste your money on renawals. And if someone starts a web page on the other extensions, it will be them leaking traffic to you.

Completely agree with all your points, it's just a strategy that can get you closer to super premiums and or more value past your budget when selecting for your business. Honestly, I think domain selection is one of the things that shouldn't hold you up but will probably restrict what brand names you can consider as options depending on where you're starting from.

People way over estimate how much domains are worth (most arent even worth the reg fee), also even if you have a domain thats worth $20k it could take 5+ years before you find a retail buyer for the domain to get that kind of price, what normally happens is the $20k domain is sold for a huge amount less to another domain investor who is willing to wait to get a retail price.

Its not easy to make money from domain names at all(well not how most imagine). Also with google now not giving any extra weight to exact match domains its not even something you need to worry about, I would much rather have a brand domain name thats shorter, take twitter the value of that before was negligible and plenty of made up nice sounding words still available. Theres also plenty of 2 word domains that a lot of companies use that are easy to remember take for instance mailchimp.com(well known email saas).

If you want to find a catchy name i normally use this site http://www.leandomainsearch.com/ you put a word in and it adds popular words on the end so like how mailchimp was formed you put in the word mail and it adds thousands of words at the beginning or end and shows available .coms, dont get me wrong a lot of names it shows are rubbish but you can definately find a decent brandable domain. Test it by typing poker into the site above and see how many decent names there are even for a competitive industry like poker.

I do buy domains in the aftermarket but thats for other reasons and not the high value premium domains. Its more for seo but thats a whole other area all together.

I haven't followed anything about seo in over a year so I basically know 0 on the subject now. I have a new site/business selling a physical product that I'd like to increase my traffic and rankings for.

My budget is pretty small. Is it possible to get anything meaningful done for a couple hundred dollars? If so, is there a good way to vet subcontractors? I want totally safe white hat work and worry more about someone screwing up my relationship w/ google than anything.

I use lots of contractors on Elance for other projects, how realistic is it to get decent seo work done by someone from there? Does anyone have anyone they'd recommend?

Is it even worth it or should I just use decent practices and Yoast's plugin?

Generally not worth it, get the basics down yourself but Googling and doing site searches for Moz.com around the topic. Not worth getting a freelancer in this instance.

Hiring someone for cheap SEO without knowing the basics about SEO is very risky. For example, hiring a plumber is risky in that you're letting someone do an important job for you and relying on them (like anything else). But with plumbing, you can go and turn on the faucet immediately and know whether or not the job was done completely. SEO never shows instant rewards and the work is often intangible **** done the background.

A few hundred bucks wouldn't get you much and there's tons of "I WILL DO EVERYTHING FOR YOU FOR $100" guys on there who don't know anything about anything.

Definitely what Phresh and cwar said above. There are some areas you could outsource that wouldn't do any damage though. For example a technical audit on your site to make sure it's a sound base to build upon, or some keyword research if you haven't got the time to do it yourself.

I would recommend learning as much as possible yourself and then outsourcing sensibly things like competitor link research, article writing, etc. You can guide a team in the right direction, just don't ask them to go and build any links for you.

Best way to spend your money is in a content marketplace to help you with writing blog posts. For a couple hundred you can get a lot of posts written and you will need to edit them yourself after, but it is a great way to get content written.

i would stop thinking of seo as different hats, I would also stop thinking about seo in terms of safe and risk free etc.

you should think of seo in terms of risk reward and roi. some methods have a short term rankings which is fine if you gain roi from it. others have longer term rankings, who knows what will happen with google updates etc, plenty of experienced people thought they had the safe link builing tactics that got slapped to **** last year.

you have a new site so you dont need to be tooo carefull, worse case u lose a $10 domain and u buy another and transfer the site over.


mostly id say put your money on roulette because you will probably have a higher roi.

its hard to say because you havnt given us any ideas what your trying to rank for etc.

there are ways you could have success for $200 but you need some out the box thinking and fees might cut into your profit.

if your limited to that budget and you have a physical product and you dont want to worry about google penalising your site then this is what I would do:

step1 List your product on amazon using the keywords you want to rank for in your product title.

step2 once its listed go to the product page listing, then view the source code pres ctrl + f and paste rel="canonical"
the link thats on that line is the full url that amazon wants google to index and rank.

buy, build spam anchor text links to that url, my advice would be to list 10 different anchcor texts and spam the **** out of it.

because its on amazon domain you will already have decent high authority and reasonable juice, add the fact amazon is highly trusted in google and already has thousand of links pointing to the domain, you can spam the **** out of it. It will rank 100x easier than your own website and its not your website so if google manually punishes that page you can rinse and repeat.


downside is the amazon fees, upside no risk to your own site and you can leverage amazons natural ranking ability, spam some links and u can dominate pretty quickly.

also you can build your "whitehat" website at the same time and learn more etc.

gl

out of interest what was the word you want to rank for i may be able to help more etc

Figure out who is the target audience for your product.

Find your target audience online, be it forums, websites, youtube channels, facebook groups, whatever.

Start contacting people to see what you can do together. Free and paid reviews. Purchased links/sponsorships. Advertisements on their site. Etc.

10,000 ****ty links isn't going to rank you anymore unless your product has no competition, in which case 5 crappy links will rank you just as well. There is a good graphic out there that equates value of various links; 100,000 PR0 links = 10,000 PR1 = 1,000 PR2 = 100 PR3 = 10 PR4 = 1 PR5... something like that... you get the point.

If you can do it on a major scale without getting caught, crap can stick sometimes. But in 2014, it's a lot easier to actually earn that 1 PR4 legitimate link. If you're "outsourcing", you will get crap links and not enough of them to make much difference. The only exception is if you're buying private network links on high PR sites, but this isn't cheap by any means.

Thanks for all the advice guys I appreciate it. I already sell on Amazon so the tips on linking to that seem like a good low risk idea.

I do know the basics of what to do with the site I just don't have much time to devote to working on seo and thought maybe I could just throw a couple hundred bucks at it on elance like I do with other things such as articles like Larry mentioned.

You guys confirmed it's a bad idea though so I'll skip it.