Daniel Felice

Strong Start

// June 9th, 2008 // No Comments » // Projects

A week has past since I Nameseek went live and so far it has been a decent start. Hits have been fairly strong considering it is a new site. I think word is slowly starting to spread around the webmaster community, however we only have a few listsings at the moment, with the latest one going up today.

Over the past week we have had nearly 1000 hits which is not to bad in its first week. Every day the hits are more and more and users seem to be browsing most of the site. The audience isn’t specific to Australian users, with about 30% coming from the North America.

I think it will take a while to get word out that you can now actually sell .AU domain names so it might take a while. There is also a requirement from the AUDA that names must be at least 6 months old before you can sell them, so I am guessing alot of people will register a few names in the coming weeks and then sit on them for a while until they can sell.

There still does not seem to be another domain marketplace for the .AU out there as yet, however I have noticed a few on eBay over the past few days. I am tempted to sell an few “deals” on eBay to generate some more awareness, so keep an eye out for that.

I have played with the layout over the weekend and made a few small changes. I have also teamed up with www.australianwebmaster.com who will show our 468 x 60 banner in return for us showing theirs. I think it is an easy and effective way of getting some free advertising as both our audience will be very similar.

I setup a Google Adword account during the week also. This has brought in about 30 hits or so, however the ad has been shown on about 100,000 searche. The click through rate isn’t great, but it is a start. I started with a small budget of AUD$30 and will monitor how it goes over the next month and might increase it if I am getting results.

So all in all it has been fairly OK in its first week. Now it is just making that first sale!

Nameseek.com.au is reality!

// June 3rd, 2008 // 4 Comments » // Projects

After a few months of developing, designing and testing, Nameseek.com.au is finally up and running. It took a while to get the site how I wanted it. I ended up buying 5 different auction scripts, and didn’t like any of them. One of them was not too bad, and I would have used it, however the guy who sold it to me turned out to be re-hashing someone else’s script and didn’t know how to support it!

I found a great script on Friday of last week so decided to just spend the money and buy it. The script is from www.smartscript.net and works very well, and the support so far has been fantastic. It is was easy enough to get running and has all the functions I need for this site to do what I want it to.

The site had to be up by June 1st, so it was a race against time to get it running how I wanted it. I had a few late nights as I had planned a holiday for the weekend which got in the way of designing and testing the script. I ended up launching the site on June 2, only a day late.

So now the tough part begins – driving hits to the site! I have enough trouble getting hits to this site, now I have to do it all over again. Though as this is a niche site, I think it will be easier.

Google AdWords:

Adwords is Google’s advertising programme. You basically sign up, add your short site blurb, add a few keywords, give them some money and then your site appears in those Google boxes on the right hand site of the search. I signed up with the lowest budget for now. I will monitor the page impressions for a month or so, and if I am getting good results then I will increase my budget.

At the moment Google AdWords is my only form of advertising. I am going to target some domain name registrars and some webmaster based forums and discussion boards over the next few weeks.

Wish me luck!