Estibot Guide to Domain Development Review

Estibot.com released a 40 page domain development guide that
outlines several strategies for domainers who are looking to develop their domains. I took an interest in this guide not only because of the content but the guide specifically targets domainers with a limited budget and elaborates on how to improve the quality of your portfolio.

The overall teaching point is to demonstrate how to turn a revenue losing portfolio into an asset that earns you passive income. Couple this guide with Morgan Linton’s Is your Domain Portfolio Junk? series and you will gain a better understanding of how to improve the quality of your domain portfolio.

There are several points that I strongly agree with, such as:

• stay emotionally detached from your domain names
• mini site development can be used as a statistical and drafting process for full development
• hand registration still works but only if you choose wisely
• always develop with scalability in mind

However, there are a couple of points that I slightly disagree with:

“You cannot turn a bad domain name into a good one by developing it.” page 30

Technically, you can but you need to have a solid plan behind it. For
example: Twitter.com, Facebook.com, Bit.ly, YouTube.com are all horrible domains without the marketing, development and business they have behind them. You can still brand a good idea with a ‘bad domain’ but in the case of domain investing, (and the point Estibot is trying to make) it is far easier to gain a return on a descriptive, generic domain than it is to go through the expensive and time
consuming process of branding a non-generic (or badly worded) keyword set.

“Search engines don’t love sites that are completely static over time. One way to add dynamic content is to include a page with automatically updating topic-relevant news. This is what I do; use a Php based RSS News Aggregator.” page 19

Fresh content is a must but STAY AWAY FROM AGGREGATED CONTENT. The idea that RSS feeds and aggregated content provides ‘fresh content’ to your site is an illusion (unless you provide a mash up or a unique way of serving it – but this is rare among domainers). It is better to release an article on a regular basis (once a week or month, minimal) than it is to rely on the integrity of using aggregated data.

Overall, I enjoyed reading this guide and learning more about Estibot itself (did you know Estibot has an End User Lead Generator?). I appreciate individuals and companies who take the time to offer strategies that help further our industry.

You can visit Estibot’s blog to download your copy of Estibot’s Guide to Domain Development.

Morgan Linton’s:
Is your Domain Portfolio Junk? 2011 Guide to Dropping your Domains – Part 1

Morgan Linton’s:
Is your Domain Portfolio Junk? 2011 Guide to Dropping your Domains – Part 2

Morgan Linton’s:
Is your Domain Portfolio Junk? 2011 Guide to Dropping your Domains – Part 3

Disclaimer: This is a non-paid review unsolicited by Estibot.com.
Read more about my content.