SmartName Shops Provide Parking Alternative
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
Easy-to-build online stores provide alternative to standard domain name parking.
A couple weeks ago I mentioned SmartName Shops, a unique parking template available to SmartName customers. The system has been available for a while on SmartName, but is now available by request on NameMedia’s other parking platforms including ActiveAudience and Goldkey.
SmartName Shops are pay-per-click based templates that include an e-commerce product feed from Shopping.com. They provide a good alternative to standard parking pages on domains that have an e-commerce connotation. Even more important – SmartName makes them very easy to set up.
Creating a shop basically involves adding your domain name as usual, selecting an e-commerce template (one is available and another on the way soon), and choosing your category keywords. For example, I set up EverythingDogs.com in about 3 minutes. The tabs at the top represent my keywords.
This example is basic and you can customize your shop fairly easily. SEO features are rich, allowing you to add custom text and change your meta tags. You can also upload a custom header. An example of a well developed Shop (owned by NameMedia) is YellowDress.com.
SmartName Shops provide a great alternative for domains that either don’t perform well as standard parked pages or lend themselves to an e-commerce site. Getting a SmartName account is very difficult, but users of ActiveAudience and Goldkey can contact their account manager to activate shops on those programs.
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SmartName Shops Provide Parking Alternative – http://tinyurl.com/kkbtbv
Great info Andrew. With all the buzz about SmartName shops lately, I’m also giving the Shopping.com feed a try on a few of my domains on ActiveAudience. Here’s one with a basic setup: http://www.battingglove.net
It would be great to see a follow up post with any results folks are seeing compared to their previous parked pages.
FYI, the url of EverythingsDogs.com is not a functioning url. I did check EverythingDogs.com, which was a functioning site.
How does the payout work? How is that different than user popshops.com or similiar sites? What is the differance if you do it on smartnames platform VS AA?
Great questions Steven. I was wondering the same thing, especially using smartnames.com directly vs. using Active Audience.
I would expect higher revenue share to be the main difference. Otherwise it doesn’t make much sense for them to make the accounts hard to get. Just a guess.
lets us know how you do with everythingdogs.com
Adam – thanks, fixed typo
I think SmartName has a higher payout than AA, but I’m not sure.
Andrew,
I have been parking with SmartName for almost 4 years now. However, I have not done SmartName
Shops. Bottom line, is it making more money than if you parked the names. I know it might be too early to tell but please keep us posted.
Thanks, Jim
Jim – it’s too early to tell. If you get good type-in traffic I suspect the parking pages would do better.
Good Afternoon! My name is David Zakur, and I am the Director of the Affiliate Parking Platforms at NameMedia (SmartName, ActiveAudience, and GoldKey).
@Steven – payout works the same as with text based PPC ads, it’s a rev share model and your existing rev share applies to ecomm as well.
@Jim – There are 2 main strengths to the eCommerce templates over PPC.
The first is that we see a significantly higher CTR% over text-based ppc pages. This means that even if RPCs are lower in the shopping ecosystem, and that’s not always the case, it will still earn you more revenue per user if targeted correctly.
Second, as Andrew mentioned, these templates are *designed* for SEO right from the start. Both NameMedia and our Affiliate customers who have been using this option have seen our sites shoot to the top of Yahoo and Google’s SERPs.
Two examples are:
1.) YellowDress.com is #1 – http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=yellow+dress
2.) BabyBag.net is #3 – http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=baby+bag
With some basic setup such as adding the meta tags, some simple custom content, or even a logo, its easy to find a niche and have the free traffic roll in from G & Y.
If anyone has any questions, or would like to have this feature enabled on your account, please contact your Account Manager or parkingsupport(at)namemedia.com.
Thanks!
David
David,
Thanks for the quick response back. I will test some names out with Smartname shops and see how it goes.
Thanks,Jim
I am looking forward to setting up shops in my Smartname account. If it works out it is a much better option than some other expensive minisite type options.