I'm working with a guy who bought a ton of domain names around the theme of his main site (originally so no one else would snatch them up)

now instead of simply parking them at godaddy and letting GD collect cash on them he wants to put them to some use...

so his idea is to create some feeder sites for his main sites > these are sites whose main (and only) objective is to redirect traffic to his main sites

(for example if you have a broad site you may create a bunch of niched sites relating to it, get those ranked highly which is often easier and redirect the traffic those niche sites get to the main broad site)

so the main (and basically only) goal of these niche sites is to send their traffic to his main sites

not a bad idea...however when he showed me his template it looked he just threw a couple links to his main site randomly  on the page at which point i responded

"if your only objective is to get people to click those links you should put some serious thought into their placement"

so both of us started to look at where visitors spent their time looking and i came across this interesting study:

EyeTracking

Anywho.., the point of this post is to 1) share that article to anyone that may be interested

but 2) to also ask your opinion:

in this scenario...if your 1 goal was to get people to click through to your other site, how would you design your feeder site?

[ yea i'm not a huge fan of webspam which most feeder sites are but also don't blame the guy for wanting to put his domains to good use]

You should tell him to go over to Syndk8 (or pay my consulting fees ;0) as there are many folks that have been at that game with a variety of schemes... I believe they call it Black  Hatch or something like that...



How’s he driving traffic to these micro-sites? Arbitrage? Organic ?? Paid crap??

Therein lies the rub, if yer doing organic you need a variety of goodies, the least of which is links... with a non-valuable mico-site, content deprived at that, some link spamming is in the future.... this has all been thought of and done before.... to be successful you need to be ahead of the game not behind it. Old scams have been picked up already....

Why not grab a site that already has backlinks? Always a good way to go... Let Uncle Earl guide you

If you guys have some cash and want to make some mooolaaa with it... and don't generally care how, then just bring in yours truly to show you the way...

But if this is a legitimate organic endeavour, then you need to consider the silliness of promoting a variety of domains with the same time/effort/money that could be used to strengthen the core domain. You can't simply put up some domains and expect them to pass any internal page rank that is worth butkis unless you actually build links to each of those new micro-site. Doing this legitimately (non link spam) is costing resources x # of sites... all of this can be poured into the core domain with much greater effect.

Your friend sounds like he needs SEO and Business advice IMO....

As for eyetracking I have read many studies and one thing is certain, each site/market (as always) has a different 'golden triangle' and I would suggest understanding the demographics of the users and more before taking anything to heart .....

I still just don't see the viability of the plan... sounds like some infomercial marketing grab bag to me.... he he

I would design an MFA-type site
[Made For AdSense]

But instead of putting AdSense on the page I would put links to my main site; making them look like adverts.

Given that I am a programmer I could take it one step further - if I had a database of my targeted main pages along with a keyword or theme then I could make the adverts truly contextual, just like adsense.

I would also put some obvious links in to the home page, and general-copy pages.

If I took the programmers/contextual route then I would cloak the contextual links in javascript as they may change frequently with the content of the page and use natural linking for the 'obvious' links.

I might also do a bit of article marketing/xml syndication......

I would also track the clicks. This could be done server side or client side.

If the sites convert well (ie send visitors to the main site) then I might also pay for advertising - but only if it was too expensive to pay for advertising the main site and the secondary sites had cheaper, secondary terms

Gyp: appreciate the input as always bud. As far the viability of the project, I think that 's best for another thread…in this case he’s going ahead with it anyways, and it should only take him a day or two, so if he wants to waste that so be it, no worries on my end.

What I was more curious about is how do you position your message to get your visitors to follow it to the next step?

I really just wanted to get people thinking about placement...i've reviewed a lot of sites in here where it's obvious people just threw up anything anywhere without taking any time to think about placement- thought it may be helpful for them to see a discussion on that

Northie: You basically nailed down exactly what he was planning on doing…yeap very similar to MFA, using article feeds, etc. Couple of good points in there I’ll pass along

Thank you gentlemen- awesome feedback as usual!

How’s that beerbreak going the Gypsy?  Cheers guys

Nic wrote:

I really just wanted to get people thinking about placement...i've reviewed a lot of sites in here where it's obvious people just threw up anything anywhere without taking any time to think about placement- thought it may be helpful for them to see a discussion on that

so how about it anyone?

each webpage only has a limited amount of high value real estate (some key areas above the fold)

so when you brainstorm your layout do you think about where your going to place your most important items based on visibility or you simply put them were they look best, neither, both, something else?

another thing i've noticed often is wasted space on beautifully designed sites...sites create by real graphic pro's which are amazingly appealing but then use massive header images for example that eat half of their 'above the fold' space which i also think is bad practice

Well my customers are scanners and feed off of visuals, so I headline what I think is most important to them. Oddly it’s not always what you think. My customers have indicated that they only need to know that they are in the appropriate category and visual assurance/reminders that they will have it quickly. So we headline top center of the page above the fold. According to our solicited feedback... that’s where they wanted to see it. But I guess it depends on what you are selling.

Every market group (demographic) is slightly different, ie; folks in entertainment niches respond better to graphic and multimedia...

I would get some split testing and click tracking on it and try some variables. The only true way is to get to know your visitors... don't MAKE them do anything, find out what they naturally react to ( qualitiative research as oposed to quantative).....

That's what I would do... but I still don't know where the trafic is comming from (PPC< Oranic>other) ....

Awesome Charles!

so did you originally deisgn the site based on your hunches of what people wanted to see, and then after some time went to them and simply asked or how di you figure all this out?

EDIT: by the time i posted this Gypsy had his answer back...which basically covers that questions- thanks!

Nic wrote:

Awesome Charles!

so did you originally deisgn the site based on your hunches of what people wanted to see, and then after some time went to them and simply asked or how di you figure all this out?

EDIT: by the time i posted this Gypsy had his answer back...which basically covers that questions- thanks!

Well the initial influences were this forum and Daves ramblings and my fascination with newspapers. Important because I have always been fascinated with how a lonely newspaper will get you to buy it and how immersed you become in the contents after reading the feature story. You don’t initially buy it because of the deep content or whether or not it’s made from recycled paper, etc. It was the headline that got you to buy it and hopefully the content turned you into a returning customer.

Its more of a constant evolution, testing etc but some of the most powerful feedback comes from customers. We do all we can to get them involved from concept to delivery. In example; at one time we were conceptualizing plus size shirts so we contacted all of the people that had previously inquired about them and recruited them to help us throughout the design and prototyping process. After launch of the line we have yet to have a return and solicited feedback is indicating a lot of customer satisfaction.

So while all the testing and statistical research is great, we still like to randomly and selectively poll customers on everything from site navigation to product quality.