Niche Switch

Not doing any online business for over a year, I thought taking part in .me domain rush might be, if not a nice restart of online activities, at least a good adrenaline race to take part in.

And……it was.

Out of my two preferred domain registrars, only GoDaddy offered .me TLD.
It took me one hour to finish “registration” of three domains I have chosen. Five minutes for one page load seemed like a record time, ten minutes was not unusual.

One hour later I’m checking same domains on Godaddy. They were still available! Not long after that, email messages with error notices are arriving:
The following domain name has failed to be registered:
BACKUP.ME
Error: BACKUP.ME: cannot register - already registered
(oh well…I wasn’t very original with this one, but it’s good one for demonstration purposes)

Trying my luck with another domain name. Godaddy says it’s registered, main registrar says it’s not.

About two to three hours after the domain rush started, I’m registering another six domains. Order accepted. Soon after, another six emails with error notices.

Another interesting thing, I was able to use a 25% discount coupon on first order with Godaddy. No discount coupons worked for the subsequent orders. No complaints about that, but interesting if they needed to fix something like that during the start / peak hours and not before (unless I’m missing something, like that you can only apply a discount code once a day).

They will refund my $400 in one day.

That brought a great domain name idea.
BorrowFrom.ME !
My one-day interest rates are really low now.

(and yeah, it felt good to be an owner of backup.me, for an hour)

Alexa rankings are completely unreliable, except few top-ranking sites.

Yet people are trying to cash on them every day. It sounds great to have a website that is in TOP 200.000 worldwide, available for a modest price. What’s wrong with such offers is that all that’s necessary is your own traffic to achieve that. Of course, the entrepreneurial minds behind offers stressing Alexa ranking sometimes followed by few exclamation marks, will usually omit to mention this rather important fact (that 90% of their traffic is them visiting every few hours).

I’m visiting a very niche portal every few days. They are around the rank of 500.000. Great ranking for a place that covers an extremely niche topic that is of interest to only few people.
I have just found that according to Alexa, I alone represent 50% of their traffic (I know because there are no other visitors from my country, completely sure about that). Now I rarely visit daily for a longer timespan, it’s usually once or twice per week. Most other users visit more frequently.

Funny thing is, while many still don’t know how easily Alexa rankings can be pumped up (there were some news going around months ago that it’s not that easy anymore, well - it’s still is), there are many that know it well.

A well known Alexa toolbar tool for Firefox, SearchStatus, had this note on their site:
“please upgrade to the latest version to avoid losing alexa rankings”

Clear and self-explanatory.

Ron Garret covered top ten geek business myths very nicely.

Quick extract of my favorite myths, but do yourself a favor to visit the original post:
- brilliant ideas will make you rich

- people will come on their own if you build good product or service

- someone will steal your idea if you don’t protect it

- it’s what YOU think, not what customers thinks, that matters

- what you know matters more than who you know

- you need lot of money to get started

- the idea is the most important part of your business plan

- no competition is good thing

and, IPO will make you finally happy

Hot off the press: PayPal users in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Thailand will be able to receive funds into their PayPal accounts as well as withdraw them to a local bank account as of September 14th, 2006.
This will have an impact (though supposedly low) on directory business, and seo and sem industry in general, as plenty of people in the field come from the above countries, especially from Poland, and Paypal is the prevalent payment type for directory transactions. I guess some of the Polish free directories will turn to paid one, and maybe we could expect the coders behind one or two directory scripts, to come with Paypal payments extension and subsequently, release their script to the English speaking market. Not a direct corollary, but closely related after few longer thoughts (Paypal integration with English interface I mean).

People from many other countries are still prevented from the ability to receive money by Paypal, they can only use it for payments. In light of the extension over above named countries, the question is why for example Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Cyprus or South Africa, were not included in the extension batch.

This is just a rant. Paper will stand anything, they say. Leave it to the paper, let it out, others say. Some call it brainstorming. I call it not knowing how to solve a problem, and not knowing what to write about, thus merging two seemingly discreet problems. One can do that in a blog that no one reads, without even blushing.
–

Soooooo…… you got this what you think is a great business idea, and the dilemma you face is, sell the idea right now for what seems to be an OK sum of money, or develop it yourself and face an uncertain outcome, maybe nothing, maybe much more than for what you could sell it right now, but certainly not a dime for next few months. On top of it, you are in a situation where something right now would be a godsend.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, they say. They didn’t have an internet when this old adage saw the light of the world, but I can’t think of an environment to which it would fit more than the internet business.
That’s not the first time I’m facing such a situation, thus there are all kinds of thoughts and possible solutions popping up in the head. How would have the wise King Solomon solved it? Where I live, if you approach a problem with a solution that will cater to all major possibilities in often a somewhat foxy manner, it’s called the Solomon’s way. In that tradition, both selling the idea now and developing it long-term myself, would be the way to do it.
–

Hey…maybe that “leave it to the paper” method really works! This post cost me an hour, but solution seems to have crystalized, or at least an approach how to solve the dilemma. I didn’t know you can use blog for that kind of stuff!

This blog shall serve as an additional resource at NicheSwitch, mainly to manage articles about directories and other topics of interest. I’m not much of a blogger, at least not a regular one, and my English is, quite frankly, a bit insufficient for witty posts with some twist, so I will have to resort to some semi-regular updating only, and to short down-to-earth posts instead of long philosophical analysis.

The switch got pressed, at least on this blog, with whole site still being in a kind of beta version. First articles on directories will be posted soon.