Supernatural Agency: Online business tales

When we started Supernatural the intent was to break away from working for others and/or providing services to others while they reap the long term benefits. In a zero sum game, providing services or collecting a salary always have a limited upside ceiling while investing in yourself does not.

We currently provide search marketing services to a few good clients as a way of bootstrapping our business so we can eventually focus entirely on our domain portfolio, particularly some in-depth development projects that will be sector leading sites when they are launched. It can be frustrating to take this hybrid route, particularly as we know how much faster we would move if we were entirely focused on our own properties. As Aaron notes in the link above, you’re always going to be better off investing in yourself, in the long run.

The other side of the equation is the ‘those who can’t do, teach’ cliche. We are increasingly being inundated with ‘get rich quick on the web’ schemes where ‘all you have to do’ is create an educational product and sell it for the big bucks. The problem with all of these schemes is that if you really knew the secrets of making millions on the web why would you tell anyone? The smart money stays under the radar, in part to avoid competition watering down the opportunity, and in part because the Googles of the world are constantly on the lookout for schemes based on gaming the system online. If you find one that works, why would you muddy the waters by selling it to anyone with a dream and a few hundred bucks?

Adding value to a domain isn’t always about advertising, PPC, affiliate programs and other revenue generators. With some domains developing a site model and building traffic is the primary value-builder. In this monetization model you’re strictly building equity for an eventual sale of the domain or, alternatively, making a future decision to add revenue generators based on traffic.

We recently launched CleanTechNY.com. From a domaining perspective this URL is a good one, however our experience with environmental sites is that they are not typically associated with buying decisions (not yet anyway- it is rapidly changing). So rather than flipping it or adding a bunch of Adsense blocks we’re positioning it for future growth in a category that is exploding.

For those of you with a bias against content development this site has an interesting twist- it is a news aggregator site based on RSS feeds so the primary content is automatically generated, up to date and relevant. In the domain world the recently launched Domaining.com site has similar functionality. Both serve as portals for their subject matter. For search purposes and to clarify what the CleanTechNY site is about we’ve wrapped the dynamic content with descriptive text.

We’re watching this with interest as the model, once we figured it out, is extensible to other subject matter. FYI, Mike and I have about ten hours total invested in this project. Dev doesn’t have to be super labor intensive…

Rosalind Gardner writes about the importance of planning your desired lifestyle and then building a business that makes it possible. In her case the subject is affiliate marketing and she makes a great case that it’s possible to work 2 hours a week and achieve the same results as a 24/7 workaholic.

This is a big part of our business, something readers of Tim Ferris’ 4 Hour Work Week will recognize as ‘lifestyle design’. We’ve both been in jobs where if you weren’t working 80 hour weeks you weren’t a real team player and let me tell you, these places are ugly- tired people, little creativity and no real increase in productivity.

So before you design your business, think about what you really want your life to be like, on a daily basis- read Roz’s post (and her ebook- its a great intro to becoming an affiliate marketer).

I signed up for this service from Voxant. You can go in, search through news stories by subject, choose a story and they give you code to embed the story in your site. The code creates a story box and has a related banner ad. The source of the story gets 40%, they get 40% and we get 20% of ad revenue, not a great deal but hey, I’m playing around here!

They don’t care about how much traffic you have which differentiates them from the other big ad servers. Their theory (which the domain world should love) is that while the big sites comprise 50% of overall web traffic, the little guys make up all the rest and, as such, represent untapped potential for advertisers.

I tried embedding one on Burner Trouble, my climate blog. Unfortunately they’ve made a critical error in the size of the units- their smallest width of story plus ad is over 600 pixels wide which means it won’t fit in the default text area for many blog templates. I wrote them a note about it.
I like the idea of grabbing free licensed content if they (or we) can fix this…

Here’s another issue. The story was about water shortages but the ad was for Cadillacs! These two do not go together!