Using Smartshops to Create Free Minisites
Just opened an account with SmartName last week and have been experimenting with their SmartShops offering. It’s too soon to see revenue or search engine rankings, but so far I’m impressed with the quality of the storefronts it creates.
SmartShops looks to be particularly suited for exact match product domains (both .com and alternative extensions). The main benefit of SmartShops is that it automatically creates good looking ecommerce minisites that look more like ‘real’ sites than traditional parking or Adsense filled mini site pages. Here is an example of a site I created today in less than five minutes…
I like the fact that there are no Adsense ads, so it doesn’t look like a standard parking page. Smartname monetizes the sites using Shopping.com and pays per click (not action). This means that if your domain is highly targeted, you should be able to earn income when visitors browse your site, regardless of whether they make the final purchase online.
As you can see above, my test site allows visitors to browse by price or brand name and hopefully will be viewed as a useful resource by anyone typing in home deep fryers.
Smartshops also offers some great customization options, including the ability to…
- upload custom header graphics and text
- upload a custom banner on top of all pages (good for linking back to a portfoilio page)
- display a contact page or have domain sales handled directly by a BuyDomains broker (your choice)
- enter conversion tracking urls and custom tracking pixels
- add social networking buttons (e.g. delicious, digg, stumbleupon, twitter, etc.)
- enter search engine verification codes for Google, Bing and Yahoo
With a little work it should be possible to customize Smartname storefronts so that they are useful and attractive enough to be favorably viewed by non-domainers and linked to by related sites. If this is possible, these ’sites’ are far more likely to achieve search engine traction and good rankings for their exact match keywords.
Next step will be to customize a few of these sites and do some basic link promotion. Hope to blog about my results later this week.
Thanks to Bruce Marler for putting me in touch with the SmartName crowd and encouraging me to try out the service.
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Just got my account too and I really like the look of the shops now we will wait and see how they do with SEO
Same here – should be interesting. Bruce is ahead of me by a few weeks with SmartName and has been seeing good results.
I realize you’re just getting setup with SN but wondering what happens if a visitor completes an action. Are you paid for both the click and the action?
Yeah, I can say looking at several of my product sites many that had 0 or little revenue have seen solid revenue that makes it work doing.
We actually are putting around 60 to 80 names over to Ecomm sites right now that are all exact match names for products and I look forward to seeing the results from that.
These pages look great, and seem to have just the right customization options. Looking forward to seeing how a few of my parked generics do (waiting for approval).
I also got an SN account just yesterday, and have setup a few “shops”. Will be interesting to see the results.
There is no revenue from shop purchases! Just keep that in mind. Shopping.com are getting free leeds!
iD
Thanks Chris – I’ve been using them for a while and have been very pleased with them. Not sure if you have seen it, but this post gives some good tips on customizing individual Smartshops to increase clickthrough and customer confidence.