What to do with your domains during a recession?	1.7/5.0 (3 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
Barry Goggin October 15, 2008

During difficult financial times, taking a hard look at your portfolio is a prudent thing to do. What can you do to recession-proof your portfolio? I already touched on strategies that are recession proof such as targeting the wealthy using premiumization.

Website development

Website development is another way to bolster your portfolio. Starting with the lowest earners makes most sense and should be the place where you make most gains. Take advantage of the long tail searches by placing plenty of text on each page targeting sets of keywords.

Long tail searches

Long tail searches are those outside the broad popular searches that describe your topic or product. Lets say you are selling Doc Marten boots and your customer is looking for black Doc Martens with 14 holes. Searching with all those terms nets you 330,000 results, searching for “black Doc Martens” nets you 686,000 and searching for “Doc Martens” gives you 6,290,000 results.

The first point is that competing for attention among 6,290,000 results is going to be tough and secondly your chances for conversion to a sale are lower. The person with a search for black Doc Martens with 14 holes knows what they want and are motivated to buy when they find it. The person searching for Doc Martens could be looking for any type or just checking out what they are which is much less likely to result in a conversion.

Building out a domain

You want to start with keywords that are broad and popular and target pages to these. Repeating the keywords too many times or in unnatural ways is called keyword stuffing and can cause penalties in the search engines. It is better to include them towards the top of the page and in a sentence structure that is natural and normal for your visitor to read.

Next you can move to less focused pages with plenty of text that should catch some long tail traffic. Using our example, you could provide a page with a photo of 14 hole black doc marten boots with the text and have it included in the Google images search. Make sure you provide the appropriate alt text with the photo.

Making money

Decide what revenue model you are using such as affiliate marketing, selling products physical or virtual or PPC. The first two models require calls to action where you motivate the buyer to purchase from you now. Much has been written about this and you can find plenty on this topic on the web.

I find PPC works best on pages that are specific but others have found vague pages work best for them. So it is probably best to experiment at first to see what works well in your sector. I have found that over time higher payout ads work well with pages that cover a specific topic triggering the showing of these particular ads. Also certain sector ads pay out more per click than others.

Long tail again

Once your site is up and running, monitor the searches used by your visitors. These can be great sources of information for new web pages targeting those long tail searches. They can also provide inspiration for new related topics which can bring in new visitors from organic search.

WordPress website development

I usually use WordPress or WordPress MU for website development. I recently picked up BoneThinning.com and have just started development using WordPress. The main graphic is completed and I decided on a theme I liked and am in the process of laying out and adding content. Then i will customize the widgets, put in ads and then promote the site to develop links.

The graphic cost $2 for 2 photos and 5 minutes of Photoshop time. The theme customization will take about 15 minutes and ad placement about the same. The longest time will be spent writing the content and developing links.

I have laid out the basics of my process in the e-book for sale on the right hand side of this website. It does not require major technical skills to produce a website similar to BoneThinning.com and I walk you through the process using screen captures. Best of all, WordPress is free software so the only costs i incur are the costs of photos to make graphics.

I am working to develop the low revenue end of my portfolio to recession-proof it. Maybe its time to take a look at yours?

Hosting Bookmarks