Domaining with Google Groups
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Barry Goggin December 08, 2008
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What could be better than a ready made audience for your domain or
website? As you know, I am always on the lookout for new inspiration
for domain names and websites. Google Groups can provide that if you
take the time to look around and even better, the group is already
interested in the topic i.e. a ready made audience.
What are Google Groups?
Google Groups is actually a reincarnation of Usenet and consists of
message boards built around common interests. I used to participate
quite actively in Usenet back in the 80s and early 90s mostly in highly
specialized groups. As time went by, Usenet became the Wild West with
porn and ads flooding the message boards and making many unusable.
Google Groups tries to make Usenet more accessible and allows
moderation or restricted memberships to be set up to control the
quality of members and messages. Some of the groups have over 100,000
messages a month and membership over 1 million.
Using Google Groups to choose domains
I generally browse the lists of groups starting at the Google Groups directory.
For example, I clicked on Home and then Recreation and then Home -
Gardens. Below you will see a list of all the groups for that general
topic and a brief description.Here are some examples:
StPaulBackyardChickens St. Paul Backyard Chickens is a post-only mailing list which announces
resources and events that assist residents in creating, sharing, and
maintaining small-scale flocks in the city. Language: English 62 members, restricted
Dallas Organic Garden Club - DOGC Dallas Organic Garden Club was organized by local gardeners to share
organic methods, techniques and to explore and apply the simple
philosophy of organic gardening within our urban oasis. Go to
www.dogc.org to learn more. Language: English 46 members, restricted
Greenhouse Hydroponics This group is to talk about your greenhouse and Hydroponics System.
Indoor/Outdoor gardening with Hydroponics (soil less). This is for
people who want to grow legal plants. (If you are looking to grow
illegal things, look elsewhere, thank you kindly). Lets make this the
best resource on the NET! Language: English 273 members
Niche domaining using Google Groups
As you can see above in these examples, the number of members varies
but you shouldn’t use that as your guide for whether to invest in that
area or not. Niche websites mix information on the topic with bulletin
boards to enable enthusiasts to share their passion for the subject.
Backyard chickens from the first example above doesn’t sound great
at first but lets explore. First going to Adwords keyword tool and
searching for “backyard chickens” shows that the average search volume
for this is 8,100 and “backyard birds” is 12,100 and average advertiser
competition. Not too bad to start for a niche.
BackyardChickens.com is taken and is a website exactly how I just
described a niche website should look. It has on-target adsense ads on
the homepage and seems to be quite active.
Organic Garden Club is the next example and “organic gardening”
yields 74,000 searches a month and with very high advertiser
competition in the Adwords tool. OrganicGardenClub.com is parked. This
is a bit too long as a name but OrganicGardens.com is also parked.
Niche opportunity? There are actually a number of parked domains in
this category that are highly commercial which you can find if you look
carefully.
The domaining bottom line
Just looking at two examples for about 20 minutes of my time, I
think you can see that some opportunities are there. You can go to
sections in Google Groups where you have more expertise if you want to
develop content yourself.
What you should look for in a niche domain:
- Passionate people. You want people passionate about their niche who
will actively participate and spread the word about your site.
- Commercial opportunity. There should be a reasonable means to turn
your traffic into a profit either through ads or through specifically
selling to these visitors. Memberships can sometimes work for niches.
- Scalable. Though not essential, a niche idea can sometimes be
scalable. Take our chicken example above, why not also have backyard
ducks, backyard cows, backyard goats and so on. A network of sites like
these can overcome the drawback of being so niche that there isn’t
sufficient profit.
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