Advice?

[kmp]

Hey everyone.

Looking for a little guidance with this one from experienced developers. I want to develop VaticanCity.net and monetize it as much as I can. Its gets 49500K exact search, so it should def get nice traffic. What would be the best approach on this one to make sure I utilize the name to its fullest potential? Any ideas and suggestions would be much appreciated!


Thanks
KMP

[catchmesleeping]

Depends on how much you want to invest in it.

I have one site, I started developing about 6 years ago. I wanted to get a listing of every hotel and every attraction within the country (I was young and crazy at the time), so I hired some young college grads through Craigslist, and told them to go around with a camera, and paid them per piece for every new listing they added to the site.

After a few years, there was tons of content on the site, that's basically not available anywhere else on the web. I'm more focused on other projects these days, but that site consistently pulls 200,000+ page views a month, without too much work these days.

Of course, it's still going to take some time before my investment on that site is returned ^_^

[radioz]

You might want to park it to see how much natural traffic that it really gets. .NET is not .COM and even .COM doesn't always do what you might expect. Of course, a good site on any decent domain can be successful as per the previous post by catchmesleeping. Vatican City is sort of an unusual place. I would think that The Catholic Church and likely some sites devoted to the Rome area are already category killers that will minimize your site greatly unless it is truly unique.

It is quite difficult to enter almost any market today. From experience, I can sure tell you that! My site VintageRadio.com is an example. Right name, traffic, and about $230 per year income after hundreds of hours of work. It's a real site with a great name even! The trouble is that other sites were doing not dissimilar stuff years before and that is what is primarily used even though my indexing is good (and, did I mention) the name is excellent (category killer?) for the purpose. To be fair, everything about the site (traffic (especially) & money) is building but it is oh so very S-L-O-W!

Good Luck!

Best Wishes,

Jon Hall

(User for 9 years but no footer anymore!)

[kmp]

@ catchmesleeping and radioz.

Thanks for the replys!! You both made some valid points and have me thinking more about my project. Maybe parking it first would be the right move. I was thinking that people searching for Vatican City were maybe the ones who were taking a trip to Rome and were looking into visiting Vatican City. This is were I was thinking about setting up some affiliates with hotels, attractions and maybe some airlines. Believe or not there are alot of hotels within a mile and closer to Vatican city. The city gets about 4 million visits a year. This is were I was hoping to capitalize on it. I def have some thinking to do before I make any moves. Thanks again for the feedback.

Kevin

[DomainParking.com]

There are many domain owners who tried setting up affiliates for websites with domains such a this one. For some it was a great success, while for others it didn't work, and they decided to park their domain instead.
You should consider starting up an affiliate program with hotels etc. If a month passes and you're not satisfied with the results, try a different approach.
If you do decide to park your domain, there are companies that allow you to develop your parking page. Perhaps that will help you in the beginning.

Good luck!