A Wiki For Every Domain Name

The Webhealth.com story.

My Dad was a family-doctor in Canada for nearly 20 years and he still managed to run into financial tight-passages. The best doctors are always looking after their patients, so caring for their own finances often takes a back-seat to upholding the Hippocratic Oath. I love my Dad dearly and am grateful for his selflessness raising my sister, brother and I, so it brought me great pleasure to help him financially. Now he could keep the family home, spend more time with my Mom and work on his long-time pet project: the health book.

For years I would call the house and my Mom would tell me that "Dad is working on his book".  It would never end of-course, because medicine is constantly changing.  The basics are always the same but treatments change (ie. Merck stops selling Vioxx and the book has to get updated to reflect that history/data point). 

After diligently writing, tweaking and cataloging 20+ years of medical knowlege, Dad awoke to the reality that getting this health book published would be difficult. He turned over the keys to his son,  granting me a free license. Then I had a very bright programmer (thanks Ying) stuff the content of the book into a Wiki.  Then I added related paid search advertising for each topic and lastly, in order to get traffic, I took my health vertical (several thousand generic domain names) and plumbed the names to the most relevant category or topic within the web site.

Result?   If you type depressed.com , eatingdisorder.com, headcolds.com (or several thousand other health related names), you now come to real content written by a medical doctor; that other professionals can update and anyone can share their experiences on. The parent site instantly gets over 600,000 unique health visits a month from thousands of generic health related domains that point to different facets of the site; and the whole affair is self monetized through paid-search.

This is the kind of thing that illustrates the power of generic domain names. Watch what happens as our users improve the content and as we begin to buy thousands of visits a day from Google Adwords to these new content-rich pages.

That's the dream anyway. If every domain portfolio owner created a wiki for each name complete with relevant content and surrounded by paid search listings for monetization, it would dramatically alter the balance of power on the web between empty domain names and search engines; and it would change the face and perception of domain parking as the name becomes the content

I am starting to think Jimmy Wales was onto something much bigger than even he imagined with this open-source Wiki stuff.

Comments

[Snoopy]

I looked at the main site (webhealth.com) earlier today and the design/layout looked very impressive. It (healthcare) sounded like an area that was ideal for a wiki. Keep us posted on how this compares to regular ppc. I guess it will take a while to really gauge things as it probably isn't easy know what kind of traffic growth will occur over the medium/long term.

[Javier]

Wow. Congratulations!
My father has also been a very important figure for me, although the time to release him economically to the extent I would like, hasn't arrived yet. I hope it will soon.
What your father has done is admirable, and what you've done is very smart.
A great example for future generations...

Regards
http://trendirama.com

[Stephen]

Great use of the wiki idea and a terrific way to put to use all of your dad's hard work, not to mention to share it with such a large population. How many medical texts get read by 30,000 people a day! Your dad must be proud.

Do you find that you see a substantial change in your conversions with the addition of such sticky content?

I can see that having such good content would really increase a users trust factor - I feel that it is a more reputable source so I'm more likely to trust the recommendations? I don't know if this makes a big difference for cpc but it might do for cpa.

Anyway, very interesting, thanks for sharing

[Omar]

Frank,

This was a really touching post. I was thinking about my own family and how things have changed for me since I’ve been doing well in the domain business.

I keep thinking to myself that there is a limited time we have to spend with our parents. It’s a difficult issue that I’m trying to balance as so much of my time goes into the business. I try to remind myself that there will always be opportunity to make money but the time I have to spend with my father will be gone forever.

[Edwin Hayward]

Frank, that's great that you were able to showcase your father's extraordinary work in such a fashion, and to give it a ready audience from Day 1.

It's worth noting that even if you don't have such a resource to draw inspiration from, one very effective way of "fleshing out" a name or family of themed/related names is to acquire a site that has been developed with care but without a great deal of attention having been put into the monetization side of things i.e. a labour of love by the webmaster concerned.

A sincere offer, a promise that their masterpiece will be coddled, respected and improved, and you might well find yourself sitting on a nice little goldmine of content. In many cases, the original domain is of little consequence if you're intending to marry the acquired material with a powerful generic, which will carry its own traffic and credibility (though of course that original domain can be "301 redirect"ed to the new site).

[Tia Wood]

I'm glad you posted this. I saw your website the other day and thought about doing something similar. I'm going to try it with some of my domains. I'll let you know how it turns out.

[IDNebook.com]

I think this is a really awesome idea and have actually been looking at doing this with alot of my IDN's due to language barrier and obstacles of actually developing the domains. Actually I'm really Jacked about this and want to get this implemented on some of my domains asap. Take for instance i have 関節炎.jp Arthritis.jp sitting at the #6 position on yahoo.co.jp with only a few pages of content. With a wiki on the site we should be ranking #1 with ease.

http://search.yahoo.co.jp/search?p=%B4%D8%C0%E1%B1%EA&x=0&y=0&fr=top_v2&tid=top_v2&ei=euc-jp&search.x=1

[IDNaffiliates.com]

posted by Omar
"Do you find that you see a substantial change in your conversions with the addition of such sticky content?

I can see that having such good content would really increase a users trust factor - I feel that it is a more reputable source so I'm more likely to trust the recommendations? I don't know if this makes a big difference for cpc but it might do for cpa."

Yes i also wonder if having to rich of content will lower the ppc , as the readers are most likely going to find the information they are seeking. I have read some places that the faster you can get them off the page the more money you will make. Care to elaborate on that frank.

***FS*** Little difference when we tried this the first time Omar.. will let you know in a week or so.. it's still new.

[kamal]

I really like this, Frank. The power of the web takes away the middleman (the publisher) and allows you to share your father's content directly with consumers. And...you make money in the process. A win win.

[DN]

This is easy, but how do you deal with spam content over thousands of domain wikis?

***FS*** It's manageable. But alot of work.. the joys of building a content site.

[Leonard Holmes]

Wow - what a great use of a wiki - and what a great way to add content to health domains. I'd seriously consider paying you or working out a way to share revenue by directing many of my health and medical domains to this content. Please consider opening this great system up!

Leonard Holmes

[Eric Shannon]

why use webhealth.com when it looks like you don't own healthweb.com... not concerned about leakage?

***FS*** I would love to own every variant, but I'm pragmatic.. you can't have it all. There are other entrepreneurs and businesses who have a perfectly legitimate right to own healthweb.com in spite of the fact that they may get drive-by traffic from my developed site. Can you imagine if the Walmart went to all the flower shops and drycleaners in the stripmall and said, "turn over your lease", you get your traffic from people coming to see me! F:)

[owen frager]

Just discovered Steve Case's (AOL) new site. Spent millions trying to do the same thing with a name that has no traffic to start from:
www.resourceshelf.com