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Some recent sites I've been busy creating more sites, getting a bit of new traffic ... www.Provence.tel www.FortLauderdale.tel www.Bath.tel www.AuroraNow.tel www.Irish.tel www.Orthodontics.tel I build these sites with a combination of TelMasters Bulk Populate and TelVision and private tools. Use free images from www.MorgueFile.com - each takes a few hours. If anyone wants help developing theirs, I'm here to help as always. Also been busy on another local initiative, sold about 40 Telnames in Aurora. Will keep you informed of progress. Dig in the links above and you will discover it! Mark www.Mark.tel |
I´m doing a map of places that accept bitcoins, with .tel. If someone accept bitcoins, can send me a message. http://lugaresbitcoin.blogspot.com.es/ |
"I build these sites with a combination of TelMasters Bulk Populate and TelVision and private tools. Use free images from www.MorgueFile.com - each takes a few hours. If anyone wants help developing theirs, I'm here to help as always." To be honest Mark, I don't think this is helping the cause - too early. Your sites look really great but there is little of substance to a user in them - no records or links to real businesses at this time. Instead, the way you (and others) are stuffing them with keywords means that you are overwhelming TelPages searches with results which do not give the searcher what they seek - will they come back and use it again when you may have improved the content? This has got to be bad for business all round since we should be demonstrating to the public that we are building a directory that has current contact details in it - even if that means fewer (but meaningful) search results in the short term. The purpose of .tel is to facilitate the construction of a real time global directory (for the benefit of those who didn't know). In my view, once people have the confidence to use TelPages and/or our Geo/Generic directories as the their first choice search portals we could look at improving our income by adding third party advertising and services - but not before.. I think that generally, the cart is currently well in front of the horse. Enabling Adsense at such an early stage has, with hindsight, been a major cause of the domain stalling. Having quickly identified that businesses were not going to buy .tel domains in that format, traffic to the ads became the objective, and took away the incentive to sell the product - genuine directory content. Until better integration of .tel and Telnames is achieved we should be protecting the integrity of TelPages. |
Hi there Mark and Blunder, Interesting comments from both of you. @Mark - Your websites, although some do not have a lot of original information look attractive, and are considerably better than all the “anytown.tel” websites that are littering the telpages with absolutely no content in them whatsoever! I think the way forward is for people to develop dot tel directories for towns and areas which are close to where they are based. For example Mark your http://auroranow.tel/ site looks good and combined with your twitter feed and the ability for you to actually meet and talk to people in your area presumably means that people like Sun Shine Blinds bought their telname from you. However, realistically, what are the chances of you selling listings or telnames to businesses in Bath England, or any of the other “Baths” around the world? Also some of your categories do not translate well between locations. For example :- http://resorts.travel-tourism.uk.directory.bath.tel/ would work fine on site devoted to a Greek Island, but is fairly meaningless for an English City. Also in the UK very few people would search for Orthodontics they would search for dentist. So I’m not sure there is much point in aiming for a worldwide audience forwww.Orthodontics.tel @Blunder, - I assume you find it easier to sell in Crediton and surrounding areas rather than further away? I looked at several of the urls you own for towns in Cornwall and couldn’t find any that were populated. One idea for you both – have you considered approaching the Chamber of Commence for towns near to you and offering them listings for all their members on a dot tel directory at a discounted rate? It could save a lot of time and effort making phone calls to individual businesses. That is what I did for www.lostwithiel.tel Regards to you both, Keith |
Hi Keith - interesting post.... picking up what you mentioned with Chamber of Commerce, we tried that for several geo directories and also the local council and paper. All seem to already operate a 'similar' offering and were not interested in a tie up. Did you actually manage to get some success with Lostwithiel and actually manage to sell listings? |
@Blunderer, we both use different models and techniques. I have several purposes for my sites: 1) prepare for links to other tel domains for free. 2) create a directory of live links as opposed to static or copied links. 3) pay for the domain through adsense. 4) showcase what can be done with a .tel given resources. 5) encourage others to populate through examples. 6) sell email identities mostly to businesses that use hotmail/gmail. 7) build a consistent subdomain structure (related, community, best). By having stubs for anyone with a .tel to link from (for free), I believe I am helping build awareness and reach. However, I still don't believe TelPages has current value when it is not indexed by search engines. And TP doesn't index NAPTR records so provides even less value. 99.5% of my traffic comes from search engines, most from Google. TP has a future purpose as a clearinghouse for subscribers to use real-time DNS information but not as a primary search engine for end users. Since Aurora is my home town, AuroraNow.tel is the first real attempt at building local awareness. It uses Twitter and Facebook and a game to do this. It has live links to other local .tels (mostly Telnames) which I encourage owners to pursue on their own. Building in my backyard is an experiment. It takes time going door-to-door to sell Telnames and the occasional pro .tel (for SEO). And baby-sitting to make sure people populate and link. And figuring out which linking categories are best. But all this does promote individual .tel site growth instead of subdomains - a factor in expanding Tel sales, growth and awareness. I hope people will get some value from what I do. Mark |
@lostwithiel: I started with the Aurora Chamber when I joined in March. Set up www.AuroraChamber.tel for them as a mobile-friendly version of their directory. Then with the executive, gave a presentation, and thought I was going places as they said great idea, "let's do a proof of concept". With that in mind, I approached the town, gave the deputy mayor and CAO and others a presentation, they got the idea and said great, since the chamber is supporting this, we will promote your concept. Went back to the chamber, they had a board meeting and said NO we can't support an individual business. Told this to the town and they also said, sorry cant support an individual business. Went back to the chamber to say lets turn this into a profit centre. Declined. AuroraNow.tel is still an experiment as noted in prior reply above, word of mouth and direct sales. Listings and identities in the other sites are via the web or by focused email. These are still viable but you are right, the closer you are to the source, the better the success. With regards to categories, I use a generic script to build my sites, so I don't tailor yet to individual regions. So you might find surfing etc in the wrong regions. Thanks for this feedback. Back to the chamber: I am on my own, promoting the www.DiscoverAurora.ca game, the only online game in town. Selling Telnames to go along with the game. Just started advertising on my own as this is still a proof of concept. The game starts at the end of August when I hit at least 60 businesses and prizes. Then will run for 20 weeks and gauge success. More on this later. In the meantime, I sell Telnames to small businesses locally that need a site or extra SEO via a pro .Tel. This has worked well even with only a few sales. Mark |
Dottel,net said Quote:
Hi there, The Local Chamber of Commerce (actually called Lostwithiel Business Group) have run a very good website www.lostwithiel.org.uk for many years, but it was not mobile friendly. I am involved in a voluntary group, The Lostwithiel Forum, which aims to promote all aspects of the town, not just business. I set up lostwithiel.tel, which is a cut down mobile version of the www.lostwithiel.org.uk site, and includes a listing for every business that belongs to the Business Group. The Business Group paid the Forum for listing all their members. The work was done as a joint promotion between the two organisations and as a fundraising activity for the Forum. If it was purely a commercial venture then my hourly rate of pay would have been very low. :):)[/size] |
I applaud all you guys, for still pushing forward with vigour, Gave up on geo's ages ago, SERPS were useless, managed to get a small town to page 5 google. Nobody pays to be on page 5 google. Large towns like bath have thousands of millions of results pages, haven't looked, but I'll bet a search for bath won't show a .tel in the first hundred pages. I'm with Blunderer on the adsense thing helping with the demise of what now I see some of you guys call pro .tels. Would that make the others (and I refuse to mention there name here) toy .tels or amateur .tels. Anyway you all know my thoughts about them. For .tel to have integrity, we would have to regard internal consistency as a virtue, and suggests that parties holding apparently conflicting values should account for the discrepancy or alter their beliefs. My belief still lies with my initial love of .tel's mobile friendly, amazingly fast, and unique use of DNS. Don't get me wrong, I still keep quite a few, a few for SEO adding links to a couple of local geos and my only tel of the week, Taxinumbers.tel (over 3,000 hits every month) brings in a few quid, see that as being a banker in a few years, as it grows, purely organically, all my local trades, still developing those using taxinumbers formula. Oh, and good old dialaroom.tel, is still sending me monthly cheques. My income exceeds my renewal costs. I still love .tel. but it don't butter many parsnips as they say up here in Yorkshire. |
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Not too surprised about that. Think you would have similar problem in UK. If you ran an Art Gallery in the town of Middle Wallop and tried to get grants for leaflets and website there is very little chance of success. Get together with a few mates, call yourself “Middle Wallop Arts and Crafts Group”, dream up some Arts and Crafts Trailaround town and you stand a much better chance of success in finding somebody to fund your enterprise.:):) Mark, Your on-line game is GREAT, lots of potential for stealing the idea.:):) Regards, Keith[/size] |
OK Guys - what I'm primarily concerned with is the integrity of TelPages. By that I mean that I believe that our priority is to ensure that when a search is made then the results returned reflect the results sought - contact details of or, facts about businesses or individuals. How the information gets into TelPages is not the issue. We expect businesses to pay us - one way or another, for making their service more easily available to their potential customers. If those potential customers use the search function on our sites, or TelPages directly, and don't quickly find the contact details they seek, will they use that source again? We all loose out because the Brand doesn't grow, and those potential customers of our customers are stuck using search agencies who hoover and harvest, and manipulate and sell details of their search requirements, to other people who want to put their brand before potential customers - all at vast expense, and to the detriment of our own sites. It's in our interest to facilitate the growth and veracity of TelPages - it gives the value to our sites. People like local - whether a city or a town - but not every business wants the bother of any sort of site. If you offer to put it together for them then they accept - which confirms the need for some managed subdirectory listings - time consuming to construct and maintain but, as Mark points out, not advancing the growth of domain ownership (they're useful for community items - such as public toilets. Who would buy 50 Telnames just to display all the public bogs in Bath?). Listing Telnames on a Geo would speed up population and extend domain ownership. However, you can't search both a subdirectory and a Telname using the internal search option on a .tel site. You have to enable the full TelPages search. This is where things currently go Pear shaped. There are too many results returned which don't have a name and number of someone who could fulfil the search query. Keith asks if I find it easier to sell subscriptions in Crediton rather than further afield. Yes, it's ten minutes down the road but, that's not the reason why I haven't populated other sites yet. I am still using the plan that I started with in 2009 but every year since then there has been the hint of a significant change/improvement in the offing which has caused me to hold back. None of these have really facilitated an enhancement of my position but the arrival of Telnames last year has caused me, once again, to proceed with caution. I haven't tried to project my, or the Tel brand very far until now because we have an imperfect product; in case I need to change direction. I'll get round to em drekly. I realise we all do what we do because that's what we do and we can but, if I pick up a telephone directory and find that all the pages are there but blank, I won't pick it up again. With regard to association with Chambers of Commerce, we work cooperatively with those that wish to do so but you don't often hear "If we recommend this to our members then we can spend the money we save not building a mobile site, on other priorities". More often these days they prefer to squander our Taxes - correction - spend three years applying for grant funds to build another one year wonder (not maintained when the grant runs out). |
Guys, first off I applaud all the efforts- Mark/Blunderer/Lwt great job. I thought I would comment about sites being populated for Telpages correctly, I think everyone involved must realize 20 or 100 or 10,000 sites populated in a certain way make no difference whatsoever. Each developer or investor whoever he or she is will populate however they would like and it will make no difference in the grand scheme. I think we can all appreciate sites that have been well populated and structured, which I would agree benefits us all. However the notion that a few of us populating in a certain way will affect .tel is not reality. Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Others have all proved this theory wrong. There are millions of ridiculous pages with no content and weird photo's and the major sites still thrive. I think a massive promotion effort and partnership effort would affect .tel/Telnames, our smaller efforts while good/great/valiant are unlikely to affect popularity or discoverability of .tel. In my opinion tel sites with google ads, have really also had zero affect on whether .tel is successful or not. 10k or 30k .tel sites with ads really? There are billions of webpages out there, let's not fool ourselves. I'm keeping the faith for a long time now that some larger developments will occur that will help the domain's success and ours, yet also realizing that all of us thinking that small developments and directories will most likely not be the spark that ignites .tel. If this was the spark, then many of the directories that I have built- or Mark has- or Boracay or Movies.tel- or Blunderer would have ignited already after 4 years. On another note: I've enjoyed great success with Geo's and I believe Waikiki is still P1 #1 for waikiki taxi- Cheers brothers- D |
I too am having lots of success with Geos. I have about 60 well populated and I am now in the process of updating the 30-40 best performing cities and towns. I will drop the smaller directores over the coming 12 months so that I can devote more time to updating. I have stuck to the plan I started out with in 2009 and made the best of what Telnic has made available. Mark's tools have made directory building and enhancement possible - and thanks to him again for all his help. Just like Google, Facebook Twitter and Yelp, I monetize with adverts. There should be no restrictions on the way you monetize your domains. Some tel owners have had success with direct selling of listings - but that would not work for me. I approached the local town council about using my ballina.tel directory for local listings when I heard they were developing an app for the town - but they showed no interest. I didn't approach my local Chamber of Commerce as I anticipated the reaction that Mark received. My directory building news is mainly positive. Hits on some of my best performing directories are 10,000 per month and pageviews are now 160,000 and growing by the month, reflecting the excellent performance in Google search of my directory listings, I am having great success with long-tail sub-domains e.g. jim-smith and co-solicitors.mytown.tel - this is definitely a winning formula from my experience. The adsense earnings are also increasing as more and more people are returning to their local tel directory because they are populated with up-to-date and reliable contact information. Yes, updating is time consuming and a major pain in the neck - but that's what I got to do right now if I am serious about developing this business. The listings are free and most days I receive a few new submissions. I occasionally get requests to update or remove a listing which I do immediately. I hear what people are saying about Telpages - but the reality is very few people use Telpages for now. Surely, further development of Telpages to return only sub-domains that contain at least a phone number is techically possible. There is no easy or perfect way forward - and each of us has our own way of justifying our investment. These are early days and you have to experiment to discover the winning formula. Everyone of us here, including Telnic and Telnames, are trying their best and in time hopefully we will be rewarded. But the last thing we need are domains that cannot be monetized with adverts. Good luck to everyone. |
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For Ballina.tel and the others, do you charge to be listing in your directory? To list only phone is great because we should build the global phone directory, but I am building a site that the phone to call is not great to list, check here in my site that I am building and you will see what I am talking about: http://aquitaine.france.villas.tel Regards http://movie.tel http://4g.tel[/size] |
Perhaps a new thread... Quote:
Once again, how such a tiny mod to a template could make a huge visual difference. data dumped together like this without a meaningful visual difference is going to be clicked? No chance There needs to be a small image next to each listing. Not the "globe icon" The perfect way to do this would be to firstly point instead to a villa specific .tel sub domain. The .tel system should be clever enough to have rendered the icon that was associated with each listings icon (if no icon image was at the sub domain then just render the standard .tel icon) So simple[/size] |
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Only new compelling features are being added to telnames. What's coming next to telnames... Considering a drastic change for boracay top level domain, to become a telname single page. If I want to sell listings (or the idea of always current, speedy, mobile optimised contact data) in boracay for inclusion in a .tel boracay directory, surely I need to keep it clear cut by showing the most memorable of boracay examples of what's actually a .tel website (boracay.tel) Any thoughts? (is it possible could we permanently redirect(301???) all the existing boracay sub-domains (so we don't lose the years of google ranking hard work) to an alternative pro.tel copy of boracay directory data? ...for a few months anyway, so google results can be carried over) ps A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link juice (ranking power) to the redirected page[/size] |
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Tony, I'm not suggesting that adverts be dropped. I can see that they are essential to your strategy and I wish you good fortune. I also agree that few people are using TelPages per se. However, TelPages is an essential component, in that it provides the search utility in our .tel domains, and is the only way that the content of a Telname can be searched from a .tel. Ensuring that TelPages returns relevant results (maintains it's integrity) should be an objective of us all. You (and almost everyone else on this thread) have populated your sites with contact details, and then sought revenue from ads. It's doing it the other way round that I do not think should be promoted, at present. Up to date content should come first. That will keep people using our sites. Encouraging the mass production of more sites which put revenue before content, and where the only current relevance is not the contact links within but, instead, the keyword(s) it contains, only results in unfulfilled searches.[/size] |
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I don't charge - even we didn't have an economic recession very few people would be willing to pay when there are so many free directories. The free listings are helping to create awareness of tel and provide a useful local service that hopefully I can develop in other ways later.[/size] |
