Show us a great .Tel

If you see a great .TEL let us all know....

MDR.TEL

hulltv wrote:MDR.TEL

Almost as good as http://mdr.de

lol yes my mistake.  ohh well

@hulltv - Great job done on http://Unlock.tel - including PayPal and Passbook integration !

http://MikeSeaton.tel

I believe we shall see many good examples of .TEL domains, whether they use the Telnames platform or use a regular web host. As more people discover the dual purpose that .TEL domains offer, we will all have probably wished we bought more .TEL prime keyword domains when we could. See this article that says it all about new gTLDs planning on raising their renewal prices skyhigh.

See http://www.tel.community/t4539-the-smartest-move-telnic-ever-made#17045

http://MikeSeaton.tel

Lot of developed projects on multifolders TELs were cancelled and about two and a half pcs of projects on regular hosting had appeared. Telnames Ltd should set a price for "innovation in marketing".

*get a prize

At a former site zagadki.tel there was a fine project for children. But it seems that after cancelling of subdomains, it's former owner had dropped this domain and cancelled the project. Somebody re-registered it because of it's former great traffic and made ordinary site.

TelBlogger wrote:www.taupo.tel

@TelBlogger - nicely done site at Taupo.tel - it shows the benefit of allowing .TEL "liberalisation" of Nameservers as an alternative to the standard .TEL template !

I wonder what you would have had to pay for Taupo.com or Taupo.co.nz if Telnic/Telnames had not gone down this path with .TEL ?

http://MikeSeaton.tel

Thanks Mike.

Possibly $US10-20,000 for those names each. But the .tel is good for directory websites.

Just gradually rebuilding traffic after the site was down for a few months after the liberalisation. It's been good to be able to add articles with some affiliate links in them too.

Have you been developing a few yourself?

Here is a site under construction

www.caribfind.tel

@Gibbs

Great work!

Is it generating some revenue?

Ok. No response. No worries.

The problem I see with this format is that Facebook business pages now offer all that these formulaic directories can offer and more. Customers are interact with companies and this type of directory can not offer that kind of experience.

So any business person is going to ask "Why would I buy a premium listing when I already have a facebook page?" which comes up in a Google search for business category and location. 

The only real answer that I can see is if the directory has massive traffic and your google analytics shows the customer the calls that are being routed to them or to their website. You can also build traffic with articles but it is very time consuming.

I don't believe people ever "claim their listings" and I have seen this model tried endlessly with yelp, yellow etc.

Having said that it's important to have a preliminary page for every business listing because that is the only way it will be found in Google search.

A better model I believe is to establish contact by email with every business to check their basic free listing information and let them know that there are enhancements available for a fee.

Then follow up that email with a phone call to try and sell them on the enhancements. But at the end of the enhancement period you better be able to show them click throughs and/or phone calls generated from your directory or they won't renew.

Good luck!

Thank you for the comments and suggestions.

We have actually given consideration to the exact points you have made about the model and we plan to make ours different from Yelp and Yellow in a number of different ways. 

I cannot and really do not wish to elaborate on those features at this point, suffice it to say that this platform will be connected and integrated to a couple of other platforms which would include B2B functions, Community Education, and Social Media features.

In response to your initial question (to which I did not get an opportunity to respond before now.. sorry): it is not launched as yet. we are now in the data collection phase which would take another four to five months to complete.

@telblogger and for the sake of other .tel community members who might want to embark on similar projects (and monetize them) I should have added that we also plan to target the 'pool' of contacts in the directory to sell other digital services ..  one quick example is selling websites using the .tel extension for which there are still many great domain names available. This is starting to bring in revenue already. We have one full time employee on that area and would need to hire more soon if the the pace keeps up.
The .TEL extension is strong... whereas almost all of the nTLDs are English language based (eg .lawyer, .Food  etc.) the TEL symbol is recognized worldwide. Of course .tel may seem ancient and related to dial-up phones, but .com was funny in the beginning and gained acceptance. (and Apple was a computer). Tel is going to grow. We have a few Telnames sites whose users want us to convert to full sites now; these sites are in the pipeline. Landing Pages is now becoming an industry of its own - Tels can be employed here also; we have started to do a few of these.
This takes focus and energy and this is what we are employing.
(if I do not reply to posts quickly, apologies. its crazy busy around here.)

@Gibbs Thanks for the information. I am wondering how you integrate social media pages into your directory? Do you just mean a link from a subscriber page to facebook, twitter et al. or do you somehow integrate the social media into the subscriber page? Cheers, good luck and thanks again.

@telblogger  we plan two features:
in addition to just a link...

1. When someone subscribes to a premium listing they have the option of having their Facebook posts and Twitter feeds show on their page.

2. Still in concept stage: Whenever someone subscribes to the premium listing they become part of a Social Circle or Community which circle among other things, will automatically cross promote their businesses on social media platforms.
___________________________________
on another note..

We are also thinking of offering a free TEL to each subscriber. I know that this was tried by a couple of directories in the UK. however we feel the key reason why this seems to have failed (we do not have any numbers) is because there was little followup encouragement to populate, and education on the benefits and ease of use of this simple platform. In a region where many small businesses do not have a website, having a Telnames site this can be a great incentive to renew subs.

Quicklook media “blunderer” might have some worthy points on this one


Im still watching on, the simple landing page being used currently for a few of mine, until wherever next .tel platform wanders to.

@Gibbs

Hi there, hoope your development is going well.

Just wondered if you know of any software or plugins that operate on a directory website that do the following: say you have a shop and it's in your directory. When someone who uses the directory with a smart phone gets within a certain distance of the shop the directory generates a deal coupon directly to the person's smart phone based on the phone's gps location. Not sure whether the phone user has to pre register for this function or not; presumably they would have to agree to the directory knowing the gps location of the smart phone.

Would be interested to know if you have come across this functionality.

Best Wishes.