My notes as I explore various business and financial topics

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

BetheBank.com is for Lease!

Why lease BetheBank.com?

One word - Bankaholic.com.  In the fall of 2008, Bankaholic.com was purchased by Bankrate for $15 million dollars.   Prior to then, Bankaholic.com was a Wordpress blog founded by John Wu.  It had an Alexa ranking of 42,168 and averages less than 20 comments per post, but had high rankings for banking searches.

"Bankaholic is ranked high in natural search for both deposit and credit card keywords." said Thomas R. Evans, President and CEO of Bankrate.  He went on to state that he believes Bankaholic.com will help increase their deposit and credit card revenue.

Although the ultimate goal may be to attract a major financial or investment institution, the domain naturally ranks high for the keyword bethebank.com.  Combine that with high margins for financial affiliates and BetheBank.com has great potential.  If you know how to optimize for SEO and build traffic, then you shouldn't have any trouble minting money here.


FAQ:



Q: How much does it cost to lease BetheBank.com?

A: The fee starts at $100/month. Rates increase at 25% a year.


Q: Why are you leasing out BetheBank.com?

A: Because I'm trying to follow Robert Kiyosaki's philosophy where I acquire assets instead of liabilities and BetheBank.com happens to be a very good asset except that I'm not making any money off it yet, and there's a yearly registration fee, so in fact, it's still a liability, but I'm trying really, really hard to turn it into an asset, dammit!

Now, did I make you forget about the rate, yet? No? Fine! Read on, then!


Q: 25% a year! That's highway robbery!

A: Look, we start off low to make it a good risk proposition.  Anyone should be able to afford $100/month to start. I mean, your cell phone & cable bill costs more than that. The monthly fee SHOULD increase as the domain grows more valuable.  Here is the fee schedule at 25% increase a year. 

                 $100.00
1    0.25    $125.00
2    0.25    $156.25
3    0.25    $195.31
4    0.25    $244.14
5    0.25    $305.18
6    0.25    $381.47
7    0.25    $476.84
8    0.25    $596.05
9    0.25    $745.06
10  0.25    $931.32


If you can't afford $305/month after five years, than it's time to give up and try something new. Ditto for ten years.


Q: Why should I lease BetheBank.com?

A: Because you're either just getting started building a finanical themed site, or you have a finance based business and want to expand your Internet presence. Trying to find the perfect domain name that's catchy, easy  to spell and appropriate is damn near impossible now a days. Once people hear the name BetheBank, they won't forget it. Shoot, I get daily searches for Be the Bank with zero presence on the web. 

Sure, you can try to build your own brand from scratch, but using BetheBank.com will give you a jump start.


Q: It still doesn't seem fair that you will be making money off the domain when I'm doing all the work creating content.

A: Ok, let me try to explain with an analogy. BetheBank.com is like a billboard.  I happen to own the billboard in a potentially very very good spot on the information superhighway. There's not very much traffic passing through this spot, yet, but the billboard is highly visible.

If some event causes an increase in traffic, such as a new city, or a new airport or a Justin Biebier concert (just wanted to get the keyword in there for Google searches), then BetheBank.com will be a very, very good spot to advertise your business.

Of course, you can always go put up your own billboard, but it might not be in as good a spot or as visible as BetheBank.com


Q: I'm not sure that analogy quite fits . . .

A: Ok, let me try another one.  BetheBank.com is like . . . a city in Texas.  They're not real cities, the way New York or Chicago is. They're there to help people locate things. So the locals can say,"I live about 2 hours North West of Dallas."

Plus, they also help the airlines navigate. For instance:

Flight 223: Good Morning tower. We're about 30 minutes outside of Houston, approaching from the South East at bearing 223 degrees.

Tower: Roger that 223.  Hold course for 15 minutes then
proceed to bearing 115.


Q: ummm . . .

A: sigh - nevermind. I can show you the Cool-aid; can't make you drink it.



Q: I'm not sure I'm convinced. What can you say to convince me to lease BetheBank.com

A: Remember the high finanicial affiliate margins? Remember Bankaholic.com? Sold for $15 million dollars! I'll split it 70/30 with ya??!!


Q: Yeah right! In your wildest dreams!

A: Ok,then. Let's pretend that YOU know what you're doing and create great content and traffic and get an offer for ... um ... $70,000.  You keep $49,000.  I get $21,000.  But, since we're pretending, let's pretend that we get an offer for $571 million . . .


Q: What makes you think that BetheBank.com will ever rate such an offer?

A: Well, some of the wealthiest companies are banks! Don't you think that Bank of America or Chase or Citi would pay to own BetheBank.com?

A second group that would be interested are investors . . . and companies that provide finanical services to them.  In other words, people with money. Tagline - would you love to earn 25% on your money? Don't wait, Be the Bank today! Ooops, I better grab that domain name, too!

Finally, there's this social lending club trend. Either a major player will come in, or a big institution will come and try to take it big.  BetheBank.com is much more memorable than Prosper.com or . . . what's that other one?  See! I can't even remember the name!

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