Doug Cunnington is our titan partner in the monthly Exper Picks rubric. It is almost a year from the beginning of the initiative and tens of our community members has acquired domains recommended by him. Doug’s experience, powerful strategies and an unusual view to the niche selection, domain acquisition and website building helped our customers to grow websites on aged domains that are ready to go.
This month Doug selected 4 domains in the Environment, Health, Food, and Travel niches and developed growth blueprints for each of them. Take a look at them below.
IYWTo.com
If You Want To (IYWTo) was once the bustling hub of a dynamic eco-movement, this domain championed sustainable living and launched groundbreaking initiatives to safeguard our precious environment.
What to do with this domain:
This is a great way to get into the Directory space, and if you’re interested in environmental causes, it’s perfect for you. The domain IYWTo.com once championed the cause of sustainable living and launched initiatives to safeguard the environment. The potential of this aged domain is still immense, as the focus on eco-friendly living is more important than ever before.
You could rebuild this site and focus on a range of environmental issues that people are increasingly becoming more conscious about, such as reducing plastic use, clean energy, and organic farming.
The site could also offer tips and tricks for sustainable living, such as reducing carbon footprints, composting, and energy conservation. You could partner with relevant organizations, such as NGOs and government bodies, to provide information about their initiatives and events. You could also offer product reviews and promote eco-friendly brands that align with your mission.
Additionally, you could create online courses on sustainability, offer eco-tourism packages, and sell eco-friendly products through an e-commerce store. This site could also offer an avenue for green-minded individuals and organizations to share their ideas and connect with each other.
The possibilities are endless, and this domain is the perfect foundation for creating a powerful eco-activism platform.
DecolonizeYourDiet.org
This domain was a project that aims to help people reconnect with their culture and health by eating ancestral foods from Mexico and the Americas. It advocates for a plant-based diet that is rich in native fruits, vegetables, and avoids processed foods and animal products that were introduced by colonizers. It is based on a book by Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel, who are Chicana professors and urban farmers.
What to do with this domain:
The health niche is a competitive one, but don’t let that put you off. This one is niched down very specifically, if you want to keep true to the Mesoamercian roots of the blog. But you could go the generic route, so you could niche down into a specific area of diet, such as improving gut health. Think: colonies of good and bad bacteria for your gut.
In order to become an authority on that topic you would need to provide high quality informational articles. There are endless videos on YouTube that you could research and get a tight summary of research and studies that are highly academic. YouTube could make it easy to do specific research without reading journal articles which could be really dense.
These could include recipes and cooking techniques, in keeping with the original site. You could take original images to make the site unique. Plus, more images means more ads can be displayed, thus, earning more money.
On to commercial content… You could partner with companies that offer gut-healthy products and services such as gut health checks, probiotics, prebiotics, fermented foods, and digestive supplements, and earn a commission for every sale made through your affiliate links.
Appetites.us
The was the site of a certified foodie, who discussed everything food in New Orleans. Including where they’d eaten, to what was going on in the New Orleans restaurant scene. It also covered general musings about food, recipes, and restaurant reviews.
What to do with this domain:
With this domain, you could recreate a food site in same format, in order to make use of some of the amazing backlinks that this site has gathered.
You could rebuild the site by looking at everything in the New Orleans food scene, from the best places to get authentic gumbo, to the top farmer’s markets to buy your organic vegetables.
If you lived in the area, you could go to the restaurant and other businesses to take photos and get first hand accounts of your experience, like a travel or food writer. And there’s no AI tool that could recreate that content. Plus, you could have featured interviews with the chefs and others in the food scene. They’d love the coverage, plus they would likely share your content on social media. They might even link from their website.
Seen at the domain name is so versatile, you can replicate this for other states. If you can get writers from that area, you could also get some amazing unique insights and photos to stand out from the crowd. You could monetize with display ads for the non product food related content. Then, you could expand to food tour or cooking class reviews so you could earn referral income. These can be very profitable, and it’s FAR less competitive than your typical product review website. Finally, you have some standard product reviews, especially related to Louisiana cuisine.
AWalkerinLA.com
The former domain of an LA-focused blog. It covered everything LA, from neighborhood restoration projects to the best places to get gelato, to roundups of tech start-ups in the area. The owner abandoned the site after they had a child and struggled to maintain the blog with all of the other hats they were wearing.
What to do with this domain:
If you’re a resident of Los Angles or a fan of the city, this could be the perfect domain for you to build a site on. You need to rebuild the pages with amazing backlinks, so you don’t lose any of that link juice.
After this, there are so many directions you could take on this site in:
- Highlight local events, such as festivals, concerts, and art shows.
- Reviewing local restaurants, bars, and cafes and providing recommendations. I would have a blast with this as a massive food fan. And, I could build a big section of content just on beer bars and breweries in the area.
- Local culture, such as the history, landmarks, and famous people from the area.
- Providing travel guides for tourists, including information on where to stay, what to see, and how to get around.
- Info on the real estate market in LA, and providing advice for buying or renting a property in the area.
- Offering a platform for local artists and creatives to showcase their work and promote their events and shows.
This is not an exhaustive list at all. This could be monetized through ads, affiliates, and lead generation. One cool part with local or city oriented sites is that you can pick some of your passions and focus on those areas. It’s nearly unlimited since your site can serve as a way to promote small businesses and local services.
Niche selection = Choosing your path
If you are starting a business from scratch choosing the right niche is indispensable for the future success. Before diving into the process of site building, it is crucial to estimate the right road, to analize the market size, to make a research of the competitors, to create a strategy of website development, and to think of the niche growth forecast. All of this is done for you by Doug Cunnington in his growth blueprints.
If you are still not convinced of the niche to start, check Odys Marketplace. And, yeah, we’ve got over 900 domains. They’re spread across more than 50 industries, so there’s definitely something for you.
