Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!
Bright and yellow, hard and cold
Molten, graven, hammered and rolled,
Heavy to get and light to hold,
Hoarded, bartered, bought and sold,
Stolen, borrowed, squandered, doled…
Gold! By Thomas Hood
Hello and welcome to another Odys Spotlight column from me, Sean Markey. You can check out my first column here, and my second here. If we haven’t met before: hello! I’m an SEO expert with a weird amount of experience acquiring, building, and selling businesses built on aged domains. I write a newsletter about SEO at RankTheory.com and, speaking of newsletters, we’re going to be talking about a great domain available exclusively at Odys.Global: GoldMail.com
A History of GoldMail
GoldMail was founded in 2005 with some REAL 2005 vibes…
From their Linkedin:
With GoldMail you create personal and powerful messages in just minutes by recording your voice over slides you make from web and other program content, presentations, PDFs or image files. Then send your message as a link in an email or post it online. They click the link and your message plays. They see your slides and hear your voice – just the way you recorded it.
They were acquired by PointAcross.com in 2014, and PointAcross.com itself went out of business in 2017. The site appears to have been redirected to PointAcross.com for several years after PA went out of business until the domain went on to expire in 2020 and (I think?) was then acquired by Odys for their marketplace.
Why are these details important?
If you’re going to spend this kind of cash on a domain, you need to make sure it hasn’t been abused and made toxic–at least, as much as is reasonably possible to make sure of such a thing–before you go and entirely brand yourself as that entity.
So this one spent some time as a 301’d domain, and then some more time as a landing page (but at least it was live and indexable). That last part is important.
Now that we have an idea of what the site used to be, let’s check under the hood and look at what kind of engine (backlinks) this baby has…
Investigating the Backlinks of GoldMail
The site’s backlink profile is anchored by some seriously strong tech/investing links:
These incredibly powerful (and old!) backlinks form a pretty solid foundation of business/tech authority.
Because this business is so old (the wayback archive for GoldMail.com goes back to 2001, positively ancient in internet-years), there are a lot of really stupid looking backlinks from when people built backlinks in 2003 with a wild abandon, and sites like SEOTopDirectory.com and ProSEOLinkDirectory.com. LoL. My, how far we’ve fallen from the light of God…
In my opinion, the presence of those links aren’t harmful. If you own a site that’s 20+ years old, there’s almost no chance your site does NOT have such links, whether you built them yourself or not.
There’s even a link from answers.google.com:
Like a lot of similarly-priced sites on Odys.Global, this site has some big sites to flex in its backlink profile, sites that lend authority and business-focused relevancy to this domain name.
How is GoldMail.com as a brand?
So Eden sank to grief,
Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Not to keep hitting you over the head with poetry, but I will absolutely keep hitting you over the head with poetry.
While the Frost poem is most likely some existential navel-gazing on the fleeting nature of everything: beauty, youth, life itself!
One thing about “gold” is fairly eternal in the context of human history: its extreme popularity with all cultures across all time.
Nothing gold can stay, except for the fascination and value of gold.
Which is a long and self-indulgently poetic way to say: this is a 10/10 brand.
I think “Gold” as one half of a two-word brand is a strong naming convention that is unlikely to go out of style. Mail is… well, mail is something that is also not going away anytime soon.
How I Would Use GoldMail.com
Okay, we’ve established that the backlink profile is valuable, and the brand name is a winner so…
What should you do with this domain if you bought it?
GLAD YOU ASKED! I actually have some ideas…
Email Marketing Software Affiliate Site
If you’re looking to get into a cut-throat affiliate game, look no further than email marketing software. There’s so much money to be had here.
In November of 2021 Intuit acquired MailChimp for about $12billion.
ConvertKit has a 33 million dollar annual run rate.
That is to give you an idea of both the money involved in the niche as well as the level of competition to expect as other sites compete to rank for these lucrative keywords.
ConvertKit offers a 30% recurring commission for any referrals you make up for up to 24 months.
Constant Contact pays $5 for every person that signs up for a trial + $105 if they become a customer.
That’s just two of the many possible affiliates to sign up for.
Fair warning though, this is going to be a bit of a slog. Starting off with an nice authoritative, aged domain will certainly help. But stretch those fingers and start up your content machine: you’re gonna need some serious work to take on a list of keywords with this shade of orange/red:
That’s for the fairly generic (though niched-down) keywords relating to “best email service provider.”
Here’s another for a set of keywords around “mailchimp alternatives:”
Still fairly stiff competition.
However, if you get it right, the pay-off is really nice.
So that’s the affiliate track.
What else could you do?
Email Newsletter As A Service
This is a very different road, but hear me out.
A week or two ago it was announced that the quickly growing The Milk Road newsletter sold to some very smart Crypto/SEO guys for an undisclosed sum. In about a year, The Milk Road grew to 250,000 readers and was on track to do one million dollars a year in ad sales.
The premise of the newsletter is pretty straightforward:
A daily, fun-to-read email about a very valuable niche. Multiply that by a smart founder with a broad reach and you’ve got the recipe for a potentially nice exit.
It’d be really easy, if you were a good writer (or someone that can hire good writers) to spin up a service that does this for people that want to own their newsletter, leveraging an audience they have (that you do not have–that’s why you wouldn’t just do it yourself).
It’s also a fairly commonly given piece of advice that one of the most valuable thing ANY business can do is to reliably collect email addresses AND THEN ALSO send them email frequently. So a done-for-you service could be a solid business to focus on.
Anyway, this one might be a bit of a stretch, I’ll admit. But the point of this is, particularly, this is a really great brand. I think if you were to put together such a service on this domain it’d help you stand out, and then use the domain’s authority to write a bunch of content on how to start, write, grow newsletters, you’d get some solid leads coming in.
These keywords, like the last, won’t be super easy to rank for:
It’s just that kind of niche.
But that’s the whole point–getting into a competitive niche and not starting from zero with a brand new domain.
Here’s Exactly How I Would Build Out A Site On This Domain
I would combine my last two ideas.
Become the Topical Authority
I’d not do anything else until I published 100 articles. No matter how low the search volume, no matter how easy or hard. I’d get uncomfortably specific with my articles, like:
- How to write a good newsletter headline
- What the best newsletter for pet blogs
- How to increase newsletter subscribers
- When’s the best day to publish a newsletter
- And on and on and on…
Some of these articles would be super informational, and I’d try to rank for ever “company vs company” comparison article:
- Convertkit vs mailchimp
- Drip vs constant contact
- Klaviyo vs Bento for ecommerce.
Whatever ones I could think of, they’d ALL have affiliate links in them.
Then I’d back that up with a bunch of posts talking about “how to set up convert kit,” “hot to get started on Mailchimp,” and each article would have a robust FAQ section sourced from Google autocomplete, people also ask, and a tool like Answer the Public.
Every. One.
Then I’d have a bunch of “how to” articles with a giant call to action at the bottom of each one like:
DON’T WANT TO DO THIS YOURSELF? HIRE US TO DO IT FOR YOU (more on that in a minute).
Once I had deep topical authority, and everything smartly interlinked, I’d try and produce a few pieces of content that targeted email marketing statistics to try and earn some links. (Rank for “email marketing statistics” and people writing about it will naturally link to you).
I’d also go and try to get some links via guest posting. Get some fresh links headed to the site, show the algo it’s relevant. I’d build them to my most important keywords or to an important info piece that I needed to rank.
I’d have my own email list, cuz you gotta eat the dog food.
Become the Service Provider
After ranking for affiliate and info related keywords, I’d have a service page to help people build a list for their own business.
The content I’d write for this–in addition to the “how to start a newsletter” type keywords already mentioned, I’d write some articles on topics that didn’t have super high search volume, but could be very shareable and apply to a lot of people’s situation, like:
- How to convert your twitter following to email subscribers
- How to run Facebook ads to grow your subscribers
- And so on…
Really try and cast an “inch wide/mile deep” kind of net. Convert as many people as you can to clients and make money a lot quicker than with the affiliate play.
I think it’d make a ton of sense to go after both, really diversify that income.
Become the Expert
Finally, I’d produce some content like “How X company could increase revenue blah blah percent by doing THIS THING,” and then go on a super deep dive about how that company could do THIS THING to increase revenue blah blah percent.
If you’re not an expert yourself in this, I think you could pretty quickly become one by doing a lot of experiments, reading a lot of case studies yourself, or just hiring an expert to produce the content.
This super specific, super authoritative expert content will give your site the kind of topical authority that bigger sites may skip over. It’s also a great conversation starter with a potential client.
Bringing It All Together
I usually focus a lot on purely SEO tactics to grow a site on an aged domain, but I think a lot of people skip over the possibilities to be had by providing a service, instead of just trying to rank for affiliate keywords. In cases like this domain/niche where there is a strong argument to be made for doing both… I hope this article served as a starting place for thinking about getting the most out of an aged domain like this.
With the authority + the good brand, I think the biggest opportunity here is to go extremely deep on a huge wave of content that will revive the site for big G’s algorithm and help it start ranking and become a topical expert rather quickly (relatively speaking).
As with the other names, if you end up buying this name, I’ll hop on a quick consulting call with you to talk specific strategy and answer any questions you have.
Thanks for reading!
