Free Unique Content: Family-Friendly Resorts
Every now and again I come across some interesting info that would add value to a website. Often these would be nice on a geo site or a travel site.
Recently, Forbes released a list of their top family-friendly resorts. I know this not ground breaking news and most of you won’t even care. But if you have a site geared towards families or vacations, this is great content. Ditto if you have a geo site that’s close to these spots.
So here they are, in no particular order:
- The Hilton Hawaiian Village Beach Resort & Spa, Waikiki
- Club Med, Ixtapa, Mexico
- Hotel Del Coronado, San Diego, Calif.
- Los Suenos Marriott Beach & Golf Resort, Costa Rica
- Ritz-Carlton, Naples, Fla.
- The Winnetu Inn & Oceanside Resort, Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.
- Disney’s Vero Beach Resort, Fla.
- South Seas Island Resort, Captiva Island, Fla.
- Paradisus Riviera, Cancun
- Half Moon, Montego Bay, Jamaica
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Another Local Trend Needs An Internet Presence
It’s been long predicted that the internet is going local. I don’t know of anyone who disagrees with this. People are dumping their Yellow Pages and are increasingly gathering their info from the net. And the best part about it is that the quantity of local areas combined with infinite types of business, lets you have unlimited choices when you want to purchase a domain name, or start a local website.
Today I want to tackle something that has been around forever, but has grown in popularity in the past year or so. More and more people are taking responsibility for the food they eat. And this trend I have today sees the colliding of several trends that’s driving its popularity through the roof.
- The demand is high enough for organic food products that they have made their way out of specialty markets and into the big box Wal-marts and Krogers.
- People are conscious of their carbon footprint, and, perhaps more specifically in this case, food miles. This may be new to the U.S., but it’s going to be huge. They are conscious of the footprint of the products they purchase.
- People want local. Most people would prefer to support local businesses. The general thought is that your putting back into your local economy.
- People are increasingly disgusted with the treatment of animals at mega-farms both here in the U.S. and overseas.
- Fear. Fear is the most powerful motivator. And people are afraid of salmonella and e coli. And they are afraid of foreign grown foods.
Combine all of these and what you get is a great trend: local farming. I’m talking produce, dairy and meat all being grown in your own city being sold in… your own city!
Mega-farms did away with this quite some time ago. But local farming has made a comeback. People are finding that if eggs are grown by a local hatchery in Houston and sold in Houston, they can:
- Support a local business
- Receive fresher product
- Have a significantly smaller carbon footprint
- All with the knowledge that the chickens weren’t mistreated in a mega-farm.
You see, if eggs are grown in Iowa, which is the largest egg producing state in the U.S., then are shipped to a primary distributor in Florida, who then ships them to a local distributor in Georgia, who then sells them to local markets, they leave a pretty large carbon footprint from all the trucks that have to take them to their destinations. This also takes time. And never mind the fact that Florida has one of the largest hatcherys already, only this distributor has a deal with an Iowa hatchery.
None of this is necessary with a local supplier. The food miles of products in major supermarkets is 27 times that of a local market. Supermarkets are starting to realize this as some of them now offer local produce, dairy and meat. They are jumping on the bandwagon. Next time you visit your Wal-mart, keep an eye out for the signs. I was at one today and saw local produce and cheese.
The number of farmers markets have grown 50% in the past decade, according to this NPR article. I know the article is relatively old, but it gets the point across. Here is a more recent success story. People can literally buy produce that was picked that day or the previous day. On top of that, they can meet the farmers that grow them. And in many cases, can even visit the farm where their food is grown. You can’t beat that for customer service. It’s all part of making the consumer comfortable. And right now, they are growing more comfortable with local farmers than a beef rancher from New Zealand.
I recently visited a Houston farmers market to see what the hubbub was about. This one has been around for a long time, but I’ve never been there. We arrived at 10am on a Saturday and most of the booths had already sold out for the day. One booth still had apples, and others had some produce I’ve never even heard of, but most of the others were in the process of closing down. You have to admire these people. They grow this food AND have to spend the time to sell it. How could you not want to support them by buying what often amounts to be a superior product? Sure they may cost more, but wouldn’t you pay $.10 more per onion for that? That’s what I mean when I say that people want to support local businesses.
Here is a guide on how to buy local from, get this, Kraft!
I think this topic would make a great site, whether you want to cover the entire country or just a state or city. A directory of farmers markets and other places where you can buy local, as well as the farmers themselves, would be ideal.
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Hyperlocal Dating Gone Guerilla
I’m not one to give you a link, say two sentences and move on. But this evening a domaining article made the front page of Digg, which doesn’t happen very often. And the only reason I’m posting about it is because it involves one of the geodomain ideas I had written about.
The full article can be read here.
The author basically uncovers a massive advertising campaign for online dating using lawn signs littered about towns with their respective geo+dating.com printed on it.
I unwittingly wrote about it back in August, here.
A real fascinating, and well-written article.
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How To Research A Keyword Geodomain Before You Buy It
To start, this post isn’t about pure geo domains. Those are no-brainers. This post is intended to help you decide if a geo+keyword.com is worth picking up.
Since I found the new Name.com tools I have been doing a lot of mining for geodomains using my trusty Domain Research Tool. There are so many geo+keyword.coms deleting every day, with countless more waiting to be registered. They are littered all over every single site out there.
So how do you tell if you are looking at a winner?
I’m going to leave out things you check for in every domain, such as pagerank, backlinks, indexes, history, etc. That said, there are four main things I look for, other than price, when deciding whether or not to pick up a geo+keyword.com:
- The size of the city/state/whatever. Not just population, but quantity of businesses. City-Data.com can help you here. This is the most obvious and doesn’t really need any further explanation.
- The relation of the keyword to the geo location. Does it fit? Do you want FloridaSnowblowers.com?
- Has it been registered in the other extensions?
- The number of other similar geos that use that same keyword. This is perhaps the most important and the reason why I’m writing this post.
For example: I have a handful of cities and states in the Name.com notification list of deleted names, including “Texas.” If a domain drops with the word “Texas” in it then an email will be sent to me. Yesterday I received a notification that FuelTexas.com deleted and was available to register. I thought it was a pretty good name. But before I pulled the trigger, I wanted to look a little deeper into it.
- Big state, both in size and population. Win.
- Fuel and Texas are almost synonymous. Win.
- It was registered in .TV but the other extensions were available. Lose.
- And finally I ran all 50 states in the DRT with the keyword “Fuel” in front of them. This was going to be the deciding factor in whether I purchased the domain name or not. Unfortunately I found that just 7 Fuel+State.coms were registered. Ouch.
Finding just 7 registered was quite disappointing. I was fully expecting 40+ to be registered. So few means that this simply can’t be much in demand. Still, these two words fit quite well together and since it’s reg fee, it’s worth picking up in my opinion.
Let’s move on to another example. I received an email notification saying that FlightsMichigan.com had deleted and was waiting to be registered. I thought it was a pretty good keyword, so I put it to the test.
- Again, big state both in size and population.
- Not really touristy like Florida or Nevada, but still a great keyword that can be good in any state.
- Again, the .TV was taken but the rest are available.
- Yet another shock: just 12 state.coms have this prefix!
I really thought such a popular keyword would be taken by now. Personally, I prefer geo+keyword.com over keyword+geo.com. It sounds better to me and feels brandable. MichiganFlights.com. Yea, it sounds better. And I’m not the only one that feels this way: running state+flights.com through the DRT… 100% gone. Not a single one is available.
So I decided to look even further into FlightsMichigan.com using one of my favorites: the Google Keyword Tool. “Flights Michigan” has a search volume of 40,500 with some decent advertiser competition. Even further, “Flights Colorado” has 135,000 searches a month and FlightsColorado.com is available! The list of available names are at the bottom of this post.
This is something you should always do before you pickup a geodomain. It’s helped me make purchases many times. There have been a couple instances where I took a keyword and found just 1 or 2 states, or a couple of the top 50 cities that didn’t have the geo+keyword.com registered. Even though there was a time or two where I wasn’t absolutely thrilled with the domains, there is an obvious demand for them.
And remember, none of these are set in stone. This is a guide to help you make a more informed decision. If your gut feeling says to ignore the rules and go for the domain, then by all means do so. I’ve done it myself.
Have fun with these:
flightsalabama.com
flightsarizona.com
flightsarkansas.com
flightscarolina.com
flightsnorthcarolina.com
flightssouthcarolina.com
flightscolorado.com
flightsconnecticut.com
flightsdakota.com
flightsnorthdakota.com
flightssouthdakota.com
flightsdelaware.com
flightsgeorgia.com
flightsidaho.com
flightsillinois.com
flightsindiana.com
flightsiowa.com
flightskentucky.com
flightslouisiana.com
flightsmaine.com
flightsmaryland.com
flightsmassachusetts.com
flightsmichigan.com
flightsminnesota.com
flightsmississippi.com
flightsmissouri.com
flightsmontana.com
flightsnebraska.com
flightsnewhampshire.com
flightsnewjersey.com
flightsnewmexico.com
flightsohio.com
flightsoklahoma.com
flightsoregon.com
flightsrhodeisland.com
flightstexas.com
flightsutah.com
flightsvermont.com
flightsvirginia.com
flightswestvirginia.com
flightswisconsin.com
flightswyoming.com
Oh, and I left FuelTexas.com for someone to reg.
(Something tells me I’ll regret not registering all of these)
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Baby Boomers Will Trigger Many Trends
Boomer companions/caregivers where chosen as one of the top jobs of the near future, as chosen by MSNBC. They’re absolutely right. In fact, the Boomers will trigger several huge trends that have already begun to reveal themselves and will be in full swing just 2 years from now.
There are 78 million Boomers, and in the next couple years many of them will be turning 65, making them eligible for Medicare. 78 million! To give you an idea of how many people that is, it is the same amount that live in our three most populated states:
The Baby Boomers are going to begin retiring and hitting up that Medicare. Expect a surge in age-related illness/treatments such as Alzheimer’s and Diabetes in the next couple years. But is that really all that 78 million people can give us?
Hell no. You see, these people will be retiring and that will set in motion oodles of trends.
To start, someone must fill their positions at the workplace as Baby Boomers are one third of America’s workforce. This is something I pointed out in a post about Generation X. Gen X is set to take over. Know their tendencies, likes, dislikes, whatever.
Second, these people may be retiring from their careers, but some (actually, I think most… and so does CNN) will move on to an every-day job… either by necessity to pay the bills, by choice to fill the time, or to fulfill their lifelong dream of starting a business. You should see a boom in the following industries due to retired Boomers:
- Senior job placement and training services. To help them find a job they’ll be happy with.
- Volunteer and non-profit (especially the Peace Corps). Now that they have the time, many will volunteer it.
- Consultants. Many of these seniors will become consultants for the very field they retired from.
- Temp Agencies. Many people turn to them, and Boomers like them because it’s most likely how they started.
- Houseboats. Both sales and rentals. Boomers love them and can now actually spend time in them.
- RV’s. Oh this will be big. You heard it here first: I don’t care about the gas crisis, Boomers LOVE their RV’s. Boomers love to travel, and they’ll do it in an RV.
Third, Boomers are going to want to live in their dream home. The key is WHERE their dream home is located. Like I said: they love to travel, so Boomers have timeshares, second homes and favorite vacation spots all across the U.S. These are the places they will want to move to. So where are these?
In no particular order:
- Flagstaff, AZ
- Tucson, AZ
- Sedona, AZ
- Palm Springs, CA
- San Diego, CA
- Lake Tahoe, CA
- Aspen, CO
- Boulder, CO
- Tampa, FL
- Port St. Lucie, FL
- Sarasota, FL
- Key West, FL
- Orlando, FL
- Boca Raton, FL
- Fort Myers, FL
- Cape Cod, MA
- Santa Fe, NM
- Las Vegas, NV
- Reno, NV
- Myrtle Beach, SC
- Hilton Head Island, SC
- U.S. Virgin Islands
- Anywhere Hawaii
- OK, anywhere Florida
- The Caribbean
Boomers already own timeshares or second homes in these cities. I feel there will be a significant surge in population in most, if not all, of these cities/places over the next couple years as the Boomers move in permanently. They are already familiar with them and will want to spend their remaining days, and money, in the place that most makes them happy. Expect healthy real estate markets in these cities.
I’m sure there are plenty more trends as 78 million people are bound to produce many. Are there any you can see the Boomers setting off?
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