My suggestions for Men.com - and to digress a bit, a sales pitch for CANNABIS.COM
 

Interesting info. Here are my thoughts...

1. Generic domains most often have much innate value even if poorly developed / not developed at all; an investment.

2. Generic domains are a great way to break into a particular market quickly...

3. However, from there development, marketing, luck, etc all then come into play.

In regards to men.com - I tend to agree with the poster above who mentioned "gay" / porn site - that may be a better use for the site...

A quick check of related keywords to men.com at Overture tends to support the idea of gay / porn as potentially a more worthwhile use of the men.com domain.

With that said, some simple suggestions, in my view, that would go a long way to making men.com better...

* Redo the homepage...

ie. many folks will mistakeningly think the menu graphic in the middle is just another ad.

* Speaking of ads - way too many and way too large on the right-hand side ... make them smaller or something and instead provide more content in that space ...

* First impressions count a lot - if a surfer doesn't see what they desire within the first screen-full, they're likely going to leave quickly, and likely not return.

* Redo the side-menu ... shift the emphasis more to the life-style related items - most men aren't there to read the news ... they want to get answers to personal men-type (ie. sex, dating, dress, hygene, health) questions, see some women, and have some fun...

* Speaking of fun ... add a message board (if there already is one, I couldn't find it), a chatroom / blogs maybe, and perhaps consider a gameroom - could tie that into paid poker sponsors or something.

X as in eliminate - offering free email - that's so 1990s ... and usually more hassle than it's worth - a few abuses of free email by users can potentially lead to far-reaching problems, such as email being blocked, and more to the point, can potentially lead to the turnishing of the men.com brand; hurting its value.

Now to really digress - hey this GFY afterall :1orglaugh

CANNABIS.COM is for sale - and seeing how much Men.com reportedly sold for, CANNABIS.COM is likely a bargain in comparison ... includes some common typo variations plus CANN.COM (a nice 4 letter!) too along with much of the content ...

Current high offer, just this past week, is $500K USD for the CANNABIS.COM package.

That's getting closer to the ballpark of what I'd consider accepting from a motivated buyer...

Please direct offers / questions to me at [email protected] and/or [email protected]

Lets do business.

Ron

I'd like to offer some constructive criticism from a technical / usability perspective.

1. The excessive use of javascript on the index is causing poor site load performance.

2. The site could really benefit from a clean, CSS only 3 column layout with a more inviting color scheme. In its present incarnation, the site is very dark and the image based fonts are terribly hard to read.

:question

Hint: Graphic design is the least of men.com's problems.

You mom-and-pop site owners (are) mom-and-pop site owners for a reason.

Did you even read what I posted? I simply offered a couple of suggestions from a usability standpoint. Nowhere did I offer or address any other issues.

Please post your great accomplishments so we can critique them.

Like it or not, KRL is a smart son of a bitch!

He's not spending his money on "overhead" until it starts getting lots more traffic and he gets the right concept on it that hits paydirt.

I think most of the people talking shit are just jealous that they can't afford a million dollar fucking domain name!

Buying a premium building and running it like a slum landlord doesn't make you a smart cookie either. :2 cents:

Go Gay. Thats probaly the best idea yet. If you did it right...it would be a monster of a site.


Lotus_Mike isn't a moron after all :) Throwing out words I haven't heard since my marketing classes back in college.

business advice? what business advice? It should be fucking obvious to any fucking idiot.

Any one laugh when Jace cant affort some design work and have to whore a big ass sig for 2 months.

:1orglaugh

I've already jumped on the guys about this.

Like I said they came to us with very strong credentials, so we'll see if they can get it together.

Cincuenta!.....,...

Whatever you choose to do, find someone with a track record for building profitable content sites. The last thing I'd be interested in design portfolio -- the best site builders I know outsource work to top-notch designers (hell, I know some web design firms that even do this.)

gay portal and be done with it :2 cents:

I'm just a regular hard working entrepreneur folks. I wish everyone would not make me out to be a Donald Trump. I'm no smarter than anyone else on this board and there are many people here who I've met and made friends with who I consider way smarter than I am and even more successful. I've had winners and losers both. You just try your best to end up with more winners.

I don't know why a few people are so obsessed with bashing this domain. Its just a domain like every other one. Nothing special yet. Maybe one day it will be a great site, maybe it will take years to get the formula right. Maybe we'll try gay next. I'm not opposed to that approach either.

But its a nice property and we'll always have intrinsic value, so that affords the luxury to work it in different ways till we nail it down tight.

The crux of this statement is that many feel you did make yourself out to be a "Donald Trump" amongst the people on this forum. All the talk of money made, and so forth. :2 cents:

Here are a few of the sites the current management and development team built and run:

http://www.MuscleAndFitness.com/

http://www.MensFitness.com/

http://www.FlexOnline.com/

http://www.Shape.com/

http://www.NationalEnquirer.com/

http://www.StarMagazine.com/

Good lord, the current index is atrocious from an end user standpoint. Really no reflection of their past work. It loads slow as fuck and a black background, with that crazy font on the menu buttons? Next.............

And they all look too bold and industrial.

You need a new agency.

If someone offered you 500k for that domain you should jump all over it, I cant see anyone paying over 75k for it without getting ripped off.

Well all the bashing started after this domain was acquired. I didn't even want to post the acquisition, but Rick came on here and posted about it.

Fuck I'm sick of it. Everyone go bash someone else already. Its fucking boring as hell seeing the same crap over and over.

I like working independently and being productive and creative. I like buying and selling things. Nothing more. That's why I love the domain biz. I don't like running big companies. I don't want to run a big company. I just like being a small businessman, its way more fun and less stress. I can't stand the bureaucracy when your small biz turns into a heavy corporation. When that point comes its time to sell, make your profits and go do your next new fun venture.

Brand has Weed.com. These two should sell as a package deal.

:1orglaugh

Have you seen me make a post on here recently saying "Check out how great Men.com is now!!"

You don't do you.

Trust me I'm not as clueless as you think. I've sent the dev team a list of things already that I was not thrilled with. I do believe everyone deserves a chance to prove what they can do. So we'll see. . .

Do you have any motorcycle or powersports related domains? I've inquired about ride.com several times but I cannot seem to get a response out of the owner.

Fire them and hire a designer...no offence but something isn't adding up here. Unless your GE or the likes, most people watch a 7 figure investment.

Not in my portfolio. I'll see if Rick or any of the other guys have one for that niche.

Ride.com is a great one. Try Biker.com. He's got that just on PPC too.

Thanks for the response. I'll email you the project we have in development, we're pretty excited about it.

The head of marketing for Men has a very solid 30 year major media corp resume.

You have to give someone like that the benefit of the doubt and a reasonable amount of time to show what they can do.

It doesn't matter what works or doesn't work. Domains on this level are like prime real estate lots. You could put a hot dog stand on there and the value of the raw land doesn't change. Yeh, the goal is to one day have a skyscraper, but that is not an easy task and more than likely it will only happen when we sell or merge the domain with a major fortune 500 company, which is the long term objective.

No, you posted some links of your agencys previous work. Why you advocate having your online entity run by a cookie cutter RSS agency in the first place confuses me. How personalized can you expect men.com to be? Any syndicated authors?

Thats a huge market. And as gas prices continue to go up more and more people are going to be getting into motorcyles I think.

Our current team insisted on not micro-managing during their build-out. We did too much of that last year with two other teams we had. Its like too many chefs in the kitchen.

I'm not slamming you - at all - that's why I said no offense...but to me it doesn't make any sense. Where I come from, no one other than huge corps invest 7 figures and just let it sit and they don't do anything with it, especially online - it's not easy to leverage net real estate with a bank. Actuall land or other property gives you collateral for loans. Letting this wallow doesn't make any sense but I could be missing it. Major media companies gobble up developed domains...this just doesn't make sense.

High end domains are relatively safe deals as long as you don't do a dot com model with a zillion employees and massive investment in infrastructure.

Whatever you do, I wish you the best. Keep a lookout for an email, I might forward a media group from LA.

I get the following message when I visit these 2 sites:


http://www.starmagazine.com/
http://www.nationalenquirer.com/

Page unavailable/under construction


WTF??

Got a PM from Brian with these two. Not sure if its in the direction of what you are doing though.

BidOnCycles.com

BidOnMotorCycles.com

That's odd. Loading fine from the states.

Not exactly. Check your men.com email, I sent you the project specifics.

Well, you've blown past me - I'm not gonna be starting a dot com looking for a public offering. This just doesn't add up to me. Something's just wrong somewhere but best of luck with it.

Thanks sincerely. Its been a challenge over the past year. We got innundated with so many ideas its hard to really know which will work best without trying different things.

I still think it'd be great for gay personals site. My two partners think it would work, but be tough then to position it for an acquisiton with a major company by limiting the content to one niche market only.

Don't want to do a public offering. The objective is to jv or merge with a major media company that has the infrastructure and media power to do it full blast. We've got things already being initiated for discussion in that direction with two big companies, but those size deals take months and don't happen without lots of back and forth negotiating.