TrickOrTreating.com Sell or Develop

I decided I am either going to sell TrickOrTreating.com in the next few days or I am going to develop it.   First, here’s a brief sales pitch. The keyword “trick or treating” appears to be highly searched, according to Google’s Keyword Tool.   As one can imagine, most of the searches are done from September through the end of October, as people are looking for trick or treating costumes and seeing when their city permits trick or treating.   The BIN price is just $7,250 for this great top Halloween domain name.

If it doesn’t sell at this price, I am going to develop it.   I figure I might as well layout my ideas for a site here, and the buyer can use this as a reference, or I can email this to my developer and tell him to follow the plan laid out here.   Either I am generating some revenue to offset tax costs, or I am saving myself an email to my developer!

Now for the development pitch. I think most of the searches are for people looking for information about trick or treating in their community.   Most of this information can usually be found on the city website, and there generally isn’t much to discuss aside from the permissible times. Sometimes, like in the case of Burbank Trick or Treating, there is a special event to coincide with trick or treating, which is great because it usually means more people are searching for this info.

For the template, I want a very cute Halloween themed logo and header.   On the side or top menu of the template, I want spaces for 2-4 banners of various horizontal sizes (maybe of cute shapes), each connected to affiliates that sell Halloween costumes and Halloween candy.   Below this, I would like a link of resources, some external, but many internally created pages, such as “Trick or Treating Safety,” “Popular Halloween Costumes for 2009,” “Trick or Treating History”…etc.

Now for the meat of the project…   On the home page (in the middle), I want text that says, “Trick or Treating Times for:” and below this, 2 drop down menus – one for state and one for city.   When a person chooses a state, the city list populates and they can then choose the city and hit the “Go” button.   It will take them to a page that has the time for trick or treating for that city, a link to the city website where it mentions trick or treating, and any additional special information.

Most people will find the site through search engines, when they are searching for something like “Lowell Trick or Treating Times.”   Because the site will launch 7 months prior to Halloween, it will gain trust in Google and continue to rise in the rankings. Additionally, because the site will look very professional and have good information, I presume there will be links to the site from bloggers and other websites who post trick or treating times.

I won’t add Adsense to the site until July or August because there probably won’t be a lot of traffic, and Google might think it’s “spammy” if a large site is launched with Adsense.   I will launch each state/city separately – slowly, so Google doesn’t see a 500 page site go up over night, and because it’s going to take a bit of time to get all the data. If I can figure out a database option, I will use it to make the data load easier.

The site will be built on WordPress, and the actual site skin and logo should be fairly inexpensive, depending on the style customization.   The difficult part will be finding all of the trick or treating times, but I did some checking and the information is readily available.   If the project is started ASAP and built over the next few months, I think it will lead to big rewards every Halloween.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

10 COMMENTS

  1. Props on the blog in general! I had looked at some of your other names listed before and then went back to the blog to try to find them in a comprehensive list instead of within each post.

    Just an idea that might be of value to move more names and for the readers: If there was a permanent nav bar or link to a page on this blog with all names you are selling, and even possibly a tool for readers to post their names on that page that might be cool..

    thx,

    ac

    • Thanks… Nearly all of the names I’ve listed on the blog have already sold. They don’t typically last long for sale. In fact, the only names I’ve listed for sale (over $1,000) that didn’t sell are BerkeleyHeights.com (developed and growing), Metabolizers.com, SchoolVacations.com and TobagoVacations.com. I think I’ve sold all of the others.

      Also, I don’t list other people’s names for sale unless there’s a compelling reason to do so. I think it will make the blog look spammy.

  2. I would develop it but that depends on how much you paid for it and how much it could bring in. There are some really good Halloween affiliate offers out there. Some of them pay you 50% on costume sales.

    It could be some really really good seasonal income.

    • Thanks for the feedback. I know of a few sites that make ALOT of money, granted its for just a couple months of the year. TrickOrTreat.com is owned by a costume company and is forwarded to their primary corporate site. I think Halloween costumes should be a big component of the site. It’s important to start working on it ASAP to be able to have a fully functioning site by the time people start thinking about Halloween.

  3. Elliot,

    There are some pretty sweet affiliate offers that come out for Halloween and Valentine’s each year.

    Yes, it is revenue for 2-6 weeks per year, but I bet you could make your BIN in affiliate commissions just in the 6 weeks leading up to Halloween 2009!

    I say develop it.

    Go with wordpress and build out 1000 pages of Halloween content. With the great domain name you have, getting 100 solid backlinks should be no problem.

    Of course, you need to start the process now, don’t wait until September!

    – Richard

  4. If you are going to develop it, don’t do it the way you have described. I don’t see you making that much money – build a big halloween site maybe, but unless you get spammy with your adsense you won’t get many clicks when someone comes to visit about “burbank trick or treating”, and those clicks won’t pay much.

  5. I see this endeavor requiring a lot of update work each year for a relatively small amount of cash. I’d sell the domain. If you’re set on developing it, put a little money into developing an automated script that allows visitors to submit dates and times for local Halloween functions.

  6. Try to sell. If no seller, then hold. My feeling, you can make $100K-$200K a year per geo domain you own (without alot of work or investment). Until you have reached this level, don’t get sidetracked with anything less than a Tier One Domain/Brand Name

  7. I think my development plan might need additional tweaking. The most money is probably from Halloween affiliates, and I should probably focus on that as the heart of the site.

    As Spike said, I can also have an area where users can submit times, party information and other special events.

    Thanks for all the ideas.

    I am still looking to sell it, but I will begin developing if it’s not sold before DomainFest.

  8. i’d develop – what about a costume contest (cutest baby, best sarah palin lookalike, etc)? allow users to vote – winner gets a trip to salem, ma, a popular halloween tourism destination.

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