When we started applying WordPress to our projects a few good years ago, the software had some rough edges. Most important, performance and security were major concerns. From v2.1 to 3.3.1 at the time of writing, things did not change fundamentally. What changed was the momentum behind each version update, the rush to incorporate best practices into the code and the sheer mass of the community of users that rely on self-hosted WordPress installations.

Many experienced bloggers assume that moving from one domain to tens or hundreds requires just a linear increase in resources, or even less so due to resource aggregation. It might even be true for mammoths like WordPress.com or their close competitors. But the picture is very different when applying WordPress as a CMS to enterprise clients, in affiliate marketing or as part of larger SEO strategies. No longer are all blogs in the network joined at the hip like a simple multi-site WordPress network. They might be required to answer from different IP addresses, sometimes in different geographic locations, run specialized A/B tests or serve as content-rich sources of backlinks in very competitive verticals. Security and project separation are also major concerns for any agency – same writers working on different accounts, having to log in back and forth between domains to keep content fresh and engaging. Think especially about the role and potential of WordPress as a CMS in large multi-nationals – who will manage twenty mini-sites in 8 languages for a household brand present in US, EU and China, when a developer can piece together a nice template in a few days, but the client and most often the agency must pilot that through different groups for approval, share publishing rights, account for advertisement budgets and at the same time worry about uptime, backups and privacy?

These are just a few of the challenges Domain Takeoff is setup to address. There are many others we might be able to fix as well – like reducing the go-to-market lead time for website developers, allowing affiliate marketers more time to drive traffic to a flexible CMS platform that can adapt to any layout or template and even optimizing spend for large lead-generation businesses in very competitive verticals like insurance or house improvements. Join us – it’s time we take off together.

In a rather plain way, Domain Takeoff started from our own efforts to manage backlinking campaigns for our clients better. If you’ve been in the industry for a while, you know there are two ways of presenting link building – the down-and-dirty one, discussed on the forums and long private conversations over Skype,  and the glossy PowerPoint-supported presented in a posh voice when approaching clients (SEO seminar organizers, we’re talking about you). Since our humble beginnings on some large media agencies paperclips budget (what we refer to as whitelabel work), we’ve been exposed to both views on link building and arrived to some conclusions of our own:

• like with everything else, there is a limited supply of authority backlinks in any given niche out there, and in time they tend to get more expensive/diluted quicker than increasing their value through aging/backlinks of their own
• same way as with on-page optimization, where you can quickly reach a ceiling in optimizing for more than 3-5 keywords at a time, there is a similar invisible ceiling in optimizing a website, and you might be getting better ROI from running several sites than focusing your efforts exclusively on a hero domain.

In short, we set up to build what we call uninterested sites for a while – honest sources of content with healthy SEO and reasonable backlinks, that simply stood out there. No AdSense, affiliate programs or any other subtle attempts to monetize them.

This is what we refer to as the “launch phase” – new or preferably aged domains, carefully built with tried-and-tested methods that bring traffic, referrals and ultimately authority.

Enter next stage, the “leverage phase”. Assume that you had 20 such domains in a nice vertical, like DIY or floor cleaning or fish and fish tanks. Through careful analytics you select the most promising top 3 and start grooming them for high-traffic (and buying sentiment) keywords. Whatever method you employ to give backlinks to one applies to all. If they are specialized enough you can turn them into a public network and link from each to the top 3, as long as you abide by Google’s terms and recommendations. Now you finally have a powerful tool to monetize – be it with affiliate products, dropshipping or simply promoting existing market players in your field. And the beauty is that you can develop such a system organically, give it time to grow while maintaining it with minimal effort, simply to find out over time that you don’t even need to go out and try to market your asset yourself – by the time your network gets a significant share of organic or referred traffic in a specific niche, other SEO companies as well as e-commerce sites will have approached you to inquire about your traffic, your referral and your reviews.

Of course, veterans will say there is nothing new to this. Except maybe our offer, that streamlines the process and allows you to focus on development and growing several networks at the same time.

Is there a third phase? We believe so – the model lends itself well to flipping sites as well as taking over multiple positions on the first page of Google searches. As for online agencies, this can turn either way – increasing writers and webmasters productivity on existing clients or as a value-added service around deploying and managing micro-sites on a competitive budget.