Eurafrasia Experiment


I was searching through my files last night and found a project I worked on a while back that I put on the shelf until I had more time.   I was playing around with a concept I called “Eurafrasia.”  As you can see from the “Framework” above, I was thinking through how to  build a couple of brands and a traffic stream across three continents: Europe, Africa and Asia. The initial focus would be on China. Eurafrasia would be an umbrella brand with niche/targeted brands underneath it. In China I would be launching Asianista.com with a fashion focus, Asiarati.com with a technology focus and slamdunkinc.com with a basketball focus. Basically building up traffic to sites that hopefully provide value to the visitors and drive some traffic to a list of affiliates. Here are the steps I actually completed:

  • Country: China
  • Subject matter: Fashion, Technology and Basketball
  • Targets: affluent middle class
  • Name/urls: eurafrasia, asianista, asiarati and slamdunkinc
  • Setup WordPress for the four sites
  • Investigated and implemented various translation tools. You can not replace the quality of a real translator but we finally went with Google Translate. Found and incorporated script that is now embedded in the templates that calls Google Tranlate.
  • Setup the Eurafrasia Solution Framework.
  • Designed a logo based upon the Mandarin Chinese Symbol for Middle “Zhong” – concept of growing Middle Class in China with a high degree of disposable income.
  • Setup an intranet for Eurafrasia  utilizing Google Apps for storing of data, reports, documents, etc.
  • Incorporated Google Analytics
  • Incorporated Google Ad Sense (content – text and banner and video – youtube ppc ads)
  • Built and published a few PPC ads utilizing Google Ad Words (built one for each and serve by keywords)
  • Implemented the translation code on all our pages.
  • Began investigating content sources. To get things rolling I implemented a key word based rss feed from Google Blog.
  • Completed the development of the feeder pages. This involved writing simple copy for Asianista, Asiarati and Slam Dunk Inc and making slight modifications for “city name” within the copy and within the subdomain. Setup in Chinese only (I had the time I would have blown it out into the other languages .) The cities I chose to use were based upon them being the top economically ranked cities within Europe, Africa and Asia. The urls for the feeder sites were as follows:
    • Asianista (due to domain listed only cities in Asia):
      • http://shanghai.asianista.com
      • http://beijing.asianista.com
      • http://hongkong.asianista.com
      • http://mumbai.asianista.com
      • http://delhi.asianista.com
      • http://kolkata.asianista.com
      • http://bobos.asianista.com
      • http://lingleis.asianista.com
    • Asiarati (due to domain listed only cities in Asia):
      • http://shanghai.asiarati.com
      • http://beijing.asiarati.com
      • http://hongkong.asiarati.com
      • http://mumbai.asiarati.com
      • http://delhi.asiarati.com
      • http://kolkata.asiarati.com
      • http://bobos.asiarati.com
      • http://lingleis.asiarati.com
    • Slam Dunk Inc (due to domain listed cities in Europe, Africa and Asia):
      • http://shanghai.slamdunkinc.com
      • http://beijing.slamdunkinc.com
      • http://hongkong.slamdunkinc.com
      • http://mumbai.slamdunkinc.com
      • http://delhi.slamdunkinc.com
      • http://kolkata.slamdunkinc.com
      • http://johannesburg.slamdunkinc.com
      • http://capetown.slamdunkinc.com
      • http://eastrand.slamdunkinc.com
      • http://paris.slamdunkinc.com
      • http://london.slamdunkinc.com
      • http://madrid.slamdunkinc.om
    • Eurafrasia (due to domain listed cities in Europe, Africa and Asia):
      • http://shanghai.eurafrasia.com
      • http://beijing.eurafrasia.com
      • http://hongkong.eurafrasia.com
      • http://mumbai.eurafrasia.com
      • http://delhi.eurafrasia.com
      • http://kolkata.eurafrasia.com
      • http://johannesburg.eurafrasia.com
      • http://capetown.eurafrasia.com
      • http://eastrand.eurafrasia.com
      • http://paris.eurafrasia.com
      • http://london.eurafrasia.com
      • http://madrid.eurafrasia.com

If I had found the time I would have:

  • defined a content approach or solution – this might involve migrating one or all from a WordPress Blog application to a user generated content application, like http://elgg.org or http://pligg.com.
  • experimented with searching for keywords on Baidu.com and incorporating those keywords into the copy being produced so we can build traffic from localized search engines in Europe, Africa and Asia.
  • Registered the  .cn names for each domain
  • Created more niche feeder pages and targeted other languages.
  • Targeted the other country specific search engines, basically building out the framework above.

With the work I was able to finish, I actually picked up a significant amount of traffic from China in this approach and for several keywords I was able to achieve a good spot within search results on Baidu.com.  Since then I have let all the domains expire with the exception of eurafrasia.com and  asiarati.com, maybe I will pick it back up later.  Regardless, it was a lot of fun and I learned alot along the way that I have utilized on a number of other assignments.

Here are pictures of some of the assets I captured along the way.

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