Domain Owl

Not many domain shattering events happen anymore. But when a Internet giant moves, domainers feel the ground shake. Ripples are spreading through the online community at the blatantly militaristic stance one company is taking toward online commerce. Is it time for online retailers to have their own uniform commercial code?

A new California law is costing many California B2B merchants their livelihood, but business watchers wonder if normal sales tax should apply to online transactions. The sales tax applied to online transactions for the new law derives from an older community based model of economics where sales taxes pay for local community services. This creates an opportunity for non-Californian business to snap up the lost revenue their Californian counterparts will miss out on.

Many other online service vendors such as Overstock.net are also defending executive decisions not to support additionally taxed vendors. This decision by Amazon.com leaves online merchants in a disadvantageous position due to nothing more than inconvenient geography. The entire model of doing business online, whether from Ebaycom or Amazon.com or a central platform website becomes a diceroll when tax issues throttle a business.

The time for an ombudsman for domain and online commerce has come, especially when the overall economy will suffer due to a poorly thought out law. With over forty other states without the added tax to furnish services, the California online retailers and merchants will suffer for poorly planned government greed. How come California domain owners, online business merchants and B2B specialists didn’t have a voice in this new law enactment?

Amazon has long been a Internet leader in storefront capacities and the direction that the commerce regulation is taking is becoming conflicted. Amazon in articular is choosing to sever relationships with California based affiliates rather than be tasked with collecting additional sales tax from those vendors for sales and monitoring their sales tax reporting and collection through their sales channel.

The domain name world has been rocked by the announcement that California Sales Tax is now due from Amazon storefronts and vendors per transactions. This means that Amazon affiliates must collect additional tax. They therefore must feature this surcharge or above the line additional charge in all their billing, pricing and advertisement offers.

This knocks the online shop and commercial B2B seller for a loop. The allows persons not located in California to exercise a business advantage over the same business type owner not sourcing goods or operating from a California location. Governor Jerry Brown of California has enacted legislation that removes a California merchant from the list of desirable business partners an online vendor or product portal desires.

Californians need to act to prevent unfair business competition this law allows. If the California business operator wants to remain competitive with a non-Californian entity, they must pay in effect a surcharge for conducting Amazon transactions in this manner. That Amazon refuses to operate along these lines should come as no surprise. The Amazon success model does not include a tax-collection attribute

Amazon stores are enriched website design offerings and blog templates that enable site users, vendors, and home businesses to feature and lit their products on the Web. This can happen from their own site, an Ebay listing, via an Amazon account, or via affiliate websites and online stores. Supposedly this is an effort by California tax authorities to collect lost revenue for online goods.

The model for the Amazon store website will also change wit this legislation, as customers and site visitor must be advised of the additional taxation. Amazon.com avoids this issue by eradicating the presence of Californian merchants within its network altogether. The anticipated $200 million net increase in revenue will probably not materialize.

But with the proposed additional ten per cent charged to the buyer, prices (and terms) will not be attractive to the public as much as the non-Californian competitors would offer equal merchandise. This is a matter which should be addressed by many legislative and judicial authorities, and begs the question regarding whether the internet should have it own branch of legal business code and standards and practices for protection against unfair laws and poorly constituted commercial legislation.

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Amidst all the cynical backbiting taking place over the three amigos kicked from Oversee.net, I have yet to hear the logic behind Monte Cahn leaving. Is this company as much of a mess as it sounds like? I can’t quite track the convoluted history of these Internet based companies. Some of the comment show some bad blood between not only domainers in general and Oversee.net, but to those individuals in particular. Were these cost cutting measures or disciplinary measures against specific individuals?

This could make sense in the long run. I find it hard to believe any above-the-line talent in a high profile domaining company needs to be let go in such a public manner unless there is an underlying reason for having made them redundant that will be made clear in the fullness of time. Gee it’s hard to believe parking didn’t work out to be a money printing machine, right?

I still take issue with internet companies so bloated with infrastructure they can’t do more that publish parking programs and weave together parking networks. That’s just not a full days’ work for any domainer, in this domain owner’s humble opinion.

The news of these job cuts has alerted domainers to the money machine that parking is built on. Affiliate programs are always only as good as their bank balance.

At the same time naysayers are shuttering offices at Oversee.net, five figure domains sales are still taking place on public worldwide auction platform. That three of the big recent sales were .co name is serious food for domaining thought. Apple buying icloud.com for $4.5 million is the kind of sale may keyword domain buyers dream of. (What took them so long?)

Some marquee six figure sales broke profitably as well. That’s a dichotomy that should speak loudly to any domainer. The parking companies are going broke but the buyers market for big dollar domains is a blown out as ever.

eNom Expired Domain Name Software. Snap Expired Domain Names the Second They become Available for Registration.

That Amazon.com is buying single consonant domain names shows that a program of investment in domain names is still happening among large to global sized corporations. This complements the small to medium sized business purchase of a brand name or entity name to support online marketing and brand promotion.

Tap your feet three times if you “get it”. As reporters and broad stream media become more conversant in the domain name game, the open market for first time domain buyers and resales will sharpen. The recent appearance of the “Get Rich Click” author on the View reflects how this is done. It’s hard to believe the domain model for online marketing and resale profit, as well as affiliate sales derivation is still a mystery to anyone, but evidently this is so.

For domainers thinking strategically, this puts them at the middle of the demand market, behind the huge portfolio holders but ahead of the newbs with B2B needs for domains as yet to be determined. Any domainer can leverage existing domains into a worth position by multiplying their investment using coupon codes, the most recent of which was the Godaddy.com Indy car event code.

The B2B and side business potential of a domain name career continues to grow. I am surprised nobody has built a domain name shop franchise for the all the hue and cry that startups have in the world today. Today the Internet market for affiliate earnings is more suited to specialized end users, specialist webmasters,  and niche authors than ever.

For the right name the right customer is out there. Do the math: if you buy three domains a year at $1.29, and spend about $50 hosting them all, that’s a potential of $100 profit if even one of those websites sells intact with the name. On that formula, selling the right customer the right name should be simple. All they have to do is add content, link liberally to their social networking groups, and blend on low speed.

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The domain world is like both the sports world and the business world, where the big names make big news and the legal ramifications and business parameters change at any moment. But recently the doings of the domain bigwigs, as well as the business restrictions and legal shifts associated with domain name trading and purchase and auction sales, have caused long term market watchers to re-estimate the current market for name trade potential.

Monte Cahn suing Moniker/Oversee is an eye-opener, unless one considers the ramifications of pouring one’s hearts-blood into an enterprise during critical business cycles of the domain game and then having the rewards twisted out of all regard. The encomiums that followed Cahn’s exit of Moniker could hardly have been garnered by a self-serving coterie intent on cementing future lawsuit goodwill.

The big impact of the February Domainer Flu Outbreak (dubbed the Playboy mansion DotCom malaise by some) seemed to be the proof that domain industry news was in fact media worthy, but the mainstream media still does not absorb and reflect domain name industry news accurately or assess its importance and relevance efficiently. What is this opaque banner between the media and general public and the domain industry? Is it only visible when one is outside the domain world?

A full week after initial reports were coming down the domain blog pike, network news, even in local areas was slow and sloppy. The attempts to cover the story , even with competition of global tabloid saturation on every Hollywood street corner, was clumsy and often inaccurate. For those looking to expand their B2B media offerings, thinks about delivering a new pipeline to broadcast media sources unable to decipher the terms, importance, or relevance of domain news to their own lives and commercial enterprises.

Domain name professionals are still weighing the value of the dot-co market. Godaddy certainly has made the introduction of a dot-co domain name into the portfolio cost friendly. Godaddy continues to sponsor entry level domainers into the name game by providing discount coupon codes. These dotcom name purchase codes, the recent feature .co registration discount, and the .info cost reduction are mighty incentive when crafting a domain development plan or business agenda for monetizing a name. These savings can really add up to domain name holders with sizeable portfolios.

It’s unsettling to realize that the domain world has been around long enough to mystify and alienate would-be industry buyers and potential players in the domain space. The battles for real estate on the domain name corporate playground show testimony to the fact that this is valuable territory to acquire and own.  Changes continue apace in the online and domaining world.
Online security is no longer a buzzword but a vulture circling over the shoulder of every webmaster.

Denial of service attacks for the Barcelona DomainFest event and the subsequent cancellation resonate with the mobile phone hacking scandal in the UK and the “Hacktivism” website hack of the PBS website in the United States. Until forthright security measures for data, hosting, and website architecture layers are followed, hacking will continue as a fact of life,  as online malice spares none. There seems to be a measure of dissonance that cognitively persuades technology officers these threats are not real, and it is a salutory effect of the many hack reports that gives webmasters worldwide a chance to correct their online security and programming integrity omissions. Will they take the chance?

Some changes are long overdue. Rick Latona’s website actually looks like a website brokerage now and not a watch shopping cart. The doings of ICANN continue to amaze Internet passersby and dubious domainer onlookers. To see Frank Schilling offer parking services is not a surprise, but my expectation is that the parking market is long diminished (except for the Whypark engine). The reluctance of some domainers to develop websites that function as new media and communication portals, with provision for any level of visitor interaction, is a long standing weakness of many domainers.

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The resources available at a website used to be distributed freeware or easily accessible downloads mirrored many other places online. But today’s B2B website can draw visitors, links and inbound site traffic if there is an incentive that demands the site visitor interact with the site in a manner that is meaningful to derive the benefit they want. The facility of almost any WordPress or Joomla application today allows upload and user rights to download and customize a third party application or a resident file document from the hosting server.

People researching free software, white papers and offers look for downloadable B2B content for almost everything. It’s true that Google Apps has free software, but like as not the casual or first time user of today does not know how to customize the spreadsheet or tweak a templet business report to suit their needs. Business publishing can be a lucrative way to finalize a website into a real application. the question and answer part of the user’s quest to make use of the document tool or instrument will make clicks recur and read-again session traffic pick up.

Business websites specializing in these types of programs ultimately have a gateway service where there is a charge for portal access, customer service, analysis of spreadsheets gone wrong, and the like. Generally speaking if a customer likes the look and feel of a spreadsheet or business report they can live with a few additional charges to finalize the document and lead them to the next step on their agenda. This is where the domain owner or B2B specialist can apply price controls to document access and create revenue streams.

Video marketing using Youtube can help show site visitors how to use the software and see results. This type of visual advertising stems from decades of effective television product promotion. The insertion of basis Youtube links is almost self explanatory. Webmasters looking to supply their visitor with audio and music features can utilize the Youtube insertion to provide this feature without a lost of problematic custom programming. Overthinking the design is not necessary, but investing some time in selecting the appropriate WordPress template is praiseworthy.

The domain name for such a website should be very simple, and relate immediately via keywords which depict the functionality. A blog setup serves to organize the look and feel of the website with SEO friendly templates. Webmasters should know that every single web application today has been adapted for use with Wordpress which has become the universal skin for websites.

Thus the basic website building approach now stems largely from an adaptation of a template made for a WordPress site. Now the business to business or client-side perspective tweaks the offering. Think about a website that saves people time researching the best and worst WordPress templates. What about a site that rates the best and worst WordPress sites according to reviewer quality and reader feedback?

Domainers can use keywords to show researchers how the best WordPress template they need can be found in a few clicks versus thousands of results. By shoring up the best choices in template functionality for time starved site visitors, the domainer can utilize the best web architecture tools and the design flexibility of WordPress while incorporating the brand as a content feature.

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In my endless slog of deleting emails that are useless and distracting in my inbox, I was shocked to see  Paypal email that usually signals a banking transaction or some other communication that begs my notice.  Paypal wanted me to know about international services possibilities and some urls they wanted to visit on their site. Are you f-ing kidding me?

I know for a fact I am one of the Paypal customers who have selected opt-out when their pointless self-publicizing emails are concerned. There is no justifiable reason I should be receiving anything from email at Paypal or that url and its origins that is not connected to my personal banking. Paypal is abusing its position as a trusted email sender at this point.

Spam is not banking. It’s advertising. And since they’ve already collected their slice of my earnings, I’d prefer it if they not waste my time.

Be advised this is a full-blown rant from a domainer who is offended that their bank sees fit to use its status as a must-read email source to flog their services. Hint: I am already a customer.

Paypal has no business using their connection to me an an electronic customer to wave their shingle and beg for more fees. Paypal takes a slice of whatever I earn and I have long gotten accustomed to accepting this as a cost of doing business with them. Apparently they are greedy for more fees and this is the  communication they have sent to me, using my email address and name, url links on their site that neither apply to be or my services.

That’s a greedy bank.

Paypal should know better. One of the last things I need to spend my time doing right now is weeding through their pointless “communications” unless they are regarding critical financial transactions and money issues. That’s why I open an email from Paypal. Not because I’m lonely and just can’t seem to find a single site online to look at.

Paypal is getting like Ebay now, where they fill your inbox with things you’d rather not see and daily weigh the utility of still being a customer. I would like Paypal to be a bank and operate like  a bank, and not be weighted down by its need for attention and traffic. Paypal is a site which should wait for when it is convenient for me to go there, and not distract me in the meantime.

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A client of mine many years ago invested in a body of about 500 forum names. His plan was to bulk build out the forums for these domain names and then sell them to individual handpicked buyers. This effort met with the expected land rush of ambiguous ambivalence. With little t no promotion of the forums as individual entities with passion and special interest, there was almost no site growth. The clones just attracted spammers.

Forum themes and mods make forum website planning fun. But just establishing a forum application install is not “all she wrote” when it comes to forum domain names. These domainers appear to me like reclusive botanists who expect their exotic orchid to flourish inside a protected greenhouse sheltered from organic activity. Parking a domain name to me is the equivalent of locking the greenhouse door.

Domain values don’t grow in the dark. They need energy and light, vibrance and electricity to grow in value. End users must enjoy visiting the site and have something to do when they get there. Registration-enabled perks or features should reward new fans of the forum site. Promotion and marketing at certain key times can make a forum flash overnight into an online destination with demographics worldwide.

The forum itself needs to be fleshed out with topics and categories and posts. A sample batch of enterprise user names and sample posts sets the stage for a community to evolve. But encouragement is necessary. And imitating another board only works if the mania for the topic is white-hot (like for Twilight fans) or the graphic design and forum theme attracts fanboard moths (like for Twilight fans).

A domain name for a forum does not have to have the word “forum” in it. The words community, group, or board (or even bb) do tend to crop up. Any short niche word plus the “bb” in a dot-com domain name makes an extremely attractive and typable domain investment. The logo itself will be dynamic and fresh, even it is only a Cooltext.com conversion.  One forum needs active linking to grow and find new viewers, if only to get palpable feedback on the site experience from a new visitor.

Forums were the way most online users hooked up with fellow fans before social media took over. But now that advertisers have soured the FaceBook game, MySpace has died a premature death, and hackers focus their lenses on  FaceBook as a mining ground for individuals, online users are being interested once more by the semi-anonymous world of the forum posting again.

Forums can be references that get a lot of SEO query results. Posting articles and quizzes can make for a fun site walkthrough. Game cheat and directories of hard-to-find resources make excellent forum features. Community searchers are looking for the same thing. To get content ideas, Google search your site keywords and review the existing results and buld a better body of reference text.

A forum as a subfeature of a larger site is an excellent way to improve SEO. Hot topics are (ironically) Farmville and Mafia Wars. Quick blurbs of information come across as natural chat, and don’t need the support of a 500 word article around them to make the bots crawl faster. By making dsense code into posting incidences, and by incorporating posting tags and images (with tags), the SEO of the forum name and the parent site grows appreciably.

The one component for the potential success of a forum is that the user base is a prurient target. Some demographics, even niche user bases, don’t get online that much. Some professional groups and age layers in certain tranches of the consumer population either don’t have time or spend their texting social media. Luring away those users can be a futile effort, since the interactivity with their cellphone or mobile device is what empowers that traffic.

Certain user groups are always going to drill a little deeper. But enabling your forum to be mobile device accessible makes for even more potential visitors and members.  But for the Internet surfer looking to make their mark or learn something about their favorite topic, the community website, bulletin board model, and forum domain are still a good choice for domain creation, name investment, partner project launches, and website development.

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I hear about the movie industry how hard it is to make a movie these days because ‘everything’s been done”. The Internet and web pages are a relatively newer medium but you get a whisper of this sentiment in developer’s discussions and in domainer forums sometimes. My opinion is that the potential of the Internet to provide entertainment, information, amusement, and direction has barely been tapped.

It may be that the initial springboard of the original slate of concepts the Internet spawned in its first wave has been drained out of launch mode. But to say the “Internet is dead” (by an artist who himself keeps creating his image every few years) is presuming that the human imagination and the human experience has been summed up. We are far from that point.

The updated world we live in is making new demands on time, processes, and problems that need solutions, every day. Feasibly, I should be able to look up an address if I am walking down the street or Google map it. But what if there was a website where you could call in and have the street directions delivered via the Iphone or Quicktime converted text to voice recording? Have you ever walked the streets of your town and met up with three to five people who need verbal street directions? I do, almost daily.

This is very close to spoken GPS for the sidewalk pedestrian. I think cellphone contracts should have an allowance of these. If this information was grouped by geo maps and zip codes on a city site,  for example, any potential traveler could tap the site and click on the “spoken directions’ to understand how to get to the mall, amusement park, airport, or restaurant. This is the age of Twitter, even though not everyone knows how to use it.

Another great idea is the Great Food Truck race, where 7 “roach coaches’ take the same amount of seed money and hit the road. The challenge of finding produce and raw materials in a strange city, while navigating the nation’s highways and providing customer service to an all new customer base is compelling. Not least when it’s from a mobile business. Business case studies using the food truck “roach coach” model make sticky reading.

Domain ideas can come from something as simple as knitting instructions or installing a vacuum cleaner bag. Ever try to put a new vacuum bag in one of those old style vacuums? That’s when we really  needed the internet. These young kids today don’t appreciate how they can text or Twitter whatever they don’t know and get answers coming out of the sky.

To me, the internet was spawned to solve these problems. I want Twitter to tell me when there are twenty-five people in line at the nearest Starbucks so I can avoid it. I want to know where is the cheapest gas along my local driving routes so I can plan my errands along the cheapest tank refill. I want to scan the most important caveats to bidding on Ebay before I press “Bid”, without digesting reams of useless FAQ data on the website.

The Web is for every user. No assumption can be made about who uses it, because the runaway hit site the next day will be for a fresh wave of Internet users who just found their solution online. This launch extravaganza of traffic will occur because some smart domainer tapped a niche. Identifying a fresh niche can take observation skills and timing, adroit deal making and entrepreneurial spirit.

Like domainers have.

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So, you’ve got your handy-dandy domain name and the thrill of ownership is still upon you. It’s time to roll up your sleeves and get the ball rolling. But now there is a plenitude of choices. Do you throw up a quick and dirty bare-bones page, make a development site and fine tune the details? Or do you launch a full fledged website with a longer development cycle?

If you are actually logging into the your hosting account manager or interface, congratulate yourself. Many domainers never get around to putting up a construction sign, let alone laying a foundation. Aggressive domainers take active steps to development their name into an online destination right out of the chute. However in the eagerness to get a smooth site established, some shortcuts may cost you time in the long run.

A domain name pushed to a quick turnover will have less SEO to show for its ride. But a longer hosting commitment and more time in play requires additional content and updated features. A quicker turnaround might welcome a less generous bid. But other projects crowding the development calendar might motivate a busy domainer to sell outright.

Each domain can operate differently. Some will sell quickly, and others will age . Estimates and projections are appropriate. More development investment will hike the resale minimum reserve. Added sweeteners might get a better offer, like unpublished original articles to pend inside the application for immediate programmed launch. Affiliate codes for correlated products can’t hurt.

Packaging a site with a domain is a “business in a box” deal many at-home business startups might like to get behind the wheel of. Sites like Flippa.com both demonstrate and develop the buyer’s and seller’s market for such warez. A dependable development model to “flip” sites might work if the quality of the output is good enough. Just be certain all advertising text is legitimate.

These are the domainer’s development dilemmas. Not every domain decision will be contingent on opinion. Look at similar names, similar sites.  If no site name similar to yours has been vended before, you may have cornered the market on a niche domain. Niche domains need niche buyers. Getting ready to market to a niche buyer means surveying users and their likely target sponsors.

Niche buyers for a domain name might be one single sponsor or manufacturer of a related product (or service) whose main core demographic for purchase is the audience the content is aimed at. This is the theory, anyway. There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to domaining. Each webmaster crrates their own world.

If the domain buy was made with the intent to develop quickly, a calendar should be in effect to manage the creation of the logo, the main links, the initial affiliates or sponsors, and the main focus and SEO density of the text. Adsense code should be applied for and ready to in its respective boxes and containers. Likely the basis of most of this gestalt was formed when the domain buy was decided on.

One thing to consider seriously when deciding which direction to take the domain website development project is the likely statistics program or application that will be used to analyze traffic. Hits, bots and scrubbing SEO index checking references can’t work if nobody knows you are there. Traffic reports that help should be coordinated with the site buttons and counters that deliver data to the right legacy site or application for the analyzer.

Before offering the site for sale,  archive the entire domain/website “beast” and make an offline storage copy. This way no matter what acts of mischief the internet spies, corporate ninjas and malware assassins plug in, your product is intact and secure and still available for sale.

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What is your preferred open source application for an enhanced content site to promote a domain? Many basic hosting plans come with allowances for databases and installations of open source applications. The administration of these applications can make it very easy for a domainer to run a website and update SEO content in a timely manner.

Open source applications are “freeware” used to make portal websites and platforms to launch blogs, videos, article directories, forums, and more. Open source software can enhance article text and allow visitors and members to print, share, or download special features or items. Using open source applications per hosting plan will be driven by whether the hosting is Linux or Windows based.

An open source application is an easy way to shape a site when from-the-ground-up architecture isn’t working. Most open source applications will introduce a structure to a web page which will suggest ways to include feature content and keyword strategic text. The Google update in DotNetNuke and the keyword and description article tags in Joomla are examples of this type of domain related SEO content manipulation.

The style sheet attributes are very easy to learn and inside many blogs and open source admin menu interfaces can be edited easily. But by looking up the open source application program lexicon, the text or style attributes you want to change can also be possible with beginner level skills. And free or custom templates for open source applications are everywhere.

To customize an open source application skin or theme, simply upload the theme file after extracting it using a Zip program, and FTP the entire file to the appropriate admin theme directory. Then the selection of this new theme name is readable in the admin interface. With custom changes here and there in the CSS style sheet, the open source application and the free template, married with your original content, is now a custom website.

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What Are Valuable Domain Names?

If you are looking to profit from buying and selling domain names, valuable domain names are the most sought after commodity. With over 20,000 domain names being registered every day, these valuable domain names may be hard to come by.

When looking for valuable domain names the top-level domain (TLD) which is the extension of the domain name, is the first consideration. There are many TLDs available today. But .com is still the most valuable, most sought after, and most trusted. The .com extension was the first to be registered back in the 90s. And this is still at the foremost of peoples minds when visiting a website.

Valuable domain names can be considered those URLs with popular keywords in them. When someone does a search for content, or specific products, and your domain name contains those keywords, you’re more likely to show up in the search results. The major search engines figure that if you’re domain name is www.trainingdogs.com, then your website is most likely about training dogs. With a domain name like this, showing up in the search engines for the keyword training dogs gives you a better chance at ranking highly within these search results.

Searching For Domain Names to Purchase

The first order of business is deciding which company to buy your domain name from. There are many options available on the Internet. Though I don’t have a favorite, I do try to make all my purchases from one company. This way I can keep track of which domain names are going to be expiring soon all in one place. I don’t want to have to keep track of which domain name is registered where.

When searching for a domain name to purchase, start with your main keyword that you will be building your site around. Chances are when you search to see if the domain name is available it will already be registered. This is where you have to get creative. Start your search by adding words either to the front of the domain name, or to the end of the domain name. For example: www.trainingdogseasy.com or www.howtotraindogs.com. By adding words to either the front or the end of the domain name, you can keep your keywords in there.

When looking for a domain name to purchase, whether you plan on turning around and selling it, or using it for your own site, putting thought into the name of the domain is very important. Choosing the top level domain name of .com should be considered if possible. Having your main keyword within the domain name should also be considered for search engine optimization purposes.

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