28 June 2011 ~ 13 Comments

Google Under the Antitrust Knife?

The news reported in the Wall Street Journal regarding the Google company corporation global behemoth of interlinking departments and divisions was too little too late. Long has Big Google dominated the internet space, where SEO practices are concerned especially. For Google to defend its practices as merely one of several choices is disingenuous.

Google has dominated not only the online search engine promotion and marketing areas of business, but has also generally been responsible for the integration many of Microsoft type business applications in conjunction with their Google access.

Just try getting on Youtube without having to reset your Google password. Google has purposely penetrated the Youtube search engine of video content to enrich its search engine database holdings, at the expense of privacy for Google member users of Youtube.

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There is no option to Youtube with a security parameter except to make a duplicate account upon which to host your audio/video channel or video content. Google has created massive departments of endeavor with each its own director of teams of workers to guide the mastery of the site visitation of a GoogleTube participant.

Big Google is now the Big Brother of Youtube. The appeal of Youtube is less than if it was associated with the multiple marketing levels that Google brings to bear. Why does a company that masters your gmail need to track your Youtube activity? And make no mistake, they are tracking it. Google has launched and promoted more freeware online than any other company, in the size and shape of business and desktop application intended to mimic (and eradicate) the need for Microsoft office Suite product dependence

Google might have had a good case against the antitrust fed warriors, but they have launched heaven and Earth to make themselves Number One, and must answer for those practices. I’m sure Yahoo and Bing and many other fledgeling search engines that have disappeared are watching the antitrust actions against Big Google with interest. But Google has maintained such an outside public profile, especially due to recent squareoffs against China’s online supercompanies, it is hard to accept they might argue their global presence is due to a humble, nonproprietary, unfair market advantage.

The catch-22 of modern business, as Bill Gates will be happy to tell anyone, is that success brings the sniffer dogs of the counter–revolution. federal mandatory concordance to free market enterprises business practices is the ugly undertow following every new wave of fresh success.A more conservative strategy of less rapid growth might have left the antitrust probe depths unplumbed. And with the bulk of the federal brain trust sifting through Google deals, internal correspondence, there may be food for legislative thought.

Except Microsoft Corporation has a proprietary interest in such online desktop business applications as Google Apps provides. Ironically these applications stem from basic computer interface utilities many Microsoft critics over the years have claimed Bill Gates and his merry men stole from other beginner software manufacturers in the early days of the desktop computer. It may be fruit of the poisoned tree that Google adopted this “free-market” clone of the Microsoft Office Suite as its own open access application, in a campaign of online offerings that brought federal antitrust scrutiny.

Want to access a Google apps program? Guess what- you just opened up all your data ad personal computing device security to Google. While Microsoft weathered many legal and antitrust storms by arguing the customization and free application of many of its wares to the online and program computing market, Google seems to be arguing that because a search engine is something that any entity online can operate, a search engines are equally free market enterprise.

Bug it is not news to anybody that all search engine are not alike. Bing does not have anywhere near the following and affiliate advertisement program volume of participants that Google Adsense does. If anything, many domainers and Internet entrepreneurs working in the domain space become uniquely affiliated with Google and Adsense for the length and breadth of their careers, and call it a success. This would not be possible is Google did not have such a stranglehold on the search engine apparatus online.

It looks like being Number One in the search engine stakes may have a price after all. The possibility of a new face in the SEO pace could come from GoDaddy if KKR and friends hatch their chickens at Godaddy’s acquisition table correctly. And why hasn’t FaceBook entered the Search Engine stakes? they’ve got the resources and the users already online 24/7.

Antitrust litigation ain’t cheap. Big Google will likely pass along these costs to shareholders and advertiser customers, which is bad news for the bulk of domainers utilizing Google-dominant SEO marketing strategies. This is good news for competitive search engines without the heavy burden of Google’s overhead or legal fees. Maybe some other search engine will give Big Google a run for its money.

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09 August 2010 ~ 25 Comments

Flippa.com

When people tell me they just don’t know how to make money online, Flippa is one of the sites I suggest they try to work with. This site vends readymade websites to buyers at auction prices. But the difference between Flippa and many auction areas of other domainer forums is that zero Alexa, zero traffic, zero anything plus content and code gets you in. These stat sets are ones that every domainer had tons of names for.

For $19, the domainer (or man on the street) can vend a website already up. This takes the profit model of the domain name world a bit further. Instead of relying on the domain resale market, autoblog engines can do the work and output the site. The money making potential of a speculative name buy just got that much more possible. The domainer creates their own multiples of opportunity.

The employable resources toward a website for domainers have always been a part of their hosting plan. Hosting companies like Godaddy offer a plethora of webmaster site publishing choices in the “Connection” area. Site templates, HTML code, and open source applications allow even newbie domainers full site design flexibility. Writing the content was all that was needed.

But today content writers in every language are an easily sourced commodity online. Getting original and keyword rich text up is as simple as writing a few emails and selecting a contractor. A little do-it-yourself juice poured directly onto the hot griddle of the hosting account can deliver some piping hot websites. And Flippa allows novices a turn at bat, as well.

For many domainers the market to sell domains feel closed to them. It takes a few successes to get their groove going as market entrepreneurs. What is not made clear to many business individuals looking to get into the domain name industry is that for some domain name sales happen instantly. For others it can take many years. The returns are varied, and there is no guarantee of profit.

Flippa.com changes all that. A quick survey of the site shows what auctions have sold. The other side of the Flippa.com coin is that now name owners can shop for sites that fit the keywords for site names they already have. Instead of chancing content they don’t want or need, webmasters can analyze available site text for purchase. If the Flippa vended website fits the bill, then they can bid their budget.

Flippa allows those with good domaining ideas and good ideas for domain names to follow through on those concepts and take profit from their brainstorms. The world is full of end user business leaders who will have the “vision” to buy the finished product. These are not the same people who will fund its growth or development however.

Flippa.com closes the gap between domain name website end user customer and domain reseller. And just think what kind of traffic your website will get while being “shopped” at Flippa.com. This is a chance for web designers, webmasters, writers and domain name entrepreneurs to showcase their packaged services. As many free markets, a sales history tells the tale.

Flippa.com will remind most domainers that flipping domains may soon be like flipping houses. If you can build it, you can flip it. The synonymous energies between the commodity of commercial real estate and domain markets as properties continue. The energy the individual domainer puts into every site, and the elbow grease researching keywords and SEO, will cap the Flippa.com revenue potential.

There is a free downlaod of the Flippa flipping book inside, as well as offers for discounts on SEO tools like SEMrush and Domainsamurai. Phone verification is needed. Sign up today, and see if your domain gifts can be utilized to the fullest.

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09 May 2010 ~ 3 Comments

No Parking on the Dance Floor

parking

As a regular domaining administrative chore, I have to go into my Godaddy domain manager to release domains for transfer or forward them to an url, or regulate their DNS records. I am not picking on Godaddy, I just happen to have a a large amount of domains there and I was reminded this morning about a topic in domain name management I feel strongly about.

One of the unhappy reminders that a domain is making no return on investment is that the dollar sign in the GoDaddy domain manager does not have an impression. The Godaddy parking product is a service that cost money to make money. While that makes sense from a certain point of view, those who know that Google Adsense also offers a similar service for free little understand the added value their premium buys at Godaddy.

Like many domainers, I view the value-add from a Godaddy service as a convenience when snapping between accounts, juggling hosting logins, and tickling domain name administration responsibilities. Of course, the service to enhance a domain’s profit from either GoDaddy or Google Adsense means little if no net profit comes to each domain’s money making channel.

Domain placement inside the ad serving revenue systems is critical to the dollars and sense monetary return of any domain investment.  I find the Godaddy cash parking solution an interesting test of Adsense feasibility. If it (the site content, keywords, and links) will pass the Godaddy CashParking qualification standards, it’s probable that Google also will accept the content construction on the domain, and vice versa.

Each revolution of the domain development cycle remains more concretely value -adding than any other domain marketing service or promotion item. Four keywords and some links and a graphic or banner thrown in and the domainer is the proud owner of a (yawn) template formatted parked page. Yippy skippy, sound the call to hounds. Alert the media. (Let the yawns be heard from Peoria to the Three Gorges Dam).

The profit over time to recoup the domain acquisition includes the registration fee, hosting fees, and any subfees like auction premiums and premium auction purchase prices. Add in the sliver of a monthly hosting cost divided by number of total of domain sites hosted at that hosting company and you’ll have your derivative monetary goal and revenue target.

For the domainer who has thousands of domain names languishing, the parked page is simply time management. But the parked page was never meant to be a permanent solution. It was only supposed to be a short and temporary detour on the information superhighway.  A lay-by, a soft shoulder in heavy domaining weather when the webmaster’s plate was full. Parking was supposed to be what webmasters did when their site was a flat tire and needed to go into the shop.

I am always disappointed to see parked page because it seems to me a domain name worth buying has a site worth making lurking behind the domain name transfer. Parked pages are models of domain development which hinge on the barest modicum of content, for my money almost a haphazard shrug of a site. To me the challenge of domain development and site potential for site use, for sites of all types, is to expansive to default out of.

There are so many things people go to the Internet for. They want education, they want advice, they want entertainment and employment. They want to be entertained while being educated, and they want to be advised about how to shop.They want to know more about things to buy, how to buy them, and who to buy the from. And they want to know the best information they can get, on every topic under the sun moon and stars.

Every name has a page waiting to be developed to spring forth. People want to do what they always liked to do, with broader scope and greater choice. Online users of the internet want to be educated about how to shop and want to know how to be employed shopping online. They don’t want to read the books, they want to read excerpts and snippets and online reviews and comments about the books. They want to read about the writers of the books and Google them incessantly.

Every subject imaginable has  a market, a website, a links directory, an article repository, a shopping portal or a video hosting destination model that can adapt to it. Dare I say it, even a blog! After reviewing all that potential, do four keywords and some links really do the project justice? Does a competent webmaster want to display some lookalike template that tells visitors “Continue snoring, go away”?

And why on God’s (for the moment) green earth would you pay for it?

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27 April 2010 ~ 17 Comments

Always Be Optimizing

timeowl

Blogging is a competitive sport. The incidence of keywords, the heightened density of certain terms and concepts to breach the walls of SEO fortitude, and the ongoing challenge to keep material fresh and readable despite these drivers are the road rules of the domain blog today. Affiliate ads are like team sponsors. The finish line is the Adsense result, the traffic metrics, and PPC values earned.

But even the most talented blogger can test their optimizing talent by asking a few pointed questions about their daily output content. Blogging can be very easy with simple repetition of key concepts and repetitive completion of SEO practices added in. But even the best blogging intentions fail. As days and months pass, promotion reminders fade and key optimizing options are wasted.

The main rule of blogging? Always Be Optimizing.

1. Optimize Your Domain Marketing

One sneaky approach to marketing a blog online is to promote  anterior services and use the blog site to garner approval or evaluation of service quality.  A domain site can’t rise in value if it isn’t seen. If you are signed up at Guru.com, oDesk.com, or ELance.com, there is a place to link up your proven material and related portfolio of work.

This drives traffic and incites useful feedback.  Reaction can help assist the blogger in choosing which domains to spend more effort promoting.  Even if you never get any contracted work at these sites, marketing your services will earn you dozens of traffic pageviews you would otherwise never experience. That data is useful when analyzing upstream and downstream clickthrough behavior.

2. Optimize Your Email

Domain names allow for creativity. To paraphrase the famous words of Walt Disney: if you can reg it, you can do it.  Inventing domain names is the ultimate in out-of-the-box business product creation.No limit exists except your own taste and your own ability to sketch a likely rationale for the name as a website, portal, directory or marketing hub.

If you’ve done some clever thinking about your domain name and made a crafty yet appealing email address name, get going sending out batches of invitations to check out your site.  Many might bite, just to see what’s behind  your domain and that intriguing email address. One clever email logline and  someone might zap a click onto your emailed newsletter or marketing campaign message just scan the site and not miss something valuable.

3. Optimize Your Exterior Strategy

One of the greatest options available to aggressively marketing domainers is the supplemental domain marketing services offered on boards and custom domain promotion sites. Outside the blog website link promotion is critical to SEO discoverability. Exterior link making and article seeding with reference links back to the target site are necessary, yet so many domainers ignore this method of site promotion.

4. Optimize Your Blog Time

Not every day is going to be a day when the webmaster of a blog can write at optimum skill. Some days the blog well is simply dry. These are good days to have an article template, tickler file, and prose or text content template at the ready. This “Mixmaster” approach has been done well and done poorly, and many domainers know when they stumble upon a site full of blind-text blandness with no information forthcoming at all.

Fix one day to post an RSS feed blog entry with a few critical comments and suggestions. Next day is a content writing day, and the day after that can be a site review day.  Roll over the schedule and take the pressure off.  Roll the content production forward one day and let the “break” inspire better text writing. Review text entries for pertinent links to include.

5. Check Your Work

Go to sites like Google, Associated Content, Facebook, MySpace, Squidoo, Helium, Triond, About.com, and others. Use the search bar and execute a query for your website name and/or url.  A Google result should have at least 4 pages of results with exactly your url or link to show.

The SEO results not there? Get cracking and ADD SOMETHING.

Sign up for AC and add articles. Submit material to About.com and other content and text publishing sites using site links as sources. Start a Squidoo lens and create a entry at Helium so centered on a  topic from your site it will never be bettered. This is when having material of all types inside your blog entries is of value. And the Optimizing motif will be reinforced with every search query.

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