Domain Owl

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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Sometimes business domains get personal. And you’d think the personal involvement would concentrate the effort, but it doesn’t always work out that way. Many of my clients and acquaintances have websites for their home business or personal businesses but never “get to them”. This wastes time on the clock for both the personal business and the individual’s capitalization of the domain market.

If the independent contractor or home CEO could follow some motivational guidance, both the domain and the business would grow. If every effort toward the business website builds domain value and the business profile, that’s half the work for twice the gain. If your business website needs “rescuing”, put a positive spin on the enterprise and polish your product or service shingle.

Naysayers may scoff at this idea. But the drive to capitalize on a website will improve the overall business profile.  Industry contacts, acquaintances, and friends will notice a new energy and drive behind the home business. Daily blog output or personal evangelism don’t hurt either. Here are some smart moves for the personal business website.

1. Make a Timetable

When a business is self-managed, the impetus is less powerful to deliver a finished website since the “in development” stage can last months, perhaps years. A proper strategy advances the personal business agenda to greater productivity. Set some traffic goals, build advertising plans, muse on some comments elicitation metrics, and set about achieving them. The home business webmaster will fritter away less time with a laundry list of HTML tasks in their mind.

2. Expand The Site Offering

Is your home business site one dimensional, flat, and have nothing of interest to differentiate it from a parked page or template except some geo data? Change up the mix and bring some widgets and fresh flavor to your message. Online visitors will have a chance to react to content or participate in surveys, whereas before development a mere name and address might have been available. That is the equivalent of a “Gone Fishin” sign.

3. Enable Registration

Think nobody will sign up? You’re wrong. I get one or two registrations a day from websites I made years ago and never change. Think what reg volume an updated active website could bring!  By growing traffic and developing a core list of subscribers, the home business manager can get ahead quickly. But visitors can’t sign up if there is no way to do it. Look for forum builds or open source applications. Simple Machines Forum and DotNetNuke are examples.

4. Get Out Your Credit Card

Online services for link promotion and directory listings can cost pennies a day and increase your SEO rank every minute. Spend a few bucks here and there to make sure when the quality keyword density comes of age (in a 30-60-90 day cycle) your links and abstracts are as present online as your closest competitor’s. Got no time for the basic tasks? Hand out the piecework to online contractors at Guru.com, ODesk,com, GetaFreelancer.com and other sites.

5. Blow Your Own Horn

Submit service or product reviews, website reviews of your site, or evaluation and/or articles online with your site url as the backlink. Mention, embd, or refer to your site link often and use relevant keywords to make the SEO values higher. Make sure most or all of your distribution of this material is at relevant sites with search engine spiders and bots scrubbing daily.

6.  Get Some Education

If you need to augment your IT skills or learn some business methodology, working with the local college or online courses can help. If the website development or advertising arm is moving slowly, find a way to capture small bits of the necessary knowledge to make more informed design and development website decisions. If you have a dollar amount in mind consider hiring a site developer to hand you a packaged site to get to the next step.

7. Rates and Pricing Feedback

Use surveys to determine what keeps your customers from clicking ‘buy”. If they have an online store, is the merchandise too repetitious from other sites? Squeeze pages and popup windows allow frustrated visitors to explain why they didn’t find what they wanted (and what it was). Use the marketing data to form a follow up mailing list announcing website changes.

8. Buy a Complimentary Domain

If you have a personal business, let’s say “McMillan-Meier Printing Company” then buying a generic name makes sense. People will remember a shorter, snappier name than the business name converted to a web domain. If FastPrintShop.com or another name that complements your business functionality and core services/products is available, forward it or organize the host name data to arrive at the McMillan-Meier Printing site.

9. Hand Out Business Cards

Yes, it’s old school. Every personal network is budding with needs to buy products, get stuff, obtain items, or secure services. In conversation, in a coffee house or at a party, folks can pull your card out even if they themselves don’t need it. But they can’t do that if you don’t order them and get them into circulation. This way people who have never even seen your website can enlarge your business prospects and publicise your domain.

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In stirring up the latest batch of sites I thought I’d extol the main sifting, sugars  and shortening of making a website. Nobody wants to lay an egg in this critical domain market. The proliferation of minisites makes me wonder where the line is drawn between full web sites and “minisites”.  So as I begin a new site, look over my shoulder and see what the secret is. If your mouse is your mixing spoon, preheat your hosting account to 360 degrees and let’s begin.

Assignment of the domain to the proper hosting resource and name servers is essential as greasing and flouring the pan. While the registry servers and name records “preheat”, get your mixer ready to churn some code. Now, choosing a recipe. Open source apps and blog engines generic and specialized. What to do, what to do. Some recipes work with some ingredients and with some others the cake falls flat.

The basic flour of any website is its content. This can be pre-sifted, keyword dense, flaky, or sweetened with adsense. Shortening keeps many readable blurb choices on the front page instead of having one entry overmaster the entire landing page. Too much of any domain flavor gets old, keep the stirring brisk. Site browsers can “crack the surface” of the site with links and categories to the side. Images can soften hard columns of prose. SEO chips and text emphasis to taste.

The site architecture answers first of all to the web administrator. Ease of use is critical when pounding out submission, editing, publishing RSS and user management tasks. These tasks will always take more time than you think they will and will almost never be done until the next month end or week end. Then the cycle starts anew. Sites with aging content make me sad. The web hates a quitter.

I recommend selecting an app you know like the back of your hand. Hobby applications learning can be done on downtime. WordPress hides the fact you have only one channel of update a day. DotnetNuke and Joomla have many portals of publications and many containers for collaboration and mass publication. MovableType or Serendipity or DruPal only if you love the interface. I don’t.

Next consider nutritional value of the website. Mixing proteins with healthy carbs and necessary fats is required. Some ads, lots of healthy content and some high-protein blurbs can make a balanced meal of a website. Some people are strictly meat and potatoes browsers who want density and a strong keyword mix. Some like the carb dishes served up next to graphics and widgets. Website fats are videos and sound bites.

Combine the elements, mixing them together so they rise to the occasion in the application engine and form a sticky site. Leave a few lumps to catch the eye. Don’t over mix. The batter will be textured and more than one color. If the taste of the raw material in the text form is different from the finished product, consider packaging the dough in a less high-finish shape.

Get some domain tasters and fellow chefs to give some feedback on the new recipe. Mix in batches. Stir in more video, some Youtube, some tunes or product tie ins. Take a survey regarding site appeal. Everyone agrees every dish can be improved or spiced up a little. And no enterprise lives up to the maxim “too many cooks in the kitchen” like web site design.

Serve as desired.

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The most happening, readable, clickable, Tweetable thing to do right now for any of your domains is prep a mobile accessible website with ready material for phone surfers. The key is to identify what content your mobile audience wants to tap into and give it to them. This is easier than it looks. There is no better way to business success. Make stuff people want, and give it to them. Simple. Easy.

Think about the kinds of things you want to tap into when waiting in line at the bank. When sitting in the car waiting for the kids to come out of school. While waiting in traffic or in the drive through line.Think about the kinds of content people can over the phone to the other person and share with. That’s not just sticky content, that’s classic “passed from hand to hand” electrifying stuff.

Giving your mobile audience content that is efficient and helps them solve a problem is good. The Internet has gotten people used to TV updates, movie reviews, and product specs at the touch of a button. Note to domainers: Users all over the world are touching the buttons right now for information, amusement, and occupation. Let them go to your site instead of somebody else’s!

A good example of a mobile access and phone friendly website is the url witchdress.com.  This website churns with original content useful for Halloween costume makers and dress up fans. But in the mobile view, the ads don’t hog the screen and the text and logo are imminently proportioned. feature rich content with links is immediately displayed without heavy headers of spam which mobile users tune out and click off.

Entertaining content that is packaged well for the mobile device and is functional for the phone interface and screen is of optimum benefit. Getting it up on the site is the webmaster’s responsibility. Making the website clean running and mobile optimized is the site designer’s and administrator’s job. But giving the site visitor something amusing to read, informative and useful to learn, and some kind of technique or method to use tops the list.

People remember the good websites. They know when they got what they wanted, and they remember where they got it. It’s easier, of course, when there is a catchy and related domain name to correspond with this function. The kinds of needs any one kind of mobile phone user might have will vary and probably be geography-specific. They may even seem trite or not worthwhile to some critics.

The green mobile user find where to scavenge fresh fruit or forage wild vegetables for free nearby. The hopeless freeway navigator may want to know which onramp is open closest going her way. The movie lover may want to get free updates on movie preview invitations and get the jump on the crowd with “I’ve seen it’ info. Kids may want summaries of books to check out at the library.

All these “needs and wants” have online web destinations to take care of the mobile user. The top rules of domaining are: Be searchable, be mobile, be original. Ingenuous domainers invent or define new content sources and populate them for visitors. The approach then becomes competitive to see what website can deliver the data in the most mobile friendly manner.

The creativity one can show when developing a site is unlimited and unbound in most cases by even the most liberal definition of censorship. Small how-to pictures can work. Condensed abstracts on the front page can speed new visitors to their chosen interest. And streamlined site plans mean that mobile access and phone navigation of the website is less painful than some websites require.

Quick snippets and strong text lead the way.  For point and-share phone users, these types of sites can get viral fast. Mobile access builds teeth into the content that phone users are conscious of. Just trying to access a new mobile phone’s features can be tricky. Wouldn’t that be a good time to be able Google search your phone model and search that site for some functionality you need to program?

The Internet holds Walt’s Disney’s maxim of leadership more true than any other medium; “If you can dream it you can do it”. With websites, if you can type it you can do it. With mobile phones and handheld Internet device sites, packaging site content for mobile audiences is a premium value-add. Optimizing content and packaging format for mobile access means word of mouth SEO that can’t be matched.

Save. Spellcheck. Publish. Succeed.

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The umbrella of the RSS feed has been shown to be useful in promoting websites yet many domainers are stunned to find a ton of stealing is going on. Content stealing via RSS feeds can be as easy and cutting and pasting and also support a lot of spam identification of your ethical website’s domain for an email campaign. Hijacked url usage for spam campaigning is an ongoing problem. Hijacking RSS feeds have become a stealing offense.

Ever checked your hosting account inbox to find 21 pages f spam mail replies and responses? Using another domainer’s url can get a lot of people in trouble but only if the owner of the domain in violation knows what to do. And there are marketing and spam companies operating in a black hat mode who will never be accountable for one millionth of the spam they send.

When a webmaster for a black hat sites hijacks another webmaster’s original s  content and putting it on their own site, they are committing online piracy. Even the inferred rights on any material at another website should be observed. The confusion over the pingback phenomenon has been noticed here and elsewhere.

When the TOS of domain protected or branded website state that the material is not to be reproduced without express permission, domainers pretty much mean exactly that. Newsreaders don’t let other newsreaders steal content. The webmaster has to set up the site to draw masked feeds without proper origin acknowledgement.

RSS feeds can be siphoned from third party websites who also fail to show proper credit. That does not mean the material did not originate at its own publishing website, however. Material published at a website is answerable to laws of slander and libel, and the republisher of this material does not carry that burden. Web journalism is intentionally clouded by many online site operators at this intersection between freelance writing and “warez”.

Webmasters can find their rogue content flying its flag on sites they never heard of. Googling the material or using Copyscape is the way to discover this hijacked content. Sending takedown letters is unpaid labor that takes time. Possible reparations might be to instruct SEO software to ignore sites and domain which employ this practice, but black hat operators know how to mask hidden or invisible content to browsers anyway.

Site publishers then take a chance that their custom authored original content will ever surface on websites or networks of websites in other languages (yet derive the SEO value thereto.) When phantom websites mine RSS feeds for keyword dense material to be siphoned via the feed, they know what they are doing. It is for the future of website development that webmasters must act together to prevent this practice from continuing.

Unless something legal and broadly observed is done to pressure violators of content and copyright TOS and make them respect source material and originating content producers, webmasters and contributors face the indirect allowance of theft by their very act of web publishing. And the ongoing effort to improve traffic and garner SEO value will be dissolved until such a benchmark is reached.

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Got original content? If not, you could get sued. So goes the conventional wisdom now developing as the frontier of Internet media, law and standard operating practices grows another branch. Those RSS feeds may not be “free” after all. For rogue operators online, the “cut and paste” method of website development may be a thing of the past. The hounds of copyright legality are upon content thieves.

Taking a bead from a domain industry leader, I reference (and cite under pain of death) Elliott Silver’s comprehensive blog post today concerning content theft. The relevant article in Wired revealed the significance of getting published in conventional print run and digital media under a syndicated banner even in this day and age. The cost of these media operations assumes use of the material under its own auspices.

The company Righthaven actively pursues legal cases against websites that puncture the value of the native content by posting it on their websites and deriving SEO value and reader interest. The details of the copyright actions pursued by this company are something every website administrator needs to know about. This is in fact a sort of domain insurance, where activities like content writing and posting build value in a site.

It should go without saying that new website ventures should contain original content. but so many newb bloggers haven’t learned that concept. And many more domain speculators actively lift feeds and copy and paste entire sections of websites as a matter of course in the race to adsense and search engine revenue. The issuing of takedown notices is a time consuming and complex activity not all bloggers and webmasters understand how to do.

Who is doing the stealing? Bloggers and other webmasters, for the most part. Silver’s article sketches a swipe at the poor Web journalism practiced by many online text contributors, but the real picture is so much more broad than that. Many (but by no means all) domain speculators populate websites using models of virtual copy theft and content “relocation”.

For what can only be slivers of cents on the dollar, random webmasters draw from the RSS feeds of multiple sites and indiscriminately repost to fill up their site pages. This practice is uneasily as common as it is overlooked and underenforced for online copyright violation. More companies like Righthaven, online services that look to police online copyright violation are needed.

Infringement is an art form for many webmasters. They seek to diffuse and obfuscate the original post yet steal or repost most of it on their own sites, often without any link or pingback to the original site.But if internet practices lawsuits go forward, a new set of rules might soon be in place.  A new rubric of online content policing might spring forth.

Many webmaster who conscientiously invest in original content would like to see this happen. Hosting companies may get involved at some point. There is a rule of common sense that should be part of every hosting company terms of service. Content theft should be an act that terminates hosting company liability. Sites composed of over 50% stolen content could be taken down by disconnect notices.

And just think what the Google rankings would scramble to show then.

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The Domain name offer can come in from the cold with the new era of blog databases and instant websites. A template or open source application used for an existing domain’s website means that any buyer can take advantage of premium content original to that domain name as part of the purchase price. This can be termed a “domain sweetener”.

Adding sweetener to your domain can be as simple as allowing the buyer to utilize the current hosting where the domain is lodged. Server information is generally given with the WHOIS record.  The WHOIS record must always be accurate for this reason. Unless a Privacy option is purchased at the time of the domain name creation, the registrant’s name phone number address and fax number is visible to the public. And even Privacy entailed records have bid or offer links at the lookup point.

What functions as a sweetener? Bundled domains with other sub-TLD’s, Emails with the domain or a free renewal might be other domain sweeteners. The ability to transform a nibble of interest into a successfully executed domain sale may take some sweetening on the seller’s part. The trick is knowing when to add the sweetener. Only the seller knows how motivated they really are to get some cash out of the deal.

Domains will attract lookups and type in interest form time to time. the record of these lookups can be tracked by referrer traffic form the WHOIS. This can be viewed from the statistics utility in the web hosting menu. The concept of the WHOIS lookup concedes that a likely buyer is checking out who owns the domain name, how long they have owned it, where it is hosted, and what the owner is doing with the domain.

A domain buyer will check out whether or not the current owner has a lot of time or investment put into the name. The theory is that a domainer will sell a name more cheaply if they haven’t developed it themselves.  Or the prospective buyer may want to see if the domain name is parked and thus assess its potential value as a parked revenue generator. The offer for the domain name may include the content seen online.

Existing content in the form of databases or text files can also function as a domain sweetener. If the domainer has invested in domain development at all, these files can be furnished with the domain name sale as a sweetener. The incentive should be communicated that valuable planning and effort are attached with the domain purchase price. The sweetener should be signalled when the buyer has had enough time to consider an offer.

For this reason, domain name offers to buy should have a deadline and a “window of opportunity” attached. This way the prospective buyer has to evaluate how motivated they are. The domain name price will not be a given with a horizon of forever, but an opportunity to buy the domain name at the stated price within a secured period of time. The communication regarding the sweetener should come from a motivated seller near the end of the offer period.

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I read an article recently in Rolling Stone magazine about some computer hackers and the “crime of the century”. In trying to blog about it, I found an interesting conundrum: The top (series of) search engine result(s) from searching for the article was a blog review of the article by another blogger, not the magazine author. By Google searching the article title, the top page of search results was not the source, but the review.

Rolling Stone is proud to announce digital issues, but the title of this one article or searched keywords did not render a result even at the Rolling Stone site. This means that every mention or Twitter or email or Digg gets related back to the first online result, the same blog but not the copyrighted origin. Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as stolen SEO.

Thus the source website yielded the SEO to the blogger. The blog author gave due credit and links to the source but the blog entry remains the top result for another author’s work. Yet it’s a mystery why the originating publisher would pass up an opportunity to get search result traffic. It’s hard to know the thoughts of a webmaster that stalls SEO discoverability and direct search engine referrals for putative digital subscriptions.

Stolen SEO should be a crime, but the individual leaving the door open are the source originators themselves. How many times have you found yourself using the Search bar at a given site, fruitlessly entering qualified terms, but not getting anywhere? These are the “light bulb” moments domainers and webmasters should tally in their tickler file of websites to build.

Target is a good example. I don’t go to Target.com because the search engine does not render results for products I know they have. Google searching should work, unless the clickthrough link pulls that scummy trick of landing the searcher at the landing page of the site, to begin the search all over again. IMOHO that is NOT a good search engine result. It creates work for shoppers.

How is this an opportunity for domainers? Domainers win when they conceive of a website that solves a problem and provides visitors with sticky content. Nothing could be more sticky than the search result for the item the web browser is looking for. One of the lamest excuses for imitation is that it’s flattering, but decades of Microsoft success prove you can’t “own” an idea.

If the store wanted to accessibly sell lawn chairs, it would maximize keyword efficiency.  But Target has left a window open for enterprising domainers. They can make a site featuring only those items inside the niche and save the shopper time, typing, and trouble. Any site that tries to encompass too broad an encyclopedia or catalog risks alienating visitors by this response failure. The elision of likely keywords from surgical results leaves the door open for enterprising web designers.

By shrinking the ugly cycle of scanning page of items after page of items at the store site, and waiting for all this to render, a site master can marry a city name or store name with an item to shop for and make a killer domain out of keywords they can optimize until the cows come home. This opportunity is available in markets heating up right now, like online coupons from sites like Dukky. Maybe users don’t want to wait for the next campaign and want the coupon now.

Why is this a domain development opportunity? Because a website owner of “Targetlawnchairs.com” could make a bunch of listings on the site and link them to the densely buried Target.com product listings. Surfing a densely niche targeted site for lawn chairs available at Target stores allows online discoverers to skip Search restarts and navigate back and forth through a million results.

Collecting information from online Web sources and redelivering it to the web visitor is not exactly rocket science. But it is webmaster science. Domainers can execute reasonable answers to online search query problems  and compose a likely site, and shrink the type in cycle for grateful web users. The traffic should tell the tale and  bring revenue and clicks.

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One website domainers need to get nice and friendly with is Google. There is no more important website in the world to domain name traders and webmasters than Google. The trials and tribulations of how Google attained internet market dominance is a moot point. The fact remains that in today’s domain name market nobody can afford to do without Google tools, hacks and SEO optimization maxims.

But so many domainers skip very important Google tools and heightening SEO rules when composing their websites. The inclusions of tags on images, the use of alternate text, the proofing of the website on cross browser versions are only some examples. Ranking algorthythms operate on so many lines a webmaster practically has to be a wizard to master them all.

Submission to Google itself is a step many webmasters skip. The signing up for ad codes does not always equal full categorization in the Google universe. Page directories and indices of certain types of sites are also included in the Google page ranking index. But so many webmasters forget this and think that one Google ad submission equals total Google bot exposure. Such is not the case.

It’s not enough just to have Google adsense. There should be a Google map and many diverse types of sits tying in notices and links to the source site. Without decent attempts at development and distribution or related and topical material online, no SEO game plan can be considered worthwhile. The marketing plan must include all the facets of Google, not just the Adsense code inclusion in site HTML.

The SEO optimization wars claim many website casualties. This can be in part due to the fact that over ambitious domain name owners aim for the top hundredths or thousandth of their category without any game plan. Without a search engine result growth plan there is no basis to tie expectations to.

Google shows the way just by returning search results for terms. What kind of site is the result made of? What type of text is the key term noted from? What spiders and bots are scrubbing your page daily? The site absorbs all these data points. Feeds by themselves might be “light”, but together with an integrated hybrid of original content and text the seo value is there.

A type of snobbery can pervade the world of webmasters and domain name owners. News scrapes and press release rewrites are not “good enough” for these webmasters who need premium content or nothing. Yet these same webmasters can barely churn out 200 words a day! Investigating the way Google displays search results can show new domain name owners and seo-minded webmasters the path to seo greatness.

Any Google search will show that millions of different types of sites and keyword instances can feed into a search engine result that produces that website or a page on that website. The gateway to internet success making websites and promoting domain names is interpreting what Google is doing. Finding the threads are available for free at Google.com.

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Domain name buying and selling is an industry, with good luck and bad luck and hard times like everything else. Long Term domain investors have learned by now not to put faith in empty promises and get rich quick schemes.  Quick recovery financially is not a guaranteed result nor is a cash windfall for every domain purchased and developed into a website.

New domainers should evaluate their best method to break into the domain name game and crack open some profit possibilities. Various approaches can be performed to break into domaining, and some are better for an individual or for a group of investors or a team of web promoters. Marketing can get the word once a site is developed and launched, but that has to be a preplanned adjunct to site development and launch.

The speed of the investment capital outlay on a domain name will start the clock on the return of investment-plus-profit scenario. Therefore a conservative domain investment strategy will put less pressure on the individual operator or project team members. A more aggressive capital recovery strategy makes every keystroke operate at a higher premiums that some campaigns cannot equal.

Different domain names will have a wider audience at different times, such as annual sporting event (Olympics) or in certain seasons (travel sites).  Ongoing steady url advancement is  the ultimate goal. The investment in time and resources during different times of the year and in anticipation of a wider and faster clicking audience online should be integrated into the domain name publicity and marketing plan.

Achievable goals in traffic building, social network attention and link building can set the stage for larger campaign to follow. Each name may have different attributes better for some methods of domain promotion than others. A catchy buzzword and flashy logo will draw some users out of curiosity, while other sites may bring only discoverability with intense keyword seeding and SEO element density.

Monetary clickthroughs trail from these dynamics. But Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was Google, Ebay, or Yahoo. Each of those domains started as press releases and conversation starter tidbits about what the site was all about. Breaking down results from day to day domaining tasks can bring the domain name owner’s value growth goals to fruition.

Having a site is essential in today’s domain market. For those domain investors relying on parking and traffic hits, the risk is palpable. Now more than ever web users and browsers online are looking for a content result or website experience with depth and individualized options. The most basic web user is puzzled and disappointed by a parking page online, and they know they can find amusement and information elsewhere and navigate owner

A parking page or registrar sponsored landing page signals disinterest on the webmaster side, and is matched by a complementary response in the end user. the template and site builders available inside virtually every hosting plan make a index page or parking placeholder a statement of neutrality that forms an assault on an expectant end user.

Searching end users will refer to buzz already being reported about the site from other channels.  If no press release or meta tags exist, the discoverability  for the site  (and the domain)  is too low. There must be a plan to cement the domain’s footprint with associated text and keywords in dozens of spaces online before true stickiness can be tested. Patterns of clicks online from the promotional material to the destination site must be grooved for future users and search engine bots to follow.

Simply trying to monetize a domain with no site behind it is risky and leaves  a bad taste in the mouths of end users looking for a online destination and a web experience. Guerrilla marketing works best with some “flavor” behind it, something to do or see when typing in the domain name as an url address online. Intense investor or sponsor efforts must be matched by a seamless, clean designed site with solid content elements to recommend it.

A projection of formal development of a domain name, and the tools and individuals using them should be assigned and plotted. Even a pencil and paper three month plan can get the wheels rolling under a domain inspiration or grassroots blog project. These calendar notations can be edited and rescheduled.

Domain promotion and marketing is time consuming. Just organizing a SEO optimization strategy draws time and energy from team members or the individual webmaster or site programmer. Milestones such as traffic peaks and click volumes should be the goals. Revenue of the affiliate and offers links will follow if the primary goal of site traffic and domain discovery is developed.

Some investors take the plunge into immediate name investment, sometimes in the auction and premium domain name arena. The investment scenarios should be matched with equal investment in formal link exchanges, content adding, text SEO and code density keyword optimization, and clean design for end users. For domain value growth, marketing and promotion benefit when there is more site product to to “sell”.

Each domain project is different, but the thirst for success is the same everywhere. Working through the various challenges and domain name elements is what distinguishes experienced domainers and long term domain investors from hobbyists looking to strike cash flow without effort. When online traffic, public interest, SEO value and a launched site follow the domain purchase, the domain name  investment is sure to pay off.

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