Domain Owl

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 Added sweeteners might get a better offer, like unpublished original articles to pend inside the application for immediate programmed launch.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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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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Some domainers need to make a small project their entry into the domaining and website creation. One great way to bring a domaining talent out from under shadow is to put focus on developing a retirement domain. A fresh new project can light the old domain fire and get some traffic burning to legacy sites already awaiting visitor traffic.

Retirement Lifestyle Domains are the hot market in developing websites and a cool name for a target demographic like future and current retired persons is a sure traffic aggregator. Crafting a keyword combination for “seniors” or retired persons gets practical traffic for articles and features. The readers will skim for their favorite topics, like crafting, sports, traveling, or finance.

Practical uses for the information take point of all content media. Can the snippet of information or how-to video go viral? Is the information exclusive to the website and thus be promoted elsewhere? Can it be easily printed? Do vendor know what to do with coupons or discount offers? Sites for seniors can be dating sites, political discussion sites or literary clubs. Seniors can check back to se if their favorite topic has been discussed or is coming up.

A retirement domain name makes a fresh and quickly growing site project. Making the content for a retirement edged website is easy. Senior citizens looking to retire and those that are currently retired want information on affordable locales, senior discount travel, and their related items specific to their age niche. Geographically specific retirement and seniors sites can be attractive venues for affiliates and coupon merchandisers.

Retirement names can open up new traffic to web links as well. Marrying keywords like “senior” and “retire” and “retirement” with city or geo specific names can appeal to investment domainers and name buyers alike. Lifestyles like recreational vehicle road warriors or houseboat owners can further develop any seniors niche for retirement specific content. Seniors have a lot of time to devote to nich lifestyles and more time to surf the web as well.

Retirement topics for news feeds and article posts are very broad. The interest is in relief from work, securement of monetary assets, continuing health, and ongoing recreational and hobby development. Medical news for a broad variety of ailments and healthy eating and exercise make endless topical editorial contributions retirement age seniors are eager to read.

Shifts and trends in retirement pastimes are news on seniors’ websites. What is the best place to take a cruise or retire around the world? Seniors and eligible retirees want to know. Contributions to the website may be involved at some point. Making a website from a name that signals receptivity to seniors interests and a domain they can spell and share with their peers is half the battle.

Marketing to seniors is a fast growing enterprise that entrepreneurs can make popular quickly because seniors belonging to groups, clubs, institutions or groups can spread the word. A seniors website or retirement niche domain can lead to a marketable entity and more resalable name.

Retirees can start up new businesses or become stock pickers. Senior citizens can run for office or go back to college. Not only do retired persons themselves review such sites, but relatives and friends can forward email traffic. A newby domainer could start a whole new career with a seniors name, even a retired domainer!

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One approach to expanding a domain definition, coining a term, or fulfilling the promise of a type in domain name dot com url is making the site behind the name. Only the domain owner can make the website. They can choose any program they want and any function they want.The site can have no ads, some ads, no images, be mostly images, or feature text or minimized objects altogether, making a stylized web site statement.

Yet ironically, webmasters and domainers usually choose to make their next site look as much as possible like any other site they’ve seen!  Even more frustrating to creative minds, they tend to complement each other most fulsomely on the sites that look most similar to others overall! The opportunity to make a vivid, original and unmatched web statement all too often gets passed by in the eager leap to uniformity of web design.

<Sigh>.

A web site starts with the domain name, or earlier. Writers and webmasters can be putting content “in the can” before they acquire the right name. Editing the database for keyword density is simple when the base domain name is finally acquired. Keywords for passion projects ten to serve each other well in complementarily topical websites.

Then it’s time to build the site. Constructing a landing page and additional pages can be daunting, thus the need and function of the site plan is introduced to the domain development process. Just some simple compilation and research and signing up for RSS feeds can fulfill a website with basic information. Domain domainance occurs when webmasters take web development to the next step.

Hosting company accounts can be fantastic (Fantastico!) resources for ideas. Using open source applications and web site HTML templates can speed branches of a site plan to web published completion in no time. Fantastico web applications can provide easy access installation and tutorial assistance for jump start administration for qualified users. Time spent fiddling with file trees and HTML skeletons can go toward the site’s content and promotion.

The secret to utilizing open source applications properly is fulfilling their promise by adding original content at regular intervals. Templates should be the starting ground for a website, not the finite end or finish line. The site plan should show a way for the author of the site to communicate directly with visitors, usually a blog. Blogs can be completely keyword dominated or barely topical, according to the author’s mod, resources, and schedule.

Web links should be framed so interested topical visitors can take their intellectual inquiry or journey of web discoverability further. Web link exchanges will come from motivated webmasters who want to mirror the appeal of your site to theirs. Features off the front page or located elsewhere should have “signposts” allowing visitors to navigate thataway. Visitors to any  website are always looking for “something to do”.

Web sites often come across as grudging efforts when the sky is really the limit. The internet does not charge for more links, better text, and more quality resolution images! And focusing the ongoing attributes toward more specialized and niche elements that capture SEO researchers can’t hurt. Webmasters should appeal to acquaintances for frank assessment of what the site signals to them in terms of next step activity and clickthrough behavior.

Constant pruning and editing of the website HTML and code  is required for the contemporary SEO optimized site. Upgrading every feature, from meta tags to picture frame dimensionality should be given some careful attention. When a visitor “arrives” at the website, what gives it curb appeal? What makes the site visitor say,  (in the words of Tiny Fey of NBC’s 30 Rock), “I want to go to there”?

The site should provide a way for users to access downloads or other dense information without site lag and dragging page rendering times. The web site should provide an outlet for visitor-to-visitor site participation and exchange of ideas and responses. There should be enough content and detail to tempt visitors short on time to bookmark the page and check back, or save it to their hard drives for offline perusal.

A new site launch is a large project or an itemized task, depending on skill level and enthusiasm.  Bringing fulfillment of a website for a new domain name is the challenge. The domainer has his hands full getting the site up and running, but with attention to these above mentioned details the webmaster for any domain based site launch, and/or the domain name owner,  can feel comfortable their efforts will not be amiss.

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Every industry has its insider secrets. Domaining is the same way.  It takes time and experience to spot some of them. Not every domainer has a silver blog in his mouth, to coin a phrase. Some inside secrets on domaining some of the books , magazines, reviews and trade blogs will never tell you. To hit the ground running in the domain name game, you might try crawling first.

1. You Don’t Need Your Own Hosting Account

Chances are you probably know about three dozen people who already pay too much in too many different directions for hosting. Domainers are exactly guilty of this more than they would like to admit. Any value realization of this fixed ongoing monthly cost is welcome. This is how hosting companies make money, because nobody can optimize to the outer envelope of their server allocations (Usually).

Domainers who want the flexibility of the access time and files resources for implementing websites can be  short the necessary duration of time, so they are paying duplicate fees for stacked hosting, often with the same hosting company for duplicate names.  Some domainers may not even understand how duplicated their hosting resources are.

These hosting accounts have generous pockets or wide tranches of unused space in the file directories. There may be database allocations and bandwidth tolerances lying fallow (and feeding someone else’ s websites). Just forwarding a domain name for a while to a subfolder on a hosting account can launch a site without specific hosting expense.

Savvy webmasters and smart domain owners can barter clicks and mortar services or an I.O.U. for future advertising for some space on the hosting account. Tuning a site or installing an application, and learning the basics, can be done before the domain name or launch project has even been identified. This also gives  the administrator domain owner some “white noise” time to work without pressure of daily blog submissions or articles to publish.

2. Content Stems from Multiple Strategies

There are a variety of ways to generate a content plethora before the initial launch date of a blog or site application arrives. Once the site is launched, the SEO clock starts and the web starts churning investigative bots to extract keyword density and content attributes from existing text and updates. Experienced content makers know how to churn SEO-friendly content out that is both original and keyword dense, yet still appealing and readable.

Having a press release article ready, some url links to existing stories about you,   an “About Us’  text file,  some background on how the website idea got started and pictures or background material or history of the product or its practice can help. In the beginning, using news from other outlets is feasible if the “take” on the article is reported as original text by the (new) site author.

3. Imitation is the Most Efficient Form of Flattery

Imitating another site has its uses. It streamlines the production timeline of a site to zero and accelerates speed toward every other domain development benchmark and site growth goal.  Site architecture in original form can be problematic to conceive and rebuilding the wheel in terms of time absorption. By the time a site is ready to launch or in its first trimester, most features will have been tweaked out of recognition anyway.

If the skill set of the team lies in content and promotion, use the template, invent a logo for the domain name and move on. People can “see through” to the content. Web standards should prevail and code hacks and unique programming irregularities should be well thought out.

Working through site design hurdles shouldn’t involve heavy books and manuals and eyestrain and late nights. The heavy lifting of marketing a website and promoting a domain name  should be the link building and article submission for content, not tinkering with awkward code. This is a trap many domainers fall into.

Branding can come later. Many dominant companies have refashioned their online site colors and logo appeal over time. It’s best for the webmaster to get the hard stuff right, and leave the easy shopping to take care of itself. Fun new themes, avatars, colorations and icons are time consuming and consensus draining. Special typefaces and large images should be avoided for server side concerns.

4.  Skip the Jargon, Take the Cannolli

Every industry and especially online occupations have a herd mentality that gets carried away with itself.  Sometimes the online swirl of ideas and vibes and trends is moving too fast for a launching domainer to properly evaluate. The players are unknown and the impressions come thick and fast. Avoid leaping before you look.

Many domaining professionals will seek to sell you their services or wares before your site is ready or even if your platform or application is not right for what they offer.  The KISS mentality pervades for a reason. Others may not have your situation or understand your project boundaries. Keep to your domain development plan and only bring a new solution or custom addition into the mix if the idea lasts and won’t go away.

5. Write your own Ticket Regarding Service and Hiring Practices

Many products have hidden caveats and many services assume more knowledge and experience than you may have.  Don’t part with money until you have had time to evaluate testimonials, references, examples or project milestones. Use a banking service or credit card with buyer protection. Realize you become a vendor when completing services and a creditor when providing wares.

Use your best judgement hiring people online.  Don’t write a blank check to a programmer, hire an amateur without accountability,  or suspend passwords or administrative control over any accounts in doing so. Work with friends of friends and referred professionals with examples to show. To see if the contractor is genuine, start small and test the communication and see how the other party responds.

Work with tried and true service contractors and web development personnel who have executed results that please you.  Someone doesn’t need a Flash video to qualify to wash your car, but they might proffer some valid real proper names and phone numbers for jobs ranging in the hundreds of dollars to the thousands for critical and time sensitive website work.

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A one domain strategy is a long game for those who have an investment view of finding return value on their domain name investment. One domain name with exceptional startup values, traffic, integrated SEO presence, domain ranking  and corporate or brandable name can be purchased using the entire investment nest egg or capital funding. A single domain can be a hobby or part time employment investment avenue.

A multiple domain name strategy includes various tools bought in bulk or employed over time in combination with one another that they return a  higher dollar value the one domain name itself. Not every name will benefit equally from like methods of marketing and promotion, yet every domain will feel some complementary benefit to the overall domain portfolio promotion strategy. The webmaster must administrate the content and keyword density efficiently.

Some names will have more traction than others from the get-go. Each domainer will have to decide if this means the “favorite son” gets more attention or less. Some domainers choose to focus on the most popular domain name in their stable. Some domainers try to shore up equal SEO results for equal time spent utilizing marketing and promotion tools.

Managing a domain portfolio takes planning, managing one domain requires simply attention to detail over various platforms and promotion campaigns. An approach to article writing for url promotion via resource quotation may not work for every domain keyword association. Domainers should evaluate their promotion skills and purchase domain names which can benefit best form each employment of their SEO optimization skill set and site content enhancement techniques.

Link building may not apply equally well over a broad array of domain names of various types. Some names may remain parked simply due to lack of time on the domainer’s part to develop them. Scheduled activities such as link building and article writing and submissions should be penciled out as far as time commitments go. The sum of many domain development parts equals much more than the sum of its SEO result.

Time assessment to develop should be an important element of additional domain name acquisition value analysis. A numerical domain or typo domain will not have the same branding appeal as a nonsense word with a catchy sound and funny onotomological effect. Domain names for best use are verbal and should encourage repetition and viral communication in an expanding loop outward. When end users stumble over difficult to pronounce or unknown domain names,for viral spread it’s game over.

Multiple domain investment will use up more time and absorb more attention than a single domain marketing project. Domainers should explore the full scope of domain name promotion and marketing options before considering themselves having tapped the full value of development potential. Experience using domain development applications, promotion websites, domain auctions, and online domain link building tools will factor into any domain name acquisition and business plan analysis and strategy further down the line.

A classic business error in the domain handling sciences is to quickly acquire many more names than the current time and resources of any domainer can reasonably develop to return value on time. A more wise domain name investment and development course is to hone SEO optimization skills and familiarize themselves with the necessary tools to promote a domain names value, and then multiply labor with supernumerary domain acquisitions.

Unless keyword and topic similarity are more than 80% congruent, each domain name’s value increase will depend on consistent SEO promotion. But a domain name traffic development strategy might take turns pointing each promoted domain name at another, thus algebraically transferring metrics of traffic while bolstering overall SEO domain name recognition.

One domain name can have multiple domain strategies, but the same domain names with the same marketing steps can be repeated over time and receive the value of an applied campaign to promote page rank escalation, SEO result optimization, Alexa categorical data fulfillment, and overall traffic increases. A social network campaign can follow these types of domain name development or operate congruently.

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The domain name market expands as proven traffic flows and stats for click through ad participation can be evidenced per url. But how can the new domainer begin to develop domain names without losing their shirt? Many people eyeing the domain name industry are loath to dip their toes in the waters without a sizable security that their money (and the benefit of their time) will not be lost.

Understanding the dynamics of affiliate ads and sponsor profits can soften this risk factor. Online Universities and white papers can explain many terms and concepts at any level. Each domainer must decide for his or her own self what role and importance the placement and featuring of affiliate ads and sponsor links will have on any one site.

One of the methods for a new domainer to break into the domain name game is to purchase domain names at modest prices. Many career domainers develop a thirst for domain name acquisition, and their eyes often are bigger than their wallets. This can be a runaway phenomenon. Such domain name portfolios end up in unpaid parking, lost to civilization.

Many an intermediate or advanced domainer has a stable of domain names, a slew of them acquired for subpremium or auction prices. Auction prices include fees that inflate the bottom line of the domain purchase price. Domain name brokering through a domain escrow service does the same thing.

Smart domainers tend to concentrate their domain buys around a central theme or idea,, or have a model for development in mind when they browse for names. They may be familiar with a certain type of website application, like Joomla, PostNuke, or WordPress, and know that they can quickly shift a domain name into a full fledged website.

This is part of a comfortable development model of a professional domain name owner. Repetition of the model suggests acquisition of similar domain names for a repeat of the website development and smooth transition from a name for sale to a live website with qualified ads and links.

Becoming familiar with the mechanics of domain name transfer can save fledgling domainers this cost. Scanning drop lists and reviewing dollar domain lists from domainers willing to transfer their expiring or deleting names for minimum fees can save a fortune. Inside the domain development model, a name with development potential can utilize the fee that might otherwise go to an auction subfee or even a registration cost and apply it toward domain name marketing and promotion. Domaining is like a Clint Eastwood movie, you get a lot for “a few dollars more”.

Currently one of the most estimable domain name promotion services available is the link building and article directory services.  Freelance contractors who know how to work the software submission engine or even hand submit their link entries to directories all over the Internet. This can cost a few dollar per domain wit the right contractor. That means a dollar domain just got itself some free publicity if the marketing plan included the regular cost of a domain purchase.

With these types of domain name and website development tools for online promotion available, new domainers can specialize in enhanced domain support activities. These include forum participation, blog or journal comments with backlinks, and posting of reviews or press releases online that encourage visits to the domain name’s website. These can’t be mechanized without a very fake look showing up in the eyes of beholders.

Dialing into websites, blogs, and forums that specifically talk about the topics and subjects your site is concerned with is the best way to promote the qualified inbound links that SEO bots take notice of. Inbound links created using link directories, forum posts, signature links, article placements and comment trackbacks are the new tools domainers can use every day to promote their websites and grow the value of their domains.

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Domainers that skip the auction threads of the popular domain forums do so at their own risk. The beauty of the one dollar domain is that once the normal tricks of developing a website and enhancing content for SEO optimization are ingrained, value builds with the additional of each domain.

Because for the experienced domainer webmaster, one additional site is simply a matter of acquiring another single domain and putting it up at their hosting account. Dollar domains can maintain growth in value that results in a portfolio sale or a one time profit opportunity when the topical keyword or term heads into the news or fetches interest from portfolio or domainer buyers.

The one time cost of the domain at one dollar should neither be the value the domainer uses to assess how much effort to put into the development of the website or the aggregate of any future price they may fetch for that name in auction.In fact, domainers should consider a handpicked dollar domain as a bargain with additional promotion costs stitched into the profit model. The dollar domain is probably worth at least a minimum subfee over reg fee, for the simple reason that it has been used before and has some traction somewhere, even if it was only parked by the previous owner.

With competitive pricing of a flexible hosting plan, domainers actually leverage more value out of the hosting plan with every domain hosted. Mocking up websites and applying domain names to paid parking, even utilizing the domain names acquired for link presences to support another site name can pay off in the long run. If a webmaster uses a minisite template to provide a web site content layer for his set of dollar domains, then uses their traffic building to supply value to those domain names, then ultimately the domainer has constructed a subset of his own traffic domains.

These traffic domains can become long term instruments of domain promotion because instead of having to rent or buy traffic domains, simply switching the forwarding of the hosting servers can build exponential traffic stats for target domain name sites overnight. For resale of a domain name or a targeted promotion, these types of domains are invaluable to have inside the hosting or registrar account. Thus the dollar domains themselves become instilled with value over time, and it can safely be said that they will resell for more than a dollar.

Dollar domains can also be used as sponsor or product promotion destinations. instead of furnishing every Google Adsense box with Google ads, try editing the text and links to go to products and links that build revenue for you. If the destination web pages have links and affiliates as well, other types of product promotions and sponsor offers can be placed there that are not relevant to original domain name, keywords, and theme. Building traffic domains as well as developing main website domains allows the domainer to reach a wider sphere of contacts. These contacts become vendors and buyers over time.

At some point a portfolio management strategy for all the domain names the domainer will buy will be necessary to organize the names into a strategic order.

The renewal date of each name should be noted as soon as the name comes under review for bidding. Of course, if the seller of the dollar domain is merely shedding portfolio “fat” and trying to rid himself of domains before their expiration, that should take the domain out of the “dollar’ estimation range in terms of cost. But one dollar is never too much to risk when there is the time frame of year before renewal to produce traffic, and gain domain value and leverage it for sale.

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Domains are websites waiting to happen. Great tools are available online, but too often domainers do nothing or everything to a site with no point in between. Finding the balance between a participation-possible site and an overblown extravaganza that leaves visitors shaking their heads takes time, attention and site analysis.

Premade sites can furnish lots of ready options for newb domainers. But the problem with templates is that unless you want your site to look just like everybody’s else’s, the final result is only going to be as good as…everybody else’s site. Premade site templates can offer a lot of value for the domainer with no editing skills or HTML comfort zone.

1. Use Video

A video attraction is a desirable addition to any site. Visitors tend to pay attention to any video application launching or threatening to launch. Audio options and features can transition an impromptu type-in browse-by into an in-depth exploration of the site content. Video is one of the most viewed features on any type of website,  because it’s the easiest to use.

2. Affiliate Specialization

Look for unique affiliate or sponsor ads. Just seeing the ads everyone else already has on a similar site doesn’t prompt your web visitor to click on them. Check out page rank level links wanted and product endorsement banners and boxes straight form the vendor. Since the ad will be unique and not tapped from the barnyard of affiliates, similar sites won’t have that offer. Thus traffic will grow and browsers will bite.

3. Evaluate Your Density

Use tools on the individual text files at sites like Textalyser.net and others to assign values to core keyword density. Grow your density by applying more virtuosity and expanding secondary keywords to connect to important central terms and ideas. Use content writers with talent to convey creative appeal in the articles and text to draw visitors into the site.

4.  Get Beta Feedback

Identify about a half dozen key people who can take the time to really review your site. Evaluate their feedback against your contributions to the site. Some of the critics should be from the internet and domainer community, but not all. While a non-domainer individual may not understand all the mechanics that go into making your website, they will substitute for casual browsers to your site.

5. Kill the Drag

Find out if your website takes too long to load for Flash, graphics, images that are too large or an application with errors in the source code or landing page script. If too much animation and on-load business is going on, restrain the display options so browsers don’t get greeted by a  stalled site and a prolonged wait time loading. They will click away just to feel in control of their browser.

6. Build a Squeeze Page

Squeeze pages maximize the opportunity presented by every site visit. There may be a key feature your website hides behind the landing pages, or a “best of show” content article that doesn’t suit the clean format of the website top layer. Direct browsers to one best piece of content with a tricky headline or opening salvo. Or use a window to catch email addresses for a newsletter or site update notification.

7. Proofread Your Site Map

Use your site map as a guidepost to mimic how bots and search engines see your site. Edit any remaining default text and improve spelling, grammar and detail whenever possible. Eliminate unneeded modules and sections. Crosslink parts of the site back and forth and expand on terms and unusual words using this feature with a Glossary.

8. Edit the Web Directory

No website should launch without a web link directory. categorical and referral links should be organized by topic, subject, and site type. Even entering three topics and three links in each section, complete with description and relatives comments can make a web link area. Overlooking this part of the site architecture is a serious error.

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I got an idea today from a web hosting forum I post at about a new idea. In a discussion of web hosting pricing and packages and plans, somebody threw out the idea that those webmasters who actually use the open source applications should pay a per usage microfee. Minimal per-usage fees could lower the overall hosting charges big ticket hosting companies use.

Since actual hosting is much cheaper without the heavy code files and directory trees of hosted open source and brand apps, why not introduce the idea of microfee licenses per user per site? One of the biggest blocks to new domain websites is the hosting fees that inflate any domain name investment. The price of some web hosting plans, even the lower end ones, could come into a realistic perspective for fledgeling domainers.

The hosting company usually offers an array of open source and trademarked applications. These applications are offered because they make it easy to install and compose websites with ease. But if the real price of hosting was nothing more than fixed electricity and rackspace, bulk development of even the largest domain portfolios could happen.

Low-rent hosting plans usually spell disaster because experienced domainers know the company will fold or crimp its sever management and take a powder at the worst possible time in the webmaster’s timetable. If the reference community of active websites was graduated ten thousand fold, imagine what the link building and article directory possibilities could be.

Of course, there is always the hope that one renegade reseller will purchase a monster account and sweep the hosting industry….and domainers along with it.

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