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.

Continue Reading

While navigating three hosting accounts in one morning I remembered more than I wish I had forgotten about the in’s and out’s of relative advantages of different hosting companies. Administrating Wordpress websites is about as easy as being a webmaster can get short of editing mere HTML pages strung together. But it can still be a headache. And performing tasks in MySQL on no coffee is torture.

I went between Godaddy.com and 1 & 1 Hosting, between 1 & 1 hosting and Hostgator, and back again from Hostgator.com to Godaddy again. This is the chore when different hosting accounts get different parts of the hosting account offering formula right and different parts of it wrong. Experiencing multiple hosting account interfaces before breakfast can take a lot of elbow grease and keyboard forgiveness.

A lot depends on the browser. At one point in the project I realized I had both Firefox and Internet Explorer open because one hosting account stayed open better in Explorer while another transited better between navigation screens in Explorer. But Explorer seemed more secure in certain parts of the hosting account interface where security was tighter, and Firefox sort of stalled in the Backup/Restore pathway of commands.

GoDaddy.com does have a cornered market on the Godaddy Hosting Connection installation utility. It’s a nice arrangement that unfortunately you have to learn to be comfortable with. Control panel and ControlPanel Deluxe have that absolute party favorite of all hosting account surfers, Fantastico. Except to get version information you have to sift carefully and compare versions and perform upgrades per application before executing database restore and upload tasks.

The jury is never really out when debating which hosting account vendor online is the best. Certainly Enom.com is a stable bedrock names registrar. but just try and get a name hosted there or working with any application without Indian medicinal juju working for you. Frustration with one hosting account leads to the germination of another at a new company. This cycle can only continue so far.

Godaddy.com has the most fluid domain manager but the bells and whistles flavor of the nonstop “Buy This” circus inside a hosting login can’t exhaust even a patient webmaster fast. This administration environment seems very commercial next to the minimal functionality of the Hostgator Control panel. The Fantastico “hosting connection” delivers good install functionality for third party applications, if the versions are consistent with the “exit” versions on other outgoing site hosting accounts.

What this means is that a WordPress install at Godaddy might be at Wordpress 3.01.01 yet the Fantastico release at HostGator might have the WordPress installation release only at 2.98.2. This means the security and support is not guaranteed for custom tweaks and plugins that are the main feature of the updated Wordpress. Backwards blog migration is never a pretty site.

Thus the hosting account selection equation might be reduced to the smoothest and most updated installation suite. Yet so many functions inside the Control Panel (except Fantastico) can remain untouched for the life of the account. Or worse, they can be experimentally tried with brilliant reactions of equal parts of glee, panic and chaos. Having the tech support number close at hand is a must.

The hosting at 1&1 hosting is a curiosity to me. The custom tweaked interface for administration of the hosting account seems to mask more than it reveals of available and necessary domaining chores. The ease of use never seems to be 100% there. For a domainer intent on SEO and marketing and domain name promotion, supposedly only programmers venture this far.

I have a 1 & 1 hosting account that it took a considerable amount of time to cancel, simply because the process was so labyrinthine I barely got the confirmation of the account cancellation in time. I got quickly into the habit of not using the account because I didn’t like the interface as was constantly stalled by the “lookup and see” factor involved in very simple tasks.

To be sure, Godaddy captures a big part of its hosting and domain business from ease of use and familiarity. But not often do I get the opportunity to see triple hosting company side by side performance. I remember how much I resisted the Godaddy interface on my journey from ControlPanel. I like the direct file management approach but miss the protections and hidden file attributes of the Godaddy File manager.

For the 1 & 1 Hosting file access was almost impossible, rendering many templates and theme graphics closed to customization. I used to cling tearfully to my Control panel until an installation version got so vulnerable to failure almost every operation was liable to disappear from day to day. This is the sort of thing that causes hosting account migration.

My love affair with Fantastico was long and meaningful. But many other administration options when navigating through reseller accounts and multiple hosting trees became necessary. Godaddy is a hosting account utility most webmasters will shoulder sooner or later simply by nature of the amount of domains hosted there. Until there is a definitive result for the best hosting company for SEO, the choice for domainers remains personal.

Continue Reading

In working inside the domain world, people become independent business men (and women) without even knowing it. Internet individuals of every age and rank, teenagers, men and women acquire domain names and offer them for sale constantly, yet they seem to maintain a sort of naivete about the fact that what they are really doing is functioning as their own carnival barker-cum-insurance- salesman. This carries risks which the domainer (possibly unknowingly) is assuming.

Brokering your own domain name sale can have its challenges.  Escrow services have popped up online and established a benchmark many domainer trusts. These domain name escrow service companies work to form a break against the tide of aggression happening with entrepreneurs trying to vend their names to people who may not even speak their language but understand the value of the domain on offer or up for auction.

In observing a heated discussion today between two bidding domainers in a private auction, I realized the lava was being generated by the fact that the seller’s decision to vend the name had not been covered by a reliable domain name broker service. Somewhere in the bid process, confusion had arisen as to how the domain sale would actually be executed. Suddenly, the history of each bid and the goodwill of both bidders was attached to a wild insistence to doing things “their way”.

This angst could have been avoided by stating as Terms of Sale a named broker service acting as name agent. Otherwise, the tension of a bid/offer scenario is reduced to a clammy sandwich of broken promises, dying away email communications, and eroding forum threads, which might have formed the basis of a profitable domain sale. The world is full of domainers who have been caught up in the bonfire of anxiety, exhilaration, excitement and pure greed a bidding frenzy whips up.

Both bidders wanted to use their own version of a buyer’s contract, which of course didn’t meet with the approval of the seller. The actual excitement of the name and who would win it was mired down in discussions of “Tastes Great/ Less Filling” variety vis a vis online business contracts. The seller was suddenly caught in the crossfire of dissenting opinions due to his own lack of foresight in covering his bases.

How did the sale pan out? It didn’t.

As the discussion wound down so did the eagerness of both domainers to get the name. The seller had lost a good opportunity and squandered the good faith of both customers. The deer in the headlights was the seller, whose paying customers had moved on to greener pastures. The domain name was the unfortunate roadkill meeting its ugly demise by the side of information superhighway.

All this pain and suffering could have been avoided if the seller had just involved a listing and brokering service that would have wrapped up every question in  neat set of FAQs. When domains are at issue, good faith and the Internet part company when dollars cross the international dateline. Always cover your bets where a domain registration or name sale is concerned. Always respect the rights of the other (domaining) party in the the transaction. Translated: Nobody “has” to do anything.

Ethical domainers do business this way. (Hint: Don’t look to PayPal to police your four-figure domain sales. ) The benefit of a growing “rap sheet” of successful domain sales at any escrow service is the enlistment of those same escrow services on your behalf in times of trouble. Your good behavior will serve you in good stead when some upstart tries to steal your domain or hijack your site. “Free rent” is a negligible concept where hosting and bandwidth costs are concerned.

Yes, escrow services charge a fee. But so do most non-banking institution ATMs and that hasn’t stopped people from using them. A slice of the action is a small price to pay for delivery of the big bid. If you’ve got online real estate, trust the professionals to turn over the big amounts and rest easy that all is copacetic. Escrow services for domain names transfer the worry of a big dollar domain sale to the heavy hitters who pave the way for a legitimate and legal domain name sale payday.

Continue Reading

At this very moment your domain name could be underway to be sold somewhere online. Without your knowledge. Think it can’t happen? One of my colleagues in the domain firmament was flabbergasted today to learn that his domain name (and website) were being vended by a well-known auction site.

One catch: he still owns the domain name.

This can happen in the world of domain name buying and selling and sadly it happens more often than one would think possible. A lot is going on at any time online and it is almost impossible for a domainer with even a few dozen names to keep abreast of everything pertaining to each name taking place. Of course, the fusillades of daily spam don’t help. I am willing to bet some clickjacking or password guessing combined with some clever timing to release the name while owner was busy elsewhere.

Thus all the more reason to vigilantly update sites daily or as often as possible. Weeding through the spam and offers and solicitations for hosting products and suchlike, a domainer can quickly get tired of seeing important notices and notifications because of the sheer volume of the broadcasts. Hosting companies are so notorious for sending out offers and prompts and reminders and advertisements a domainer is practically immune to opening their email.

And that’s when the domain name pirate strikes. It’s a good bet the pirate of any domain name knows your IP address and can track your activity by a login or posting activity somewhere. Just Google someone’s IP address or their corresponding user name with their email and sooner or later a trail forms. What is not so clear is how liable a registrar or auction site is for hosting a sale of a name clearly in dispute of ownership.

This is the dilemma many domainers face when they register a name. If privacy is not purchased, then any working online operator can limp their way to some kind of hack or pose a sale if the domainer is busy enough not to notice. Many domainers watch the droplists and deleting domains auctions for just this reason. Being on good terms with your registrar and knowing their terms of Service doesn’t hurt either.

Keeping track of domain name activity that has been pirated started many years ago, when hijacked popmail addresses and phantom spam campaigns spouted reams of “reply -to” spam aimed at astonished webmasters who’d never even used their inboxes. I personally have had important emails topped out of my administrator email account only to find the limit reached. On a 100 GiG mailbox that’s a lot of spam.

What’s even more frustrating is that if a sale is reached via the fake auction listing, the third party “Buyer” becomes part of the mix. As a buyer in good faith, if he parts with hard earned cash for the name, is he entitled to it if the registrar ever sorts matters out? For a lucrative domain name with marketed traffic and keyword density with a site up, that’s a significant loss to the owner of the name, who wasn’t even listing the name for sale in the first place!

Virtual records are all very well, but printed purchase receipts and domain transfer records with renewal dates and expiration projections can work to demonstrate original chain of title to a domain name. It then becomes the registrar’s responsibility to disclose why they released a name not unlocked for sale by owner. Domain locking is enabled for just this reason. The IP tracking of the registrar or hosting company should underscore this utility.

One final point: if you go into partnership with another domainer or sponsor for a site or name project, keep a record of the email communication where rights and titles and participating profit percentages and shares of the enterprise are clearly spelled out.These can be handy reminders when project leads forget where their enterprise is going or where it came from.

Every development deal is its own ship sailing to a unknown destination. Online webmasters and site operators need to helm their own vessel. Attention to detail is key. Backups and records of performed work are advisable, especially when billing is ongoing. Clarify deal points with partners and keep track of time and billable hours spent contributing to the project. A hosting company will have records to confirm your login time and access.

To keep all your domain names in the batter’s box, review the lineup from time to time. Keep renewal date checks current and know all the procedures to transfer or billing inquiries ahead of time. View the traffic hits as RBI’s and police site errors. (Hostnames may form some kind of infield fly rule). If your domain names are playing every inning, they can’t go AWOL. This way, when it’s time to have a time out and call the umpire, you have all your ducks in a row.

Continue Reading

Domaining is a lot like the process and concept of feng-shui, the harmony in relationship to spaces and other objects practiced by the Japanese for millennia. The two concepts have a lot in common. A harmonious relationship in feng shui results in beauty and peace. A harmonious relationship in domaining results in profit.

Feng shui considers the attributes of a different plane of consciousness and calculates the astral possibilities of likelihood of positive and negative events from a varied dimension from the current static reality. Sound like so much hocus-pocus? Follow. Domaining situates a domain on the dragon’s eyeball of the internet traffic market and rolls the dice and sets the roulette wheel of fate in motion. The laws of chance can govern its monetary success.

Many people involved in the Internet domain name game miss the philosophy dimension that is necessary to manage a domain portfolio. Such people see direct equations of investment and profit with no values in between. These are most likely those scrambling around asking questions like “why  didn’t this domain sell?” or “why didn’t someone offer me a staggering amount of money for that domain I bought yesterday?”.

This demeanor boils down to a basic question. “Why don’t people do what I want when I want? ” This has many answers. In the domain world the only guarantees of resale success for a domain name are effort. Not the least of which can be answered by an individual’s ability to effectively launch their domain sites and promote them effectively.

I have been in the domain name game for about twenty years now. The more things change, the more some things stay the same. It’s impossible to believe (yet wholly common and accurately conveyed) that many aggressively profit seeking domainers do little or nothing to promote their urls, while actively soliciting bids as though the names were traffic horse race winners.

If I had a dime for every domainer who wrote me hurt and victimized emails about how their brand new speculative domain wasn’t being snapped up by the highest bidder, I’d be in hog heaven. And with the developing sites market exploding the way it has, anyone would be a fool to expect high volume profit and massive cash turnover in days. Those stories are fantastic for a reason.

The domain name commodity market  has a lot of people in it to game the system. They seek to leverage value from a name or website that otherwise might be perceived as having none. Petulant questions and whining yield no revenue. Building links, adding articles, submitting link directory entries and buying ad space yield traffic and web clicks.

The successful turnover of a domain name for a resale of huge dollar gain is a yellow brick road. For anyone who has seen the “Wizard of Oz”, Dorothy’s story doesn’t begin and end with her demanding shrilly to get the ruby shoes as she stands in front of the witch’s house. She has a journey and she acquires partners and they aid her with significant wisdom and counsel.

The incorporation of magical belief and chance and fate and destiny affect the way many stolid businessmen perceive the internet. Something about the web makes them believe magical things can happen. It is possible, but without a magic wand summoning the auction fairies to do your bidding is difficult. Sprinkling magic dust on the domain resale offer letter is not possible.

How does this relate to feng shui? The concept of harmony and one’s place in the universe is one that correlates to domaining. Every domainer maps an independent journey through the domain name commodity market with their own fate in their hands. Seasons change, yin and yang operate in flux, and balances are restored.

In the domain game, your name value is your karma. But the five elements of domain name feng shui I would categorize as the name, the hosting account, the site design, the traffic building and the content. All of these must work in harmony. For many domainers, significant gaps exists in one or more of these columns per name.

Each of the five phenomena of the domain name market and resale commodity bazaar operate to strengthen and vitalize name value. Elide one category and the energy drains away. Without movement and traffic, a site is stagnant. Without active promotion and the humanistic zest of ideas, a domain falls flat. And the domainer must look within to find out why.

To dissipate and destroy name value happens more often than domainers are comfortable dealing with. Changing horses midstream, flirting with content strategies, and assuming important website architecture changes are needed when not even one week has gone by is a way of fencing with the feng shui of the domain  market. A bad way.

Yes, the Internet can be stormy and dangerous. But when the right energy is contributed it runs smooth and clear like flowing water. I urge all domainers to contemplate their interactive environment and consider their domaining feng shui. A successful approach like this one could be a new way to gain emotional perspective and retain motivatonal drive to snowball domain value skyward.

Continue Reading

Traffic is the key to a successful website, and a domain, for that matter. The earning potential for affiliates and link sponsors as well as featured ads is a function of what traffic will participate in the lure of services and goods for sale. But so many domainers expect traffic without putting out sufficient incentive. The lure of a site must be established for traffic to evolve in significant numbers.

The time and efforts that domainers will put into domain development varies. The investment some domainers are comfortable making may skip the right name and focus all the marbles on the wrong name. The more names a domainer adds to their stable, the more the effort for each individual name will diminish. Advice can come from all sides, qualified or unqualified, and mean nothing or everything.

Partnership is key to developing domains intelligently. Unless the independent domainer forges ahead with a team of inspired specialists, the registered domain will languish inside the locked vault of the parked page or lie fallow in the doldrums of the hosting account. That’s a lot of wasted  Cnames setups and idling frames redirect records.

These types of scenarios generally increase the value of a domain name very little. Many domainers operate alone, with hundreds of name waiting in the wings undeveloped. Partners can break down the benefits of link promotion strategies and help make decisions regarding text contributions and editoral calendars for content posting. And the main thrust of the impetus forward can be put toward a tangible goal.

Domainers rolling their sleeves up and developing make money. Otherwise so many domain energies are wasted in pointless debates between ad types, website features, or value appraisals that don’t really add to the bottom line. Posting on discussion forums can help a newb domainer learn, but many busy domain portfolio managers are much more concerned with marketing their names to buyers directly.

Sales pitches without teeth tend to be ignored or dismissed outright. The pumps for a domain buy needs to be primed when the transaction is domainer-to-domainer. Just shoving the domain onto the market rarely brings a satisfactory return. Savvy domain shoppers want stats and traffic volume to cement a bid. Without these a domain offering can sound like a desperate Hail Mary pass.

Undeveloped and/or unused domains are a huge waste. The importance of a road map or marketing plan for every domain at purchase is key. At the very least any unused (undeveloped) names should be directed toward a landing page of the domainer’s existing site to bolster traffic for a target name under review for development or sale.

These are the risks of domaining. And the rewards? Huge auction bids, online traffic in cascades of hourly clicks, and ad revenues piling up almost faster than the metrics can add them up. Or perhaps one sale happens with just one very happy bid that makes a domainer’s year. For prurient domain developers, this can be very feasible if they don’t overspend on media buys.

After all the Adwords, SEO, Article Writing, Media Buys, Blogging, Classified Ads, Social Bookmarking, and buzz, a big ticket domain resale is the goal. But not every domain marketing instrument is right for every site. The appeal of a website based on a speculative domain can be a delicate thing to manage or anticipate. Media buys for one audience can work whereas for another domain audience they fall flat.

And that’s just the beginning. There is always the hook of the promotion cycle at the social networking sites, ongoing link building, and negotiating and pitching to joint venture partners. Domainers spend the balance of their time wrestling with their hosting accounts and tugging names from one registrar to another. The most desperate go for email drops and ad swaps, which pose SEO risk for negligible return.

Adwords can work when the site had traffic. SEO is the responsibility of the webmaster. Article writing is a core foundation of any site strategy. Media buy investments like blogging, Classified Ads, Social Bookmarking, Facebook or other social networking, paid link building, and other sponsored appeals for traffic can blend into a nice fountain of online viewers.

Domainers, start your engines and rev up to speed new traffic clicks to your site today!

Continue Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like domainers have.

Continue Reading

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.

Continue Reading

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.

Continue Reading

Everybody wants a blog comment with an inbound link back to their site. I see hundreds of them here and elsewhere. Link exchanges generally work to the benefit of both sites, since only the webmasters of relevant sites with SEO value need apply. Search engines denigrate the value of unrelated links. Lots of spam and lots of erroneous commenting needs to be addressed.

SEO bots scrub down the blogosphere daily. But the reality is few can keep a blog going. The number one issue with administrating a blog domain is that the blog engine needs effort and attention. Admittedly it sometimes needs more time some days than others, but administration of the blog domain that is a domain blog can absorb more minutes than observers might suspect.

One of the most surprising aspects to curating a blog is administering approval of the comments users and visitors leave at the site. Various articles should have different users with varying home urls and different email addresses. But with the effort some domainers and online contractors are making these days to promote their domain urls, some spam comes along.

Here are some notes for those reading this who attempt to comment here or spread the url word about their domain or website online. Whether it is a FaceBook page, Myspace address, subdomain, or Squidoo link, these rules for commenting apply. Links and comments promoting links will be deleted meeting the following criteria.

1. A comment with a home page name that does not relate in either subject value or keyword association with my domain or blog is probably not going to be approved. These are obvious spam.

2. A blog comment that is misspelled is probably not going to be approved. This shows the writer is not a native speaker and too careless to spellcheck. Grammar errors mean a scripted posting machine did the commenting.

3. A blog comment abusing the administrator of this site is probably not going to be approved. Comment administration decisions are final.

4. A blog comment repeated word for word across a half dozen articles with identical commentary text  is probably not going to be approved.

5. A blog comment flogging an unrelated service or site is probably not going to be approved.

6. A blog comment uniformly unconnected to the content of the article AND misspelled AND promoting warez AND to a topic-unrelated site domain name url  is probably not going be approved.

7. A blog comment that is in a foreign character set and thus unreadable  is probably not going to be approved.

8. A blog comment that is too long (a page or more, 700 characters plus, ) probably not going to be approved.

9. A blog comment that is relating to an adult name or mature content site when the posted site is completely unrelated to such material is probably not going to be approved.

10. Asking for free publishing of this site’s content elsewhere on a  site with advertising and affiliates, and for free writing services on your site’s behalf will probably get deleted. Appropriate communications along these lines happen via email, not in the public comment area.

Bonus Round:

Your link will probably get deleted if it is one in  series of exactly similar posts on various stories under different email addresses and site names.

Continue Reading