Domain Owl

Once upon a time in domainland, a domain name such as a five character generic might be had for a song. Then came the land rush, the market flooded with buyers and sellers, arbitrageurs and entrepreneurs. The cycles of name selling fury and famine drove the domain name commodity around the globe. Soon, geographically specific domain names had their vogue. And target end user markets for every type of product or service, entertainment or activity rose just as geographically specific country codes came online as well.

Domain names today should come with a monetizing plan, a social network campaign, a end user participation strategy and a promotion timetable. The monetizing plan keeps the domain owner evaluating every effort to market and develop the site behind the name. A monetizing plan for the domain name should include the webmaster’s estimation of the earnings potential of a domain name as a resale target goal product, or a growing concern online. The social network campaign can reflect back on the system architecture and programming choices of the website developer.

An end user strategy for site interaction and participation can include social network promotion and communication throughputs, but it part of a larger whole. Who tells their friends about the site, and how? What kind of content prompts the reference of an article or url via email, Twitter, or FaceBook? What sets of users are evangelists, which digest the material and act on it, and which form a passive set of visitors? This brings into focus the change in available end user niche demographics now trolling the Web looking for place to surf.

The millennial niche consumer markets is reshaping food chain revenue volumes and it may be affecting small device and computer sales as well. Millennials are coming of age postcollege consumers with recreational incomes to spend but caveats previous groups didn’t have. The optimization of any such website marketing to Echo Boomers should integrate these factors into the look and feel of the website.

DINKS, Yuppies, and Baby Boomers did not have as many environmental and sustainability concerns in there foods as millennials. And a millennial niche market consumer will not be as likely to ignore chemical or medicinal warnings or aftereffects of certain types of chemical or preservatives in foods, products, home cleaning products, or clothing manufacturing processes or big box goods.

Millennials are also called Echo Boomers. The website of choice for a millennial will likely cater to a cause, which limits interaction to brief comments, ‘Like” actions, or donations, or will entertain the end user, with video or gaming content. Millennials are much more likely to type in a gossip website url as a news source than two thirds of older Internet users. Brand awareness of such a user group will include more website names than legacy product brands and site visits and searches shift toward clothing and media brands and trendy retailers than older groups.

The web user of today will likely expect a rationale behind a website and a way to interact with site instead of just encountering information and content the are expected to read. Audio and video enhancements flavor the experience in a way millennials like. The younger Internet user will be coming from sites where they are actively engaged in gaming, clicking, and watching moving pictures and animated ads. A site with “nothing to do” will bore this user from an interactivity standpoint. Millennials have a strong resonance with “MTV style content programming.

Webmasters can utilize ens user potential of millennials by exploiting the design to appeal to ease of use from mobile phone devices, cellphones, tablets and content enriched by updated media player upgrades. But millennial end users are also not shy about obtaining knowledge and participating in political or economic causes akin to their core values.

But future planning, like insurance and estate or financial affairs are not likely advertising successes for this user group. Matching millennials appeal website content and affiliates in site architecture that rewards search result lookups for this niche is key. i.e., Someone spending $6600 on a graphite hunting bow is not a match for a user who will spend $100 a month on digital downloadable game content.

Ad design and revenue potential for millennials sites should be carefully considered. Affiliate ads featuring teenage smartphones or senior disability living accessories are not good matches for content designed to attract millennials users. But products that utilize technology like digital or Mp3 content will be much more in line with this end user’s expectations and desires. Ads for TV shows or digital content can be very strong affiliate performers for programs and films that are marketed to this World Wide Web user segment.

Knowing which likely advertising offer users will click is key to implementing a monetization plan for a website or domain name. Since any buyer for that name will likely also intend the domain to be user for a similar purpose, grooming search engine results and navigable traffic to the site should be tailored to a likely demographic profile.

Social networking and TV-based content is a likely win for sites and domain names tailored to this group. Since millennials grew up with the Internet, likely sites to appeal to them will feature next-stage technology, products, and site design. Ad the entitlement so many critics attribute to this group with can work for domainers looking for product-related clicks and service offers on their millennials based web sites.

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Many domainers can be somewhat unfamiliar with the way copyright is legally defined and protected. Domain lawsuits and disputes regarding domain named and websites content violation of copyright become more numerous every day. WIPO and other UDRP settlement companies can determine in arbitration which of two parties will go forward as owner of the domain name and have the right to operate Internet enterprises using that domain. With successful internet websites earning millions of dollars, the incentive for improper means of stealing trade secrets is very strong.
Website owners should take reasonable measure to establish copyright. Nondisclosure agreements should be reached and signed between the copyright owner, such as the domain owner, and the contractors, such as web designers, image or art creators, and content providers. The publishing notification of the website, usually found at the bottom of a website in small or nearly unnoticeable text, serves to underscore this emphasis on Internet use and materials copyright.
EU directives and domestic coterminous agreements originally covered media like films where fifty or even seventy years of copyright protection was automatically afforded. Trade secrets with IP protections can allow online software or “app” developers to guard trade secrets. It is important for domainers to follow the same procedures to safeguard development investment in their own domain names. Defining the trade secrets is the owner’s responsibility.
And the development phase of any website or software is the most closely guarded period, because without attachment to a name server or proprietary file location, the copyright needs to be proven in conjunction with other records and recorded storage media to belong to the owner. Once the website is launched and published online, the trade secrets phase has passed. The relationship between parties until that time, during that time, and beyond should be stipulated legally if angel investment or first round funding is in play.
For companies where a domain startup is involved, onsite physical security is suggested. Storage of network devices and system passwords should be implemented. Photocopying printed material and facsimile transmission should be logged. Shredding work development documents can be a good way to make sure nobody hijacks expensive progress toward a website launch for their own online store or portal. Employees access to trade secrets should also be restricted. Future patent income could be at stake.
Non-compete agreements can guard companies against their ideas and software getting stolen, but the problem become more serious when an independent contractor works for a domain name entity or website. The copyright laws do not protect against independent development of a secret, policy, software program, or original trade secret. Implied agreements do not stand up in court. Before a domainer extends trade secrets to a friend, colleague, industry acquaintance, or subcontractor, they better make sure they can operate prudently with respect to their copyright protection.
The computer network and the domainer’s devices are prime trade secrets storage areas. Online media can serve as a springboard to a hacked file server or desktop hard drive, where documents and programs are filed. Standalone computers and portable laptops should be checked daily for spyware and keylogger programs. if a hacker knows what you are doing and only needs several hundred lines of code to customize and publish online to copyright it before you, the deed could be done before the ‘owners” of the technology turn around.

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The news beating on the tom toms is official, Facebook’s integration of social networking is now a fixed integer of the Google algorhythm. This has been a convention of the domain and website world for some time but Google is now acknowledging they are rolling the social networking  values of a site into their calculation for page ranking.

For any website without a social networking campaign, an effective campaign, that sinking feeling in the PR values will tell its own tale. The types of avenues to a successful social networking (read Facebook) strategy are everywhere. But what is the best way to sink your teeth into a Facebook marketing strategy? Dive in and let your user groups know about your site. Ask for feedback ad send messages. Let Facebook be your new SEO campaign headquarters.

The goal of any domainer? To get their website “liked”. People can “like” something without being a friend. The key is to deliver an app, service, information set or product at the site that will balance out the liking. A huge social networking value for a near template web site will make Google look silly. We hope. But carrying forth visiting Facebook users from your targeted website and delivering bookmarking Friends is worth its weight in SEO gold.

One has to hope that Google isn’t handing over too much SEO power to another online site. Core demographics should match the people doing the liking, such as a fireman putting forth a “Like” for the website that offers a free testing for the civil exam for firefighting. Qualified Facebook traffic in and of itslf could start a tidal wave of end users flocking to your website and heightening the value of your domain name. Get cracking!

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The Wikileaks effect has spawned copycats offshoots wannabe and genuine peers. The world of corporate secrets confidentiality, and whistleblowing may never be the same again. Even people who never interested in the Wikileaks site cannot deny the timeliness of this market.

While Washington D.C, spooks want to call this action terrorism, it may be just people getting around all the red tape to let the public know about wrongful action by businesses, governments, and individuals. Secret spilling may be a domain gold rush.
What gave rise to this user base? Decades of people watching whistleblowers in federal, state, and civil suits get targeted and having their lives take a nosedive due to the strain of following the court system.

New sites are springing up to pick up locally where the scope of Wikileaks doesn’t reach. That’s geo-specific traffic. Brusselsleaks, (not about fibrous green vegetables), BalkanLeaks, (accepting documents of Bulgarian nefarious deeds), Indoleaks, (politically volatile), and Governmentleaks in China, (not even approved of by Assange) all are heritage offshoots of the original Wikileaks website.
It’s hard to know what is entailed when one starts an enterprise like a wikileaks type website, but to be sure there are plenty of industries that could use one. Key players in commercial trucking, pharmaceutical medicine, animal safety and environmental hazards agencies could probably all have very good ideas about what comprises a wikileaks type site specific to their industry. Getting end user traffic might be both a journalistic enterprise and a social science experiment rolled into one.
The keyword for a niche industry or commonly known abbreviation might work for the morphology of a successful new -leaks site. The robo-signing of mortgage loans, for example, might spring a site called roboleaks.com, robowiki.com, robo.wiki, or robonomics.com. Finding your own industry niche leaks site, or drawing information and making it palatable to other readers and viewers is the first step. (At this writing roboleaks.com was unregistered).
Then by drawing together media, video, and Youtube type assets to an easily accessible channel for ongoing viewers provides end users with more reasons to check back in on and possibly contribute to your site. The fools-gold of domainers building trend name sites is the avalanche of banners and links nobody touches. But the real value of serious end user contributions and forum communities can make a new buyer very interested indeed.
The leaks site doesn’t need to have legs for five years, but who knows when the next end user will target your platform for their big deposit of information or data. Suddenly you have a high traffic domain you can point to any one of your sites for a bump in hits. Now, did you really think this was time for parking a name like that?

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Since the first decades of manufacturing and business processes have moved on after Internet platforms, online directories, and web vending, the time for convergence of client side and consumer portal applications is at hand. Site visitors and mobile users aren’t looking for individual site experiences, unless the site has gaming or video or audio products to entertain them.

Today’s web users are actually mobile web users, people who want to bank while they wait in line at the food truck, who want to shop while the bus or subway train is locked in transit, and the want hyper-reactivity to texting speeds. that jump off the charts. Mobile users want low click access volume, but will tolerate high volume clickable apps like games or shopping once the access has been ported.

High style, broad applicability, excellent performance and smooth design are what mobile, tablet, netbook and laptop device users want from website today. Tolerance for old school flash intros and brand-stamping tooting your own horn just get in the way. This builds a new market for domainers looking to find answers to their questions. information as always, is the Queen to the content King in domains.

Keywords like cloud, track, mobile, one touch, tech, tablet, phone, and a combination word of any other keyword, like store, shops, net, hub, can make a brand out a new site idea quickly. With the site vending and domain name auction volumes in the ranges it has been lately, developing even one app for directory for any niche topic or entertainment accessible by phone or tablet makes a domain a full fledged website.

Mobile users don’t text idly. They don’t stand around rubbernecking on the information superhighway. They want a usage value for any domain name. The shorter the domain name, he easier it is to type in while in the car, on the bus, in the train or waiting around for mom and dad. Parking won’t deliver the way development can.

Use your domain development energy to focus on one time and type saving app for your end users out there with time to waste and downloadable tolerances left on their wireless plans. The mobile end user site you make could be part of the final convergence to personal computing for everything under the sun.

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Many computer games and console games are now being released or being readied for release online , beta mode, Free to Play mode or single subscriber license. Game publication and wikipedia pages for games like Halo:Reach, Gears of War, and many other legacy games with sequel titles have large online fan bases. Check out fan sites for gaming and forums on specific games to get clues about keywords and meta tags.

Free to play means that anyone can play by going to a server online and enrolling as a free player. Many huge game makers use free to play as a way to entice nonpaying players to create characters and profiles they will defend with a subscription. The levels of skills and types of quests or scenes they can play are limited. The game theory is that they will invest enough time and resources when the time comes they will pay the license fee to unlock new game play scenarios.

But new players and new games mean the earning curve is steep for game devices, game cheats and game codes and formats that help a player along. Many sites today pick up huge traffic volumes from recurring searches regarding game tasks, quests, rewards, skills, bonuses, and game stories. Facebook hosts three large global demographic games such as Cityville. FrontierVille, Farmville, and Mafia Wars. These are built-in game site users who will follow your tweets directly form the Facebook announcements.

The game site can be made using the blog format for a site, or what is preferred, a forum. Games are very social in nature. People want to chat about what level their characters are at. what level of play they are at, which platform is best, etc. Much of the newer combat type game has little room or encouragement for real community chat inside the game. making a game forum site that allows this a focal destination for game users between gaming or just downtiming.

Some domainers may feel there are already too many gaming sites. There are, and many of them almost completely seeded with other game names. But avatars tailored to the game title or gaming market, new content and new username, moderator potential will always motivate some online end users. Sign up on a few game forums and post until you can launch a signature link right to your target market.

If your game site is marketed to one game, it will be that much more easy for your end user to navigate. It will also lend an air of specialization that sites overreaching themselves do not have.

1. Isolate the game to be the site subject. New games have less competing saturation.
2. Purchase a domain.com or .net that will fit the bill. Something cool, but not trademarked.
3. Research or hire content creation. Keywords, information, and how-to formats should be best.
4. Build a forum site with a blog or a locked thread of miniblogs topics indexed as a glossary.
5. Hire base users from Craigslist (or forums) and other gaming sites to populate the beta forum.
6. Concentrate on unique and hard to find game lore, capitalizing on informing players.
7. Put reviews or guest blogs on the site with hotlinked keywords to the glossary.
8. Set up DMOZ and Google adwords entries for the game site indexing and listing information.

9. Place affiliate offers as desired.
9.a popups and squeeze pages should tap max traffic with an appealing offer or ad. Think of your gaming audience and try not to mimic the ads on every other game site.
9.b make sure no ads or material violate copyright of the game publisher.

10. Repeat as necessary for any other game titles that appeal.

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Tearing up the domain wires this weekend was the announcement that industry reports suggested the use of cookie tracking and invisible programming. Every domain name blog and e-commerce site took due note of the Namepros faux pas. Downstream clicks logins and transactions are not supposed to be tracked by any website bearing claims against such, per Google and other industry agreements and commerce regulations.

But Namepros.com, a particularly popular domainer chat and thread portal, has been fingered as being guilty of these practices. Namepros.com enjoys the bulk of domain name industry player traffic to a significant degree. If there was any customer base or site membership you would not want to get angry with you, it would be the domain name buyers and sellers and online commerce professionals that make up that site.

Cookie tracking exists. Is this a real surprise to domain name buyers and sellers? Probably not. But seasoned users of Namepros will remember how the terms of service include the fact that multiple accounts are verboten. There is actually a warning. This basically guarantees that some kind of black hat tracking was going on. And since tracking cookies are the only way to do that, it was fairly clear this was going on. But individual users still can clear their own cookies.

The trick for a lot of forum members is that they might worry if the domains they are looking at and the deals they are negotiating don’t get communicated to third parties. That’s always a possibility, especially when the players are known buyers with money to burn. Many of those individuals are operating under pseudonyms anyway. The big ticket domainers operate from behind brokers anyway. And it is not likely they would be unwise to let anything critical slip in instant message or email.

Frankly, my opinion is that domain forum mods are overworked.  Actually tracking every user would be difficult because e visits would be so random.  Just supervising all activity and guarding against spam is tough. Keeping out false registrations is time consuming.   This kind of tracking sounds like a lot of work. I believe the most such data could be used for is predictive metrics of what threads mobilize users to leave the site. That’s not to say it’s right to operate in this manner.

When webmasters of any website evaluate traffic, they can have any number of reasons for doing so.  To leap to the conclusion that this data is being used for some commercial profit is not right. Namepros is hardly the first choice of many domainers and function as a marketplace, and a secondary one at that. e that many sites perform under the radar operations of this sort. It is surGetting caught with their hand in the cookie jar will be the price that Namepros pays when domainers go there to log in and rethink their choice.

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One blogger here on Domainowl.com has noted that domains were $6.99 with privacy included. Sorry, but you’re wrong. Dot com domains are still $8.50 at Smartico (I checked). If anyone is interested in other Indian or Asian domains here are some discounts:

.CO.IN, NET.IN, ORG.IN, GEN.IN, FIRM.IN, IND.IN are $4.89 with a maximum of one year registration to be enjoyed by Smartico customers.Another single year limit discount is .IN domains, which are $4.83, .ASIA names are $12.03, (single year domain purchase limit) and and .CN.COM’s are $12.03, ten years limited.

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The overdesigned site continues to create traffic opportunities for domainers. Tapping web rage at an incompetently designed (and poorly constructed) website yields fresh ideas for new sites that will attract traffic as the frustration with the company destination site grows. The same tricks the website uses to improve SEO strands the customer at the website, click after click.

For many domain name owners, finding the niche to get traffic is difficult to pinpoint. But the poor showing many websites make, even  glossy superbrand sites, embarrasses their company and offers a savvy webmaster a chance to shine. These are sites for companies like Target, Starbucks, and Rite Aid/CVS. Their unwillingness to proffer data and grudging inability to offer up the very information people seek is blindingly inept.

Why have a search bar with such poor results? Why bind a shopping customer to a buying decision before basic information is revealed? Why limit product availability and pricing data behind a login ? These types of website gimmicks make visitors frustrated and time sensitive surfers furious. Sadly, customers are used to the un-usability of these sites. (And if you call the store, you get a recording referring you to the website!)

You can’t find anything. The Google result leads you to the landing page where the search has to begin all over again. The assumption is that the customer will keep clicking and clicking until the site makes them cry “uncle”.  There is no valid reason a database or a clickthrough path should be this awkward and nonsalutary. The frustrating “option” is to undergo the “Contact Us” maze.

It’s just very poor design that renders customers willing to anywhere else to  get the answers they need. But how conscious must the webmasters of the site be to have organized he site plan this way? If a heading says “Medical Summaries” and I click on the product name, why is the CVS site search result an alphabetical search bar when I already performed the search and clicked on the result? Why not have the result be the …medical summary?

I was trying to compare the cost of a prescription drug online and I ran into an ugly surprise. There are still websites whose functionality is so poor they cannot render a liveable result without extra clicks, extra searches, extra pulldowns, extra runaround. The silver cream should have been a one click product listing reachable in the one click I performed from the search engine.

The three pages of drugstore products with silver in them did not help. Worse, clicking on the default drug listing that matched my search result returned me to an alphebetical index I had to click and click and click again and again to dot to dot find the information listing. Laughably, my search for “silver sulfadiazine price”  got an apologetic “Sorry, no search results found.” How inept a website is that?

I checked other sites, but they were online order houses. The whole point was to determine which local drugstore to transfer my prescription to. Without price information what data could possibly determine my choice? Why did the pharmacy require a blind transfer irrespective of price, when everybody knows there is some kind of offer or bonus for transferring prescriptions?

And fishing through my email for lost passwords to drugstore accounts I really don’t use is another waste of time. How can this be a sound process? How can site visitors forgive this inefficiency? Because they feel they don’t have a choice. Because the toleration for poorly performing corporate sites has become ground in. Web site visitors need search engine result choices.

This is where the domainer comes in. A website can be made furnishing comparative price information for the vendors . This is the information the store had decided must be buried beneath layers of click-heavy obscurity. The domainer gives the clicking public a choice.

Thus the unwary surfer has a place to go, to solve their problem and get their information. The unnecessary repetition of information many domainers see on new sites suddenly has just become very necessary. True, the development task may not be easy. But a domain name based on even one product, with an updated list of chain store pharmacy prices could make search engine referred viewers very happy.

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The blog domain triggers a dilemma for domainers everywhere. Blogging is not for everyone, and many eager new bloggers make this uneasy discovery after too many late nights and scraping the bottom of the barrel to complete one post. But for every domainer I know looking to unload some names for a profit, very few have mined the “domains wanted’ areas of the likely domain name forums.

The domains wanted and domains for sale forums are of critical importance to any newby domainer. Every domain forum worth its salt will have these areas and have them actively posting hourly. They show what the market is like for someone who has a portfolio of names to sell at the right time for the right price. One way to maintain and build value in a blog domain is to set it up and use to fruitful effect.

The domain name buyer and reseller must gauge the interest and buying arena of any blog name they have. Yet so many domainers buy blog names in bulk, refuse to develop them, and ten cry foul when an easy resale doesn’t hove into view. The target buyer will not appear like the Ghost of Christmas Past. They need to be cultivated, marketed to, and campaigned. Bloggers are customers too.

Bloggers need to see how they can use their new domain as an email tool. they need to see what it might look like on Facebook. Blog name buyers may never have had any of their named Tweeted before. It’s a heady thing to feel successful online, and marketing using social networks in today’s online e-commerce village does the trick. A new blog domains could be a useful tool for promoting of their extant domains, or some of their private and personal enterprises as well.

A savvy domainer faces the issue every day: keep the horses in the stable or make them earn their apples and carrots? The smart domainer will use the blog domain to further the career of their other domain names or decide to try and establish it as a marketplace for goods and services. But blogs today are lookup sources of information. Original content that is readable and unique should earn page views and enhance site discoverability.

SEO value comes from one blogger realizing something is left out of the discussion somewhere else and employing keyword density and meta tags to let other potential readers know where the data is. Or the domainer could just market the traffic data to other name owners and resell the name due to the sales appeal of the traffic and clicks. Hybrid hosting makes this possible in volume easily.

The blog domain was a promotional tool from the start, a website that was easy to build and accessible to change. This concept was part of the blog apparatus from the beginning.Even now domainers who have a lot to say suffer under perceptions that somehow their words aren’t “good enough” for a blog or that they “can’t write”.  This was what audio voice recognition software was designed for.

But many domain owners quail at blogging. They believe only a ‘true” writer can blog. Very few people originally looking for an emotional or substantive voice online needed to establish their own personal destination unless they had a stored reservoir of things to say or topics to treat. But now a blog can be a mood catcher, a dream space, or a public relations powerhouse.

A rose by any other name….

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