Domain Owl

The Twitterverse is filled with “blah” websites that make the first time visitor flee upon landing. but a few features can make the browser hang around and click a few times to make sure they aren’t missing anything. A domain name with “forum”, “talk” or “chat” can be its own SEO boost by receiving links from related forums. If the forums don’t allow you to furnish your link in a s signature line, put it in your profile.

1. Install Custom Avatars

The option to include an avatar in a forum post personalizes the user and allows them to enjoy making a statement with every comment. It’s a disappointment when this option is not provided. Worse, when especially cutting edge sites have default avatars, it’s a real conflict with their stated ambition to seem avante garde. If the new template does not have any images for the avatars or (worse,) has only the same ones on every board of the type, and make sure the template is used on other high-SEO sites.

2. Chatbox/Chat Board

The chatbox used to be for people who wanted Twitter but it hadn’t been invented yet. They would spout nonsense, get into fights, or babble incoherently. Providing a chatbox invites repeat traffic and user connections available only at that site. If users need to exchange FaceBook identities for easier and more facile communication, you’ve done something wrong. If webmasters find that the forum site gets spammed or uploaded files are out of control set parameters to limit size of graphic upload or only allow a miniature preview.
If spam links get out of control, then only send the participation bulletin to a few chosen users or define the chat as invitation-only. Webmasters can set up a weekly or nightly appointment time when the chatbox is enabled, or restrict the chatbox participation to ten administrator-approved posts. The newsletter or email reminder could alert members of a forum that approval is required up to one hour before chatbox tie, allowing adequate server bandwidth overage protection.

3. Mod Your Board

Deserted Web forums are the worst advertisement for websites in existence. A static one-shot HTML page at least has the excuse of being prepared for brief visits. Forums with extended participation expectations should have at least one full time moderator policing the content and invigorating the discussions.And always put a email verification and other restriction, such as a addition number or image reading Captcha, on the enrollment login registration processs.

An unmodded board may get record enrollment, and 99.9 per cent of it will be out of control spam. Adult material, wares advertisements, email solicitations or instant message abuse needs to be nipped in the bud. Abuses will multiply and encroach until the keyword tags for your forum point in an entirely inappropriate direction in a few days’ time.

4. Tag Clouds

By devising tag cloud per forum category and section, a webmaster allows for loading categorical tag cloud keyword options for user pulldown or fill-in. Thus every post has a resonant keyword association. Always encourage members to introduce new ideas and forum category topics. A search engine bot or spider will trace the development of the new pages the new category builds and their relevance and growth with respect to the rest of the forum.

5. Twitter Favorite Posts

Many forum users will be looking to publicize their own site links or just distinguish themselves by making relevant, board members or forum visitors know more about them, when they are on the forum, and how they can interact with such key users. Encourage such star members to mod their own section, write a review or blog for the board, and/or devise polls and surveys on the forum subject matter. Community members may visit the forum or return to check in just because this user may have said something they want to read.

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A client of mine many years ago invested in a body of about 500 forum names. His plan was to bulk build out the forums for these domain names and then sell them to individual handpicked buyers. This effort met with the expected land rush of ambiguous ambivalence. With little t no promotion of the forums as individual entities with passion and special interest, there was almost no site growth. The clones just attracted spammers.

Forum themes and mods make forum website planning fun. But just establishing a forum application install is not “all she wrote” when it comes to forum domain names. These domainers appear to me like reclusive botanists who expect their exotic orchid to flourish inside a protected greenhouse sheltered from organic activity. Parking a domain name to me is the equivalent of locking the greenhouse door.

Domain values don’t grow in the dark. They need energy and light, vibrance and electricity to grow in value. End users must enjoy visiting the site and have something to do when they get there. Registration-enabled perks or features should reward new fans of the forum site. Promotion and marketing at certain key times can make a forum flash overnight into an online destination with demographics worldwide.

The forum itself needs to be fleshed out with topics and categories and posts. A sample batch of enterprise user names and sample posts sets the stage for a community to evolve. But encouragement is necessary. And imitating another board only works if the mania for the topic is white-hot (like for Twilight fans) or the graphic design and forum theme attracts fanboard moths (like for Twilight fans).

A domain name for a forum does not have to have the word “forum” in it. The words community, group, or board (or even bb) do tend to crop up. Any short niche word plus the “bb” in a dot-com domain name makes an extremely attractive and typable domain investment. The logo itself will be dynamic and fresh, even it is only a Cooltext.com conversion.  One forum needs active linking to grow and find new viewers, if only to get palpable feedback on the site experience from a new visitor.

Forums were the way most online users hooked up with fellow fans before social media took over. But now that advertisers have soured the FaceBook game, MySpace has died a premature death, and hackers focus their lenses on  FaceBook as a mining ground for individuals, online users are being interested once more by the semi-anonymous world of the forum posting again.

Forums can be references that get a lot of SEO query results. Posting articles and quizzes can make for a fun site walkthrough. Game cheat and directories of hard-to-find resources make excellent forum features. Community searchers are looking for the same thing. To get content ideas, Google search your site keywords and review the existing results and buld a better body of reference text.

A forum as a subfeature of a larger site is an excellent way to improve SEO. Hot topics are (ironically) Farmville and Mafia Wars. Quick blurbs of information come across as natural chat, and don’t need the support of a 500 word article around them to make the bots crawl faster. By making dsense code into posting incidences, and by incorporating posting tags and images (with tags), the SEO of the forum name and the parent site grows appreciably.

The one component for the potential success of a forum is that the user base is a prurient target. Some demographics, even niche user bases, don’t get online that much. Some professional groups and age layers in certain tranches of the consumer population either don’t have time or spend their texting social media. Luring away those users can be a futile effort, since the interactivity with their cellphone or mobile device is what empowers that traffic.

Certain user groups are always going to drill a little deeper. But enabling your forum to be mobile device accessible makes for even more potential visitors and members.  But for the Internet surfer looking to make their mark or learn something about their favorite topic, the community website, bulletin board model, and forum domain are still a good choice for domain creation, name investment, partner project launches, and website development.

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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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The rush of getting a great domain for reg fee or selling a domain for a profitable margin can’t be duplicated. Cooking up  a great domain sale or domain acquisition creates a entrepreneurial fervor that is a completely new career in marketing, sales, and advertising. There is no drug more compelling or more rejuvenating than domaining fever. But a few caveats wouldn’t go amiss.

The domain trade blogs and domain newspapers tout the sale of big dollar domains and six figure auction sales many domainers may never see. They can dream about them, but they may never see those big ticket paydays in the domain world personally. Domain forums are places where the highs and sometimes the lows of the domain world get seen, but not everything in between.

I have known million dollar domainers and can appreciate the unseen time and effort they put into their domaining careers can be lost in the melee of a celebratory domain name sale. They have spent early dawn hours and late night sessions plugging their domain name candidates into the matrix for profit and assuming link building, SEO techniques, and domain name marketing and promotion will support the inflated resale price.

The domain sale headline of a huge price for a single domain name has a back story. Those responsible for big sales might be teams of promoters and investors acting behind the scenes. The consulting advice they receive and the strategy to sell the name go unseen, by and large. The auction may not be the first time the name was offered for sale, and many sleepless nights may have been spent agonizing over the reserve price.

Many domain name buyers and sellers aggregate multiple domain name sales across weeks, months, and years to establish a financial longevity and career perspective on the domain name career and what it means to them. These domain name entrepreneurs may spend countless hours talking to prospective buyers, campaigning at live auctions with bidders, and days and weeks of travel time attending domain name trade shows and conventions.

The big ticket domainers have some serious mileage and dues paid for those big auctions sales. And for every big ticket domain sale, you can bet the seller has a sizable portfolio of unsold names waiting at home. That domainer has spent years combing through every name drop list and every auction site spreadsheet, scrutinizing each proffered name for potential future value.

When the “ordinary” or newbie domainer gets started, their eyes should not be in the clouds. Luck and lightning may strike, but they really don’t bolster the family checkbook. Domain lightning in a bottle is a fun read but can’t be counted on. Every domain investment, large or small, should answer to measurable likelihood of gains and multiplicity of return on investment.

Domain name buying, domain name creation, and domain name acquisition is a fun and stimulating activity. Trading domain names opens up the mind to future possibilities. But the actual monetary involvement with the domain name career should be delimited to specific timetables and renewal dates that shore up the concrete edges of the domain name buy.

Financial constraints for marketing and promotion should follow the marketing plan. A map for stages of investment of time, money, and website or link development should be assigned milestones. These chronological datelines in the life of any domain ownership should include SEO results when keywords are added in, page rank changes (if any), and potential bidders or buyers for that name.

These types of notes and metrics can keep a distance between the emotional relationship many domainers have with their online real estate and the dollars and cents realities of ongoing maintenance, hosting, and renewal that come with domain name management. Any model of prurient investment urges reconsideration of ongoing effort, time and resources toward lesser probability return entities.

The wise domainer will streamline their efforts towards the domains that really count, and survive the ups and downs of the domain market with equanimity. The trade papers and the domain blogs can promote the big ticket domain sale until the (Tu)cows come home, but the sensible domainer will keep numbers, analysis and cool headed thinking on their side.

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Can I just give a Hall-of-Shame shout out to all you domainers who furnish signature links to domains with no site and no opportunity for visitors to interact? There are many domain name owner guilty parties out there in domain world. They want the SEO, they want the traffic, but they leave the porch bare of welcome. This is just inhospitable domaining.

Domains can only be resold if the domain owner puts a positive spin on the future possibilities. But what kind of a message is it when the parked page has barely 50 words on it??? How do you expect to promote or sell a domain nobody can interact with? The Internet is all about interaction. Putting up a roadblock and then saying you cant sell  a site isn’t domaining. It’s complaining.

So many times I type in a domain or click on a signature link, intent on registering and contributing an opinion or article lead-in on a certain topic, only to find for given “x” domain a parking page, or worse, a template minisite. This is especially a problem when the name indicates a …forum! Forum domain names with no forum make me wonder what the domainers are doing with their hosting accounts.

When a domainer inserts their url into their signature, they are announcing they want traffic. But what a chump invitation, the bar’s closed. Putting up a forum is as simple as clicking an application installation, thinking up a clever webmaster name (”admin” is sooooooo imaginative), and making a few categories and topic threads. This amounts to little more than a few sentences concerning the domain name topic at the very least.

Forum applications are free and intact, secure and familiar to web users. Trusted hosting companies and open source sites have free downloads all over the web. A forum name deserves a forum look. registration has bene fine tuned and  the bugs worked out. Making a forum is easy, and tutorials are everywhere. Newbs can make and host forums easily and concentrate on the SEO work and content building. And then they have a salable database to sell as well.

Domain owners look constantly to the next domain sale. They talk about the putative values of their domains. Sometimes prospective buyers need to be shown the way. Making a forum for a forum domain is the logical next step. If a domain name owner for a forum can’t do that, they really shouldn’t be promoting the domain sale. They’re not making their own case.

The “fairy godmother” approach to domains never worked for me. This is the steadfast belief that any domain name deserves an angel buyer with deep pockets and no notion of what came before their domain name purchase. Yet domainers are exactly the type of prospective domain name customer, buyer, or investor to execute exactly the research to expose lack of development!!!

To me, a forum gives a site life because it does not depend on the webmaster to give it life. Participants can comment, introduce timely new topics, make up funny names and start a community happening. But many, many domainers have gotten into the habit of not minding the store. They may have designed or even branded a forum, then abandoned it to the winds of Fate.

Easy forum applications include the elegant Simple Machines Forum, which a glide and smooth rendering that legacy users of pHpBB will appreciate. There is the wildly popular and dramatic Vbulletin, rich with features and options. Newb users can easily fashion phpBB to their needs. And MyBB is a simplified approach to forum administration and operation. Quicksilver Forums is another forum application option not known to many but intact and secure.

Even if there is a forum up, you hit the wall registration confirmation wall. This can be from laggard STMP servers, incomplete installation, ineffective choice of forum application, or hosting company inefficiency. Check the reviews for forums here. Getting a message that your registration has been duly noted for posterity stalls any instant enthusiasm a site visitor has to participate with the site. It’s like a yellow light flashing at the user.

That’s nice, unless the webmaster or domain owner has delimited registration until their approval. Guess when they’ll check back? When you don’t care about the site anymore, when you don’t have time to visit, and can’t remember what you were going to post. Timely administration or relevant permissions make a forum a welcoming and interactive online destination.

Exactly the type of online domain, active website, and content rich database  you’d like to buy.

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Think you’ve got what it takes to be a domain name professional? A domainer starts the day early, or “urly” as the case may be. Yet the true domainer’s day is packed with conflicting needs and time traps. Evaluating media, reading blogs, writing content and designing sites is absorbing. The time seems infinite, yet by the end of the day, it’s all gone. It happens in the blink of an eye, every day.

The domainer day must be navigated with key efficiency for multiple tasks. Managing business plans for websites, building site plans, choosing domain name, and checking auction sites takes time. Domain site bookmarks and favorites are natural time savers. Anything that shortens a task completion cycle, like a domain auction service, data reporting tool, domain forum, or tips update form a domain industry source is valuable.

Domainers must always be referencing their chosen domain news platform, or reviewing their hosting functionality and related discounts and offers. Domains come up for sale every day. Keeping competitive while managing existing domains is tricky. Budgets and timelines are the religion of true domainers. Rapid execution of these domaining tasks  is key across many different domain name sale, promotion, marketing, and development objectives. The reward is the profit.

Here is a sample agenda schedule in the day of a domainer:

6:00 a.m. Conference call between domain name investment partners.

6:30 a.m. Check email and review pertinent notifications and messages.

7:00 a.m. Login blog #1 and administrate comments & build new blog entry.

7:45 a.m. Check domain forum #1. Read messages and respond.

8:00 a.m. Review daily Pool auction and aftermarket drop listings.

8: 45 Log best picks from drop and deletions lists. Make min and max offers.

9:00 a.m. Peruse Droplist keyword lists and budget 2nd and 3rd offer ceilings.

9:30 a.m. Take call from domainer contact with bulk portfolio sale.

10 a.m. Register for a new topical forum for new domain name. Post 10 threads and then establish link to url of domain name in signature.

10:30 a.m. Check domain auctions and drop list bids between forum posts.

11:00 a.m. Make 3 blog entries with url link and domain name trackbacks.

12 noon. Munch lunch while listening to domain radio shows. Watch domain SEO information videos from live streaming or attempt some halfhearted cardio exercises and stretching hardworking neck and back muscles.

1 p.m. Open domain portfolio report and check date files for tickler spreadsheet with passwords and user names and visit 5 domain keyword related forums and make three posts in each one. Mark date of visit and adjust spreadsheet to next “tickler” sites for the next online development domain link promotion session. Print out report for domain portfolio notebook update.

2 p.m. Brainstorm new domains to buy, forming potential domain names from keywords and terms from clipped media reports. Use the Network Solutions WHOIS,  Godaddy, and other resources to verify if domains already exist and how much they might cost. Scan for current Godaddy coupon codes and determine if a bulk buy is in order.

3 p.m. Collect text files of custom content ordered form members of online domain forums. Evaluate keywords in Textalyser, and verify originality using Copyscape.

4 p.m. Make custom logo for new domain minisite using Cooltext. Experiment with textures, colors, fonts and sizing.

5 p.m. Submit Google and Adsense data for a new domain. Compose the minisite file with text content files collected and test the new site appearance in your resident browser or HTML viewer.

6 p.m. Proof marketing email for key domain site and send to broadcast list from registrations at the site. Submit new articles and graphics to the open source application and jot in a notebook the most viewed recent articles.

7 p.m. Review domain expiration report in domain portfolio software. Submit two domain names “for sale” threads for BIN auctions in two domain forum auction categories.

8 p.m. Sign up for streaming video webinar from trusted consultant in the domain world. Download videos from archive to review offline. Log into domain forums and change signature link to newest domain venture.

9 p.m. Review email bids and counter offer for bid domains. make payments to content authors, domain owners, and graphic artists for custom logos and themes for new partnership site. Browse SEO blog for reminder tips.

9:30 Stream favorite TV show on one LCD screen while adding keywords and doing text searches on the other. Use commercials for ad hoc keyword and meta tag addition in window with open source application site login in the article editor administration interface.

10 p.m. Review Alexa ranking for each domain in the portfolio spreadsheets. . Perform domain name and website analysis & compose review charts. Determine priority tasks for the next day.

[Rinse, lather & repeat.]

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The first thing domainers do when coming upon a domain name they like is to check the stats and review traffic. This is when passive domainers get stuck. If they haven’t been actively promoting their site for the inflation of value for the domain name, they look somewhat foolish for asking for a premium offer.

Webmasters should develop a business plan of site development. Without it, any inquiry to profitability is on an amateur level. They look really stupid when asking friends to wave a magic wand and let them skip the work to deliver platinum site rankings and optimum profitability results like affiliate revenues and high resale appraisals.

Extremely passive domainers might write 35 emails a day bemoaning their lack of profitability from a site, but look aghast if you suggest they do one of about a dozen very simple tasks to maintain SEO keyword discoverability and site rankings. I am not sure if they consider these task beneath them or merely just about for the rank and file. This is what divides the boys from the men of the domain name world.

Everybody likes money. Many webmasters and domain name operators and investors are in the domain business to make money. Nevertheless, next time a webmaster asks you how to make money from a site, point them to this article and the points below. Even million dollar domainers know essential chores equal high SEO ranking, visitors, and clicks.

1. Sell Something

A passive site has no appeal. Your site must furnish some kind of product, information, original text, opinion, critical review, or value addition to the browser experience. hashing together a site out of patchwork elements from other sites and feeds yields nothing. Offer some kind of creation for impact.

2. Forum Post

Forum posting is one of the fastest ways to  promote user links for your domain name into the search engines. This is because the search engine algorhythms for site material stop at the keywords for those sites and related secondary keywords. Yet Google and other search engines yield search results that include forum posting user name, post thread word combinations, and featured tags for the post combines with the domain name link.

When a domain name owner or webmaster has a site they want me to promote, the first thing I ask them is what forums do they belong to. If I get the email equivalent of a “blank stare”, I know they have fallen short of real effort to derive monetary gain from their website. Forum posts instantly become part of the web on somebody else’s dime. Readers over time carry SEO longevity that pays off after months of users browsing that forum.

3. Stop the Admin

Do a Google keyword search for blog user name “Admin”. About an infinite number of unfocused results, right? unique usernames can instantly derive SEO results but bloggers insist on using “Admin” as the administration username. Changing the name of the Admin should be an easy task or something that needs planning and thought before installing (or signing up for) the blog.

This is an opportunity to infuse one of the commonly repeated terms related to a site and add a qualitive characteristic that makes the site individual. Using the initials of a single user is also hardly a recommendation. The admin’s name automatically appears in the code or the posting for the site. For example, a photography blog should use an admin name like “lensmaster” or “digitalphoto” instead of “Admin”. Why waste an opportunity to promote?

4. Website/Domain Name Marketing Plan

A domain marketing plan should include weighed keyword analysis, forum posting strategy, link exchanges, article submission and link submission implementations, and content addition schedules. The cost of web hosting, likely traffic, and promotional efforts toward a stated PPC or affiliate revenue goal should be in it.

There should never be any question what a domainer should be or could be doing to promote a site or domain name. Resale at a higher price is the goal. Credentials to validate the higher sale price are statistics, content, revenue, and subject matter and site composition. The domainer’s job is to build those credential metrics brick by brick every day.

5. Site Feedback

Site feedback requests force browsers to actually review your site. This process furnishes the webmaster or domain owner with a volume of traffic they can measure clickthrough statistics against. Nothing the observers say in graven in stone or Biblical writ, but a common denominator of opinions on a certain topic is food for thought.

Make feedback for the site and its content part of the domain marketing plan.  There are hundreds of domain and website forums out there. If a domain owner or webmaster registered as a user of each one and spent even 45 minutes posting a minimum of ten responses to current threads and  provided a signature link and feedback response opportunity, over three months that’s 90 independent link and browsing visitor attractions seeded online.

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