Domain Owl

If you are a domain name acquirer looking to make  a profit on your next good idea, think about the two parallel and newly convergent spending patterns moving through retail markets right now that website visitors participate in. These are gaming and entertainment spending, done by teens,  twenty and thirty year old computer users, whose idea of entertainment is double digit hours spent per week on websites hosting role playing games.

Sound like a foreign culture? Most websites, domains, and extensions are being purchased by domain industry watchers looking to gain revenue from stores, warez, merchandise, content, exclusive writing, brandable downloads, and affiliate programs. Any offer that is beneficial to someone in this gaming-as-entertainment community will pass the word on to their cluster of friends, who happen to also be your niche market.

Chat sites, cheat sites, bot scripts, and custom bonus wares associated with gaming.  Webmasters should be trying to build a site that is new and different from other gaming sites. Webmasters foreign to the gaming culture can read the game play synopses found online, or check out the illustrative art and graphic novels the game media are now expanding into.  Likely domain names could spring from these readings.

The challenge is still there to attract meaningful users to the site. One way to form a community of regular site visitors is to launch a gaming forum. This unites users and lets them communicate with each other.  If you can find a way for players of some of the biggest games to be drawn to your site, and furnish an opportunity for them to interact with it, the site will be set up for some serious traffic success and gamer buzz.

Black Friday proved that consumers are ready to spend if the price is right, and Cyber Monday proved that consumers in bulk will move money over the wires from any device they find convenient. If your site visitor doesn’t have $70 to spend on a gaming DVD or CD title, then your site might offer other interactivity options. What about a trivia quiz, list of best bulletin boards for that game, or links to Youtube videos or fan trailers of upcoming games?

Mobile gaming, cellphone gaming, tablet gaming and console gaming are the hot searchable markets even mainstream public consumers know about. The Wii, Nintendo, Playstation, X-box and other legacy console ownership means the user is trying to find a way to make the hardware yield more value. Help your user find ways to do this! Just because they are not gaming does not mean they don’t want to spend time online doing game-related activities!

The Holiday season is upon us, and people searching site keywords for gifts is nigh. Parents searching for things to keep the kids busy in the backseat or in the family room is happening. Even tightly clutched checkbooks are coming out of their spending thaw this winter. This is the right time to have a site up with secret leveling strategies or quest tips.  This is the right time to acknowledge that gaming is what’s moving the web today.

Gaming consoles and high tech computer equipment are being promoted actively in electronics stores. New games and console entertainment for such media behemoths like Halo Reach is being released after massive conventions and media releases and press attention. World of Warcraft and Gears of War have huge fan bases. Lord of the Rings gaming titles also have committed fans.

Viral fan campaigns on social media networks and via Youtube uploads can migrate a huge stampede of traffic to available sites with seeded links and limited access downloads and gaming warez. Especially if something new and different s happening. Is your website ready?

The Pirate Bay lawsuit showed the money site operators can amass and liquidate to legally defend themselves from a losing equation. Even where communities have suffered massive economic depression and occupational layers have disappeared, consumer spending on electronics, media, games, screens, projection hardwares and programming remains constant. The web continues to build on itself. Build with it toward a gaming site that will enjoy robust traffic and more potential click revenue.

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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.

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Domaining is one of the best things about the World Wide Web. Anyone can do it. There is no ethnic tabu or gender restriction, educational bias or language barrier. The web allows individual users their own path to domaining success. The domain name game is a custom career with no checklist or required curriculum to start or actively participate in online.

And it is a myth that every domainer webmaster or site designer has to know all the code types and applications administration tasks in the beginning. the learning curve of a domainer is both a challenge and a reward. Domainers make excellent peer advisors. Learning to navigate the basic starting points of owning a domain and promoting it for resale can be the start of many lasting online relationships.

Online web travelers from all over the world use the internet every day to traffic in domain names and related products. Being able to make websites, engineer hosting account setups, and administrate open source applications are some of the skills needed for domain name careers. Hosting account ownership and registrar commerce is a must for domainers. Studying the interactions and execution of domain purchase, registration, transfer and hosting of names and websites are pivotal domaining skills.

A robust Internet connection with some tolerances for crisp security and ISP access is suggested. Facebook access and experience using Twitter is a bona fide asset to any domainer working online today. Niche skills like language or industry core competencies can lift a newby domainer into the advanced level of his group of interested name promoters and owners.

Domaining can be as multifaceted as the individual operator decides their business day online needs to be. Working offline editing HTML code or participation in domainer chat are equally valuable domain name development inputs. Photo editing, graphic design skills, and overall adherence to web standards is a valued set of skills that can become domaining sidelines for other domainer clients.

Basic computer skills and word processing facility is very much utilized in domaining and basically any online editing of text and material. Indexing a numbered list, or formatting a bullet point in the code might be needed one day and then never again. Some spreadsheet analysis may occur using traffic statistics but graphic representation of these reports is commonly available.

People generally want to know what to expect when they break into the domain name game and how the industry works. The individual domainer will produce his own agenda and set his own standards about how their day or   week or month will progress in terms of domain acquisition and resales. Redesigning or editing sites for user ease of use is a common task.

Domainers usually hire subcontractors to get little things like code editing or site patches done, as it is not a good use of their time to learn a skill from the ground up when it can be done by an online domainer professional. The skills domainers learn ramping up in the job make them feasibly able to perform these tasks for others as well. Search engine optimization and link building are almost domain industries of their own.

The schedule of a domainer can be arduous or part time. The domainer can spend all their time scanning drop list auctions, reading technology tutorials, or building social network relationships with other domainers. All can be equally valuable. The underlying trait of a successful domainer is the willingness to learn and the ability to actively participate online in business areas relating to domain name commerce.

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Domainers speak in a language of their own. Their constructions for their websites also speak volumes. But websites have advanced beyond mere online destinations. They are now portals for other devices such as wireless devices and cellphones. A webmaster or domain owner with a cellphone or mobile phone app can bring a new generation of web user to the site.

Does your site have a mobile app? I ask because I am being convinced by contacts on all sides that unless you give a remote visitor to your site something to do, all is lost. Conventional domain wisdom now has it that the teeming hordes of wireless device tappers must be kept busy with digital bread and circuses! Building the appeal is the key.

In ancient Rome, senators and Emperors ordered festivals of spectacle for the anxious crowds to get their minds off the pressing social, political, civil and economic problems of the era. The forum was filled with games and combat, and bread was thrown to the crowds. Today’s forums have XBox games and World of Warcraft combat, and people spend their sustenance in clicks.

The offering of any site, url or domain to deliver some amusement, entertainment or a solution has become primordinately important. Today’s web user demands new entertainment and new activities than just text images and organization of a grid of panel diodes. Even when the visual array is much much smaller than a breadbox, users want something to occupy their minds.

When looking for an app to provide, think inside the box. Look for free online scripting and application building tools and resources. I actually downloaded a free application for building a computer game. Every once in a while I load the program and build a new action or ponder a new route to the mapped game architecture. Webpage making got fun again.

What will you build? A click driving puzzle or game, or a mapped site journey that guides visitors and users through multiple screens? A link to other sites with multiple click pathways? Coloring book images or downloadable activities for kids score big with new users. Selection scripts with “rewards” or coupons and discount codes make visits to the site profitable.

What activities are available at a target website for niche users is up to the webmaster. Quizzes, surveys, puzzles, comment opportunities or analysis of stated commentaries or opinions is one way to go. But custom games, text sallies, mobile phone rewards and prizes can also now be part of the mix. Many sites are customized strictly for the mobile user.

Webmasters can download software to make their own computer game. I use FPS Creator to fashion a game that soon will be ready to offer to user to my own game website. I may offer enhanced participation options and features to a paying membership after a free play period. Every major online game maker is doing the same thing. With this app my attraction bring my domain into the big leagues as a future online search destination for free game play.

So the project design for the new website will flourish and visitors will discover something new to do. Then their friends will Twitter the site and word of mouth and word of link will get the news out. People doing nothing in airports and waiting rooms and on beaches will manipulate their digits to my site. With an activity for new users and niche game players, the domain will be bookmarked and Facebooked aplenty.

Game sites attract teens, kids, and adults. Themes for games, characters, and game play options build a user base.  Cheat codes and tips for quest completion, as well as hints for top scoring points can form another entire value building url. Elegant solutions make saleable websites that are very far from minisites. With a portfolio of content, a  modest single word domain name just became a business-in-a-box.

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