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.

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….

I was reading a book on Internet Marketing published in 2008 and saw a suggestion that no fad, niche or trend would make a long term site investment.  This shows how fast the Internet and its users adapt to contemporary uses. And how quickly website manuals and conventional wisdom regarding domains ages. Niche names are the new “standard” of domain flavor popular in domain circles today.

Not invest in niche domain names? This statement assumes a disinterest in future happenings and evolving language many web users spend hours looking to discover. Niche websites can capture the overall appeal of a broader topic yet pinpoint the developing frontier at the same time. A niche domain name is likely to have an online user base ready to click on the url and see what lies behind the name.

To delimit the Internet into a mass of only “accepted” terms is suffocating for free thinkers and early adopters.  I couldn’t disagree more, and I feel that the Internet is made for targeting niche topics, associated niche domains, and development into content-rich niche sites and setting them forth online. Niche domains have a smaller target audience but a larger bull’s eye to hit.

A niche domain name associates a word or abbreviation of a section of a broader category group, topic, subject, activity, or idea. Niche names allow those skilled and knowledgeable in fast track domain development and website launches to take the lead in marketing and promotion of new domain names and those names relating to trendy terms, topics and subjects.

Website browsers are looking for focus. Web users drilling down on data pieces regarding fine points of a topic to realize research or study objectives is only one pie wedge of the web. Establishing a site as a resource for core information about an emerging technology, field of study, terminology or science can be fun. Being the first to market with a given corner of any market is a victory. Authoring lore is a privilege given to few.

One of the first and most often asked question about domain name enterprises is ‘How can I make money?” By putting work into it.  The basic site dynamics for profit making remain the same. But the effort required to market a website is not an open and shut case. individual decisions have to be made and individual risks must be taken.

While sellers of domain names want to promote the classic domaining myth that if you buy the name the public will come, such is not always the case. Effort and luck play a part in successful domain name promotion and value creation. Affiliate ads, review posts, ad banners and clickable links can generate pay per click revenue to the site owner and/or webmaster.

The page rank, once established, can be a stepping stone to renting out the front page or leasing the domain name itself for traffic improvement to another site. Many content “pushers” look for avenues to promote their products or sites to vend their wares or get the word out. Making a site available suitable for this content is one way to go for a money making domain venture.

Content on many websites flirts with the boundaries of traditional advertising. Content such as web promotion, product reviews and offers make customers pay attention when the content or subject matter isn’t compelling enough for them. This content must be strategic enough to springboard ads. Not just in theory but in practice.

The reason ads don’t work for some sites is that they are too repetitive. The same batch of ads on every other site won’t bring unique clicks to your destination. Visitors to the site must make decisions about visiting ads or going elsewhere. Duplication of top keyword ads readers see elsewhere simply makes your site look like everyone else’s.

Many new domainers coming into the market scoff at the mile high tombstones of the big domain sales. But one reason domainers watch the auctions is to see what kinds of money are flowing to what types of domain projects. The corporate money is what every domainer dreams of. And it still flows to certain names optimized for key domain name markets.

The announcement of the auction at Sedo of a name sale for six figures doesn’t happen every day. But Metal.com sold for $165,000. That’s big money for the long domain investor. Sedo continues to vend big money name sales worldwide. And trading up continues to be the smart advice to long term industry domain name professionals. Because the right name will find its corporate home.