Domain Owl

The 2011 Domain Fest event garnered a small bouquet of winners. Moniker (formerly Snapnames) has posted the results. For Fijiislands.com, a $58,830.00 sticker price is fairy impressive, the standout sale of the auction. Longish name propertyappraisal.com fetched $23,530.00. An organic name, the totally potentially awesome organictea.com earned $17,650.00, a big hint to all those name searchers looking for “organic” revenue.

I’d like to see typo traffic for brassieres.com, which sold for $3,112.00. A more abstruse name, dialectic.com, earned $2,500. The multiuse product name generic, cables.info, did pretty well for a /info name, nabbing $1,315. An unusual entry shows that country code names are dead with the right shorty domain, to wit, staff.me got bid for $1,250.

The conventional wisdom about only short names selling coms under fire after news of th this next sale. The Long long domain name wirelesssecuritycamera.com got $830, this could be huge because the market for this generic product has highly specialized tiers of price ranges. Wirelesssecuritycamera.com is a long domain name but can be promoted and marketed with keywords or used as a forward.

Product based domain names can be Amazon stores or review sites, or with a little imagination real communities for product interface comparison and upgrade sourcing. Every try finding an upgrade or patch for your product Wouldn’t it be nice if you could Google your unit and get the patch or upgrade link or file at one website?

Net hitter cyberbargains.com earned, $750, a good hint to scout out cyber- starting names or cerate one for revenue or marketing. That is a real nice price for such a generic and promotable name. You can practically hear the Facebook calling. The winter product based domain name newskis.com schussed outta the rack for $675.

These name sales should illumine the sales process and value generation plan for domainers looking to leverage online web site publishing tools and resources for value creation in domain name investment.

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DirectI, parent of BigJumbo, DomainAdvertising.com, Logicboxes and ResellerClub (amongst others) announced this week the merge with the DomainAdvertising and BigJumbo brands into a single Domain Parking Platform. The merged entity will function under the brand DomainAdvertising.com. this signals a shift in parking offerings from seller side features to a more customer based approach.

Do you need an entire company to structure a parking offering? Aren’t these generated by scripts? Where does the human factor add value? I have yet to see a compelling content generation model from any parking company, which emphasizes the metrical aspect to website and domain promotion but skips the content angle. This mirrors how I feel the parking industry should be developing. Once the arrogance of a parking company fades away, the utility of their service offering improves.

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Got a great idea but still working out the right name? Before you buy your web hosting, check out some great coupon offers. Domain name coupons and consolidated renewal and name purchase coupons, as well as cheap web hosting deals can reduce overall operating costs while keeping reseller level development resources handy. Any other cost of the domain project, from improving marketing, to social networking, to domain promotion and/or SEO building, will benefit from additional resources freed by savvy domain shopping.

The experienced domainer can spot a noob from a mile away. Getting in the habit of using domain name sites and coupon discount codes can streamline business costs of domain creation and incipient development. Using the right registrar tools can help as well.

Browsing registrar coupons is a good way to check out cart prices and decide whether to invest in more domain names. Here is a way to work out some possible searches for those lightning strikes of brilliance that comes along. Domain name keyword suffixes such as -fire, -work, -now and -grid, as well as -trip, -advisor, -muse, and -zero can work well to make an abbreviation or keyword into a brand name domain.

Look at the keyword domain site www.geartaker.com. This is a fantastic example for using keyword formation to make a splendid new domain name. The word combines “gear”, a hot keyword, and “taker”, an easy to spell and remember suffix keyword. If your new website idea or domain concept is a destination portal or listings directory, consider suffixes such as “pit”, “hub”, or “Box”.

When looking for the right domain name to match your concept, use a pencil and paper. Start a workable lexicon of developing a unique domain name and then use this morphology technique to start a list of domains to search for at your favorite (cheapest) registrar. Think in terms of synonyms, also A common synonym for TV, for example, is “tube”. To get real peentration into your field of name potential, think of all the possibilities to search for your keywords and then try synonyms. the shorter, the better.

Frankly, reviewing the search results for domain name at a registrar can be informative. if every TLD and sub-TLD in that category is taken, it might be worth picking up. It also might be worth searching to see when the name drops, who owns it, when the name will expire, and how active parking solution has been incorporated for it, if any. The name game in parking has changed in recent years to reflect the expectations of many domain investors for undeveloped names.

If a name is part of one of the aggressive parking systems such as Whypark, the name has been carefully monetized. Parking systems alow owners of multiple domain names to orchestrate administration task and schedule updates and maintenance of certain parked names within provided content and link encouragement programs. These include SEO promotion for those keywords that apply to the involved domain names.

Some registrars, such as Godaddy.com, have an extensive suggested list of domain names available through standard registrar vending and premium auction purchase. This can be a great deal when bulk renewals come due. Bundling renewing domains with discount codes and buying new dot-coms at a discount is part of a strategically cost-sensitive domain investment business model.

Make sure to test out how the domain keywords and/or synonyms work with other words, such as “Free”, top, high, and money category keyword names formed with words in that category such as price, value, free, cheap, and dollar. By working these out into a list, the domainer can test for previous purchase and current ownership while keeping tabs on the domain development trends of other competitors.

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Remember all those people who said the domain name game was falling into disuse and only a few big players would or could afford to be around this time this year? Well, all that conventional wisdom can be thrown out the window with a review of the news from the domaining landscaper of today. Some if it sounds new, some it sounds familiar. If it sounds like you’ve heard some of the news before, it means you are a card carrying domainer.

Make no mistake, the big names still govern the world of domains, and when Frank Schilling vends his millionth name or Google tries to partner with Skype, the headlines are about search engine movings and shakings. Yesterday Google was trying to establish specific infrastructure to take over the online world with categorical strategy, yet in the face of antitrust probes Google is suddenly a baby-faced child with no evil intentions whatsoever.

Online privacy has become an increasingly thorny issue, with major hackings taking place one servers in a disturbing frequency of instigation. When the ICE gets involved in domain names and hosting issues, commerce has arrived in the domain sector. The issues continue to make domainers wonder how much say they should have in their own industry. New precedents are being set every day for how domain name portfolio owners should make decisions about their names in the context of laws and ICANN regulations..

ICE claims that because servers are located in the United States, the material and code on those servers operates under American governmental jurisdiction. United States law enforcement has been in the news recently seizing potentially hackworthy servers, which should be more than enough to make rogue coders and sniffer system operators go dark. But does this mean clients of less than savory websites will simply seek out web hosting that is globally redundant? This makes the “redirect” of any webmaster to placing the hosting and domain name on separate servers of critical importance.

Some domaining debates will never grow old. Where does the value potential of country code top level domains really lie? Can peer domain name appraisals and monetization assessments be trusted? Do language barriers between character based alphabet lexicons interfere or enhance search engine results? Does a premium domain sale commission equal highway robbery? How far from cybersquatting is copyright infringement, and how much is a domainer liable for finding out? The argument over the efficacy of parking programs evolves endlessly and further again.

The perspective that domaining is an investment commodity market becomes more concrete when news about domain name sale commissions cloud the actual profit from any resale or auction purchase. Every domainer has to burn through a learning phase where backlink checkers, affiliate programs, web hosting complexities and comparative auction returns get examined. The fact that a modern domain name owner might have to wade through news feeds, purchased clicks, and paid posting is now a norm.

Domainers are now specialists in SEO, short names, numericals, and typo names. The establishment of a keyword domain name or a brandable domain can still make news when it resells in an auction frenzy. Flippa, SEDO, Godaddy and WhyPark are the talk of the domaining town. Traffic and parking programs have gone from performing a sidewalk shuffle to requiring approval to introducing innovative options again. Are domainers the customers of parking companies, or vice versa?

The exotic fringe of today’s practicing domaining professionals dance through a maze of traffic control, statistics manipulation, and illegal practices experimentation.Will the day come when actual Internet “Coast Guards” patrol the Web, actively chasing down smugglers of illegal clicks? International law works well in theory but when does a website operate in international waters?

Domainers may need to become astute in setting the deal terms in place when multiple continents are involved. The good news is that ideas become fresher and minds become more open to new website and domain based concepts as business online every day. Given the success of many nonsense words that became global brands that control online commerce today, the ability of anyone to select and leverage a domain name is now just a registrar shopping cart away.

Who knew that one day the Internet, not the sky, would be the limit?

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There is no topic more likely to stir debate in a room crowded with domainers than keyword density. The benefit of topical keyword density, domain keyword relativity, and links with corresponding keyword inclusion is the Holy Grail of all webmasters and domain name professionals. But being the architect of a successful money earning website means mixing it up a little and changing the game plan once in a while. it also gives your readers a new flavor to check out, and you can keep them informed about this change by sending a newsletter to your registration email group.

Existing keyword density should be some thing that varies. One week a webmaster’s content strategy might focus on sports, or technology terms, or current affairs, or recent news events in that subject or topic sector. Prominence of content should vary as well, in bold, italics, source links or titles. Search engines can usually tell if a website is put together by cut and paste methods or whether genuine keystrokes have been effected.

As the content gets refreshed and updated. Content should never be all text, there should be dynamic links, graphics, images, scripts, and other objects to show variation. An all content website is an encyclopedia nobody wants to read or print. But meta tags and keywords used on titles, descriptions, and relative text can inform visitors and enrich keyword density. One well tailored blog post can do the work of three “plain wrap” entries.

Even for given topics, there are variable methods for disseminating content types. There is always another application treatment to consider. For example, for a website concerning parrots, cartoon, illustrations, dot to dot drawings, puzzles, trivia questions, Iphone apps, parrot games and news about parrots can give a broad range of content to what might a very limited topic. Look for where your keyword topic is in the news, and supplement keyword content with news and feature writing regarding those reports.

Shifts in keyword density can occur when momentary focus to a specific attribute or point of the subject matter is pervasive enough to sway the site content density. This is actually a positive signs to search engines, who will index this as concurrent with the same changes at other, higher ranked sites.And new articles with findable keyword titles can assist researchers using title queries at the search engine level to find better information.

The evaluation of keyword density should not happen using only one tool or website. The webmaster should never trust only the resident app. Architects of a content strategy should not use only one authority when researching keyword density at a given website. The search engines’ won’t. The keyword content is the primary mover and shaker of page rank, and without fluctuations the site looks static.

It might be a good idea to change periodically the condition of having RSS content feeds provide data t your site. Changes in keyword density and the sources of content can cause search engine to take notice of your website and check back and refer cached versions to new designs and implementation of outside source news and content. The aggressive webmaster looking for improved placement in search engine results can find new leverage by changing the type, look and feel, and sources of keyword content.

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Whenever I hear someone say “We’re working on the website” or “We haven’t decided which way to go with the domain name”, my domaining ears perk up. The expertise a career domainer can offer someone in this position is priceless. Fending off the domain name purchase is pointless, but so many great sites die in these birth pangs. Witness so many arbitration cases being lost because the domain owner dropped the ball very early in the value creation race. The real way to manufacture a domain sale for profit is the consulting or domain launch process for others.

The growth process for every domainer is different. People of different backgrounds and varying degrees of education and technical background can become domainers almost by accident. But like many businesses, the ability to profit comes from the ability to strike when the iron is hot. Waiting for the client to realize the “now” moment doesn’t work. Domainers need to groom their domain clients into realizing website plans online. Then the income building and profit making can begin.Domain names are not like new clothes, they derive value from use, not disuse.

And for a domainer, hearing the growing pains of a non-web savvy domain prospect is music to their ears. Because the domainer holds the upper hand and can educate the new business owner or operator about the ways their domain can grow as a business tool. Just the incentive to build a site and get a domain into the SEO mix is the impetus that drives the primary marketing effort of any domain name. Every business opportunity that is idling is actually a live business opportunity being strangled to death.

Business people or individual entrepreneurs tend to look for the money before they develop any content. This is a self -circular defeat mechanism, because how can there be affiliate programs, sponsors, microtransactions or paying memberships for a site that doesn’t exist? Building the content is always the most important primary step in building any website. Building a website is the primary component in growing domain value and building traffic statistics. Domainers can execute a site before any plans or agreements for ads or sponsors take place.

The cost of marketing s often overinflated. The reason viral marketing can fall flat is that promoting a website and domain name with little or no application value at the destination is fruitless. Referral traffic can make or break a new site, which is why niche audiences need to overlap. People are looking for things to do. The utmost business model online is to find a need and fill it. Find “x” domain to fit “y end user and create “z” application for the equation.

A huge error many would-be domain entrepreneurs make is anticipating stopgaps and blocks to their success before the intangibles even become defined. A failed imagination counts the hurdles, a strategic thinker calculates the potential for success. But partnering talent and handing off responsibilities makes a delegation opportunity for smart leaders with vision.

Groundbreaking websites weren’t built by individuals who quoted sound reasons for not going ahead with their project. Smart domainers know how to turn the “no” in this sentiment into a “yes”. Nobody ever made a lot of money following someone else’s roadmap. if the entity doesn’t exist, it’s because everyone else is waiting for another entrepreneur to cross the finish line to have a reason to start the race. Smart players get coaching advice, successful winners work with expert trainers, and ultimately, the best domainers go where they are needed the most, in development cycles stalled in doubt.

Even flawed organizations are kept alive by the quality of the strengths of the key players. Knowing when to attach advanced talent and utilize resources for advancing agenda items can’t be done if all planning is forestalled by anticipatory question that circle the drain powered by doubt and hesitation. Faint heart never won the day. Certainly not in domaining, anyway.

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So there’s a website name you want to buy a domain for, or an idea you have for a company you want to start. The web hosting purchase for the idea and domain name usually requires an associated domain name for the enterprise. Coming up with these for other names and keywords can be easy. When it’s your personal project conceiving a domain can be harder. Word morphology can help.

Domainers have this happen sometimes. You always have great ideas about domain names but under pressure to come up with one right away, your mind goes blank. We call this domainer’s block.

Here are some tips and techniques to form a domain name from your idea or concept and some keyword alternators that can help domain morphology work for you. Be aware that each tier of these tips forms its own domain name market niche, and there are domainers who deal only in names with those specific keywords involved. In this case consider if buying the name you really want isn’t worth the price, and make an offer.

1. Cutesy names

I want to say a word about cutesy names because sometimes they do work. Other domainers may simply term them 5-character names or short domains (because of very short length of the domain word). Bitsy, anything -hoo.com, -gold- and others will occur to you as you try to think up the right one. But other formative names can be considered cute, such as “scout”, Mr-(whatever), and My-(noun/keyword).com.

2.Store Names

I call these names store names but they are essentially any name that indicates to a SERP bot or search engine that shopping is possible. A lot of people go shopping online. They do their browsing online, their information gathering online, and they do their fact checking online. They look for deals online and they want to shop. Look at the basic keywords of your idea. Play around with them. Insert them into the following word endings, such as -shop, -store, -hut, -house, etc.

3. Rhyming Names

Rhyming names can best be exemplified by Froogle, a budget spinoff of Google.com. This was supposed to be a shopping portal for low budget products with bargain prices, associated with (you guessed it) Google. If your name rhymes with a popular website, getting people to remember your website name might be made much much easier. Rhyme slang is very catchy and cool, and looks good in a logo. The memory and verbal elements of a name with verbal slang can have a lot going for them.

4. Forum Names

The names that indicate a bulletin board site online are fairly straightforward. As an example, we can use the keyword “morph” with other names to make a easy to remember and short easily typed in domain url.

Chat, speak, talk, quick, bb, cafe, and forum are the key words to attach to your idea words to make a new domain. In the domain morphology drill, these keywords plus domain word parts form domain names that in our example would be morphchat.com, morphspeak.com, morphtalk.com, morphquick.com, morphbb.com, morphcafe.com, and morphforum.com. (I do not own these names).

Obviously, some sound better and work better than others. Remember to save time by using a registrar that suggest available keyword domain combinations directly from the search result. Domain keywords such as babble, buzz, and chew can also work but may not always have as broad an appeal as the first group. In our example, these would be morphbabble.com, morphbuzz.com, ad morphchew.com. Morphbuzz.com could be a cute blog name.

5. THE names

The

names can be phunny to talk about because you need to make sure the articulation goes in the “the”. The use of “the” in forming a domain name principally occurs when the user is trying to establish an air of authority, especially if the site in question is a blog. The word

the

attached to anything makes it seem like an authority.

Remember also to check if there is a trademark or copyright on the name you form before you buy it and spend time and money and media resources and effort promoting the name. You might be doing the work for someone else. This type of name is best used when you really really love the name but it’s taken and you’d like to start out with as close to most desired domain possible.

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To get many newby domainers over the beginner’s hump, here is a tried and true launch recipe to get your blog or site started without the huge all consuming resource intensive crash launch every domain name owner dreams of. Instead of a lousy construction page, a parking page full of links, or a 404 error give your search traffic something sticky to look at. This is the way to build a webpage that can yield revenue, job opportunities, and give you legitimacy in the blog world. That’ a springboard to real online marketing power when the big idea comes along.

1. Setup the WordPress

Browse the instructions and don’t get overly technical. All the Google adsense widgets mean nothing without content marketing and promotion. And oh yes traffic. We’ll get to that later. Learn the basic editing and posting techniques for posting blog entries. The search engines don’t give extra points for marked up sites with nice colors. They count words and content. Focus on that a big part of the job is done. Don’t change to templates with custom code requirements or special code tweaks you won;t know how to fix or roll back. Understand how to post, edit, edit comments and submit an RSS feed.

2. Blogroll Personal Bests

One article that is much better than the “Hello World” post is the best list. This the list of the best of the best websites for this niche audience. You don;t have to do much, just come up with 150 words and a description of each and why they would appeal to your end users. Link the article to your Blogroll links page link. Don’t make these look like the links on every other site. Come up with newer sites that browsers will check out because they don;t know what they do.

3. Be Savvy on the “About Us” Marketing

Most of these pages elicit a snore. But the whole point of a domain is to dream up the perfect user base. Wise domainers use their “about us” page to tell a funny story or help the browsing end user understand why the website is personal and has meaning to you. That way the reader can decide if they identify with those emotions. Don’t forget to put deep links to the rest of the website in this text or at the end of the prose in other related links.

4.Invite Guest Stars

Before launching the blog, invite a few friends to prepare guest posts to flesh out the beginner’s look at the site. These people will use the links to their work in networking for jobs and to friends, without yo even asking them to do so. If they put a profile on the end of their submissions mentioning their pet projects, employer, or hometown, those words end up being searchable text down the line.

5. Plan your SEO Link Strategy

Hang out your shingle at affiliate program sites, at web administrator forums, or anyplace where advertisers want to reach their user niche on a budget. This way marketing their product also markets YOUR site. be very selective about using social networks until you have an exclusive offer or something that makes users stop and check it out. Don’t spam.

Mix all ingredients, save, and launch!

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Sometimes just deciding what name to buy from a droplist or domain auction can get overwhelming. The following five items are ways to analyze the financial throughput of a name and its likely appeal to buyers down the road. When appraising a domain name you want to buy, check over these characteristics of a good domain name.
1. Is the Pitch for It “good in a room”?
Formulate the elevator pitch for th domain name or development idea. These days people understand very quickly the marriage of a website app, the domain name, and the scripted code programming undercarriage of development that forms their union. Every pitch will springboard into a new further development. If you talk to a store clerk or a fast food cashier and they “get it” in under 5 seconds, you are good to go. In fact, the more pitches you polish, the more the Q and A can develop your idea and move you to the next step.
2. Is there a Facebook Strategy ?
Facebook has become so omnipresent online employees may be starting to call Mark Zuckerberg ‘Bill”. But it’s doubtful even Zuckerberg could have foreseen the instant absorption of Facebook into familial communication, work relationships, sunrise hoops squads, cheerleading pep sessions, and World of Warcraft leagues. Right now people are making movies to launch on Facebook to attract attention. A cool factor, a gadget factor, a tech factor, anything that plays across personal networks to a niche crowd can work.
Facebook does not bow to many external controls, so working with it is mandatory. Test how you Twitter and tweak your Facebook page to a clean first impression. Keep in mind, many “sign up with Facebook” login scripts don’t work, even on huge multimedia sites. Sometimes business partners are just farming for data. Unless you are a big swinging dictator of online affiliate marketing, or can partner with Facebook is some way, your advertising and retail spending may have just been allocated 150%.
3. Feminine Appeal
Does the domain name/idea appeal to women? A lot of women don’t go to websites that don’t appeal to women. But about 85% of the men domainers I talk to have ideas for male based demographic end user sites. But what about the women? Domainers should develop a tangent for women to interact or a talking point that might sway potential social networking for women. Is the site a jumping off point for online mass collaboration?
Domain development and website traffic today is about niche users, end user marketing, and site appeal for demographic specific users, be it geo-specific, age specific, or qualititatively specific, like a site for patients with a medical problem or a set of FAQs about a computer operability issue. Women in Egypt may want to learn more about the three basket factor and the “Rich Dad” myth. Emotional branding and website bounce can be your friend as well as theirs.
Media is a huge content driver in websites. Lots of women worldwide can’t even access secondary school for study of economics, business, accounting or corporate communications. But they may find their way to a computer terminal somewhere, or a smart phone. And don’t forget, women can be partners and investors in a site they like. And they can be participants and web administrators helping you run the site from across the planet.
Women use the internet double timing home management responsibilities and domestic diva-dom. Think about the market globally for translated advanced business cribs or study tips. Middle Eastern and foreign character language country code domains have huge growth potential especially in translation or using third party website applications that have packages for foreign language utility.
4. Check the Competition
I looked up several domain names this morning related to gaming. Not surprisingly, most of the keyword combinations I searched for at Network Solutions were taken. That tells me I am onto something. Checking further, I glimpsed a kaleidoscope of parked pages but no revenue bearing home pages of a site with ads and content. That means with one day’s WordPress development I am in first place for SEO for those keywords. Definitely a buy.
5. Fringe Elements
When looking to acquire a domain name and the consequent development project, be on the lookout for copyright or trademarks words in the domain. Use online sources to check. The dogs of war are snapping at the heels of trademark infringers and copyright derived hijacked traffic. Don’t get WIPO’d out and challenged with expensive UDRP legalities. Perform the due diigence now required for any forward motion on a domain name in the online business space. One qualified dispute action and you slide down the chute back to ground zero.

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Do you need a second home (Page)? I say this because Twitter, Facebook, and so many blogs have replaced the need for a personal webpage. I credit MySpace with building a template non-web personnel could use, but the creativity of customizing a Facebook page is fairly limited. The reason these social networking sites became popular was due to the bridge between the average user’s skills and their impatience to have a site online for further marketing and promotion.
The best-known blogger I visit online have very unoriginal and unappealing blog templates, the worst of them covered with ads. You might think it’s unusual for a domainer to take issue with ads on a website, but when they clearly dominate the message, text and graphics, I do. When a website looks like a race car and not a greeting card, there is a design issue present and a business driver manipulating the creative decision making.
Ning did this well, but tried to shove a business template and online portal programming burden onto hobby users, and tried to leverage near-business users into using social network look page templates. But I never understood why so much convergence towards a unified set of puzzle pieces was supposed to be acceptable, let alone desirable. Remember when a website might involve your own favorite color, or have a picture of a place you’d like to live someday, or even a few flowers or keepsakes? The personalization of websites has been washed away. And for many people there are simply too many choices.
You can find a bunch of templates for blogs, but the one you’d like to use for personnel expression doesn’t really fit the business website you’ll be pouring all your effort into. This is why so many people have a Facebook page and a blog and a main website but none of them seem s really express them completely. And at the very end of the day, the domain name you thought was so clever that night at 3 a.m. when you bought it, doesn’t gel with your PTA network or online gaming community friends or your out of town clients.
In the rush to get everybody online, more than few originality and personal optimization corners have been cut. And then you have the small business web design client, who thinks they need a $45,000 website and refuses to look at any of the 350+ shopping cart software programs applications on the market. For business professionals with a lot of different things in the hopper, the answer is a second home page. It’s so much less work than trying to build the be-all end-all of all websites, which brings so many collaborative online projects to a halt.
The first step is deciding on a domain name. Right now drop lists are bursting with bargains, and a new site allows you to skim the possibilities without paying a steep domain auction listing fee. For many domainers, those extra $30-$50 in charges can make the difference between a spate of hopeful domain name renewals or a final throwing in the of the domaining towel. But the idea of creating a unique online presence for many has long since vanished. The haste to use templates, launch an app, bring together an email list or Twitter user group has almost abolished the creativity still possible online. For the outside the box thinker who starts making  truly original pieces of code again, here’s to you.

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