Domain Owl

In working inside the domain world, people become independent business men (and women) without even knowing it. Internet individuals of every age and rank, teenagers, men and women acquire domain names and offer them for sale constantly, yet they seem to maintain a sort of naivete about the fact that what they are really doing is functioning as their own carnival barker-cum-insurance- salesman. This carries risks which the domainer (possibly unknowingly) is assuming.

Brokering your own domain name sale can have its challenges.  Escrow services have popped up online and established a benchmark many domainer trusts. These domain name escrow service companies work to form a break against the tide of aggression happening with entrepreneurs trying to vend their names to people who may not even speak their language but understand the value of the domain on offer or up for auction.

In observing a heated discussion today between two bidding domainers in a private auction, I realized the lava was being generated by the fact that the seller’s decision to vend the name had not been covered by a reliable domain name broker service. Somewhere in the bid process, confusion had arisen as to how the domain sale would actually be executed. Suddenly, the history of each bid and the goodwill of both bidders was attached to a wild insistence to doing things “their way”.

This angst could have been avoided by stating as Terms of Sale a named broker service acting as name agent. Otherwise, the tension of a bid/offer scenario is reduced to a clammy sandwich of broken promises, dying away email communications, and eroding forum threads, which might have formed the basis of a profitable domain sale. The world is full of domainers who have been caught up in the bonfire of anxiety, exhilaration, excitement and pure greed a bidding frenzy whips up.

Both bidders wanted to use their own version of a buyer’s contract, which of course didn’t meet with the approval of the seller. The actual excitement of the name and who would win it was mired down in discussions of “Tastes Great/ Less Filling” variety vis a vis online business contracts. The seller was suddenly caught in the crossfire of dissenting opinions due to his own lack of foresight in covering his bases.

How did the sale pan out? It didn’t.

As the discussion wound down so did the eagerness of both domainers to get the name. The seller had lost a good opportunity and squandered the good faith of both customers. The deer in the headlights was the seller, whose paying customers had moved on to greener pastures. The domain name was the unfortunate roadkill meeting its ugly demise by the side of information superhighway.

All this pain and suffering could have been avoided if the seller had just involved a listing and brokering service that would have wrapped up every question in  neat set of FAQs. When domains are at issue, good faith and the Internet part company when dollars cross the international dateline. Always cover your bets where a domain registration or name sale is concerned. Always respect the rights of the other (domaining) party in the the transaction. Translated: Nobody “has” to do anything.

Ethical domainers do business this way. (Hint: Don’t look to PayPal to police your four-figure domain sales. ) The benefit of a growing “rap sheet” of successful domain sales at any escrow service is the enlistment of those same escrow services on your behalf in times of trouble. Your good behavior will serve you in good stead when some upstart tries to steal your domain or hijack your site. “Free rent” is a negligible concept where hosting and bandwidth costs are concerned.

Yes, escrow services charge a fee. But so do most non-banking institution ATMs and that hasn’t stopped people from using them. A slice of the action is a small price to pay for delivery of the big bid. If you’ve got online real estate, trust the professionals to turn over the big amounts and rest easy that all is copacetic. Escrow services for domain names transfer the worry of a big dollar domain sale to the heavy hitters who pave the way for a legitimate and legal domain name sale payday.

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At this very moment your domain name could be underway to be sold somewhere online. Without your knowledge. Think it can’t happen? One of my colleagues in the domain firmament was flabbergasted today to learn that his domain name (and website) were being vended by a well-known auction site.

One catch: he still owns the domain name.

This can happen in the world of domain name buying and selling and sadly it happens more often than one would think possible. A lot is going on at any time online and it is almost impossible for a domainer with even a few dozen names to keep abreast of everything pertaining to each name taking place. Of course, the fusillades of daily spam don’t help. I am willing to bet some clickjacking or password guessing combined with some clever timing to release the name while owner was busy elsewhere.

Thus all the more reason to vigilantly update sites daily or as often as possible. Weeding through the spam and offers and solicitations for hosting products and suchlike, a domainer can quickly get tired of seeing important notices and notifications because of the sheer volume of the broadcasts. Hosting companies are so notorious for sending out offers and prompts and reminders and advertisements a domainer is practically immune to opening their email.

And that’s when the domain name pirate strikes. It’s a good bet the pirate of any domain name knows your IP address and can track your activity by a login or posting activity somewhere. Just Google someone’s IP address or their corresponding user name with their email and sooner or later a trail forms. What is not so clear is how liable a registrar or auction site is for hosting a sale of a name clearly in dispute of ownership.

This is the dilemma many domainers face when they register a name. If privacy is not purchased, then any working online operator can limp their way to some kind of hack or pose a sale if the domainer is busy enough not to notice. Many domainers watch the droplists and deleting domains auctions for just this reason. Being on good terms with your registrar and knowing their terms of Service doesn’t hurt either.

Keeping track of domain name activity that has been pirated started many years ago, when hijacked popmail addresses and phantom spam campaigns spouted reams of “reply -to” spam aimed at astonished webmasters who’d never even used their inboxes. I personally have had important emails topped out of my administrator email account only to find the limit reached. On a 100 GiG mailbox that’s a lot of spam.

What’s even more frustrating is that if a sale is reached via the fake auction listing, the third party “Buyer” becomes part of the mix. As a buyer in good faith, if he parts with hard earned cash for the name, is he entitled to it if the registrar ever sorts matters out? For a lucrative domain name with marketed traffic and keyword density with a site up, that’s a significant loss to the owner of the name, who wasn’t even listing the name for sale in the first place!

Virtual records are all very well, but printed purchase receipts and domain transfer records with renewal dates and expiration projections can work to demonstrate original chain of title to a domain name. It then becomes the registrar’s responsibility to disclose why they released a name not unlocked for sale by owner. Domain locking is enabled for just this reason. The IP tracking of the registrar or hosting company should underscore this utility.

One final point: if you go into partnership with another domainer or sponsor for a site or name project, keep a record of the email communication where rights and titles and participating profit percentages and shares of the enterprise are clearly spelled out.These can be handy reminders when project leads forget where their enterprise is going or where it came from.

Every development deal is its own ship sailing to a unknown destination. Online webmasters and site operators need to helm their own vessel. Attention to detail is key. Backups and records of performed work are advisable, especially when billing is ongoing. Clarify deal points with partners and keep track of time and billable hours spent contributing to the project. A hosting company will have records to confirm your login time and access.

To keep all your domain names in the batter’s box, review the lineup from time to time. Keep renewal date checks current and know all the procedures to transfer or billing inquiries ahead of time. View the traffic hits as RBI’s and police site errors. (Hostnames may form some kind of infield fly rule). If your domain names are playing every inning, they can’t go AWOL. This way, when it’s time to have a time out and call the umpire, you have all your ducks in a row.

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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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Traffic is the key to a successful website, and a domain, for that matter. The earning potential for affiliates and link sponsors as well as featured ads is a function of what traffic will participate in the lure of services and goods for sale. But so many domainers expect traffic without putting out sufficient incentive. The lure of a site must be established for traffic to evolve in significant numbers.

The time and efforts that domainers will put into domain development varies. The investment some domainers are comfortable making may skip the right name and focus all the marbles on the wrong name. The more names a domainer adds to their stable, the more the effort for each individual name will diminish. Advice can come from all sides, qualified or unqualified, and mean nothing or everything.

Partnership is key to developing domains intelligently. Unless the independent domainer forges ahead with a team of inspired specialists, the registered domain will languish inside the locked vault of the parked page or lie fallow in the doldrums of the hosting account. That’s a lot of wasted  Cnames setups and idling frames redirect records.

These types of scenarios generally increase the value of a domain name very little. Many domainers operate alone, with hundreds of name waiting in the wings undeveloped. Partners can break down the benefits of link promotion strategies and help make decisions regarding text contributions and editoral calendars for content posting. And the main thrust of the impetus forward can be put toward a tangible goal.

Domainers rolling their sleeves up and developing make money. Otherwise so many domain energies are wasted in pointless debates between ad types, website features, or value appraisals that don’t really add to the bottom line. Posting on discussion forums can help a newb domainer learn, but many busy domain portfolio managers are much more concerned with marketing their names to buyers directly.

Sales pitches without teeth tend to be ignored or dismissed outright. The pumps for a domain buy needs to be primed when the transaction is domainer-to-domainer. Just shoving the domain onto the market rarely brings a satisfactory return. Savvy domain shoppers want stats and traffic volume to cement a bid. Without these a domain offering can sound like a desperate Hail Mary pass.

Undeveloped and/or unused domains are a huge waste. The importance of a road map or marketing plan for every domain at purchase is key. At the very least any unused (undeveloped) names should be directed toward a landing page of the domainer’s existing site to bolster traffic for a target name under review for development or sale.

These are the risks of domaining. And the rewards? Huge auction bids, online traffic in cascades of hourly clicks, and ad revenues piling up almost faster than the metrics can add them up. Or perhaps one sale happens with just one very happy bid that makes a domainer’s year. For prurient domain developers, this can be very feasible if they don’t overspend on media buys.

After all the Adwords, SEO, Article Writing, Media Buys, Blogging, Classified Ads, Social Bookmarking, and buzz, a big ticket domain resale is the goal. But not every domain marketing instrument is right for every site. The appeal of a website based on a speculative domain can be a delicate thing to manage or anticipate. Media buys for one audience can work whereas for another domain audience they fall flat.

And that’s just the beginning. There is always the hook of the promotion cycle at the social networking sites, ongoing link building, and negotiating and pitching to joint venture partners. Domainers spend the balance of their time wrestling with their hosting accounts and tugging names from one registrar to another. The most desperate go for email drops and ad swaps, which pose SEO risk for negligible return.

Adwords can work when the site had traffic. SEO is the responsibility of the webmaster. Article writing is a core foundation of any site strategy. Media buy investments like blogging, Classified Ads, Social Bookmarking, Facebook or other social networking, paid link building, and other sponsored appeals for traffic can blend into a nice fountain of online viewers.

Domainers, start your engines and rev up to speed new traffic clicks to your site today!

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Everybody wants a blog comment with an inbound link back to their site. I see hundreds of them here and elsewhere. Link exchanges generally work to the benefit of both sites, since only the webmasters of relevant sites with SEO value need apply. Search engines denigrate the value of unrelated links. Lots of spam and lots of erroneous commenting needs to be addressed.

SEO bots scrub down the blogosphere daily. But the reality is few can keep a blog going. The number one issue with administrating a blog domain is that the blog engine needs effort and attention. Admittedly it sometimes needs more time some days than others, but administration of the blog domain that is a domain blog can absorb more minutes than observers might suspect.

One of the most surprising aspects to curating a blog is administering approval of the comments users and visitors leave at the site. Various articles should have different users with varying home urls and different email addresses. But with the effort some domainers and online contractors are making these days to promote their domain urls, some spam comes along.

Here are some notes for those reading this who attempt to comment here or spread the url word about their domain or website online. Whether it is a FaceBook page, Myspace address, subdomain, or Squidoo link, these rules for commenting apply. Links and comments promoting links will be deleted meeting the following criteria.

1. A comment with a home page name that does not relate in either subject value or keyword association with my domain or blog is probably not going to be approved. These are obvious spam.

2. A blog comment that is misspelled is probably not going to be approved. This shows the writer is not a native speaker and too careless to spellcheck. Grammar errors mean a scripted posting machine did the commenting.

3. A blog comment abusing the administrator of this site is probably not going to be approved. Comment administration decisions are final.

4. A blog comment repeated word for word across a half dozen articles with identical commentary text  is probably not going to be approved.

5. A blog comment flogging an unrelated service or site is probably not going to be approved.

6. A blog comment uniformly unconnected to the content of the article AND misspelled AND promoting warez AND to a topic-unrelated site domain name url  is probably not going be approved.

7. A blog comment that is in a foreign character set and thus unreadable  is probably not going to be approved.

8. A blog comment that is too long (a page or more, 700 characters plus, ) probably not going to be approved.

9. A blog comment that is relating to an adult name or mature content site when the posted site is completely unrelated to such material is probably not going to be approved.

10. Asking for free publishing of this site’s content elsewhere on a  site with advertising and affiliates, and for free writing services on your site’s behalf will probably get deleted. Appropriate communications along these lines happen via email, not in the public comment area.

Bonus Round:

Your link will probably get deleted if it is one in  series of exactly similar posts on various stories under different email addresses and site names.

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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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I read an editorial by an archconservative columnist today bemoaning the lost cause of moderate conservatism. My instinct was not to empathize with the author but to investigate the target of his arrows, a website and individual called Breitbart.com. How could a liberal news bonfire like Breitbart’s apparatus dig such a pit under a conservative observer like David Klinghoffer and get it wrong?

It’s hard to believe that the National Review is as compelling reading or exciting journalism as many original news blogs, but the author persists in his shibboleths. When Huffingtonpost.com started, few people could stomach a woman whose main claim to fame seemed to be losing an expensive gubernatorial campaign with her somewhat estranged husband.

A visit to Breitbart.com does not elicit the “oohs” and “aaahs” of a CNN style media outlet. Nor does it salaciously tabloid up any items a la the New York Post or OMG.com. But what is fetching about Breitbart.com is that it is extremely impactful to experience a new media outlet whose brisk  data signals are not generated by mainstream profit making. Breitbart.com is an example of making a portal and destination out of your own real surname.

Breitbart is hardly a household name. It is not a noun or a verb nor is it a keyword hybrid or name referrer to any known category in the extremely competitive world of “name” domains.  Yet Breitbart.com has enough presence  as a brand to stand for the “low” and outre media extreme at the end of the news outlet pantheon. This type of blog generally receives little fanfare.

The world of words is not a timid one, and this author couldn’t be unconscious of the honor he was paying Breitbart (.com).  Just guiding online or print keyboard jockeys to web surf to a new destination is the kind of advice and counsel marketing firms are racking their brains to come up with. And I hadn’t even heard of the site before the chance catch of Klinghoffer’s article.

Klinghoffer claims the National Review is still readable. “Vital” and ‘interesting’ mean different things to different people. I doubt the National Review is destination daily reading for anyone who doesn’t have a vested interest in blogging it, reviewing it, cribbing it or is concerned in an article. While its past relevance is undiminished and certainly historic, it is a dinosaur whose text preaches to a tiny choir located among a globeful of singers.

Unless you live in John Updike country, neocons aren’t criminals. They’re relatives, friends and neighbors. I doubt anyone releasing published news online via their own portal strives for a political resonance first, news value second. To shape an impression of a news portal with custom video tags and headlines “crazy” simply peppers the pot with name calling where none is warranted.

And so we’re back to the neocon crunching. If Klinghoffer had wanted to “bury the lead’ he might have left many details of the crazy neoconservative news channel’s identity absent or the url unmentioned. Instead he gives focused free publicity to his stated opposition’s website? By any definition, that is web strategy with a …twist. Klinghoffer gives Breitbart.com reams of free P. R. in the guise of critiquing his site offering.

The effect of contemporary media is so ingrained the conditioning takes a while to wear off. Starting a new media outlet and polishing an offering to suit a cross hatch of online searchers and visitors takes guts, considering the competitors. The journalism media is full of reports how print journalism is dying.

Klinghoffer’s article practically begged any reader to take a look at the Breitbart site and judge for themselves. Yet the coverage did not differ in tone or object so radically to note any such contrasting effect as Klinghoffer suggested would be present. I found the Breitbart.com news offerings fresh and untainted by slant and advertising spin. And I would have been surprised if anyone had suggested there was a portal online I hadn’t gotten scent of.

From this point forward, Breitbart.com might be one of the sites I check out when something big is happening to get the third or fourth media perspective. This is a strongly branded domain providing useful and sticky content to readers and visitors. How Klinghoffer could have promoted his rival yet claimed to criticize them in the same article is a matter left to…magazines like the National Review.

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This is the age of the mobile domain name. Everyone has got not just a cellphone but a smartphone, an Internet portal users can hold in their hands in line at the fast food place, waiting for the movie to start in the theater, and waiting for the kids to come out of school. The mobile domain name website designer needs to feature an app for browsing site visitors to utilize. Just signalling one point on the landing page for mobile users is a start.

Everyone has got a cellphone. Infants and pets have cellphones. barbie has a cellphone and her doll has a cellphone. But not everyone likes the navigation or reduced footprint mobile access to Internet sites offer. My take on the mobile use of websites is that the visitation to any website can enjoy huge traffic bursts as long as there is a unique, standalone, easily navigable application (app). This can build in a number of directions.

I am confronted daily at my local bus stop by people who don’t know when the bus gets there. They are all holding cellphones. The reason they can’t access the local bus routes via internet is that the website for this service (mta.net) is the most bloated internet presence ever constructed. Getting schedule information is a tough dig.

Talk about a bloated online destination. Mta.net is the worst and most overpacked online enterprise I have ever seen, and its schedules are buried under a site map sinking under the weight of too much pablum.  The overdesign of this site reaches critical traffic stalls regularly and the bus schedule I normally use has a permanent error built into its Adobe page split between the 5th and 6th age of my most used bus schedule.

What if I made a website that featured the bus arrival times and schedules for my local bus stops in an easily mobile-navigable format for simplistic mobile phone users to track and access? It sounds like re-inventing the wheel. But if the data owners don’t like their wheels to be accessible to riders, someone else can showcase the wheel and its dynamics.

Navigating an Adobe brochure on a cellphone with a screen size the size of a Lorna Doone cookie doesn’t work for me.  But checking the schedule of the MTA bus route 183, MTA bus route 96, and MTA bus route 222 maps tos a series of clicks which culminate in (you guessed it) the entire multipage bus schedule download. This is awful to tab through on a numeric mobile phone keypad.

But what if a local website hosted these schedules in navigable form so that mobile users could grab their  data while waiting curbside? Furthermore, a fun marketing idea might be to print stickers with this url and slap them on the bus stops so people would get the idea. Instead of worried faces and unnecessary delays, bus riders could access schedules “on the hoof”.

If a vendor or internet source online offers data in an unpalatable format, there is no law that says you can’t repackage that data on your own site and garner the clicks. By identifying bad websites and poorly accessible data, webmasters of would-be mobile features can target a repackaging strategy and spread the word. And domainers promoting these sites may see some tasty traffic.

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After all the industry-speak and techno-blather about mobile apps died down, I was hoping these terms could die the death of so many over-hyped computer and Internet lexicon casualties. But it took an experience with a mobile device and a website that failed the mobile test to help me understand just what a mobile domain could deliver. Domains need to furnish mobile shortcuts to cellphone users beached on an overcooked website.

I was at a Starbucks trying to log into the Starbucks mobile website on my cellphone. I was trying to log into my Starbucks account and reload my card. Usually a website will make it very easy for you to spend money there. But not Starbucks. I navigated the website for 25 minutes and was not able to log in or reload my card. The Starbucks site simply wouldn’t allow it.  So much for the “rewards” program.

The problem is that Starbucks has not designed a website with mobile users in mind. It has designed a website that includes every coffee type to order, every philanthropic program, every possible non-coffee option jammed on the front page. Mobile users will burn minutes navigating this nightmare using the mobile internet access afforded by cellphones. Logging in is a challenge or a chore.

The Starbucks mobile experience was a joke. The Starbucks staff couldn’t help me do it. Every coffee type, promotional gift gimmick and rebranding idea was stuffed up front on the mobile menu. Starbucks thinks people in a hurry want to read about growing traditions in Costa Rica while thumbing the ‘reload” button. Too bad the site couldn’t handle it.

When a website stands in the way of the loyal customer repurchasing goods, there is a problem. This got me started thinking about a shortcut to set up online to access my favorite mobile apps. This would be a domain or site to use when trying to get online at my preferred sites. But could my web links enable logins where the mobile site destination architecture failed?

If you are a website designer or webmaster, you may have noticed lately that even the most titanic brand and websites have gotten simplified. The mobile version of many websites should not be necessary. Only four or five main navigation pathways should be functionally necessary on any website. Categories of links should sort them in navigable order. Vending goods or services should have priority and a clear path to mobile access.

Using the alphanumeric keypad for my cellphone’s internet navigation portal is troublesome and not particularly intuitive. And when Googling results I often have to take the luck of the draw just to speed navigation to a particular site. But what if a domain name or site set up a one stop shopping spot where I could navigate favorites without storing them on my cellphone? And what if somebody put up a panoply of websites with links to the immediate business send of the these websites, so I wouldn’t get lost in navigation limbo?

Food for domain thought. When reviewing the drop lists and thinking up new mobile names, think about the types of sites people want to access most. Think about how many of these portals are loaded with too many bells and whistles, overdesigned web sites and landing pages crammed with every conceivable public affairs message and brief. There are too many.

Closing the distance between the point mobile users want to get to and where they start can reap big rewards for clever webmaster domainers. Domain buyers should keep an eye out for quick typeable short names that deliver custom link pages or sorted quick links to popular and difficult to find necessary links. There could be traffic in it.

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The Domain name offer can come in from the cold with the new era of blog databases and instant websites. A template or open source application used for an existing domain’s website means that any buyer can take advantage of premium content original to that domain name as part of the purchase price. This can be termed a “domain sweetener”.

Adding sweetener to your domain can be as simple as allowing the buyer to utilize the current hosting where the domain is lodged. Server information is generally given with the WHOIS record.  The WHOIS record must always be accurate for this reason. Unless a Privacy option is purchased at the time of the domain name creation, the registrant’s name phone number address and fax number is visible to the public. And even Privacy entailed records have bid or offer links at the lookup point.

What functions as a sweetener? Bundled domains with other sub-TLD’s, Emails with the domain or a free renewal might be other domain sweeteners. The ability to transform a nibble of interest into a successfully executed domain sale may take some sweetening on the seller’s part. The trick is knowing when to add the sweetener. Only the seller knows how motivated they really are to get some cash out of the deal.

Domains will attract lookups and type in interest form time to time. the record of these lookups can be tracked by referrer traffic form the WHOIS. This can be viewed from the statistics utility in the web hosting menu. The concept of the WHOIS lookup concedes that a likely buyer is checking out who owns the domain name, how long they have owned it, where it is hosted, and what the owner is doing with the domain.

A domain buyer will check out whether or not the current owner has a lot of time or investment put into the name. The theory is that a domainer will sell a name more cheaply if they haven’t developed it themselves.  Or the prospective buyer may want to see if the domain name is parked and thus assess its potential value as a parked revenue generator. The offer for the domain name may include the content seen online.

Existing content in the form of databases or text files can also function as a domain sweetener. If the domainer has invested in domain development at all, these files can be furnished with the domain name sale as a sweetener. The incentive should be communicated that valuable planning and effort are attached with the domain purchase price. The sweetener should be signalled when the buyer has had enough time to consider an offer.

For this reason, domain name offers to buy should have a deadline and a “window of opportunity” attached. This way the prospective buyer has to evaluate how motivated they are. The domain name price will not be a given with a horizon of forever, but an opportunity to buy the domain name at the stated price within a secured period of time. The communication regarding the sweetener should come from a motivated seller near the end of the offer period.

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