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Why Travel Websites Will Never Die
The market for living breathing travel websites remains healthy, due to a bouquet of factors. One of these is that the classic mistakes of trying to everything in one website can’t possibly occur in any travel website. The search parameters have to be so wide, specific, or time consuming to enter it makes a headache out of searching for fun places to stay. Common keywords for a travel website might be “deal”, “air”, and “fly”.
Travel websites were originally created for people to get to the pricing data and bypass the advertising, promotional, and marketing beeswax. Then the travel websites dded that back into their own websites. Travelers using websites often feel distanced from timely data and locked away from real solutions and good answers. Domains for travel websites should include keywords like “fun”, “quick” and “info”, and deliver on those keywords as well. The design and template, scripting and language should complete this concept.
Another travel website mistake is trying to deliver a functional website that shrinks the cycle of end user search time without users being caught in the web of unnecessary add-ons and product bundling. The search function for so many travel, airfare, ticketing and cruise websites is so overcomplicated it seems like an obvious no-brainer just to list fares. Compiling the best of certain fares or routes or travel packages can deliver traffic or bookmarking for later reference.
Instead of scaring away end users with complex algebra, better designed travel websites can serve the target demographic better. This will guarantee return clicks like no other website factor and promote word-of-mouth site promotion. Making the research easier for customers always allows them greater facility in making choices. As geographic place names become domain names, development becomes very cut and dried. A straightforward approach to content, without false keyword stuffing and dummy listings, can satisfy users and create resonant traffic patterns.
A final mistakes is losing touch with the user base that is most likely trying to get some answers and trying to distract them with useless flag-waving. The advertisements nobody reads are a huge turn-off, yet some webmasters insist on paving their site content with animated banner ads and inks. Worse, banal font choices, unclear images, and unrelated subject matter can confuse a end user confronted with a top search result website without the information they need anywhere visible.
The more existing travel websites fail, lack security, age, or simply become to irritating to use, the more room there is for new and up-and-coming webmasters to craft the travel websites of tomorrow. The framework and domain blog software has never been more available or more expertly edited for instant adoption. The next great travel website could be around the bend…made by entrepreneurs carving a profit out of a niche market.
And the key domains they will need will be in the hands of seasoned expert domainers.
Introduction to the Domain Trade
Buying and selling of domains happens now in almost every country around the world. Anyone can buy a domain name, but legal requirements and laws suggest a legal adult is the best candidate for a domain occupation. Tutorials, videos, seminars, white papers, and websites devoted to the buying and selling of domain names, content, and websites are online in every language. The formal use of a domain name is to frame a website, but the commodity of a domains for future resales is a thriving industry.
There is a variety of uses for a domain name as a sales entity. A domain name can be an embryonic brand or product, or a location and online destination. One strategy to make money selling domains is to leverage value from domain ownership is to concentrate domain ownership in critical TLD suffixes. Advanced knowledge of computer code and software is not required at all to buy as many domains as desired.These domain properties are secured inside an online account with a password and user name for buyer privacy. However, business norms for domainers make the registration data available to researchers online unless buyers purchase additional privacy safeguards.
The owner of a keyword domain with a high generic value and an extant page rank may want to offer the dot com, dot org, and dot net as a package, which offers top first-pass domain management without competitors trying to hijack traffic away from a launch effort or website promotion. Comprehension of domain name commerce terms and trading advice can be obtained by participation in online forums and trade shows worldwide
Domain names can be very affordable to collect. The price of any domain name in a dot-com theater of commerce is a range from five to fifteen dollars depending on the registrar, or licensed vendor. Dictionary names are generic domains which are assumed to be salable in any language. But trademark checking and language translation can introduce less risk to these investments. Copyright lawsuits can overturn ownership of established brands and trademarks, even from other countries.
As with every investment idea, financial risk can become a hazard. Domainers should survey the likely market and historic high auctions sales for similar names before investment four figures or more. Another strategy is to invest in keyword domains of emerging technologies, popular hobbies, and occupational or trade product sites which are very specific but offer an advantage to visitors. This might be via a coaching video, an explanatory essay, or images directed at ease of use or performance improvement.
The blueprint for any domain value growth model should be a business plan for launching a website. Many domain owners also refer their domain urls to parked pages for link revenue derived from bulk volumes of visitors.
There is an etiquette for making and withdrawing domain offers, and an accepted community and marketplace for such transactions. Disputes concerning domain name ownership, illegal domain name transfers, copyright violations, trademark jumping, and fraud are governed by accepted policies per the name registrar and web hosting company where a site or domain name is hosted online. Email communications and legal escrow processes can be required for large value domains, and auction companies online dealing in domain name sales charge a percentage fee and a transaction fee for these services.
Domaining Weekly Recap
ICANN switched the June meeting from Jordan to Singapore, proving that (as I have long suspected) ICANN members must have elevated Frequent Flyer miles to enjoy than us common folk. I can’t even figure out how I would look across the aisle to a Middle Eastern person with the polarization of races and nationalities due to world politics at present. ICANN has the resources to hold the meetings online anyway, I am not convinced of the merit of these trips around the world.
Demand Media, a global player in the domain name registrar market, posted fourth quarter earnings and operations financial results. The surprising thing is, the operation of any registrar can be changeable with the market. The time was when everybody was throwing up a shingle trying to be a registrar, outpacing every competitor with gimmicks, clever marketing, and real value. But now you’re likely to see mere templates overlaid with old registrar subcontractors shilling for renewal income.
But Enom, one of Demand’s biggest flagship registrars, still has eleven million domain names. That’s a big chunk of the parking market right there. I’d like to know how many of those names are parked in programs other than those hosted by Demand Media. That might change some of those financial reporting numbers of the parent company this time next year.
Well, ICANN certainly raised a few eyebrows by cutting their sponsorship fee in half. But speculators remember when they doubled it, so it’s hard to feel the love on that. The rising concern over whether or not Triple Z adult TLD marketing and commerce will be appealing, let alone feasible is rising in the mainstream domaining industry. But will the Triple-X TLD bring a new breed of domain name buyers and sellers into the market?
The release of foreign country code top level domains has been an interesting experiment for the domain world, yet most investors and auction analysts still confirm that dot com is king. Generic names now popping up in the ccTLD spaces may be more subject to being targeted by WIPO actions or UDRP arbitration as a nice reward to the owners for their labors. Domainers have to keep an eye on their legal budget and their
I read an interview with the President of WIPO. The contention that copyright and trademark infringement protection is universally applicable eludes even the most conservative of domainers. Witness the endless logroll of headlines which tout cases that follow one case logic one domain name, and another individual set of standards the next. One thing is always a truism, cement the primary base of investment resources in the dot com for best returns.
Leaks Sites
The Wikileaks effect has spawned copycats offshoots wannabe and genuine peers. The world of corporate secrets confidentiality, and whistleblowing may never be the same again. Even people who never interested in the Wikileaks site cannot deny the timeliness of this market.
While Washington D.C, spooks want to call this action terrorism, it may be just people getting around all the red tape to let the public know about wrongful action by businesses, governments, and individuals. Secret spilling may be a domain gold rush.
What gave rise to this user base? Decades of people watching whistleblowers in federal, state, and civil suits get targeted and having their lives take a nosedive due to the strain of following the court system.
New sites are springing up to pick up locally where the scope of Wikileaks doesn’t reach. That’s geo-specific traffic. Brusselsleaks, (not about fibrous green vegetables), BalkanLeaks, (accepting documents of Bulgarian nefarious deeds), Indoleaks, (politically volatile), and Governmentleaks in China, (not even approved of by Assange) all are heritage offshoots of the original Wikileaks website.
It’s hard to know what is entailed when one starts an enterprise like a wikileaks type website, but to be sure there are plenty of industries that could use one. Key players in commercial trucking, pharmaceutical medicine, animal safety and environmental hazards agencies could probably all have very good ideas about what comprises a wikileaks type site specific to their industry. Getting end user traffic might be both a journalistic enterprise and a social science experiment rolled into one.
The keyword for a niche industry or commonly known abbreviation might work for the morphology of a successful new -leaks site. The robo-signing of mortgage loans, for example, might spring a site called roboleaks.com, robowiki.com, robo.wiki, or robonomics.com. Finding your own industry niche leaks site, or drawing information and making it palatable to other readers and viewers is the first step. (At this writing roboleaks.com was unregistered).
Then by drawing together media, video, and Youtube type assets to an easily accessible channel for ongoing viewers provides end users with more reasons to check back in on and possibly contribute to your site. The fools-gold of domainers building trend name sites is the avalanche of banners and links nobody touches. But the real value of serious end user contributions and forum communities can make a new buyer very interested indeed.
The leaks site doesn’t need to have legs for five years, but who knows when the next end user will target your platform for their big deposit of information or data. Suddenly you have a high traffic domain you can point to any one of your sites for a bump in hits. Now, did you really think this was time for parking a name like that?
Five Ways to Promote your Domain
This is the Christmas season. That means good tidings and wishes of good cheer and so on. But it is never to early to start next year’s marketing plan for your domains and developed websites. Here are five things you can do today, per domain name, to improve your domain name value, page rank concretely and provide better sales and traffic metrics through the next sell offer or buying negotiations. Santa could bring good things in his sleigh for jolly domainers next year.
1. Rent a browser and plant some homepages
Find five new users per domain name who will put your website as their home page. Every use of their browser daily updates and indexes as a searchability and web presence factor. Finding new users form Craigslist or sifting through email responses to target end users with more precise communications in mind should keep your site bookmarked. Make your bookmark digits the new year’s goal. Added features and ease of use can make some homepages permanent. Use a very positive and well thought out branding approach for this type of marketing.
2. Organize a Traffic Plan
The rainy-day project most domainers never get to is the upstream and downstream traffic click reports. These can be awkward to absorb and bulky to review. But they will clue the designer and webmaster in to where users are likely to be found. Market to those sites, and more clicks will come. Review an updated study of demographics for end users with holiday leisure Web traffic in mind. Got a gaming or entertainment site? School’s out and newly mobile teens and students will be looking for content to test their new devices on. Link up and seed new directory additions for domain exposure.
3. Create Button Sites
Button sites are dashboard pages organized so encouraged visitors can review your broad diversity of online content offerings and select the one closest to their heart for a closer look. But just links won’t do any good. Make some magic with a custom graphic for each link or site, (perhaps the logo), and provide connotative dimensionality like something “fun to drive”. A button is infinitely more fun to punch than a plain old link. End users can find news and RSS feeds from other sites at other sites. These are especially utilitarian for mobile users trying to navigate without knowing how to type in urls via text tools or work their sparkly new phone.
4. Utilize FaceBook Properly
FaceBook is a great medium for social marketing, unless there is value reward or functionality with your end user’s “Like” click. Do they get points, offers, free coupons, or something? Make sure the offer is blended into a slogan or some type of marketing text aimed at the recreational “Like” clicker. Make your ‘Like” message domain name related. FaceBook users want to be the first in their group to know about the cool new thing, class, event, hobby, charity, or website concerning anything. Their announcement or url promotion can bring end users in droves to see what’s up. A cute domain name packs a lot of punch here.
5. Devise a Campus Campaign
Schools and college campuses are the target institutions of choice these days. Find a way that your website and its functions creates value and pinpoint ways to market to those users. Some campus newspapers and institutional trade publications may accept your ad. Your domain name should be prominently displayed. Bored students and people looking for another way to spend their time scan even back pages of trade journals and newspapers looking for something interesting. Your site or its optional participation entertainment give people “something to do”.
Upline Tracking
Tearing up the domain wires this weekend was the announcement that industry reports suggested the use of cookie tracking and invisible programming. Every domain name blog and e-commerce site took due note of the Namepros faux pas. Downstream clicks logins and transactions are not supposed to be tracked by any website bearing claims against such, per Google and other industry agreements and commerce regulations.
But Namepros.com, a particularly popular domainer chat and thread portal, has been fingered as being guilty of these practices. Namepros.com enjoys the bulk of domain name industry player traffic to a significant degree. If there was any customer base or site membership you would not want to get angry with you, it would be the domain name buyers and sellers and online commerce professionals that make up that site.
Cookie tracking exists. Is this a real surprise to domain name buyers and sellers? Probably not. But seasoned users of Namepros will remember how the terms of service include the fact that multiple accounts are verboten. There is actually a warning. This basically guarantees that some kind of black hat tracking was going on. And since tracking cookies are the only way to do that, it was fairly clear this was going on. But individual users still can clear their own cookies.
The trick for a lot of forum members is that they might worry if the domains they are looking at and the deals they are negotiating don’t get communicated to third parties. That’s always a possibility, especially when the players are known buyers with money to burn. Many of those individuals are operating under pseudonyms anyway. The big ticket domainers operate from behind brokers anyway. And it is not likely they would be unwise to let anything critical slip in instant message or email.
Frankly, my opinion is that domain forum mods are overworked. Actually tracking every user would be difficult because e visits would be so random. Just supervising all activity and guarding against spam is tough. Keeping out false registrations is time consuming. This kind of tracking sounds like a lot of work. I believe the most such data could be used for is predictive metrics of what threads mobilize users to leave the site. That’s not to say it’s right to operate in this manner.
When webmasters of any website evaluate traffic, they can have any number of reasons for doing so. To leap to the conclusion that this data is being used for some commercial profit is not right. Namepros is hardly the first choice of many domainers and function as a marketplace, and a secondary one at that. e that many sites perform under the radar operations of this sort. It is surGetting caught with their hand in the cookie jar will be the price that Namepros pays when domainers go there to log in and rethink their choice.
The Name of the Game
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.
Using Forums to Build Domain Value
A client of mine many years ago invested in a body of about 500 forum names. His plan was to bulk build out the forums for these domain names and then sell them to individual handpicked buyers. This effort met with the expected land rush of ambiguous ambivalence. With little t no promotion of the forums as individual entities with passion and special interest, there was almost no site growth. The clones just attracted spammers.
Forum themes and mods make forum website planning fun. But just establishing a forum application install is not “all she wrote” when it comes to forum domain names. These domainers appear to me like reclusive botanists who expect their exotic orchid to flourish inside a protected greenhouse sheltered from organic activity. Parking a domain name to me is the equivalent of locking the greenhouse door.
Domain values don’t grow in the dark. They need energy and light, vibrance and electricity to grow in value. End users must enjoy visiting the site and have something to do when they get there. Registration-enabled perks or features should reward new fans of the forum site. Promotion and marketing at certain key times can make a forum flash overnight into an online destination with demographics worldwide.
The forum itself needs to be fleshed out with topics and categories and posts. A sample batch of enterprise user names and sample posts sets the stage for a community to evolve. But encouragement is necessary. And imitating another board only works if the mania for the topic is white-hot (like for Twilight fans) or the graphic design and forum theme attracts fanboard moths (like for Twilight fans).
A domain name for a forum does not have to have the word “forum” in it. The words community, group, or board (or even bb) do tend to crop up. Any short niche word plus the “bb” in a dot-com domain name makes an extremely attractive and typable domain investment. The logo itself will be dynamic and fresh, even it is only a Cooltext.com conversion. One forum needs active linking to grow and find new viewers, if only to get palpable feedback on the site experience from a new visitor.
Forums were the way most online users hooked up with fellow fans before social media took over. But now that advertisers have soured the FaceBook game, MySpace has died a premature death, and hackers focus their lenses on FaceBook as a mining ground for individuals, online users are being interested once more by the semi-anonymous world of the forum posting again.
Forums can be references that get a lot of SEO query results. Posting articles and quizzes can make for a fun site walkthrough. Game cheat and directories of hard-to-find resources make excellent forum features. Community searchers are looking for the same thing. To get content ideas, Google search your site keywords and review the existing results and buld a better body of reference text.
A forum as a subfeature of a larger site is an excellent way to improve SEO. Hot topics are (ironically) Farmville and Mafia Wars. Quick blurbs of information come across as natural chat, and don’t need the support of a 500 word article around them to make the bots crawl faster. By making dsense code into posting incidences, and by incorporating posting tags and images (with tags), the SEO of the forum name and the parent site grows appreciably.
The one component for the potential success of a forum is that the user base is a prurient target. Some demographics, even niche user bases, don’t get online that much. Some professional groups and age layers in certain tranches of the consumer population either don’t have time or spend their texting social media. Luring away those users can be a futile effort, since the interactivity with their cellphone or mobile device is what empowers that traffic.
Certain user groups are always going to drill a little deeper. But enabling your forum to be mobile device accessible makes for even more potential visitors and members. But for the Internet surfer looking to make their mark or learn something about their favorite topic, the community website, bulletin board model, and forum domain are still a good choice for domain creation, name investment, partner project launches, and website development.
The Feng Shui of Domaining
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.
