24 August 2010 ~ 3 Comments

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.

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19 August 2010 ~ 15 Comments

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.

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06 August 2010 ~ 10 Comments

Nursing Domains

You can teach an old domain new tricks. Many years ago I had the opportunity to bid on some strategic ” nurse” names, domain names having to do with nursing and having NURS as part of the domain name morphology. But as the way of so many domainers the portfolio has thinned over the years.

One way the landscape of the domain world is changing is that development is hardly the shrug-and-begone effort it once was. Today free open source applications sturdy enough to hold thousands of viewers logged on are available for free, when in the early dawn of hosting and domaining immense investments n programming and coding and design were required.

Currently also video hosting and technology for mobile and voice applications spur new development for domains ideas that were once unaffordable pie in the sky. These names tended to sit in the “renew without review” pile for many years. After a while these names ran together in my mind and excessive spreadsheets were needed to organize them.

Many years ago I went through a names acquisition phase where many different types of domains were purchased as part of various trends. Each domainer follows their own drummer and where domain buying is involved the beat can get hot and heavy. The dispersal of them was painful like children at railway station partings.

One of these was a nursing name, a domain name having to do with the nursing field. Professional domains and the inevitable websites to follow were thought to be gold rush domains at the start of the Internet. Nursing is  hot occupational trend right now, as many private and public institutions know well. The publishing arm of the nursing and medical fields is a money maker, as those thick heavy nursing books cost big bucks.

Nursing was one of many domain trends hot a few years back, but just try finding one name with Nurse in it on a portfolio site of domains available name forum. I tried and came away with no results, even from portfolio name holders who had scads of names in the closet doing nothing. I happen to know that many nursing names I looked up and found available would have easily been in the $500 range five years ago.

I kind of wanted my old name back. Many of my names at that time operated from sort of keyword blend of important general tag nouns and trendy suffixes. I sold it later, wishing I had some ideas about how to develop it. At the time I didn’t personally know any nurses. Today my (former) domain name is parked and immobile, owned by someone who wouldn’t even answer my bid email.

That was then, this is now. I do know some nursing students and professional nurses now, and after hearing their stories I have decided to launch a nursing preparation site for individuals studying to be nurses or nurses with ongoing study responsibilities. A former black hole in my personal text writing knowledge base has been filled. I can know write some credible text for at least a minisite.

What is the potential audience for such a site? The impetus is on nursing students to master a huge amount of material and my site will service research requests for general and focused nursing information. But the viewer demographic doesn’t end there. Medical treatment lookups and general public searches for diseases and emergency treatment can populate the traffic graphs too.

Watch this space for development updates and traffic reports. And don’t ever give up on a concept you feel can make money. Some domains hold that old maxim true,  “You only go around once”. But sometimes, online, in the domain name and website development market, you can go around a second time. And it’s a hoot.

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09 July 2010 ~ 8 Comments

Domain Racing

Domains are like horses, they take investment, nourishment, training, supervision, contact with people and an opportunity to shine on the track. The domain “racing” attitude can be seen in everything from the domain name buyer’s assessment of the domain name’s “points’ to the resale value and aging potential of the value of any domain name.

Horses need nutrition, exercise, rest, training, and the right jockey. Starved horses don’t succeed, they just drop dead. Horses need the right feed and the right care to grow into blue ribbon winners. These horse racing industry dynamics can translate to the world of domains as content, test launching, SEO optimization and site plan grooming, and bandwidth and hosting provisioning.

Horses that can run are like domains that can attract traffic, keep viewers interested, and make consumers interact with commercial or monetary offers or ads that bring the domain name owner revenue. Domains that can “run” are catchy names, clear indicators of the content awaiting them, original material and derived from strong stock. A sponsor name across the saddle doesn’t mar the ability of the horse to race.

The right combination of people to bring a winner to the starting gate is the envy of any domainer. Site jockeys can ride the rails of affiliate ads, link building, and site optimization with skill.  Competitors are always chomping at the bit. Domains need discipline, not to sit in pasture idling away their years in parked pages. Pages fat with unneeded ads and filler won’t race competitively at all. Sites need the right webmaster and domainers are savvy to pursue this wisdom.

Domain racing is a challenging sport but a costly one. Thoroughbred names, like premium auction winners, can cost a lot of money to groom into money earning entities. Experienced domainers always have an eye out for the ‘dark horse’ domain that could net them a fortune. Like many horse racing agents, they scout out young domain talent to see what can be done to bring a new domain name into the senior cup winning form.

Many horse racing fans eye the “pink sheet”, the track betting notes, before a big set of stakes races. Domainers do the same thing for domain names at auction, checking stats, earnings, and provenance of names as well as their past history “on the track”. The knowledge particular to domaining, like horse racing, can pay off with the right set of contacts, advisors, and consulting experts.

Domainers need to be wary of domainer “horse dealers”, domain sellers who go flogging names of little value with falsified stats or claims of affiliate earnings without proof. The SEO or keyword factors are very much like bloodlines, and the provenance of other legacy names performing in the Internet domain world support continued investment in domain grooming.

Sometimes a domainer just feels lucky. Sometimes they want to know what it feels like to be a winner so bad they spend too much money on the wrong horse. Typos names, names purchased and developed for accidental traffic form well known proper domains names, might be said to be stakes horses. These names are practically a secondary marketing domaining, like low cost breeder racing and track traditions.

For a winning formula in domaining, newby domainers could do worse than look to the horse racing world for inspiring ideas about how to succeed in an industry crowded with competitors, fraught with luck, and dependent on the animal nature of the Internet “beast” to perform well at the right time. Timing the right domain name entry into the internet stakes can be a neck-and-neck fight to the finish.

As always, in domaining, “the horses are on the track”.

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01 July 2010 ~ 4 Comments

Retirement Domains

Some domainers need to make a small project their entry into the domaining and website creation. One great way to bring a domaining talent out from under shadow is to put focus on developing a retirement domain. A fresh new project can light the old domain fire and get some traffic burning to legacy sites already awaiting visitor traffic.

Retirement Lifestyle Domains are the hot market in developing websites and a cool name for a target demographic like future and current retired persons is a sure traffic aggregator. Crafting a keyword combination for “seniors” or retired persons gets practical traffic for articles and features. The readers will skim for their favorite topics, like crafting, sports, traveling, or finance.

Practical uses for the information take point of all content media. Can the snippet of information or how-to video go viral? Is the information exclusive to the website and thus be promoted elsewhere? Can it be easily printed? Do vendor know what to do with coupons or discount offers? Sites for seniors can be dating sites, political discussion sites or literary clubs. Seniors can check back to se if their favorite topic has been discussed or is coming up.

A retirement domain name makes a fresh and quickly growing site project. Making the content for a retirement edged website is easy. Senior citizens looking to retire and those that are currently retired want information on affordable locales, senior discount travel, and their related items specific to their age niche. Geographically specific retirement and seniors sites can be attractive venues for affiliates and coupon merchandisers.

Retirement names can open up new traffic to web links as well. Marrying keywords like “senior” and “retire” and “retirement” with city or geo specific names can appeal to investment domainers and name buyers alike. Lifestyles like recreational vehicle road warriors or houseboat owners can further develop any seniors niche for retirement specific content. Seniors have a lot of time to devote to nich lifestyles and more time to surf the web as well.

Retirement topics for news feeds and article posts are very broad. The interest is in relief from work, securement of monetary assets, continuing health, and ongoing recreational and hobby development. Medical news for a broad variety of ailments and healthy eating and exercise make endless topical editorial contributions retirement age seniors are eager to read.

Shifts and trends in retirement pastimes are news on seniors’ websites. What is the best place to take a cruise or retire around the world? Seniors and eligible retirees want to know. Contributions to the website may be involved at some point. Making a website from a name that signals receptivity to seniors interests and a domain they can spell and share with their peers is half the battle.

Marketing to seniors is a fast growing enterprise that entrepreneurs can make popular quickly because seniors belonging to groups, clubs, institutions or groups can spread the word. A seniors website or retirement niche domain can lead to a marketable entity and more resalable name.

Retirees can start up new businesses or become stock pickers. Senior citizens can run for office or go back to college. Not only do retired persons themselves review such sites, but relatives and friends can forward email traffic. A newby domainer could start a whole new career with a seniors name, even a retired domainer!

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14 June 2010 ~ 8 Comments

Domain Insider Tips for StartUps

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Every industry has its insider secrets. Domaining is the same way.  It takes time and experience to spot some of them. Not every domainer has a silver blog in his mouth, to coin a phrase. Some inside secrets on domaining some of the books , magazines, reviews and trade blogs will never tell you. To hit the ground running in the domain name game, you might try crawling first.

1. You Don’t Need Your Own Hosting Account

Chances are you probably know about three dozen people who already pay too much in too many different directions for hosting. Domainers are exactly guilty of this more than they would like to admit. Any value realization of this fixed ongoing monthly cost is welcome. This is how hosting companies make money, because nobody can optimize to the outer envelope of their server allocations (Usually).

Domainers who want the flexibility of the access time and files resources for implementing websites can be  short the necessary duration of time, so they are paying duplicate fees for stacked hosting, often with the same hosting company for duplicate names.  Some domainers may not even understand how duplicated their hosting resources are.

These hosting accounts have generous pockets or wide tranches of unused space in the file directories. There may be database allocations and bandwidth tolerances lying fallow (and feeding someone else’ s websites). Just forwarding a domain name for a while to a subfolder on a hosting account can launch a site without specific hosting expense.

Savvy webmasters and smart domain owners can barter clicks and mortar services or an I.O.U. for future advertising for some space on the hosting account. Tuning a site or installing an application, and learning the basics, can be done before the domain name or launch project has even been identified. This also gives  the administrator domain owner some “white noise” time to work without pressure of daily blog submissions or articles to publish.

2. Content Stems from Multiple Strategies

There are a variety of ways to generate a content plethora before the initial launch date of a blog or site application arrives. Once the site is launched, the SEO clock starts and the web starts churning investigative bots to extract keyword density and content attributes from existing text and updates. Experienced content makers know how to churn SEO-friendly content out that is both original and keyword dense, yet still appealing and readable.

Having a press release article ready, some url links to existing stories about you,   an “About Us’  text file,  some background on how the website idea got started and pictures or background material or history of the product or its practice can help. In the beginning, using news from other outlets is feasible if the “take” on the article is reported as original text by the (new) site author.

3. Imitation is the Most Efficient Form of Flattery

Imitating another site has its uses. It streamlines the production timeline of a site to zero and accelerates speed toward every other domain development benchmark and site growth goal.  Site architecture in original form can be problematic to conceive and rebuilding the wheel in terms of time absorption. By the time a site is ready to launch or in its first trimester, most features will have been tweaked out of recognition anyway.

If the skill set of the team lies in content and promotion, use the template, invent a logo for the domain name and move on. People can “see through” to the content. Web standards should prevail and code hacks and unique programming irregularities should be well thought out.

Working through site design hurdles shouldn’t involve heavy books and manuals and eyestrain and late nights. The heavy lifting of marketing a website and promoting a domain name  should be the link building and article submission for content, not tinkering with awkward code. This is a trap many domainers fall into.

Branding can come later. Many dominant companies have refashioned their online site colors and logo appeal over time. It’s best for the webmaster to get the hard stuff right, and leave the easy shopping to take care of itself. Fun new themes, avatars, colorations and icons are time consuming and consensus draining. Special typefaces and large images should be avoided for server side concerns.

4.  Skip the Jargon, Take the Cannolli

Every industry and especially online occupations have a herd mentality that gets carried away with itself.  Sometimes the online swirl of ideas and vibes and trends is moving too fast for a launching domainer to properly evaluate. The players are unknown and the impressions come thick and fast. Avoid leaping before you look.

Many domaining professionals will seek to sell you their services or wares before your site is ready or even if your platform or application is not right for what they offer.  The KISS mentality pervades for a reason. Others may not have your situation or understand your project boundaries. Keep to your domain development plan and only bring a new solution or custom addition into the mix if the idea lasts and won’t go away.

5. Write your own Ticket Regarding Service and Hiring Practices

Many products have hidden caveats and many services assume more knowledge and experience than you may have.  Don’t part with money until you have had time to evaluate testimonials, references, examples or project milestones. Use a banking service or credit card with buyer protection. Realize you become a vendor when completing services and a creditor when providing wares.

Use your best judgement hiring people online.  Don’t write a blank check to a programmer, hire an amateur without accountability,  or suspend passwords or administrative control over any accounts in doing so. Work with friends of friends and referred professionals with examples to show. To see if the contractor is genuine, start small and test the communication and see how the other party responds.

Work with tried and true service contractors and web development personnel who have executed results that please you.  Someone doesn’t need a Flash video to qualify to wash your car, but they might proffer some valid real proper names and phone numbers for jobs ranging in the hundreds of dollars to the thousands for critical and time sensitive website work.

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03 June 2010 ~ 6 Comments

Privacy Domains Hot

It’s always a good day to spin a new domain name out of trends, news, technology and consumerism. To be frank, I’m talking about domain names having to do with personal security, surfing privacy, identity theft and online malware and hacker attacks. In the online web browsing Internet surfing world we live in, awareness and proactive suppression of massive attacks on computers and directory process files is necessary.

Bots and rootkits and seeded access triggered malware is legion. Just going online without a security software screening network access, anonymous remailers, and fast-scanning device defenses is taking your computer’s productivity into your own hands. Identity theft and phishing, password scraping and bot attacks make the servers CnC smoke every minute. Adobe software and sites like FaceBpok face huge security threats from hackers.

Bot, script, host, server, secure, privacy. These are viably searched keywords and terms every curious Internet user will be checking out. Discoverability for security keywords is high. These dynamics and trends are ones that every computer owners or technology consumer wants to know more about. Identifying a term and making a website from a keyword domain involving security and/or privacy is a good idea right now.

Bots are a term most every computer user has heard of, but rarely knows what they are and what they do. Positive bots search the web for certain instances of code and keywords. Bots work for search engines, scrubbing down sites for data particles and relaying wanted information about the site. Reviews of anti-phishing and password detection products are in high demand form the search engines. This is the recipe for a great site.

Negative instances of bots are involved in the malware activity indicated. Command and Control servers govern bot activity once resident on host computers. Bots can report back when the active user is triggering sensitized processes and executing key target actions, like logging into a bank or accessing a secure government server. Just streaming a video from a site can infect the device via bot infection.

Malicious scripts, codes and hacks are are present on every computer currently than most owners realize. The active browser can screen several onclick or onload video actions and get clickjacked into popups or new windows. Bots such as Conficker and Storm can get loaded on the administrator’s or the PC user’s next startup routine. Malware can lie fallow in the background, collecting and reporting site and operational user data for future hacking use.

Free resources like Bothunter and others can slow or halt the incidence of server side or resident PC malware instances. Software such as anonymous remailers can utilize group network resources for shared bandwidth on an anonymity assured basis. Internet browser project teams and companies patches are constantly addressing these newly reported threats. But end users researchers are not the only web browsers whose inquiries heighten discoverability revenue opportunities.

Companies now use massive software arsenals to mount security campaigns against users who violate the company Internet policy. Simply by visiting suspect sites, these data scripts, malware instances and net bots can access browser cookie files, history and drive processes. Exiting personel, bitter employees, disgruntled workers can get sloppy or careless and bring down an entire system. These managers and IT staff browse the web constantly looking for security and privacy sites with good information.

Why shouldn’t it be yours?

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01 June 2010 ~ 7 Comments

To Typo or Not To Typo

Typo domain names are a curiosity in the web market. Domains are purchased with the aim in mind to grow their value via use online as a website url. But typo domains depend on a negative action to achieve their upside. Typing in a word they can’t quite remember, committing an error when spelling what they are typing into the address bar, or using a moniker for a longer term can result in some serious typo traffic.

This is especially true when the domain name is formed from a word that is hard to remember or the letters as they follow through the url word aren’t intuitively placed on a keyboard. the resulting error fixes a hit on the actual website domain url the mistyped word appears as. These types of domains get a sliver of the traffic actual destination domains do, but they derive significantly more traffic online than unpromoted site names.

The value of the educational practices of the global world at large is responsible for creating the world of typo domains and their associated resale market. Sometimes people are typing in a domain destination and they are distracted by a phone call or a conversation. Not everyone using a keyboard in today’s computer environment took formal typing courses. This yields a mainstream public of touch typists prone to errors.

The investment strategy for typo domains tends to fall into a cost per click analysis. This can mean the cost to the webmaster for each click that pays a profitable margin, or the cost per click to keep the website up and running. For a free parked page this cost per click is going to be much less than a constructed website. Unless the unwary domainer has fallen into the trap of the for-fee parked page.

Any profit model of development for a typo domain name should appreciate the interest the original correctly spelled domain name owner might feel about it. of course, the opportunity was always present for that domainer to have purchased close typos, a practice many experienced domainers know to do. Having typos of names a webmaster is intensely bringing to a launch is intelligent planning as it removes the risk of others from benefiting from your development effort.

Typo names have the benefit that can be created and purchased from a registrar at inception. So if a prominent new term or domain enters the SEO fray, an aggressive domainer can search the available names list or new name creation possibilities at a registrar and get the new. For this reason, aggressive domainers watch the traffic list and try to derive new typo names for resale to the typo domain market.

Surveying typo domain holders should be the practice of many big ticket name auction bidders. In the event of a resale campaign, the offers will be slim is this base is well covered.  Popular names so well known they are typed in are usually destinations like FaceBook, Twitter, etc. But typo domains can be place name typos like Duba.info for Dubai, a popular city in the Middle East.

Buyers of typo names are wise to review the unique visitors report, traffic volume over (seller) ownership and revenue from the name to date. this will qualify and underline any domain offer and start negotiation discussions that assume revenue will be constant or grow. The investment and short term gains and long money are about the same as the mainstream domain market except for really hot names and equally hot lawsuits pending.

Typo domains have their own subgenres and distinct buyers and sellers for certain types of typo names. Typo names from categories like generics, adult names, and other derivative in the keyword or domain word market. But some domaining experts warn domainers not to get into the typo domain market except for soundalikes of domains they already own.

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27 May 2010 ~ 9 Comments

Single or Multi-Domain Strategy

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A one domain strategy is a long game for those who have an investment view of finding return value on their domain name investment. One domain name with exceptional startup values, traffic, integrated SEO presence, domain ranking  and corporate or brandable name can be purchased using the entire investment nest egg or capital funding. A single domain can be a hobby or part time employment investment avenue.

A multiple domain name strategy includes various tools bought in bulk or employed over time in combination with one another that they return a  higher dollar value the one domain name itself. Not every name will benefit equally from like methods of marketing and promotion, yet every domain will feel some complementary benefit to the overall domain portfolio promotion strategy. The webmaster must administrate the content and keyword density efficiently.

Some names will have more traction than others from the get-go. Each domainer will have to decide if this means the “favorite son” gets more attention or less. Some domainers choose to focus on the most popular domain name in their stable. Some domainers try to shore up equal SEO results for equal time spent utilizing marketing and promotion tools.

Managing a domain portfolio takes planning, managing one domain requires simply attention to detail over various platforms and promotion campaigns. An approach to article writing for url promotion via resource quotation may not work for every domain keyword association. Domainers should evaluate their promotion skills and purchase domain names which can benefit best form each employment of their SEO optimization skill set and site content enhancement techniques.

Link building may not apply equally well over a broad array of domain names of various types. Some names may remain parked simply due to lack of time on the domainer’s part to develop them. Scheduled activities such as link building and article writing and submissions should be penciled out as far as time commitments go. The sum of many domain development parts equals much more than the sum of its SEO result.

Time assessment to develop should be an important element of additional domain name acquisition value analysis. A numerical domain or typo domain will not have the same branding appeal as a nonsense word with a catchy sound and funny onotomological effect. Domain names for best use are verbal and should encourage repetition and viral communication in an expanding loop outward. When end users stumble over difficult to pronounce or unknown domain names,for viral spread it’s game over.

Multiple domain investment will use up more time and absorb more attention than a single domain marketing project. Domainers should explore the full scope of domain name promotion and marketing options before considering themselves having tapped the full value of development potential. Experience using domain development applications, promotion websites, domain auctions, and online domain link building tools will factor into any domain name acquisition and business plan analysis and strategy further down the line.

A classic business error in the domain handling sciences is to quickly acquire many more names than the current time and resources of any domainer can reasonably develop to return value on time. A more wise domain name investment and development course is to hone SEO optimization skills and familiarize themselves with the necessary tools to promote a domain names value, and then multiply labor with supernumerary domain acquisitions.

Unless keyword and topic similarity are more than 80% congruent, each domain name’s value increase will depend on consistent SEO promotion. But a domain name traffic development strategy might take turns pointing each promoted domain name at another, thus algebraically transferring metrics of traffic while bolstering overall SEO domain name recognition.

One domain name can have multiple domain strategies, but the same domain names with the same marketing steps can be repeated over time and receive the value of an applied campaign to promote page rank escalation, SEO result optimization, Alexa categorical data fulfillment, and overall traffic increases. A social network campaign can follow these types of domain name development or operate congruently.

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22 May 2010 ~ 8 Comments

Domain Niche Marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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