Domain Owl

Once upon a time in domainland, a domain name such as a five character generic might be had for a song. Then came the land rush, the market flooded with buyers and sellers, arbitrageurs and entrepreneurs. The cycles of name selling fury and famine drove the domain name commodity around the globe. Soon, geographically specific domain names had their vogue. And target end user markets for every type of product or service, entertainment or activity rose just as geographically specific country codes came online as well.

Domain names today should come with a monetizing plan, a social network campaign, a end user participation strategy and a promotion timetable. The monetizing plan keeps the domain owner evaluating every effort to market and develop the site behind the name. A monetizing plan for the domain name should include the webmaster’s estimation of the earnings potential of a domain name as a resale target goal product, or a growing concern online. The social network campaign can reflect back on the system architecture and programming choices of the website developer.

An end user strategy for site interaction and participation can include social network promotion and communication throughputs, but it part of a larger whole. Who tells their friends about the site, and how? What kind of content prompts the reference of an article or url via email, Twitter, or FaceBook? What sets of users are evangelists, which digest the material and act on it, and which form a passive set of visitors? This brings into focus the change in available end user niche demographics now trolling the Web looking for place to surf.

The millennial niche consumer markets is reshaping food chain revenue volumes and it may be affecting small device and computer sales as well. Millennials are coming of age postcollege consumers with recreational incomes to spend but caveats previous groups didn’t have. The optimization of any such website marketing to Echo Boomers should integrate these factors into the look and feel of the website.

DINKS, Yuppies, and Baby Boomers did not have as many environmental and sustainability concerns in there foods as millennials. And a millennial niche market consumer will not be as likely to ignore chemical or medicinal warnings or aftereffects of certain types of chemical or preservatives in foods, products, home cleaning products, or clothing manufacturing processes or big box goods.

Millennials are also called Echo Boomers. The website of choice for a millennial will likely cater to a cause, which limits interaction to brief comments, ‘Like” actions, or donations, or will entertain the end user, with video or gaming content. Millennials are much more likely to type in a gossip website url as a news source than two thirds of older Internet users. Brand awareness of such a user group will include more website names than legacy product brands and site visits and searches shift toward clothing and media brands and trendy retailers than older groups.

The web user of today will likely expect a rationale behind a website and a way to interact with site instead of just encountering information and content the are expected to read. Audio and video enhancements flavor the experience in a way millennials like. The younger Internet user will be coming from sites where they are actively engaged in gaming, clicking, and watching moving pictures and animated ads. A site with “nothing to do” will bore this user from an interactivity standpoint. Millennials have a strong resonance with “MTV style content programming.

Webmasters can utilize ens user potential of millennials by exploiting the design to appeal to ease of use from mobile phone devices, cellphones, tablets and content enriched by updated media player upgrades. But millennial end users are also not shy about obtaining knowledge and participating in political or economic causes akin to their core values.

But future planning, like insurance and estate or financial affairs are not likely advertising successes for this user group. Matching millennials appeal website content and affiliates in site architecture that rewards search result lookups for this niche is key. i.e., Someone spending $6600 on a graphite hunting bow is not a match for a user who will spend $100 a month on digital downloadable game content.

Ad design and revenue potential for millennials sites should be carefully considered. Affiliate ads featuring teenage smartphones or senior disability living accessories are not good matches for content designed to attract millennials users. But products that utilize technology like digital or Mp3 content will be much more in line with this end user’s expectations and desires. Ads for TV shows or digital content can be very strong affiliate performers for programs and films that are marketed to this World Wide Web user segment.

Knowing which likely advertising offer users will click is key to implementing a monetization plan for a website or domain name. Since any buyer for that name will likely also intend the domain to be user for a similar purpose, grooming search engine results and navigable traffic to the site should be tailored to a likely demographic profile.

Social networking and TV-based content is a likely win for sites and domain names tailored to this group. Since millennials grew up with the Internet, likely sites to appeal to them will feature next-stage technology, products, and site design. Ad the entitlement so many critics attribute to this group with can work for domainers looking for product-related clicks and service offers on their millennials based web sites.

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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?

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Feel like your site has all the elements for success but it somehow remains a secret? Tired of hearing about social media but not sure if it can work for you. Use these methods to get get your online site message across when just owning the domain name and launching the site isn’t enough.

1. Tagline Your Hook

Get your site’s basic point into small simple reductio that travels well on Facebook, Twitter and other social media. The domain itself should point the way. Get ready to have it translated into other languages. Facebook is not only an English language site. The business card and the motto should quickly broadcast an available end user market and speak to them simply and  well. This will be instantly obvious to potential advertisers.

2. Look for New Niche User Groups

Skip personal network friending for people and their babysitter and their neighbor and their Farmville friends. Find the people the other sites are to big or too ignorant to find. The tattoo removal seekers who want Vegan options, The Linux programmers who want Linux only games, corporate human resources associates looking for software aptitude testing, pick your market. Think hard about who might feel your site is worth their interest, then leave no stone unturned finding them.

3. Tap The Trouble Nerve

People get anxious and motivated to act when they have a worry or concern activated. Transforming the site message into a warning (Clickjacker.com, Who’s Using Your Mouse Besides You?”, can bring users and originate a referral email sendalong. People flock to trouble faster than they flock to charity sites or feel good blogs. Make  a road accident disaster scenario and envelope your site’s solution into it, and let the end users come to rubberneck.

4. Provide a Solution

Find a way to get a demographic interested in your site to solve a problem, and power up the elbow grease to find them and notify them of your site’s existence and what it can do for them. The path to the solution should be gimmick free and easily navigable from the landing page. Is there a cost? Who does it help? Why does it work? A quick scan of the home page should let anybody solve the mystery.

5. Delegate the Message

Any website with a serious effort towards a social media marketing campaign needs ambassadors, messengers and key influencers. Guerrilla domainers want niche users and their broadcasters who will spread the message of your site in their own personal networks. Facebook is saturated with direct marketing everybody ignores. Let the key players and pied pipers do the work for you.

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Blogs are meant to be read. But where are all the readers? Readers can be people holding mobile phones, tablet users at the gas station (or in traffic), laptop users tapping at the library, students researching at the library, or Window 7 phone users trading apps on the screen in a coffee shop. These people Google, download and save to their hard drive or flash drive all the time.

This is the pool of computer users who may find their way to your blog.  The need for end users and site participants is on the mind of every webmaster. Where does these visitors come from and why don’t more of them stay at the blog site longer are the questions people want to know the answers to. This is a very simple recipe to get ideas about what subject matter to come up with for blog posts. Providing detailed, well written, accessible text content is what readers want. These posts give users the  answers they need.

Unless a blogger has a guaranteed reader base visiting daily, the majority of visits will come from search engine queries. If a webmaster has no visitors at the blog, it’s because no density in topicality is driving any results to a position high enough for anyone to take notice. This is the function of keyword density, and there are all kinds of ways to sneak it into a site in a manner that yields results.

Deep linking to other posts is a blog practice many bloggers ignore or seldom use. Installing the plugin with most popular archive blog post tiles can help do this. Links to other related posts, squeeze pages, and newsletter blasts of indexed blog entries can’t hurt. Squeeze pages are text and HTML pages composed for an exit process for the site. If different content is on the site, if there is a product offer, or if coupons or other limited time activities are possible, this is the place to let exiting visitors now.

Why plug in a most popular articles index at the front page column level? If a reader is skimming a blog post, they may skip over the next column and see something they want to read. Just by posting this indexed list of articles with links can be an article posted in the comments section of many sites online. Readers will appraise a site to see if it is a good place to revisit. A jumble of related titles lets them know more text is nearby without another search.

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So, you’ve got your handy-dandy domain name and the thrill of ownership is still upon you. It’s time to roll up your sleeves and get the ball rolling. But now there is a plenitude of choices. Do you throw up a quick and dirty bare-bones page, make a development site and fine tune the details? Or do you launch a full fledged website with a longer development cycle?

If you are actually logging into the your hosting account manager or interface, congratulate yourself. Many domainers never get around to putting up a construction sign, let alone laying a foundation. Aggressive domainers take active steps to development their name into an online destination right out of the chute. However in the eagerness to get a smooth site established, some shortcuts may cost you time in the long run.

A domain name pushed to a quick turnover will have less SEO to show for its ride. But a longer hosting commitment and more time in play requires additional content and updated features. A quicker turnaround might welcome a less generous bid. But other projects crowding the development calendar might motivate a busy domainer to sell outright.

Each domain can operate differently. Some will sell quickly, and others will age . Estimates and projections are appropriate. More development investment will hike the resale minimum reserve. Added sweeteners might get a better offer, like unpublished original articles to pend inside the application for immediate programmed launch. Affiliate codes for correlated products can’t hurt.

Packaging a site with a domain is a “business in a box” deal many at-home business startups might like to get behind the wheel of. Sites like Flippa.com both demonstrate and develop the buyer’s and seller’s market for such warez. A dependable development model to “flip” sites might work if the quality of the output is good enough. Just be certain all advertising text is legitimate.

These are the domainer’s development dilemmas. Not every domain decision will be contingent on opinion. Look at similar names, similar sites.  If no site name similar to yours has been vended before, you may have cornered the market on a niche domain. Niche domains need niche buyers. Getting ready to market to a niche buyer means surveying users and their likely target sponsors.

Niche buyers for a domain name might be one single sponsor or manufacturer of a related product (or service) whose main core demographic for purchase is the audience the content is aimed at. This is the theory, anyway. There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to domaining. Each webmaster crrates their own world.

If the domain buy was made with the intent to develop quickly, a calendar should be in effect to manage the creation of the logo, the main links, the initial affiliates or sponsors, and the main focus and SEO density of the text. Adsense code should be applied for and ready to in its respective boxes and containers. Likely the basis of most of this gestalt was formed when the domain buy was decided on.

One thing to consider seriously when deciding which direction to take the domain website development project is the likely statistics program or application that will be used to analyze traffic. Hits, bots and scrubbing SEO index checking references can’t work if nobody knows you are there. Traffic reports that help should be coordinated with the site buttons and counters that deliver data to the right legacy site or application for the analyzer.

Before offering the site for sale,  archive the entire domain/website “beast” and make an offline storage copy. This way no matter what acts of mischief the internet spies, corporate ninjas and malware assassins plug in, your product is intact and secure and still available for sale.

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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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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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Many domainers pass up fantastic deals on dropping app and other types of live build site potential names.  Serious domain money can be made constructing a destination that draws eyeballs. The new devices like mobile and new phones and portables need small screen apps to make the clicks flow easily. Think all the great apps are gone? Balderdash! if you are sitting on a snappy site or a cool domain name and you aren’t building or tweaking an app, you need to be put in the domainer penalty box.

1. Build an Iphone App

The surprising news about Iphone apps is that they aren’t original apps, just tweaked versions proofed as gateways to the real apps for device users to tap for use. Even a directory site of preferred iPhone apps by category (travel, business, music, entertainment0 makes a valuable resources for spot-bloggers or sometime readers who want one site to check to get the urls they need. Make a nonsense word domain name the brand and the app name.

2. Make a Walking Tour

Know those museum tours where people walk around with headphones on, absorbing the information without having to scan plaques or read brochures? Ever listened to or seen an awful piece of marketing material on a place you know like the back of your hand? You could probably spend one hour recording stream of consciousness memories and do it better. So go ahead, do it better.

And the market for directions is unbelievable. Last week I saw three different groups of drivers looking to connect to the Wi-Fi at  McDonald’s to get driving directions and hotels. Just verbal streaming of how to navigate local roads and offramps will be a huge attraction for visitors and tourists. Is it a California place? Offer the details En Espanol, hasta luego. You just got twice the clicks.

This is the way to wring value out of  a geo domain name. Those people leaning out of their car window to ask which way is North, where is the freeway, and how far is the Starbucks? Those are your target market. Hook the whole thing up to a recorded phone message. They can print 20 pieces of paper or dial a recorded version of your site or zip code at $2.50 a minute. Think of the possibilities…..

The only thing standing between your authorship of a walking (or driving) tour of anything, be it your hometown or any geographical attraction, is your making it. Work the microphone and upload the YouTube. Then link it up! Think how much easier tourists would rather listen to the list of available nearby restaurants than read it on a site. As some people say, it’s hard to get to Beverly Hills from Beverly Hills.  Lightbulb!

3. Make Your Passion Pay

Got keyboard habits that lead to Madden mischief? World of Warcraft warfare skimming your time away? Those Farmville elves on FaceBook sucking away the most creative part of your day? Make those hours (days, weeks) spent churning at a game pay off. Build a site with cheats, tips, personal anecdotes and tricks for new(b) players to learn by. Anything to do with gaming has wheels online right now.

4. Niche Targets

Niche hobbies like ballroom dancing to skeet shooting will want a presence and a community. And these community members will want sites that operate as portals to direct them to the best and latest resources online serving their interest. If you can’t find a good site for your chosen passion, chances are nobody has built it yet. Bringing one site link and short text entry a day to your hobby or niche interest blog and reviewing it can make a destination in three weeks.

5. Simplify Something Technical/Medical

Nobody’s got time to read the manual/desk reference anymore. But everyone’s got time to watch a few YouTubes and suck up the details. Shave away the gluck, and relate the necessary step/symptoms in English. Clarify and define new terms and features for any product/condition. Think about how painful it was to learn that simple trick or fact for dealing with a  problem. The information sharing will set you free.

What to use for ideas? Think about your own frustration points for installation, programming, and device fixing. Think about what symptoms alarm people. Give them a well to go to. People are scared of two things: Doctors and technology. You are not the first to feel the pain. Include an Adobe .pdf of the real brochure or links to the source for those who really want to drill down.

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