Domain Owl

The good news about doing business online is that online Internet users are now conditioned to search, point and click. Tapping that instinct is the webmaster’s job. Tapping the webmaster’s talent is the domainer’s job. One way domainers can extract value fro their hosting dollar is to produce a blog. But many domain name buyers and sellers can’t leverage value from the blog or reap benefits. They try and try, but something gets lost in the mix. Yet domainers have profit and cost targets just like everyone else. Every blogger does.

Websites intend to communicate using words and images. Software to produce easily changeable websites were produced to ease this communication path to HTML publication online. Blogs, basic message boards with one or a team of authors, became functional for users to read and authors. Then blogs for profit started, to attract visitors and showcase ads, but few writers can garner the audience or channels the resources to turn a profit. The Internet is indeed full of dead blogs.

An online blog actually increases value over time, as its content get more clicked, more integrated into SEO databases and linked up elsewhere. But revenue hungry blog writers are constantly on the prowl for hosting-account-paying cash. And now newsletters are an option. Newsletters are publicizing marketing tools popular among savvy blog webmasters. The HTML templates are found everywhere. Mail servers, hosting accounts, or online sites can distribute them for you. Newsletters can be fun, satiric, comedic, newsworthy, or merely advertorial. The trick is how to implement them.

Newsletter distributions can hurt and help you. Not everyone who once read your domain (or any other type of) blog, and liked it enough to sign up, feels the same today. Not every past reader wants to get daily reminders you exist. Some days the inbox fills up too quickly and the guilty parties are an object of scorn. But a good way to split the difference is to address some of your best stuff, (in this case, surgically topical domain industry or SEO writings) to a subset of the readership audience. And bloggers should time the release to spike the readers’ interest, and salt and pepper the blog audience, not dump a pile of unread code in their spam folder.

Where is the profit for blogging and sending out newsletters? This can be done for a fee. But instead of limiting your readership (or membership) by implementing some kind of mechanical flytrap, use the power of suggestion. Gently (and only occasionally) remind your readers of the effort needed to fulfill their entertainment or information needs. Provide the supplemental or in-depth material only to those who sign up. Then follow up to your readers with a subtle  suggestion and a Paypal address. If your readers have even 20% of the goodwill you think they have, then for every hundred signups you might get perhaps $5 a month.

Let’s look at the metrics. For a blog with two thousand signups, that’s twenty groups of readers who might each generate (for a newsletter) ten out of a hundred reader signups. Ten times twenty is two hundred. Out of two hundred putative signups, using the 80/20 rule, 160 people will decline the opportunity to fork over any ducats, and maybe forty people will consider it. If forty people send you $5 even once, that’s $200 toward your enterprise hosting costs. And maybe publication of an eBook. If they make this decision over a year’s time, the blogger still clears costs and pays their way to a coffee or two.

Any any further offers, special content, or ideas and communication exchange between the subscribing parties is at the blogger’s (webmaster’s) discretion.

Continue Reading

In my endless slog of deleting emails that are useless and distracting in my inbox, I was shocked to see  Paypal email that usually signals a banking transaction or some other communication that begs my notice.  Paypal wanted me to know about international services possibilities and some urls they wanted to visit on their site. Are you f-ing kidding me?

I know for a fact I am one of the Paypal customers who have selected opt-out when their pointless self-publicizing emails are concerned. There is no justifiable reason I should be receiving anything from email at Paypal or that url and its origins that is not connected to my personal banking. Paypal is abusing its position as a trusted email sender at this point.

Spam is not banking. It’s advertising. And since they’ve already collected their slice of my earnings, I’d prefer it if they not waste my time.

Be advised this is a full-blown rant from a domainer who is offended that their bank sees fit to use its status as a must-read email source to flog their services. Hint: I am already a customer.

Paypal has no business using their connection to me an an electronic customer to wave their shingle and beg for more fees. Paypal takes a slice of whatever I earn and I have long gotten accustomed to accepting this as a cost of doing business with them. Apparently they are greedy for more fees and this is the  communication they have sent to me, using my email address and name, url links on their site that neither apply to be or my services.

That’s a greedy bank.

Paypal should know better. One of the last things I need to spend my time doing right now is weeding through their pointless “communications” unless they are regarding critical financial transactions and money issues. That’s why I open an email from Paypal. Not because I’m lonely and just can’t seem to find a single site online to look at.

Paypal is getting like Ebay now, where they fill your inbox with things you’d rather not see and daily weigh the utility of still being a customer. I would like Paypal to be a bank and operate like  a bank, and not be weighted down by its need for attention and traffic. Paypal is a site which should wait for when it is convenient for me to go there, and not distract me in the meantime.

Continue Reading

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

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

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

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

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

How did the sale pan out? It didn’t.

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

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

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

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

Continue Reading