Domain Owl

Sometimes just deciding what name to buy from a droplist or domain auction can get overwhelming. The following five items are ways to analyze the financial throughput of a name and its likely appeal to buyers down the road. When appraising a domain name you want to buy, check over these characteristics of a good domain name.
1. Is the Pitch for It “good in a room”?
Formulate the elevator pitch for th domain name or development idea. These days people understand very quickly the marriage of a website app, the domain name, and the scripted code programming undercarriage of development that forms their union. Every pitch will springboard into a new further development. If you talk to a store clerk or a fast food cashier and they “get it” in under 5 seconds, you are good to go. In fact, the more pitches you polish, the more the Q and A can develop your idea and move you to the next step.
2. Is there a Facebook Strategy ?
Facebook has become so omnipresent online employees may be starting to call Mark Zuckerberg ‘Bill”. But it’s doubtful even Zuckerberg could have foreseen the instant absorption of Facebook into familial communication, work relationships, sunrise hoops squads, cheerleading pep sessions, and World of Warcraft leagues. Right now people are making movies to launch on Facebook to attract attention. A cool factor, a gadget factor, a tech factor, anything that plays across personal networks to a niche crowd can work.
Facebook does not bow to many external controls, so working with it is mandatory. Test how you Twitter and tweak your Facebook page to a clean first impression. Keep in mind, many “sign up with Facebook” login scripts don’t work, even on huge multimedia sites. Sometimes business partners are just farming for data. Unless you are a big swinging dictator of online affiliate marketing, or can partner with Facebook is some way, your advertising and retail spending may have just been allocated 150%.
3. Feminine Appeal
Does the domain name/idea appeal to women? A lot of women don’t go to websites that don’t appeal to women. But about 85% of the men domainers I talk to have ideas for male based demographic end user sites. But what about the women? Domainers should develop a tangent for women to interact or a talking point that might sway potential social networking for women. Is the site a jumping off point for online mass collaboration?
Domain development and website traffic today is about niche users, end user marketing, and site appeal for demographic specific users, be it geo-specific, age specific, or qualititatively specific, like a site for patients with a medical problem or a set of FAQs about a computer operability issue. Women in Egypt may want to learn more about the three basket factor and the “Rich Dad” myth. Emotional branding and website bounce can be your friend as well as theirs.
Media is a huge content driver in websites. Lots of women worldwide can’t even access secondary school for study of economics, business, accounting or corporate communications. But they may find their way to a computer terminal somewhere, or a smart phone. And don’t forget, women can be partners and investors in a site they like. And they can be participants and web administrators helping you run the site from across the planet.
Women use the internet double timing home management responsibilities and domestic diva-dom. Think about the market globally for translated advanced business cribs or study tips. Middle Eastern and foreign character language country code domains have huge growth potential especially in translation or using third party website applications that have packages for foreign language utility.
4. Check the Competition
I looked up several domain names this morning related to gaming. Not surprisingly, most of the keyword combinations I searched for at Network Solutions were taken. That tells me I am onto something. Checking further, I glimpsed a kaleidoscope of parked pages but no revenue bearing home pages of a site with ads and content. That means with one day’s WordPress development I am in first place for SEO for those keywords. Definitely a buy.
5. Fringe Elements
When looking to acquire a domain name and the consequent development project, be on the lookout for copyright or trademarks words in the domain. Use online sources to check. The dogs of war are snapping at the heels of trademark infringers and copyright derived hijacked traffic. Don’t get WIPO’d out and challenged with expensive UDRP legalities. Perform the due diigence now required for any forward motion on a domain name in the online business space. One qualified dispute action and you slide down the chute back to ground zero.

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Have you gotten bogged down with everyday activities and missed a prime domain name deleting from your hosting or registrar account? Assigning an old email address, spam filtering, and the wearying upsell chain of emails from your hosting account and registrar can make even the savviest domainer skip any subject lines from those domain auto-generation lists.

Make a spreadsheet or get a small notebook. On each page (or in each column) write down the name of the domain you bought, the place you purchased it, how much, and the expiration date. If you have the Paypal address or the email contact and name of the person who sold it to you, this could be queried later on if there is a contested name change.

If you used an online forum, resales portal or auction house, get the user name and note whether or not the person exchanged proper trader rating data. Selling a domain name can be something that domain owners trumpet to the skies, especially if they made a profit. Following the purchase, Google the domain name to see if any comments (or protests) regarding the domain name sale have been published online.

The domain purchase price becomes the new start value for the domain. Every marketing cost or time investment must evaluated for change in domain value from here on in. Don’t use any other projected values discussed in the negotiation phase of acquiring the domain. Those are not concrete. Your goal is to change this domain name purchase value and increase it until the name can be marketed for resale.

Create  a page in the notebook or spreadsheet for domain traffic and SEO measurements. It is worthwhile to note online metrics generators searches for the name on such and such a date, and tabulate changes at these same generators for the name later on. If you jump around using sweetheart sites to get the values you want, the data validity won’t be as strong as all values over time.

As stated, the domain purchase price is the establishing value. This value can be inserted into a variety of formulas. These formulas can be used to generate reports for domain name auction or resale data later on. By establishing an origin data point for all your domain calculations from then on, you can make a quarterly growth table for all the values. These would be traffic, new user signups, offer inquiries, or ad responses and Google revenues.

The notebook domaining method can be used if you only have one or two domains and don’t feel a need to mechanize the data. But it gets easier as you buy more domains to just add the basic information and let legacy formulas through the sreadsheet take over the work for you. Also, exporting data be  comes easier to cut and paste into a computerized spreadsheet, especially if you are catching up.

Regarding domain name expirations; If you outline the Expiry date in red, or sort regularly once a week to check domain name expirations in the spreadsheet, you do a quick check for renewals due, So, when the panic strikes in the middle of the night your most valuable domain is slipping away through the droplist, you can flip pages or scan the top dates for calmness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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