Domain Owl

Whenever I hear someone say “We’re working on the website” or “We haven’t decided which way to go with the domain name”, my domaining ears perk up. The expertise a career domainer can offer someone in this position is priceless. Fending off the domain name purchase is pointless, but so many great sites die in these birth pangs. Witness so many arbitration cases being lost because the domain owner dropped the ball very early in the value creation race. The real way to manufacture a domain sale for profit is the consulting or domain launch process for others.

The growth process for every domainer is different. People of different backgrounds and varying degrees of education and technical background can become domainers almost by accident. But like many businesses, the ability to profit comes from the ability to strike when the iron is hot. Waiting for the client to realize the “now” moment doesn’t work. Domainers need to groom their domain clients into realizing website plans online. Then the income building and profit making can begin.Domain names are not like new clothes, they derive value from use, not disuse.

And for a domainer, hearing the growing pains of a non-web savvy domain prospect is music to their ears. Because the domainer holds the upper hand and can educate the new business owner or operator about the ways their domain can grow as a business tool. Just the incentive to build a site and get a domain into the SEO mix is the impetus that drives the primary marketing effort of any domain name. Every business opportunity that is idling is actually a live business opportunity being strangled to death.

Business people or individual entrepreneurs tend to look for the money before they develop any content. This is a self -circular defeat mechanism, because how can there be affiliate programs, sponsors, microtransactions or paying memberships for a site that doesn’t exist? Building the content is always the most important primary step in building any website. Building a website is the primary component in growing domain value and building traffic statistics. Domainers can execute a site before any plans or agreements for ads or sponsors take place.

The cost of marketing s often overinflated. The reason viral marketing can fall flat is that promoting a website and domain name with little or no application value at the destination is fruitless. Referral traffic can make or break a new site, which is why niche audiences need to overlap. People are looking for things to do. The utmost business model online is to find a need and fill it. Find “x” domain to fit “y end user and create “z” application for the equation.

A huge error many would-be domain entrepreneurs make is anticipating stopgaps and blocks to their success before the intangibles even become defined. A failed imagination counts the hurdles, a strategic thinker calculates the potential for success. But partnering talent and handing off responsibilities makes a delegation opportunity for smart leaders with vision.

Groundbreaking websites weren’t built by individuals who quoted sound reasons for not going ahead with their project. Smart domainers know how to turn the “no” in this sentiment into a “yes”. Nobody ever made a lot of money following someone else’s roadmap. if the entity doesn’t exist, it’s because everyone else is waiting for another entrepreneur to cross the finish line to have a reason to start the race. Smart players get coaching advice, successful winners work with expert trainers, and ultimately, the best domainers go where they are needed the most, in development cycles stalled in doubt.

Even flawed organizations are kept alive by the quality of the strengths of the key players. Knowing when to attach advanced talent and utilize resources for advancing agenda items can’t be done if all planning is forestalled by anticipatory question that circle the drain powered by doubt and hesitation. Faint heart never won the day. Certainly not in domaining, anyway.

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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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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 world of online marketing and domain promotion operates with dollar signs in its crosshairs. Taking profit online is a guilt-free occupation. If responsible webmasters don’t position their sites and groom their online research for clicks and related revenue opportunities, the money can’t flow. But the tools to realize cash revenue can be unwieldy for domain name owners.

Digital goods can be electronically conveyed and charged for, and pathways to these thin margins of income can be loaded onto any site that takes the webmaster’s fancy, in any order they choose. But not every site has got its act together yet. Defining an image, offering a service, honing a brand, or establishing a foothold on a market niche takes work in the Internet world.

But the opportunity to partner with another webmaster, provide online profiles for clients and their websites or domain names, and/or consult with broker, auction or resale estimates for their names is everywhere on the domain forums and auction sites. These are some of the most basic and primary marketing and promotion services any domainer looks for.

1. Location Data Mining

The market for location data is expected to reach nearly $13 billion by 2014. ISP providers and Google can package your personal data and release it by court order or corporate policy. Geomapping and zip code data can provide a saleable database for future resale. Adding records via blog posts and article entries with associated table data relating to cities and zip codes can have value.

Online users have a research use for those types of data which makes any database containing it saleable. Building a database with sushi restaurants indexed by zip code, constructing an art and craft supply website with link urls to the major craft fairs and supply stores online, and focusing on building a nice database for a selected user niche for certain website’s services all have a value. Data mine for a target niche, and vend the data online.

2. Affiliate Revenues

With strategic and aggressive content composition effort built around a related domain name , a profitable website starts to take shape. When page ranking projects a competitive start value to ad placement, affiliate ads cane start racking up fees for clicks. But building a qualifying website that can deliver clicks and traffic to justify the hosting costs remains a task.

3. Sponsor Promotions

Individual and direct marketing sponsorships take work to negotiate and coordinate, but they can be well worth the trouble. Direct sponsorship ads have the benefit of being custom crafted with original graphics. But the hidden value of original executed sponsorship ads is the novelty value they will have, versus the ‘already seen that” presence so many affiliate ads languish in.

4. Domain Marketing for Resale

Many domain names are purchased for the sole goal of resale for profit. The portfolio of a domainer is rife with opportunities for strategic resale. The pricing and email campaign to market the domain, or the purposeful listing of the domain name at auction is the bottom line. But identifying likely domain name buyers from IP addresses and reference urls can also be likely.

5. Online Domain Name Promotion Services

Promoting a domain name, spreading links online, submitting urls and writing content are all ways to realize dollar value for efforts online. Take a visit to get Listed.org and scope a local business or your own firm. Missing a few entries or a zero result? Null presence on search engines is a bad sign. Just suggesting key information and basic facts can make visitors to a given website much happier.

Software for link and article submission and link building is only one way to make money online. Listing domain site abstracts and communicating a site’s main idea takes work. Making the site effective and optimizing traffic, SEO and hosting resources is a saleable job. Evaluate what skills you are good at and build a reportoire of online clients and sales. Tweaking blogs and delivering graphics are in-demand services webmaster need.

6. Brand/Service Creation and Promotion

Learning how to build Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube presences is an art. These setups can take time and effort not every webmaster has.   There is always one slice of the brand promotion pie a webmaster is loathe to execute on his own.  Once done effectively, the process or cluster of promotion tools can be enabled for others. Anything that saves time is of value to domainers, including auction droplist analysis and data collection.

Once a domainer can demonstrate to a webmaster they can imitate a result or deliver a product, they are in business. Writing a search code script, inventing a new animation, offering an online widget, anything the webmaster can do to provide a solution can work. Building a database of local business that will print a page of material for a flash drive or businesses with free babysitting  could be a Twitter superstar of tomorrow. If you build it, they will come.

Webmasters and domain owners can leverage an online or realtime user base, traffic volume, or demographic of site users to get clients or exercise site publicizing activities. Whatever “problem” one webmaster has, there are likely thousands standing behind them in line to solve it.

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