Let’s face it, image is exceptionally critical to any online business and domain names have their own brand image. Short domains, one word names with the dot com after them are in extreme demand. A domain name must be memorable and easy to remember because a domain name must be able to stand alone for any corporate to have its own online identity. Customer’s today type in the most used domain names simply from memory. A great domain name means search engines simply aren’t necessary.

Who are domainers?

Domainers are the professionals who deal in domain names. Domainers buy, sell, and develop domain names in a manner similar to real estate investors. Domainers generate revenue via domain parking, web-site development, and resale of domain names. Domainers are also sometimes referred to as domain investors, web site developers, domain registrants and commercial registrants.

As of December 2006 there are an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 individuals globally who make buying and selling domain names a part of their business. USA Today reported that many Domainers prefer to remain anonymous due to the highly competitive nature of their business[1]

2. What is pay per click advertising?

Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising technique used on websites, advertising networks, and search engines.

Advertisers bid on “keywords” that they believe their target market (people they think would be interested in their offer) would type in the search bar when they are looking for their type of product or service. For example, if an advertiser sells red widgets, he/she would bid on the keyword “red widgets”, hoping a user would type those words in the search bar, see their ad, click on it and buy.

These ads are called “sponsored links” or “sponsored ads” and appear next to and sometimes above the natural or organic results on the page. The advertiser pays only when the user clicks on the ad.

While many companies exist in this space, Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing, which was formerly Overture, are the largest network operators as of 2006. In the spring of 2006, MSN started beta testing their own in-house service, MSN adCenter. Arguably this advertising model may be open to abuse through click fraud, although recently Google and other search engines have implemented automated systems to guard against this.

3. What is direct navigation?

Direct navigation describes the method individuals use to navigate the Internet in order to arrive at specific websites. Direct navigation is a new, loosely defined term, which is generally understood to include type-in traffic and bookmarked traffic. This involves an internet user navigating to a website directly through the website address bar, bypassing any online search engines and navigating directly to the domain.

WebSideStory has recently published a report illustrating that direct navigation traffic, converts into sales for advertisers at a rate twice that of search engines.[1] Specifically, the Q4 2005 study of internet traffic, revealed that direct navigation traffic such as browser type-in traffic, bookmarks of existing sites and visits to existing, known website domain names converts into sales for advertisers at 4.23% of total visits compared to 2.3% for product and service related searches performed via the search box at search engines such as Google and Yahoo.[1]

Do you have skills predicting future trends? What names might be big in the next few years if a woman or a black man were elected president, if an issue other than terrorism begins to creep into the world psyche? If green becomes in or America revamps its health care system what will be the key domain names that will represent the future? What names today represent a great business opportunities for you tomorrow?

1. Treat it like a business. The purpose of every business is to make money. Therefore, if you want your blog to be profitable, then you have to run it like a business. That doesn’t mean you have to hire employees, or anything like that, but rather that you need to take it seriously, and be willing to invest some time, money and resources to make it successful.

2. Have a plan. You may as well start off on the right foot. The vast majority of successful businesses began with a written business plan. Try to be as specific as you can. How will you generate income? Who are your visitors? What percentage are likely to click on ads or buy something? How will you get traffic to your blog? What is your marketing plan? These are only a few of the questions you should answer.

3. Free isn’t always best. Blogger.com and WordPress.com have made it easy for anybody to start a blog for free. There is nothing wrong with using free blog services to learn about blogging. However, you will have less control over your blog if you host it on those sites. Yes, it’s free, but they can also remove your blog without any warning, and that’s not good for blogging for profit.

4. Invest a little. Okay, so going the free routine isn’t good for business, but what’s the other option? The good news is that you don’t have to pay anything to Blogger or WordPress to use their blogging platforms. However, you should set them up on your own domain name and hosting. You should be able to get a new domain name for under $10 per year, and decent hosting can be found for as little as $10 per month. That’s almost nothing when compared to starting a traditional business.

5. Monetize it. There are two main ways people use to generate income from their blogs. The first is by selling affiliate products. This is where you get a percentage of each sale for selling someone else’s product. You will get a special link that identifies you as the seller, so they know you made the sale. The second way of monetization is Google AdSense. You sign up for their program, then add a snippet of code to your blog. They will then add targeted ads, and you get money every time one of your visitors clicks on an ad.

Perhaps this is because the return on the investment of your advertising dollars goes further online than just about anywhere else. Not only that, it’s very easy to track your results when you advertise on the internet. And the tracking can be much more specific when compared to offline ads. For example, you can find out exactly where each visitor is from, information about their computer, what time they visited your website, how long they stayed, and the list goes on. It would be virtually impossible to do this with any of the traditional marketing methods.

If you have been thinking about advertising on the internet, then you have probably heard about using social networking as a free marketing option. The good news is that it can, and does work. However, the general rule of thumb is that the less you invest in online advertising, the longer it will take to see results. That doesn’t mean you should skip social sites for marketing, far from it, but be prepared for it to take a while to see an increase in your profits.

Continuing with social networking sites as an example. They are free to use, but you will have to post to them regularly. This takes time. You then need to work on positioning your business as a top resource for whatever it is that you’re selling. You can do this by becoming a noted expert in the field, which also takes time. But, once you start gaining traction, your followers will start recommending you to their friends, and you can experience exponential growth before you know it.

On the end of internet advertising business are the paid options. We’ll use pay per click (commonly referred to as PPC) for an example. This is where you pay for each click somebody makes on your ad on a search engine. However, a lot of the search engine’s visitors won’t even know it’s an ad. Let’s say you’re selling table lamps, you would select keywords (the terms people enter into the search engines for information) that best match your business. You will then pay the search engine you have a PPC arrangement with each time somebody clicks on your paid ad. How much you pay per click will largely depend on how competitive the keyword is.

PPC can be somewhat risky if you don’t know what you’re doing, but most places will allow you to set a daily cap on your pay per click spending. This will help you keep your budget under control as you learn how to do it better, and until you start seeing solid results; at which point you can invest more in your internet advertising business choices.

What this means to any business – online or off – is that there’s a congregation of potential customers just browsing these sites in their idle hours when they might be bored and have nothing else to do. This is a perfect opportunity to drop a bee in their bonnet about you and your business. Thousands of companies have done this, and thousands have found success.

However, for an offline business attempting to tackle the social media market, you’ll have an easier time of it if you approach it with the proper attitude. While both online and offline businesses will use social media as a way to engage the customer, the online business deals with social media the way that an offline business would have television ads. It’s a straight way to the sale, since a customer visiting an online business’ site is doing the closest thing to physically visiting the business itself.

If you have an offline business, this is not the case, as the customer is ostensibly at a computer and not at your physical place of business while browsing social networking sites. It’s important to consider this difference and use it to take a different approach to advertising your offline business using social media. While an online business is bringing customers to the storefront, you should be looking to create an impression of your business and try to entice them to come to the physical store.

While it is definitely advantageous to consider making an online version of your site for ease of purchasing, you want to have the customer come to your physical store. This means creating awareness of your products, brand, content, and expertise – and creating that drive to experience the whole package by going to your store.

While it’s likely that the most profitable way for offline business to generate customers in terms of long-term revenue is still offline, the virtual market is taking off fast, and it’s likely that the current state of affairs will change over the next five years. Now is a good time to get involved with marketing through social media and figuring out how it can best serve your offline business before it takes off to a whole new level.

The top two ways to profit from your list are also the easiest, so let’s look at them:

1. Build trust and loyalty among your customers. Your customers will not buy from you unless you are able to prove your worthiness. So, you have to spend notable time working to build their trust. You can do this many ways. You can join forums that talk about the products or service industry you have an interest in, and look for experts in your field to offer their advice and recommendations to your subscriber list.

Also, make sure your website is clear and offers your visitors relevant and important information they will find helpful during their journey. If you are practicing affiliate marketing, and even if you are not, make sure you tested or tried any products you plan to sell so you can provide your subscribers honest reviews of them. This is the #1-way to build trust, and trust always leads to higher profit margins.

You should also build a user-friendly website, one that has a navigation bar placed in a prominent location. Make sure you provide your customers with a contact us page and always respond to customer or visitor inquiries within 48 hours if this is possible. The sooner you get back with your visitors, the better reputation you will build.

When responding to customer’s that contact you through your website, make sure that you remind them to sign up for your free newsletter if they haven’t already, which will contain more information on the subject they are looking for. Don’t automatically assume they want to be subscribed to your newsletter just because they asked a question on the topic. Tell them what your newsletter offers, and how they can subscribe.

When you build trust and loyalty, your customers are also more likely to refer your business to their friends and their family. Some web owners design a page after the order page that allows the customer to input the names and emails of two to three of their friends that might also be interested in your products. This is another simple way to build your list. Make sure you provide them an incentive for checking you out, in the way of a free report, book, checklist or newsletter subscription.

2. Fulfill your subscriber’s needs. Everyone has needs. The whole point of doing business on the web is to fulfill the needs of people surfing the Internet. If you want to make money selling a product or a service, you first have to find out how that product or service will fill your prospect’s needs. How will they benefit from the product or service you offer? Have other people benefited? If so, how and why? Providing your customers with this information will help you create a profitable opt-in list, one that will transform visitors into paying customers.

One of the simplest ways to tell your customers how you can fulfill their needs is by listing the ways you do this on your landing page, or on another prominent place on your website. Make sure you bullet each benefit and explain to the prospect exactly how you plan to serve them, and why your product or service is better than that of the competition.

The more content you provide, the more secure your customer will feel about their purchase. They are also more inclined to believe you are fulfilling a need they have.

Let us take a moment to look at the first bullet, trust. Many people fear that building trust among strangers will prove difficult. Realistically speaking, anyone can build trust easily. How do you build trust?

First, run a legitimate business that you know something about. Don’t try selling aromatherapy to someone just because it is a hot trend. You have to know what you are selling to sell it well. Next, if you want to encourage your customers to buy, offer them some form of guarantee. You can for example, offer them a 90-Day money-back guarantee on any products they use on your site, provided they use the products in the time frame appointed and have a legitimate reason for returning them.

Statistics show that even when customers do not feel satisfied with a product they will often not return it because they either (1) forget about it or (2) are too busy to mess with it. Nonetheless, when you build a guarantee into your sale, you put your customer’s mind at ease, and they consider their purchase less risky.

Lastly, provide your customer’s helpful hints and guidelines that will help them get the most benefit from your product. This shows your customer you have a vested interest in helping them succeed. This builds trust and loyalty, and converts subscribers to buyers. That is your goal to begin with.

One such trend is the use of the web for targeting your market locally, nationally, or internationally. This can be achieved through pay per click advertising (also known as PPC). There is a myth that PPC is risky and expensive. While that can be true for those who don’t understand how it works, the truth is that PPC can be a great way to increase your profits. The best part is that you don’t need a big budget to get started. You can simply start small, then ramp up your efforts as you generate more revenue with your PPC efforts.

PPC really comes down to selecting the right keywords. In basic terms, keywords are those terms your potential customers will be entering into the search engines for more information. Therefore, you need to give careful thought to which keywords and phrases you want to be associated with. That means you shouldn’t be looking only at the cost to you per click. Sure, you may be able to find a great deal on a low-competition keyword, but if it’s not a good match for your business, then you are only throwing your money away.

The good news is that you can find out what the top keywords being searched for are. Again, don’t just select a keyword because a lot of people are using it. You need to also consider your specific needs, and what your customers are looking for. For example, if you are selling custom-made, luxury yachts, then you wouldn’t want to select “used boats”, “cheap boats” or “second hand yachts” for your keywords–even if they get a ton of searches and have a low per-click cost–because they aren’t what your ideal customer would be searching for.

Pay per click is one of the internet advertising trends that is too effective to pass up, but it isn’t the only trend you should be plugging into. Another one of the big ones is the use of social networking sites. While most people are familiar with sites like Facebook for staying in touch with family and friends, such sites also provide enormous benefits for marketing your business. Make it easy for people to add you to their contact lists.

However, don’t think you can just keep blasting them with your marketing message. Instead, try to foster relationships with the people who have added you. Also, anything you can do to get them to interact will help you establish yourself as the go-to source in their eyes.

We have only covered two examples of internet advertising trends, but there are more, and who knows what the future has in store. Do your best to stay informed of any new opportunities that come along, and be ready to take advantage of them if they’re a good fit for your business.

1. Is the release brand new? If the latest WordPress release is brand new you might want to hold off for awhile. They do a great job of testing and re-testing their releases. Going live always brings up a hiccup or two, it is just the nature of the beast. If you hold off a week or two that will give the WordPress development team time to address any bugs. So for example, instead of upgrading to WordPress 3.0 maybe wait a couple days and see if WordPress 3.1 is going to come out.

2. Backup! Yeah i will admit I have upgraded WordPress before without backing up, and nothing happened. Why tempt fate though? Why take the chance. I know I never want to be the guy on WordPress support forums saying “I didn’t back up my site but…” Make sure you back up your site before an upgrade.

I usually use the cPanel of my host to create a database backup. You will have to figure out how your host handles back ups. I also back up my wp-content folder by downloading it via FTP. I zip it and create a copy to store a couple different places. Lastly, I do an export from the back office of WordPress. I navigate to Tools and then Export. This way I get a small XML file that will cover all of my pages, posts and comments.

3. Plugin Compatibility – One of the best reasons for waiting to see if a release is stable is that it gives plugin developers a chance to catch up. When you upgrade there is always the chance your plugins won’t make it. If you have a certain plugin that you find indispensable, you might want to monitor it to see if it gets updated to match the WordPress upgrade. Some plugins will work fine anyways, and if you keep an eye on the plugin homepage or forums you will find that out as well.

If you remember these three steps or rules, you will have no problem with your WordPress updates. The biggest key is to back up! Years of hard work can be flushed down the toilet if you don’t! Enjoy your WordPress site and may all your updates be smooth and trouble free!