John Khu is an author and also a seasoned professional with vast experience in expired domain name business. He is the owner of the path breaking web site called
http://www.expireddomaingains.com which provides complete and up-to-date information on expired domains and their eternal secrets.
How To Add Immense Value To Your Expired Domain By Buying Expired Domain Traffic
November 13, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
Sensible expired domain traders always realize the immense value of expired domain traffic and they also understand how expired domain traffic can supplement the overall value of the domain in providing a premium value that eventually helps them in getting the best possible monetary gains. You can make your expired domains prosperous, richer and healthier, when you import and supplement additional traffic to your domain; quality links and an organic type of traffic can help your domain automatically add better value and a premium tag. An expired domain with a big list of quality traffic and inbound links could be a big asset to your domain trading business. However, to make your ambitions a big reality, you may wish to find a practical way to pool traffic and links to enrich the expired domain.
Now, the big question is how you propose to bring quality traffic to your web domain Expired domain traffic will not just come trickling down to your web domain. To make it happen, you will need to create a solid action plan that aims at making people come visiting your web domain. There are several strategies and techniques that help you add traffic and links to your web domain. Here are some of the proven strategies and methods that empower you to import better quality traffic to your expired domain:
Approach Number 1: Buying an expired domain that already has some amount of traffic and inbound links is a viable option. However, finding such a domain is actually a tough task because of the intensive competition surrounding that domain. To ensure that you are buying a good expired domain, you can request for an expired domain appraisal report from the owner. In many cases, an expired domain name may have little amount of traffic attached to it; under such a scenario, you will need to look and examine closely at the uniqueness and specialty of the domain.
Approach Number 2: This is a roundabout way of developing expired domain traffic that needs some amount of time and money. It is also quite tedious and complicated task to add traffic and links to your expired domain. Domain parking is possibly one of the easiest methods to bring good quality traffic to your expired domain. The most beneficial aspect of this approach is the low cost involved in the exercise. Web portals like Sedo offers cheaper domain parking services that also provide a simple web template to make your prospective visitors to click on the page and lead them to another web site.
Approach Number 3: However, the quality of traffic generated here is quite inferior and many search engines may never rate this type of traffic. To bring high quality expired-domain traffic to your domain, you may also wish to set up a well designed and well conceived web portal. When you promote your web portal in a systematic and organized manner, people will come flocking to visit your web site, by typing the actual URL on the address bar of the web site; this type of traffic is true and real and it is highly organic in its nature. An effective Pay per lead program is another additional and lucrative program that could be a potentially powerful formula to create domain traffic as well as a small amount of income.
Approach Number 4: If you are short of good quality traffic, you can even buy a pack of quality expired domain traffic from a seller. However, you are never sure of the inherent quality of traffic purchased by you. In many cases, it may not even work to your benefit and expectations.
Adding value to your domain by importing high quality expired domain traffic means:
Creating a premium web domain that carries a top of the class commercial rating.
Setting up a well coordinated business opportunity that can provide you lucrative gains.
Learn and understand the insider secrets of using the expired domain traffic to its fullest possible extent.
Facebook 101 – Business Value
November 11, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
When talking about web 2.0 and social networks in particular, the first name that usually comes up is Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg’s brainchild currently has more than 100 million active users worldwide. The social networking giant acts just like all the others, in that users can create profiles, add friends, write on walls, upload photos and most importantly…POKE. These applications do not separate Facebook from competitors, like MySpace, but there are several factors that do. Firstly, the clean user interface came as a breath of fresh air to all the MySpace users who became aggravated by their cluttered profiles. Secondly, Facebook started out as a college student online social network, where members had to register with a .edu email address. The security Facebook instilled in their members came just at the right time in the market, as MySpace was becoming a haven for stalkers. Finally, Facebook opened up its doors to outside developers, who have created over 50,000 applications for the community. Applications have been developed, which allow members to send bumper stickers or find real estate listings. Their incredible success and mass utilization makes it a perfect web 2.0 tool for all types of businesses. Everyone understands the concept of Facebook, but few business professionals understand how their company can capitalize on utilization of the platform. This article will be your step-by-step guide for unlocking the hidden value of Facebook.Registration: The first thing to do for all new members is obviously registration. Once logged in, take a look around your home page and become familiar with the new feed. Your news feed will keep you up to date with all the actions of your friends. The setting can easily be changed if you only want to be notified of certain actions.Friend Requests: Once you have your bearings it is time to invite partners, friends and colleagues to become your friend. Now it is time to get down to business. Complete Profile Info: Fill out all the information in your profile exactly how you would with your LinkedIn Profile. Search engines are going to crawl this page, so you want as much professional information as possible, as it will help with your ranking. Add Application: Browse through the application gallery and add apps that you see useful. I recommend adding the RSS reader to your page and then linking your personal or corporate blog to it. This will drive traffic to your blog and will add another link to your blog. Another useful app to add is the Twitter app, which will directly feed all your twitters to your profile. Create Groups: Create a group for your whole company, departments or project teams. You can set these groups to private or leave them open for the public based on the reason the group was created. Applications can be added to groups if needed. Use the discussion forum and wall to quickly communicate with team members on specific projects or problems. Create Product/Service Fan Page: Establish your brand by creating a large following on Facebook. Fan Pages are vital because they allow consumers to communicate directly with the company and/or other consumers. If you just released a new product, your fan page can give you a great deal of value feedback, as most likely your fans will start discussions on the page. These pages also allow your consumers to be very hands on because they can upload pictures and videos. Advertising: Facebook makes all of its revenue from advertising and has developed quite the impressive ad platform. Depending on the size of your company, you can choose different types of advertising. Anyone can buy ads at any time by number of clicks or by number of impressions. When you run this type of ad, you choose what you want to advertise, type in the text of the ad, upload the photo for the ad, choose a social action, pick the location (worldwide, state, city), pick the sex, pick the age, type in keywords, set a daily budget, pick your max bid and finally choose your schedule. The social actions are stories about a user’s friends that are related to and displayed alongside your advertisement. You can select which pages or applications provide relevant social actions that can be paired with your ad. Another type of advertisement that larger companies use, links actions taken on a company’s website to actions taken on Facebook. If your friend rents a movie on Blockbuster.com, he/she can choose to share this on Facebook. If they choose yes and one of your friends likes the genre of movie you rented, an ad will appear in that friend’s news feed stating X rented Y movie from Blockbuster.com. The level of personalization Facebookhas created for their advertising platform separates them from other social networks. Insights: Along with the superior ad platform, Facebook has developed a powerful research platform to track the performance of your ads. You have access to data on activity, fan demographics, ad performance and trends. With this information, you are better equipped to improve your custom content on Facebook and adjust your ad targeting. Their robust database of authentic demographic information provides you with deep understanding of exactly who is engaging with your business and how. Best of all, this service is completely free. Application Creation: Another great way to promote your company is to develop a powerful application. With Facebook Platform, you can create applications that integrate deeply into Facebook, harness the power of the social graph and create new opportunities for you business. The platform provides you with all the necessary tools to quickly create custom experiences for users to interact with your business. There is currently over 400,000 registered developers on Facebook, so don’t wait any longer. As you now know, Facebook should not be taken lightly. It is one of the most powerful web 2.0 platforms available in the current market and all businesses should be implementing a few of these discussed steps. Social networks are not just for fun anymore, which is why companies like Ernst and Young, Apple and Nike all have strong presences on Facebook.
A specialty holdings firm based in Atlanta GA, Four Elements is comprised of young and talented individuals boasting a variety of skill sets in business development, creative design, and social media and marketing promotions. Founded by Maxwell Finn, Zeshan Muhammedi and Taylor Pemberton, Four Elements believes that every thriving entrepreneur and business deserves dedicated persons focused on building a sustainable business without having to visit a variety of companies. By bringing top tier ma
The Future Value Of Your Blog
November 2, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
All the hype about the sale of Weblogs Inc. to America Online (AOL) has given rise to the now famous question – How much is your blog worth? In acquiring Weblogs Inc., AOL has provided some concrete metrics to future valuation of blogs. How much will traditional media be willing to pay for a blog? Conversely, how much would you sell your blog for?
AOL-Weblogs Inc. Deal – Benchmark for Future Blog Valuation
Weblogs Inc was established by Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey in 2003. It is a network of blogs which includes under its wings successful blogs such as Engadget and Autoblog. Jason Calacanis pointed out that Weblogs Inc. earns in excess of $1 million yearly in Google Adsense revenues alone.
AOL purchased Weblogs Inc. for a confidential sum assessed at somewhere between $25 – $40 million. After said purchase, Tristan Louis came up with a blog valuation scheme based on the deal. He created a chart of blog value using the value of each inbound link to Weblogs Inc. as the basis. It is common knowledge that blog readers follow links. Search engines also act as users and primarily determine blog quality rankings based on linkage data thus direct and indirect value links are a great proxy for value measurement. In the blogosphere, conversations that nurture connectivity represented by links and indexes like Technorati give a vantage view of the value of a blog.
Tristan Louis itemized the publicly available data (list of blogs indexed) at Weblogs Inc. network including the number of inbound links (Technorati blog numbers) per blog divided by the purchase price to determine the value of an inbound link to a blog. At the rumored price of $25 million, the estimated value is $ 564 per link. At $30 million, it is $677.57 per link and $903.42 at an acquisition price of $40 million. Interestingly, the consumer segment chalks up the biggest percentage of linkage. Engadget represents over a third of the overall network traffic.
Applying Tristan Louis’s Weblogs Inc, sale, Dave Winer has also sold http://Weblogs.com to Verisign for a rumored price of around $2 million. Blog entrepreneur Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media has signed a deal with VNU Media to publish Gizmodo (gadget blog) across Europe in six languages. VNU Media is a leading worldwide information and media company which owns ACNielsen, Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter, among others. With this deal, blog publishing has hit big time.
However, the value of a blog is not calculated based solely on links using AOL’s purchase of Weblogs Inc. Jason Calacanis, the man behind Weblogs Inc., disputed using links alone as proxy for the value of the blog network. He reiterated that the acquisition price was based also on the ever reliable revenue, earnings, management and other metrics.
Tristan Louis based his valuation scheme on links to a blog but he also acknowledged the significance of technology, talented management team, financial performance and growth. There is direct correlation between links, traffic, revenue and earnings capacity of a blog or blog network but it takes sound management to maximize all these potentials.
Value of a Blog – Some Metrics to Consider
How much is your blog worth? There is no one standard gauge yet. But one way to measure the value is to look at certain factors to gain a better perspective on how to measure the future value of a blog.
Aside from number of links as mentioned earlier, traffic level is a key factor in determining blog value. Highly trafficked blogs definitely have a bigger potential for earning compared with those blogs with few readership. A blog’s success is highly dependent on visitors/readers. However, ascertaining the value of traffic is a thorny issue. Some bloggers value traffic anywhere from $3 to $10 per hit a day. From this data, a blog with 2000 unique visitors (page views) would be worth between $6000 to $20,000. The downside to this valuation approach is that some traffic is more valuable than others. A personal blog might have 1000 unique visitors but more difficult to convert to revenue than a blog with 1000 readers that blogs on the topic of digital cameras.
Aside from diverse traffic streams that come from bookmarks, direct links or RSS subscribers will make risk of losing traffic low. Social bookmarking sites are inching their way to becoming prime sources of traffic, with peer referral at times carrying more weight than search results. There are a number of well known bookmarking sites you should link to. Top bookmarking sites include Furl, http://del.icio.us, Diggs, to name a few. By leaving an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed, you can feed you readers’ desire for information. Visitors can get automatic updates whenever you provide new content. Having a fairly good base of bookmarkers and subscribers ensure a steady flow of fans and repeat readers – the all-important traffic.
In the blogosphere as in any other field, revenue or earnings is a major focus. a logical approach to blog valuation would be to base its worth upon current and projected earnings, assuming that your blog is earning something to start with. Again, there are varying views on how to use current earnings to measure a blog’s value.
Some bloggers opine you should expect six to eight months earnings as your blog value. A blog with a daily income of $150 would be worth between $27,000 – $36,000. Still, others determine a blog’s value as being two years of current earnings. A blog earning $150 a day would be worth $108,000. Again, there is a huge disparity between these methods of assessing value. Having diverse streams in the form of multiple affiliate programs also increases blog revenue. An affiliate program is an advertising model in which a blog owner markets via his blog a given product, on behalf of another company. The blog owner is reimbursed a percentage of all sales sold thru his affiliate link. Reimbursement rates can vary from 1% and upwards. Google Adsense is a prime example.
Visitors access blogs throughout the Internet primarily through search engines. If your blog does not have a post appearing in the top ten search engine rankings, the chances of visitors reaching your blog is low. A blog’s presence on relevant search engines is a significant medium for maintaining a blog’s success. Search engine ranking and pages indexed in search engines is critical for generating traffic to a blog. Having your blog among the top results of a search or receiving a high Google PageRank (a system for ranking blog posts) would increase your blog’s overall value.
High quality content will always be a key factor for determining a blog’s value. As has been said time and time again – Content is King. Moreover, search engines can only “read” a blog. What attracts a search engine are the words, the content of a blog that explains, informs, shares and educates readers. Good content increases blog value.
All these aforementioned objective metrics can be considered in assessing the value of a blog. Added to all these, a talented management team behind a blog, its underlying tools and blog technology in use can further help to estimate the future value of a blog.
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