Congratulations, you've bought a domain name!

[myst woman]

Congratulations, you've bought a domain name!

Now what are you going to do with it?

The best strategy of buying a domain name is to leverage core competencies like forum building or clever graphic or even appealing content. Just deciding how to go forward with a domain name development strategy is complex enough when you have an idea. Perhaps the opportunism of buying the domain name overcame any reasonable idea of what to do with it. Without a well-planned timetable of effort toward website construction and adequate resources, a domain name is a lottery ticket dependent on luck,

But if you draw a blank, the domain is sitting in a "hold pattern" and sacrificing traffic aggregation and SEO notice. Sadly, this is a common domain development trajectory when content-challenged webmasters embroider favorite sites and leave the harvest from other names barren. By concentrating on just one part of a website, feature-rich modules will start to meet the same development aspect as the rest of the site. By committing to content in the form of a keyword rich forum, an article archive, or blog updated daily, the core subject and content offering to the viewer emerges.

Here are some domain name and website development strategies in case you are a new domainer and are looking to start your first project series. These projects assume resources in plenitude for web hosting, a domain name purchase, and enough internet access and computing efficiency to launch an online presence adequately. A potential webmasters should consider how much time each project application requires, what is the cost return on effort expended in time and money.

1. Blog

Blogs can be very purposeful marketing devices or pointless, stream of consciousness rants that absorb reader time. They can also be RSS feed fodder. You can Twitter a blog (if your fingers have the stamina). There is a lot of online advice and support available for weblog software and applications like Blogger, WordPress, and others online. Many allow a blog for free use to some users. Learning as you go is a good speed for blogging. This can groom editing and content submission skills without taxing your budget. Themes and graphics implementation skills build with every posting.

2. News Site

A news site is an excellent way to build web site grooming skills and HTML based website management. These beginner text editing and keyword tagging skills will begin to develop the advanced abilities that can be carried to other website projects in future. Also these tasks give a webmaster an idea how long average entries might need to administrate on a regular basis.

News articles are all about the facts and should take a minimum of creativity to edit. News sources should be reliable agencies. Formatting, ad code, online research, and the mechanics of site ranking and page rank tools can make a news site profitable and dynamic. A proper news site follows the journalistic ethic of Who, What, When, Where and How?.

3. Content Aggregator

Content Aggregators are different from news sites because the scope of the topics can be anything and usually encompass much more than news style articles. Features, sports, opinion, and business are all news topics but the style of the article can provide more agreeable creativity. The closer the main subject and title of each article or blurb winds to the main core, the better search result is intended.

Even by today's flexible standards, a content aggregator can amass an admirable skeleton of content on a predefined set of topics faster than one or several people might. Content aggregators can match domain name or user generated keywords and collect and publish articles of these topics as a function of the site script. Scripts or lengths of code necessary to these special features can be edited to vary sources or keywords for feeds, news agency scanning, and submission to categories within the site.

4. Discussion Forum

Discussion forums are online communities with topic or subject related sections of discussions and questions, activities, quotes, surveys, and links and other features built around a single theme. The discussion forum theme might be a television show, a product (like an Ipod), a technology (like quantum physics) or whatever the rest of the wbsite is about. "Bare-bones" forums have very few features and it is suggestible that such a forum is very 'young" or so limited by its server capacity. Stripped down forums indicate instability and reduction in options for participation due to complete or corrupt programming.

Many webmasters introduce a series of feature pages inside the greater website architecture. The discussion forum page allows visitors to login and become part of a community unified by interest and enthusiasm in the one main topical subject. Discussion Forums also functions as the easy reading version of a product site or FAQ nobody really wants to read. Forums provide lots of answers for searching owners/operators/fans of whatever they need to know. Every user on a discussion forum is in some stage of knowledge or development about the topic.

5. Image Gallery

Image galleries attract visitors through search engine results to the gallery images. Visitors can leave comments, rate photos by stars from a value of 1 to 5, and form their own gallery for others to browse. Image galleries can be very easy for new members, visitors, and photography and graphic design buffs to show off their wares. The storage capacity and bandwidth will frame the offering and participation options for site visitors. When subjects are sorted by topic, such a website can function as a low cost legal vending portal for photographers and image file buyers. This is known as a "microstock" site.

6. Portal

A portal is a super website of many diverse elements and attractions sewn up under one surface or "landing page". Menus, (or interfaces imaged with mouseover click programming) that lead to a subfeature of that site underly the main site plan. Menus allow the sites, top, and lower part of the portal page to operate as windows into additional website experiences. Superportals incorporate special themes and "skins', graphically customized visuals, that reveal outward facing possibilities for site enjoyment. The race for the most stunningly impactful "skin" that will impress the viewer/visitor in combination with site features is competitive.

With enough related web pages and content features, the portal develops an experience profile. The administrator and contributors then strategically upgrade and complete the site in multivarietal ways, such as to update content and refers news and articles that they build a website with many layers of dimensionality. Portal pages, sections, modules or categories can be developed one by one or congruent to linked features within each module. Portals generally require hosting capability that is quite robust to support these features.

For example, it is common for a new portal to have many features installed but they may lie "dormant" or unpublished until the test of the site is intact. Many modules can be purposely unpublished until the webmaster is ready to administrate that area as well as the rest of the site. While the sophistication of the portal programming does seem to overmatch the minimum functionality, it should be considered that portals and their programming code is designed to anticipate future growth of the site

7. YouTube Channel

YouTube is a viral video or slideshow portal that contains uploaded video for embedding into almost any portal, blog, or website. A Youtube User can sort a series of uploaded videos into a "channel" which browsing watchers can enjoy end to end. When users on YouTube read the comments left by other users, they can track back their other videos watched by other users to compare tastes and exchange comments. With the right strategy, YouTube can use its metric and associative platform benefits to urge new original site visitors back to the portal (where better content awaits).

Many online users may not realize there is a website feature available with YouTube accounts that can increase exposure and likelihood of site visits. This expands the participation and response potential to the site in accordance to whatever YouTube material you choose to put up. YouTube as a communication channel operates via subscribers who desire to be kept updated as to any new material. Collecting subscribers denotes the popularity of a "channel", and the material stemming from that user's audience base.

The Website/YouTube crossover has many curious detractions. The content on the website must correspond or be edited suitable for the YouTube website. Notes in the video channels must either identify or promote the original content's owner, such as a website or sports channel. Here again does originality in content, media, or design lift the website over the rest of the cookie-cutter or default themes and templates covering sites all over the Web. Satiric, comic, or sincere YouTube video topics can equally gain user bases and fans which become repeat visitors.

8. Humor

A collection of humorous stories, riddles, puzzles and games can often draw visitors (even over content) because many different types of people are looking for fun and games, whereas more specific audiences are looking for content specific reading. Humor can make an excellent lead-in from other sites. Cartoons and designs can emphasize these moods. Humor that is made of almost entirely graphics can appeal to as many languages as the site can be marketed to.

9. Web Link Directory

Link directories are actively promoted, aggressively marketed sites featuring site reviews, descriptions, keywords, and links to that site. A link directory is formed of categories and topics or specializes in certain types of industries and topics. Some webmasters spend all of their efforts just to groom their web directory sites and weed through url submissions. Web linking is big business in an industry when almost every webmaster want to see search results immediately visible and growing.

For example, let's say a webmaster wants his domain (www.snakecharmer.com) name out there online. He finds a web link directory, concerning every type of animal. This is a good starts, it is more specific for this type of listing than an Encycopedia, but if the target website is a snake website, some links submitted should be on a specific snake inclusive animal websites. An actual directory that would point search engines more likely in the direction of the snake topical website would be best to apply for linking.

[steveto]

Hey Myst,

This article is great. It's like a mini ebook for the starter domainer. Maybe we can get this stickied! I even have this problem about not doing anything with my domain names and these are the exact things I was thinking of using them for. Could you write something up about SEO and how to get backlinks..what backlinks are good...tools to use and so on? Totally should write an ebook. Your style is way easier to understand than others I have read and seen.

Please include more help links too.

Great job!