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Every­thing on the Inter­net starts with a domain name!

I know that may come off as a bit over reach­ing — but its true. From email to news, search, video or any­thing else on the Inter­net — you have to know where you’re going which is only achieved by a domain name.

The ABC’s of domain names, which as a title may come off as a lit­tle corny to you, is an exer­cise that makes you think about your indus­try or busi­ness, what you’re doing in it, and how you go about doing what you do as it relates to domain names. The use of the ABC’s for­mat is to pro­vide a sim­ple, back to basics approach to deliver fun­da­men­tal con­cepts that pro­voke thoughts, ideas and ques­tions on domain names and how they are a part of your world.

So, what­ever all of that means — lets dive into the ABC’s of domain names and find their rel­e­vance in your line or work, per­sonal life, hob­bies, edu­ca­tional back­ground, expe­ri­ence or spe­cial areas of inter­est to see what jumps out and comes nat­u­rally to you:

A: Adver­tis­ing — domain names offer the per­fect venue to adver­tise your prod­uct or ser­vices or to pro­vide poten­tial rev­enue by domain park­ing and/or affil­i­ate programs.

B: Brand­ing — the brand is in the name. Hav­ing a great tar­geted domain name can really build a brand, or can actu­ally be the brand (eg: Google.com)

C: Com­mu­nity — the Inter­net is all about an inter­con­nected com­mu­nity. Through domain names, you cre­ate a real des­ti­na­tion and an iden­tity for what can become a community.

D: Direct Search — hav­ing a generic word based domain name is your best path to direct search traf­fic. Direct Search is here to stay and will likely take an increas­ing share of the over­all search mar­ket­place. Direct search bypasses the likes of yahoo.com and google.com as the user types in the des­ti­na­tion site directly into their browser (ie: www.computers.com).

E: Ecom­merce — want to con­duct busi­ness online — you need to start with one pri­mary thing — a domain name. Ecom­merce is one of the lead­ing uses of the Internet.

F: Friends & Fam­ily — con­nect with your friends and fam­ily with domain names — either by email, your favorite web­sites, or photo shar­ing sites and videos, etc.

G: Global — syn­ony­mous with the Inter­net — domain names (par­tic­u­larly .com) have mass broad appeal on a global basis, with global potential.

H: High Returns — where else can you buy a piece of vir­tual real-estate for $8.00 and sell it within a mat­ter of weeks or months for over $1000? Fund.com just sold for $9.99 Mil­lion in March of 2008.

I: Invest­ment — domain names are appre­ci­at­ing more than any invest­ment for the price. Sim­i­lar to invest­ing in stocks, bonds, real estate or insur­ance — domain names offer what I believe to be sta­ble long last­ing appre­ci­a­tion with the poten­tial to cre­ate aston­ish­ing returns. Want to learn more about domain invest­ing — you can always check out www.domainprofitsbook.com.

J: Jus­tify — Jus­tify your web pres­ence and online busi­ness with a great domain name that demon­strates who you are and what you do.

K: Key­words — domain names can be based upon major key words for your indus­try or tar­get mar­ket. Just the same, the key words you use in your Inter­net mar­ket­ing can be gen­er­ated from the domain name you choose and how it relates to your tar­get industry/product/service/noun/verb.

L: Local­iza­tion & Loca­tion — tar­get­ing niche audi­ences by loca­tion and a spe­cific geog­ra­phy has proved to be a very strong, iden­ti­fi­able mar­ket­ing oppor­tu­nity for any­body online. Embrac­ing local­iza­tion for your domain invest­ment objec­tives is a great path to consider.

M: Mon­e­ti­za­tion — mak­ing money and cre­at­ing mul­ti­ple sources and streams of income are the cor­ner­stones to the poten­tial and rea­son why peo­ple buy savvy domain names.

N: New Mar­kets to seize — new prod­ucts and ser­vices are always being launched, just as new com­pa­nies and mar­kets are being formed. Find­ing with a good strong domain name to cap­ture the essence of your busi­ness or tar­get mar­ket for your online pres­ence is always a great start­ing point.

O: Orga­ni­za­tion — a domain name is the per­fect way to iden­tify with your orga­ni­za­tion. Whether it’s a prod­uct, ser­vice, or brand — your domain name is your face on the Internet.

P: Prof­its — Domain are a great way to make money and prof­its. Invest wisely and you can find your­self with a great windfall.

Q: Quest — Like any busi­ness ven­ture, you are on a quest to explore, learn and make money.

R: Rev­enue — domain names offer a myr­iad of ways to gen­er­ate rev­enues. There are numer­ous ways and avenues to gen­er­ate rev­enues with domain names, how­ever, in some cases are closely held ideas and resources. Becom­ing edu­cated about domain names and being focused on cre­at­ing a long last­ing busi­ness is a great path towards gen­er­at­ing revenue.

S: Search Engines — Search engines are the gate­way to choices on the Inter­net and essen­tially, a direc­tory of domains clas­si­fied by the type of infor­ma­tion, prod­uct or ser­vice they offer. Search engines are a pow­er­ful mar­ket­ing tool and a source of traf­fic for the domain name owner.

T: Tech­nol­ogy — sim­ply, with­out tech­nol­ogy, there are no domains, web­sites, search engines, email or the like. The beauty of domain names is that you really don’t have to under­stand or learn too much tech­nol­ogy to get started, or to make money.

U: Unique Users — peo­ple com­ing to your website/domains gen­er­ate traf­fic. The more unique users that visit your web­site — the more traf­fic they cre­ate. The more traf­fic — the greater the value. The best way to cre­ate long last­ing value with domain names is cre­at­ing a venue where a con­sis­tent and grow­ing base of unique users visit your domain name/website.

V: Vir­tual — Domain names are vir­tual real estate. Some rep­re­sent ocean-front prop­erty while oth­ers can rep­re­sent sky scrap­ers, apart­ments or vacant land in the mid­dle of a bar­ren desert. Build your port­fo­lio of vir­tual real estate for the longer term or flip your domain name for a quick sale and profits.

W: World Wide Web — The world wide web and its begin­ning started with domain names and/or their under­ly­ing numer­i­cal iden­ti­ties. With the advent of the world wide web, email, search engines and the increas­ing con­ver­gence of com­mu­ni­ca­tions and media — busi­ness and indus­try has cre­ated high demand and appre­ci­at­ing val­ues for good domain names.

X: The X Fac­tor — there is a mys­tique and cer­tain unknowns regard­ing the true value of domain names, how to cre­ate rev­enue and prof­its, and what strate­gies are best to cre­ate traf­fic to your domain name or web­site. The more knowl­edge­able and pre­pared you are to dive into the domain name world — the bet­ter off you are in man­ag­ing the X Fac­tor when it rears its head.

Y: You — buy­ing, sell­ing, and own­ing domain names is a reflec­tion upon you, what your goals are, where your inter­ests lie, and how you want to make money with this vir­tual real estate. You need to decide what your objec­tives are and how you are most com­fort­able in approach­ing your invest­ment and ded­i­ca­tion towards mak­ing money with domain names.

Z: Zeal — approach your domain activ­i­ties with pas­sion and enthu­si­asm. The more pos­i­tive your think­ing and focus is with domain names — the bet­ter you will be able to man­age it, be pre­pared, and have an open mind to seize new oppor­tu­ni­ties and make money with your domains.

We hope you enjoyed this arti­cle and find that each time you read it you take away some­thing new and dif­fer­ent that can add value to your world of domain names.

This arti­cle is writ­ten by Chris Kern. Chris has been a ser­ial entre­pre­neur, cor­po­rate finance spe­cial­ist and domainer for the past 13 years and is the author of the author­i­ta­tive resource book on domain name invest­ing “How To Make Money With Domain Names” which can be found online at: http://www.DomainProfitsBook.com. “Every­thing On The Inter­net Starts With A Domain Name” is a Ser­vice Mark of Chris Kern.

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I’m about halfway through an 8-hour DVD course on using Google Adwords to pro­mote your busi­ness and my head is spinning.

I’ve been using Adwords for about 4 years and have spent thou­sands of dol­lars adver­tis­ing with them, so I’m not a new­bie with this sys­tem. How­ever, after just going through two of the DVDs, I feel so excited about the insights I have into Adwords.

In case you don’t know what Adwords is, it is those ads that appear down the right hand side of the page when you do a search on Google. Almost any­thing you search on will trig­ger a few ads and some­time it will trig­ger hun­dreds of them and many pages.

Adwords can be a very effec­tive way to reach your tar­get mar­ket or it can waste your money. I’ve wasted more than my share but also gen­er­ated a lot of the right kind of traf­fic to my web­sites. Learn­ing to gen­er­ate a lot of the right kind of traf­fic for the least amount of money is what this course is all about, and it is well worth the rather large invest­ment I made in it.

Keep check­ing back as I share with you some of the gems I’m get­ting out of this course.

Best,

Rick Smith

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How much can you make with spe­cial inter­est videos? Like all things … it depends. Not the clean answer you’d like, but it does depend on many things.

How many copies do you think you can sell? At what price? What is your pro­duc­tion cost. These all fac­tor into your profit.

It is an impor­tant busi­ness exer­cise to do some pro forma pro­jec­tions before jump­ing into a project. You have to have a large poten­tial mar­ket, high sales price, or both, to make a sig­nif­i­cant profit. And then of course you have to fol­low through with mar­ket­ing to let your maket know about your product.

Here is an excerpt from the DVD, How to Make Money Sell­ing Your Own Videos that shows what the poten­tial gross sales from spe­cial inter­est pro­grams can be. You can make this spread­sheet your­self in Microsoft Excel.

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I hear that ques­tion a lot from skep­ti­cal new­com­ers to this business.

Yes, you can but it isn’t for the per­son look­ing to get rich quick. I would love to say that it is as easy as pro­duc­ing your video and then putting one ad out there and voila, the orders come rolling in fast and furi­ously. It may hap­pen for a small num­ber of peo­ple who are lucky, but for the rest of us it just doesn’t work like that. There are many aspects to con­sider and much work that has to be under­taken. But if you are like me, imbued with the entre­pre­neur­ial spirit and obsti­nate enough to not quit when the chips are down, then you can make money doing this.

Last month I was lucky to present at the Video 08 con­fer­ence pre­sented by the 4Ever Group. My topic was on how to sell your spe­cial inter­est videos. I was happy to see a room full of peo­ple inter­ested in explor­ing this area. My intent of pre­sen­ta­tion there was to show video­g­ra­phers a way to add an extra income stream to their busi­ness, and that is the way I look at this busi­ness. Over the past few years I have added enough of these income streams that I now make most of my income in sales of my own prod­ucts online. I really do wake up and find that I’ve made money while I was asleep. Check­ing my morn­ing email and see­ing that orders have come in is as good a jolt as a cup of strong coffee.

Before work­ing for myself, I worked for a uni­ver­sity pro­duc­ing and sell­ing video prod­ucts. Some prod­uct lines sold well, oth­ers bombed. That will also hap­pen to you. At the uni­ver­sity, I was lucky enough to get that steady pay­check. So the key is to min­i­mize your bombs and enhance your suc­cess­ful prod­uct lines. How do you do that?

Here is a quick list.

1) Pick a topic where you can def­i­nitely iden­tify the intended group of peo­ple who would be inter­ested in buy­ing it. It doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily need to be one you are inter­ested in but that does really help. If you can’t say who would be inter­ested in buy­ing it and how you would reach them, then you prob­a­bly haven’t defined the niche suf­fi­ciently.
2) Research to see if there is a need for this infor­ma­tion and if video is a good way to pro­vide the infor­ma­tion. There may already be well estab­lished prod­ucts avail­able — if so, how can you com­pete?
3) Approach the mar­ket with the intent to pro­vide infor­ma­tion that peo­ple need to solve a prob­lem. This can be infor­ma­tion on how to do some­thing, research infor­ma­tion, enter­tain­ment… but be clear about what your prod­uct should do.
4) Broaden your prod­uct line. Pro­duce more than one video on your prod­uct and also con­sider other prod­ucts such as eBooks, audio CDs, etc. that will enhance your line. If you only have one prod­uct, either they will buy it or not. If they do, then you have noth­ing else to sell them. Keep the rela­tion­ship strong by hav­ing a con­tin­u­ing line or related prod­ucts to offer them.
5) Test mar­ket before you spend a lot of money in pro­duc­tion. More on that in future arti­cles.
6) Lis­ten to your mar­ket. Ask for feed­back about what they like and don’t like about your prod­ucts. Use this infor­ma­tion to be plan­ning ahead to make more videos along this same topic.
7) Do not make this into a motion pic­ture. You are pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion; keep it sim­ple, clear and con­cise. Pro­duc­tion value is impor­tant, but don’t over­look the most impor­tant goal of con­vey­ing infor­ma­tion the end user needs and is will­ing to pay for.
Price well. Don’t be afraid to exper­i­ment with your pric­ing to get the the most profit from your prod­uct. You may find that $14.95 is the right price, or per­haps $100 is right for you. It all depends on the prod­uct and the mar­ket­place you are going to.

In future blog entries I will delve into these more deeply. I also encour­age oth­ers to share their advice as well. My hope is to edu­cate and help other entre­pre­neur­ial media pro­duc­ers be suc­cess­ful in this excit­ing area. Like a good friend of mine says, “All boats float,” mean­ing we’ll all ben­e­fit from the ris­ing tide.

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Unlike the pro­duc­tion busi­ness, the spe­cial inter­est video busi­ness lets you mul­ti­ply your prof­its and sell prod­ucts around the world from the com­fort of your home. The Inter­net gives you amaz­ing lever­age. For pen­nies a day you can have your own store­front that sells your line of videos 24/7. Or you can have oth­ers do it all for you and send you monthly checks. You may have this be a part time income stream or you may turn this into an excit­ing full time busi­ness. I can’t tell you how good it feels to wake up in the morn­ing and see that I have made sales lit­er­ally while I was sleep­ing. Or fin­ish up break­fast, go into my office and see that I sold some of my prod­ucts while I was leisurely eat­ing my breakfast.

Here is an excerpt from my new DVD How To Make Money Sell­ing Your Own Videos where I talk more about this subject.

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