Domain names buying selling and building on.

I can't begin to tell you how important a good domain name is.
Some people make a decent amount of living out of trading domain names, spending hours trying to find something thats not only short and catchy but sellable!

I myself have a portfolio of names. Some of which point to sites, some of which I hope to develop into sites in the future and some which I have bought purely because I believe I can sell them on for a profit.

Look at these domain names and the amounts they sold for:
Business.com was resold in 1999 for $7.5 million
sex.com was reported to have sold in 2006 for between $12 / $14 million US dollars

I haven't made anything like that but it goes to show that domain names are big business.
On several occasions I've sold domains that I've paid £1.99 for. For varying amounts between £250 and £750. Returns that I am more than happy with.

It's not anything that's going to allow me to retire but it's a nice bit of pocket money from time to time.

If you are wanting to buy domain names in order to sell them then you're going to need to find something that stands out from the crowd.
There are quite literally hundreds of millions of domains already registered, and to find good ones is not so simple anymore. Get yourself a thesaurus, think of a site theme youy want to focus on and start searching. The chances are 99% of the domains you try will be taken.
Combinations of two or three word domains without hyphens are your best bet these days.
I bought www.gettingpersonal.co.uk and www.ratemyface.co.uk some time ago and made over £1,000 profit selling them on.

Once you've found the name you want and have registered it you have

Free stuff. I love it!!

I'm quite well known in our offices for my love of free stuff.
Only today in the canteen did our group technical director stand startled as I threw myself past him to pick up a deserted 10p under a table!
The great girls in our promotions department always keep me in my mind when there's a freebie going and I can't resist tasting the free samples in the supermarkets, even if it is something I wouldn't usually eat!

I don't though just love free stuff on a personal basis, I love to use free stuff in my work too.
Some of the best sites on the web today can provide you with content for your site, content that elsewhere would cost hundreds if not thousands of pounds.

Flickr is an absolute dream. You can create groups and collections on there of your favourite pictures and then display them direct in your site through RSS feeds, their particularly good slideshows or indeed use the Flickr API's to develop your own Flickr based tools.
By setting up a group on flickr you can also allow other people to display their images in your group, and if you set out your terms correctly and ensure you give the rightful owners of the pics credit, you can often get them to agree to have those pics displayed on your site too.

YouTube is another great site. I'm sure we've all browsed youtube on numerous occasions. It's a great source of video content, full of funny, wacky and sometimes disturbing clips. However amongst the madness there is a lot of serious content on youtube.
If you are setting up a site based around a particular topic you can quite easily find accompanying videos on youtube that you can embed easily into it, there are instructional videos on most subjects there. Search them out and use them, that's why they're there!

Print vs Web or Print & Web?

First of all I'll apologise for not updating the blog recently.
It's been a hectic month or two both in work and at home.

Work is interesting at the moment, lots of different bits to work on, linking up with external companies to handle various elements of our business and also we have our in house builds to keep on top of.

We're constantly trying to think up ideas that will provide extra value to our customers and of course we want to make a bit of money along the way. As a newspaper publisher we have tried our best to keep up with modern trends and realise that we are now much more than a print publisher but an all round Media company. Print is still at the forefront of where we want to be and where we want to go, but our web offerings are really coming on and if we can maintain our momentum we can achieve great things I'm sure. We've got an enthusiastic and talented digital editor in Christian Dunn and in Martin Wright we have an editor who identifies the web as friend rather than foe, which breaks down a lot of barriers.

It's still tricky convincing a lot of people who have spent their life working with print that the web is an enhancement to our business, not a replacement, yet!!!
The web, should we use it correctly, should in fact drive readers to the paper and vice versa, afterall research shows that title websites have, if anything, a positive effect on print sales.

It's easy to blame the internet of course. In a climate that sees one medium decline and another increase you would think there was almost certainly some cross over. This is more evident with the nationals but still relatively unheard of as far as the regional / local paper is involved. The best way still to publicise in any town is a story in the local newspaper. And if you're selling advertising to local businesses, a lot of your clients still want to be able to hold that ad in their hands. Me included!!

It's an interesting argument, and one to which the is no definitive answer but I firmly believe in the sustainability of both print and web services running hand in hand for some time yet.

An interesting article can be found at the Times online.