Category Archives: Websites & Domains

topics on website/domain name issues.

How to Buy a Good .COM Domain

Posted on by
Reply

I was looking over a fellow’s sales domain today – lots of dashes, lots of words – you know the type. It seems that there’s few really good domains available out there. Not that it’s impossible, but it requires a lot of thinking.

A few months back, I got tired of thinking, and wondered if there was another way. And so the 4WDN (4 Word Domain Name) ‘phenomenon’ was born.

Four word domain names are the same word, repeated four times, usually with dashes. For instance ‘health-health-health-health.com’ is my health information site.

Now, should you be querulous at this point (and some have been), I should point some things out:

  • Even if the domain name looks odd, it is very easy to remember, since you’re using good keywords (as shown by WordTracker’s keylists).
  • The repeating of four times is because of the play between ‘four’ and ‘for’, making it a bit of a pun (and a bit more memorable). It also makes four words unique, rather than five, six, seven, etc.
  • They give people a level playing field for domain name buying and speculation. When new name formats come out, people often try to buy them up (remember the .TV domain?). Right now, you still have the chance to buy a good .COM domain name, and build a site on it, or just wait and sell.

Rather than talk more about domain names, I’ll just point you to my ‘Official’ 4WDN site – you can download the free report there. It’s worth the trip: even if four word domain names don’t interest you, it’s got good tips for all domain name buying.

And who knows, you might end up buying a name or two ‘just in case’.

The Joy of Writing vs Making Money

Posted on by
Reply

The first week, and already I’m missing posts…

Actually, I have two good reasons for skipping yesterday – the first one was that I actually had too much to say. Wrote it all down, found it too spread out to make a cohesive entry, and mothballed everything so I could spread it out over time.

This wasn’t laziness or vanity – according to a seminar I heard about ‘second hand’ (where all the best rumors come from), Google likes web pages of a certain length – currently around 200-300 words. A year ago, 700-800 was consider fine (of course, I could already tell that less was better: I have articles with AdSense on them, and shorter ones usually end up better targeted).

The second reason was money-oriented – I’ve been working on my paying sites, in particular Gift-Cal.com and byGwen.com, my wife’s art site.

I already described the PHP for rotating a series of pictures – but I also worked on a catalog/shopping cart style code in PHP. Each shows catalog images/thumbnails of the products (calendars or artwork) – you can click on it to view more detail, and order by PayPal.

The result is a couple of small, light sites, with PayPal payment processing (instead of a merchant account), no need for a db backend, and a single easy to maintain file for data (image name, title, description, price, as well as id and category numbers).

Besides a great workout in PHP (I’ve only just started it this November), it was an opportunity to tailor a site the way I wanted, rather than try to fit my model into a prebuilt solution. There’s still more to do behind the scenes (right now, I edit the data file by hand, instead of creating an Admin section to handle it), but it works, and I like the result – you can of course drop by byGwen.com and Gift-Cal.com and see if you agree.