You can always tell when the going gets tough, because the tough get going. In other words, when the economy slows down and sales performance goes with it, smart businesses don’t cut back on sales & marketing expenditure, they increase it.

The logic for this is simple. If your competitors are reducing market exposure, that is when you should be increasing yours and get increased value for your marketing budget.

US web hosting company NameCheapHosting are doing just that with some great offers this month. Not only do they have aggressive pricing, they also throw in lots of special offers and freebies when you sign up with them.

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WEB ADMIN 101B-11 – Expired Domain Tools

22. Using Software To Grab An Excellent Expired Domain

In practice, grabbing a good expired domain name is a cumbersome and difficult exercise. Grabbing an excellent expired domain name not only needs an extra effort but also a quick reflex and lightening action to beat the online competition.  To make things easier and to quickly find expired domains, you will need to find a way or method that helps grow in the expired domain name business.  In this regard, good and efficient expired domain software comes very practical and handy.  A piece of expired domain software is also a useful tool that can provide you that extra edge to your business efforts.

Expired domain software comes in many flavors, forms, styles, and interfaces; however, the most common objective is to find the best looking expired domains for you.  The nature and type of each of these programs vary considerably and each one of these expired domain software programs is charged different rates.  Some of them may offer different programs based on the functionalities, while the others may provide you comprehensive expired domain software that includes a number of different programs pooled in one single package.

A premium grade expired domain software will provide you many features and amenities like:

* Domain Name Manager:  This is a useful program that can sort out expired domain names by their length and type by using a practical looking interface.  It also helps you looking at the most usable and practical set of expired domain names.

* Top Level Domain Manager:  With good expired domain software, you can easily search for all top level domains.  You can also search for all types of domains that are both obscure and country specific.

* Browsing domain names:  A top grade expired domain software will allow you to browse the internet for domain names.  You can use a browser like Internet Explorer to look at any page to check out if they are already expired or about to expire in a few days of time.

* An efficient Domain Name Creator:  Just enter a base word on to the create domain name search box, you will draw a list of thousands of names that are about to expire or already expired.

* Browser Search Capability:  When you provide a search term in the expired domain software, it will help you scour through well-known search engines like Yahoo and Google.

* Multi-letter domain name searching:  Good expired domain software will help you search through all multi-letter domains containing two, three and four letters.

* Complete word list facility:  It can also empower you to look through a big catalogue of potential domain names that may expire in the nearby future.

* Custom Word listing:  Meaningful expired domain software will help you search by entering any word from your dictionary, right from names to technical terms.  You can also create your own list of expired domain names for exploring and inspection.

* Status Checker:  With good expired domain software, you can check for link validity of a particular domain name.

* Link Extractor:  You can also create a big list of links for entire expired web site.

* A convenient Domain Filter:  This unique feature will allow you to filter out all unnecessary expired domains, so that you can save your effort and time.  Thus, expired domain software is a precious tool that will make your expired domain name business a worthwhile and profitable one!

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WEB ADMIN 101B-10 – Powerful Success Tool

21. Targeted Expired Domain Traffic

On average, more than 20,000 domains get expired everyday, and this figure is slowly increasing day by day, as more numbers are starting to expire almost on a regular basis.  The expired domain name market is also becoming a lucrative proposition to people, who wish to set up a lucrative online business.  Apart from selling expired domain names, you can also use expired domain traffic, either to sell it or use it to develop your web site.

There are two ways through which you can use targeted expired domain traffic to set up a viable business.

• You can purchase an expired domain name and sell it along with its expired domain traffic to someone, who is looking for a domain that can provide immediate results.
• You can also register an expired domain name for a year or so and develop a web site over it, advertise and pool together targeted traffic.

However, creating targeted expired domain traffic with your web site takes a long time, involves spending lot of money and putting in considerable effort.  Though selling such a web site can get you huge profits, there are chances that you may loose your patience while waiting for the D-Day!

It makes a clear sense to lay your hands on an expired domain that has a big pool of expired domain traffic attached to it.  Webmasters have the habit of detecting and pinpointing highly lucrative expired domain traffic out of a huge list of expiring domains.  When you buy an expired domain with well established expired domain traffic, you can get several benefits like:

• A top place in many of the well-known search engines and web directories
• A number of back links that can promote your web site to others
• An access to many types of promotional and advertising channels
• Use the existing expired domains with well established expired domain traffic, as an invaluable sub domain to further develop the business.

Before buying an expired domain name, make sure that you check out the name for its targeted traffic.  There are several online software tools that will help you critically examine an expired domain name to check, whether the domain in question has accumulated any traffic in its previous avatar.  Once you seek out a good and productive domain, you can increase your profits without having to spend more money.

The most common way of obtaining targeted expired domain traffic is to contact people who have lists of expired domain names attached with a list of loyal subscribers.  By chance, if the source from where you are intending to buy expired domain traffic has a large list of subscribers, then you contact the source, with a request to send an email to the contacts in the list, giving them valid reasons and explanations to check out your site
and look at the contents.  It is also possible to convert your one-time expired domain traffic into frequent web site traffic.  To achieve this goal, you may need to ask your site visitors to sign up for a regular newsletter or an auto-responder series.

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WEB ADMIN 101B-9 – Essential & Practical Tips

20. Buying Expired Domain Names

If you are looking to buy expired domain names, you may find it very relevant and productive to carry out a thorough research to know more details about the expired domain that you are intending to buy.

When you buy expired domain names, you are involving a third party and an administrator (usually the registrar) in the process of the transaction.  Thus, you will need to be very careful in how you are carrying out the process of buying the expired domain. There are a number of factors that you must evaluate, consider and examine, before arriving at a decision to buy the expired domain name.  Expert and professional people buy expired domain names after spending enough time to evaluate the possible advantages and benefits that come attached with the domain.

Before proceeding to buy expired domain names, you will need to consider the following factors and parameters:

• Is the domain name precious for you?  Is it very important to buy the expired domain name in spite of perceived demerits?
• What is you budgetary allocation for the purchase of a particular expired domain?
• How quickly or how soon you want to complete the transaction?

Example:  Let us say that you are in the business of selling flowers to your consumers. Now that you have enough experience of running this business and with your own personal experience, the likelihood of finding a simple, but powerful domain name is quite difficult.  Thus, you want to keep aside a portion of your budgetary allocation towards buying a good domain name.

Now, you will start searching for a good expired domain name and later you will create an extensive checklist of most probable names.   Let us say that you will end up in creating a shortlist of names like:

• Flowersforsale.com
• Flower-sale.com
• Flowersforsale.net
• Beautifulflowers.com

Now that you have the names at your disposal, it is the time for choosing the best name for your business and buy the expired domain name of your choice. To perform this delicate task, you will now need to examine and inspect the exact use for which you are seeking the name for.  Now, you can check each of the above names by entering the URL’s on the address bar of the browser and examine if any of them has an association with similar sites.

Once you make a survey, you can observe the following issues with your probable expired domain names and later buy expired domain name.

* The search findings are related to your domain names and there is actually a thriving business with some of the web sites found on the search engine.  In such a case, you may find it very difficult to find a suitable expired domain name.

* The search findings relate to your probable domain names and there is a thriving business related to some of them, but these web domains do not use a primary URL. Under such a scenario, though it is quite difficult to buy an expired domain, you can still find one that is good for your business.

* The search findings relate to your prospective domain name, but the searched material contains old and outdated materials.  Some of the searched domains may display broken links, wrong pictures and other sundry notices.  Here, your chances of finding a good expired domain name will become brighter and easier.

* The searched domain names relate to your list, but most of the searched domains link to one or more affiliate programs.  Under such a scenario, you may find sourcing an expired domain name little easier.

* The searched list will always point to a ”Domain for Sale” page:  Though this scenario offers plenty of opportunities, it could still be the biggest challenge in front of you.  You can buy an expired domain name that is most suitable for your business.

However, ensure that you will never buy an expired domain name that imitates or mimics a popular web portal;  when you buy these kinds of expired domains, you may land in deep legal and copyright trouble.

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 Expired Domain Fortunes $9.99 in BuildaSkill’s book & software shop

A comment I read somewhere prompted me to think about domain names for websites ….

Our own domain name buildaskill.com might seem obvious enough, especially when we Capitalise within the name string - BuildaSkill.com - but there are people out there who like to play with words, and why not?  It is after all an ancient form of humour.

BuildaSkill.com could be punned as BuildAskIll.com (I’m sure eBay think so from some of our blog and forum posts and comments).  But it gets funnier, or more insulting, or dangerous, for some other domains.

Consider those famous Microsoft support professionals ExpertsExchange.com (providers of deep-core support for individuals and corporates running Microsoft Exchange Server and associated server suites) - how about someone calling them ExpertSexChange.com ?

Then there’s the leisure complex company, Pen Island Resorts, who aught to shoot their webmaster for opening them up to jokes about PenisLand.com - or they could change their marketing strategy to attract bored housewives and Club 18-30 female members?

As much as there is an aversion to using hyphens and underscores in domain names (a sort of stigma that doing so means you’re a Johnny-come-lately to the web world), there are clear cases for when it’s advisable.

As the online retailer Perfume Bay found out - online auction mega-site eBay took exception to their domain name taking them all the way through the US court system because of name-copyright infringement - www.perfumEBAY.com (All credit to TamEbay  for discovering the story).

Sometimes it pays to find your office joker and run a proposed domain name past them first