Let them go

First of all I have to apologise for not writing here for awhile, I was and still am very busy writing code, something else I love to do besides writing my blog. I will be back in here shortly and let you know where my roads take me.

This is about ideas and talking about them or letting other people steal them. I was cooking some business ideas wondering if I should talk about them and if I do, would people go ahead and make money with my idea and forget about me. I know that question lingers around in lots of bright heads. One answer I got during a Microsoft' "Ignite your career"entrepreneurial session got me puzzled for awhile but, as much as it doesn't make sense, it holds some truth.

I forget who answered : "Ideas are cheap, it's what you do with them. Talk to as many people as you can, your idea will only get stronger". Yes and no and if you ask me.. I say don't follow this advice to the core !

Ideas are indeed cheap, as much as you're in love with yours, one hundred other guys have the same idea. That only means you should love it more. Talk to as many people about it... no.

Only share the idea at one stage, then calm down and do it, build it and here is the gold in that advice : "it's what you do with it". Follow through and don't worry about people stealing the idea, grow it, build it and stop talking when you start doing, then start talking again but now you've got a product.

An incoherent and incomplete idea is easy to take apart and ridicule, and that can tap into your enthusiasm and never recover. I know people that are talking a lot about others ideas and theirs as well, but they all get cold after a short while and never get anything out of that. The idea has to grow, be thorn apart and brought back together like Led Zeppelin or Genesis just did. Then you can talk about it with close friends and it stands the test.

Don't talk your idea out of you, people will go ahead and do something with it, obviously, and that's a compliment to you if they do. Talk some and do some more..

LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. Infinity Anger Management
2. Tip Top Website
3. Fire Site Flash

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at Bynapse.com - the easy web.

Reciprocal link of the week : TimeBooking

LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. Mingle Too
2. IMBEE
3. Consumating

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at Bynapse.com - the easy web.

Reciprocal link of the week : Aloe Living

LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. Peer Trainer
2. MedStory
3. Med Story

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at Bynapse.com - the easy web.

Reciprocal link of the week : TimeBooking

LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. Startup Business School
2. Alternative Energy Store
3. Tony Yoo's Protolize

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at Bynapse.com - the easy web.

Reciprocal link of the week : Aloe Living

Buying the right stock photo

Your site is ready for a face-lift and you’re looking for the right images to use. You’re also looking to print something consistent with your web site so your image looks solid and established. Here is where a stock-photography site comes in handy. But there are thousands out there …

There are differences in the quality of the pictures, prices, photo licensing between those sites and you can buy photos for web-only use, print, multimedia, personal .. Read the license agreements carefully before buying, especially if it’s a model picture (a human face is visible). You save if you get a subscription for the time required to build your site (if you are buying a large number of pictures) otherwise, sites like Fotolia are perfect for one-picture downloads.

The best way to look at photos is if they’re royalty free as you may usually use them in prints, web sites, multimedia presentations, for business communication, decoration and even personal use (you may print your photo wallpaper). Most sites provide this type of licence with subtle flavours to it so make sure you read the license agreement before you put up that huge banner on Champs-Elysées.

Determine how many pictures you need before you buy to decide between a bundle and a unit price.

Are you ready to use them? You can only use one image for a certain number of prints (a fair number provided in the license agreement) and you can not resell photos or templates using those photos. You may play with photoshop and alter an image, without gaining the copyright to it though but this is what I call wasted money, meaning that if you buy something, it should be what you need and should not require further alteration (that is not true for dresses, they always require alteration, believe me, I learn from watching … ).

What does royalty-free mean for the buyer? Most stock sites provide that type of license. It’s important to determine the right license you need and royalty-free gives you unlimited use of a photo in any media, you pay for the image only once and use it as many times as you need. This is the most permissive license ad you should look for that as your business may grow and you should save printing more copies of your materials. Right-managed photos need a special setup and environment to live in as well as a more refined targeting of the audience and are usually more expensive and may include brand names (models, companies, trademarks) .

No matter what license you acquired, you can not resell the photo you bought. If you buy a template from Bynapse (my web templates shop) you may use it, you even get stock photos and logos or clipart for free, but it’s the same story... You cannot claim copyright to the images and you can not resell them. Nor you can resell the template containing the images.

Now there is such a case where you buy the rights for an image (for the right price, of course) but you can become the owner and the photographer loses the right to use or sell the photo ever again. Fotolia is an example of a stock agency that sells image rights. It’s all about finding the right image for your needs and buying the setup, the environment and the colors that put you up in front and keeps you there.
Apple is an example of a company that does everything beautiful and stylish and look at it grow. Vista looks sleek and design gets better all the time.

Web 2.0 is all about using the right colors, images and message and if you have designs you want to discuss or you just want people to see, post them here and let’s talk.

LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. Mufon.com
2. Bionic Woman
3. Sci Fi Universe

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at Bynapse.com - the easy web.

Reciprocal link of the week : Pogo Cheats

Little search box

The neat search box at the top of that sleek looking Web 2.0 style site you just visited looks good? Well, you can have it too, tailored to your desires.

The ability to perform an easy and efficient search seems to be the main ingredient and the greatest achievement nowadays and Web 2.0 style sites are all including it. Tailoring search results and harvesting a powerful search engine’s capabilities to extract relevant information and present fast results is a requirement all main search engines respond to.

Of course you’re not keen to see your competition on the results or in the ads displayed on the result pages (that happens if you’re not running a blog, like me, in which case I welcome all pertinent info to show up). You may not want to see any ads at all in the results (that comes for a cost, no matter if you use msn, Yahoo or Google to power your search). Display the ads and you get a free way to monetize the searches initiated from your site. Needless to say that you can restrict the search results to your web site or web presence (suite of web sites) or, you may just favor them in the results … sneaky

Here are a few links to such pages providing easy access to custom (to you) search engines. Just follow their instruction to get what you are looking for and know that you can modify the appearance and fully integrate at a later time, you don’t need to start Google size.

• Live Search Box - http://search.live.com/siteowner (this is Microsoft’s answer, really easy to follow guides, a bit slow for my taste). Nathan Buggia has a blog entry covering the basics, read it here.
• Google Coop - http://www.google.com/coop/cse (this one is Google’s solution, so easy and fast but for business use it costs $. I really like free stuff)
• Yahoo Search Builder - http://builder.search.yahoo.com (Yahoo, good, personalizable search results and powerful search analysis tools. Not as customizable or friendly as the previous two)
• Crafty Search - http://www.gonecountrygraphics.com/craftysearchbox.html (sooo easy, straightforward, unreal, sooo limited results though, I’ve put this here because it’s so easy to integrate though)
• Ixquick Search - http://us.ixquick.com/eng/link_instructions.html (easy to integrare and customize, real results coming back)
• Pico Search - http://www.picosearch.com/ (easy enough, I’m not yet convinced about the accuracy of the results, to be discussed)

Know that all search engines provide the results as XML as well, free or for a fee, so you can go all the way and have the results display in your own page, simply by consuming the XML dataset returned. Now you don’t need to know what XML is unless you’re a developer and you should better start reading up on it now.

Next week we shall talk about stock photos: who’s cheapest, why buy and how to do it or why not start selling too.

LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. HideAPod.com
2. I Started Something
3. Marie-Eve Janvier

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at Bynapse.com - the easy web.

Reciprocal link of the week : Wood Wireless

You need to see my site

In the movie Field of Dreams a farmer gets convinced by a mysterious voice saying “If you build it, they will come.”, that he is supposed to construct a baseball diamond in his corn field. This catch-phrase ruled the dotcom boom and it worked. Unfortunately, web entrepreneurs cannot cope with it anymore. You need to do more.
People come to your site if they can find it. Whether they stay there or not after they land, it's a story discussed in other posts on this site.

I am sure that the basics on getting some attention online are quite well known and pretty vaguely mastered. I shall write them down without going into depths as every web entrepreneur works toward fulfilling them to the best of his knowledge and abilities for as long as its online business shall be.

• Know your purpose. Master your goals. Have a roadmap and don't try to start Google-size but get there.
  
• Write and design for your target audience. Some industry best-practices work for everybody.
  
• Expect to change your knowledge about your audience. Apply what you learn from your traffic metrics and adapt.
  
• Follow design guidelines and don't overkill. There are more than 11 billion webpages out there, try not to scare me off.
  
• Use every marketing technique (online and offline) available to get the word out.
• It helps to own a domain name. (you can park it or taste it while you start up)
  

And the list can go on, feel free to add to it and let me know.
Here are a few items not everybody follow up with routinely and that need a little paragraph on the side.

• Optimize your site for Search Engines.
  
• 80 percent of website traffic comes from a search engine query, states McAfee in “The State of Search Engine Safety". I don't know about you but I would use all the techniques to make search engines love my site.
• Use site submissions, search engine optimization and search engine marketing and don't expect immediate results and don't expect to rank high on results either. You need to earn that but "if you work it, it will come". This entire topic is an art in itself.
• Link to others and exchange links. Don't hold back on linking away (you can start by linking to this site .. no ? well .. I tried ). Try building up the links and having a few links back to you a day on some other sites or directories. This pays up.
• Link and endorse your clients. Make them feel important (they are by the way) by linking to them (if they have a web presence) and giving them a small presentation. Your business feels more established and they will link back to you helping you grow as well.
• Use reviews of your products and testimonials. Word of Mouth online ? Yes, third party sells work.
• Use professional digital images to illustrate. A good picture is worth a thousand words. Let the user see the product it buys, provide video or links to reviews.
• Answer the people. If you receive emails or comments, don't leave them there forever, answer them and get an honest opinion back.
  
• Let's be honest, not everybody is cut to spend hours programming and building websites or even marketing and optimizing them. Weigh the value of your time and consider hiring a pro. Who's that ? A friend of a friend ? Well, measure up your goals, dreams, ambitions and you will know how expensive you should go.

Blogs can be both entertaining and informative and it's free to get out there. News and honest opinions help the community and help your traffic as well. Needless to say that every comment is welcome and enriches your view and your ways.

LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. DuggBack
2. Web Design From Scratch
3. Filmator

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at Bynapse.com - the easy web.

Reciprocal link of the week : Free Directory

LinX BoX

This Friday’s (published this monday) Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. Earthcam - Most interesting Webcams of 2006
2. How Stuff Works
3. Visible Earth

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at Bynapse.com - the easy web.

Web 2.0 business models

Web 2.0 is a hot topic, is this and that and all together as one. A technological and social shift defined by a manifesto that was published by Tim O’Reily that offers examples on how web technologies enable the change and makes a prediction on the obsolescence of traditional software development. Google is currently working on a Web based OS, it’ll come and probably the web will be called web 3.0 by the time applications will all run on the network rather than on PC, showing user created content and being improved by users and developers together rather than software companies. For some related thinking read my “Web 2.0 for rookies” article.

Web 2.0 has siblings, like “Enterprise 2.0”. "We're using Enterprise 2.0 as short hand for blogs and wikis behind the firewall. But that's entirely too limiting," said Andrew McAfee, associate professor of Harvard Business School, "We have not yet seen all the neat things that will go on inside enterprises.". Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg concludes that "Web 1.0 was all about getting things online. Web 2.0 is going the next step and making it work," with sites, he said, that are "created by the people, for the people every day.". Web 2.0 and it’s implications for enterprises is still on debate.

The truth is that if you need information while you study at some university, you’ll find it on the university site. And yet the student community events are on somebody’s blog or a student community site or even on MySpace and you need to visit that. Add healthcare questions and math club meetings or student discount store and you end up having a dozen sites to visit before you are ready to start the day knowing enough to be efficient about it. Now just imagine what a ”community site” would do in this situation where users add the required content if it’s missing, along with a story on how to go about the subject. A forum is good but the business model is not forum like, it’s integrating a variety of services that meet community needs. That triggers a Web 2.0 business model.

The new web companies move on a totally different path than the dotcom business model. The model is to capitalize on user-generated content. Digg, Facebook, Photobucket, Zillow, PickPal and YouTube, to name a few, are open houses that facilitate work from anywhere and are basically cheap to start-up compared to the dotcom million dollar launch model that provides closed portals (providing a huge amount of information but incapable to grow with each visitor).

"Web 2.0 is really the acceleration of transformation," Andrew McAfee said "It's not that users got smarter or more social. It's that technologists figured out what consumers wanted."

Social networking: Bringing it all together is one of the Web 2.0 business models generating a cascading effect based on user generated content and user interaction. Metcalfe's law comes into play here: “the total value of the service is roughly proportional to the square of the number of customers' utilizing the service”. If a user using Freewebs cannot connect to another using Facebook, it will switch. But what users can do, is syndicate their content. And for the users that can syndicate their content (MySpace users can not), tightly integrated API’s are available enabling marsh-ups.

Pay per use: Developing the compelling value innovative solution is another business model that applies to this wave of web companies. The service is free but for the killer feature you need to pay. It’s the software as a service model and the revenue comes from a critical mass of users willing to pay a reasonable price that supports it all. It also pays itself from partnerships. Those services are also publicised by users on social networking sites and the technology provided is reusable and expandable with users help. Flickr is a perfect example for this category.

In both these models, the product the company brings to the web is technology and this is used to generate the business value. In both cases the user generates its content (photos on Flickr, articles on Blogspot …) and they all interact. None of these companies have a “product” per-se, they don’t sell a CD or a book or a car, and yet they act like hubs and the revenue comes from partnerships, advertising, content … and the list can go on, I just leave it up to you to add to it.

LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. Time and Date
2. OpenMinds.com
3. Advertising.com

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at Bynapse.com - the easy web.

LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. Boowa and Kwala
2. Abika.com
3. Telerik.com

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at Bynapse.com - the easy web.

Web 2.0, oil to cyber space

Not too long ago, if you were from Texas and had a little bit of land that only cattle enjoyed thus far and walked into an office on Wall Street asking for money to drill for oil, money were flying to you. A while after that, in the 90’s, oil is still a business but if you’re a geek stepping in that same kind of office with a dot-com idea, money would be coming in fast.
Whenever a new wave of resources or technologies comes up, people are fast to take the new road and fill up the unavoidable cracks of the beginnings. The cycle is so predictable; it’s almost a natural law.
Web 2.0 is one of those waves that revigorates adds opportunity and generates business and it has been around for long enough to mean more than just buzz words. CSS, RSS, Ajax and Web 2.0 do express now real and useful technologies combined with a modern design and architecture based on collaboration and usability to generate a refreshing and manageable user experience. Is it a new version of the internet? No. Is it a new way of thinking? Well if it is, is one that generates business.
Gucci.com is a popular web site that breaks every SEO rule (with JavaScript turned off, all you get is a blank page) and yet it is a reference for Web 2.0 website design.
At Seoul digital forum, Google CEO Eric Schmidt defined web 2.0 as a “marketing term” and being based on Ajax. But Ajax is not search engine friendly. So can you enjoy Ajax and please search engines? Well yes, just make sure the content is html. Web 2.0 may be based on technology (it has actually been made possible by the technology) and yet you hear SEO, SMO and “content is king” all the time.
In the end, users enjoy a simple to decipher html content page just as much as search engines. But are search engines the “goal” of a site? Good ranking can not be the target. Scott Orth completed a case study for one of his clients that used Ajax and CSS and as the user experience improved (which is also at the foundation of web 2.0), he enjoyed a 97% increase in rankings and traffic jumped 53%.
Amit Kumar from Yahoo said that, while technology is awesome, simplicity is also crucial so engines can understand content of page.

To conclude, technology is not a drawback and I’ll use it anytime since search engines will start to understand it sooner than later and then, you know, being first matters over being best. At least under the laws of marketing...

LinX BoX

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PPC Advertisers Hints, Tricks, and Guru Guidance.

Vasilis Pasparas wrote an article on Quik-Find.com about PPC advertising and I felt it does a great job on summarizing the subject for us. I wrote Vasilis and he was kind enough to reply :

Dear Bogdan,
As i have told you over Yahoo Messenger today, i would like your comments on our PPC Article located at http://www.quik-find.com/ppc_tricks.html. Also i allow you to post it on your blog with any comments either form you or your users.

thank you, I really appreciate your comments

Regards Vasilis Pasparas High Speed Data Networks INC Lambi 85300 Kos Greece

Here is the original article:

The following information is presented to all internet marketers, webmasters, and SEO's as a good solid foundation that we hope you can use to get the most out of all of your PPC marketing efforts ... both here at Quik-Find.com, and at any other Pay Per Click search engine that you elect to invest your marketing budget into. In following our stated mission to clean up the PPC industry, we feel it appropriate to take every measure possible to educate and enlighten.

PPC Advertisers are good for the industry. You make more intelligent decisions, attain higher Returns on your Investment, and through your success, make the Pay Per Click model a viable one, both for the PPC operators, and for the advertisers. It is our hope that on this page, and the pages that follow you'll take away at least one thing that will either save you money or make you money. Either way, we both win.

Incidentally, if you're a casual search engine user/consumer, and not a Pay Per Click Search Engine client or marketer ... you should read these articles as well. Knowing the way successful businesses operate and think will most certainly help you in making better, more informed buying decisions.

1. Choose your Weapon
There are now over 500 Pay Per Click Search Engines out there, all seeking your business. It's important that once you have made the decision to use PPC as a marketing strategy, that you fine tune that decision into choosing which of the vast array of PPCs not only deserve your marketing dollar, but which ones are most likely to help you get the best return out of it.

2. Know your Prey
How well do you really know your target audience ? Nobody knows your business better than you, and nobody knows the type of person that's likely to purchase your product or service better than you, right ? Wrong. Let's examine some of the strategies that we have seen to work in not only properly identifying your real target audience, but in actually targeting them effectively.

3. Use the Correct Ammo
All keywords are not the same ! If you're a veteran of PPC advertising, you probably have a stock list of keywords that you bid on (Throw that away, right now). If you're new to this game, then welcome to perhaps the most important decision you'll have to make during your PPC marketing effort: selecting the proper keywords for bidding. In this article, we're going to debunk all of the myths and current "industry standards" for generating your keyword list, and hopefully open your eyes to the next generation of thinking in PPC Keyword Selection.

4. Shoot to Kill
So you've taken all of your time ... nights, weekends & days off, and you have found what you consider to be the best search engines to market in, you have the best keyword list known to mankind, and have identified and targeted thousands of potential customers. And they've made it to your website. Job Well Done. Not exactly. Until you're counting your profits, your job is not yet complete. Perfect Marketing doesn't necessarily translate into profit. This is where the real work begins....turning your the visitors you have fought so hard to obtain into paying customers.

LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. Bust A Name
2. Funny Junk
3. Threadless

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at Bynapse.com - the easy web.

Building the Comunity Product

iPhone launch clearly showed in the few months that have passed, the power of the community in spreading the word and keeping the topic hot. Even mediocre blog entries, regardless of them being favorable to the product or not, got a lot of visits and social networking sites had days of “iPhone-related only” topics on their front page, and all that from “thunderlizards”, self-appointed evangelists and bloggers that looked for some traffic for their Ad-Sense supported pages.
On the other hand, buzz building does not generate awareness. So what made all these people get involved and build an open community? They found something worthy of building a community around it. It’s tough to impossible to build a community around mundane and mediocre products regardless of the amount of money or marketing minds you throw at it. If the product is worth a community it will get one no matter how hard you try to stop it from forming.
Is a great product enough though? Well, you may have the website that puts Flickr to shame but Google Analytics shows 0 visitors. What you need is a platoon of thunderlizards, right away. You need to be proactive about the community and stir the waters a bit and help form the nucleus and to do that, you need to decide to build Closed or Open communities. Nike owns a community; you may choose football players and have a virtual championship, as long as they’re Nike players. An open community is built on self-appointed evangelists though and if you can’t have such a community forming, it’s time to review the product.
You can build the product for the community and have the community be the product. That is an amazing concept so beautifully built by Treadless. Just check them out; they have built the perfect community product.
Social media is art about context, communication and collaboration so you have to recruit your evangelists right away and have them build the nucleus of a community around you and suggest and encourage people to further spread the word by blogging and commenting. Just asking your customers for help is so flattering that they will help you, much to your surprise.
All right, where to find these evangelists? All great deeds need a champion that inspires and shapes the world. All you need is to be or find and assign that champion, that original hero that gives the community identity and inspiration. What employee wakes up in the morning thinking: “Today I will carry the flag for my company on the virtual world”? Would they be thinking: “I might get fired for my comment yesterday on that blog post”?
The community has to welcome criticism as this is a long term relationship with ups and downs. Luckily, the criticism the community gives the product or the company is always a constructive one. You should fear no criticism as that means people are going away and they usually never return. Freaking out and trying to control the community as soon as something not-so-nice comes up, just kills it. Love letters from the community to the owner of the company are just a myth.
For your product to attract and foster a community on its own it needs flexibility, malleability, extensibility, it needs to be able to grow by having others build on it. It needs and SDK (Software Development Kit) that allows widgets, plug-ins, tuning. The community needs build on and that flatters the community as admits that you did not build the perfect product, but it can get there sure enough. Once someone builds a widget, a plug-in for your product just try to take your product away from that person. A community may as well start building around the plug-in. As long as tweaking is possible, someone will try it and make it great in a way you never thought of.
Participate in the exchange. The community does not run the company but it has a voice and it needs answers from within the company. The involvement of the CEO in the conversation is a bit extreme for a large company though. Participation in the conversation also means you make sure the community is easy to reach and included in your operations. Just search for forums, “user groups” or blogs at Apple, Microsoft, Netscape, Yahoo, Sun or Ford, Harley Davidson, Shell …
For all that happened, Apple deserves a Hight Five on building a community product.

LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

• Obsolete computer museum
• Memepool
• Simply Audiobooks

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Sites that you don't stumbe upon in your every day surfing. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.
And don't forget my web templates shop at http://www.bynapse.com/.

LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. Guerilla Marketing
2. Webmaster Radio
3. iMusic

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at http://www.bynapse.com/.

MySpace .. YouTube, the real transformers of the web

The web is only 15 years old and it transformed the world. The first website, ever, was published in late 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee and has been preserved for the future by W3C and you can see a copy of it here.
Since then, websites have changed the world and now they’re changing the web again. Yahoo and AOL did portals, and they did them so well that they practically killed the competition until technology allowed for something like Google and Blogger to arrive. But before Blogger and with the right message, MySpace and YouTube have changed the way younger generation thinks about the internet. I remember a beer’s slogan “your friends know why” put that beer on top of the list in Eastern Europe for years and MySpace “a place for friends” has the same impact in cyberspace. YouTube generated a video community so well that members lived every transformation of it with passion.
A quote from News Corp. CEO Peter Chernin : “If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether its YouTube, whether it’s Flickr, whether it’s Photobucket or any of the next-generation Web applications, almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace.”. Read it all in We Don’t Need Web 2.0 and see that he might be right as they’re actually leading the Web 2.0 revolution.
The way the internet is evolving is by putting you at the center and bringing you the world, the way you like it. The emphasis is, finally, on beauty and usability, and sees the impact it has on everything else and on you as well. The best article I came across on the changes the web is seeing is written by Michael Rogers and he’s asking: Can Web 2.0 change the world?. I’m saying yes and MySpace and YouTube are the real transformers as they changed with a swift move, the way we think about it.

Here is but a list of sites that have changed my world:
· eBay.com - the auction and shopping site
· wikipedia.com. - encyclopaedia
· napster.com, the music file sharing website, this shook some ground
· youtube.com. the video-sharing network
· blogger.com, Blog publishing system and the following myspace.com, amazon.com, slashdot.org, digg.com, flickr.com, photobucket.com that came with the same wave. And I’m only mentioning a few.

The web is now a space for interactivity, sharp and clean WebPages with bold and simple designs centered in your browser and linking to one another to bring your content up front. Bandwidth is no longer a luxury so, when you consider building a web presence, look above the fence and see what others are doing don’t be afraid to use graphics as dial-up lines tend to be less used anywhere. Now you can play games online or just use a web template to build a website with little headache and great impact.

Which websites widened your world?

LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. WordTracker
2. URL Trends
3. Hairy Mail

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at http://www.bynapse.com/.

What is Social Media Optimization

Being a website owner or just writing a blog, like I do here, seems to be getting scarier. SEO - “Search engine optimization”, SMO -“Social media optimization”, “Content is King”, the right content to the right audience … wow, it could be frightening and it sounds like a ton of gold. I am a programmer so I’m not so much into marketing as I am into coding and yet I’m a fan of this world of fluid interaction. Knowing it exists and the effects it has on your blog or site is a must.

Some time ago I wrote an article on Web 2.0 that I’ve submitted to digg. The traffic spiked up as I got another 500 visitors in a day. That has to get you thinking, especially if you are into making some money. Was that “social media optimization”? I think it was just a taste of it. It’s a hot buzzword that adds up to SEO and sounds like a lot of time required to be invested.
SEO is about clearing the way for search engines to fully index your site, as well as using keywords in your text as often as you can do so without making it unreadable to the “internet scanner”, which is the way most visitors read articles (I’m among them). Social media optimization is about allowing your visitors to take away your content. Say what?! Well, yes, your content has to be easily shareable and commented on, even if this means implementing only the “Digg This” button on your blog, like the one at the bottom of this post. Tough to explain to your CEO, this should be an objective as visitors usually link back to worthy content, as long as the content is accessible. Adding tags and a Digg button, "Add to del.icio.us" or Technorati chicklet are the least you can do and it’s virtually painless. You can use a neat service like the one provided by AddThis.

Don’t get too excited though, most of the articles submitted to digg will only get one digg, yours. It’s not a recipe for success; it’s a way to get noticed.

Getting on the front page of social media sites offers credibility and visibility and those sound good to a site owner. A nice article about their experience with one of their articles and social media is shared by Daniel Tynski in the Anatomy of a Super Digg where, within five days, they received a total of almost 234,000 unique visitors.

Tips and tricks on how to get there are everywhere as bloggers are trying to monetize on the subject (what a free marketing campaign for those sites, huh?) and here are a few I find really useful an easy to read:

• 10 techniques for reaching the digg front page – Nice collection of articles


• Digg power user – Strategies to survive out there


• Become a del.icio.us power user – by David Brunelle

A comprehensive article on Social Media Optimization outlining the “5 rules of social media optimization” by Rohit Bhargava gets the tough part out of the buzzword.

The effects
Usually short lived and the traffic is barely converted. Links may be coming in, though, from quality sites, and people will at least get your newsletter or subscribe to your feed. You need to get the initial wave of visitors and convert them. Very few blogs are enjoying a constant attention and most of them never get any hits at all.

Free training
One of the real benefits to blogging and applying SEO and SMO is the training it provides to creating readable and inspired keyword rich content, increase expertise and encourages a discussion. Using social media certainly gets you a free training on using tags, providing a clean and comprehensive image of yourself and gets the word out.

Get back on the horse
Social media is about real life and living people. Digg has a feature called “bury” so life can be bitter in those communities as well as it can be sweet. Success is totally dependent on participation, on engagement. Compared to Search Engine Optimization, Social Media is definitely demanding more time.

It’s the ham and eggs paradigm, where the pig is committed and the chicken is only involved, it’s up to you to determine where you stand.

LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. PriceSpider
2. greenphone
3. 23andme

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your proposals for next week as comments.

And don't forget me at http://www.bynapse.com/.

Survive the confusion

There are 122,000,635 sites out there according to NetCraft and the key activities are now picture sharing, videos, blogging, forums, reviews, social networking and .. communities. It's a lot of place to lose yourself in and, as much as it looks crowded, it's only the beginning of the internet. So whom do you trust and whom do you turn to for advice when you're trying to make your way in cyberspace? How do you build your site and how do you promote it?

Ask yourself the following question : Do you trust brands or bloggers views over traditional marketing?

Can either of them be fully trusted ? The ultimate value of a web site has to be trust and probably that's what this new age of the internet is all about. Ten years of exquisite marketing campaigns can be thrown down the drain in six months by bloggers and forums telling a different story. Bloggers can be more honest and less censored than the "marketing message" that is often too polished. On the other hand, reviews are usually subjective and often don't offer the full understanding of the big picture. A Yahoo study found that 2 out of 3 regular social media users are advocates. Ford encouraged it's engineers to blog about how to make their engines better and got a lot of free and very reliable exposure while it developed a better engine. It's a total win for everybody and brands are moving marketing into the hands of professionals that speak about what they know. "Word of mouth" is powerful.

Social media brings exposure and gives you the actual pulse of the world. It also gives the marketers that same information and allows better targeting of the audience. Brands will always try to bring you in and make you switch, it's just a matter of choice and the multitude of sources of information is just the opportunity to provide a more comprehensive view.

Building or Tuning a website up these days may be a little frightening as the rules appear to be changing as we speak. The information moves from site to site getting commented on and being presented in ways only XML and aggregators made possible. Presentation of content is no more an essential part as you may read this post from any rss reader, my newsletter or a post on a social media site.

People don't go to portals any more, they demand a "come-to-me" environment and that is what aggregators, social networking pages, blogs and "web 2.0" applications stand for. To generate more confusion, more and more content is being user generated. The RSS feed icon illustrates probably the essence of what the web is about these days and new or updated sites should provide the feature as the important part is to be in the aggregated feed, on the screen, as the user picks the best-that-I-know-of content.

Bottom line, the time for canned content has gone. Portals are dead or mutating and news are delivered though aggregators rather than broadcasting companies websites, even if they usually originate there. Overhaul your site or start a new one thinking platform, collaboration, content sharing and reviewing. Let users create, move, tag and discuss as empowering them makes all the difference and provide core web services to open up to developers. Yes, your content will be scattered across the cyberspace and yet look how Flikr's name is present everywhere and pays nothing for it.

Web 2.0 websites for rookies

This age of the internet is all about decentralization.
Only a few years ago, during the “bursting of the dot-com bubble”, almost an entire generation concluded that the internet is over hyped and turned its attention elsewhere, thus leaving place to a new generation of technology and models to get center stage and turn the tables out in cyberspace. Web 2.0 does not mean there’s a new version of the internet out there, it’s not a technical specification. The term was promoted, according to Wikipedia, by O’Reily Media in 2003 and it’s explained in depth in the “What is Web 2.0” article.
The decentralization is the main concept that made the tables turn on the web and building a presence out in cyberspace these days has to consider the beneficial aspects of what took place. For marketers and brands, it’s still a headache, since the “portal” which was the key of the “first age” or “first generation” of internet communities is no longer the key to getting the word out. This time, the “consumer” is mastering its own universe and products and brands are orbiting around them. Bloggers and online communities go around constraints. It is human nature to avoid barriers and wherever one is encountered online, the stream goes around and ignores the constraint to a degree that may throw the site, brand or portal to internet’s shed and thus dramatically hurting its business. Blogging, social networking, search engines and friendly directories on the other hand are the new community and here is where “word-of-mouth” is happening and getting a recommendation about a product values more than all the publicity around it.
Excellent examples of Web2.0 websites are YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us or Technorati to name a few and, of course, Google which probably represents to Web 2.0 what Netscape meant to the internet before the turn of the century. There is a wealth of information out there so when you start your web presence, know that you should consider it.
Not everything that has the 2.0 extension at the end is really about web 2.0 though. It’s a concept and an age of the internet and many are trying to take a profit out of internet rookies by selling web 2.0 related items. Just use your better judgment and look for reviews in those wonderful online communities. Joining these new and dynamic communities is exciting and fulfilling as it opens up, literally, the planet and connects you to whatever is actually making news out there.
There has never been a better and easier time to join and get connected and for a website publisher or webmaster.

I’ve put together this list of ideas to get you started. Please comment and add to this list so that the web can benefit from it.

• Write a paragraph about what your website stands for and submit it to share sites like Digg, Reddit or Now Public. Bookmark your site on Del.icio.us and submit your site to StumbleUpon. Submit your following articles from your press section to those directories when you publish them on your site. If you’re writing for geeks, submit your site to Slashdot too. Here is a top 10 social bookmark links list from About.com.
• Create a Google Group or Yahoo Group covering your site topics.
• Create a blog and use it to be honest about your site or your interests. A blog is personal and the language used is less formal. You can actually write in a blog, responsibly but “off your company’s record”. Try using Blogger, Word Press or MySpace. I am also using Freewebs but I find Blogger to be the easiest to use. Now if you do that, you should join Technorati and claim your blog.
• Submit your site to search engine friendly directories and DMOZ.org. This process should be free but it’s time consuming.
• Most blogging directories offer Real Simple Syndication (RSS feeds) by default. You should use it for your site’s news section too. As soon as you have an RSS, submit it to feed aggregators like FeedBurner or Squidoo. Some of those aggregators offer you the possibility to send out a newsletter with the newest articles, automatically.
• Test your site and make sure it appears correctly in all major browsers. We are living wonderful times for testing site appearance on different browsers and making sure that the site is compliant to W3C standards and looks good across browsers since Safari, the web browser used on Mac, is now available for windows too so you can have all the browsers on one OS to test with, unless you develop on Mac and you have IE5.
• Use excellent portals like YouTube and Google Video to post video and Flickr, Photobucket or Picasa Web Albums to publish photos.
• Search engines love XML sitemaps. You can submit that to Google webmaster tools and keep an eye on your site’s traffic with Google Analytics or the new set of tools from Yahoo, the Site Explorer.
  

Publishing advertisement and having high page ranking are good for the morale, but most visitors use ad-blockers and optimizing for search engines is a continuous job and there are professionals out there doing just that, keyword: “SEO Optimization”. Those are not the goals of the new websites and, if high page ranking helps, it does not guarantee popularity. For designers, digital-web offers a nice article about web 2.0 from the designer perspective.

I will not go into depths about what each of the sites mentioned above stands for. Research is probably the most enlightening experience one can have and I leave it all to you. Comment and add items to my lists and keep in mind that web 2.0 is all about social media, the consumer takes center stage, and that changes the world.

Conquering website basics

The web site is your magazine. You are publishing a highly interactive collection of columns on any subject you can think of, providing that the web site sticks to a certain content category.
The webmaster is the publisher, the designer is the editor and paired with a SEO expert and a graphic artist, the few html pages that are bound to become “the web site” are off to the cyberspace.
Now that you got a publishing house and decided what content you site shall provide, a handful of design concerns are due to emerge in the process, and due to the ever evolving nature of the internet and the technologies involved, a great many will emerge after the publishing process has been completed. A webmaster is there for that reason, keep in touch with the present and prevent the website from being stacked up in internet’s shed and lose all its traffic.
Ah, yes, traffic. This is the gold of the cyber world. Domain names, pictures, content, mailing lists are assets and good content is the key of bringing people over. Just sign in for my newsletter and you shall find out why.

For typical commercial Web sites, the basic design concerns are:
• Design: determined by the content and its category
• Content: the most important piece of the puzzle, the substance of the website and the key to “Search Engine Optimization”. Content relevance to the goals and the targeted public is paramount to the success of the site.
• Usability: Just see how Google gets to be on top... with such a simple interface. For the visitor, the easiness to reach the goal (which is not necessarily contained in the “marketing pitch” the site was designed around) is essential to further referring the site, linking to it or just submitting articles to social directories like digg.com which in turn, generate the so much needed extra traffic (that you are trying to retain and convert to the goals of the site). Just check out the billions of dollars worth of free publicity Apple gets only from the upcoming iPhone or from AppleTV.
• Consistency: the site looks and feels in a consistent and professional way. The appearance should include a single style (try using stylesheets to create a standard look for various objects on the site) that flows throughout. There are a few keywords about the style : clean, decent, simple, emphasize content even if the content IS pictures or videos.
• Readability: after all, the TEXT of the site is what got visitors in, even for the site that sells desktop wallpaper.
• SEO: The graphic designer and the SEO expert don’t usually get along very well. Optimizing the site for search engines is crucial to visitors coming to check out the content. Graphics should complement the text and make it easier to read while providing a relaxing environment for browsing the site. The site needs good old text and plain links to get noticed by search engines.

A nice and easy way to get started and conquer the basic design question: “How should the site look like?” can be overcome by using a website template like the ones at http://store.templatemonster.com/?aff=badulescu. Web templates are great ice breakers in the process of getting a website on its way.
Make sure the template, if you buy one, does not make a hole in your pocket at this stage though, the site needs to bring at least enough money to survive on its own.

What do I need a web presence for?

Before you go any further in building a web presence, you need to answer an obvious question: “What do I need a web presence for?” This also includes the answer to: “What am I going to do with my website after I publish it?”.You may not realise it but answering these questions about your existing or upcoming web presence would clarify a lot about whom your target audience is and what your message and content should be. You may be surprised by the fact that your viewers are actually coming to your site for a reason you didn’t even think about while developing your site or your marketing message.

What do I need a web presence for?

Just because you want to find your name with Google
Getting yourself out there is probably the lowest investment you will make. Having an URL on your business card also makes a good impression and allows people to see a bit of you and discover how you think, even if it’s only a marketing image of you, and make an impression about yourself as your website acts like your most detailed business card.

Create a constantly available interface (Provide information)
Let everybody know who you are. Provide information about your organization, business, products, goals, history, ideas and person. Anything that others may be looking for in you is the subject of a web site providing constant availability of your message and an entry point to exploring more about your message.

Promote your products
Providing information about your products and/or services, FAQ lists and contact information for visitors to ask questions and get answers, helps businesses even if the product itself is not sellable online. Many businesses provide information about the products or services they are selling from a physical store.

Promote your interests, hobbies, ideas, activities, groups you belong to
You are not out there for the gold but because you have a passion (backpacking, basketball and swimming, cooking…). You can share this with millions of people and you most likely need a BLOG.

Write your own column or provide Information
Information is a valuable commodity. You can make it widely available with a blog or an information specific web site or you can sell it to “members only” or “subscribers” in an easy to provide electronic format.

Get people in your store
Provide information about products and services as well as opening hours, a few representative pictures and location information, maybe allow printing a discount coupon, and people will be walking into your store more often.

Make some money, affiliate marketing
You don’t have your own products or services but you can still create sales by affiliating your web presence to an existing online store like the one I have at Amazon or the affiliation to a hosting service like 1and1. Buying from a real store is still generating the most sales, but the internet gains ground every year in an accelerating rhythm.

If you sell something, take the money
There are quite a few online money services you can subscribe to and you are instantly capable of accepting credit cards and provide a virtual shopping basket. Most of the companies providing Credit Card services give you the shopping basket that you easily integrate in your website. You can provide an easy to complete checkout point and get the money fast.

Create presentations and demos of your software or e-book
Create presentations of your products or the software you develop. Provide a few chapters of your book in electronic format (usually PDF) or publish your weekly flyer online.

Provide technical and customer support
Customers always appreciate a company or a vendor that stands behind its products. Provide FAQ’s and Knowledge base articles. User Manuals and User Stories, a discussion forum and a support email address can greatly reduce the number of time-consuming support calls you receive.

Live Large, Retire Rich
Certainly you may hear that the internet is the new El Dorado. It’s definitely NOT Dorothy’s Yellow Brick Road and it’s not a gold mine either. It is, however, possible to make nice profits in the cyber world. Most of the money is made through sales. You can sell services and products, information, ads, digital products (photos, videos) and cyber real-estate (space on the web site).
This is a real arena and competition is fierce. You need to do your research before you start selling online, especially if you’re selling your own product. There are a few standard marketing questions you have to answer here, like:
Is there a market for your product or information?
Can you sell your product online (buy-download or buy-ship sale)?
With a continuous attention to promoting your space online and a constant Search Engine Optimisation you can make a nice profit online.

Beware of hosting scams

If the deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is!

Let’s begin exploring the hosting traps you may encounter out there by clarifying the basics about hosting and hosts.
All hosting companies enjoy the same basic limitations, no matter how much iron they throw at the problem. There is no mystical realm of unlimited CPU power and endless memory and storage capacity.
The average web site uses around 50 Megs of disk space (when you start your web site, you will probably be more than comfortable within 10 Megs) and not more than 1 Gig of bandwidth per month (unless your site is overwhelmed with images or is dealing with pictures or videos, lots of them).
Beware of “unlimited” space or bandwidth deals as there is no such thing as unlimited resources. Those deals often end in site termination by the hosting company under the excuse that “your site uses too many resources”. If the deal is too good to be refused, make sure you will require less than average resources to make sure your site stays up. Usually, one or two percent of the sites use all the bandwidth or the space advertised anyways so here is where those deals play.
Most people don’t realize that the bandwidth and space used have little to do with the server resources being used. The resource usage refers to the amount of CPU and RAM as well.
Keep in mind that the cheaper the plan is the more pages-per-server they have to pack to get their money’s worth.
Here is a nice list of Scams I stumbled upon: http://www.websitehostingchat.org/web-hosting-scams.html or just type “Web Hosting Scams” in Google.

Basically, if it says unlimited resources, stay away.

Stay away of hosting companies that offer FREE DOMAIN names, unless they specify that the domain name is “personal”, meaning it’s yours, not theirs. There are a few deals out there that offer free domain name bought by the hosting company and if you’re still with them after a year, they offer to transfer it to you. I just like to imagine what would happen if that domain would bring a six-seven figure revenue that year. Also beware of the transfer free, it usually costs more than buying the domain for a few years.

You may need to pay up front for a year to get a good price. There usually is something fishy behind that request. There are also reputable companies that offer that, but as an alternative and they encourage you to pay monthly. Just imagine paying less and getting less or nothing (downtime, sluggish servers, terrible support, low bandwidth) and being stuck with that plan, not even being able to move your domain to a decent host. You should only pay up front if you researched the company and it’s solid.

I encourage you to check the many “reviews” out there about the company you’re doing your research on. You may even start by checking out the reviews before starting the research on a particular hosting company. Recommendations and forums are usually the best places to get an insight on what a certain company is like, and those resources are usually made available by reputable hosting companies themselves so that you get as much info as you need, on them, before you buy.

This is but a glimpse of what the subject covers and it’s out here just to raise the question and make you do your research and buy from a trusted company or a company you were referred to by a trusted source.

How to choose a Hosting Company

Now that you have decided to go ahead and buy a domain, you have long struggled trying to find the right name for your business or blog and tried them out using availability tools like the one I'm making available on the home page of my blog, the next step is to go ahead and find the hosting company that offers the right plan for you.
If you are writing a blog, you might consider standing out by getting http://www.yourname.com/ (org.. net..). Usually a .com domain gravitates around $6 / yr, of course if you're looking into having the "music", "movies", "programming" or other obvious name domains, the road is bumpy unless your bank account stands out as well. In this case, you can get your domain and direct it towards a free bogging service like the one I'm using. There are hundreds of them out there and they all come with any kind of bells and whistles imaginable. If you're interested in having a business site, a free service does not cut it. You really need to have a distinct and direct link to your customers, even if you're not monetizing the traffic by displaying ads, a site that presents a "hosted for free by ..." footnote just makes me think about a garage company which I would not trust with my credit card number. That service is more suitable for public services and students and it actually makes the daycare (for example) look good as it shows that you, as a parent, are not paying for website hosting as well. There are too many to count hosting companies out there and you will find all price ranges, and all kinds of catchy features. One of the resources I stumbled upon in my search is http://www.findmyhosting.com/, a hosting plan search engine. I never used it as I got my insights on 1and1 the company I am currently using and I found that they are offering the technical solutions and the packages I was looking for. At a certain moment, it's time to stop shopping and go for it. I've put together a list of features and services that a hosting company should really offer if you have got a marketing plan or wish to sell a product or service of your own.
· Domain names - You may not need to buy your own domain, the hosting plan may come with it. There are many hosting companies offering a free included-in-hosting domain name for as long as you are their client, even with their basic, cheapest plan. WARNING, the registration of those domain names included in the plan should be Private (you should own it, not the hosting company)

· Money Back Guarantee - the longer the grace period, the better. You need a way out if it turns out you can't do there what you came for in the first place.


· 24/7 Support - Essential to hosting. Make sure they're not just offering a "comprehensive FAQ" and email support. They should offer live chat and phone support. You need a real person on the other end of the phone, not a recorded message.

· Control Panel – it’s your central neural system where you control your account. Here you manage email accounts, services, statistics (very important), affiliation links, search engine optimization, websites, domain parking and all other aspects of your hosting. Easy upgrade – you should think ahead and get a company that allows you to easily change your hosting plan as your needs may grow. “Think Big – start small”. You should always start with the basic plan though.

· Statistics – Comprehensive report on what pages were shown, how often and to whom (even the geographical location of your visitors is an interesting factor). You may be thinking your site targets the North American market but you get more European hits. That’s good; it’s just that you have to put on your marketing hat again. Statistics should be up-to-date and easy to browse through.

· CGI, PHP, ASP, FrontPage Server Extensions, Perl, other - What each of this things is part of some other conversation. You should be able though to use some server side application to get back the data from your customers (a guestbook, a form, orders, and suggestions). Those should be offered for free.

· Email Accounts – Now that you’ve got http://www.yourcompany.com/ you need an office@yourcompany.com email account that you can reach with your email client. That’s a POP account and you should be able to forward, auto-respond, check for viruses and filter out SPAM right there on the server.

· FTP Accounts – You need to be uploading files through your ftp client. Maybe not right away so the basic account may miss that, but make sure the next-in-line package offers that. If your business grows, you shall definitely need to upload files or the entire website developed with other tools than the branded Website Builders most hosting companies use.

· Shopping Cart and Password Protected areas, paired with SSL communication- If you are selling something, your hosting company should provide a shopping cart so that you develop your virtual store and provide secure checkout for the products your visitors are buying. You may also display your user Account information and reports and all this should be secured. This is not the starter plan but keep in mind you may get there.

· Newsletter – You are out there because you want to create a community. It makes good sense so make sure you can offer that without choosing the most expensive plan.
There are even more things to consider when you are choosing your hosting provider. Your site may grow and provide media streaming, photo printing (and thus require storage space), online gaming. Make sure your host allows you to grow or allows you to move to another host without hassle. If you are writing a blog, you will need Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and a blog system.

Domain Tasting

Domain Tasting is actually the subject of a US Federal Cybersquatting Lawsuit. You should be aware of the pros and cons when you go ahead and "taste" a domain as It's NOT yours yet. Owning a domain is a different story that just tasting one. You may come up with a great name for a domain and "the big sharks" out there may simply seize it for themselves. Read up on it here.

Domain Parking and related terms - Monetize your unused domain

Domain parking is an advertising practice to monetize traffic visiting an under-developed domain or web site. The domain name resolves to a page containing relevant advertising listings and links. These links will be targeted to the predicted interests of the visitor and may change dynamically based on the results that visitors click on. You may have a technology site, if your visitors click on the web programming links a lot, they will be presented with web programming links more often as the Ad system learns the dominant behavior of your visitors. The owner is paid based on usual pay per click rules (number of clicks and sales generated). The keywords for any given domain name provide clues as to the intent of the visitor before arriving.
Another use of domain parking is to be a placeholder of an existing site. A site has moved and instead of presenting the visitors with a "you will be redirected in 5 seconds or click here", it presents relevant ads to monetize the old address as well while your visitors begin to move to the new one.
There are 'one-click' and 'two-click' implementations, that generate ads without the selection of a keyword or may require the visitor to select a keyword that will bring in a list of ads. The ads are targeted based on the domain name or the keyword being selected by the user.
You can park your domain without monetizing but.. let's not go there. We all know the "Under Construction" animated gifs that completely turn me off and I probably never come visiting that site ever again. Placing ads on your unused domain makes much more business sense, presents a welcoming page to your visitors and imagine their surprise when.. coming back to where-they-saw-that-offer, they find an entire site trying to get their attention. People usually like that, it's human nature. They also don't like if they were misleaded and the topic they thought the url stands for turns out to be a totally opposite or to have nothing in common with the one presented before while the domain was parked. I would not be too worried about that though since you were not advertising your domain while it was parked.
You are not allowed to tell people to go to your domain and click the links.
It's a quick way to have a web presence on your domain names before you build up your web site. It is also a service almost all hosting companies offer to their clients (as they are affiliates to third party parking companies) so it should be easy to find and implement.
Oh, and when you buy a domain, read up on "Domain tasting". It's a neat way to check up on the marketability of your domain.

First step has been made

Ok, I guess I have a fair idea about what makes this blog tick. Have you stared your own blog yet? If not, remember that the hardest part is to find its direction. It should naturally flow on its own afterwards.
I have started by buying a domain and got it hosted. I also need time to develop it but now that I bought it.. I've got to act on it or it'll be yet another good idea lost along with some money. Don't you hate it when you lose money? The old "boot up" thing, it’s so actual with so many (if not all) of us.
So here I own a domain name and I am paying for it (Hugh, that's got to make some people sweat). What now? Well, while I start on developing a website and take my time to play with colors and graphics (Did I tell you I am a programmer? Yeah, I am a teckie, right.) I got it parked. So here is an interesting concept: "Domain Parking".
Believe me, getting the domain name is a tough job, it's easier to decide what to do with your website afterwards, at least from where I'm standing.
So what is Domain Parking? You get the domain and, before doing anything, you put it to sleep? Well it certainly sounds like that. In a few words, you get the domain and direct it to a parking service that displays ads targeted to the activity you decide to use the domain for when you're ready. Believe it or not, this brings in some revenue as people stumble upon you parked domain every day (oh you will be surprised. I know I was).
Here you go, domain parking brings in some dollars, maybe enough to pay for the hosting for the first year, while you bring yourself together and put up the best web site you can come up with, one step at a time.

Get a real Cyberlife

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