How To Turn Off Google Personalized Search

As was reported widely last month Google has decided to turn on personalized search for users that are not even logged into their Google account. If you are not familiar with personalized search, this is the algorithm Google uses to determine which search results to show based on your previous search engine usage.

Previously you had to be logged in to your Google account to see the results, this would at least give you the ability to log out to see what the general browsing public would see compared to what your usage has caused the search results for you personally to be.

Once Google turned on personalized search for people even when they were not logged in it caused a bit of an uproar because now, even with all the SEO effort you may put in, you were never quite sure of what the general browsing public would see.

One of the first things I did was found a way to turn off personalized search, this allows me to see what the actual SERPs are compared to what I personally see when logged in, although  someone who has searched for a specific term before may have their own personalized results I can now at least see what the Google results would be if personalized search was not on.

In the case below I am logged into my Google account but will go through what I see and how I turn off Google personalized results:

You can see the View Customizations link on the right side above the search results. Click that link.

Above you will see the links to remove web history for your account, to remove web history and personalized search click on Remove Web History from my Google Account.

Now things are a bit different when you are not signed into your Google account, per Google your search is personalized based on a cookie.  Here is a the quote from Google on how to disable personalized search when you are not signed in:

1. In the top right corner of the search results page, click Web History.
2. On the resulting page, click Disable customizations.(Because this preference is stored in a cookie, it'll affect anyone else who uses the same browser and computer as you).

One interesting thing that I should point out is that Google does say that if you have turned off personalized search for those times you are not logged in you will have to redo the process again since the settings are stored in the cookie itself and the service is opt-in by default.

That last little bit is concerning.

Anyway, enjoy your non-personalized results.

How To Build A Wordpress News Aggregator Version 2

After seeing all the downloads of my original free E-book on how to create a Wordpress news aggregator in 15 minutes I realized that it was probably time for an update. In this version I will show a more streamlined approach to creating the news aggregator, once again it is not my place to judge the value of Wordpress news aggregators, people love them or hate them. I can say I have had very good feedback on the ones I have implemented to the point where I have actually had people request their feeds be added based on traffic to the site.

Assumptions before we start:

Domain name has been purchased, if you are a domain investor you probably already have your favorite domainer friendly places, if you are not and you need a domain name to start your aggregator you can go to the consumer friendly GoDaddy.com

Hosting account has been setup, if you need hosting check at Hostgator.com for great packages for Wordpress hosting, I use Hostgator for this blog and also use their dedicated servers for Missouri.me.

DNS has been switched over to your hosting provider.

Last assumption, your hosting provider uses Cpanel for the management of your account and has Fantastico installed which allows for easy as can be Wordpress installation.

After the steps above are taken care of it is time to install Wordpress, as mentioned you will want to first login to your cpanel account, to do this go to:

InsertYourDomainName.com/cpanel

Example for the site I am using for test here: http://NewspaperHeadlines.net/cpanel

After doing this a login window should pop up, here is an example:

After you have logged in with your username and password it is time to find the icon for Fantastico and install Wordpress, in my case Fantastico is at the far bottom right of the rows of icons. In your case it may be elsewhere, it is the icon that is a little blue smiley face, here is an example:

Click on the icon and you will get a screen with a row of menu items on the left, under blogs you should see a menu item called Wordpress, click this. You will then want to click on New Installation, you will then get a screen with several items to fill in that looks like this:

In my case I am wanting to install this as the main site for the domain name so for directory I will leave blank, for admin user id you can input what you want to have as the admin id and then select a strong password.

For admin nickname, this can be anything although I tend to make it either the name of the person who is writing if it happens to be a blog, but in this case I am using reporter as the nickname.

Choose the email address you want to use unless you are using the default that it sets and then select a site name, in my case I am switching this from the domain name NewspaperHeadlines.net to Newspaper Headlines.

For description something short but descriptive, somewhat like a tagline, should be used.

After those fields are completed click the Install Wordpress button.

It will take you to step 2 of 3, click on the Finish Installation button and Wordpress is installed. If you want the details of the installation sent to you input your email address into the box shown in step 3 of 3 and click send email.

At this point you are done in Cpanel and Fantatsico and will be doing the rest of the work from the Wordpress Admin Panel.

To get to the Wordpress admin panel go to:

YourDomainName.com/wp-admin

You will see a screen that looks like this, login with your admin login and password that you created previously.

At this point you are ready to start making some tweaks in Wordpress, although going through all the various plug-ins and site tweaks I like to make is outside the scope of this how-to there are a couple things I do want to point out before we do show how to install the plugins required to start the news aggregation.

First off go to the menu item posts in the left hand menu, you will see a screen that has Hello World as the only post in your installation, if you mouse over the words Hello World you will get a little menu that gives you the option to delete that post, delete it.

After this you will want to click on the links menu in the left hand menu, you will want to check the box next the the word name in the gray menu bar, this will select all the links automatically installed, after doing this click the drop down box where the words Bulk Action are and select Delete and then hit the Apply button, this deletes all the automatically installed links.

Now, one more deletion and then we move on to just a couple more tweaks, click the Page button in the menu bar on the left, you will see an About Page, high light the text and delete that page or you can keep the page and edit it later to show what your site is about.

At this point you need to click the Settings menu button on the left menu bar, after doing this you will see a list of menu items drop down under where the word Settings was by itself before.

First you will want to click the menu item under settings that says Privacy and select that you would like for search engines to be able to index your site and hit Save Changes.

After this click on Writing in the left menu bar, after doing this you will want to click the boxes for Atom Publishing protocol, and the one below it that starts with Enable the Wordpress, etc,etc, publishing protocols.

Save changes and then we have one more tweak to make.

Under the settings menu select Permalinks, you will want to select custom structure, this allows for Wordpress to have title names that are readable by the search engines and more likely to be indexed. I would use the custom format of /%postname%/

This uses the title of each post name as the file name that the search engines will see. You also may want to use keyword rich category base and tag names as well.

After completing this you will want to click Save Changes.

Now it is time to install the Wordpress plug-ins required to run the Wordpress news aggregator, to install plug-ins you will first want to click on the Plugins item in the menu bar on the left, in this case I am only going to show the specific plugins required but if you want more information on the Wordpress Plugins I use on a full installation of a blog check out Wordpress Plug-ins.

For this though we will want to install FeedWordpress and the FeedWordpress Duplicate Post Filter.

After you clicked on the Plug-Ins menu item you should see a couple additional items below the Plug-ins button, hit the Add New button. You will see a screen like this:

You will want to do a search for FeedWordpress and hit Search.

The top one in the list will be FeedWordpress. You will want to hit the install button, and then when you get the pop up you will want to hit the orange Install button, and then after that you will be at a screen that gives you an option to activate, hit the activate button. After you activate you may get a pink box at the top of your Wordpress admin panel that says that Magpie RSS is out of date, hit the upgrade button, it is a one second upgrade with one click.

Now it is time to install the duplicate post filter. Once again you will want to hit the Add New button below the Plugins menu item on the left and now search for Feedwordpress duplicate by hitting search plugins. Just like before you will want to hit install next to the top item which is FeedWordpress Duplicate Post Filter and then hit the orange install button in the popup and then activate.

At this point you have what you need installed to start your aggregator, now it is time to add a feed to the site so news will start to flow, you can add as many as you like but for purposes of this example we will just do one.

You will want to first hit the Syndication button on the left, now you will see something like this:

In my case, for testing purposes only I chose StlToday.com which is a news source in the St. Louis, MO area. Long term I would choose many options and have them in different categories.

To select StlToday.com I put the URL http://StlToday.com in the Add New Source box and clicked syndicate, after going to the next screen I clicked Use This Feed.

Technically at this point you are complete but there are a few more tweaks. You will notice after going back to the syndication page it shows that automatic updates are not on, it is possible to hit the Update button and have the news fed in now but lets make it easier on ourselves and turn on automatic updates.

You will want to click on Feeds and Updates in the left hand menu under Syndication, there are a ton of options for FeedWordpress which are outside the scope of this post, they are all very well defined and you can determine how you want to configure each option, in this case though we will simply turn on automatic updates so each time new news comes into the feed it will be posted automatically.

You will see under Update Scheduling a drop down, the top item is cron job or manual updates, in this case we will set it too automatically check for updates after pages load.

After doing this go to the bottom of the screen and select Save Changes.

Now click on Syndication again and click the Update button. It will automatically load the news from the feed, and now every 60 minutes get any additional news.

You will want to read through the various options for the FeedWordpress configuration, there are options to have clicks of the titles automatically direct you to the feed source or to keep the content on your site and then after reading the article they can click through to the source.

Although outside the scope of this how-to you will also want to configure categories and other items to finish up your Wordpress installation and also want to upgrade your theme. Although there are plenty free ones out there I am been really pleased with the themes as StudioPress.

Thanks for taking the time to read, hope it helped you get moving.

10 Offline Ways To Promote Your New Website

Whether you are looking for ways to promote a new small business website or a major web development project it is important to find ways to promote the site, although search engines and targeted PPC advertising help drive traffic it is very important, especially for local small businesses to promote their sites on a  day to day basis as their storefront on the Internet.

Too many times I have sat with a business and they talk about having  a website but then talk about how it has never had any traffic, in other words it was a  neat thing to have but they never thought of it as a way to connect with customers or promote their business.

Here are a few ways to promote your online presence with offline methods:

Business Cards - Plain and simple, the standard business card is a standard in business, if you do not have your website listed on the business card you are missing one of the most effective ways to promote your site. I have seen this to many times, someone has a website but you look at their card and sure enough it is not there. Having your domain name in your email address is not enough, make it clear where to go to find your business online.

Take Out Menus - If you are a restaurant do not miss the chance to promote your website on your take home menus or even on your table menus. If you are a business in the area of a restaurant that has take home menus ask if you can buy space on their take home menus for your logo and website. It works, people take these home and stick them on their fridge and see it everyday.

T-Shirts - If you happen to have a business where a uniform is used or have had T-shirts printed up for various reasons make sure you stick your website on it, I have seen people have their phone numbers, addresses, hours, basically everything you can think of on it except for their domain name. A large portion of people focus on remembering the website name these days not the phone number. They can get the contact info from the website.

Billboards - Same as above, more people are looking for the website to go to more so than a phone number these days. A person I spoke to just tonight who is a very non-tech person said he even realized today that he realized it is now the FIRST thing he looks for and never pays attention to a phone number any more on a billboard. If you have a website and have bought billboard advertising do not miss the chance to promote your online billboard (website).

Newspaper and Radio Ads - Lets face it print media is dying a slow (but quickly turning to fast) death so why miss the chance to promote your online presence if you are still advertising in print media. You know people are heading online, make sure they know where to find you there. If you are advertising on radio same thing goes, people are tuning out ads more and more on radio, make sure you get in your website name so they know where to find your online presence, they are more likely to remember that than just about anything else that you may say.

Magnets - Want to keep your logo and site name in front of people hand out refrigerator magnets in your place of business. People use these to hold up pictures, menus, etc so it is a constant reminder when they go to the fridge.

Letterhead - Many small businesses still use letterhead to send business letters or promotional letters on a daily basis. Take advantage of this to get your website in front of the customers or partners you are promoting your message to with your offline paper mailings.

Car Stickers -Window stickers are a great way to get a site and logo in front of people, I see these daily and they are very cost effective to get printed up. Why not get your site name in front of everyone while you are running to get groceries are heading out on a sales call.

Banners - This is something I have used personally, I see many small businesses on a day to day basis that have banners in front of their place of business or in targeted highly visible locations in their area. Most are missing this chance to promote the place people can go to find out more about them, their website.

Team Sponsorships - For years one of the ways local businesses have shown their support for a community has been to sponsor a little league team or maybe the all star soccer team in their area. Think of the value you can get if you give more than just your business name on the jersey and instead put your site name. People are watching their children run around the field for hours at a time, why not keep your site name in front of them.

I am sure there are many others but these are some top ones I have seen used and in many cases not used enough. If you have other creative ways let us know in the comments section.

Personalized promotional items with your company logo and contact information is a great way to promote offline, especially when you give away a products that is useful to people.

How To Upload Websites To Your Hosting Provider

One thing I think many of us with a background in technology or a bit of development experience take for granted is that everyone understands how to FTP (File Transfer Protocol) or upload files to web hosting providers. For many of use we have been doing this for years and it is something we do not even think twice about. So, before I go any further, I apologize up front for this basic tutorial, but as more domain investors look to do some level of development this is an important skill for people to have.

After launching the beta of EzDevelop.com I received questions from 3 different people on how to upload files to a web server. I was shocked at first then realized not everyone that is a domainer has a technical background. Although the next version of what we are releasing will have an option to use our hosting I thought it may be a good idea  to do a how-to for those that are both using our services or, really anyone that just simply wants to know how to upload their site to a web server using FTP.

So, for all you domainers our there with no tech background, here is a quick step by step. It may not be all inclusive but it should help point you in the right direction:

1) Download an FTP program - The program I use is FileZilla, you can download it by clicking here.

2) Install FileZilla. It is a very easy point and click installation, just download and then double click the file that you have downloaded.

3) At this point it is assumed that you have created the account on your hosting provider to upload the files too. You will need the username and password that you configured for this account. In many cases you create the account through cpanel/WHM.

4) Since it is likley that you will want to upload more than one file make sure all the files for the website you are uploading are in one directory, this way you can upload all at one time without having to upload each file one by one. Here is an example:

5) Now open FileZilla by clicking on its icon on your desktop. In my case I see this after doing so:

6) Now you will want to login to your server using FTP with FileZilla, to do this you will type the domain name into the host field below the menu bar at the top of the FileZilla app, you will then type the username and password into the fields allocated for those, this is the username and password that you would of created in your hosting account (i.e. on HostGator.com or another). After filling these fields in press the quick connect button to connect to your server using FTP. NOTE: You will of needed to change the DNS on your domain name to point to the web server before doing the above steps.

7) An example of what you may see after connecting through FTP is shown below:

After doing this you will want to switch to your public_html directory on the server, in my example you will see it in the directory listing box for the remote site. To switch to that directory on the remote server I double click on public_html and it then gives me a listing of the files in that directory.

9) You will now want to upload your website to the public_html directory. To do this I will simply drag and drop the files from the folder that I opened earlier with my web site files in it and then highlight them by first clicking on the top folder or file and then moving my cursor over the bottom file in the list and pressing my left mouse button (assuming you are using Windows and not a MAC).

Here is an example of the files being selected:

10) After selecting them you will want to drag them either to the bottom box with files listed in FileZilla or to the public_html directory in the top box of directory listings on the remote site side of the FileZilla app window (you can see the sides of FileZilla are defined as local site or remote site, left side is local site, right side is remote site).

That is it, your site is now ready to go, BUT, one thing I should note, it is my preference to do it this way but for many it may be even easier to do the following, since you can also list your files that you want to transfer on the local site side of FileZilla and then select them all and then hit the right mouse button and hit the upload button and it will just the same as what I did before by selecting them in a different window. For many this is probably the easier way but for various reasons I use the drag and drop method.

Although I am sure there may still be some questions, this should help at least point many people new to file transfers and just getting into domain develop in the right direction. Sorry for boring the tech folks in the crowd.

Closing The Deal

One of the biggest hurdles people have when selling any product is the ability to actually ask for the close, or as I always say, ask for the check. Whether you are selling domain names or selling encyclopedias door to door it really does not matter you still have to close the deal.

The problem many people have is confusing the ability to get someone interested in your product with actually closing the deal. At one point in my career I was the same way, I could get them interested, just waiting for me to ask to close the deal, but I just could not get past the stigma of asking someone for money (and that is where alot of this comes from, it is ingrained in most people not to feel comfortable asking someone for money). But when you are selling a product (domain name) you have to close the deal, you have to take the money or it does not matter.

In many cases this is confidence as well, you have to believe in your product to get to the closing process, but you really have to have confidence to actually ask them to write you the check, wire you the money, or Paypal you.

Many people mistake having a great personality and being able to talk well in front of people with being a good salesperson. Unfortunately that is not the case, I know alot of really great people that are a blast to hang around, people love to listen to them, but they cannot actually close the deal. This is the biggest problem I have when people refer sales people to me. I can tell in 5 minutes if they are going to be comfortable with closing the deal.

When it comes to domain sales I think the real reason a lot of people try to do it through email is that there is no verbal communication or personal connection to overcome to ask for the close. If you are not from a sales background and have top domain real estate it is likely a good idea to use a domain brokerage service if you want to get the top value out of your top properties. They are not afraid to ask and they know how to stick to their guns to get the most value.

So, next time you are selling a domain name or website keep in mind you are selling a product, they are getting something in return, do not be afraid to ask for payment. It is the only way business gets done.

Minisite Development Domain Selection Tips

I have had several (dozens...) of emails in the past week asking various questions about developing minisites, using wordpress for minisites, revenue on my minisites, and how-to create minisites.

As most people will tell you, I do respond to each and every email rather quickly most of the time, if I miss one its because Outlook may of been a little aggressive filtering it to junk mail.

That said, I thought I would do a few posts this week about various minisite development topics and how I choose between doing the Minisite development myself or if I outsource and also what names I choose and why.

First things first, when do I choose to build compared to outsourcing to someone else?  This comes down to a couple factors, the largest one being time to be quite honest. I have a very demanding sales job that I do along with my Domaining. People ask why do both? Well I actually like the field I am in and the job I do so I use outsourcing based on using my time more effectively (if you really want to get an idea of how to work effectively read 4 Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferris).  I would expect the majority of domainers work a full-time position while domaining part time, outsourcing is the key if you plan to develop any of your domains if that is the case.

The second big one is the type of site I want built, I have zero graphic skills or  graphic creativity, I admit that freely, if I want a simple minisite with simple text content that can be SEO'ed I have that process down to minutes for the site creation. I create those on my own, if it is a site I think could use more of a designers touch and a nice logo then I outsource.

That said, one thing I have learned from experience is make sure the minsite focuses on keywords that have a decent PPC.

I will give a really good example of this, I like to use certain domains for testing various SEO work and Google Adsense optimization.  A few months back I purchased KingCobras.org. I recognized ahead of time that the site would not have high PPC values but it was a name that receives quite a few searches per month (approximately 22,000 for exact match) and would be perfect for what I was testing (SEO on images).  The site is not pretty by any means but I was able within a month to go from a couple visitors a day to 200 to 300 a day (pageviews are higher obviously), it has leveled now in the 100 range due to lack of attention but can easily be rasied back up to that level.  I was able to get a reasonable CTR but the earning per click was a measley 3 to 6 cents. Once again, expected, but it just goes to show to anyone just picking terms to grab traffic if you are looking for dollars and not cents per day pick your content and terms. Thats the point right, to make money:)

Now as far as that site goes, it gets good traffic, I now have a base to build revenue from, there are revenue models that I know will actually make some money off that site and they will be implemented in the near future and I will report on this.

Now, lets go the opposite direction, a site that gets much smaller search volume but pay per click is much higher. WomensBikeShorts.com. Exact match searches are around 2,900 a month which is much lower than the KingCobras.org site so traffic is lower, BUT revenue is much better on a per day average. Why is that? Well its because it is a product people are looking to buy, when people search for a term like Womens Bike Shorts they are looking to buy a product, when they search for King Cobras they are researching. Big difference between what people will pay per click between those 2 intentions.

So, to circle back around to selecting outsourcing or for that matter minisite topics. Its about revenue, if you are looking for high pay per click terms look for services or products, develop your site to match the terms that bring the biggest payback. I would rather a site that gets 20 unique visitors a day getting 20 to 30 percent CTR with 30 cent clicks than a site getting 200 visitors  a day with 10 percent CTR getting 3 cent clicks. 

All those factors need to go into your decision process when choosing a name for development, deciding if the outsource cost is worth it, or if you want to do it yourself.

I will be posting later this week with an exact how to of how to launch simple Wordpress Minisites that have been proven to have solid CTR for those times when you cannot justify or just do not want to outsource your domain development.

Domain Name Buying and Selling Do’s and Don’ts Part 3

OK, final installment of Domain Name Buying and Selling Do's and Don'ts. Some of the comments I have got through DM on twitter and in email from those that know me have been fun and actually have led to some fun ideas for future blog posts. Keep in mind these are mistakes that most domainers have made at sometime or another (myself included) and are meet to help not berate.

After todays installment I will leave this theme of posts for a bit:)

1) If you are selling a name based on traffic and revenue, DO make sure you test it at multiple parking providers first. Although I prefer Parked.com in most cases I find that certain names perform better at other parking providers (I do much better with adult names on SedoPro).   Now why it is important, I recently sold a name on 2 years revenue that at Parked.com was making approximately $20 a month. I tested this same name on SedoPro and it made $80 a month, thats a major difference if you are looking at a 2 year revenue multiple. $480 compared to $1920 just by taking the time to test on multiple parking companies.

2) Do NOT backorder domains at just one drop catcher. You will miss names you want guaranteed, it takes no more than 3 minutes to add the backorder on a second site (or even 3rd). I routinely use Snapnames and Namejet (to a lesser degree Pool) and have even on occasion use Godaddy backorders. If its a good name its worth the effort to cover your bases.

3) Do NOT ask for appraisals on forums, when I was a newbie I did this, its bad for 50 different reasons. Its not worth the effort.

4) If you are trying to move a traffic name be prepared to provide more details if its a name you are asking for more than $1XX on. I see people acting surprised when people want to see referrers, keywords, 3 months revenue, etc. If you cannot provide that is fine but do not expect to get the same revenue multiple that someone who can provide would get.

5) This one is more of an annoyance than anything, READ the forum rules before posting a for sale thread. The rules are there for a reason, the rest of us are abiding by them, you need to as well.

Thanks for reading once again. If you are into traffic names item #1 above is probably the most important one out of this 3 part series.

Domain Name Buying And Selling Do’s and Don’ts Part 2

Getting ready to board a flight but thought no time like the present to post the second list of Domain Buying and Selling do's and don'ts. Had some good commentary on Twitter and email after the post yesterday.  Enjoy the second installment:

1) Brandables - Do not buy brandable anything, I do not care if it sounds really cool, is 5 letters long, and is .com. If you are buying hundreds or even dozens of these you could of spent that money on a quality domain that has value. If a group of guys buzzing on coffee are brainstorming ideas for names of a company and searching real time the chances of them a) hitting on yours and caring enough to buy it, or b) not moving onto to another idea on their whiteboard, are pretty much slim to none. TeenDomainer.com had a nice post on why not to do this in .ME, .INFO, etc today as well.

2) Do not buy 5 word .coms and expect to move them at prices that match single word .com prices. Its ok to buy a keyword rich 3 word domain, it has worked well for me on Minisites and for a niche product thats great. But do not buy MyCoolNicheProductNameInRed.org and expect it to do as well as a single word .com. I am amazed (amused) everyday by the names that are being pushed everyday on the forums like this. On that note.

3) Do not list everyname you own as premium. When I scan the forums for domains to buy it is almost an automatic ignore as soon as I see PREMIUM KEYWORD DOMAINS, or SUPER PREMIUM.  75 percent of the time those names are weak, very weak. And on another note...

4) Do not ignore the forum sales forums. Its a buyers market right now, there are bargains to be had. NOTE: This item may of been a bad idea, competition.....

5) Do NOT buy premium .TV names with $5,000 renewals unless you have a solid plan to recoup your cost with a site development. Not that I had any with $5,000 renewals but I did have one with a $500 renewal. Its was a very nice name that even fit the extension well. I dropped it, it hurt to do it, but at the end of the day it made since and with the money saved I was able to invest in a traffic name that actually makes a profit.

More to come, I post these for people to learn from my mistakes that I made early on when I got started, and from those that I speak with daily. Don't take offense if you are making or are have made these mistake. I may not have made all of them but some of these are from experience.

Domain Buying and Selling Do’s and Dont’s

Everyweek I make at least a couple Domain related transactions, whether it be purchasing a name on Namepros.com or selling a name through email or Sedo there is usually some negotiation that takes place. Rick Latona has a series of blog posts concerning general selling do's and don't which some people have a hard time accepting. People just do not like the truth sometimes, especially when it may be something new they are learing or even more so when it is something they no but just do not want to admit.

I came up with a list of more than 30 do's and don'ts  for when dealing with domain transactions but limited my list to 5 and will post more in later blog posts, some of these are obvious but for a newbie coming in or for someone who is simply new to any transaction based business I hope these can help.

1) NEVER, I mean NEVER accept the first offer. Even if you think the number is fair understand that its a starting point. When making a counter offer NEVER counter with your lowest acceptance price. Example, recently I sold  a name on Sedo for $2,000.  The first offer was at $750, did I counter with $2,000, no, I countered with $3,000. If I would of countered with $2,000 they would of offered something lower. This increased my transaction value by hundreds of dollars.

2) When buying names make sure you have the money to buy, do NOT string out the seller for days, weeks, months coming up with the funds. If you cannot buy it do not make the offer. Its ok to say no if the seller comes back with something that does not meet your budget, but once you commit you better be ready. I had a transaction string out for 3 months last year due to this. I had already posted a name was sold then the person suddenly kept having excuses for the funds not showing up.  I still had the name but the hassle was not worth it. Never again. (One exception, if you work out payment plans ahead of time)

3)  Do NOT believe the traffic numbers on Godaddy auctions. Its been proven time and time again that these numbers are not accurate and can be driven up by unsavory characters buying traffic to push up prices. Do your research, if you cannot figure out where the traffic is coming from then do not take the chance. I have seen many a name that showed hundreds, if not thousands, of visitors per month that after doing a bit of research could not figure out any reason why the site could be getting that much traffic. There are plenty of how-tos available on how to check for backlinks, Alexa rank, etc for a name. Save yourself some money and use them.

4) OK, so a funny but very true one, people make jokes all the time about buying domains when drunk. Seriously, its funny but true, if you have a list of 100 domains in your cart at your register of choice and you know you had to many Gin and Tonics do not hit BUY:) I say this one almost in jest but I am sure I have a couple names I have dropped (cancelled...) due to this.

5) Be careful not to jump on every overly hyped extension to hit the market. I will admit freely that no one has a crystal ball and some may actually do well. But if you invest all your domaining dollars in .TV, .MOBI, .ME, .TEL (let me emphasize that last one .TEL) you will not do as well as focusing your dollars on .COM, .NET, or .ORG. I have made my mistakes in this area, learn from my mistakes here. That said, I have made some large domain purchases in one of those listed above and am a believer (.ME for full disclosure). That came after people (money guys, marketing guys) caught on to it and actually funded a project based on the branding and possibilities of it. Note that it was based on MONEY not emotion. Domaining is a business not a hobby.

I am sure people will have either strong agreements, disagreements, or comments. Feel free. There are dozens more that could be listed.

Wordpress Plug-Ins for Minisites

Wordpress is one of the most flexible and easily implemented tools for developing minisites for your keyword domains. Whether I am looking to develop a high traffic minisite or a more niche topic I can find ways to use Wordpress as the base for my site and use one of many free Wordpress themes to customize the look and feel.

Many webhosting providers provide point and click install of Wordpress through Cpanel and Fantastico which makes the process even faster.

Once up and running I have several Wordpress plug-ins I use to make the site more SEO friendly and make site more functional from both an admin and user perspective.

There are hundreds of Wordpress plug-ins, these are my goto plug-ins for vritually every site, some I recently started using and am moving back through my older sites to add:

Add to Any Share/Save/Bookmark Plug-In

This tool adds a button at the end of each post that allows the viewer to easily share your story on Digg, Facebook, and may other social news and network sites.

Download Add To Any

Google XML Sitemaps

To make sure your site is fully indexed and visible to Google (Yahoo and Microsoft as well) it is very important to create a compliant sitemap. This plug-in automatically creates the proper file and updates it as you add posts and pages. It is very configurable and allows automatic notifcation of sitemap updates to Google, Yahoo, and more.

Download Google XML Sitemaps

All-In-One SEO Pack

The All-In-One SEO Pack makes it a snap to easily setup your post titles, meta tags, and other important SEO items in one spot. Where I really find this tool useful is on a per post basis you can configure description, keywords, etc.

Download All-In-SEO Pack

Statpress

Statpress is a tool for viewing stats for your Wordpress blog, this allows for reporting based on last referrer, keyword referrals, and other areas of interest as well as tracking the top referrers and keywords. I still use Awstats but find myself referring to this frequently as well.

Download Statpress

OK, a couple that I do not use on every site but have found useful too:

FeedWordpress

This plug-in allows for automatic posting of RSS feeds from other sites to yours. If you are wanting to setup a niche news aggregator using Wordpress this can be an quick and easy way to do that.

Download FeedWordpress

WP Super Cache

If your site gets frequent updates and high traffic this is a must, this plug-in creates cached files of frequently viewed pages of your site. I have a couple sites that this became a must on after traffic grew over 1000 uniques a day.

Download WP Super Cache

Twitter Tools

This one is a recent addition for me, this allows for your blog posts to be automatically fed to twitter or for your twitter posts to automatically generate blog posts on your Wordpress blog. I also use it to create an auto-updating "tweet view" on my right sidebar. Its a nice way for visitors to keep up and gives the site a more personal feel in my mind.

Download Twitter Tools

I am sure there are many more that can be pointed out that can be useful, feel free to leave a comment with plug-ins that you  find useful as well.

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