Free Google email hosting may seem to have little to do with SEO. However, what I am going to share with you is more than SEO, it will help improve your website performance.

We are not only talking about optimizing your website for search engine robots; we are talking about making better for real human visitors – your potential customers.

For the technically inclined, you will understand that the mail server is taking up valuable resources on the machine which you also use to serve Web pages. Such sharing of CPU resources may slow down your website performance.

Website Optimization

Dynamic website using content management systems and blogs will suffer in terms of performance, i.e. how quickly the page is displayed on your visitors’ computer.

Now let say you stop using the mail servers and dedicate all the computing power to your CMS and blogs, then their performance will definitely improve.

Likewise, if you are running a busy e-commerce website with shopping-cart then you definitely want to use all the computing power for a smooth check-out process and give the best customer’s experience.

Stop using your Web server for email hosting, instead use Google Apps for all your business email accounts.

Google Apps Email Features

The biggest advantage is the SPAM and virus filtering.

Can you imagine those emails with virus infected attachment sitting next to your gorgeous Web pages!?

Even with anti-virus software installed, the mail server which comes with your Web hosting account cannot compare to the level of security and the computing which Google can offer.

If you are interested to know more about the fantastic features which Google hosted email for business can offer, visit

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/security/index.html

And Google gives you 100 free email accounts with 6GB of storage each.

POP3/SMTP for Outlook and Outlook Express

You can access your business email using the familiar GMail webmail interface and/or download your email messages to Outlook or Outlook Express.

Your email address will remain the same, i.e.

yourname@yourcompany.com

And not some esoteric mynamenotavailable@gmail.com

However, in order to use the free Google Apps and your own domain name, you need to edit the DNS/MX settings. For those who have an existing Web hosting, you can get your hosting provider to enter the MX records provided by Google.

Set Up A Domain Just for Google Email Account

If you have an idling domain name or thinking of registering a new one just to take advantage of the email service of Google Apps and not to host a website, then you have to make sure your domain registrar also offers DNS hosting or DNS management.

GoDaddy and many other domain registrars do not offer this option because I guess they want you to also buy hosting from them.

Try Name.com, you can use Google Apps with their domains.

Otherwise you’ll need to register for the free DNS management service at ZoneEdit.com

Set Up SPR Record for Your Google Email Addresses

Last point, you will want to set up a SPF record. At your DNS management, add the following TXT record:

“v=spf1 include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all”

Would you like to make a passive income with your unused domain names?

Domain parking monetization would be the answer to the thousands of Internet entrepreneurs who registered new domains and buy expired domain names quicker than they can build content for the websites.

If you are not aware of domain parking monetization, then you would have only 2 options.

1. Park it with your registrar for free
2. Create a new hosting space, and put up a “under construction” page.

Option 2 is the preferred method if you have the spare web space and time to tinker with the web page. More importantly, you put what you want on the website.

However, most people will opt for the first option and just park it with their registrars. It is simply more convenient to do so.

Free Domain Parking is Not Free After All

However, do you know you could be losing money if you park “free” with your registrar.

Take Godaddy as an example, it provides free parking for your domains. Your “parked free” domain will displays Sponsored Links and other ads put up by GoDaddy. In fact, I think it looks better than an “under construction” page.

When people come to your domain and click at those sponsored links, GoDaddy get paid – not you. Your domain is now making money for your registrar!

You can stop this!

You can park your domains with paid domain services and get paid for all those clicks.

Paid Domain Parking

There are a host of domain parking monetization providers that will help you to earn domain parking revenue with your unused domains.

• DomainSponsor.com
• iMonetize.com
• Klickerz.com
• RevenueDirect.com
• NameDrive.com
• Fabulous.com
• Sedo.com
• GoldKey.com
• ActiveAudience.com

I do not used all of them. Just a selected few.

You will get a better comparison of the various paid domain parking services at www.parkquick.com.

The selected few paid domain parking services which I am using are Klickerz.com, iMonetize and Afternic(ActiveAudience).

I started with Afternic because I’ve put up some domains for sale there and conveniently park with Afternic. However, ActiveAudience which Afternic is using to serve the parking pages, are forward to Sedo parking pages. And I don’t like it.

SEO Friendly Domain Parking

One thing I am particular concerned, beside higher earning per click, is whether the pages serve by the parking service is SEO friendly. You don’t want your domain, especially if it already has a Google pagerank(PR), to have the following SEO taboos:

• dynamic URLs
• HTML frames
• forwarding to external pages

For various reasons, including SEO concerns, I will recommend Klickerz for better earning and GoldKey for SEO friendliness.

I thought such thing happens to you and me but not to a billion dollar company like Google.

It was report in WebProNews that Google Slips Its Leash and lost control of its domain name Google.de. I guess such slip-up happened because the German does thing differently from the American or there might be a difference in culture as far as running a big corporation is concerned.

Some third party managed to catch Google’s expired domain name and registered this prized domain name.

Google must be embarrassed by the fiasco. However, it resolved the matter quickly and went back to business as usual.

So What Happened?

I guessed it was a matter of expectation and the lack of good communication.

Did the Americans try to speak Deutsch or the Germans try to speak English?

I suspect that DENIC, the German domain registry, does thing different from its American counterpart and the Americans have not appreciated this difference in the work culture and renewal procedures and regulations.

There is definitely a lesson to be learned here. We are dealing with the Internet, there is cultural difference and the way you work in your country may be different from how things should be done in the host country.

Cross Cultural Differences

I’ve worked with Americans in the USA and the German in Deutschland. They behaves differently. Even the Americans from west coast (e.g. LA) work differently from the people from the east coast (e.g. New York).

Being a Singaporean living in this multi-racial country, I believe we are used to such cultural differences. And we tend to handle such differences better – that is a very special trait that most Singaporeans have.

Don’t you agree?

Still on the domain name trading matter because I have been spending a bit more time recently to study the investment potential of domain names.

When we speak of domain name trading, people tend to think of registering a new name and selling it for a profit.

In actual fact, in domain name trading, I am talking about selling used domain names. “Used” in this case means the domain is actually pointing to a website with content and preferably indexed by the major search engines.

When the domain is used and has several backlinks(inbound links), there is a good chance that traffic is already coming to this domain. The more traffic coming to the domain, the more valuable. Because, you can monetize this traffic and also further improve your revenue by search engine optimization.

It is for this reason that savvy domain investors are paying top dollars for expired domain names.

What are the other reasons that people are pay thousands of dollar for an used domain name?

(It was reported that Diamond.com was traded for US$7.5 million)

1. The domain name trading market is still expanding.

2. We do not hear many Singaporeans doing this yet. We will, soon.

(This is for my Singaporean readers. I think many Singaporeans are born traders so there must be someone in Singapore already making lots of money quietly trading domain names.)

3. Everyone who starts an online business needs a good domain name eventually.

Reason: You don’t want to put your income at risk because someone in Google decides to close down your BlogSpot.com blog.

4. People are willing to pay several hundred dollars upward for a domain name they fancy.

5. It’s a truly global business, you target people from the USA, Europe, Japan, India, Middle East and Asia who are looking for domain names because of the

- letters and words in the domain name
- pagerank
- existing traffic

I started to trade domain name seriously only last September. I registered accounts with TDNAM.com and Afternic.com. So far, I’ve lsted about 40 domain names at Afternic and sold a domain name recently for US$500. To replenish my inventory, beside registering new domain names, I also buy expired domain names at TDNAM.com. I had spent over US$300 over the last 4 months on expired domain names.

In fact, I traded my first domain name about 2 years ago – IndexFuturesTrading.com for US$150 on SEDO.com. I guess I could easily sell it for US$500 today.

What You Need to Get Started Trading Domain Names

MONEY

You’ll need to put aside US$500 to US$1,000 to start this online business and build up your domain name inventory over the next 12 months.

DISCIPLINE

You are not about to go on a shopping spree and spend all your capital in a weekend. For a start, you MUST NOT buy more than 5 domain names a month – no matter how cheap they are. There are always better domain names coming to the market if you look hard enough.

DON’T BE CHEAP

You are in the business to buy and sell good domain names – NOT cheap domain names. Do not buy a domain name because it’s cheap. If people are selling cheap, very likely, there is no buyer for that name. Buy a domain name because you have done the research, and opinion based on your own research, the domain name is undervalued.

SPECIALIZATION

Deal with a specific category of domain names. Start with only .COM domain name. This is most in demand and you can expect to turn over a profit quickly. You want to specialize in a certain industry e.g. real estate, finance, health or etc.

CASHFLOW IS MOST IMPORTANT

Domain name trading is different from domain name speculation. In trading, you focus is on the cashflow – as long as you make a profit, you will sell your domain names to increase cashflow.

In domain name speculation, you focus on the profit margin and hope that you will make the most money with a domain name – you have to be lucky all the time.

Would you want to become a successful domain name trader?

If you are already making money trading domain names, do not stay quiet, we want to hear from you.

Update Jan 9, 2007: Here’s an article by Mercanti Group, an investment bank, on Virtual Land with some interesting statistics on e-commerce in relation to the rising prices of domain names.

Recently, I started to become more serious with domain name trading. There are a couple of reasons that prompted me to explore this business on trading of domain name.

For many years, I’ve been registering and accumulating interesting domain names. I currently have about 100 domain names including more than 10 .SG domains. I spent more than US$1,000 a year on domain names.

So far, I only sold one domain name via Sedo.com. It was a keywords rich domain name for the financial industry.

At that time, Sedo.com was the leader of the market. Now, we have more popular domain auction sites, such as Afternic.com and Tdnam.com.

In fact, I registered with these two sites 2 weeks ago and had since purchased 3 expired domain names. All 3 domain names have valid Pagerank and existing traffic. I intend to use these 3 domain names to boost the PR value of my other low PR domains.

Selling Domain Names

I am using Afternic.com to park my inventory of domain names. Over the years, I have registered more than a hundred domain names, mainly keywords targeted .COM and also .NET, .ORG, .WS and .SG. However, .SG domain cannot be traded in the open market.

Here’s a list of domain names up for sale:

1. 1st-Domain-Registration.com
2. About-Debt-Help.com
3. Airfares-Singapore.com
4. Bus-to-Malaysia.com
5. BusinessLeadsGuide.com
6. ChinaInsiders.com
7. Content-Goldmine.com
8. Digital-Photography-Guide.com
9. Fast-Debt-Help.com
10. Free-Internet-Calls.com
11. GeomaticsAsia.com
12. KidsLearningOnline.com
13. MWCX.com
14. Nice-Bus-Malaysia.com
15. PDA-SmartPhones.com
16. QuBB.net
17. SearchOptimizationGuide.com

I was feeling vain and decided to register a couple .SG domains. Just cannot tahan that TC registering a hundred of those keyword .SG domains e.g. success, mlm, tea, spirulina and etc. So I also registered 2 fanciful domain names, “infopreneur” and “tycoon“.

There is no real content on both websites yet. And I have not really decided what to do with them. Maybe, I will published some ebooks and put them on infopreneur.sg.

Update Jan 2006
I decided to gave up the infopreneur.sg domain after 1 year and retain tycoon.sg. Over the past year, I have been accumulating more .SG domains and these cost me a big sum of money. Also, .SG domain names do not resale value due to the restrictions placed by SGNIC. I reckon it would be better to save the money and invest in a couple of good .COM domains. Visit Domain-Name-Trading.com for more information.

Yes, put all those Eleven Thousands articles there and make that into an archive complete with local search engine. But, I’ll need a programmer to do some scripts for me to automate the process. I am too lazy to edit and upload all the 11,000 articles.

As for Tycoon.sg, I really don’t think I should be talking about about dead tycoons lah! But the problem is I don’t have much information on the live tycoons like our Mr Ng and Mr Oei. So you know any sources or information on these tycoons, please put them in the comments.

I registered 2 domain names using my name:

• shihengcheong.com and
• hengcheong.com

These domains are to facilitate my friends and business associates to contact me. The landing page is basically a contact form which will forward the message to my personal email account. Why not just use email? You probably know it’s not really safe to hand out your business email address just like that. My name and email address was used to register some online networking marketing program. And then you get some people who put your email address togather with 30 other addresses in the c.c. list – the ideal fodder for malicious hackers.

Just having a landing page with a contact form is boring so I thought why not start a blog and write about how I go about my every day life. Not that it is colorful, interesting or even juicy but more for venting my frustrations and letting off the steam and more importantly is to practise writing.