The fluctuating market for domain brands is thinly traded. The risk inherent in owning them, the Internet advertising market, the stock market, and the economy overall are constantly in flux. So if you own a digital asset of this value, then its valuation is fluctuating whether you like it or not. If you have a domain worth $1M, then throughout its lifecycle, the domain may have been worth $70, $1,000, $50,000, $1M, $5M, $1M, $500,000, $1M, $250,000, etc. while being left to its own devices.

But our assertion is that if you are actively working on design, ecommerce conversion, SEO, SEM, arbitrage, application building, partner building, staff development, etc., or some combination of those opportunities, then you are optimizing your asset or small business the right way. If it has a significant value, as proven by its 100K plus valuation (which is constantly in flux), then you would be harming yourself by not building the asset or at least trying your best. And by proactively adding value and traffic into a business with ideas, code, customers, etc., instead of lame basic PPC parking, you keep the valuations moving up during what would ordinarily be stressful cycles of asset fluctuations.

Under this improved model, the domain valuation that you had been mistakenly banking on merely serves as a downside hedge. Your killer, evolving business, using a world-class domain brand, may not grow the way you had planned. Yet you are still covered by owning a great domain and any value that you added to it in the same risky fluctuating market where you started, hopefully at a higher natural baseline due to an evolving market (similar to a convertible bond).

If you really own some of the world’s best, unused domain brands, you are being negligent every day that you aren’t working on improving them. You are losing opportunity, which is extremely expensive for you. Look around, and you will find that Phone.com, SEO.com, Software.com, HappyBirthday.com and thousands of others are MUCH better off as companies being built, not domains being parked and neglected.

From my book:

“Every time you fail to assertively take advantage of all opportunities and employ all Best Practices, you are essentially throwing cash right in the garbage (or even worse, into the hands of your competitors). This money is called Opportunity Cost.

Controlling opportunities requires a careful setting of priorities. An example would be if you spend 100 hours to make $100K when you could have chosen a better business option and spent 100 hours to make $200K, then the Opportunity Cost is $100K. You lost $100K–the cost of making the wrong decision. The opportunity to improve in all areas of business is always at hand if you pay attention.”

In this case, the opportunity cost of not developing the world’s best domains is too high, so they should all be proactively developed like any other ongoing business.

1. Decide how you want your long-term network to look and how you want it to work. The beauty here is that it can look like anything you want because LinkedIn has practically an unlimited number of people in each industry and sub-industry niche that you can attempt to associate with forever. Today would be a good day to start building your network, so you don’t get any further behind.

2. Keep in mind that just as you should “dress for the career you want to have,” you should associate with those on LinkedIn that you perpetually want others to believe you are “like.”

3. Whoever you try to add can see the others in your network before they approve you as part of their club. Over time, new people will believe you are one of the same with those in your own network, as if you are at a country club. Mind you, this may be considered pretentious (just like a country club). Again, the job is to get paid, which is what I would think is the best goal of joining a private, fancy club.

4. So if you were a graphic designer and you wanted to expand your practice, you could identify your future, target market and the best future makeup of your company; with those ideas, start building a network full of people who will help you create your world. There is an unlimited amount of choices, but it’s not easy, it’s competitive and time consuming—as making money should be.

5. So for example, you can start adding the world’s best graphic designers to your own network, and the same great, marketing managers from the industry. They can all be found with simple, key word searches and/or using the LinkedIn advanced search menu system, which is very simple and straightforward.

6. Next, target your sales prospects. For example, you might find you have specialty design work for Venture Capitalists, so target all of them on LinkedIn. There are millions of options. True, you will only be able to add and close a small percentage of your attempts in the beginning. But as you adjust your messaging based on feedback, and as others see your growing, powerful network, you will get an ever-increasing portion of your attempted LinkedIn “Adds” to say “yes” and therefore become part of your network to leverage and for others to see. Keep in mind; it will be very rare for any executives to delete you from your mutual network once added, so this is great. And all of the people you link to will expand their own networks perpetually, which enhances your mutual one.

7. So the object is to add as many people that you want to associate with over time that will help your company. Don’t add anyone that would make you look correspondingly weak because that will reduce your high-end network building prospects.

8. If you made it this far, then you are ready for the hard part: asking huge numbers of great people to add you to their LinkedIn and probably get rejected a lot, less and less each day, but a lot nonetheless.

9. The time consuming part of building your network is to figure out email addresses to add folks. Once you find the people, then discover their email address and send them a standard LinkedIn form email, and then you just wait and collect a certain percentage of them in your network. Thank them and ask for a call, send them emails and newsletters, arrange meetings, all based on your long-term business agenda. Thank you very much LinkedIn for the megabucks this creates for proactive prospectors at no basic charge.

10. Here is how you find the email addresses:

You can try to find the common syntax used at their company with other employees by discovering their domain and typing into Google “@acmecorporation.com.” This might find the record for Mary Jones to be mjones@acmecorporation.com, and Tom Williams to be twilliams@acmecorporation.com. So if you know the president is John Smith, you can assume he utilizes the same syntax in his email and try to contact him through LinkedIn at jsmith@acmecorporation.com. If that “bounces” in their system, don’t give up; try john.smith@acmecorporation.com, john@acmecorporation.com, ceo@acmecorporation.com, etc., or call the secretary and pretend that you know something and ask for his email address. In any event, persistence truly pays.

Bingo—you just bypassed a bunch of bureaucracy, got to the boss, and permanently associated her with your network and vice versa. Even though you may ultimately be ignored or rejected, it’s another notch on your belt and having it over with means you will be one-step closer to the ones who won’t ignore you.

If you only add the execs that you want to work with, then those are the only ones that will ever be on your network, and it will keep giving you additional leverage to try to work with them and any others you seek.

11. Keep in mind this is free and easy, but it won’t do a thing if you don’t spend the time and energy to do it correctly—like anything else in this world

12. Thanks and LMK what you think. Cheers

- Mike

Within each of those cities, we will partner with local business leaders to permanently infect their communities with our charitable works and business offerings. At minimum, we will offer the service suites of MilitantMarketing, Phone.com, SEO.com, Graphics.net, Dial-a-Geek, Information Architects, and maybe networked X3O gaming centers and services. Plus, we may offer services from BrowserMedia, StrongTech, Podcast.com, Software.com, Yield Software, or other emerging assets if it suits our mutual strategies at the time.

Office environments will be set up in strategically relevant neighborhoods in our key cities. The offices will be staffed with a regional manager and sales and support personnel who will work together on behalf of every participating WVC Company or project. Some personnel will be expected to specialize in one particular company or subject area that warrants exclusive attention. Settlements, commissions, and custom arrangements between entities will be frequently required to make sure each has fairly balanced operational economics within this model.

We will also establish a Grassroots.org presence in each office, and therefore community, and ensure local 501c executives can easily access our people and free technology services. Also, Make Change! Trust will make strategic charitable investments and long-term commitments in each of the communities utilizing the same executive infrastructure, social/business networks, supporting entities, personnel, and office space. Moreover, Grassroots.org will expand its mentoring program with local university business schools, like the MBA project we have with Dingman Center at UMD, and launch business plan competitions within that structure.

We will also review the possibility of building Byte Back or similar technology training centers in each city. They have seven centers where they teach computer technologies and offer free help with job training in the inner city. I was the first Chairman of this organization ten years ago, and I remain a supporter of their work.

Moreover, we will set up an Internet expert speaker series once per year to go to each city surrounding the events and conferences that we help support. We can easily staff this with compelling speeches from WVC CEOs, CTOs, and marketers, as well as from our expanded community. And we will host an outstanding party during each conference period, which will be supported by sponsorships.

And we will heavily promote and recruit bands for RockConcerts.com in perpetuity at popular local rock shows and events and co-promote our charitable work, and possibly Podcast.com too.

We will also study and invest in select Internet companies in each community; we may establish community web sites in some of these communities using local domain names and our best of breed web technologies and ideas.

We will have our leaders join technology and venture capital networking and investing groups, entrepreneurs’ organizations, and chambers of commerce. The intention is for our leaders to establish themselves as long-term leaders in their communities and to establish WVC as a permanent and valuable fixture in the targeted region. We will make sure that we have all the leaders from each city receiving our newsletters, added to each of our LinkedIn accounts, and followed up within a structured professional sales system with extensive CRM and data mining support.

We will actively network with and recruit leading regional investors, so they can access our deals and projects. We will use MilitantMarketing to heavily promote all relevant activities for each of our entities in the press and business communities, in perpetuity, and in our target markets. We believe our best bet is to start by meeting and cooperating with the most established technology companies and investors in each region prior to expending significant additional resources on outbound sales campaigns. In each community, we expect to establish our position quickly and expand it steadily. I believe that each company and our overall strategy are unique and meaningful enough to garner considerable press attention, which makes the strategy even more likely to succeed.

There are many details to execute this strategy successfully over a long time, but this is the fundamental premise I intend to pursue sooner rather than later. I think it is a powerful and efficient way to build up our companies while simultaneously expanding our charitable work. I look forward to your feedback and participation in making our dreams a reality. Thanks for reading.

Anyhow, I finally realize that Jobs positioned Apple to be the all round preferred hardware provider for the future of technology (a nice position). For me, “convergence” is the future of technology. Steve has it down regarding consumer electronics and PC related devices. Jobs’ strategy will disintermediate dozens of large wannabe leaders.

The exciting part is how it all subtly, but powerfully, comes together. First of all, the PC or Mac can download any multimedia, including anything made by consumers worldwide just minutes after production. Each piece of content is easily indexed on your own PC and online, given the appropriate tagging.

Next, Apple created the iPod, which is mostly a hard drive and display with full multimedia capacity and an easy, user-friendly interface. Obviously a popular invention. Now Apple has launched the iPhone. Given we bought Phone.com, even before they came up with iPhone, I am a big believer and promoter of NextGen and VoIP telecom, which is naturally convergent with many other Internet connected apps.

Apple then announced the iTV, an obvious product to go within their array. This is when I realized how it all came together and how advanced they are. The beauty of this strategy is that in the future, a TV, Phone, iPod and PC will be almost indistinguishable, besides the ala carte features chosen, the display size and placement.

The iTV can wirelessly beam the very same content to the iPhone with ease, which can also beam the same content to another enabled device like the iPod or PC, and back and forth with no loss of data integrity. They are interchangeable and therefore convergent–as it should be–and not coincidentally just like WashingtonVC’s service strategy.

Apple also opened up the content flow by creating iTunes, an easy way for publishers to deliver bits of licensed content and collect fees. Obviously a good idea. You should realize that they will try to open up licensed online television distribution too–another thing I’m a huge fan of. In other words, you will log in and download the shows you want easily and legally.

iTunes, iTV and others will continue to leverage the opportunity to fill technology applications with uploaded user controlled content like YouTube. Apple will also make all applications user-friendly, I’m sure, and allow most of the content pieces to be easily managed and altered, be they TV shows, phone calls, or rock concerts.

This is why I am suddenly a fan of Apple. Maybe it’s a good time to review the stock valuation again.

Peace.

Mike Mann

Irrespective of their short term profitability, many of the sites with social network hooks are able to create great services and give them away for free to a lot of people, quickly. A main premise of our work at WashingtonVC is that our sites and technologies should be inter-linkable for maximum leverage and efficiency. In other words, we want to make everything possible into a social network of sorts, and do so successfully. Web 2.0 social network methods are truly innovative and therefore appealing to the broad technology community, potential customers and the press alike.

Most sites that we work with have a capacity to open themselves up to social networking, open APIs and other methods of efficiently expanding their user bases if they haven’t done so already. Today, social networking is the low hanging fruit for a serious industry site. The most compelling way to open up your network after you give away a free account is to immediately seek ways of getting all members and visitors to upload their address books, and then automatically contact any of their friends or associates using a properly vetted conversion process. The “upload address book” theory is the one that I think is most appealing today. In fact, we should use a program that harvests all email addresses from customer’s PCs if they want, and then they can control which friends and associates to distribute invitations to their new, free, cool, properly incentivized network.

On another note, the rest of the low hanging fruit in the industry is Yield Software, or other optimization and analytical technologies, a conversion tour in flash on every site, a “live” operator in chat or video chat. As well as a flash or PPT product presentation, an upgraded graphical image and brand, an active blog, a prominent phone number and other responsive contact info linked to CRM, LinkedIn profile links. Considerable testing and trials of SEM and SEO strategies, good branding, assertive IP development and protections, innovative business associates with reliable linkages, completely tagged and indexed dynamic content, good UI, modern search and browse technology including parametric, and possibly surveys and sweepstakes. Anything to hook them in, keep them and get the same from their friends as efficiently as possible. Look for this stuff across WVC’s network of companies.

What else is up? Maybe you are sorry you asked, but here is more low hanging fruit: give everyone in your expanded business network special business cards with serious promotions on the back, meant for other “high level” people to build your network. You don’t merely want to tag the Internet with your messages, offers, links and content, but you want to infest the physical world with your tags. Presumably, business cards are among the cheapest methods to put your tag in the wallet or on the desks of the right targets. So for example, if Phone.com gives a one month free trial online and on PPC to hook in consumers, then on the back of the business card, they could offer a 6-month free trial instead, so the card has real value. Other companies could create their own high-level promotional hooks.

The idea is that within our network (or yours), the leaders of each company should carry the business cards for the leaders of the other companies, as long as they are compatible and noncompetitive. This phenomenon would benefit all consumers, companies, investors and employees in a positive cycle–all stakeholders’ boats rise with a rising tide. If for some reason a company doesn’t want business cards with marketing hooks, they should still test advertising specialty items like calendars, pens, shirts and more innovative trinkets that can be successfully spread around your target community.