By Cathy Craig, Contributing Writer

Women today have not only broken into the domain and Internet industry, but are increasingly setting up their own businesses and finding a new flexibility in their professional and family lives.

In a series of interviews, six women who have mastered the field -- Elon Bomani, of divadomains.com; Emily Robbins of emilyrobbins.com;  Lisa Steinke and Lori Anne Wardi of domainnamedivas.com; K.W. Boswell of Walsh Envelope Company; and Michelle Miller of webverb.com -- offer an array of perspectives on how to make entrepreneurial dreams a reality.

  “My main profession is Mom, CEO,” said Elon Bomani. “I fill the roles of a stay-at-home mom, network marketing business, and a real estate investment firm.”
 
  Elon currently runs about 14 individual domain names with her retired husband. In addition to working on a new book, she runs a reseller program through Godaddy.com called DivaDomains.com, a blog called TheDynamicDiva.com, and an internet marketing site, Internet-Marketingdiva.com.

  “I teach people how to do the work and I provide the services to help them get started,” Elon said.

“Helping a customer find a domain is one of these services offered and for those that want to enter the [marketing] field and become a reseller from my site...it is a good match...I just refer and the site does the rest.”

  Elon has expertise in internet marketing, domain-name reselling, blogging and providing holistic health advice, but she attributes all of her success in balancing these roles to her faith in God and the divine spirit.  “I get up early to meditate, pray, visualize and read inspirational work by others.  I am very metaphysical about life. I have been blessed in so many ways; I know it is my responsibility to help others realize they have the same opportunities I have. Someone did it for me.”  

  Elon’s strong business plan and dedicated work patterns have successfully helped her to care for her family and her business.

  Emily Robbins has been self-employed since 1997. Emily joined the business world as a Quality Assurance Engineer. After years of seven-day work weeks, Emily’s doctors told her she could no longer work on computers full-time. Repetitive motions in un-ergonomic environments inflamed her joints. She was in so much pain that she didn’t sleep for months and dreaded the thought she would have to do
something else.  While she was on disability, she realized people get brainwashed into thinking there’s only one career model: “go to college, get a good job, go to work everyday.”

  Emily broke that routine and now has more domain names than she can even count. Her advice to
anyone thinking about starting up their own home business is, “Diversify, diversify. I can’t stress
this enough. If you have one site and it gets buried in a search engine, you’ll never get found. If
you have your business plan diversified, you may find that different markets do better during
different times of the year... not every month is a great income, but I have found how to balance
it.”

  Emily now runs a blog, emilyrobbins.com, and has a multitude of domains that work for her doing
pay-per-clicks or affiliate referrals.  Emily didn’t start with an airtight business plan or
knowledge of the domain industry. She learned a lot of it on her own and attributes much of her
success to the support from her parents. “In the beginning, I found I would beat myself up a lot
...with my condition, it was not always possible to be productive and it was hard to learn to deal
with this. I had to learn to listen to my body about when to work and found I am a lot more
productive working when I feel like working.”

  Emily believes there are still plenty of great domains out there to buy, as there are always new
fads and concepts: “The opportunity is endless.” Being a woman in this industry has not slowed Emily
any. “Many of my customers don’t even realize I am a woman until they meet me.”  

  Lisa Steinke and Lori Anne Wardi are the co-founders of Dream Big Media, Inc. (dreambigmedia.com).
The first line of their website gives you a great idea of what working for these two must be like.
“Remember when you were a kid, and you believed all things were possible?” Lori Anne  asks.
“Jinglegram.com was our first and probably most complex web project.  It started as a labor of love
(not an idea for a business)...for my 9-year-old nephew who was in a total funk. I wanted to do
something special for him for Christmas...So I found a ‘real’ Santa Claus on the web and I hooked him
up with the video email product we were using... I wrote a 2-3 minute script for him to record just
for my nephew --and he delivered it in full Santa regalia. On Christmas morning, with my entire
family gathered around, I called my nephew to the computer and told him I had a special message from
Santa just for him.  Well, his reaction was one for the record books...His jaw dropped and his hand
flew up to cover his open mouth...His eyes lit up like two saucers... and he squealed with delight.
‘How did Santa know that I’m in a band? How did he know about my book report...?’ Then Lisa and I
thought…  let’s make the experience I gave to my nephew available to kids around the world!  What
parent or loved one wouldn’t give their right arm to see that kind of reaction from the children they
love! So Lisa and I dropped everything else and got to work on making this vision a reality.”

  Lisa tells us, “Christmas does come once a year, but the spirit of Christmas lives in our hearts
everyday... Jinglegram, it is really a message of love. Sometimes, I go back and listen to the trivia
and product videos as a sort of affirmation...there are many companies that do 70-90% of their
business at Christmas. There has been a lot of money made by personalized Christmas messages from
Santa… The first year we created Jinglegram, it was really just an auto responder... There was
something so similar in all the messages: Parents (and other family members) just love to let their
kids know how wonderful they are and how much they are loved. In our hurried life, we don’t often sit
down to really do that as much as we should. Then, the love story continued, especially with the GI
Jingle. I remember emails from groups of soldiers in Iraq who would take the time to group to a
computer so they could make sure their kids received a Jinglegram.”

  Lori Anne spent five years practicing employment law in New York City before she decided to open
her own consulting firm in 2000 (pebblealley.com). Lori’s background in law and human resource
management, as well as international relations, allowed her a great foundation to start from.
“However, for several years I have had an entrepreneurial bug and had a growing interest in the
Internet and web-based businesses,” she says. “I started Dream Big Media, Inc. in 2004 with Lisa as
an outlet for those aspirations. Creating websites and building web-businesses is something I’m
passionate about... Whenever I’m not ‘working’ as a consultant… I’m ‘playing’ building my web
business.”

  Lisa, who has a background in English and psychology,  is a proud mother of three. She says, “I
loved staying home, but I was also very interested in what was going on with the Internet.  I wasn’t
much for the coffees and playgroup dates; I was the mom on the floor playing with the kids...so, I
began to teach myself  ‘HTML’...”

  Before starting Dream Big Media, Lisa had a marketing company and before long, she “was seeing
opportunities, sites that could be built...while researching domains. I feel like I am researching
business, ideas, and dreams; I’m really like a kid in a candy store.”  It wasn’t success overnight:
“Lori and I are both what you could say, ‘dreamers to a fault’ in the sense we could get carried away
with our dreams and forget about money and get lost in our own creative endeavors.”
 

  “The best part,” Lori says, “was [that] we got a million dollar education in building an online
business...The truth is that we made just about every mistake in the book - paying too much for site
development; paying too much for hosting; not focusing enough on our sales process/conversions,
etc…and the list goes on…. Mostly we learned from that experience what not to do when building your
online business... We also learned not to rely on any one site for a bulk of our income…”
  To aspiring women, Lori Anne says, “ I have consistently been in the corporate world throughout my
career… and I can say that it is very different being a woman in the domain industry than in any
other I’ve been a part of… As both an attorney practicing law at a large firm and as a management
consultant working in some of the country’s top investment banks… I can say that women have broken
through the glass ceiling and are forces to be reckoned with at every level of business… You will see
women in the rank and file and climbing the corporate ladder and doing extraordinary things every day
in corporate America. In the domain industry, however, women are a much less obvious force.  In fact,
when you attend some of the domain conferences, which is where many of the biggest deals get done, it
seems to be that less than 5% of the attendees are women. Now don’t get me wrong, I KNOW there ARE
women in this industry... It’s just that they don’t seem to ‘get out there’ and put themselves ‘front
and center” the way the men do.  We want to encourage more women domainers so that women are not left
out of this growing, exciting and very lucrative field.”

      K.W. Boswell is a business graduate of Villanova University with a portfolio that includes
3,000 domains.  A mother of three, K.W. learned Spanish as an exchange student in Madrid, Spain.  She
taps this language skill at trade shows and when dealing with the Spanish clients of her family
business, Walsh Envelope Company.  
 
  K.W.’s interest in the domain industry was first piqued when she heard about the flowers.mobi
domain name being sold at auction in 2006.  She realized there was a whole market just waiting to be
investigated. “I asked my teenage son about domains and stated I wanted one...GOOGLE was my teacher.
As I learned of new terms, such as domain, domain names, domain auction, GSM, .MOBI, .TV, and many
others, I set up Google alerts so that I could read about what was being said. In essence, I was
learning a new language.”

  K.W.’s comfort with language and communication has naturally flowed into what she is doing with her
business portfolio. The domains she has chosen to secure are those she sees as having potential for
children, education, science and scientific reform, water quality, eco-friendliness. The same is true
in the representation of the domain extensions, having .COM, .MOBI, .TV, but also some .NET, .ORG,
.INFO and .US.  

    “I love the infinite potential that exists in domaining, and I see much of this as a work of
legacy. I also love the freedom that it offers – my office is portable.”  

 To young women interested in the domaining industry, she had this to say: “You are already far more
qualified than I am purely on the basis of your age – you have grown up with the internet immersion
that exists.”   

     Michelle Miller is a benchmark for women domainers. She has passionately supported, created, or
molded many of the names we have come to know among the domain community.

    Michelle attributes her fierce competitive spirit to playing basketball at an early age. When she
was 7 years old, a coach asked her to sit out briefly at a basketball practice to give the boys a
chance to win, to which she replied, “Why?”

  It is this same attitude that Michelle still uses to attack her business projects. She expects to
be on the same playing field as men and to take the same challenges. She believes she is seen not as
a woman but as an executive on a team.  However, Michelle finds being a woman in the domaining
industry gives her an edge; that is, a feminine eye can give you an advantage in marketing appeal.

  Michelle has been COO of Buydomains.com, manages her own consulting firm at webverb.com, and most
recently is spearheading and revamping the Name.com project. “The industry barely (if at all) existed
when I started working for BuyDomains.  I was initially drawn to the similarities between real estate
and domains;...I had really planned on getting out of the industry... I was approached by many domain
related individuals and companies for various consulting work. So, I launched WebVerb (my consulting
company) as a means to provide various Internet business/domain related services. And in less than
two years I connected with Bill Mushkin, founder of Name.com.  I felt a great connection and found
myself back in the industry in full-force – with a name, like name.com, good people and a great
foundation, in an industry that is thriving. This is a very good place to be!”

  Michelle’s advice to a woman looking at the domaining industry is to “take your time to understand
each level and where everyone fits into each level of the domaining market. There are the individual
domainers; there are those with the portfolios; and there are the businesses that have a lot more. 
Then there are the investors and those that are not necessarily in the industry but provide a step of
the industry.”  

  Finally, she said, “Be passionate about what you are doing. A person that loves their work will
give 110% without any thought to it, and they will show up every time they are needed and push their
company to achieve.”