Sweetmantra: Internet Marketing Advice

Why It's a Wrap for my Movie Domain Name Website

Like many of the ventures I have launched over the years, the idea for Hollywoozy, my site where I would review movie domain names, came to me out of the blue.

At the time, I thought it would be both fun and educational to use movie domain names (the good and the bad) as a springboard to discuss what makes a good marketing domain name.

I also wanted to create an outlet to share my amusement and frustration with the idiotic domain names chosen by the marketers of movies.

I feel that I accomplished both those objectives, and the reaction to Hollywoozy has been very positive.

Since launching the site, I have had the opportunity to discuss movie domain names with studio executives, filmmakers, marketing folks, and intellectual property lawyers. In doing so, I gained a deeper understanding of why most Hollywood movies end up with less-than-ideal domain names. It was an eye-opening experience.

Here are some of the reasons why movie domains are the way they are (and won't likely change anytime soon):

1. Since the bulk of a typical Hollywood movie's marketing dollars are spent on traditional, offline media (mainly television and print), the online marketing component is given low priority, little attention, and relatively tiny budgets. Finding and obtaining the best domain name is not seen as a priority, and any money spent on purchasing the domain name(s) will come out of the already squeezed budget for the movie's Website.

2. Many movie marketers refuse to deal with domain investors who might already own the ideal domain name. It's become almost a matter of principle that Hollywood would rather pay $10 and register a brand new but inferior movie domain name than pay someone else $500 for a much better domain name. Hollywood feels it has been 'burned' too often by cybersquatters (or what Hollywood perceives as cybersquatters) and wants nothing to do with even the legitimate domain resale market.

3. Because the online marketing of a movie is treated as a low priority, there is little to no measurement done, which means there are few opportunities for the powers to be to learn how having a better domain name would impact their overall success.

4. Since the main focus of Hollywood movie marketing is to generate buzz and put bums in seats for the movie's opening weekend, most of the marketing activities are geared towards that tiny window of time. Having a better domain name is not seen as having much of an impact on this either.

5. The studios don't really care that they don't have the perfect domain name. They figure that because they will be spending millions to market whatever domain name they do have, they will still get tons of traffic to the movie's Website. And they also figure that the search engines and popular movie portals like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb will also drive organic traffic as well.

Having learned all of this, I have decided it is pointless of me to keep making fun of Hollywood and its often silly choice of movie domain names. If anything, I've become very forgiving of Hollywood and its domain name foibles. I know the domain names are lame. You know the domain names are lame. And, yes, Hollywood knows the domain names are lame as well.

Since this situation isn't likely to ever change, and since I have a long list of ideas for other ventures I want to turn into reality, there will be no more updates to Hollywoozy.

I've had a ball creating and updating Hollywoozy, I've loved the discussions and learning and relationships that have flowed out of it, and I hope its visitors enjoyed reading it.

Cut.

Print.

That's a wrap.

My Five Most Popular Blog Articles

I'm on holiday the next little while so I thought I'd share some links to five of the all-time most popular articles I have ever written for my blog:

• 10 Twitter Tips for Professionals

• 10 Facebook Tips for Professionals

• Does Someone Want to Buy Your Domain Name?

• 12 Questions You Must Ask Before Doing SEO

• Ten Must-Have iPhone Apps for Marketers

Apparently blog posts with numbers in the title do very well. ;+)

I hope you enjoy these, and I look forward to resuming writing again later this Summer.

Discover "Minivertising" at 2009 CMA National Convention

Forget about thinking big. You need to think small!

That's the rallying cry for a presentation I am giving at the Canadian Marketing Association's National Convention in Toronto on April 28, 2009.

The Canadian Marketing Association (CMA) has invited me to present my newest talk, "Minivertising", at Canada's largest marketing conference. This national convention is held each spring in a different city and welcomes thousands of attendees.

Here are the details:

"Minivertising" – The Big Future in Targeting a Tiny Niche
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
10:30 - 11:30 AM
Register for the conference

Forget about thinking big. You need to think small! Until recently, it was expensive if not impossible to market to a highly segmented target audience. Not any longer. Discover how marketers and entrepreneurs can use social media and emerging Web tools for affordable and effective mini-targeting. No matter what the size of your company is, you can learn how to become a dominant player in a profitable niche.

If you’re a marketer, you will learn how to use the principles of minivertising to generate interest for your client’s products and services, no matter how constrained their budgets are. If you are an entrepreneur or business executive, you’ll discover affordable and measurable ways to attract highly motivated customers to you, almost overnight.

For more information and to register, visit the CMA National Convention Website.

I hope to see you there.

P.S. Here is a link to the list of Minivertising Resources.

Why Settle for a Lousy Domain Name?

At long last, I can finally reveal one of the cool initiatives I have been working on at Tucows over the last little while:

On October 29, we officially launched YummyNames, our new service that offers marketers the ability to purchase or lease premium domain names from the Tucows Domain Portfolio. As our tagline says...

"Why settle for a lousy domain name?"

That same day, I got new business cards, since I am now the General Manager of YummyNames. Woohoo!

The Tucows marketing team did an amazing job supporting the launch, so I'm going to explain what YummyNames is all about by sharing some of the material they created:

• You can read the news release that Tucows issued.
• You can have a look around www.yummynames.com, which was designed by the talented team over at Mouth Media. (They also worked with us to develop the overall YummyNames brand identity.) There’s lots of information on who we are and what we do.
• You can check out the special “Social Media Release” or SMR for the YummyNames launch. Think of it as a one-stop shop for bloggers or anyone else looking for information, images, videos, facts and quotes about the launch of YummyNames.
• You can watch the video below (or follow this direct link to the video), and I’ll do my best to explain YummyNames in three minutes.

The overwhelmingly positive response we've received so far from the marketing and advertising community proves that there's a need for a marketer-friendly premium domain name service, and I am delighted to be heading up this new service.

We've got lots of work ahead of us, but we're off to a great start! I hope that you agree.

I've Been Waiting for this Week for Months, and Here's Why...

This is going to be a big week for me, and you can be part of it.

For starters, I'm really looking forward to this week's 2008 Digital Marketing Conference (October 29-30 in Toronto) from two perspectives: one as a member of the Organizing Committee, the other as a representative from Tucows.

Wearing my Committee member hat, I'm thrilled to see all the pieces and people finally coming together for what I believe will be our best Conference to date. (In case you missed it, here are my Seven Killer Reasons to Attend the 2008 Digital Marketing Conference.) I'm also really looking forward to learning, networking, and catching up with other digital marketers from across the country. I'll also be leading an Experience Exchange Roundtable discussion on Domain Name Strategy, so that should be fun.

With my Tucows hat on, I'm super excited that we're sponsoring the Networking Reception on Wednesday, right after the Roundtables. I'm sworn to secrecy, but what I can tell you is that I'll be unveiling 'something' we've been working on for months, plus Tucows will be giving away a one-of-kind door prize worth $2,000. On top of all that, reception attendees will be getting a special gift that I think is pretty darn cool.

If you haven't already registered for this year's Digital Marketing Conference, please don't wait any longer. The Digital Marketing Conference always sells out. Head on over to http://www.the-cma.org/digital for more details and to register.

Have a great week, and I hope to see you at the Conference and the Networking Reception.

Marketing on a Coffee Habit Budget

Are you an entrepreneur who drinks coffee? Or do you know one that does?

The reason I'm asking is that I've just finished putting the final touches on the presentation I am giving this Wednesday night (October 22) at a unique entrepreneur's learning event in Toronto.

My talk is entitled "Measurable Marketing on a Coffee Habit Budget" and I am going to show everyone in attendance how to use Search Engine Advertising to generate hundreds of qualified business leads a month for less than cost of one Starbucks coffee a day.

I'll be explaining and showing how Search Engine Advertising works, sharing some of my expert tips and tricks, and I will be giving away a gift worth over $50 to everyone who attends. Yes, everyone!

The last time I gave a presentation like this, people paid serious money to attend.

This Wednesday's entrepreneur's event is special, however, because the cost to attend is $0. Zip. Nada. Nothing.

You can get all the details and register for the event here.

I'm donating my time and energy because the event helps to support a really good cause (Street Kids International) and the people organizing it are terrific. You can read more about that in my blog post from last week about this event.

I hope to see you and your friends there. With our without your cup of coffee. ;+)

The One Question Every Entrepreneur Asks

If you're like most entrepreneurs, chances are you've asked yourself the following question at least once:

"How do I get more business without spending a fortune on advertising?"

This is probably one of the biggest challenges you face in your business, which is why I'm thrilled to let you know about an exciting event I am participating in on the evening of Wednesday, October 22nd in Toronto.

This event will be very different from other "seminars" you may have attended. It will help you tackle the challenge of boosting your business while at the same time you'll be helping support a fantastic program that helps youth in developing countries become entrepreneurs.

In one evening, you will:

• Learn practical and tactical techniques and tools that you can use immediately to find new customers fast and affordably. (By the way, I personally guarantee this is going to happen because I am giving one of the presentations! More on that in a moment...)
• Be inspired to take action on what you learn
• Have a blast with some "fiery" entertainment
• Experience all of this at absolutely no risk as this is a "Pay only for the value you receive" event. No Value...No Payment. Period.
• Make a big difference in the world. All proceeds go to helping street youth in the developing world become entrepreneurs, through Street Kids International

Sound great? It will be. It's called:

"Big Results For No/Low Dollars: Powerful and Inexpensive Marketing Techniques for Entrepreneurs"

and you can register for the event here.

This evening is part of an exciting, innovative and valuable program of practical education and training, exclusively for entrepreneurs, called Success Circle. The evening will include some amazing surprise entertainment and a roster of expert speakers you don't want to miss. The speakers will be:

• Warren Coughlin, one of North America's top business coaches, will discuss a) the key skills that must exist in your business to allow you to blast off, and b) easy-to-kickstart business building tactics available to any entrepreneur that generate quick leads, very inexpensively.
• The amazing Collin Douma (of Radical Trust fame) will share with you the wisdom he imparts to large corporations eager to exploit social media.
• Some Internet marketing dude named Bill Sweetman will reveal how to ensure you generate profits from the most universally, but non-strategically, applied marketing tool on the Internet. ;+)

How is this evening special?...

You will receive practical, tactical knowledge, tools and techniques you can use right away. This is not about giving you a teaser that requires you to drop $3,000 on follow up courses before you are able to implement. I hate those kind of things, and this isn't one of them.

Join me at this event on Wednesday, October 22nd and you will get knowledge, confidence, tools, and inspiration that will help you add to your bottom line, while making an amazing difference in the world. And you will have a ton of fun... All at no risk.

Register for this event now.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Seven Killer Reasons to Attend the 2008 Digital Marketing Conference

As you may have noticed, I've been busy spreading the word on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter about the 11th annual Digital Marketing Conference, which is being held in Toronto on October 29th and 30th. I'm on the Organizing Committee for this year's Conference and after months of planning we are now finally able to publicly share our excitement about the speakers and sessions we've arranged for you to experience.

Here, in my opinion, are seven of the best reasons to attend the 2008 Digital Marketing Conference:

1. Rob Master from Unilever will be talking about how one of the world's biggest traditional advertisers has fully embraced digital marketing, especially social media.
2. David Pogue, technology columnist for The New York Times, will be riffing about Disruptive Technology. David's brilliant and entertaining, which is a rare combination in my books. Here's a link to a funny video of David Pogue in action!
3. Everyone I talk to these days is struggling to hire good people. That's why we've persuaded Charlie Gray from Google and Bruce Powell from IQ Partners to talk about how to recruit and retain digital marketing talent.
4. The videogame industry is bigger than Hollywood, and so we've lined up Ron Bertram from Nintendo of Canada to reveal how he helped take the company to the top of the videogame market in Canada.
5. Just in time for the biggest shopping season of the year, Derek Szeto from RedFlagDeals.com will share an awesome and uniquely Canadian Boxing Week case study.
6. The Experience Exchange Roundtables are back by very popular demand. This is your chance to pick the brains of some of the country's smartest digital marketing minds. I'll leave it up to you to decide if I qualify for that title, but I will be leading a roundtable on Domain Name Strategy.
7. Coming up right after the Roundtables is the Networking Reception. The company I work for, Tucows, is sponsoring the reception and we've got a few treats in store for attendees so you definitely won't want to miss this.

So there you have it, a small taste of the inspiring and informative agenda we've got planned for you at this year's Digital Marketing Conference.

Don't wait until the last minute to register. For the last several years, the Digital Marketing Conference always sells out and we literally have to turn people away at the door. Head on over to http://www.the-cma.org/digital for more details and to register today.

I hope to see you there.

"Minivertising" - Join me in Vancouver to Learn About this New Marketing Strategy

Forget about thinking big. You need to think small!

That's the rallying cry for a keynote address I am delivering in Vancouver on September 11, 2008.

British Columbia Association of Integrated Marketers (BC AIM) has invited me to present my newest talk, "Minivertising", at a Marketing Luncheon at the Four Seasons Hotel.

Here are the details:

"Minivertising" – The Big Future in Targeting a Tiny Niche
Presented by BC AIM
Thursday, September 11, 2008
11:30 AM - 2 PM
Four Seasons Hotel, 791 Georgia Street West, Vancouver, BC
Register for this Event

Forget about thinking big. You need to think small! Until recently, it was expensive if not impossible to market to a highly segmented target audience. Not any longer. Discover how marketers and entrepreneurs can use social media and emerging Web tools for affordable and effective Mini-targeting. No matter the size of your company, you can learn how to become a dominant player in a profitable niche.

If you’re a marketer, you’ll learn how to use the principles of Minivertising to generate interest for your client’s products and services, no matter how constrained their budgets are.

If you’re an entrepreneur or business executive, you’ll discover affordable and measurable ways to attract highly motivated customers to you, almost overnight.

For more information and to register, visit the BC AIM Website.

I hope to see you there.

My Internet Marketer's Diary: Chapter 1 - Sewing the Seeds

Last week, I officially launched my newest online venture, Hollywoozy, the first Website devoted to reviewing movie domain names.

One of the many reasons I am always launching new things is that it gives me a chance to experiment with and refine different marketing tactics, and Hollywoozy is no different.

What is different this time, however, is that I am going to lift up the curtain and share some of the marketing tactics I am using to promote my venture, along with the results. In most cases, these tactics do not involve spending any money, although they all require spending some time to implement.

In this first chapter of my Internet Marketer's Diary, I am going to list five of the key tactics I used leading up to Hollywoozy's official launch on July 20, 2008. I consider these the essential building blocks of a good online marketing campaign.

1. Build the Site with Search Engines in Mind

In addition to following SEO (search engine optimization) best practices, one of the best ways to ensure a site is very search engine friendly is to create it using a blog platform, because search engines love blogs. My site was created using TypePad, which is my favourite professional blogging platform, however you could probably achieve similar results using WordPress. I also made sure that my site featured the most heavily searched keywords and key phrases that I was targeting. For instance, since Hollywoozy is about movie domain names, I made sure the phrase "domain names" was used extensively throughout the site on every single page.

2. Invite the Search Engines to Crawl the Website Prior to Launch

I wanted to give the search engines a head start on finding my site, so I added discrete links to my new site from some of the other heavily trafficked Websites that I own. This got my site indexed by Google a few days prior to its official launch, so that when people started to search for "Hollywoozy" in Google on the day of launch (which many did, according to my Web analytics reports), the site was already listed in Google's search results.

3. Use Tags to Define the Content of the Website

Prior to launch, I registered my site with Technorati (the leading blog directory and search engine), complete with a keyword-loaded description and lots of relevant tags. Technorati is frequently and deeply crawled by the search engine spiders, and within 24 hours Google had found Hollywoozy's listing on Technorati.

4. Generate Targeted Traffic via a Multiple Domain Name Strategy

I am proud of the unusual brand name I came up with for my site, however I am the first to admit that "Hollywoozy'" is not a descriptive name. That's why I also registered moviedomainnames.com and a few other descriptive, keyword-loaded domain names, which I pointed to my new site. The $28 (total) I spent registering the four domain names was the only cash outlay I made towards marketing the Website. That's peanuts to pay for the targeted type-in traffic my site will likely get from these domains over time.

5. Invite Some Enthusiasts to a Sneak Peek

In the week prior to launch, I used my Facebook status line (and Facebook's message service) to invite my friends and colleagues to let me know if they were interested in getting a "sneak preview" of my newest venture. The curious keeners who responded got early access to my site. Not only did they tell some of their friends and colleagues about the site (thank you, everyone!), but they were also a great source of feedback and ideas. Michel Neray, for instance, suggested I make a small but important tweak to how I displayed my domain name reviews, and I quickly took him up on the idea. All told, about 20 people in my personal network got an early peek at the site, and they helped to quickly spread the word post-launch.

In the next chapter of my Marketer's Diary, I will reveal the tactics I used to kick off the official launch of the site, as well as share some of the results to date. For a taste of how successful the launch was, try doing a Google search for "movie domain names" (which is the focus of my site) and see if you can spot Hollywoozy in the search results. ;+)