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:
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.
One of the more unusual aspects of my job as General Manager of a large portfolio of premium domain names is that I see all the "poison pen" letters from lawyers representing clients who believe (usually incorrectly, I should add) they are legally entitled to a domain name that we own. Since we own over 100,000 domain names, we get quite a few of these letters every week!
I make sure that we respond to each and every one of these inquiries, and now that I've seen and dealt with hundreds of these letters I wanted to make a suggestion to the marketing community at large:
"You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar."
Admittedly, I didn't come up with this age-old concept, but I'd like to remind people that you will have better luck resolving a dispute - any dispute - by playing nice than by being hostile.
For instance, the next time you think that someone owns a domain name that you think you are legally entitled to, don't make your first move a "nasty lawyer's letter."
Instead, just reach out to the current owner with a courteous phone call or email (which you can get from checking the public WHOIS records) and let them know you have some questions or concerns. You might discover that the current owner is a lot nicer than you think, is not a hardened criminal, and is more than willing to negotiate in good faith. You might even learn that the original basis for your complaint is flawed and that - surprise, surprise - you aren't legally entitled to the domain name after all.
Not only will you save yourself the time, hassle, and significant expense of going the legal route (fighting a domain name dispute can cost many thousands of dollars), but you will begin the dialogue on a positive and constructive basis, not an adversarial one.
I go out of my way to help the small minority of folks who approach me nicely and are willing to listen to and consider our side of the story. Between us, we can usually resolve the situation within a few days. Unfortunately, I can count these "honey" folks on the fingers of one hand.
I'm not so sympathetic towards the "vinegar" folks - those who courier me six-inch thick stacks of legal documents that make all sorts of false accusations, ridiculous demands, and set unrealistic timelines for a response. (One law firm did this to me, quite deliberately, on Christmas Eve, two years in a row.) Sadly, these "poison pen" letters make up the vast majority of inquiries I receive. Sure, we respond to them as well, but I'm not going to cut them any slack or do them any favours. Why should I?
In the end, this boils down to one simple suggestion: be nice. ;+)
(A version of this post originally appeared on the Canadian Marketing Blog.)
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 conferenceForget 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.
It's 2009, so I would hope by now that any marketer reading this article online understands the importance of securing your company's brands as domain names. In other words, Acme Furniture should own and control the domain name acmefurniture.com (and, if it's a Canadian company, acmefurniture.ca as well) even if you don't yet have a Web site.
My question for you today is, "Have you done the same for Twitter?"
Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that is growing in popularity at an astonishing rate. The purpose of this article is not to explain or promote the benefits of Twitter; that topic has been covered by others.
What I want you to understand today is that Twitter IDs (or "user names" or "handles") are the equivalent of domain names.
For instance, the Twitter ID for my personal brand, Bill Sweetman, is @billsweetman (which corresponds to the URL http://www.twitter.com/billsweetman) and for my corporate brand, YummyNames, it is @yummynames.
Even if you don't understand Twitter or don't think it has a role to play in your company's marketing efforts today, I strongly urge you to still secure your Twitter ID now.
In my case, I do all my Tweeting (as its called) as @billsweetman but I made sure that I registered all my other professional brands as Twitter IDs so that when and if I want to use Twitter for those other brands I already have the most intuitive Twitter ID.
I predict that over the next few years, millions of dollars will be spent by companies buying, selling, and fighting over Twitter IDs. I have already seen a number of nasty legal spats develop, and I have personally brokered the sale of several Twitter IDs already. And this is only the very beginning...
If you are Acme Furniture, you should make sure you get your hands on @acmefurniture right away. Since there is no fee to register a Twitter ID, you have no excuse not to do this. Simply head on over to http://www.twitter.com and sign up for a free account.
Don't be the person who in a year or two is having to explain to their company President why you didn't secure the company name as a Twitter ID. Take two minutes and do it today.
One final tip: Twitter will eventually suspend an account if it has not been used for six months, so make sure you post something once a month just to keep your account active and not risk losing your valuable Twitter ID.
I will be attending, and speaking at, PodCamp Toronto next weekend, February 21-22, 2009 in downtown Toronto.
PodCamp Toronto is a free "un-conference" devoted to social media, and despite its name is about way more than just podcasting. I attended PodCamp Toronto two years ago and loved the energy and inclusiveness of the event. I highly recommend it, and you can't beat the price. Yes, it really is free to attend and hear from (and interact with) many of the sharpest minds in social media today, including Chris Brogan, Collin Douma, and Eden Spodek.
I will be giving a talk entitled "The Secret World of Domain Names" on Saturday, February 21 at 3:30 PM in Room 229. This will be a marketer's guide to domain names, and I plan to shatter some common domain name myths and show you how to buy, protect, and rescue your domain names. I will also explain how you can use domain names to generate a steady stream of targeted traffic. And for the first time ever in public, I will take you behind-the-scenes of the domaining (domain name investing) industry, a secretive, billion dollar industry that you can get a piece of for less than $10.
I'm really looking forward to PodCamp Toronto, hanging out with my fellow social media enthusiasts, and sharing my passion for domain names with everyone.
For more information about PodCamp Toronto, visit the PodCamp Toronto Wiki. See you there!
I often write about the importance of managing your domain names and caution people about what could happen should they fail to do so.
I recently witnessed a chilling example of this. Thankfully, this story has a happy ending.
Erella Ganon is a Toronto-based artist whom I have known for over a decade. She also happens to be a friend of my wife. On Friday night, my wife asked me to look into something on behalf of Erella. A few days prior, Erella had lost ownership of her domain name, erella.com, and she was very upset.
Erella had first registered erella.com in October, 2000 with domain registrar GoDaddy, and had been using it since then for her Website and email address. Her Website, located at www.erella.com, is where Erella showcases her work and promotes her services. It is her primary means of generating employment.
An artist and single mother, Erella supports her teenage daughter by doing a number of freelance creative assignments. Sadly, for many years, Erella has also been battling brain tumours. 2008 has been especially difficult for her as she's been in and out of the hospital for seven different surgeries. The good news is that she's on the mend.
During the last few months, in between surgeries and post-operative recovery, Erella was unable to do a lot of her normal day-to-day activities, and due to a misunderstanding, didn't renew her domain name like she normally did. The domain expired, and 26 days later it flowed into GoDaddy's expired domain auction, where it was bid upon and eventually acquired by a domain name speculator based in Hawaii.
Since I work at Tucows, one of the largest domain registrars in the world (and, full disclosure, a competitor of GoDaddy), I am very familiar with the domain name lifecycle and expired domain auctions. I knew that the domain speculator had broken no laws when he acquired the erella.com domain name. It expired. He bid on it. He paid for it. He now owned it.
To him, erella.com was just another domain name he won at auction. He didn't know the story behind how and why the domain expired, nor would anyone expect him to have known that.
At the time I first heard about this, Erella was convinced she'd lost her domain name forever, and was understandably very upset. Email messages to her were bouncing, and adding insult to injury, the domain speculator had added a banner ad for his Hawaiian real estate business to Erella's homepage.
I promised Erella that I would investigate what had happened and see what I could do to help. After researching and identifying the domain speculator, I contacted him via email on Saturday in Honolulu and convinced him to transfer the domain name to Erella.
By Sunday morning, erella.com was back in Erella's hands, and by mid afternoon her email and Website were up and running again.
Needless to say, Erella was ecstatic. I, on the other hand, was pleasantly surprised. This domain speculator responded to my inquiries and could be reasoned with; that is not always the case, and I have the scars to prove it.
The truly frightening thing is that this can happen to anyone who owns a domain name, and most people who find themselves in this difficult position don't know a domain name specialist like me that they can turn to for help.
With that in mind, I'd like to offer five very specific pieces of advice to you on how to avoid ever ending up in a situation like this.
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:
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.
My good friend Kindha Gorman officially launches her own Web writing boutique, MightyThink, this week. Since I have always admired her wit and way with words, I thought that interviewing her about her new company and writing for the Web might be both educational and fun.
Q. So I just have to ask you, Kindha, what motivated you to leave the stability of a full-time job to launch your own boutique, MightyThink?
Starting a content development firm like MightyThink has been one of my long-time goals. After spending considerable time learning about the domain name business, I saw an opportunity to contribute.
As the domain industry changes, relevant and quality content is becoming essential for premium domains. Websites have so much more potential when the content is useful, timely, and engaging. That's where MightyThink comes in.
Sure, a cushy full-time job has its perks but writing is my passion. Launching MightyThink is my way of being involved in this exciting domain industry by doing what I, and my team of writers, do best.
Plus, my fourth grade teacher said I had a problem with authority, so I figured I should just become my own boss. It's best for everyone.
Q. What's the most frequent mistake you see people making when it comes to the copy on their Websites?
Sadly, the Web is full of boring, irrelevant, and outdated copy.
Above it all, the most common mistake I have noticed is Websites that don't properly cater to their target audiences. When creating content for your site, think of your readers and the reasons they're likely on your site. Does your site give them all the information they need? Is it clear? Is it engaging? Is it visually friendly? Is it easy to read?
When you have a domain name, or a brand you want to market, you have a great opportunity to captivate your audience and make sure they visit again.
Since we're on the topic, here a few more of my pet peeves:
- Unclear messages;
- Long pages;
- Outdated information;
- Long paragraphs and no white space;
- A lack of keywords to entice the search engine;
- Off-topic and/or boring copy; and
- Spelling and grammar mistakes (A big no-no easily fixed by hiring an editor. The spellcheck function, by the way, is not an editor.).
Q. A lot of companies are interested in launching a blog but struggle with creating the content for it and keeping the blog updated. What advice do you give to clients like this?
A blog is a great tool to ensure there's fresh content on your site. The downside is that you have to invest a certain amount of time and energy to make sure people come back regularly. It sounds easy but there's some planning involved.
If you want to get your blog bookmarked by your target audience (and I imagine you do), the blog needs to be:
- updated daily;
- about relevant and timely topics;
- written in a conversational tone;
- professional looking and sounding; and
- interesting!
This may seem like a daunting task, especially since there are only 24 hours in the day. Many companies hire outside writers, who understand their goals and messages, to act as their voice. This frees up much-needed time, but still maintains a relevant blog.
Q. How important are online press releases?
A keyword-rich and well-optimized press release is quickly becoming an invaluable marketing tool for businesses to generate traffic and drum up clients.
Not only do online press releases tout news about your business quickly and effectively, they also can be easily optimized with keywords to ensure they're indexed by the almighty search engines. By adding some strategic links and relevant keywords, your little press release (and your Website) will attract the eyes of journalists, researchers, RSS feeds, search engines, news subscribers, and most importantly, your target audience.
Here's a tip: If you're writing the news release yourself, keep your press release to one page, two pages if absolutely necessary. If it's any longer than two pages, journalists become grumpy. No one likes a grumpy journalist.
Thanks, Kindha, and best of luck with your new company!
Kindha Gorman is the owner and brain behind MightyThink's brawn. With over 10 years of experience in writing, marketing, and strategic planning, Kindha has written for magazines, newspapers, Websites, large retail chains, healthcare organizations, financial institutions, and high tech outfits. Throughout her varied career, she has learned a thing or two about good writing. Just ask her. She has bored many of her friends with lectures about the proper use of commas, hyphens, and semi-colons.
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 EventForget 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.
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. ;+)
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