Yesterday .CO domain names became available to the public and is being marketed by domain name registrars, such as Namecheap and GoDaddy, that .CO could be universally recognized as “company”, “corporation” and “commerce”.
While you might not care what .CO stands for in your organization, it is a good idea to consider registering it to secure these domain names for the sake of domain name defensive registration. While its hard to predict the true popularity of this new top level domain, we still recommend registering .CO domain names in the near future.
(Photo credit: Stefan)
From a brand perspective you want to ensure that your desired web properties are registered to you. This goes to say that if you have a website (that you care about) you should own the .COM, .NET, and .ORG domains, if available.
The small investment made to register these is worth the type of image you want to present to those who may either mistype, or get re-directed from a search engine.
In the legal world, simply protecting your intellectual property, or trademarks, registering any domain names you can with your brand name in it is called defensive registration.
Whether you are a small business owner, or an executive at a large firm, it makes obvious sense that an investment as small as $10 and typically at the most $100 a year for a domain name makes sense. You want potential or current customers to land on your web property if they type in a domain name with your brand name in it.
(Photo credit: annaOMline)
There I was, peeking around the corner, with a rubber band in hand, to find my friend who had snuck around the other side. I saw him duck and try to hide, no cover was in site so I had a clear shot. I pulled back hard on the rubber band, stretching it to the limit, aiming carefully with my eye, and released! WHACK. I felt a sting. Did he get me with a counter attack? OK now the sting really hurt, in my eye. I had released the rubber band in the wrong direction, towards my eye, point blank. Not the best way to start off a morning rubber band fight.
Online marketing isn’t about shooting rubber bands back and forth at your potential clients and customers. Even if you write a compelling message on the band before whirling it across the room (think global), they are going to shoot it right back at you, empty handed, or worse yet, it might end up in the wrong direction. Think pain in the eye, not fun.
When attending parades as a kid, I always looked forward to being on the receiving end of the candy throwers. You know, the red convertible carrying the mayor, while his assistants would whirl tasty candy in the direction of the excited youth.
I found it even more fulfilling when I was on the candy throwing end a few times. While walking with some non-profits that were getting out the message, we threw out candy with messages attached. You could call this lead generation, and hey the advertising was cheap.
The idea of bounce back marketing isn’t new. Online and digital marketing changed the game years ago, and continues to hype it up. Your best bet is to continue working hard to tell a story your customers will repeat.
(Photo credit: Thomas Hawk)
Business, Technology•
on June 12th, 2010•
Before July 1, 2010, you may want to renew your .com and .net domain names for a couple of extra years as the yearly registration price is scheduled to increase by about 7% after July 1.
VeriSign announced almost 6 months ago that it would be increasing domain name fees citing the need to increase the core infrastructure that supports the .com and .net top level domains.
This price increase might not hurt the pocket book that much if you own just a couple domains, but for those that have a size-able collection of .com and .net domains, it probably will be an obvious increase from the recent past.
Just a friendly reminder, and it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to jump on over to your favorite registrar, such as Namecheap, to renew for a couple more years before the price increase.
(The affiliate link above to Namecheap was included because we’ve found them to be a reputable domain registrar)
Over at the Conversion Room Blog, Google announced a couple of ways for both end users and website owners can increase privacy of website analytic and statistic data from Google Analytics, a robust and widely popular web analytics tool to show how visitors engage with their website.
For website visitors, Google developed the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on, to opt-out of their website visits being tracked by Google Analytics.
For website owners, Google is providing on their Code site, some methods to anonymise the IP address information sent to Google for geographic reports. The website owner can now set their data collection to only send a portion of this IP address information. This may have an impact on the accuracy of geographic data reports.
read more
One of the things I’ve observed in the realm of social media marketing is that many marketing experts debate where you should focus your marketing efforts. This stems from a variety of opinions, experiences, and where their target market’s “hang out”.
Social media marketing puts businesses where consumers hang out. As marketers we love the plethora of information available from status updates, profile information, and other pools of data. Our society has become adept to weeding out the crap, and shoveling in the good, high quality information. Cream rises to the top.
If you look at the following chart comparing traffic metrics of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter in the light of sheer volume of people to market to you might right off the bat say, lets jump on Facebook! They have massive amounts of traffic, wahoo!
Now of course there are many other social networks that deserve attention, but for sake of making a point, those three are the ones chosen.
Go where your people are
Taking a holistic approach to Internet marketing and social media marketing is key to success for any business or individual. But taking the time to find out where your target market “hangs out” is critical.
Take a look at the following world map of social networks, courtesy of vincos.it:
You probably see at least some social networks on the map that you’ve never heard of, I know I did. The key is to find out where your market is and to listen, participate and act upon where they are.
