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.
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.
When you created your product or service, you likely had a target customer in mind. It could be a broad audience, or highly targeted. Either way, you have a desired set of customers that will purchase and use what you have to offer. Have you clearly relayed to them what value you offer them?
It happens all too often that the perception of a target market may be the opposite of what affect you wished to have on it. With inbound marketing, the driving of traffic and converting it into leads and customers, you have the chance to be concise, clear and effective in your message, while affecting the bottom line, while increasing customer and client satisfaction. This happens with the product or service being found by the right target market and their perception being more qualified, or in line with your desired result. Both sides find success.
There are a few key differentiators from an effective message and an ineffective one:
Unclear value – Can the reader, viewer, listener understand the core value that your product or service offers?
Difficult to follow calls to action – Some calls to action are utterly miserable and are difficult to follow for the “end user”
Boring - Keep it lively. People interact better when the message being relayed to them isn’t dull and stiff, even if the subject is
By combining the natural desire you have to promote your brand in a vein of positive light, be authentic with the message and by using smart inbound marketing techniques your Internet marketing and social media marketing campaigns will have natural success.
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.
While reading through a plethora of blog posts in Google Reader earlier, I saw post after post of the same information, over and over. Links to the same source of information bowing down to (unnamed) marketing writers gets old.
Don’t get me wrong, some information is worth spreading and can “go viral”, however, it happens all to often by aspiring, and also well accomplished blog authors that they repeat the same content.
While thinking about this I thought of cover bands. Its nice, sometimes, to go to a wedding or local downtown celebration event and hear some familiar songs by a cover band. You might even get lucky and make a request that the band knows! Rock on! But tell me if I’m wrong, there is something about the original band getting up on the stage and ripping through an original song that they wrote, and that you’ve been listening to over and over on your favorite album. The intensity of knowing the audible sounds that are gracing your ears were created by the ones standing on the stage and performing.
This is similar with content. Content is such a vague term that it almost sounds cheesy and overused. What I am referring to is the story you are telling, whether its written, in video form, or audio.
Get out there and tell a story, grab the microphone and rock it up, but try not to be like Adam Sandler in the Wedding Singer, at his lowest moment.
(I have to credit Drew Schug for inspiration for the title of this post during a conversation we had on Twitter on this topic)
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 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.
We are an Internet marketing and social media marketing company that helps businesses get found on the Internet, initiate more leads and convert a higher amount of those leads into customers.
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”.
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.
When you created your product or service, you likely had a target customer in mind. It could be a broad audience, or highly targeted. Either way, you have a desired set of customers that will purchase and use what you have to offer. Have you clearly relayed to them what value you offer them?
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.
Over at the Conversion Room Blog, 
