Thinking About Starting a Blog? Have a Blog With Little Traffic? Read This!

Elliot Silver
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In the last year, I’ve added a few domain, technology, and business blogs to my reading list. Frequently, my favorite blogs to read are written by one person rather than a team of writers. It’s fun to get to know the blogger and learn about his or her business.

One blog I’ve been reading more and more is written by Heidi Cohen, who happens to be one of my former grad school instructors. We re-connected on Facebook, and I learned that she has a widely-read marketing blog.

Today, Heidi wrote a post with advice for wanna be bloggers. The article covers some of the reasons traffic may be light and/or why people may not be commenting or returning.

Even if you do have a blog that gets a good amount of traffic, you should check it out to see if it could be better.

Things I Learned About Renewals

Elliot Silver
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In the past month, I’ve been going through the first round of  dog walker advertising renewals on DogWalker.com, and I want to share a few things I’ve learned that might be helpful to you if you have web directories.

Paypal is great, and Paypal subscriptions are  fantastic. Every day, I am getting payments from dog walkers whose listings are expiring but automatically renew via Paypal. These renewals take the trouble out of collecting payments after the first year, saving me significant time and effort re-contacting dog walkers and re-billing.

I am thankfully getting FAR fewer cancelations and/or refund requests than I anticipated.  I would say it’s probably less than 10% including subscriptions where the payment failed (may be due to expired credit card or cancelled Paypal account).  There have been over 50 renewals so far.

If you do use Paypal, here’s a tip for you.  If your Paypal account is used for multiple websites, you will want to realize that the receipt people receive will have your company name. In my case, it’s Top Notch Domains, LLC, which has confused a couple of businesses who didn’t remember the DogWalker.com website.

Since I am billing for a few pet websites, I should probably change the receipt to “Pet Website.” Actually, a better solution would be to open separate Paypal accounts for each website. That’s probably the next step, although it could prove to be a hassle, but it’s something for you to consider if you accept Paypal.

I’ve found that some people (like myself with many subscriptions) cancel their subscription prior to billing so they have the option to pay the next year if they want and not automatically. One thing that works for me is emailing these people a week in advance to remind them of their pending expiration date and giving them a link to pay using Paypal.

If they still don’t respond or aren’t amenable to renewing, I let them know exactly how much traffic their listing has seen as well as the traffic to the city searches. I then compare it to the cost of Internet advertising to show the deal they get on the site.

Finally, if the company says advertising hasn’t worked for them, I ask them how they are tracking results. Since most don’t, I ask them if they mention the Yellow Pages when they call a local business, and they typically say “no.” I tell them that similarly, most dog owners wouldn’t mention their DogWalker.com listing unless they had a special DogWalker.com offer where they had to mention the listing. I recommend that they try it out for another year with a special offer to track all business from the listing.

Finally, I’ve been taking checks from some people who don’t want to use Paypal.  Checks are a pain in the neck because they can take a week to receive and a week to clear. One bad check fee can cost 50% of the actual listing!  I don’t like taking checks, but if it’s a check or nothing, I’ve accepted checks.

Hopefully some of these lessons are helpful to you as you build out your websites and take advertising.

Why I Rarely Hand Register “Trend” Domain Names

Elliot Silver
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106

3-D was hot last year, and some might argue it’s still hot. Everywhere you went, people talked about 3-D televisions and movies, and practically everything else 3D. From my perspective, that chatter seems to have died down a bit and consumers aren’t buying 3D tvs as much as expected. Too expensive, ugly/annoying glasses, not enough programming…etc all contributing to this.

There are tens of thousands of 3D keyword domain names in many extensions that have been registered by a good number of domain investors. Some of these may be worth something if 3D comes to every household (or many households), but most will end up in the scrap heap, with 3,4,5+ years of renewals down the drain. They’ll be discarded like the losing lottery tickets they were hoped to be by their owners.

The problem is that picking up on trends early is difficult. To make matters worse, you could literally register thousands of domain names in a specific vertical, and only a few might actually have meaning and be worth something. When it comes time to renew thousands of names that you’ve invested time and money into, how do you choose which to keep and which to drop, when there may be the same  likelihood  of success (or failure) for each particular name as of the time of registration?

Many domain investors who are buying these domain names are buying a significant number of them at once. This is expensive, and even if a couple of the domain names are sold at a premium price, they may not cover the acquisition and carrying cost for the full lot of names bought.

I personally don’t usually register many trend domain names because it’s easy to get caught in the hype. One minute you have a couple and the next you find 25 similar unregistered names that you have to own. Soon enough, you become one of those people that feels the need to tell everyone else about this big trend, otherwise, there won’t be anyone to buy your names.

When you buy “trend” domain names, make sure you don’t spend more than you can afford to lose. There may be trend domain names that become valuable in time, but there are many more that are worthless and aren’t even worth the price of hand registration.

Why I Believe Overstock Has “Become O.CO”

Elliot Silver
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115

In a pretty surprising  announcement today in a press release, Overstock.com Chairman and CEO  Patrick Byrne commented, “We have become O.CO.” Byrnes went on to say, “As a lifestyle destination, consumers can find absolutely anything on O.CO whether they are shopping for furniture, bedding, clothing, and jewelry, buying a car or home, and, soon, looking for their next vacation spot.”

It’s not often that a large retailer announces a re-branding effort like this, and it looks like the company may be ahead of the curve, as .CO will go more mainstream during the Super Bowl. The press release mixed Overstock.com and O.CO, and I think we will probably see a lot more O.CO and less Overstock.com in the near future, as using both would probably be harmful to the brand as that would be confusing.

In my opinion, Overstock has become much more than a company that sells overstocked items cheaply, as the brand name suggests. By transitioning to O.CO, the company that has done it’s best to become known as the big O, will now become the big O.

In a way, it’s similar to how Kentucky Fried Chicken moved towards the KFC branding when fried foods became a negative stigma in the US.

With the marketing efforts of the .CO Registry supporting companies like Overstock and Go Daddy, I think we are going to see more companies using .CO domain names in the next few years.

Monitor Website Downtime with Montastic

Elliot Silver
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9


Late last year, I had some issues with hosting performance, and my blog wasn’t always stable. If it was hit with excess traffic or if a plugin wasn’t working optimally, my blog went down for generally short periods of time.  The most frustrating thing about it was that it usually required a quick reset and it would go back to normal.

If I was out of the office or if it was in the middle of the night, I wouldn’t know that my blog was down until someone emailed me or until I returned and tried to log in to approve comments or write an article. I sought out a way to detect if my blog goes down, and I want to share that information with you, especially if you have mini sites that you don’t check regularly.

I use Montastic.com to monitor some of my websites, and it’s a great (free) tool. I signed up and gave them the domain names of a few important websites. When one of them goes down for some reason, I get an email alerting me to the outage. I then get a follow up when the site is functional again.

I never realized how frequently a couple of my sites went down, and after seeing this information, it got me to switch to a more flexible cloud server, where I’ve had much fewer problems.

Montastic also has upgraded plans that allow you to access other tools as well as have your website monitored more frequently. I think it’s a great tool to have monitoring your critical sites.

Report Suspicious Go Daddy Phishing Emails

Elliot Silver
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9

GodaddyLike every other domain registrar, Go Daddy is required to send domain name owners an annual email for each domain registration per ICANN regulations. These emails ensure that the registrant’s Whois information is accurate. GoDaddy also sends customers emails for renewals and account updates.

Some nefarious individuals take advantage of this, and they spoof Go Daddy’s emails, in the hopes that a domain registrant will click one of the fraudulent links and type in their GoDaddy account and password, giving account access away to the thief. This is one way domain names are stolen from Go Daddy accounts and from other domain name registrars.

I’ve received phishing emails like this in the past, and I generally delete them without clicking on the link to avoid giving any information to these thieves and to avoid landing on a website laden with malware. Although hitting the delete button (and/or reporting the email as phishing with your email provider)  is probably the safest way to dispose of an email like this, recipients can do something that will be more helpful to GoDaddy and other customers.

If you receive what you suspect is a fraudulent email from Go Daddy, you should file an abuse report with the company. They will ask for a variety of information from the email you received. This will help the company track down the thieves and become aware of the attempt. This can also help Go Daddy get the website shut down to prevent others from falling prey to this scam.

Domain owners should know that this doesn’t only happen at Go Daddy, as other registrar accounts are also targets. If you receive a phishing or malware email that purports to be from GoDaddy, you should report it to the company.

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