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

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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.

New Restriction on Comments

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There seems to be a myth out there that if you post a keyword in the name section of the comments along with your url, you’ll get a valuable back link from my website. Not only does Google look at the fact that ALL comments have “no follow” in them, but the company also knows that these are non-authoritative  comments.

To be perfectly blunt, you will get absolutely no SEO benefits from the practice of posting a keyword phrase with a url in my blog’s comment section.

When I visit other sites, It’s annoying to see people’s names appear as “The BEST Detox diet!” If it annoys me on other sites, it must annoy others as well.

My Akismet spam filter catches a lot of spammers who do this, but sometimes they get through since they are “real” comments.  I am just giving everyone a head’s up that I may remove the urls in any comment I wish. Of course I own the site and could do that anyway, but I wanted to give advance notice to be fair.

I will not alter the actual comments in any way, but I may remove the url.

Things I Learned About Renewals

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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

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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.

Going to DomainFest

I know, I know. You read on my blog that I was going skiing at Breckenridge in lieu of attending DomainFest.  Shortly after my article was posted, you may have read on Frager’s Factor that I wasn’t going to DomainFest, where I think the article seemed to imply it was because I had issues with Oversee.

Surprisingly (because I didn’t think anyone would actually believe what he wrote), a couple of people emailed me asking me if I had problems with Oversee. I don’t. In fact, most of my domain names are registered at Moniker and will continue to be registered there.

After speaking with a close friend and colleague, I’ve decided that I need to go to DomainFest. I’m going to fly cross country 4x in the next few weeks. If you’ll be at DomainFest, I will see you there.

Why I Believe Overstock Has “Become O.CO”

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.

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