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PeoplesBank.com Expires; Who Is to Blame?

Elliot Silver
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On July 30, 2010, PeoplesBank.com expired, and it now appears to be coming up for auction on NameJet. The previous registrant was Maine Bank and Trust, located at 6 Atlantis Way in Lewiston, Maine. According to some research I did, TDBank is (or was) located in that space, which jives up with the @banknorth.com email address used by the registrant, since Banknorth is now known as TD Bank (they were known as TD Banknorth for a while).

I’ve done some research, and it appears that the ownership of this domain name is about as confusing as the history of bank mergers, acquisitions, takeovers, and other activities that faced many local banks. Maine Bank and Trust owned this domain name (and is still listed as registrant). Similarly, Maine Bank and Trust also owned MaineBank.com back in 2001. If you visit MaineBank.com now, you’ll see a message that says Maine Bank & Trust is now People’s United Bank, and you are forwarded to Peoples.com.

The strange thing to me is that People’s United Bank and TD Bank do not appear to be related. Somehow, TD Bank ended up with PeoplesBank.com, while People’s United Bank ended up with Maine Bank & Trust, but not the PeoplesBank.com domain name that shows Maine Bank & Trust as its most recent registrant.

Making things even more confusing is the historical information on TD Bank’s website regarding the Peoples brand name: “The company first opened its doors as Portland Savings Bank in Portland, Maine, in 1852, and later grew through a series of mergers and became Peoples Heritage Bank in 1983. At the turn of the millennium, the opportunity for growth presented itself again as Peoples Heritage Bank, through several acquisitions, expanded deeper into New England and took the name Banknorth.”

Although this particular domain name has not had a website on it in quite some time, it’s an important domain name for security purposes.

Across the United States and throughout the world, there are a number of People’s Banks. Some of these banks include:

  • Peoples United Bank (Peoples.com)
  • The Peoples Bank (ThePeoples.com)
  • People’s Bank (PeoplesBank-WA.com)
  • Peoples Bank (PeoplesBancorp.com)
  • PeoplesBank (BankAtPeoples.com)
  • People’s Bank (PeoplesBankMTW.com)
  • Many more can be found by searching Google

Hopefully someone from TD Bank, People’s, or possibly one of the other banks known as Peoples will make sure this domain name doesn’t fall into the hands of someone who could potentially use it maliciously. Compete shows that over 6,000 people a month visit PeoplesBank.com.

Safeguard to Prevent a Domain Theft

Elliot Silver
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12

I was   speaking with a friend at DomainFest yesterday afternoon, and he had just learned a few of his domain names were stolen from his Moniker account. A friend of his saw these stolen names for sale on DN Forum, and fortunately for him, the domain names were quickly returned to his account once Moniker was notified.

One thing my friend mentioned was that he never received an email from Moniker informing him of the account change. With Moniker, I believe the customer doing the transfer has the option to have an email confirmation sent or not once the account change has been completed.

As a safety precaution, I think Moniker (and all registrars) should make these confirmation emails mandatory. They should automatically send the transferor and transferee a confirmation notice upon account change. Had my friend not been told about the thread on DN Forum, his names may have been transferred to a different registrar, and that would have made them more difficult to recover.

Kudos to Moniker for taking quick action on this. Having a responsive account representative like Bari is one of the primary reasons I am a happy customer.

City in The Box vs. My Custom Sites

Elliot Silver
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10

After posting an article highlighting some news Fred Mercaldo shared with me, there were a number of questions from readers asking about Burbank.com and Lowell.com, two of my websites built on different platforms. I want to address some of those questions, which may be helpful in your geodomain development endeavors.

Burbank.com and Lowell.com were both originally built on the same static html platform by my developer. The original articles were written by copywriters I hired, and I either took the photos or hired a photographer for them, I did all the SEO work on both websites and managed the advertising sales (poorly). Because the sites I had built were static html, I needed to update 5 or 6 pages on each site whenever I needed to add a content page. This was a pain in the ass, and I sought out a different solution.

After learning about the City in The Box platform, I decided to move forward with Burbank.com. The site receives 20,000 +/- unique visits a month, and I wanted to leverage Fred’s development and advertising sales experience. His team put all the content I created on its platform, and they have continued to add articles and events. I am also able to add events as well. Essentially, I can be as involved or uninvolved as I would like. The team has also been responsive to my development requests. In fact, someone posted a comment on my blog about a small error they noticed, and it was fixed within minutes.

On Lowell.com, my developer (Mike McAlister) used a bunch of design elements I wanted and built it on WordPress. People can sign up for an account and post articles and events on the site. This is also great because it makes the site more interactive for visitors and local organizations. It also helps build traffic while engaging local businesses. The downside to this is that I still manage everything, and it’s not easy to get people to add content for some reason. It’s a work in progress.

One downside to City in The Box that I found was that SEO wasn’t as good as I hoped, and Fred and I discussed that aspect of the site. Burbank.com hasn’t suffered in rankings, but I was worried about that aspect. A piece of very good news that was announced is a deal with a SEO company that will make changes and updates across the platform to improve SEO.   With Lowell.com, I am able to oversee the basic on-site SEO, and I use the All in One SEO plugin, which has been helpful.

Fred Mercaldo and his team are responsible for bringing on advertisers on Burbank.com.   This should have started yesterday, and it’s the most exciting aspect of working with the Scottsdale.com team.   Including hotel revenue and ad sales, I made under $1k/month.   I think they will ramp this up tremendously.   I am responsible for ad sales on Lowell.com, and although I have a number of advertisers now, revenue isn’t strong (under $500/month).

The primary reason I moved forward with City in The Box is because they have experience building a profitable group of websites in Scottsdale.com and other local sites. I wanted to reduce my role in day to day management of Burbank.com due to my time constraints, and I wanted to have access to their advertising sales team.

With the smooth transition I’ve had so far, I am confident that this will be a profitable endeavor. I have never been afraid to significantly invest in domain assets, and I think it’s important to invest in those domain assets in order to create additional revenue streams.

I’ve always been wanting to take initiative and do things myself, but there’s a point where I realized I can’t do everything on my own successfully. I reached out to the best of breed, and I am confident this will be successful. As promised before, I will be happy to provide updates on the sales process in a few months.

As I continue to reiterate, I am not making any money on affiliate deals for sign ups or getting any kick backs for discussing this. I want to be open and transparent with my business.

Example of Smart Usage of a Generic Brand and Domain Name

Elliot Silver
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Walking through a farmers’ market a couple of days ago, I saw a shop with BBQ sauces, spices, supplies, and seasonings. One unique product I saw was seasoned skewers, which are grilling skewers that contain seasonings on the outside, allowing your chicken or beef to be seasoned from the inside while being grilled. Seems like an interesting concept.

I think the company did a great job choosing a name for its product. Had the company been called XYZ seasoned skewers or something brandable like Taste Skewers, I probably would have forgotten what they are called. Smartly, the company owns and brands its product as “SeasonedSkewers.com”

I think it’s smart because it’s branded as its product description. The company could have chosen a cutesy brand, but people probably would have referred to the product as seasoned skewers. Additionally, if they hadn’t called themselves the product name, it would have given a competitor an opportunity to enter the space, since the product is unique but not one of a kind.

If your company develops a new product, sometimes the smartest thing to call it is exactly what it should be called.

Bahamas.CO is Launched

Elliot Silver
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As I had hoped, version 1.0 of Bahamas.CO has launched, with a few days to spare. The website was built on WordPress, and I opted to use a heavily modified template due to time constraints (I needed to have the site launched by August 20th) as part of the .CO Registry’s Founders Program.

The template modification was completed by my web designer Mike McAlister of Six One Five Design, who has done the majority of my design work for the last three years. Usually he builds my sites from scratch, but he knew I was under the proverbial gun on this project, and he jumped in to make the necessary template modifications. For those that are curious, I used the Los Angeles template available on ThemeForest.net (affiliate link) for $32 out of the box.

I also previously mentioned that the logo was designed as part of a contest on 99Designs.com, and ironically the winner of the contest was Theo Develegas of Acroplex. Not only was it my favorite logo, it was also voted as the favorite by you guys, which is always a good thing to see.

I had around 40 articles created by a writer I found on eLance. I added all of the articles, found photos on iStockphoto.com and Flickr, and I coordinated the photos and articles. I still need to do a bit of internal page linking in the next few days, to better enable people to find the pages.

For the next couple of months, I will monitor the website, work on SEO, add articles and photographs, and see how it performs in the search engines. With some extra work, the traffic will grow, and I will begin to work on phase two, integrating a hotel and activities booking engine. In a few months, I will update you on traffic stats and the all important search engine stats, which will be interesting to me (and probably you) because of the .CO domain name.

Until then… thanks for reading.

Fred Mercaldo & Scottsdale.com Announces New Developments and Enhancements for Popular “City In The Box” Software Solution

Elliot Silver
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I just received some news and updates from Fred Mercaldo about his company’s “City in the Box” software platform, and I want to share it with you. If you’ve been thinking about working with the company, now is the time to seriously consider it. (This is not a paid advertisement nor am I being compensated in any way for writing this or if you sign up.)

My website, Burbank.com, has been on the platform for a couple of months now, and traffic continues to be solid and advertisers keep asking for information and creating business listings. The sales process is set to begin in about two weeks, and I am very excited about the prospects.

The company has three big announcements today:

  • They have added Laramie.com and SanMateo.com to their upcoming development projects, bringing the number of City.com properties using their software platform to 55.
  • Scottsdale.com has entered into an exclusive partnership with ZogMedia to provide SEO supervision for all of their partner sites.   They have also added FaceBook and Twitter applications/features to City In The Box.
  • There will be a price increase, effective November 1st or once an additional 25 City.com properties contract with them for development, whichever comes first, from $12,500 to $16,500.

According to Fred Mercaldo,

“With all of the features City In The Box delivers, and with a decided trend towards developing rather than parking, it has never been a better time to take advantage of our services. We are arguably not only the best priced software solution available today, but also the most reliable and widely used, and it is a system built for monetization.

You get a complete business directory for your City, and by selling Premium Upgraded Listings, along with Category Partnerships, combined with our easy to use Content Management System, you are ready to go to market on Day One. Tons of unique content, Calendar of Events section, custom logo and color schemes, professional SEO, and much more are included. And in cases where after launch you need Advertising and Marketing services, we will do this for you thru our CitiesPlanet program!”

For further information, visit CityInTheBox.com and CitiesPlanet.com. A brief PDF overview can be downloaded on the City in the Box website. You can also send Fred an email at fred@scottsdale.com.

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