Marketing Online - Marketing Strategies - Marketing Tips - Internet Business

I bought my own domain name in March of 2000. I was in hog heaven; I was finally a real business. Now, I am a business in transition once again.

When I bought my domain name, I checked the Whois network to make sure my selected name was clear. Much to my relief, it was. So, I bought the Domain Name, started building my site, and started promoting like a mad dog. Less than 2 months after moving to my own domain, I am generating over 6,000 hits each month to my site.

I have firmly established myself under my domain name, and I have created an environment on the Internet where I have over 300 links pointing to my dot com site. I worked 16 hours a day to build the site to its current level and to get all of those links established. I am now starting to make some decent money from my website for the first time ever.

And then BAM! It happened.

I received a certified letter in the mail from a lawyer in Seattle, Washington. It seems a very large company owns the trademark on one of the words in my domain. I have managed to negotiate a settlement with them giving me 60 days to complete my transition, but after that 60 days, I must give up every single reference to the Trademarked word completely!

Ouch!

In the course of the last few days, I have learned some new things about protecting your business from a nightmare like this. Too bad I did not know this information two months ago! Fortunately, due to this article, you have the opportunity to not make the mistakes I have made.

Just a few days ago, I would have told you that there are only three steps involved in getting started as an Internet based company. The first would have been to find a domain name that you are comfortable with. The second would have been to visit http://www.TotalNIC.net/whois.html to do a search to make sure your selected domain name was open. And the third was to find a reliable and affordable web host for your domain services.

Of course, that is the simplistic view, because it does not take into account the design and the construction of your website. It also does not take into account getting your e-commerce set up or anything like that. Basically, this simplistic view was the three steps that you would need to take to get rolling.

But, the events that I have dealt with over the course of the last few days has changed all of the forever. Now, I will insist that there are actually six steps in this simplistic view of the process. Steps four, five and six can be taken care of all in one website. That website is:

http://www.uspto.gov/web/menu/search.html

Step Four: Learn about the Trademark and Servicemark laws. Basically, the way I so far understand it, anyone can purchase a trademark or sevicemark without the aid of an attorney, though they do recommend that you use an attorney for your own protection.

Trademarks and Servicemarks are used for product based companies and service based companies, respectively. In effect, what they do is to protect a name or a certain word in the eyes of the business world.

Now, Trademarks and Servicemarks are not entirely unique to the company who owns them. They also have product and service categories attached to those “marks”. Thus, Nikon could not have challenged me using the name “F5″ because I had “F5″ attached to a computer based business, and they have “F5″ attached to a camera product. Different types of product and service categories allow more than one company to own a Trademark or a Servicemark on a particular name.

HINT: Don’t trust my understanding of Trademarks and Servicemarks as the God-honest interpretation. Talk to an attorney who specializes in this industry for a God-honest interpretation.

The general idea behind these “marks” is to prevent the consumer from getting confused between two companies offering similar products with similar names.

Step Five: Visit http://www.uspto.gov/web/menu/search.html and search for your selected name in one of the Trademark search engines. If your selected name is “marked” already, then check the “marks” to see what industry the “mark” represents.

Step Six: If your “mark” is clear, BUY IT! The do-it-yourself Trademark will cost you a mere $325 for 10 years.

If that seems like a lot of money, then stop to remember me. I have to give up my domain, and I lose the money I used to purchase it. Then think about my 16 hour days over the last two months. Then think about those hundreds of links out there that will be dead links in less than 60 days. Then think about the fact that I will be going from 6,000 hits a month to probably less than a hundred hits in my first month at my new domain. Then think about all of the work that will be required to move from one domain to the other, and change all of the references from my old domain name to my new domain name.

$325 in comparison to all of the time and goodwill I will lose and have lost on this deal, is just a drop in the bucket of what it could have saved me.

Let me put this another way for you. Do you remember the Dick and Jane stories we read when we were kids?

See Bill do his homework.
See Bill buy his domain name.
See Bill in hog heaven.
See Bill work hard.
See Bill work long hours.
See Bill promote the domain like a mad dog.
See Bill do this for two months.
See Bill check his mail.
See Bill read his important looking letter.
See Bill chew his nails.
See Bill lose everything he had worked hard for in a flash.
See Bill eat a bottle of aspirin in one week.
Don’t be a Bill.

Who owns your domain name? Oftentimes customers will approach me after they have already chosen a domain name. What I investigate first is who actually owns that domain name. I no longer ask the customer directly, because 99.9% of the time the response is always “I do!” when in fact many of them unwittingly do not. Determining this is an easy step; you simply go to an independent domain registrar such as Register.com, http://www.register.com, and type in the domain name and choose whois when the results pop up and you can see who is listed as owner.

The problem we run into is when individuals have chosen to purchase their domain name through a hosting service at a discounted rate. The hosting service is the company that purchases and owns your domain name, and in essence you sometimes just end up renting it along with your hosting service. This is a great way for the hosting company to ensure continued business. Think about if, in the future, you decide to change hosting services. Who do you think you will have to contact to have your domain redirected to another hosting provider? How anxious do you think they will be to provide service to you? How quickly do you feel they will redirect your url? What will happen if they forget to renew your domain name and someone else obtains control and ownership of it? What happens if that hosting company goes out of business? I have seen it happen.

To take this conversation one step further, there are now hosting companies that will purchase the domain in your name, so you are the official owner, but they still retain control over your usage of the account. An important point to remember is that ownership of an account as well as having the ability to use the account are important features when deciding how to purchase your domain name. I am not saying this is a fact with all hosting companies; I only ask you to consider it for your own well-being and future viability on the internet. Purchasing a domain name yourself is only a matter of spending a few extra dollars per year, and is well worth the security of knowing you are the owner and the one in control of your domain. Consider the amount of work that you have put in to targeting and obtaining traffic through the search engines on your keywords and search terms. Think about all the business you will loose if you have to start over again with a new domain name from scratch.

If you are about to start the process of obtaining an internet identity I suggest that you take the time to consider the future ramifications of the decisions you make today. Paying an additional $20.00 every two years to register and maintain your domain name is a small price to pay considering the problems you might otherwise encounter.

One of the best reasons for indulging in expire domain business is its ability to provide you very lucrative profits for the money invested into the business. Expired domain market is a busy place where everyone would jostle and rush out to find their own expire domains with sense of deep conviction. In reality, buying an expired domain is not as easy as you feel it will be! There are several reasons and causes that motivate people like you and me to buy expired domain. Here are some established tips and suggestions that will teach you how you can buy expired domain in an ever-busy market place.

Generally, all soon to get expired domains go through three phases of life:

In practice, grabbing a good expired domain name is a cumbersome and difficult exercise. Grabbing an excellent expired domain name not only needs an extra effort but also a quick reflex and lightening action to beat the online competition. To make things easier and to quickly find expired domains, you will need to find a way or method that helps grow in the expired domain name business. In this regard, good and efficient expired domain software comes very practical and handy. A piece of expired domain software is also a useful tool that can provide you that extra edge to your business efforts.

Expired domain software comes in many flavors, forms, styles, and interfaces; however, the most common objective is to find the best looking expired domains for you. The nature and type of each of these programs vary considerably and each one of these expired domain software programs is charged different rates. Some of them may offer different programs based on the functionalities, while the others may provide you comprehensive expired domain software that includes a number of different programs pooled in one single package.

A premium grade expired domain software will provide you many features and amenities like:

I’ve had extensive conversations with my mentors, and affiliate marketers who do extremely well. We all agree that you should always use a promotional domain when promoting an affiliate product.

A promotional domain is a domain that you buy just to promote an affiliate product. To use a promotional domain, you can:

1) Redirect that domain to your affiliate url at the registrar

2) Put some redirect code in the index page that’s physically loaded on the promotional domain itself

3) Pre-sell the affiliate product on the index page of the promotional domain, and then have them click through to the affiliate site

There are several reasons that you should use a promotional domain.

One reason you should use a promotional domain is because, during a BIG product launch, there are often a lot of spam complaints against the primary domain for the affiliate product. This is due to tons of overly aggressive affiliates “hammering” their lists so much that list members get irritated and file spam complaints. These spam complaints lead to that domain getting blacklisted. When you send out emails containing references to that blacklisted url, your emails are often blocked by filters!

Using a promotional domain can increase your email deliverability substantially. This can lead to a massive increase in sales!

A second reason that you should use a promotional domain is that many people hate clicking on affiliate links. The very though that someone is earning a commission from their purchase upsets some people who understand affiliate marketing. They just have a psychological hang-up against an affiliate profiting from their purchase. It doesn’t matter that they often would have never known about the product if it wasn’t for the hard working affiliate.

A third reason to use a promotional domain is that it allows you to pre-sell the affiliate product and to also build your list. You can set up a page on the promotional domain where you do a review of the product, or pre-sell it in other ways. On that page you can collect the visitors’ email addresses prior to forwarding them on to the affiliate site. Do this by offering a free report, or using other standard list building techniques. Then, instead of sending them to a standard “thank you page,” you send them to the affiliate site.

The sales page on many affiliate sites really stink. If you can do a better job of selling that product, then perhaps you want to post your own sales letter on your promotional domain, and then have your order link “deep link” into the affiliate site, bypassing the “sucky” homepage, and linking directly to the order form. If you do this you just need to make sure that the order is tracked properly. If you’re not sure how to do this, ask the owner of the affiliate program, or a trusted programming expert who understands cookies, etc.

Bypassing terrible sales pages works so well that many professional copywriters spend a lot of time writing better sales pages for great products that they know would sell IF the sales letters were better. They sift through places like the Clickbank Marketplace, looking for niche products that would be in demand if properly marketed. They do the standard market research, and when they discover these hidden gems, they fix the webpages and make lots of sales on products largely ignored by other affiliate marketers.

As an aside, if you do discover one of these gems, and it’s obvious that the sale page is not working, you may even want to offer to buy the rights to the product from the owner. You know that he’s not making much money, and you know how to fix the problem! Buy the business, fix the website and then resell the business at a profit.

My friend Dr. Mike Woo-Ming, and his copywriter, have the rewriting of terrible sales letters down to such a science that they run a membership site where they pass along revised sales letters to their members. That’s how important the sales letter is and how impactful it can be to rewrite “sucky” web pages. You can check out what Dr. Mike is doing at: http://WillieCrawford.com/DrMikesSecret.html

Getting back to using a promotional domain, if you are a serious affiliate marketer, it’s often a non-decision. A domain costs you less than $9 per year. Just one sale of an affiliate product more than pays for the domain for a year. If you sell big ticket items, as I do, the commission on a single sale is often $700 or more. Just one extra sale covers the cost of 80 - 90 promotional domains for a year (I buy my domains wholesale).

If using a promotional domain means that 20% more of your email gets through, since it’s not mentioning a domain that may be blacklisted, you’ve just increased your sales by 20% (all things being equal). If that’s just one or two extra sales paying you a few hundred dollars extra commission, it’s certainly worth it.

I buy my domains through a domain name reseller account that I have. I pay $90 per year for this account, but earn a commission every time that I sell a domain. I also save every time that I buy or renew a domain. You can check out the service that I use at: http://875PerYearDomains.com If you click the link at the top of that page labeled “Become A Domain Reseller” it tells you how to get setup as I am (so that you can buy your own domains at wholesale).

By now you should be convinced that you really should be using promotional domains. However, let me give you two additional reasons.

Many online communities, and discussion forums, have stopped allowing you to post affiliate url’s in your signature file. They’ve done this largely because many affiliate program managers were teaching their affiliates to post to some of the more popular forums and then leave a link. Many inexperienced affiliate marketers were making a lot of “spammy” posts that really said “nothing,” just to leave a link. Forum and community owners noticed this and thus the backlash was a prohibition against posting affiliate links.

At the same time, many of these forum owners have said that it’s ok to post links pointing to your own domains where you then mention affiliate products. So, in those forums, you would post links to your own domains. On your domains you have pages that pre-sell the product, or perhaps even offer a bonus for buying the product, and THEN you have them click through to the affiliate site. This is the PERFECT place to explain your bonuses if you are offering some extra inducement for them to buy through your affiliate link rather than your competitors’.

A second and final reason for using a promotional domain is that it looks better to ezine publishers and owners of article directories. These publishers want to offer their visitors and readers professional looking material, and frankly… affiliate url’s with all kinds of strange characters don’t look very professional. Articles with those obvious affiliate links scream “He wrote this article to sell me something!” Articles with less obvious affiliate links allow your readers to “lower their shields” and be less defensive. They are more open to your marketing message, so you will make many more sales… and isn’t that what it’s all about?

Copyright: Copyright © 2006-2008 Willie Crawford