Finance Fridays: Domain Names Again

Yes, there has been a bit of a theme this week, as I’m sure you see by now.  Today, though, depends more on what you can spend versus trying to save money.

Buying domain names can be a business in itself (it’s called “domaining”) and frankly, it’s a business practice that drives me insane.  I personally believe that if you have a domain name you’re not using, you should point it somewhere it’s going to be useful.  Otherwise, sell the thing.

Alright, now that that’s off my chest, back to today’s post.  My suggestion is to buy as many company specific domain names as your budget affords you.  Get all the .coms, .nets, .bizs you can and point them (with proper 301 redirect of course) to your website.

But wait, there’s more.  Don’t just get the TLDs (that’s Top Level Domains) for your main site, get anything you can afford that correlates with any sub-page within your site, and point those domain names there as well.  (Again, properly 301 redirected, you don’t want duplicate content.)

Why should you do this?  Two reasons:

1. So you can get as many people to your site who attempt typing in random domains (yes, people still do that, and more often than you’d expect.)
2. To keep your competition from getting traffic that should rightfully come to you.
3. So know one else makes money off your idea (start typing I can has cheeseburger options in the address bar, good luck finding the one with the cats.)

OK, that was three ideas, but the second and third are basically the same (I just wanted to throw something in there about LOLcats.)

So that’s my tip of the week, go and buy some domain names, and don’t pay more than $10 on each.  If your current company chareges more than that, start Googling, there are cheaper (and better) options out there.

Google Business Cards — Received

I received my free Google Business cards today, and I couldn’t be happier.  First of all they’re free so who can complain about that.  Secondly, they have my Name and my profile ID right there, something highly necessary for a guy named “Mark Miller.”

Oh, and finally I’m ranking somewhere on the front page of the Google SERPs for my name.  I need to change my profile pic (and I’ll probably go do that right now) but still I rank!

If you haven’t yet created a profile, I strongly suggest doing so.  The steps to do so are pretty simple.

Tech Tip Tuesday: Make A Backup

I work in the hosting industry for my day job.  It’s interesting and educating (and many times humbling) work.  Other than the day job, I build websites, run a few (3) blogs, keep a few (5) Twitter streams, do the whole Facebook thing, the Flickr thing, and teach others about using the social web to market their businesses and websites.

One of the things that has amazed me in each and every one of these positions is how little people create backups of their information.  Most people create a backup once a month, many don’t make backups at all.

Of course I have had experience in this.  About a year ago my girlfriend’s computer crashed and she lost her entire educational portfolio (not fun when applying to Law Schools.)  Unfortunately she did not have a backup of any of these items anywhere, so they were lost to the ether.

I personally have always backed up my data in some form.  Whether it be online with Carbonite, some other online storage, or on an external hard drive.  I’ve even used my GMail account to save files as attachments. 

Marketing Tip Monday: Renew Your Domain Name

There’s a problem in the web industry.  People only buy their domain names for a year at a time.  Why is it a problem?  Well there are a number of reasons, and I’ll delve into those throughout the week, but for today, I’ll stick with some of the Marketing implications.

First things first.  You never (never, never, never, never, never) want your domain name to go past due.  When your domain name goes past due it is usually (depending on your registrar) pointed to a parked page.  You’ve seen these pages on other sites, I’m sure.  They’re the ones with a group of adlinks to “similar services.”

The reasons for not wanting this to happen should be relatively obvious.  You don’t get any business from a website that is down.  On top of that, you also lose reliability instantly.  Additionally, anyone coming to your site and seeing that will probably never come back, or worse yet, they might click on one of those adlinks and go to a competitor.

Another reason to renew your domain name for as long as possible is to assist with your rankings within the search engines.  That said, Google and Yahoo have never officially said that a domain name that is only registered for a year will have a lower ranking.  However, you have to believe that they will see a domain name that has a longer registration more reliable as the business plans to be around longer and isn’t holding on year to year.

Finance Friday: Ditch The Phone Book

When was the last time you went to a phonebook to look up a local business?  Seriously, think about it.  Even before the days of Internet magic and finding things at the click of a button, many people used 411 rather than look anything up in this tome.

Today,  whenever a phone book shows up at my door it usually ends up in a recycling bin within five minutes (if that long.)  But, I did decide to browse quickly through one the other day just for old times sake.

I was amazed, astounded, thrown completely aback.  There are still companies that use the phonebook advertisements.  I couldn’t help but think, “What a complete waste of money.”

Google Apps On Campus

So the Google Apps Bus pulled into ASU this morning and set up their stand.  The goal of the ride is to teach students about all the wonderful things they can do with their Google run student email accounts.  So, of course, I ran by to see what the fuss is all about.

First things first, the Googlers seemed to be a little too pre-coffee at 9 in the morning.  I’m sure they’ll wake up and get a little more excited during the day (at least until the 100° heat sucks it back out of them.)

As “I just woke up” as they were they were all pretty forward, saying, “Hi,” and “Welcome,” and all that to the students who stopped by.  They were all asking questions about what part of the Google Apps we liked, and whether or not we were familiar with this or that feature.  Etc., etc., etc.