Tech news outside the mainstream
Uncommon news and information with a technical twist and some topics that are a bit out there. Enjoy...
If your business doesn't have a strong online presence, plan on going out of business.
Companies often allocate substantial funds to marketing campaigns in order to promote their products or services. These campaigns encompass various expenses such as TV and radio commercials, print advertisements and social banners. The objective is to enhance brand visibility and reach a wider audience, which typically necessitates a significant investment. A 30-second TV spot during prime time can cost around $110,000, excluding the additional costs for production and management. It is crucial that the target demographic does not miss these advertisements by channel surfing. Print advertisements are also expensive, with production costs and yearly commitment terms averaging around $20,000. Consider how your customers will find you and most people are less frequently viewing these mediums, everyone is online and it is the first place anyone goes to find anything. Bottom line, traditional advertising is very expensive and no where near as effective as a domain name and won't be going forward.
Any businesses that wants to survive and prosper must develop a comprehensive marketing strategy that centers around a domain name and a robust digital marketing presence. Recognize the value of domain names and the exposure they provide, opting to add different domain names for various product segments and growth. Domain names are marketing assets and they persist in value though mergers and acquisitions.
Become digitally enlightened and gain significant advertising value, extended market reach, brand recognition and authority all with the power of a domain name. There's no excuse today for being as short sighted as this management team.
Is the "Birds Aren't Real" movement a growing conspiracy or is it an epic marketing strategy?
You'll have to decide for yourself. The founder and lead activist Peter McIndoe has been written about in The New York Times, The Gaurdian, The Hill and on hundreds of other sites since the movement hit mainstream in 2017, but it's roots really began decades before. I suspect more grass than roots.
Did you know the word bird, B.I.R.D. means Bionic Information Recording Drone. If not all birds are drones yet, they may soon be along with flying insects. Keep a close watch on dragonflies and carpenter bees.
The right to privacy is slipping away like a bird though the forest trees. Don't be fooled by the government smoke show. Have you ever seen a baby pidgeon? No. But, you do see birds sitting on power lines charging up their batteries everyday. Yes, and there's a lot more down this rabbit hole.
Visit BirdsArentReal.com buy a t-shirt, create awareness and stand up against the surveillance state.
Domain name values are rising for several key reasons:
First, they provide unprecedented advertising abilities and can reach out to new clients and interact with them 24X7 where no other media can't even compete.
Secondly, absolute creditability. People judge your domain name, your url, your address, this is how they find you and get to know you. How well your site looks and works is also a factor, I hope that is obvious. Don't lose the fish at the dock. But, if your domain name is off center, or has extra words, hyphens, number, all these make it weaker and harder to do business with your organization. Look at how you view and surf, how fast are you gone and less likely to put a credit card up when these two key points are off? 77 percent are gone in less than half a second.
Domain names are like real estate, they're virtual real estate, but the difference is domain names rarely and infrequently come back on the market. Once sold, they are gone. If they do come up for sale, it's usually in the aftermath of a merger and for 100X what it last sold for. Like real estate, inventory is low and depleting. The pool of good names is drying up at an accelerating rate.
Get the .com extension or you'll be giving business to it. Maybe a .org depending on what your business is, and a .us maybe a good thing 10 years from now, but get the best .com names while you can. For the all the reasons above, and most prominently, domain names are the most powerful advertising mechanism in place for the next 20 years.
Prices are going up. Open to offers, take a look here.
The key method of developing your business is advertising. Call it integrated marketing with all the other forms of getting your message out, but it still boils down to advertising, which is making it public and memorable.
You may advertise in a trade magazine or on a billboard, but your website is the only form of advertising that's constantly available to your audience. Your domain name is the focal point for all of these marketing components, at the corner stone, and the foundation from where you build your brand upon.
Get a dot com name. Other extensions may gain popularity in 20 years, but for the foreseeable future your marketing efforts will end up in the junk folder. Even in tech where .io and .ai have some traction with start ups, it translates into they're in beta, not ready for primetime. As a decision maker can you back your choice of doing business with an organization that's not really established?
Read my last post about Branding for Authority and Affinity for more information. Here are some premium domain names that I have for sale.
There's a lot to branding your business in sync with your domain name and I'm just going to discuss a few key points that begin with the letter A.
Authority and Affinity
Being a brand authority now of days is having a powerful domain name. Powerful domain names are valuable because they are memorable and reflect your business as a leader in your industry. Like it or not we live in the age of information overload, and that's a good thing. As a kid I would ride my bike back and forth to the library trying to juggle a stack of books, knowledge and products from all over the world are now at anyone's finger tips from just about anywhere. How does a customer find, return to, or recommend your business in a sea of 1.7 billion websites all competing for the first page of Google? This is why your domain name matters.
Affinity is the sense of the natural path to your business, a relationship to or the path of the least resistance. If a customer has to remember your domain name or apply a silly extension, not only are they going to have a hard time getting back to you, it's even more difficult for them to refer your company to their contacts. Word of mouth is still a powerful tool in growing your business.
Here's a few great articles on the subject of branding and why your domain name matters: Spend Less on SEO, More on a Memorable Brand by Jamie Zoch and The True Cost of Your Domain Name by Chris Zuiker.
One point I would add to both of these articles is that not acquiring your matching domain name is leaving the door open for your competition to purchase it. Some companies have spent millions just to keep their competition from having them.
Many online businesses have been thriving throughout the pandemic, some have had an unprecedented 2nd quarter. How? The answer is simple, they have mastered the art of the UX (user experience). Evaluate your sites whole UX and ask these 10 questions about your site from Medium.com. I'd add credibility to that list and that begins with your domain name. The article is from 2018 and is every bit as relevant then as it is today.
For the DNN platform there's an upgrade for the developer's UX too with Vanjaro.com from Mandeeps.com. When you design all day, what you experience matters. The new UX is comparable to Wix, SquareSpace, and Weebly. Featuring a Drag & Drop Live Editor, Responsive Editing, Automatic Revision History, Workflow Management, and in context, user aware, centralized site administration and it's open source. Vanjaro.com is compatible with custom DNN Modules, (including XMod Pro) and hundreds of existing solutions on the DNN Store.
The experience is the journey. Make it better and make more sales.
This article is by Kasssey Lee on TLDInvestors.com originally from GrandSeeds.com
Your domain is the address of your store in the digital world. If consumers remember what you sell and where to buy it, that’s powerful marketing. Your brand helps them remember what you sell, and your domain helps them remember where to buy it. Therefore, you want your domain to be easily remembered. The easiest way to remember your domain is to make it match your brand.
It's never too late to get the matching domain name, it just gets more expensive.
Here's a company I discovered while looking for some keyword analysis on my GeorgiaBeachHomes.com website, Wordstream.
Not only does Wordstream offer keyword advice and optimization, they have a suite of utilities to tune up your marketing campaigns. Wordstream is a Google and Facebook Premier Partner leading the industry in search optimization.
I like the design of their wesite too and they have a wealth of information for those of you just getting started with online advertising. Spend a little time reading though the Pay Per Click University and learn about bid management and conversion tracking.
From and article on WinningWP.com about getting the best domain name possible by Karol K, he provides 22 essentials tips to help those new to the industry. There's only one other tip I would add to this post, it's well worth it to buy a great domain name. Memorability and validity make your business standout. Not everyone can afford a million dollar domain, but there's a reason why they are worth those kind of numbers, specifically site traffic and being the brand authority.
Remember you are building a brand when you build your website, and there's no point to building all your collateral advertising around a sub par domain name.
Summer 2019 Reported Domain Sales
For those of you that are not in-tune with the domain industry, here are some recent domain name sales that have been topping this summer's domain charts. Please keep in mind that only a very small fraction of sales ever get reported. Orion.com changed hands, but the price was unreported, rumor has it that it sold above 30m. Prices have been rising for great domain names.
Voice.com 30M
Money.com 20M
EKO.com 1.5M
Room.com 1.5M
Nursing.com 950k
Links.com 789k
Carrot.com 565k
BettingOdds.com 486k
Cooking.com 402k
Casinos.org 400k
JoyRide.com 300k
Money.com.au 279k
PFF.com 270k
Crystals.com 188k
Viajes.es 165k (Travels Esp.)
Visit DNJournal.com for the reported year to date sales chart.