Small Business Who Gets Domain Name Brand Protection And Call To Action

Today I was working with a customer who had purchased a pretty extensive custom web development package and part of the kick off process was domain name selection and discussing branding, call to action and related topics.

It became a very interesting conversation based on the experience of the customer I was working with, his currently primary business is focused on selling a very niche product online and he has some very nice call to action and keyword domains to support his business and I must say we spent quite a bit of time discussing his thoughts on domain selection, domain investment in general and brand protection.

He was really concerned about brand protection due to the fact that after his initial site became successful people picked up what equates to typos or singular instead of plural versions (his original site was a generic one word with USA on the end). From the beginning he was open to a plan to buy up keyword domains to use as supporting sites to his primary site, this will work great from an SEO perspective if done right as well as keep his competitors from purchasing those, but since the site we are building is going to be done on a very nice call to action domain he also understood that there were certain phrasings he should pick up just to be safe.

There are not many small businesses that understand the value of having multiple domains, owning the .NET, .ORG and more when possible and overall planning of a strategy for a network of supporting sites. It was an absolute blast working with a customer who understood from the beginning and not only supported this effort but pushed us even deeper into the plan than we would of expected.

With the right education and experience businesses get it. I wish I could take credit for the education here, but I was just a small piece, unfortunately this customer learned through a bad experience but knows not to let it happen again.

.ME Call To Action Domain Auction Favorites

Although most of my .ME investment is around geo domain names I also think certain verbs and call to action names work very well with the extension. I was just browsing through the 15 call to action domain names that are headed to the exclusive auction at Namejet.com and noticed that several were already over the thousand dollar mark and one over two thousand dollars. Not bad considering the auction has not started yet.

Here is the list of names that are headed to auction:

Chat.me

Photo.me

Monitor.me

Protect.me

Rescue.me

Answer.me

Drive.me

Rate.me

Know.me

Free.me

Review.me

Host.me

Link.me

Fix.me

Friend.me

Out of these, Link.me, currently has the highest bid "pre-auction". Although I think they are all great I personally like Photo.me, Answer.me, and Friend.me. There is obviously quite a bit of interest in the auction, many of these names have over 60 bids currently and I expect that to increase before the backorder deadline for the auction is here.

The deadline for backorder at Namejet for the first group of names is September 24, 2009 at 8am Pacific. Good luck to the bidders!!!

What To Do With All That Hyperlocal Online Advertising Traffic

Hanging out here with Patrick Ruddell from ChefPatrick.com and thought I would put a post out before we head out for a little fun this evening. Actually had typed this post on the plane but for some reason my Apple iPhone Wordpress app decided it did not want to save it after I typed it up flying down.

Anyway, on to the info, one of the great things we have had happen, and I have alluded to before, is that after the launch of Missouri.me we have had customers calling to tell us they have customers coming in or calling that found them online. Thats the best validation you could have as a business, what was even better was one business actually told the yellowpages sales person they would not be spending on an ad this year based on the success they were having with their marketing package we had created for them.  All great news but lets get to the bad part, enough happy talk all the time. Well we will end up with happy...

We had one customer contact us stating they were concerned because we had sent traffic to them but they could not figure out how to convert it to customers. They basically were stating we had done our job now they had to do theirs. As much as I love the fact they were happy with what we were doing at the end of the day I want them to benefit from the clicks they were receiving from us. We sat down with them and discussed their site, etc. At the end of the day it was determined with the business they are in they really need some form of call to action. What I really like about this is the fact that a business that really focuses on offline type of services gets that they need to take advantage of their targeted traffic. They have made the determination they need to put real focus on building their web presence around more than an about us. Good for them.

We will be offering them services to help them with this working along side their in house marketing team. From a domainer perspective they also are now very interested in acquiring domain names in their niche since they are getting the targeted traffic concept, nice for a legacy marketing team to pick that up.