You allowed Google, Microsoft, and others to track your location and pass it along…

Not domaining related, but if you browse the web using any modern browser and you don’t explicitly turn off the “Geo” feature of your browser then you “consented” to the EULA of your browser and they are tracking not only the sites you visit, but also from WHERE you are currently… plus they pass it along to any site that asks for it.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I am in IT and I know a bit about domains and websites – did you REALLY intend to tell all those companies about all the sites you visit, when and where you are physically, etc?  Didn’t think so.  You can do a simple search of how to turn that so called feature off, but here is a link to make it easier to turn of the Geo tracking.

BTW, this isn’t just an evil empire thing – they all do it.  Another thought while I’m at it… if you have a smart phone you might want to do a simple search on what you AGREED to as well… iphone, droid, win… take 2 minutes and come back and tell me that isn’t frightening…  Now go to some of my sites and buy something :)

7 Website Copywriting Rules,7 Copywriting Mistakes and a Template for free

If you are writing your own content for a website, online store or even a blog you need to be aware of the basics of copywriting.  This goes equally well if you are outsourcing your content as you’ll need to make sure they follow these tips so you will get the most content bang for your money!

The following is the list of copywriting tips and mistakes(rips) I use.  If you like them and want the template I use, I’ll give it to you free and you can use them to ensure you or your staff follow the rules for online copywriting.

Copywriting Tip/Rip #1:

Start your content with (Tip) a great headline or (Rip)just some random irrelevant title.

You do want people to read your content after you spent time writing it, correct?  What most people don’t realize is that if you have a boring headline 80% of people will NEVER read any further.  It shouldn’t, but the title matters… a lot!

My template has some great sample titles you can use.

Copywriting Tip/Rip #2:

(Tip)Provide good, quality content, but (Rip)don’t waste people’s time or bore them.

Write your content with a goal and get to the point.  You don’t need a 1000 word article to get good results when 200 or 300 would do and cover the topic well.  Let’s face it – people get bored and distracted very easily in the age of IM, Twitter, FB, Texting so don’t give them a reason to be distracted.  Less is more most of the time.  You will probably find it difficult to write fewer words at first.  I know I do.  All the time.  :)

Copywriting Tip/Rip #3:

(Tip)Use keywords in the right places or (Rip) use some cute title or saying or quote you love.

This is all about letting the search engines find you and then letting them help you out by indexing you for the keywords you really want indexed.  In your first sentence, preferably the first words, need to be the keywords and phrases you want to rank with in search engines.  Don’t use some cute quote, saying or random intro sentence.  If you can, also use the keyword in your headline, meta titles, meta descriptions, anchor text for links and in any of your images alt tags.

Copywriting Tip/Rip #4:

(Tip)Use keywords in the body of your text and (Rip) use keywords all over your text and repeat them excessively.

You’ve all seen the proverbial web page with keywords reeking out of it and thought, that is stupid, and immediately left.  It may work for a short time because the engines won’t pick up on it initially unless you are truly blatant.  But, in the long run, readers will leave immediately and your ranking will drop.  What you really want is people to come AND STAY on your site so write your content for PEOPLE, not search engines.

Copywriting Tip/Rip #5:

(Tip)Use varying titles, meta titles and meta descriptions or (Rip) use the default or same one for everything.

Always use a keyword or phrase in your titles and meta information, but make sure to change them up some and try to make it relevant to the content as well.  By default many CMS’s like WordPress use a fairly poor SEO default title.  You can vary it yourself or you can set up the post structure where it shows the post title.  Better yet, use a free plugin that will do even more for you by default and help propel your content to the next level of search!

Copywriting Tip/Rip #6:

(Tip)Mention benefits of your site, service or product or (Rip) mention just features, facts and figures.

Features, facts and figures have their place in content, but people really only want to know WIIFM, what’s in it for me.  Do you want to have 58% less plaque on your teeth or do you want to have a dazzling smile that all the hottest people will notice and love?  Thought so!

Copywriting Tip/Rip #7:

(Tip)Tell people what you want them to do or (Rip) let them guess based on your site content or jedi mind tricks.

This is a call to action and you must have one or people will wander aimlessly and probably leave your site.  Tell them to order this now, or contact me now, or sign up for the free newsletter, or even read this other article. 

P.S.  Bonus Tip… Buttons, links and graphics help – especially ugly red flashy ones.  So please

to sign up for my domain name and website RSS feed :)

Almost forgot, if you want my free content template just contact me and I’ll give you the link.

Information diet

I have several projects going on with domains and domain development right now so I’ve decided to go on an information diet.  This is a concept I’ve seen in several places and you can find a lot more about it with a simple search so I won’t bore you with the details. 

What I will say is that if you are like me, you waste a lot of time reading emails, blogs, newsletters, etc and most of that time is poorly spent.  Just like with a weight diet, you don’t need to be consuming anything that will only make you fat…  I’ll keep you updated, but take 5 minutes and don’t read that SEO, marketing, etc post and do this instead – you will thank me later!

Domains and Blogs – making money online tips (part 2)

This is Part 2 of a review I started on some great tips from John Chow. Clike here for Part 1 of Making Money Online Tips.

Next up is AuctionAds – I haven’t used this one, but it seems really promising as it essentially wraps up eBay affiliates to provide economies of scale so they payout from ebay is higher than you could achieve on your own. Good concept. Now you may be thinking, why eBay. Well, you can buy just about anything on eBay which means you can get commission on JUST ABOUT ANYTHING on eBay…

Here’s another one I haven’t used – ReviewMe. He says this is his biggest money maker at the point of the ebook being published so it must be good especially if you have niche traffic that many people would want reviews within that niche. This is basically a sponsored review reseller so I need to look into it to see if they let you do the review or if they autopost content to your blog. Either way it seems like a win-win. You get content and ad revenue…

John’s own PPC network, TTZ Media, is up next.
I have no way to review this yet and I haven’t found much in the way of whether people use it effectively or not so I won’t comment on it unless I try it out. Feedburner ads is in the same league because the information is a little dated given Google has owned them for a while now. What I will say is that you REALLY need to use a feed service and FeedBurner is pretty easy to use – ads or no ads.

DealDotCom seems like it is well geared to marketers since you get a piece of anyone’s action who you get to sign up. No time limit is key!

Chapter 3 – Blogging Tips. Now we’re getting somewhere since John blogs about how he makes money blogging (his words, not mine). This section should be great!
If you are going to be a serious blogger follow all of these tips:

  1. Pick a topic you love. If you don’t you won’t stay with it.
  2. Use your own domain name! There are so many “free” services to blog, but if you want to make real money and develop a real following you must have your own domain. If you need help picking out a name or finding an available domain email me – I’m pretty good at finding available names that won’t cost you much, if anything, more than the registration fee. On a side note, if you really can’t afford hosting email me as there are some pretty cool options where you can have your own domain hosted at no cost and still make money off of it pretty easily.
  3. Update your blog. A LOT! Remember, content is king, and Google is the king’s Daddy. No sense in being the court jester.
  4. Build relationships – both with your readers and fellow bloggers in your niche. It may seem counterintuitive, but the more you comment on other blogs and guest post and cross post, the more you will be seen as a market leader! Also, really pay attention to your comments because those are the readers ASKING you to engage – so engage already!
  5. Use multiple sources of revenue. See his article for more links to a lot of possibilities for monetizing your blog.
  6. 10 mistakes to avoid – most of these seem to be covered in other areas, but here is the summarized list – remember these are things to AVOID: Not posting new blogs, blog only for money, post an entry before proofing it thoroughly, be impersonal, be a copycat, don’t respond to comments, don’t give a full feed RSS, don’t associate with other bloggers, write for Google’s bot because everyone loves 25 repetitions of the same keywords, and finally, don’t read JohnChow.com – that is funny, imo.
  7. 7 habits of highly successful bloggers. Over half of these are definitely covered in other areas, but they are slightly expanded upon so here they are in summary: Blog consistently – try using a posting frequency plan, be passionate about your topic, interact with your readers, give some link love – sometimes it is good to give because often you will get more than you originally gave, create your own brand – this will happen one way or another so you may as well be conscious of it, be a good writer – get help with creating a template if necessary and use a proof reader, oh and finally, read JohnChow.com.

This got long again so I think at this point you should just go download the ebook and read it… Well worth the time!

7 surprising Domain Name sales methods

This is a 7 part series on some of the often overlooked ways you can sell domain names. My focus on these is to have as little additional work involved as possible – enough has already been written in how to actively market and sell domains (if you need a reference to some of this let me know). In retrospect, this overview of the 7 surprising (and simple) domain name sales methods should have come first (each tip article came first), but I’m glad I didn’t because part way through I swapped out number 6 with a better method.

Selling domain names has to ultimately end with the sale of your domain name and the following is a list of ways that I’ve either sold a domain or in one case a friend of mine made a sale. None of these methods took more than a few minutes time and are in addition to the normal sales channels.

Method number 1 has a little background so without further ado, here are the 7 methods:

Domain name sales method #1: Whois your most targeted buyer?

Domain name sales method #2: Take advantage of the oldest profession in the world (communication profession that is)

Domain name sales method #3: Track and analyze your parking statistics for upward trends

Domain name sales method #4: Set up an email account on your parked domains

Domain name sales method #5: Check out the domaining forums – seriously

Domain name sales method #6: Use a premium listing on domain sales sites

Domain name sales method #7: Forward your parked domains traffic to your sales page.

I hope you are able to take advantage of at least one of these – please let me know of your experiences and anything that might have worked for you in the comments below!

7 surprising Domain Name sales methods Part 7

This is the final installment in my series on 7 surprising Domain Name sales methods. If you missed Part 6, you can find it here.

Just to recap, this is all about Making money online with domain names by selling your domain name in unique ways – we’ll cover other monetization methods in another series.

Domain name sales method #7:

No Parking on the dance floor!

No parking baby! Telling my age a bit if you catch that reference..

No Parking image

No Parking Baby!

Most domain owners who have parked domains have seen significant reductions in the Parked pages revenue and in a lot of cases a decline in traffic. If you have product domains or names that get any decent type in traffic you may be frustrated with your pennies you get from parking.

As an internet business, what is the most valuable thing you can have – traffic of course. And in this case your domain has VERY targeted traffic since people are typing it in their browser! Why not use domain forwarding and have all that traffic go to your domain sales page! Even better, have a sales page segmented by types of domains or in your Forward address and group like domains together!

You can also include a parameter like “domain=YourDomainName” so you can still track how much traffic is coming from each domain. This combination is surprisingly effective and while they are on your site they will often browse around quite a bit and possibly buy something or click an ad at the very least! I have used this process to forward like domains to an existing developed domain with a similar topic and it worked well for that, too! Be creative and don’t settle for just letting your domains gather dust – one sale and you can make more than the parking for all your domains for the entire year!

Good luck if you try this tip or any of the 7 for selling domain names!

~~ DomainNitro ~~

7 surprising Domain Name sales methods Part 6

This is Part 6 of 7 in my series on 7 surprising Domain Name sales methods. If you missed Part 5, you can find it here.

Just to recap, this is all about Making money online with domain names by selling your domain name in unique ways – we’ll cover other monetization methods in another series.

Domain name sales method #6:

Resale markets like Afternic, Sedo and GoDaddy – with a Premium twist

If you have more than one or two domains then you probably have them listed for sale on Sedo, Afternic, Godaddy, or one of several other resellers. No secret there, but what you may not know is that several of these services have “Premium Listings”, not to be confused with other “Premium” services which require you to pay up front a fee to have your domain listed in more prominent areas of the domain search results.

Premium Listings, such as the Premium Domain Listings on GoDaddy, have a much heftier commission on the back end so you need to account for that in your price (currently they are at 30%).

Premium Domain Name Listing


That may seem like a steep price to pay, but the way they feature these domains is at a fixed price so you can account for that in your listing price. They get some pretty good results because when someone searches for a domain such as walkingshoes.com and it is listed as a Premium Listing they go straight to a sales page with the price ready to go. If there isn’t an exact Premium Listing available then one of the more prominent suggestions is to buy similar “premium” domains right beside where they suggest other extensions!

You don’t pay 20 or 30 or even 50 dollars to have it featured in a general category of domains (I’ve done this on Sedo and Godaddy with poor results) and it gets better placement because they do a good job of pattern matching what the original name search was for with the available domains in the Premium Auctions.

I know several people who have had great success with this and considering how few offers I’ve gotten recently on GoDaddy I’m definitely going to add more Premium Listings!

Good luck if you try this tip for selling domain names! Domain name sales method #7 is coming soon!

~~ DomainNitro ~~

Domains and Blogs – making money online tips

I have been looking at ways to make money with blogs and domain names and websites recently and I came across an eBook (free, so don’t sign off) from John Chow that is really well done.

John is one of the more prolific bloggers as far as making money blogging so it shouldn’t surprise you that he has a pretty good ebook. What is surprising is that it is free and full of good information and all it will cost you is your email address if you pick it up from his site. I’ve already downloaded it and he says it is free to redistribute so if you don’t want to give him your email you can find it here.

I generally take lots of notes and mark up documents as I read them so I thought I would just type them up and create a short list of tips for making money on your blog/domain in a review format. The following are my notes and comments/thoughts I had as I read the ebook:

Chapter 1 – it is an introduction, but it is really all about what I would term accountability. Take a look at this quote related to “Someday Never Comes”:

“When you talk to a successful person about his goals, he’ll tell you what he plans to do and when it will be done. When an unsuccessful person talks about his goals(assuming he even has one), you’ll hear something along the lines of “I hope to do this someday.” Here’s a clue for all you losers out there; someday never comes.”

Some people will call that quote mean or too blunt or say that it is overstating or oversimplifying. BS! Think back about a time when you were most productive or accomplished more than you thought possible. Usually people think of these times and they are related to a project with a specific due date or something they really enjoyed and knew had to get done. A work project with a deadline is really just a goal someone else imposed on you… also, the things you enjoy usually tend to get done and done well! Why not blend the two? John says you have to have a time limit or it isn’t really a goal. I think that is the very heart of a goal! So do something you enjoy and set timely goals!

Make Money Blogging

Chapter 2 – Recommended Money Makers. No, I’m not talking about Chris Moneymaker or anything related to poker this time. In this chapter, John goes into different ways to make money on your blog.

First is content links – now this ASSUMES you have some really good content… Content links are great because you don’t have to sacrifice any ad slots in your primary advertising areas (usually following the F pattern). These types of ads read your content and dynamically place hyperlinks as ads as part of the text so it is easy to implement and pretty unobtrusive. He recommends Kontera and even lets you piggyback off his subscription because they usually won’t approve smaller blogs. I’m sure he gets some kickback or ad revenue, but who cares if it gets you in the door.

Next is Text Link Ads – I haven’t used a service like this before, but basically it looks like you are giving up your recommended/favorite sites section of your blog which makes it look like you are recommending whoever they place in they ad… I’m not too sure about this one since it is YOUR reputation you are selling… If anyone has any experience with this please let me know.

Google Adsense comes next and for the vast majority of people that is going to be the first network you experience. I like Adsense and they tend to display truly relevant links and they have text, image and video ads of all sizes so you can really fine tune your site and test different size ads with different layouts. Seems like a waste of time, but small changes make huge differences with adsense and almost any other network in terms of conversion (clicks in this case). He also mentions Bidvertiser, but unless you really need to get paid at $10 increments I can’t see the benefit.

This got much longer than I expected so I’ll post the rest later. Let me know what you think and whether you like to see links/reviews like this one.

~~ DomainNitro ~~

Common SEO mistakes

I know, I know… Two days in a row, but Neil Patel has a great post on “5 SEO Mistakes that Crush Rankings” over at QuickSprout.com. If you are building sites or are wondering why your current sites aren’t ranking well this could help. There is also a link to the SEOMoz SEO Beginner Guide which is well worth the time to read.

I know I am guilty of one or more of these on each site I build :( Let me know where you fall and any tips you might have in the comments!

Also, John Chow has an innovative idea for link building today - check it out if you use WordPress.

Domain Name Marketing

Neil Patel has a great post on Marketing Tactics over at QuickSprout.com. If you are selling domain names or anything else online it is worth a quick read.

Especially relevant is the long tail discussion because you can relate it to domain name long tails pretty easily.  Let me know what you think of his ideas and which ones you already follow in the comments!