Blowing up the Domain Name world!
For those of you who really know me you’ll agree that I rarely ever become a fanboy or rave about product x or person y, but I just read the best blog post ever – in so many different aspects – from engagement to stickiness to SEO to call to action… go read it NOW, seriously. Let me know what you think. I subscribed even though I’ve sworn off new subscriptions – now who to bump? Hmmm.
How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise, and Get Paid to Change the World
Do you have a website that you want people to visit? If not, what are you doing reading this blog entry?
Since you are still reading I assume you do.
Now, when you start getting that magical traffic, are you throwing away money? Probably! Most people assume if they do one of the following the traffic will come and they are right…
Now what if I told you that you had to immediately pay 2X or 3X more in time or money to get the same traffic? Would you do it – maybe, maybe not! If you have a good idea of your costs to get a visitor you might find that it wasn’t worth it. The problem is you are doing EXACTLY that!
No, you’re not you say? Ok, if you can answer this question honestly and the answer is yes then you can stop reading this because you are in the vast minority…
Do you run a/b tests on your pages including your home page, sales funnel pages and squeeze pages?
Didn’t think so. Why not? Do you enjoy throwing away money?
A/B testing really is simple and it can increase your conversions and thus visitors who stick around by 2x or even more. Now who doesn’t want twice the page views and potentially revenues? The first time I did this I couldn’t believe how glaring my results were – literally a background color and position of one squeeze form performed over 300% better than the original one I had put up that came as a template form. The crazy thing is you can test really quickly and easily with the tools available today – for free even. Google has a great set of testing tools and there are many more available that add varying degrees of automation to your testing.
Recently I ran across a blog series from Cameron Chapman over at KissMetrics.com that includes the following articles:
Take 15 minutes and read over these great tips on testing and then take 15 minutes more to implement your very first test – if it doesn’t show you any differences then please contact me so I can hire you ASAP for my site!
Make sure you look at the third one on emails that convert as Cameron actually gives some examples of what you might use as a test… Start with the big impact ones such as the subject line (ie, the headline of an email) – I really like the idea of varying it by something like “Product X on sale – 10% off NOW” vs “10% Discount on Product X – Today ONLY!”. If you have any examples or anything you want to share please leave a comment below! Good luck!
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.
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:
This got long again so I think at this point you should just go download the ebook and read it… Well worth the time!
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.
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!
I’ve been working out how to ramp up content on some sites, but don’t want to farm much due to the lack of quality I’ve seen where I’d have to rewrite most of the content which defeats the purpose. Since I know I can’t do it all, I was pleasantly surprised to see a really nice article over on GigaOM.com regarding content and SEO.
They basically take the path of Wikipedia or any of the old school Q/A sites. This seems like a novel approach, but when people are truly interested in a topic they will volunteer their opinions and input freely. They will also take more pride in what they write and give excellent content!
That is the same effect you see in great forums where you have passionate people who love the topic – think cameras, sports like college football, apple products, etc. People spend hours and hours surfing, commenting and posting new content all on their own time!
SEO Content Creators
The more recent technical development and evolution of Forums is an expansion of what were thought of as communities at one time – I’m talking about Facebook! You can’t get a more engaged, dynamic, content creation machine than a few hundred million people banging around a site every day!
Now if I can figure out how to transfer this concept on a smaller scale to find and persuade people to contribute content to things I’m interested in it will solve all my problems!
Take a look at the post – nothing groundbreaking, but it sure got some thoughts cooking about how to engage people and get them to participate in a site!
This is slightly off-topic. Not that you don’t want to be motivated, but it isn’t really domain related.
There is a seminar series going on that is essentially free… It is called “Get Motivated” and it has several venues, but the one in Birmingham includes the likes of Zig Ziglar, Rudy Giuliani, Rick Belluzzo, General Colin Powell and Laura Bush!
Not to mention that in all likelihood it will feature the past two national champion college football coaches, Nick Saban (Roll Tide) and Gene Chizik (not an Auburn fan per se, but for this game I am a huge Tiger fan). May have to modify this post if Auburn doesn’t pull through, but I’m betting they win by 2 TD’s!
It should really be a great time and I hope to learn a lot and GET MOTIVATED!
I know I said this wasn’t domain related, but I actually like their domain GetMotivated.com as it is actionable and memorable and the exact same as their event series!
Hope to see you there!
There are some great domain names dropping this week and Tuesday is pretty strong. Shane has several listed including SeatingChart.com and Yoyos.net which are great names. However, I think he missed the best one…
SpareTireCarrier.com – could go a lot of ways with this one – the obvious is a product site, but it is screaming for a Male only version, Man on the street, People of WalMart type site. Could also be a belly fat targeted weightloss site, but what fun would that be? I was going to put a picture in this post, but I thought to myself… how can I possibly put a picture of a fat belly in the same post with a link to the PoWM site… just can’t do it.
While over at namejet, I like to see what is really drawing early attention because most people won’t even bid until close to the end of the drop cycle. So when there are already close to 200 bids for a domain that doesn’t drop for 5 weeks and the price is already at $2500 it will be pretty big. The domain is MiracleSpa.com and I’m guessing people want it for the huge number of baby boomers and spa go-ers – I can tell you people will drop a LOT of money at a spa really quick and if they are selling MIRACLES, well then, I expect to pay a lot more!
On a different note, ShoeMoney is running a killer contest that closes today – go post your entry! I can’t go on those dates, but I’d definitely enter if I could!
Good Luck!
~~ DomainNitro ~~
Every person with a job, a small business, a 16 year old’s lawn mowing service, the lady calling for donations whose caller id you hate to see pop up, the bum on the corner… everyone, is in sales. If you are reading this, more than likely you are selling yourself! Wait, you know what I meant – get your mind out of the gutter!
Anyway, you are either selling your time and knowledge to a company in exchange for a paycheck or you are trying to sell a product or better yet, domain names or internet based products . Most people never make the connection that they are selling themselves – if you can let that sink in, you can immediately apply some insight to your online business.
You are a salesman!
Think about it like this – if you are selling things like information products (ebooks, articles, etc), SEO guides, Websites or domain names then you have a product to sell. True salesmen can sell anything – ie, icecubes to eskimos, but that is not me and it probably isn’t you. Knowing that is key to your success!
Why is that important you ask? Well, most people have a really hard time selling face to face or even online, but bear with me for a second…
What was your last conversation where you were carrying on without thinking about it at all – spouting off facts, figures, trivia and insight? Was it related to some hobby or sport or family member? Think about it. Do you LOVE to talk about or participate in anything? It could easily be cycling, running, working out, dieting, flirting, politics, stocks, bonds, corporations, insurance (you are just wierd), blogging, ipad, iphone, laptops, hdtv, bluray, movies, music, kids, parents, sports teams, gardening, sports cars, yoga, dogs, cats, hair, recycling… the list can go on forever, but the point is the conversation you had was about something you LOVE and are passionate about!
Selling online is tough, it takes time and commitment, but if you love what you are doing it doesn’t even seem like work – it is actually fun!
For me, it is domain names, websites and related products. For you it might be aquariums and products like fish food, lights, plants, floaty thingies like miniature treasure chests and ships or whatever you put in aquariums – the point is that if you love aquariums you immediately thought I was stupid and thought of 17 other things that would make more sense to sell… so why don’t you sell those? Don’t want to sell physical products? Easy, go to clickbank or one of the other info product middlemen and search for aquariums – you’ll get more than you would expect to find. On a side note, you don’t have to really sell physical products per se – many companies will drop ship or have a reseller affiliate id and you can leverage their infrastructure and never even see a product nevertheless touch it.
It is as simple as this – every day I like to look for domains – either dropping domains, online auctions, domain markets and even hand registering domains. I would be doing this anyway, even if I didn’t want to sell the domains as I think they are valuable in ways stocks and bonds can never be… But that is just me – maybe you are a great salesman or you just enjoy pimping your time to someone else.
Can’t come up with any ideas? Contact me and I can help you out in under 5 minutes I bet. I have a stack of hand written notes and ideas for my own stuff that I can’t get done in 20 years and I have a knack for coming up with ideas and I like this stuff so feel free to email me or call me up.
Now get out there and sell some stuff!!!
~~ DomainNitro ~~