|
a)-Choosing Your Domain Name- Leverage?
Yes - Your Ultimate Success Depends on it.
-
You want to have your own domain name (YOUR COMPANY.com)should you decide or wish to
move to another provider. That way your customers can continue to find and do business with
you.
-
To maximise your LEVERAGE nstead just getting a domain that 1.you like and 2. is
available lets get the most bang for our efforts by choosing a site name most likely to be
choosen by your customer searching for your product or service. Put yourself in their
shoes. Who are they? What do they like? and What would they be likely looking for? Write it
down.
-
If your site is called johnhenry.com and you are selling tobasco sauce - no one is going
to find you. Ideally you would want to pick a name such as tobasco.com TobascoSauce.com. I
just posted up a new site recently (3/40 pages completed) called
Financial-Success-books-ebooks.com Each word had a fairly high search term profitabily
rating using a program designed to ensure the profitabily of your site starting with the
theme you choose for your site and words you use in its content. The Google rating for that
site is 5 which is quite high for a brand new site.
-
Go to overture.com and
play around using the "Term Suggestions Tool" using probable search terms people would use
trying to find your website. Pick the best responding terms and write them down for future
reference. ie. "Hot Sauce", "Condiments" . . .
-
Go to Google.com and enter search terms and see which are responsive and which don't
show up at all. Mind you if you get amillion hits for the term sause that will be the
amount of sites you will be competing with. A better term might be "Mexican Hot Sauce".
-
Look at the top sites your search pulled up in Google. Go to those site and in your
browser menu bar, mouse pick on "view" and then "source". Look at the meta tag "keywords"
that they are using to get top search engine listing. Write those down.
-
Try Word
Wizard with you best terms for some probable names
-
Try Domain
Twist for some word combinations. I tried Hot-Sauce & Mexican and
Mexican-Hot-Sauce.com is available!
-
If you want to search for a domain in a specific language go here
Multilingual Translator
b) Most people have experience the anoyance of having to change their email addresss because
they have change internet providers or because theiri internet provider has gone out of business or
they moved from a telphone line to a cable service.
One of the biggest advantages of having your own domain name is that your email address is fully
under your control. What most people don't know is that it is very simple to direct where you email
is sent if you have full control of your mail box or "mx" settings.
If you conside your email address Hose@Mexican-Hot-Sauce.com The domain name is registered in a
central directory. And when computers get your name or email address they look it put in the
central directory to see where they should send it.
Well you can go to this directory anytime and change the your email destination address. To give
you an example how this may be useful, say I signed up with my email address to spamnews. Because I
have full control of my mx setting I made up the email address spamnews@Mexican-Hot-Sauce.com
Normally my email would be sent to my hotmail email account. Now lets says all of a sudden I
started to get a ton of garbage emai at that account - well all I have to do it id direct it to a
non-existent account ie. I use blackhole@mydomain.com for that purpose - problem solved.
In the same way if you changed your internet provider tp let's say shaw cable you just redirect
your email now to myname@shawcable.com. The of thumb is never use the email address the internet
provider gives you as that name is fixed. If a spammer passes your email address to multiple
parties you are doomed to be buried in email.
Here another trick I do is use a web based email
provider http://www.fastmail.fm as my main email provider. I direct all email addressed to
anything@visiontowealth.com as well as 10 other domains to that email address.
As fastmail.fm automatically changes my from address
when I reply to email I can pick up and send all my email fron one convenient place. Neat eh! and I
never use my real fast mail address. Another advantage of this web based email provider - its
rigidly virus checked and no virus containing email has reached my computer in over two years -
except once when I stupidly downloaded a file from a site I should of know better. I receive 100's
of email every day and about once every two weeks a virus is intercepted before I even see
it.
Incidently the best virus checker by far for your
personal computer is AVG Their main customer
base is big business - the free download is merely a loss leader to introduce their appliction of
industrial strength products. If you are in trouble with your machine use this web based address as
a back up go trend micro http://housecall.trendmicro.com
In the same fashion having control of your domain name
also allow you to redirect your website from one location to another. Say for example my hosting
company was knocked out by the blackout we recented experied (Aug. 2003) well I could up load my
web files to another provider, change my redirection setting with a matter of minutes and within 24
hours my website will be ccessible all over the world. It takes that long for all the directories
around the world to be updated.
Where do you go to have full control of your mx and
domain settings. Go to http://www.zoneedit.com they will allow up to control up to 5 domains for
free. Beats waiting for a technician to get back to you when every minute your off line is money
lost or a potential customer gone. Typically you get charged for this service at rate of a zillion
dollars an hour for something that takes less than 2 minutes to implement.
If your interested in getting instructions on how to
set all this up send me an email - Les.
|
