Network Marketing Tricks

Yesterday I covered just how massive and powerful the Internet is (as if you needed to be told!) and today I’m going to cover the real basics of websites, what you need and how to accomplish that.

Websites come in many different flavors, from the very tiny, to the gargantuan. If you’re not familiar with websites and how they are created the range of options may seem daunting but for our purposes (primarily lead generation) all we need is a domain name, some content, and a method of contact for collecting the prospect’s details.

I’ll deal with domains first. With close to half a million new .com domains registered every day finding a suitable domain name isn’t always an easy task. You want something that grabs the attention. Something simple and easy to remember. Egg.com, Amazon.com, Yahoo.com, there is no way anyone could forget those names, or mis-spell them in their browser, but don’t think for a moment you will find something like that! One and two word domain names are very hard to come by, and hours of frustration await you if you attempt to search for an available one.

So how do we select a suitable domain? Well here are my top tips:

1. Short and Snappy. You want your domain to be simple and easy to remember. As already stated one word domains are probably out of the questions (certainly for .coms) but two or three words, carefully chosen can be just as effective. Everyone remembers my site, www.HateYourBoss.co.uk, which I have printed on all of my stationary. Try a little humour to get noticed and remembered!

2. Expired domains. Although almost half a million .com domains are registered on a daily basis, a very similar figure expire. There are hundreds of thousands of registered domains, not in use as actual websites, which are not renewed and reach the end of their registration EVERY DAY! My second tip then is to see if you can find a gem in those lists. Try a specialist search tool such as Deleted Domains

3. Use a different extension. While the term dot com has become synonymous with the web there are plenty of good alternatives. Using your country code is a good start (.co.uk for UK, .de for Germany etc.) and can give you a much better chance of finding the domain you want. Being a little more experimental however can yield some really great results. Last year for example I set up my first site using the .biz extension (www.yourveryown.biz) and I recently built an online store for a men’s fashion company called Clobber, using the Italian country code (www.clobber.it)

4. Avoid Ambiguous spellings. After building a site for a company named Stetfield Separators, a lot of their customers were complaining they couldn’t access the new site. It turned out that separators is commonly mis-spelt with an ‘e’ in place of the first ‘a’. Bear this in mind when choosing a domain and also try to avoid double characters whenever possible.

5. Don’t get frustrated. While a short and memorable domain is great, don’t fret if you can’t get your first choice. Try writing down a list of 20 keywords then search for domains based on those ideas… keep searching and you will find something suitable.

Any reputable domain registrar or web design/hosting company should have an online domain search tool. If you can’t find one just do a quick search on Google. It may also pay to shop around a little. Domains have become very affordable over the past few years but there are still some companies who insist on over charging!

Tomorrow we’ll deal with content.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 9:22 am and is filed under Uncategorized, Building your business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.