Tag Archives ⇒ website

Site Creation – Domain Registration

· Brandon Hann

Today, domain names are everywhere and they aren’t always used for a company’s website such as HP.com or Apple.com. Domains are now registered to capitalize on all sorts of things like catch phrases, movie titles, personal names, marketing jargon and just about everything else. When it comes to registering your own domain, you’ll want to ask yourself a few questions:

  • What message will the domain convey to other people?
  • Does it make me sound professional?
  • Is it easy to remember?
  • Does it infringe on a registered trademark?
  • Does it have branding potential?

The most important question is: Is it available? There are millions and millions of domain names out there already, so finding one you like may be a larger process than you anticipated. However, there are plenty of after-market places to buy registered domain names for sale.

How do I decide what to get?

After answering the questions above, you should have a clearer path to finding the right domain. If this site is going to be your personal website, try using your name or nickname. If you’re using this domain as a business, obviously use your business name, or find something generic that relates to you business. As time goes on, more and more traffic will be coming to your site, so pick a domain that you won’t want to change a year from now. Your domain name is also part of building your brand name.

There are also lots of top level domains (TLDs) to choose from. You might know the top three: .com, .net and .org, but there are over 1600 TLDs worldwide! Each country has at least one like the United States (.US), Tuvalu (.TV), Montenegro (.ME), United Kingdom (.CO.UK) and Western Samoa (.WS). Picking your TLD can be a matter of geographical location, preference or necessity. Keep in mind that foreign domain extensions often cost more and might carry specific restrictions.

Where do I get a domain?

To search for an available domain name and register it, I recommend GoDaddy. I use them for all of my domain services and setting up an account is free. The best part is that, compared to others, they still offer the cheapest domains when you consider all the free services you get.

If the domain you want is already registered, you might be out of luck unless the owner is holding the domain for the “right price”. Yes, domains are sold as commodities these days and some can command millions of dollars. The best advice I can give in this situation is to contact the owner and see if they’re willing to sell. You can do this by finding out the registrant’s email address using Who.is.

Alternatively, you can search after-market domains on sites such as Sedo.com, Afternic.com, SnapNames.com, NameJet.com, BuyDomains.com, GoDaddy.com and Pool.com just to name a few!

Notes

Use your best judgement when registering or buying a domain. When buying, know that there are a lot of scammers out there that will try to steal your money or make a domain seem worth more than it really is. When registering, make sure you’re not treading on someone’s trademark. This can lead to you not only losing the domain name, but also paying huge lawyer’s fees and fines.

A complete list of domain extensions can be found on Wikipedia.

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Proper Grammar and Presentation

· Brandon Hann

Writing a blog or creating a website can be easy when you know what your subject is, who you plan to approach it and how often you’re going to update, but if there’s one thing that can grind your hard efforts to a stop, it would be grammar and presentation.

Among other things, grammar can make a huge impression on your professional image and ultimately make or break your site. This is especially true when you’re selling things online. Imagine if you were buying from a online retailer and their site was loaded with spelling errors, incorrect product descriptions, wrong prices or just sloppy command of the site’s language? I’m fairly certain you would be less likely to buy from them if you had a choice of purchasing somewhere else.

It’s not just grammer, but your overall presentation. I was watching a video on YouTube about just this subject and it brought up a great point about presentation. The example was about online retailers who all share the same generic item description, so if you’re shopping, you might see the same product on thousands of different sites with the same description, price and everything. At that point, what’s going to make your decision on who to buy from?

Don’t let a visitor’s decision to be narrowed down to the name or even color of your site! Let them see your site as the more professional. Chances are if you’re selling products online, you’re going to be selling something that is out there more than you can imagine, so the best way to stand out is to create a better experience. Besides, Google is aware of the massive amounts of duplicate content out there, so give them a reason to rank you higher than the rest of these sites. You wouldn’t believe how little changes to your site can affect your search engine rankings.

The same rules apply in the real world. I guarantee you’re more willing to buy a tv from Best Buy than you are from a van in the parking lot. Ok, that was an extreme example, but you get the point!

Put some time into your site. Your visitors will notice. Nobody said it was going to be easy to manage a site, but if you really want to bring yourself forward in a sea of millions, that’s the only way you can do it. At least initially. As time goes on, you’ll gain more power and leverage, allowing you to accomplish more with less.

What happens if a trademark becomes genericized?

· Brandon Hann

I was reading the article about Google™ getting denied on their trademark application for the name Nexus One. To quickly summarize the story, Google™ wanted to trademark the name Nexus Phone because of their new phone to be release, but apparently another company had already registered this name over a year ago.

The USPTO has denied the application and now we all await to see what happens. I don’t think Google™ will have any problems with this, but the whole story got me thinking about trademarks in general and the ensuing battles between stakeholders. More specifically, I started thinking about trademarks becoming genericized and what would happen to if Google™ simply became, google…

Genericizing is when the mainstream public starts using a trademark name as a generic word to describe a product or service. This usually happens by mistake, but it’s root cause stems from a company that has maybe done too great a job at marketing! Or maybe they just left a much larger impression on the public than previously expected.

Trademarks that can become genericized

To better define what I’m talking about, take the following list of brand names and ask yourself this question: Do I refer to every similar product by these names?

  • Kleenex® – The proper term for any facial tissue not made by Kleenex® is simply facial tissue.
  • Q-Tips® – Off brands are known as cotton swabs.
  • Xerox® – You didn’t make a “xerox” of something unless you did it on a Xerox® copy machine.
  • Adobe Photoshop® – People always attribute all photo editing as “photoshopping”, but this is incorrect. (Side note: I was reading an interesting page on Adobe’s own website outlining the proper usage of the term and all of their trademarks and it’s very specific.)
  • Band-Aid® – What else would you call it? That’s right, a bandage.
  • Blow Pop® – Not every sucker is one–just the ones made by Charms® which is now owned by Tootsie®.

I’m pretty sure you get the gist by now. So, what might happen if the brand name Google™ became a generic term for searching? If you really think about it, how many times a week do you tell someone to “google it” when they ask you something you don’t know? How many times a day even?!

I was watching an episode of the recently cancelled show, The Forgotten and in one of the scenes, they are searching Google™, but the logo was replaced with one of similar colors and simply titled ‘Web Search’. The rest of the page was google and it was clearly obvious. Ok fine, they didn’t want to pay for the use of the name, but…

In another scene, someone asks this woman how they got their information and she clearly says, “We googled it…” For anyone who knows anything about the trademarking process, you know that part of your responsibility as a trademark owner is to protect your brand and part of this protection is to ensure that it does not become a genericized term (as Adobe® outlines on their website above).

Trademarks that lost their trade value

To further clarify my point, here’s a list of some terms that were once valued trademarks:

  • Aspirin – Bayer® used to own this as one of their trademarks until it was declared generic.
  • Cellophane – Originally owned by DuPont®.
  • Dry ice – Believe it or not, the Dry Ice Corporation of America once owed this term!
  • Escalator – Once owned by the Otis Elevator Company.
  • Yo-Yo – Declared generic in 1965.
  • Laundromat – Once a proud brand, now a generic term for all coin-op laundry facilities.
  • Heroin – Another trademark taken from it’s original owner, Bayer®.

Whether these trademarks lost their “trade” value or not is open for debate, but what is clear is that each term has found it’s way into our very vocabulary. In fact, just looking at the list above, you may not have even known that these were once brand names.

All this talk about trademarks and losing them got me thinking about registering my own company name and logo for the sake of protection, but even then, nothing is guaranteed, right? At any rate, I bought a book on the subject and I must say, it has a wealth of information about all the ins and outs of trademarks and such. One of these days, I’ll actually get around to reading the step-by-step guide!

Ultimately, nobody can predict the future, but I ask again, what would the world be like if Google™ appeared in the dictionary without the capital G?

How to write perfect web page titles

· Brandon Hann

Ok, so perfect might be too strong of a word, but the point is that most people mistake the title of a particular web page to be the same as the main title of their site. Unless ALL of your web pages have exactly the same content on them, this is not the case.

I like to think of it like this. Let’s say you’re a book publisher called Ledfrog Publishing. You want to publish three books with these subjects: ‘making money online’, ‘how to play the game of soccer’ and ‘how to make a website’. Now you want to title them, so naturally you come up with “The Ultimate Guide to Making Money Online”, “Playing The Game of Fútbol” and “Create a Website in 10 Minutes”. These are all great titles because people would know exactly what they’re getting into just by looking at the cover. What you wouldn’t do is name them all “Ledfrog Publishing”, right?

If that came so naturally to you, then why are you making simple mistakes when naming your webpages?! I’m not yelling at you, but I am here to help! For the record, the reason people make these mistakes is because they think of their website as being one giant book and therefore, as long as they name the site correctly, every “page” within should follow a natural order.

Well this is true if everybody who came to your site stopped off at your homepage and then navigated through it page by page from there. However, I can almost bet that most of your traffic comes from a search engine and visitors likely found it by clicking on a keyword they searched for. What this means is that they landed at your site on some random “page in your book” and unless they click on something else, they are completely unaware of your site!

So instead of your site being a giant book, think of it as being the publisher and all the books are the web pages within. This will help you think of creative (and valuable) titles for each page.

I found a great guide online for creating titles and I wanted to summarize the process here. Remember that search engine optimization is extremely important to your site and it will dictate how much traffic you get.

What is a title?

Go to Google, do a search on anything you want and when you look at the results, you’ll see the blue titles that provide the text that’s closely related to your search. Try a few searches and even switch the keywords around a bit. You’ll notice that the results drastically change based on a few changes. This is because one site or another has written a title that better matches your search query. A title rests within the HTML code and is often overlooked by a web designer.

How do I write an effective title?

Read your page before you post it online. Read it twice if you have to. Start extracting keywords that summarize that page and write them down. You can even write down the most commonly used keywords. Once you have a nice list, start creating 60 character titles that match those keywords. Don’t just list them. As a helpful tool, search for high-ranking sites that have similar content and see how they’re naming their pages. You don’t want to copy them, but get an idea of the format.

Remember that you will be ranked for the words you use in your titles. If you start adding words like: about us, contact me, home, etc. you’re going to be ranked for those words first and not for the content of your site. This is another reason not to name every page the same as your site’s title.

Why do some sites consistantly rank high?

As with all other SEO tips, no one trick works alone. You need a combination of great titles, original content, good keywords, backlinks and regular updates to keep your site ranking high. As a result, some sites hit the nail on the head for more than one SEO category and that usually explains why they’re always at the top.

There’s really not much to it once you change your thought process on what a title’s function is and how it relates to your page. The goal is to show the usefulness of the page to Google and your visitors. The last tip I can give you is take a look at your titles and ask yourself if you would click on your own site if you saw it pop up on Google.

Day 1 – Signed up for first affiliate program

· Brandon Hann

March 2nd, 2010

This is technically not day 1 for the blog, but this is the first day that I started my project and it was a big day! I think at one point, I had about 15 tabs opened in Chrome!!

I want to start by saying of all the sites I’ve looked at in regards to free information to making money online, JohnChow.com seems to be the most honest. This is not to say that others are crooks, but John Chow appears to be in this industry for the freedom of it and not just the money plus he’s willing to help out anyone who needs it.

I’ll start listing the other sites that have been helping me out in this as soon as I get my links directory up. As I get further into this project, these daily reports will no doubt get more detailed, so stay tuned and follow me on Twitter or Facebook and the RSS feeds.

What I did today

I signed up for AzoogleAds today and expect my application to be approved (or not) within a couple of days. From what I gather, they seem to be the best affiliate network to start with. Previously, people were touting their referral payout system as being great, but I learned today that they have changed their payout from being a lifetime system to being only valid for 6 months.

I also made minor changes to the site including two subscribe links in the top right to allow visitors a choice between viewing RSS feeds in a reader or getting them by email. I then worked on some various SEO techniques on some of the older posts I had made.

The last thing I did today was setup an email newsletter account with Aweber. Newsletters is not all they do. This service is a monthly charge of $19.99 for the basic service, which is all I needed to begin with. Check out their website to see more details on what this service done, but basically it allows visitors to sign up on the site so you can send them newsletters, updates, free downloads, etc–email marketing.

Although I haven’t edited it completely, I did add a basic form on the sidebar for users to sign up for the newsletter. I plan to move this form up and make it fit in better.

That’s it for now.

Welcome – Read me first

· Brandon Hann

I know this post comes a little late considering I’ve already updated the site and have started posting my stuff, but I thought I’d create this welcome page for those of you who are new to the site and want to see what the future holds for it as well as how to get connected and stay connected.

This site was designed to be a personal blog for me, but over time, I get more and more requests to help people with building websites, finding/providing hosting for those sites and essentially just get people online. For anyone who knows about web design, marketing, promotion and maintenance, you understand how big of a job even the smallest of projects can be!

Some people don’t understand how it all works and comes together, so it’s hard for them to realize (and accept) the costs associated with such work. I’ll admit that even myself never understood how companies can charge thousands of dollars for search engine optimization when all the tools are right in front of you and they’re free! Well, after trying these tools out myself, I realized you’re not paying for the knowledge, you’re paying for the service.

And that’s what it comes down to–the service. So here’s what I’ve decided to do with my site.

I am going to focus primarily on helping others get online with their own ideas and business ventures for free! That’s right. You will learn everything from the basics to the more advanced. I will cover all aspects of creating your website, monetizing it, promoting it and most of all, maintaining it.

This site will be updated daily with relavent information that I have hand-written myself. Periodically, I will publish free ebooks that will consolidate content from the site into an organized fashion. I will attempt to provide bits of news articles that pertain to the subject matter and I will be active in responding to emails, comments and more.

All for free.

Why free you ask? Well, there’s reason to try and sell information that can already be gotten for free online, so what I want to do is give it all away. In turn, all I ask is that you help me promote the site! All you have to do is post links to my site wherever you feel they would fit in, send your Facebook friends over to my site, follow me on Twitter, sign up for my RSS feeds (what’s RSS? I’ll tell you here!) and/or join the mailing list.

The site is small right now, but is growing! I hope you enjoy what I have to offer!

Thanks,

Brandon
www.ledfrog.com