Your brand is a critical part of your business and the name is half the battle. More often than not brands do not put as much value on domain management as they should. Registering your domain might seem like a small detail in the bigger picture but often it can make all the difference. The same attention to detail should be invested in your domain as you would invest in storefront signage or selecting the right location for your business. The folks over at domainnamesales.com have come up with a rock solid infographic to help you avoid domain disasters like: poolife.com, therapistsfinder.com or IPallover.com.
The right choice of domain name will lower your lifetime marketing costs. Avoid cutting corners and taking the easy road. Ideally you should use short, descriptive, generic and easily identifiable adjectives when choosing your domain, and avoid the use of dashes, made-up terms, broken language or excessively long names. An example of the ideal domain is Diapers.com, a short domain that gets right to the point. The URL gets 106 million unique visitors, 50% of which found the domain using the search term “diapers”, which serves up diapers.com in number one spot on Google search engine.
Well, we can’t say we didn't see this one coming a mile away. After years of consumers and the general public gradually migrating their phone directory searches to online sources, and seeking out businesses using popular search engines such as google, the phone book companies are finally starting to roll back their services. Phonebooks are not what they used to be, and are going extinct much like us digital folks said they would years ago.
Yellow Media, the company behind Yellow Pages and other smaller phone books, have thrown in the towel for Canpages, the company they bought only recently for $225 million. Not only has Yellow media closed up shop with Canpages, but they have drastically reduced the number of phonebooks being printed, closed several offices and let go scores of employees. Instead, the company plans to shift the majority of their business online. This comes in conjunction with reports thier print advertising revenue is in free fall mode, tumbling 15% in the last quarter alone. Unfortunately, when looking at the situation with online revenue for Yellow Media, the gains from online advertising have not made up for losses in print.
This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, a valuable resource base for articles and information applicable to both new and established businesses.
This article can serve as a road map to help you get on the right track to starting your business and removing some of the stresses of entrepreneurship. Give it a read and let us know what you think.
An entrepreneur’s life can be a real roller coaster. Having started a few businesses in my career, I thought it would be useful to highlight some of the hard-won experience I’ve learned throughout the process—the kind of advice I wish I’d known when I started my first, or even second, business.
Social media is the biggest thing going right now when it comes to getting your business involved in online marketing. However, it seems that there is an increasingly large number of businesses and organizations who take the wrong approach to getting involved in the whirlwind.
Often, businesses big and small, will hire young employees to manage their social media presence based solely on the notion of that generations savvy relationship with things like Facebook and Twitter.
Unfortunately, this is often the worst thing a business can do, as those socially savvy hipsters use social media for hanging out with their friends and sharing, and not for the purpose of business. If you are going to use social media for your business, then social media should be about your business - and ROI (Return on Investment) should be a sizable consideration.
Like anyone dealing with a bad breakup can tell you, now that it is official, we can all move on with our lives.