The Ten Golden Rules of Online Marketing

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Monte: Hello everyone. This is Monte Cahn, your host of Domain Masters. Wow, what a busy week we had last week. We were at SES all week long and had a great show. The buzz in the air is definitely cooking. Everyone is talking about direct navigation, search, the introduction of MSN into the search market. Even AOL was there with their own booth with AOLSearch. I see the market really heating up. Last week we also announced the sale of ShoppingCart.com to MonsterCommerce, which is a great company; one of the top companies in SEO-friendly ecommerce solutions shopping cart solutions for web sites. So, if any of you are looking for a great cost-effective shopping cart solution, MonsterCommerce is definitely a great company. Their CEO, Stephanie Leffler, is definitely on top of the game in terms of everything that you need to know about search engine friendly shopping carts and flow in terms of purchase process and getting people to check out. We offer their products and services on Moniker.com on our web site. I am going to have Jay Berkowitz as my guest tonight. Jay used to do a lot of the top ten tips for domainers back when we first started the show, and he hasn't been on for a while. Since then, obviously, the domain market and the SEO market have changed quite a bit; and he has a lot of information that could be helpful for all of you who are listening about how to help your domains become more saleable, more valuable, how PR can help out with the increased value of your domain names. Just as an example from last week, the ShoppingCart.com sale; putting that message across the wire drove all kinds of business to us at Moniker.com and it can for you at your web sites and your businesses. There are some great techniques and great ways to do that. So, we're going to have him on. He's the head of tengoldenrules.com and he' also our marketing director as well. So, we get to get part of his time while he's a very busy guy. He was also the former director of marketing for EDIETS®, which is one of the most successful online diet sites. So, Jay will be on in a couple minutes. We're going to break for a couple commercial; pay some bills. We'll be right back in a couple minutes with Jay Berkowitz.

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Monte: Hello everyone. Welcome back to the show. Again, my guest tonight is Jay Berkowitz. He's the CEO and founder of tengoldenrules.com; and also the Chief Marketing Director for Moniker.com. I thought it would be a great idea to have him on the show. We've got some great tips on helping everyone increase the value of your domain names. Jay, welcome back to the show.

Jay: Thanks. Nice to be back.

Monte: Great. Just before we get rolling on some things that will be very helpful to everybody regarding their domain names and some of these new top 10 tips to make everybody successful, give us a little bit of a background on yourself and, basically, what you used to do, and how you got into this business, and what you've learned since you've become part of our organization and working with other clients. Then we can roll onto some of the great points that we are going to discuss tonight.

Jay: Sure. I started out working for advertising agencies; and I was lucky enough that my first account was McDonald's® Restaurant. I got to work on really cool brands, like McDonald's® and Coca-Cola®. Then I started getting more into technology stuff; and I worked with AT&T®. I then moved to CLIENTSIDE, and I worked for SPRINT® and I managed a group of 31 marketers at SPRINT®. At my next job, I managed a large courier company's web site and internet marketing and software marketing. I got into the internet about 1996, 1997 and I really made a conscious choice. I saw that as a future career opportunity and a future opportunity for all of us to really know as much or more than anyone else about internet marketing and the internet in general. So, I kept pushing my career in that direction. About 3-1/2, 4 years ago, I moved down to Florida to work for EDIETS®; and EDIETS® is the leader in the online diet and fitness space.

Monte: Now, are they still considered the leader?

Jay: Yeah. They're definitely the leader in diet and fitness.

Monte: Okay.

Jay: Just had a profitable quarter; their first one in a couple quarters. But, they do very well in terms of top line revenue. They seem to spend a little bit more money these days than they probably should.

Monte: Right. Now they spent a lot of money on online marketing, right?

Jay: Right. About $40 or $50 million and they're consistently in the top ten advertisers in online advertising. You know, if you're in the target market, which are women, probably 25-55 years old, you probably see a lot of their banners.

Monte: Yeah. Yeah. So, when you were with them, you lead up a lot of these campaigns?

Jay: Exactly. We did really a lot of work around online advertising and banner, and really being the dominant player on the major portals on MSN®, YAHOO!®, and AOL®. We wanted to own the spaces where the women were going, we wanted to own the diet and fitness space for sure, women's pages. So we were very, very aggressive in testing lots of different banner creative and then lots of different landing page creative. As people clicked on the banners, how effective can we be in converting them to either a trial or to sign up for a newsletter. The ongoing newsletter part of our business was very important as well; because for every sale we could get on day one, we were often able to get a sale in the future, because someone would sign up for the newsletter. Over time, they'd realize, “Oh, you know, this company really does know what they're talking about. They really do have doctors and fitness experts.” And over time, they might say, “Okay, it's my time. I'm going on a vacation” or “I couldn't fit into my summer pants” or “I want to wear a bikini this summer”; and that would be the demarcation point. They'd click on that newsletter and sign up later on if they didn't sign up when they first came to the site.

Monte: Right. Right. So, okay, from that EDIETS® experience, you got a lot of experience on starting your own business. So, tell us how you made that jump.

Jay: I was asked to do a presentation for the Direct Marketing Association, and I wanted to create a bit of a brand for myself. It was something I'd heard at a presentation that you really should create a brand for yourself in this day and age; because companies used to manage our careers for us, and we could work there for 30 or 40 years and get our gold watch. But, in this day and age, you should really create a brand for yourself and around yourself. Think of your resume like a brand and think of your training like you're developing your brand. So I started developing what I considered to be one of my best assets, which was the internet marketing that I had learned the hard way over the past 7 or 8 years. There were no books, there were no courses when I started out, probably a lot of us in this call started out. And I learned it the hard way through trial and experience. So I created the tengoldenrules.com web site and presentation to save a lot of other people the hard work that we'd all gone through through trial and error. And I gave the presentation at the DMA, and five or six people came up to me afterwards and said oh, that was really great. Will you do any consulting? I know you're probably really busy; but can you help us with email marketing or search engine marketing? I started talking to a couple companies and realized I could have my own business and have a little bit more freedom and be able to do what I really love, which is consulting and educating people.

Monte: Right. Right. And getting back to that brand, creating your own brand, and making yourself valuable versus working for a company for a long period of time. And nothing's to say that working for a company for a long period of time is a bad thing. I was in the corporate environment for 15 years before I started my own company and did this for a living; but, one of the key things that we always talk about and push is it's very important to create your brand and identity on the web by having a domain name, especially a domain name that either says what you do, or what you like to do, or concepts or an idea, or your last name, first name-last name, something, rather than using commercialized email services to communicate; because it is your address, it's your identity on the web. The more that you, let's say you're in a business like yourself, you want to promote yourself and your business around the domain name instead of advertising AOL®, or MSN®, or HOTMAIL®, or someone else. You want people to know you as you. So, that's a really important topic and subject that we can also talk about during this call; because it's something so basic, but so many people still use commercialized email to communicate even though they have their own business.

Jay: Yeah. And I'm totally with you. When you get an email from someone, one of the things that I say on my web site is I say “click here and I'll give you a free consultation, a free look at your web site from an internet marketing perspective.” And when I get an email in and it's JoeSchmoe@aol.com, I just immediately my mind doesn't take his business as seriously as if it's someone at [businessname].com. It's so easy to buy a domain and set up an email account. How much are email accounts on Moniker?

Monte: Oh, $2 a month or something. Inexpensive.

Jay: And it's easy to do.

Monte: Yeah. It's easy to do. You can have actually 10 email boxes and communicate; and at least have your email be something that's yourself or your identity. It's definitely something I highly recommend to everybody. Even if you don't have to go out and create a new one, use an existing domain name that you own and start using it as your email.

Jay: Yeah. And protect a whole bunch of stuff that you can think of; because I bought JayBerkowitz.com, Berkowitzs(plural).com if our family wanted to use it. You know, just grabbing different options like that and holding on to them, even if you don't activate them.

Monte: Right. I registered my kids' names so they have them. Of course, you know, our personal email is Cahn.net; I couldn't get the Cahn.com at all, but at least we got the Cahn.net. So we communicate from a personal standpoint. My wife uses the Cahn.net email address.

Jay: Certainly for business it's critical, if you want to look like you're a serious business.

Monte: Definitely. Definitely. So that's interesting. So, you started giving the feedback and the tips; and of course you came on the Moniker, I guess it's been, uh, well, we're going on a year.

Jay: We're coming on two years actually.

Monte: Are we?

Jay: Yeah.

Monte: Yeah, we are coming on two years. Geez, time flies. So, we're coming on two years. So getting into the domain market, because that's what a lot of people want to listen to, and also SEO because you've gotten into it heavily. A lot of stuff has come out into the market; and now that you have a little bit of a staff and they operate here out of the office, you have an SEO person, and you have somebody else that's good at content and knows programming. You do a lot of work for us and other clients. Give us a little bit of background about some of the things you've learned about just the domain industry in general, and then we can get into some of these new tips and ideas about how people can increase the value of their domains.

Jay: One of the first things about the domain industry is really true for all internet marketing. It's just changing so fast, that you have to stay on top of stuff. You've got to be out at the conferences, which Moniker is doing a great job of getting out to the conferences and participating, going to the sessions, having a great show booth and network. You probably learn more at the parties than you do at some of the sessions.

Monte: Yeah. The parties are actually great opportunities to network and get business; and being at both obviously covers yourself. But just for an example, at the SES Show just last week, ourselves, Moniker.com, MonsterCommerce, WebmasterRadio, INFOSEARCH MEDIA®, Text Links Ads, and PRWEB® all threw a big shindig on Wednesday when then was nothing else planned. It was like the day before the last day of the conference; and it was great. It was a great party and people had some fun and were dancing and playing music and drinking, and everybody got to do some business together. I know there was a lot of business done in the room, and people got to know each other a lot better.

Jay: Right. And maybe it would help if we listed off some of the shows that we like to go to. Certainly the SES (Search Engine Strategies), it's a JUPITERMEDIA® show; and I love that show. JUPITERMEDIA® does a really good job educationally. The trade show is great and all these trade shows are booming; but I really like the educational job that they do.

Monte: Yeah, yeah. They have quite a series of shows. They're international now. As a matter of fact, for those of you that are interested, JUPITERMEDIA® announced that they are going to do, I think it's going to be called SES Latino 2006. It's going to be located at the InterContinental Hotel in Miami in July. I think it's mid-July; I can get the dates for everybody if you're interested. If you go to the JUPITEREVENTS® web site, I think it's JupiterEvents.com, anyone that's interested in breaking into the Latin American market, it looks like it's going to be a really kick-ass show to be at; and it's going to be right here in our hometown. I mean, we're in Pompano Beach, about 30 minutes away; still it's in South Florida. So, finally, we don't have to travel somewhere for a big successful show like that.

Jay: That's great. And you've had a lot of success at WebmasterWorld. It's a bit more techie kind of show.

Monte: Yep. WebmasterWorld is also a great show. That happens two times a year; and it's a great way to pick up, I find it a lot more personable than JUPERMEDIA®. JUPERMEDIA® is a much bigger event, and it's not so much as people know each other as much. I mean people in the industry know each other, but a lot of people from just the general public attend to learn more about their web site development and stuff. They have an advance course, a novice course; they have 2 or 3 sessions going on at one time to basically try and satisfy everybody. WebmasterWorld obviously comes the WebmasterWorld.com web site, where it's an online formed community. People educate each other every day and learn about the web and things that work with each other and help each other out; so it's like as if everybody knows each other. It's a big, giant family; and everybody there gets together. That show has grown quite a bit; and it's a much different event. But, anyone that's interested in learning a lot more about SEO, search engine keyword strategies, domains, all that stuff, they have all kinds of different forum topics at WebmasterWorld.com. It's a great forum as well.

Jay: One of the, it's sort of the grand-daddy of internet marketing shows is a show called AD-TECH, if anyone wants to check that one out. It's like JUPITIERMEDIA®. It's a really big show, big trade show, just getting incredibly big again. A massive, huge show. That one's a little bit more skewed toward the publishers, the big advertisers, YAHOO!®, AOL®, MSN®. But it's also a very good educational show and a great networking show. A great trade show as well.

Monte: Yep. AD-TECH it's a good mix of brick and mortar advertising agencies and advertisers, and now a lot of the online community obviously is mixed in with the brick and mortar stuff. They're kind of merging together as well. We don't exhibit at that show yet; but we probably will next year. It's becoming a broad audience, people that are helping companies brand themselves on the web are looking for various ways and there's not too many registrars that have booths or attend that.

Jay: So, really staying on top of the leading edge stuff, getting out to the shows, participating in shows like this is awesome. Back to your original question, the domain name business just keeps changing; but there's a lot of things that stay the same, and we're going to run through. I always like to do things in 10's, so we're going to go through 10 tips that can help you stay on the leading edge with your domains and your domain marketing, and really build value in your domain name.

Monte: Right. Right. So, the first tip which we got full benefit of last week by the announcement, and we have been in the press a lot as a company; but, we wanted to use our own example. That was a good idea on your part, Jay, to suggest this; because when we announced the sale of ShoppingCart.com and properly mapped out the relevant keywords inside that press release, it was a huge success for us.

Jay: Yeah. It's really awesome. I'll take you through the steps that sort of go through our heads when we create what we call a web-optimized press release; and there's really two ways to create a story. One is, if you have a story, and this one really was a legitimate news story; the Excite@Home folks are selling off their domain portfolio. They selected Moniker as the exclusive agents for the portfolio, and Moniker was successful in selling one of those domain names, ShoppingCart.com, as Monte mentioned earlier. So, you take those elements together, you had a former internet jewel, the crown jewel of excited home. It was once the largest ISP in the world. More people had their email addresses at Home.net than any other ISP in the world at one time.

Monte: Right. It was 4 million customers at the time, and now we're talking about 1999, 2000. So definitely one of the largest ISP email companies in the world for sure.

Jay: And it was a real stock darling when they did their IPO and everyone thought it was going to be just fantastic. Then in 2001 they declared bankruptcy, and they haven't been able to decide what to do or agree what to do with all the assets between all the different bondholders and stakeholders. And they're finally coming to the conclusion and they agreed to sell the domain assets. So we had real hard news in that story, but we wanted to take it a step further. So, we did a lot of keyword research; and we optimized around some main keyword phrases for that release. We used a service called PRWEB®, and we focused on including those keyword phrases in the headline and throughout the article three or four times. We had a really incredible success with this release. It got very broad pickup. We got picked up in ZNet.com and San Francisco Chronicle.

Monte: Which is actually great timing now. Granted we timed this a little bit on purpose; so, people need to think through this if you're listening. Here we are, we're at a conference at SES in San Jose, right in the heart of Silicon Valley, one hour south of San Francisco; and we announce purposely position this particular domain name for sale, which is ShoppingCart.com and sell it to MonsterCommerce, who is also at the show. Also a sponsor of our party, also a leading company in the shopping cart space. It's been a project in the works between us and MonsterCommerce for over a year basically to try to get this thing positioned for sale at the right price and to be able to really spin this up and have it really hit the press hard. So, go on, Jay.

Jay: So, it's a combination of taking some news; and sometimes it doesn't need to be such hard news like this was, doing your keyword research and finding out what phrases people search most frequently, and then writing those phrases into the press release. We liked PRWEB®, who is a friend of WebmasterRadio and a friend of Moniker; but I recommend them to all my clients regardless. You can do a free press release on PRWEB®; but at a minimum, we recommend spending the $119 level. If you contribute $119 to support your release, you get out on GOOGLE® News and YAHOO!® News and you get the search engines right back to your web site immediately. By the way, it's also really effective to add the press release to your web site first, and direct the links to that press release so that people are actually coming to your web site to read the full content of the release.

Monte: Which actually results in possible driving business to your web site, because they come to your site, they're steered to your site, and they say oh, wow, what a great story. Then all of a sudden they're doing business on your site.

Jay: Exactly. I mentioned….

Monte: So give us an example of some of the phrases that you guys selected, or that we all selected, out for this particular press release. By the way, we actually bowed up and did a much broader press release for, I think it was, like the $300+ press release, correct?

Jay: Yeah. I'm just going to grab that link for everyone.

Monte: You know, something else that's important to note is PRWEB® services for those of you that are interested are offered at Moniker.com and they're discounted. If you go to Moniker.com and go to the “Promote Your Web Site” section of our web site, which is right off the front page, it's right on the link in one of the middle boxes, you can just get referred right from us to PRWEB®. There are some discount rates there for everybody. You save I believe 10% or something on all your press releases.

Jay: I just added the link to the Moniker release on the site for those of us who are on the chat. If you're not, go to Moniker.com; and the bottom right-hand corner of your screen, click on press releases and you'll see our press release. But we focused on the term internet domain name in the headline. We said “ HYPERLINK "http://moniker.com/pressreleases/moniker-pr-2005-08-10.jsp" Former Internet Crown Jewel Excite@Home To Sell Million Dollar Domain Name Assets”, and domain name is an obvious term for us to focus on. And we also focused in the sub-head “MonsterCommerce to purchase valuable internet domain name….” Adding internet domain name, the longer the term, the likely the more specific a search is that someone does, and the more effective it is. So, then we repeated those terms “internet domain name” and “domain name” throughout the press release.

Monte: Okay. Then so the result of that was not only great pick-up, but it also drove traffic.

Jay: And if you see on the page, those of you who are on that page, we've added a banner to that page. So, the banner that's being served right now is “10 Free Domain Management Tools” on my site and it's just a nice, polite suggestive sell; because if people are searching for an internet domain name and our press release comes up and they get to this page, we want to also remind them that we're all about doing some business here. Of course, press releases are really designed to get people to your web site and build your company's information and do some business.

Monte: Right. Right. So, again, just to recap that first point is that it's important that, by just putting a press release out, you really should be thinking more strategic when you put a press release out. You should use some keyword research, find out what the best searched words are so that you can put them in your press release, drive people to your web site by having the press release on your web site, and linking from the press release to your web site first, so that they come to your web site to read the press release. Then, you can offer special offers or other products and services or information that most likely people are going to read or you have the potential of having them click on or click through or spending money on your web site.

Jay: Perfect. Couldn't have said it better myself.

Monte: Okay. Great. So that's a really important point when driving people, or trying to drive more business using web-optimized press releases, search engine-optimized press releases. Okay, now talk to us about naming strategy and talking about keywords. Let's talk about the domain names and the keywords and the industry; and how you beat that game, or how you master that.

Jay: A couple different things that are going to help you are what we call naming strategies. The first one is if you can purchase the industry generic keyword domains for your industry, it's incredibly powerful. We just told the whole story about purchasing the domain name ShoppingCart.com. It's a very, very highly searched term; and a number of people, as most everyone in this call-in knows, don't use search engines. They just type in the name they're looking for or the category they're looking for. So, ShoppingCart.com will become very valuable for MonsterCommerce because they sell eCommerce shopping carts. So, if people type that in both in searches and directly into the URL, they're going to get a lot of great, great traffic. The domain Autos.com was one of the first major successes Moniker had in the domain sales business. As a matter of fact, it was the first $2 million name, right, Monte?

Monte: Right. We sold that domain name for $2.2 million back in 1999, at the end of 1999.

Jay: Exactly. And that's a great example of Autos.com just gives you the significance and importance of having that industry generic domain. It gets thousands and thousands of unique type-ins every day; and a domain name like that is only available once. So, if you can source the domain that defines or describes your industry and that domain name is a parking page right now, or isn't being used, or the company seems like they're stumbling a little bit, you may be able to grab that domain name and someone will build their brand around that domain name. So, it won't be available again. It's very rare that those types of domains come up for sale.

Monte: Yeah. That's true. Well, they do; they're being now purchased in large portfolio sales and at big, huge premiums.

Jay: And, you know, these types of names are going for millions of dollars. It's a great investment. You really to think about it as a long-term, strategic investment for your industry.

Monte: Right. And one of the things, I had Stephanie Leffler on Domain Masters last week while we were at SES to talk a little bit about their reasoning for purchasing ShoppingCart.com; and if you do a search in GOOGLE® or in OVERTURE® for shopping cart, look who shows up in the top 3 or 4 position. It's MonsterCommerce. So they're spending a fortune every month buying the keyword of shopping cart, shopping carts, the different variations as keywords. Now they're going to get all that natural type-in traffic; and I believe that name generated tens of thousands of unique visitors every month. Obviously people are typing that domain name in because of direct navigation value and because people think they're going to a shopping cart site to buy shopping carts. They're certainly not going there to look at a shopping cart, the kind of shopping cart you push around a grocery store. So, even though they paid $285,000 for this domain name, they spend thousands and thousands of dollars every month buying this keyword; and now they own not only the keywords that they buy through OVERTURE® and GOOGLE®, but they also own the domain name, so they get all the benefit of the natural type-in direct navigation traffic as a result. So they were easily justifying it. And I believe the shopping cart keyword term has been going for about $4.50 or $5 per click.

Jay: Over $5.

Monte: Yeah. Over $5. So, imagine how much money they're spending, you know, not even converting. You know, how many people convert. I don't know the ratios from them yet; but it was not easy for them to pay up that much money for the domain name, but they justified it.

Jay: The other thing that's really significant is you mentioned that the natural results on the left-hand side of the GOOGLE® search or a search in the other search engines as opposed to the paid or sponsored links on the right-hand side, well 72% of consumers prefer to click on the left-hand side result. Fifty-five percent of consumers know the difference between the paid and unpaid, but 72% overall, some of them don't know why they like the left ones better. They just know they like them. So, having the domain that shows up on the left-hand side and having the domain name that's in the search is a significant portion of the GOOGLE® results that come back.

Monte: Huh. Where do those stats come from?

Jay: I forget exactly who did the study, but it was a major study that came out in the fall of last year.

Monte: Yeah. I mean I certainly believe that, because I've heard those stats before.

Jay: Really significant and widely quoted that it's so.

Monte: Right.

Jay: I've quoted it so many times now, it's my own.

Monte: You've turned it into the Jay Berkowitz study. [Laughing]

Jay: But it's very widely accepted in the industry that that's the type of numbers; and we all know it to be true. The left-hand side certainly eclipses the paid or sponsored links on the right-hand side.

Monte: Alright. So just to recap the second point. Definitely create domain names that are keyword based to take advantage of the natural type-in traffic; so that, if you're buying keywords for your business or for your web site, also try to get the actual domain names with those keywords in it so you get the advantage of the natural type-in traffic. Lot's of times, a matter of fact, 67% of the time people end up at a web site through direct navigation versus search engine. Now a lot more search engines are done, and this is a study that was done by WebSite Story; I've quoted this before, and people can't believe it. But, if you think how many times you're in a search engine and you see the 20 results and sometimes you just bail out on the search. You don't even, you sometimes don't even click through, or you click through but never get to the web site you really want to go to. A lot of people see that it's a domain-based web site, and they just go ahead and type the domain name in the URL line and they end up getting there much more than 50% of the time through direct navigation versus being on a search engine. And so, this was an actual study by WebSite Story, who was actually at SES; and they confirmed that study with me again. This was off of statistics based off of 2004 numbers. I'm sure it hasn't changed that much in 2005; and I don't know if they've updated it yet. But, it's important to buy the keywords and the keyword domain names so that you are getting at least the natural type-in traffic and the direct navigation traffic to your web site. Think international.

Jay: Think international is our sort of third tip to build value in your domains; and there's some really awesome stuff coming up in international country codes and extensions in terms of some of the biggest ones. .de. There's over 8 million extensions out there who have the German, 8 million domains that have the German extension; and the second one is .uk.

Monte: It's .co.uk.

Jay: .co.uk. .it is huge. .us is big as well. It's over a million. You've got to think about protecting your domain internationally, both from people who might sort of try and poach on some of your traffic or present themselves as you; and as well, hopefully to expand if you're not international today. Hopefully you will be one day. You want to secure your domains beyond your borders, and there's some really exciting stuff coming up. I think .eu is going to be really significant representing European Union; and Monte, you can probably expand on that a little bit.

Monte: Yeah. The .eu offering will be due out very soon. The land rush trademark protection process of Moniker.com will be offering .eu extensions and .eu obviously stands for the European Union. It's going to, as Europe in some ways is coming together, you know, with the Euro and kind of globalizing themselves as one big community, at the same time they are also dividing themselves a little bit between France and Great Britain. They're trying to separate themselves from the European Union in some of the way; but one thing that is coming together is the .eu extension and there's going to be a lot of people registering those domain names to take advantage of a couple things. One, the land rush and be able to secure top-level domain names in that .eu extension; but two, to cover their businesses and their international identities to make sure that they are covered broadly and globally for their domain names. So, as Jay mentioned, .de now is the second most registered extension in the entire world. Most people don't know that, but there's over 5 or 6, I think we're approaching 6 million .de extensions, which has bypassed .net, which of course has been around longer than .de has. So, the Germans are definitely capitalizing on the .de extension; and it's a very popular extension. If you go to DNJournal.com, you'll see that a lot of .de names are selling for lots of money as well because of its popularity.

Jay: Is that just because the German market is booming and it's a sole sort of destination in that area, right?

Monte: Yeah. And to be quite honest, a lot of European countries, a lot of countries in general, but particularly in Europe and I would say Canada, and you're Canadian, people are more attracted to promoting localized or country versus outside the country. So one in Germany actually may type in a .de extension before they type in a .com. So, even though .com is global international commerce, and it was established a long time ago, most people think of it as a United States-created commerce extension, which really most United States commerce cites reside on .com web sites. So, if you're in Germany and you're living in Germany, regardless of whether you're looking for something local or not, your natural type-in domain name would probably end up in a .de extension; and I'm seeing that as a trend in Canada as well.

Jay: Well, that's number 3. Thinking international.

Monte: Thinking international. Now, how do we cover the basic of SEO when it comes to domain names?

Jay: There's a term I've been using for the last couple years which is sort of replacing location, location, location as one of the most important terms in marketing, and that's search, search, and search. The natural search engine optimization. We talked about the left-hand side results; the right-hand side, which is the sponsored links, the pay-per-click; and there's sort of a second layer of search, which is the feeds, the sort of mid-level search. And it's really only available in YAHOO!®, and it's less important today. But the real opportunity is the free traffic; and like we talked about before, the 72% of people who prefer to click on the left-hand side. So, there's sort of three-core basics of search engine optimization that are going to help you get ranked and get in those first 3 or 4 pages of GOOGLE® on the other search engines. About 55% of all searches are done on GOOGLE® today, so I use GOOGLE® to refer to the search engines; but I'm really referring in most cases to all of the different search engines. YAHOO!® and MSN® and AOL® make up about 40%, so the big 4 make up between 90% and 95% of all searches. So, one of the most important things you can do is have a strong link-building strategy. You want to get lots of other sites to link to your site, and the preferred position is that they link to your site and you don't have to link to them. It's not a bad place to trade them a link or what's called the reciprocal link. You say to someone who's not a direct competitor but may be someone in your industry, would you mind putting a link on your site, I've already put a link on my site to your site. Would you give me a link back to my site? The reason it's so important is because GOOGLE® and the other search engines evaluate how many webmasters throughout the world are linking to your site, because they're only sending out automated spiders. There's not a human being looking at the sites anymore like they did in the old days on Demoz and YAHOO!®. It's a totally automated system, and the spiders are going out from link to link to link to link throughout the world of the internet; and as they go from link to link to link, they measure how many times other sites link to your site. The more links you have, the more value or importance they rank your site as having. If someone searches for a keyword phrase, like….

Monte: It validates, it's Google's way of validating the fact that your site is legitimate, popular, a wealth of knowledge or a valid place to do business, because there are other people verifying you by linking to you.

Jay: Exactly. So, when people search for terms like domain name and internet domain name, GOOGLE® looks at its calculations they've done and says who has the most sites linking to their site? And fortunately, Moniker is very, very highly ranked. Something called Google Page Rank, which GOOGLE® ranks how many links you have to your site. So the first tip in the basics of SEO is getting lots of links to your site. I'll tell one other interesting story. I met a gentleman who bought the domain four years ago, Hubcaps.com. He paid a lot for it, and he had sort of like a wrecking yard. He's now doing $4 million a year in hubcaps, all different shapes and sizes; and he's the CEO of the company, but he said he spends 2 days a week personally building links to his site. And that's been his single biggest success, not only in his search engine results, but also if you get links to your site from other highly-ranked sites, people are going to click on those links and come to your site. He'll go out and he'll spend a whole day working on maybe like leather auto accessories and finding all the other sites that do steering wheel covers and seats. He'll spend a whole day on leather; and anyone who does anything in automobile leather, he'll say you do automobile. Would you put a link to my site, because your customers might want hubcaps; and he gets thousands, and thousands, and thousands of unique visitors who come in through the search engine and through the links.

Monte: That's a great strategy to spend a day or two a week to do that, and look at the money he's making doing that.

Jay: So, link building is really critical; and it's either the most important thing in GOOGLE® or it's the second most important; because there's a phrase you hear over and over again at these trade shows, internet marketing and search engine shows, which is “content is king.” What they mean by content is words on the page. GOOGLE® is not very good at reading pictures unless you put a name or an alt-tag to the picture. For the most part you need words in traditional, straightforward html that their search engine spiders can read. When someone does a search for a term like internet domain name, you have to have the term internet domain name on your page in readable text.

Monte: So that it can find it.

Jay: Exactly. And what it does is, it goes to its directory and it says okay, which site has the term internet domain name on its site the most times and which page has the term internet domain name on its page the most times? That's why I said in our press release example earlier, we include a phrase like that three or four times if that's the phrase we're targeting. Three or four times throughout the page, in the title of the page, in the title of the article, in the first paragraph in the body of the article, and in the final paragraph of the article. And the search engine then says, okay, if someone wants a site about internet domain names and a page about internet domain names, here's one; and oh, by the way, they reward you for having new information on your site. So having a press release and having a new page, GOOGLE® will reward you even further for having that information.

Monte: That's great. That's a very good point and just a couple basic things that people should still concentrate on.

Jay: And the final one is just adding great meta-tags; and your meta-tags are the title and description in keywords tags that tells GOOGLE® and the other search engines what that page is all about. There's some buzz in the industry that goes back and forth; and people say that meta-tags aren't important anymore. And they're certainly not as important as they were. There was a day that you could put anything in your meta-tags and you could pop up in the search engines. And that was a day 2 or 3 years ago when not very many sites were optimized; and a lot of people were sort of tricking the search engines that way. But clearly the title tag and the description tag and the keywords tag is still very important today. We did some work with a web site that had a good page rank, but they were nowhere to be found on GOOGLE®. We just changed their meta-tags, and within two weeks they had first-page results on a number of their main terms just by changing their meta-tags. So, it's still very, very important. If you want to see your site's meta-tags, you can go to a web site and click on view at the top in your browser, and then click on source. Or another way to do it is just hold your mouse over a web page, right click, click on view, and source, and you're able to have a look at the meta-tags, the title and description meta-tags, and ignore all the dashes and all the other html code; and there it is in English. It will say title and it will say what your title tag is. By the way, if your title is welcome or your title is the name of your company, I would highly recommend talking with a search engine company and optimizing those tags.

Monte: Yeah. Definitely. Now, something else we touched on before that now comes up again is the protection of domain names; and this is not the same as internationalizing your domain names, but this is protecting your domain names. So describe the protecting your domain names philosophy.

Jay: Well, there's a couple thoughts under protecting your domain name. The first one is you really want to make sure you purchase common misspellings and typos of your domain name. You want to protect yourself from somebody else being able to grab the common things that people might spell, either if your name is spelled phonetically, which is people just spell it out the way it sounds and it's not really the way the domain you own, or if people commonly misunderstand how to type it, or if there's common typos, common letters they reverse, and things like that. Some domainers out there are making thousands and thousands of dollars capitalizing on other people's misspelling and typo traffic.

Monte: Right. So, one of the things that everybody needs to be conscious of, which is simple basic stuff but, every time I speak on a panel or I'm speaking to people at our booth, the misspellings, the plural, singular versions, the different extensions; and there's a lot of new extensions coming out guys. There's, besides the main extensions that you see out on the market today, which is .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz; then you have the popular country codes that we just discussed, which is .de, .co.uk, .us, and depending on where else you do business on the internet, .cn is going to be reviving soon quite a bit. ICAN has just approved .travel, .jobs, which are considered STLDs, they also approved .xxx for the adult industry. So, if you're in any one of those spaces, you're going to want to cover yourself in those extensions. Then there's .mobi, which is going to be for the mobile phone and device market and PDA market; and there are several others on the slate to come. There has been in existence .name, .pro, .aero, .museum, again which have various uses but not as popular, obviously. But, if you're doing business on the web, if you've got your brand and it's been popular, if you're going to be in it for the long haul, spend the extra $10 or whatever it is to get your domain name. At Moniker we'll give you a great pricing of $7 or $8 a domain name and you can just cover yourself. It's worth the expense annually to cover yourself on all these other extensions. The STLDs are going to be a lot more expensive; but, still, if you're going to be along for the long haul, you definitely want to cover yourself.

Jay: Okay. Great.

Monte: Test. Test. Test. What do you mean by test, test, test?

Jay: Well, great marketers are constantly testing. You want to test different ways to optimize your domain revenue. If you're running an eCommerce site, obviously you want to be testing different landing pages. You know, if you're buying pay-per-click, you just don't land people on your home page. You want to test different designs, different ads, different conversion funnels. Once people decide to come on and make a purchase, you want to optimize that purchase funnel as they're going through it. It's something we're working on yet again with Moniker right now. Making it easier, making it more seamless for people to make a purchase. As soon as they get bogged down or confused, there's a good chance that you'll lose them.

Monte: Right.

Jay: And understand your best performer. What's your best performing banner or your best performing keyword. You're constantly trying to beat it. Beat your best. Test. Test. Test.

Monte: Right. And, you know, we just did a whole new web site, as most of you know, and we're getting a lot of feedback and comments from our customers. Most people like it; but it can be a lot easier. So, we're going to go Friday, I think, Jay, we're all having a meeting; and we're going to redesign some of the flow process to make it even easier and get people to a two-step process to purchase a domain name instead of several steps, just to make it easier and have higher conversion rates and have a better customer experience. So, it's important to do that.

Jay: And do lots of testing. Like in some cases, a two-step process isn't better than a three-step process or the four-step. You want to verify it and validate your new design with testing. Send half the traffic to your old design, half your traffic to the new design. At the end of a couple weeks you'll have a pretty clear indication which one's the winner.

Monte: Okay. The next thing is create a UVP, a Unique Value Proposition. We spoke about this before, but it's becoming more and more important. Bringing somebody to your web site by offering something free or unique or something that attracts eyeballs.

Jay: You know this strategy is all about getting permission to remarket to people. As a matter of fact, Monte and I are going to see a presentation tomorrow night by a world renowned internet expert named Jerry Shereshewsky; and he's writing a new book. He's from YAHOO!® and his book is called Getting to Maybe. What his philosophy is all about is that the internet is very different from selling and the philosophy of traditional retail. You know, when you get someone in a car dealership, they want to sit you down and get your pen out and get you to purchase a car. They don't want to let you go.

Monte: Right.

Jay: But the internet is very different. We're not as trusting of web sites; well, we're not that trusting of car dealers either, but that's another show, I think. You really want to just give them enough information for free, give them something of value for free that they're going to say, okay, this company's legitimate. I trust them a little bit. Maybe I'll give them my email address and find out what other special offers or promotions they have; or maybe I'll subscribe to their newsletters or join a sweepstakes. You know, it's not getting the sale today; it's about getting a maybe. Creating this unique value proposition to build this business relationship with the customer. Building the person's trust over time. I talked about the EDIETS® example earlier. Half the sales EDIETS® get, they get from their newsletter and from their permission marketing they do with people. You know, they would be half the business they are today if they didn't have that remarketing platform. So, get the people on your site and get permission to email them, send them offers and newsletters down the road.

Monte: Right. And we're going to have kind of a domain evaluator product. We're going to have a kick-ass looking Who Is readout now, that's going to give some statistics about the domain name and some page rank, and some [inaudible] ranking information and some link popularity information from MarketLeap and work with those guys on having a really unique Who Is readout that is valuable to people as well, that will bring people to our web site.

Jay: So, we're building a UVP at Moniker that will say, if you search for a domain name, we're going to give you more value about that domain name than is it just available or not. We're going to tell you how much traffic it might get and how much value that domain name will have.

Monte: Right. So that will be a unique value proposition for us.

Jay: Tip number 8 is that a home page is not a landing page; and what that tip is all about is, as I mentioned earlier, when you're buying pay-per-click traffic or buying banner traffic, you don't want to just send people to your home page, you want to come up with a landing page that's very specific to what they're looking for. For example, Moniker also offers hosting, or they offer domain names for sale. They don't want to just put people into their generic home page, they want to put them specifically to the page about domains for sale, domains to buy, or domain appraisals. Put people specifically to the landing page that answers what it is they're looking for.

Monte: Right. So definitely have a landing page set up to convert that customer to what you're trying to accomplish; because the home page doesn't do it.

Jay: And our next suggestion, number 9, is about learning how to monetize your domain. I know you've spent a lot of time on that on this show, but there's a lot of things you can do with domain names, and Moniker can help you. Moniker has a partner web site called TrafficClub.com that can, if you're not using your domain for its intended application, you should either put that page as a parking page or for sale page, or do a TrafficClub pay-per-click page so you're making revenue on any traffic that comes to that domain name until it gets its intended use.

Monte: Right. And that does a couple things, Jay. Like the points we're going through are to increase the value of your domain name. Having a stagnant domain name that just gets natural type-in traffic does not get sold for as much as having one that actually monetizes. The key metric today for those that are buying domain names on the open market is anywhere from, on the low end now, is 5 times annual revenue and, on the high end, an upwards of 10 times the annual revenue. So, the more money you make on an annual basis, the more valuable that domain name becomes. Now I'm not talking about a web site annual revenue, unless somebody is buying your business. I'm talking about natural type-in traffic that monetizes through advertising links set up specifically based off the keyword that somebody is typing in. So, if you're typing in Autos.com, now you actually go to CarsDirect; but if you go to another web site and you type in something that is auto related, and you have auto-related links down in the page from a PPC landing page solution, such as TrafficClub.com and somebody clicks on those links, you're going to get paid. As that money accumulates and you have that record of accumulating dollars based off of natural type-in traffic, not only does the page start to get indexed, it starts to become cash, people start coming to those particular pages as reference points or as portals and the traffic ends up increasing quite a bit, the conversions end up increasing, and you end up making more money as a result. So, do not let your domain name sit stagnant. If anyone wants to be able to start making money on their domain names and their traffic, go to TrafficClub.com and sign up for an account. We'll take special care of you there. It uses several PPC engines inside that solution, such as DomainSponsor, and FABULOUS™ and OVERTURE® and GOOGLE® and SearchBox, and many others; and it compares the best PPC solution on a domain-by-domain basis and ends up making you more money than if you had it all in one solution. So, it's a really killer system and it's working very well. It's starting to even optimize names better today than it did in the beginning.

Jay: And it's available at TrafficClub.com or the customer service team at Moniker is great. They can walk you through how to set it up and how to optimize your domains. I did it with a number of domains that I had sitting stagnant, and I'm making money until I figure out what I'm going to do with those big boys.

Monte: Right. And if you look at it in very simple return on investment terms, as long as you make your money back to pay for your renewal the next year, then it pays for itself. It's just like renting a house and using the revenues of the house to pay your mortgage payments. If it does that, then you have an appreciation value that takes place in the domain name, and the domain name becomes more valuable. The longer the domain name has a creation date, the more valuable it is now to GOOGLE® and the search engines. So, if you have a creation date that is 5 years ago and it's been in existence for 5 years, it's a lot more valuable than a newly-registered domain name according to GOOGLE® now. So you want to keep those domain names going, active, don't let them delete, keep them going.

Jay: And we have one final tip, number 10, on how to make your domains more valuable; and that's to capitalize the revenue opportunities from the traffic you get to your domain name. So, you can run banners on your site or other companies'; and it's really easy to set up a GOOGLE® AdSense account or your own GOOGLE® AdWords account and show actual GOOGLE® ads that are triggered off the content on your page, and you split the revenue every time someone clicks on that ad with GOOGLE®. So you can make a lot of money from banners for either selling per impression, per click, or per sale; and it's really simple to set up your GOOGLE® AdSense account. As a matter of fact, we've just started doing that on tengoldenrules.com to try and make a little bit of revenue off some of our article pages and stuff like that.

Monte: Right. So, this is a good opportunity for people that already have web sites that are already having some traffic there and you can supplement your income and fill some space also with some relative links and keywords now. Sometimes you have a problem with GOOGLE® and how those match up to the keyword, but in most cases it maps out pretty good. There's other options out there together. Knoodle does a very good job at contextual advertising and there's a lot of other companies out here. OVERTURE® has an AdSense-like project under the works which is through YAHOO! search. So, they're going to be competing pretty good with that and so is MICROSOFT® and the MSN® network. And there's a lot of the sub-feeds, which are MyGeek, GenieKnows, and a bunch of those that are starting to come into the market pretty heavy as well, and ValueClick, and so on.

Jay: There's an educational site. They use the GOOGLE® ads on their site, and they are able to cut their cost of their own acquisition in half by running the GOOGLE® ads on their site. So, essentially half the people who come to their site click off and go to another site; but they've tested it with and without; and it's much more profitable for them to give up some of that traffic and make some money on half of those clicks.

Monte: Right. Well that's great. So, those are some tips we've covered in the past, but in a little bit more detail now that we've had some time to work with these things and they are becoming quite successful. I think what we'll do, Jay, is continue to work on the new opportunities we see in the market. I just did mention some information about what some of the search engines are looking at these days. People have been asking by the way about privacy and domain names and whether that affects GOOGLE® page rank. The answer is absolute no, it does not. GOOGLE® and YAHOO!® have publicly announced at the WebmasterWorld forum that having a privacy protection on your domain name does not hurt you in any way; however, new creation dates are definitely being looked at, changes of ownership are being looked at as well, but as long as the creation date is staying the same, it seems to be working out pretty well. We're also offering a TF service, a transfer fulfillment service on our site where one can go and put in a backorder on a domain name that's either scheduled to be deleted or has not yet been deleted and you can grab the domain name before it actually deletes now after 36 days after the expiration date. What that does is it actually, instead of the domain name being deleted and you grabbing it as one of the first one's to register a domain name, you're able to keep the previous creation date of that domain name. Therefore, you don't lose that advantage. So, if a domain name is from 1999 or 2000 or 2001 or even older, it's very, very valuable; because it was established a long time ago. You may want to do that; so you can go to Moniker.com and put in backorders for those types of domain names now. We pull from NetworkSolutions' database, which is the largest deleted database in the world, since they lose more names than anybody. More people are letting their names go out of NSI than anywhere else, so there's still millions of domain names that are being deleted every year, and we grab those before they're being deleted through Moniker, and we pull from BulkRegister and ItsYourDomain, and all the registrars that are actually losing business rather than gaining business. So, it's a big advantage to market that.

Jay: That's cool.

Monte: So, with that, we're running a little bit late. So, Jay, I want to thank you again for being on the show and I thought it was a long time due. If anybody else wants to learn about tengoldenrules.com, please go to Jay's web site and you can learn a little bit about his online marketing initiatives and he'll be happy to give you some help and assistance. Jay's been a great help to Moniker.com since he's joined us, and I'm sure he'd be willing to offer any kind of advice and help out anybody on their projects as well.

Jay: Yeah. And the best one is the first one's free.

Monte: And the first one's free. Like getting your free consultation at the gynecologist.

Jay: [Laughing]

Monte: Alright, Jay. Well thanks a lot for being on the show.

Jay: Thanks, Monte. See you tomorrow.

Monte: Appreciate it. Okay, take care.

Jay: Bye everyone.

Monte: Alright, before we wrap up guys and folks, just to give you a little bit of a heads up for next week, we have it looks like finally the .xxx ICM Registry is going to be allowed to talk about the .xxx extension. We're going to have them on next week; so that should be exciting. We're going to get into basically what this extension is going to look like, who is going to be allowed to register it, how you're going to protect your trademarks, the costs, the general details of that extension, and the time frames. And we're also going to have Chris McMichael on the phone who is the CEO and founder of Military.com, which was just acquired by MonsterCommerce. And we should have a pretty exciting announcement next week as well regarding the AtHome Liquidating Trust portfolio of domain names; and so I'm sure everybody will see and read about that in the search engine-optimized press releases that we're going to be putting out regarding that announcement, that will hopefully take place later this week or next. With that said, I wish everybody a good day and a good night; and be the master of your domain name. I'll see you next week on the show, same time, same place. Take care.

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