Monthly Archives: September 2009

184 Million Internet Domain Names

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Verisign posted recently that there are 184 Million Internet domain names registered. The VeriSign article is here.

Of the 184 million domains 74.4 million are ccTLDs, which are country code specific such as .cn for China. Read the entire article at VeriSign’s site. VeriSign’s services are quite impressive, look at this statistics quote from their post:

VeriSign’s average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load during the second quarter increased from 38 billion to 49 billion per day

Looking to create your own portfolio? You can obtain a godaddy promo code here.

Customer Acquisition

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Customer acquisition online is thankfully a marriage of creative and metrics. You can track the performance of advertisements, messages, or any type of content online. Customer acquisition is a numbers game dealing with A/B testing, multivariate testing, correlations between advertisements and landing pages, and more. The process of optimizing customer acquisition has the following steps:

  • Implement online marketing campaigns
  • Optimize the advertisements
  • Create landing pages
  • Correlate a call to action of the landing page with the advertisement
  • Optimize your site and landing pages
  • Test advertisements with landing pages
  • Optimize for customer lifetime value

Find details of each step here on the customer acquisition and optimization post. Instead of cross-posting the entire content I will just point you there.

Community Sites

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godaddy_promo_codeOne of my favorite sites is FatWallet. They just seem to get it right. Their business model is great and the benefit to the user is excellent. Most importantly the company is motivated to make the customers happy. A customer will find great deals and cash back deals which in some cases provide a revenue stream for the company.

So instead of a site advertising things you may not want and making advertising revenue, this site appears to benefit when and only when you have benefited and are happy as most are affiliate deals or commission splits. FatWallet has been around for quite a while and is very popular.

I also believe they did a great job with their forums. As a business you could either build a staff and create editorial which may be considered somewhat biased by your audience or you can let the audience create the content. By allowing the deals to be found and discussed by their audience the benefit is twofold. First you do not have to utilize your staff and payroll to create content and secondly the visitors to the site will more than likely assume the content is less biased.

I do not mean to over simplify their site or service, they have many fantastic features. I, as a business owner, can appreciate the genius in aligning your goals with the goals of your customers so everyone benefits and have a good portion of content generated for free by your audience.

They have the best deals around, check them out.

Constant Optimization of PPC Campaigns

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Search engine marketing optimization is critical to obtain the best possible return on investment. There are many factors to consider when marketing via a search engines pay per click platform.

Many factors are within your control to test, analyze and optimize, while other factors are not. Whether your competitors bid on the same keywords, what price they are willing to pay, changes in customers search behavior, changes in industry terms or new features, and other factors may be out of your control. It is possible depending on how you set up your campaign that your daily spend can vary greatly. You may even lose all traffic and not obtain visitors on a particular given day due to factors beyond your control.

Not only do you need to test every possible variable such as the advertisements, time of day, geographic targeting, mobile devices, landing pages, keywords, and many more, but you need to constantly watch the campaigns closely to assure you are maximizing your return on investment.

I wrote about this topic more extensively here.

AdWords Bid Simulator

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Everyone loves to be able to predict the future. Now if you could only predict your future spending and whether or not additional spending would result in better results or not. Google AdWords is trying to assist you in doing just that. Here is their explanation of the simulator:






Bid Simulator takes some of the guess work out of cost per click (CPC) bidding by estimating the number of clicks or impressions you could have received if you had used a different maximum CPC bid.

From Google’s official blog here is the post related to the AdWords bidding simulator, see the tutorial here, and/or watch the video below:



Bid AdWords
A great way to bid adwords is to first be able to determine your potential best price for the ads. While this may not show your return on investment, if you already know the value of the words this will allow you to attempt to scale at the best price. Adwords bidding is an art, but with the simulator they have added a science element to this.

Typically you would have to change your bids, wait until they take effect and watch your spend change. This could take time and you would have to keep track of your changes to determine the optimum price. However with the bid adwords tool you can do this in real time without spending any money.

East Coast Startup Event Was Excellent

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Local Startup / Online Company Events
For the last year since returning to the east coast I have been attending local events. As I was looking or local startups and online companies in the Washington, DC, Maryland and Virginia area we started Beltway Startups to focus on those companies in this particular geographic area.

The events I found varied in format and attendance. This particular event, Startup Rockstars #6, allowed local online companies and startups present their ideas, current development, fully launched sites/services, and any in between stage to the audience. The event was started and can be found as a meetup and well attended. Here is a list of these local startups and I encourage you to find similar events in your area as it is always good to meet other entrepreneurs.

earth_aidEarth Aid – track and improve your consumption (electric, gas,water) in one place by importing, much like a financial site, your utility information. The information is imported for you and shown grahically, suggestions are also presented to assist you in conserving energy.
sec_watch
SEC Watch – bringing transparency to ~800,000 annual SEC Filings. In 2008 they indexed over 15 million pages. Instead of searching the governments site for data, try their search as it is real time and in some cases they have the data before others.
bands_in_townBandsInTown – allows you to discover live music and concerts in your area. You can also purchase tickets, and they scan all the various ticket sellers so you do not have to. You simply find the events in the area you happen to be in at the time, using their site or iphone app, and then with one click purchase tickets without having to visit the ticket selling sites.