Keeping their attention is even harder.

I frequently counsel clients on their online business strategies. Over the years, I find myself giving some of the same advice over and over. As a helpful tool, I’ve put this advice into a checklist. Some of these may be appropriate for your business, some may not:

• Monitor how your visitors use your website and be prepared to change the website based on user behavior. You don’t need to invest in technology for this. Google Analytics is a powerful and free tool. Analytics will tell you quickly what’s working and what isn’t.
• When pitching new clients or dealing with current clients, always be able to show them hard numbers demonstrating what they will save by working with you and, more importantly, what they will earn.
• Invest at least one hour per day in promoting your website.
• Market your site aggressively, but DO NOT SPAM. Sometimes this can be a thin line. Make sure you don’t cross it.
• Technology changes on a daily basis- stay on top of the latest innovations and use them to stay ahead of the competition.
• There are certain words with a proven record of getting people’s attention on the web. The most important ones are “Free” and “New.”
• Identify what distinguishes you as a leader in your field and then plaster it on your sales materials.
• Stickiness is the key to visitor retention. Engage your visitors with discussion forums, message boards, guest books, polls and surveys.
• Guest books are a tremendous way of gathering testimonials.
• Everybody loves freebies! Give your visitors free online tools, e-cards, white papers and advice (without the hard sell).
• Never stand still! Always innovate, change and update. Give visitors a reason to come back again and again.
• Video is the fastest growing platform on the web. Use it to your advantage! Use video on your site to promote your business and for customer service (demos).
• Use clear messaging to convince visitors why it is in their best interest to keep coming back to your site.
• Understand that customers rarely buy on the first visit.
• Research your competition continually. What are they doing on their websites? Where are they advertising? How are they using social media?
• When it comes to navigation, offer your visitors a choice: drop downs, bottom links, list, search, etc.
• Sweepstakes, contests and scavenger hunts are proven ways of building traffic. For scavenger hunts, have visitors hunt for a word, a phrase or an item on your site and give visitors an excellent chance of winning (once again, choose prizes that make economic sense for your business). Hold these contests on a regular basis (monthly for example), and make sure they begin and end on the same days and times.
• Make visitors to your site as comfortable as visitors to your home. Give them every opportunity to personalize the site to their needs and tastes.
• If you want to use surveys as a marketing research tool, then make sure you give your visitors something of value in return (without breaking the bank!).
• Communication on the web is a two-way street. Don’t just hit customers over the head with a hard sell. Offer advice to your visitors about specific products and services. Give them clear cut answers without telling them outright to call you.
• Remember- thanks to the Internet, every business is open 365 days a year, 24 hours per day. If you are not prepared to work and compete every minute, then you shouldn’t be in business!

Obviously, this list is not exhaustive. Nevertheless, it should give you plenty of food for thought. If you wish to discuss any or all of these items, or if you just want to discuss your online business strategy, please give us a call at 212.260.1978.

Registering and buying a domain name or multiple domain names is a remarkably simple and relatively inexpensive process. While some corporations have registered thousands of domain names, many companies get by with a single domain name or just a handful of domain names.

At this stage you have already selected the primary domain name for your company. If you haven’t as yet or are in the process, we suggest you read this tutorial on selecting your company’s domain name in our Business Learning Center.

Who should I register with?

There are many legitimate companies where you can register your domain name. These companies, which also often provide web hosting services, organize your domain names and add a variety of services along with providing the names and hosting. Companies that have registered over one million names include GoDaddy, Network Solutions and ENOM.

The procedures on each site vary slightly, but all have the same essential elements. Pricing can vary, but it rarely costs more than $20 per year, per domain name.

Domain Name Availability

When you go to these sites, they will first ask you to type in the domain name you hope to register. The search for your domain name will reveal if it is already registered by someone else and what other domain name suffixes (.com, .net, .org, etc.) are available for the name you’ve chosen.

If the domain name you seek to register is a name you’ve trademarked and someone else already has it, you can use the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) to get the name transferred back to you.

Example: Search for jimsdrugstore.com and jimsdrugstore.net

This indicates that both names are available

Suggested Additional Domain Names:

To protect their brands, companies frequently purchase multiple domain names. This generally comes under several categories:

• Multiple “suffixes”
• Trademarks and product lines
• Common misspellings (i.e. foofle.com, which redirects to google.com)

Multiple Suffixes: Many businesses choose to register their core domain names with multiple common suffixes, including .net, .org, .info, and .tv. This prevents competitors and squatters from creating confusion. When you own multiple domain names, your web host can “point” all of the names to your central site, so that they all end up in the same place.

Trademarks and Product Lines: Again, to protect your business from confusion, it is important to own the domain names for trademarked products and services and for product lines. For example, The Coca-Cola Company owns many domain names including coke.com, coca-cola.com, dietcoke.com, and cokezero.com.

Common Misspellings: Another group of individual domain names you might consider purchasing are common misspellings of your domain name. In that way, if someone types the misspelled name they still end up on your site. McDonalds failed to take this precaution. If you use the misspelled macdonalds.com, you go to a pure advertising site. Over 55% of the macdonalds.com visitors end up going to mcdonalds.com with their next click.

Another advantage of registering multiple domain names is that most companies will offer significant discounts for each additional domain name registered.

Purchase Options

Domain sellers give you the option of purchasing the name for one year or multiple years. The multiple-year purchases are invariably offered at a discount. Your choice must be based on your budget and the plans for your business. Many start-ups choose to purchase for one year because they don’t know if they will still be in business for a year or they want to preserve every possible penny for other investments (staffing, marketing, etc.).

There are several advantages of registering your domain name for multiple years. For one, it takes away the headache of renewing annually. Secondly, one factor Google looks at when evaluating a site is how established a business is.

A five-year domain name registration gives an indication that you are either an established business or a young business that plans on staying in business for a long time. A five-year registration on Network Solutions, for example, gives a 34% discount.

Private versus Public Registration

When you register a domain name, you are given the option (at a price) of keeping most of your administration information private. If you don’t want the world to have access to your contact information (e-mail address, phone number and mailing address) then you should choose the private registration option. The only information that comes up in a search is the domain names itself and the name of the contact person (the designated domain name administrator). Private registrations typically cost around $10 in addition to the fee for registering a domain name.

Hosting options

Most companies that offer domain registration services also offer hosting services. This means the domain name is linked directly by the company to the server where your website will “reside.” Hosts provide disc space on their servers (or a dedicated server), FTP accounts, e-mail accounts and other services.

For issues with choosing hosting companies, please go to the Business Learning Center tutorial on Web Hosting.

In Conclusion

The process of purchasing and registering domain names is far simpler than choosing which domain names to register. Blue Fountain Media has helped many clients with their domain name selection and purchasing needs and would be happy to help with yours. Give us a call at 212.260.1978 and we’ll be happy to help.