Archive for 2008
By now, you’ve hopefully read Jeff Stolarcyk’s article on choosing and researching domain names. If you haven’t, please head over to “What’s in a name?” and read that article first.
Now that you’ve got your list of possible domain names, let’s look at the technical background behind domain names. Managing your domain names is critical to staying on top of your business.
Management and the
Domain Name System (DNS)
I’ll use a tool like SRSPlus.com to manage domains all in one place, as well as modify and update Domain Name System (DNS) records. DNS is like a nickname system for servers on the Internet. Each domain name is assigned a specific numerical set. Rather than having to remember these numbers, DNS translates words (like yourdomain.com) to the appropriate numbers automatically. If you’re using Yahoo! Small Business, you can register domains at http://domains.yahoo.com.
Once you’re done, you can use the built-in control panels to point your domain name to your website. When you register the domain you are registering the TLD (Top-Level-Domain), for example pretzelbloggers.com. You then gain control of sub domains, like store.pretzelbloggers.com or twisted.pretzelbloggers.com.
The WHOIS System
WHOIS is the protocol used to obtain data about domain names. WHOIS provides contact information, expiration date and DNS Name Server information (often used to explain where the domain’s site is hosted). This information is public data, so there are a variety of services out there to “Protect” your WHOIS data by filling it in with masked data. This prevents spammers from combing the WHOIS database for e-mail addresses.
Your Domain Name
is going to Expire!
If you’ve registered your domain name, you’ll eventually receive a letter in the mail from Domain Registry of America, Domain Registration Company, or some other misleading name. These letters are worded in such a way as to trick domain owners into thinking that they were the registrar of the domain and include various phrases and logos that appear to look official. Highly inflated prices are charged to ‘renew’ the domain. But read the fine print and you’ll see that you’re actually transferring control to this company. You’ll then end up paying higher amounts annually, and losing the majority of control from your site. You also may experience downtime during the transfer process.
We all hope that when we hire someone they will turn out to be productive and honest, but the real world of business teaches us differently. You must have procedures and paperwork in place for those times when a good hire turns into bad news. As your business grows, you can protect yourself (and your employees) with these processes and policies.
The Application
Does your company use an attorney-approved application? Resumes are not always complete or even true. Attorney-approved applications require the applicant to sign a document stating that everything contained on their application is true and accurate. Further, if there are falsehoods, employment can be terminated immediately with the proper evidence.
A.) Include language conveying company policy for revealing felony and misdemeanor convictions and pending cases.
B.) Include a release for references and other background checks.
C.) If your state is an “At Will” State it is always recommended to have the At Will explanation in your application statement be sure that each applicant signs off on it.
In reviewing applications, what are some obvious red flags?
• Applicant signature at the end?
• Applicant chooses not to allow previous employers to be contacted.
• Applicant leaves criminal questions blank.
• Applicant fails to explain why he or she left past employment.
• Applicant does not explain employment gaps or the reason for leaving the previous job is questionable.
• Excessive cross-outs and changes.
• Applicant fails to give complete information.
The Interview
When conducting the interview, don’t be afraid to ask some tough questions and monitor applicant response. Some examples include:
• Suppose your supervisor asked you to get information that you know is confidential and he/she should not be trying to access. What would you do?
• We require background checks on everyone we offer a position with our company. Do you have any concerns with that?
• We’re going to be contacting your past employers for references.
• Ask questions about any unexplained employment gaps.
Checking References
Does your company check references? If the answer is no, start now.
Any sound hiring procedure includes checking applicant references. Many times this part of the hiring process is de-emphasized or forgotten altogether. Make it a distinct step in your hiring sequence. Be sure to ask for at least 2 professional and 2 personal references. Family members don’t count.
Many states are on the employer’s side and have loosened regulations regarding references. In many cases you can learn more about a prospect’s past than the typical, “Start date and end date” response. Consult an employment attorney in your state to find out what you can and cannot ask of a fellow employer as well as what you may or may not disclose to other employers.
Background Check
Background Checking can be outsourced, but you must disclose this information to the applicant on the application and during the interview before conducting a check. Keep in mind not every position needs to be screened at the same level (or at all) depending on your industry or position. Be sure to have a policy in place for this process.
Employment Policies
Do you have documented policies and procedures that show zero tolerance for Company theft, dishonesty, and misconduct?
Some important policies to have in place are your specific positions on:
• Confidential Information and Company Property
• Theft
• Use of Third Party Confidential Information
• Work Ethics Policy
• Whistle-blower Policy - offer an award for employees that identify co-worker’s engaging in illegal or dishonest conduct while on the clock.
In a perfect world, every employee turns out to be as great as they look on paper. In the real world, smart e-commerce operators protect themselves. If you have the above policies implemented, you’re in good shape! If you don’t, then adding these processes should be at the top of your “must-do” list.
We have essentially outsourced several important divisions of our little company to Solid Cactus.
In turning over customer service, call center services and PPC marketing, our little company
now looks very big.
—Paul Roth, StyloFinePens.com
StyloFinePens.com is an example of how passion leads to ambition. After working with pens for years as a manager of a local pen shop, Paul Roth finally decided to take his passion to the next level and founded Stylo Fine Pens in 2006 making him owner and CEO of his own specialty writing instruments store. Seeing the obvious, nine months after opening the San Francisco-based store, StyloFinePens.com was finished. “The online component of the business really helped things sky rocket,” Roth admits. “Now we’re not dependent on any specific location.”
That expansion came with its own problems. Stylo Fine Pens, as the name suggests, sells a limited range of generally high-end writing instruments. When the calls started coming in from the website, Paul realized he was losing out. “Every time the phone would ring, there would be a customer in front of us…the calls were just dropping. Every time we would serve someone in the store we would also get this kind of a pang that we were losing a sale.” Call Center Services were an obvious option for StyloFinePens.com.
“Call Center completely changed our business and without a doubt was the very best business decision we’ve made,” says Paul. “Now if the phone rings more than three times, we hear it drop-off and we know it drops to a friendly place.” Adding Call Center Services was the first move in a triple play which Paul Roth says completely changed his business.
The second move was adding live chat. Solid Cactus partnered with LivePerson offering Managed Live Chat to Call Center clients. With Managed Live Chat, online visitors simply click an icon and a chat window appears with an agent waiting on the other end to answer any questions the customer may have.
Paul was part of the process from the beginning. Solid Cactus Managed Live Chat subscribers are encouraged to take part in the training of agents in order to ensure customers receive appropriate treatment and accurate information. Clients fill out an in-depth questionnaire depicting how they want their customers to be handled, as well as providing information on products they carry. In addition, clients are asked for text and copy that relate to products, and culture specifications for the brands they sell.
Live Chat agents find pride in selling specialty products such as Stylo’s pens. “I wondered myself, ‘how intricate could it be?’” Paul says. “But it is. People want to know why they should buy a $600 pen when they can buy one for $30. The staff really caught on to that.”
Ironically, the final move piece in the transformation of StyloFinePens.com occurred to Paul Roth while reading an issue of eBiz (we’re so proud!). “I struggled with PPC advertising like everyone else,” he recalls. “Then I read about a guy who’d turned his business over to Solid Cactus and let them handle his search engine marketing.” I decided they probably knew considerably more about pay-per-click than I did, so I let them handle it.”
This is where eBiz Insider and our parent Solid Cactus look really good. “Three big things happened,” says Paul. “First, our calls decreased. Second, our clicks decreased. Third and most important though, our sales stayed the same! That means we were able to cut our pay-per-click spending by two thirds. That’s huge!”
Bottom line, Paul Roth will be the first to tell you that Stylo Fine Pens is a 1400 square foot dot in San Francisco. “But we have a sophisticated website,” Paul says. “When customers call we have call center and we answer e-mail inquiries with live chat. We are professional from top to bottom. No one can tell how big—or small–we really are.”
“Bounce rates” are critical to search marketing. A “bounce” is when a visitor reaches your site, views the entry page and leaves. A healthy bounce rate in a niche market is about 30%; if your products are aimed at a broader audience lean towards 50%. Google’s free Analytics data is a great way to review benchmarking.
If your bounces are below 30% you are doing something very, very right. Above 50% means half of your traffic is leaving immediately and it’s time for changes– be they color themes, navigation, pricing points, re-categorization, keyword changes and/or landing page modifications.
The opposite of a bouncing is called being “sticky.” It measures how much of your traffic sticks around. If your stickiness is 75% - three quarters of your traffic is staying put and going at least one page deep.
In SEM, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) bounce rate can either make or break you. You are (1) paying for the traffic and (2) in total control of that traffic – make sure your keywords line up with your ads and your site. Better keywords mean a lower bounce rate and more relevant traffic. Search engines reward relevancy by increasing your campaign’s quality score.
Several SEM metrics are important to increase conversion rates, improve Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and capture more market share
You can measure a bounce on several different levels:
1. Landing Page – what is the bounce rate of that particular product, or category/section page?
2. Keyword Level – what happens to
the traffic once it reaches your intended page?
3. Ad Level – does your creative/copy match the page where your visitors
are landing?
4. Position – with sponsored results, positions 1 to 3 get lots of clicks but generally don’t convert as well as lower paid search positions. Check your analytics to see which positions
convert the best at and have the
lowest bounce rate.
5. Engine / Traffic Source – sometimes the demographics of the advertising engine don’t line up with your buyers’ demographics. For example, college students are most likely to use Google while senior citizens are heavy MSN Search users.
Think of a bounce in terms of a customer entering your store, looking around and leaving. Now, in the e-commerce world think of this as a visitor entering your site and not going more than one page deep, not engaging in live chat, checking shipping or even adding an item to the shopping cart.
Keep images, content, links and logos in check and above the fold. If you disrupt a buyer’s intention you risk a hard bounce. When the customer has to look around for what they searched for within a few seconds, you risk a bounce.
Optimizing paid search campaigns for bounce rates can help you increase your conversion rate, decrease your cost and ultimately (hopefully) convert more and at a higher percentage.
Have a sticky day!
Your domain name is the most
powerful piece of branding your store
has on the Web!
A strong, recognizable domain name for your business can bring even more organic traffic to your site. A poor domain name can prevent surfers from ever finding your site.
Show the Engines Who You Are!
Include keywords or phrases in
your domain name to increase high natural search engine rankings. What makes you unique from the competition? What’s important to your industry or exemplifies your approach? Then evaluate your choices.
Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) is a great, streamlined resource for investigating search volume. If I’m starting a blog
about my favorite pretzels, I could
type in phrases like “pretzel blogger”, “pretzel blogs”, and maybe even just “pretzels” on the off-chance that the name is available.
As you can see, the phrase “pretzels” has an average search volume of about 165,000 queries each month. The bad news is that our other terms don’t generate any search volume at all - they’re not even on the list.
Our best-performing choice - Pretzels.com - is parked. These “parked domains” are registered but land on pages without useful content. Most fill their sites with ads to cash in on direct traffic coming into the site in error. Finding a high-traffic keyword to incorporate into your domain is a quick and efficient way to gain traffic. For instance, SoftPretzelRecipes.com would be a good choice if it ties into the theme of your site.
If you’re stumped on domain name suggestions, check out SnapItNow.com for a comprehensive list of variations on the keywords you want to pursue.
Name Checking
Just because a domain is available now doesn’t mean that someone didn’t previously ruin its reputation with the search engines. The Internet (as the kids say) never forgets and a new store can suffer from a previously banned or blacklisted domain. Perform proactive domain detective work.
The WayBack Machine (http://www.archive.org) can show you old versions of a website, indexed by date. Check to see if they’re link farms or pages with spam-filled, malicious code. Search engine indexes penalize the latter. The process of getting re-indexed can be long and painful, so avoid these domains
wherever possible.
Redirected Domains -
The 411 on 301s
If an available domain name resembles your site, don’t leave it for someone else! Pointing multiple domains at your website is a wise tactic for attracting more direct traffic. Registering alternate top-level domains - TLDs are the suffixes in a URL, the .com, .net, .org or .biz in the site’s address - can salvage repeat shoppers who don’t remember if your site was PretzelBlogger.net or PretzelBlogger.biz.
Registering alternate domains is smart brand protection. If you leave PretzelBlogger.org unregistered and a competitor provides terrible customer service, their bad business practices will damage you.
A domain costs less than $10, so cover any plausible top-level variations for your domain and use your new keyword research skills to discover high-traffic misspellings of your domain name. Look for domains that will pass value (traffic) onto your store’s site. As for the domain with the lousy history, redirecting the bad domain at your already vetted good domain means you get all the traffic and none of the bad history.
Once you have those domains registered, set up a 301 redirect to point them to your e-commerce store. It might be tempting to turn some of your domains into dummy sites that link into your store, but engines frown on that strategy. Make sure every variation of your domain (yes, even PretzelBlogger.com vs. www.PretzelBlogger.com - Google counts the version without the ‘www’ prefix as a separate entity) points to the true, canonical version of your site.
Summing up
Successful branding, a strong Paid Search campaign, qualified links and a healthy social media presence can help even the most obscure domain find incoming traffic. Picking the right domain name from the start, however, can reinforce
your brand and bring in an increased amount of direct and repeat traffic. Smart domain selection makes your e-commerce website more effective and requires just a little research!
