How GoDaddy Captured a 50% Market Share

I just read about how GoDaddy recently achieved a 50% domain market share, which internet people are saying is an amazing accomplishment. I am far from being surprised about that.

My reasons to expect their great success are (A) GoDaddy.com has a strong combination of excellent marketing skills, (B) very large ad budget, including substantial money for high price Super Bowl ads, (C) very diverse and extensive offering of additional products and services for sale, (D) including various web hosting products/services, and something you may not think much about but important to small domain buyers and small business owners is their overall (E) good 24X7 support with short on-hold wait times, often no hold time, all combined with a (F) powerful upselling program.

I am sure GoDaddy will soon go well beyond capturing a 50% market share, with the next big level being my prediction GD will eventually capture a 75% market share and dominate the space. hmmmm…..does GoDaddy have stock we can invest in?

Newly Developed Family Child Center Website

This week we completed a new small web site about child-care and family child care centers. Getting good and responsible child care for your kids is very important to both the children and parents.

By the way, we need more content for this new website. Do you have anything to contribute about child care, kids, rasing kids, children’s entertainmen, etc, (possibly family experience with childcare) that we could publish on the site for everyone’s benefit?

A content contribution would be greatly appreciated. If you choose to contribute some general knowledge to the site it does not need to be professionally written. Either long or short is ok. You name may be used or not published if you wish.

You can review the new site by clicking-on the image:

Natural Healing Institute Naturopathy Medicine

Just completed one more small website about natural healing. Natural and alternative medicine therapy medical health practice is gettng more popular compared to traditional medicine, which usually relies more on drugs and fighting disease vs disease prevention as is the case with natural healing.

The new site is located here: Natural Healing Institute

Any comments are welcome. In addition I am actively looking for more site content so if you have something to contribute or know of any alternative medicine articles or healing tips as far as natural healh and natural healing remedies are concerened it would be most appreciated if you can post them so I can add your contribution to the new web site. Thanks.

LiveApp.com and LiveApps.com domains for sale

Two very high profile premium domains for sale, LiveApps.com and LiveApp.com. Registered since 1999. Available as a pair or individually.

There are more than 65,000 app developers and well over 100,000 apps already developed. I believe Apple Computer purchased AppStore.com last month for a ton of money.

The domains are not being sold by a broker at this time. Please contact me direct for more details or with any reasonable offers.

P.S. also interested in finding a good domain broker to market and sell these 2 great LiveApp(s) domains. Willing to pay substantial commission upon sale but not paying upfront fee as unfortunately was done before. As a side-note, domainers can be warned to avoid paying a fee in advance to a broker no matter how legit he seems, or well known he is. That’s because there’s always a possibility of a falling-out and you losing the money (since the broker already received his money, with the potential sales commission perhaps not really being his main goal but you did not realize that aspect) and thus the broker may not do much ‘work’ for you or be slow at the marketing (possibly because he already has his money) so you may end-up in a dispute and ask for a refund but the broker may not want to refund your pre-paid money, been there and done that, unfortunately! Another issue which casts doubt about how legitimate the up-front fee model is you have to ask yourself why if the broker can really get a buyer he simply does not do so regardless of getting money in advance, especially since his commission will normally be far greater than the up-front fee he wants?The answer to that question should be obvious.

New Website with Health & Wellness Products

The new Health and Wellness Organization web site has been developed and is now online, offering a wide assortment of health and diet products and supplements which can contribute to your good health and wellness.

Sales Should Be Atributed to the Correct Website

Regarding domain name sales reports I noticed AfternicDLS gets credit for more sales than deserved. For example, I personally purchased a good health related dot-org domain last week but it was listed in DNjournal.com as being sold by AfternicDLS (even though Afernic.com had nothing to do with the process). It appears credit for many of the sales in both DNjournal and in other media too are often attributed to Afternic when the BuyDomains landing page was responsible for the sale, having nothing to do with Afternic’s name.

The name above and several others I have purchased this year were always a direct result of typing on the domain name and seeing the BuyDomains landing page. The landing page has the BuyDomains phone number at the top announcing the name is for sale and inviting a phone call to the BuyDomans toll-free number, or clicking the link for more details or making an online purchase it goes to the BuyDomains.com website, with Afternic not mentioned on the web-page from what I can see. In fact, I don’t believe Afternic is mentioned at all during the sales and ordering process which appears to be done only under the name BuyDomains.com

Of course I realize they are both divisions of NameMedia.com but it seems like the Afternic.com website gets undeserved credit for far more sales than warranted and greater marketing benefit than is due them. In fact, I would be willing to bet BD landers are responsible for many sales, especially to end-users and higher priced domains) compared to Afternic which is believed to have a lot of sales mostly to domainers and resellers.

The reason we mention this is that Afternic.com is obviously getting more marketing and advertising credit plus greater overall publicity than justly deserved for domain sales. On a more personal note, I dislike the Afternic.com web site which has been riddled with various bugs for ages, lacks certain important features such as bulk operations, and unfortunately has offered poor support for a long time). In fact I removed my domains from there some time ago.

It Sure Seems Difficult to Get Affiliate Referrals

Here is a transcript of a recent live chat session with a well known domain name firm who offers developed sites either free or for a monthly fee and has what sounds like a lucrative affiliate program. For the benefit of those who don’t know, an affiliate program is where you get commission based on the income of the person you referred. The affiliate income you receive comes from the company and not out of the revenue of the referrals account (according to the terms of all ther affiliate program agreements I have seen).

Support: Hi, how may I help you today?

Me: Hi, regarding your affiliate referral program. I have HEAVILY marketed it with probably 100’s of forum posts and our affiliate link being on each post in the signature area, plus marketed it in my Blog too which gets good and relevant traffic but no affiliates are reported by you under me from all that time, work and energy I put into it.

Me: Are you sure your 90-day Cookie which identifies those who clicked the link for the next 3-months is really working?

Support: Yes, as far as I know. I can double check yours. Ok, please hold. Ok, I see your referral link is working fine. But I noticed that not all of your websites have the “develop your domains” affiliate link placeholder on the site.

Me: Right, because it detracts from the web site in my opinion.

Support: And you are using the correct referral link which is this number (example 12356789)?

Me: Yes, that number is accurate.

Me: No one could have possibly marketed your affiliate program more than myself recently what with 100s of forum board posts and many other posts including website blog articles but not even 1 sale from all that time, work and energy! My one and only affiliate was from personal level marketing I did with a close friend.

Me: What a complete waste of my time this has been. I will not be offering the affiliate code in blogs and forums anymore since it is an exercise in futility ASSUMING the COOKIE really is working for 90-days.

Support: Well, it could take some time for you to see the results

Me: Why?

Support: It would be difficult to predict any kind of average time

Me: If someone wants to sign up for an account why would they delay?

Support: Well, all new sign ups do need to go through an approval process

Me: But that takes a few days and I have been marketing your affiliate program for a much longer time (about 2-months) so that it makes no sense (to not even get one referral with all that effort).

As a side note I can say I did not market this affiliate program for only monetary purposes as I sincerely felt these sites were excellent and had great potential and in fact still feel that way today. That is a reason I marketed the affiliate program as much as I did since I felt other domain investors could also use this web site development service well. However, with that said, any revenues from the affilliate program would have been most welcome, especially in view of substantial declines in my other income sources.

The hard to believe poor results affiliate code was immediately removed in my signature lines at the 3 forums and I stopped the marketing of their service (at least from the affiliate aspect) since this entire affair and this support chat made little sense to me. Unfortunately, I suspect non-crediting (for whatever reason) of affiliate referrals may be more common than you would expect.

Internet Affiliate Marketing Has Negatives too

Interesting report from Mike Cohen (Wannadevelop.com/articles/affiliate-marketing) - who is extremely upbeat and excited about internet affiliate marketing. My response is there are some major negatives regarding affiliate marketing.  For example, there is a big problem involving the typical low Click-Thru-Rate (a.k.a. CTR) with internet-affiliate-marketing, what with the CTR being so very low on average. Unless your website gets lots of visitors  it will prove tough to monetize well, especially with consistent revenue.

Another problem with affiliates is you need to watch the links constantly since places like CJ.com seem to always be cancelling various programs for unknown reasons. If you do not handle the cancellation email you won’ t know you are not getting paid. Also, if you deal direct with the affiliate account there is the issue of the affiliate frequently changing the banner or link code and again you may not replace the code (perhaps forgetting) and not realize you are not getting paid.  Even if you do handle ongoing web site coding changes it will involve constant monitoring, time and work changing the code.

Some People Don’t Understand Good Marketing?

We recently called a company LiveFaceOnTheWeb which markets their service this way “With thousands of LiveFaceOnWeb Virtual Greeters on the internet, we are seeing very creative and innovative ways to implement LiveFaceOnWeb Technology. We would like to help you pick out your LiveFaceOnWeb Virtual Greeter and explore the many options that will further improve your websites performance.”

When we called we were quite ready to buy their service and would have signed-up right away to put their Virtual Greeter on our FreeMLSlisting.com real estate website – if only we could have got a discount (even a small discount would have been OK at the time) since we dislike paying full price, especially for a higher priced service (which we assumed could have a degree of price flexibility, especially to attract new clients.

However, the person on the phone said absolutely no discounts are possible (even a small discount) and I need to pay full price which was about $600 for the package I had it mind. He said there is no negotiating possible, with a bit of a negative sounding voice, at least in our opinion.

Today we get email from them offering roughly 25% off the regular price bringing the cost down to near $400. Unfortunately, we are not as inclined to order today compared to a couple weeks ago so may not take the offer after all.

This shows the importance of offering prospective clients who are looking for a good deal on first contact a discounted price rather than waiting until you realize they did not buy the product so then you later want to give a lower price, but that’s often a failure due to the time delay.