All posts by Editor

business, Consultancy, E-Commerce, money

Domain Names What are They Worth?

2 Comments

I have recently been caught in the domain name game. I wanted to buy some small domain names, ones that are easy to write like wcx.com or delight.biz. In this process I discovered a number of things about where the market is for domain names. It appears there are a number of companies and individuals who have come with the questionable idea of buying all the domain names they can within certain category. So for example Ron Jackson has brought as many as he can 3 letter and four letter domain names with .org .biz .com. So if I wanted to buy a domain name www.40c.com which is Owned by his company Internet Edge, Inc. I would have to email him and make him an offer. Which I did.

I wanted to buy delight.biz I got a very nice email back from Ron informing me that I should make an offer. So I did I offered him $100 he than replied that he would only be interested in a sum around $1500. Which made me think. What’s in a name? Some say that names can be fortuitus. I wonder for example what did ebay mean or Amazon before the dot.com era. The first is made up and the second a jungle in South America. Was it the name that made these companies successful or the product. I will leave you to decide.

Having the perfect domain does not guarantee you success or an income. If the domain name you are searching is lucky enough to have a holding page it still has a value of nil in terms of traffic or internet relevance. Google will not be directing any traffic to this domain. To gain any relevance in the search engine fields you will need to make it special create something unique and wonderful and that takes TIME and MONEY.

A couple of my clients have chosen very long domain names. On the internet I do not think it really matters. So long as you engage you visitors. If you succeed at that they will bookmark or RSS you and more importantly return. Believe me if somebody is interested by something they will insure they get it.

Web business is not about getting 200, 000 visitors who and came go. It is about achieving your goals. If your goal for example is to sell 10 web design projects than all you need is hundred of the correct visitors looking for a design company.

Post script: 1

It also interesting to note that if you have a brand and some body has taken your domain name. You can apply to www.internic.com who will send them packing if they think they are cyber squatting.

Post script: 2

With new domain names coming out all the time one should be able to find there desired name in one of the new veriants. mx.com, me, etc at 123-reg which I use.

Marketing, sales

How Bouncy Your Blog Is. Will Tell You How Good Your Design Is?

3 Comments

First welcome to my new blog design.

What do I mean when I say bouncy, well pretty much as it sounds. Bounce rate is a term used in website traffic analyses. It happens when a visitors leaves your website after just landing on one webpage. How is that possible? I hear you ask. On that beautifully design website of yours. With all that information and well written blog posts. Well it’s easy. For the large part it comes down to design presuming that your blog posts are readable and interesting. (this is the test)

There is no agreed definition for what attributes a bounce some say it in the first 10 or 15 seconds that a user leaves your site other say it is failing to click on another page. My bounce rate I have to admit was too high. This is probably due to monetisation on the old site. I genuinely believe that monetisation offers extra services to users. Unfortunately it was probably too much so I will now have to seek a balance.

According to Avinash Kaushik:

“It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying

Now there is goal to go for! what are your bounce rates like?

Consultancy, Meeting

How Expensive Is Poor Leadership

1 Comment

More than you think………….. Retaining talented employees should be a major focus for companies these days. I have heard over the years, that “anyone is replaceable.” When I was a young engineer fresh out college, I believed it myself. There were over 50 engineers in my graduating class and I was competing for jobs like they were. We had very similar skills and backgrounds and I knew I had to separate myself from them so an employer would hire me and not them. Even a couple years after college, I still believed that I could be replaced at any moment by fresh new talent.

It has been drilled into our heads over the years that we are replaceable and we have to conduct ourselves in a way that borders on humiliation. I took my first leadership role over a year ago after working for a few companies that really did not value the contributions of their people. Overtime and chaos was name of their games. Fortunately, those experiences allowed me to create my own leadership philosophy that centers on the fact that my people are not replaceable.

Employee turnover is very expensive. I recently was invited to speak at the 2005 Talent Management and Succession Planning Conference on creating a work life balance for employees to motivate and retain good talent. My emphasis will be on the importance of creating a pleasant work environment where leaders and employees respect each other. People will generally stay with a company if they are treated fairly, are given legitimate challenges, and feel their contributions are recognized.

The best way to illustrate the cost of poor leadership is give an example of what it takes today to hire a mid-level engineer. First, the engineer’s resume would cost the company around $15,000 provided it is coming from a recruiter. Today, many professionals move around the country, so the company would offer a full relocation package that would include moving of household items, vehicles, and pets. This would cost around $8,000. Then the employer would cover travel expenses including airfare, temporary housing, rental cars, and maybe thirty days of living expenses during the transition. I will be modest here and say that would cost around $5,000. Many employers also cover closing costs on both selling and buying of a home that could run as high as $10,000 total. Finally the engineer may be offered a starting bonus of $2,000. So, before the employer even starts paying the engineer his or her $65,000 a year salary and before the new employee steps in the door they have paid out around $40,000. This is a very large investment and I have seen many people in these positions quit after ten months to a year from poor leadership in a hostile work environment. Now the company has to do this routine all over again.

Good leadership is the key to retaining good employees and bad managers will only drive them away. As a leader myself, I cannot afford high turnover. I invest time and money into enhancing my people to be better employees. It becomes expensive to keep hiring people and training them to be productive and successful employees. I realize employees leave companies for a variety of other reasons. However, I can still do my part to make their work life a pleasant one.

About the Author

Chris Ortiz is a senior lean consultant and the owner of Kaizen Assembly. He has spent the majority of his professional career working for Fortune 500 companies, teaching and guiding them to become more efficient businesses. He has designed and constructed well over 100 assembly lines and other manufacturing processes resulting in millions of dollars in cost savings and waste reduction.

He is the author of 40+: Overtime Under Poor Leadership and his Ten Signs of an Incompetant Leader ihas received international recoginition. Chris has been featured in the Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times, Orlando Sentinel, and dozens of work life balance newsletters and trade magazines. He is an active speaker on workplace related issues and writes articles on leadership, overtime, and employee based programs.

Chris can be reached at chrisortiz@kaizenassembly.com or visit his company’s website at www.kaizenassembly.com

Marketing, sales

Good or bad Marketing We Promise too…

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Good or bad marketing?

What do you think of their email below?

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By referring a friend using my special link below I get £5 too 🙂

If you join, don’t forget to use my special refer a friend link below:

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Thanks,

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business, Consultancy, E-Commerce, service

Understanding Spam – How it Works and who it Benefits

For the longest time I could not understand spam. I failed to see the benefits of a promised breast enlargements or a new Gold watch that is not offered on Amazon. To put it frankly I considered it a total waste of everybody’s time. Why did some yo-yo sit there comprising emails that make no sense with links that would never be clicked upon or is that the case?

For the average educated person one can assume there is no interest in spam. The Spam market is for the poorly educated who most probably have little or no education. It is this type of user who is the most susceptible to this type of marketing. (third world countries) Unfortunately the spammer cannot differentiate from the email address the country of origin. (maybe we should start using country domains on our emails)

Spam exists because it does achieve it objects. 17 percent of the emails sent out will be clicked upon on and presumable a slightly smaller percentage will buy the products offered.

Of course due to the low cost of this form of marketing it is very attractive marketing for certain products. I was going to write companies here but I know any western company caught associating with this would face legal proceedings.

There is millions of pound spent on anti spam software, hundreds of thousand man hours on security. Is it effective? Well yes intill we have the next round where it starts again each side trying to better the other in spam wars.

So how do we defeat Spam? Educate People so that they know better would be my choice. It might solve one or two other problems too.

For Further reading on this topic check out Bruce Schneier excellent article http://www.schneier.com/essay-143.html

Ask a Question, Relationship, Uncategorized

Banking Crisis the Reality and the Discussion

Last couple of days if would appear that we hear nothing else on the radio and TV other than the banking crisis that is happening around the world. It would seem unlike the days of old.  When things in the 21st  century happen they happen at lightening speed. In the matter of 6 months I never heard so much analysis over the current credit crunch. The more we talk about it the less real it becomes.  Just today ideas are being floated for a government managed mortgage lending. In a free society this pushes beyond the realms of reasonable.  Is all this discussion helping us? do we need someone to make a decision? What do you think?

 

It is not particular hard to understand that what goes up must come down. We can not expect to have year after year growth in housing prices. It is just not possible. Of course the problem is nobody wants to feel the pain to put it right. Least of all the current Labour party, but I suspect for a lot people there will be real hardships in this changed environment.

 

What would be your strategy?

Management

Losing The Vote

July 08 saw a by election defeat for Labour. Only two days before the election they had seemed to be doing well. To say that it was unexpected is putting it mildly. So why did Labour lose the seat. They appeared to be running a well run campaign. All the polls before polling day thought that they would hold the seat. I remember watching it at home on TV. While the current most talked about reasons is general unhappiness with the economy, houses prices, and the credit crunch. I think it was something else too.

What was very interesting while watching this on TV was the way Margaret Curran the Labour candidate behaved. There has been some speculation that the former Labour MP had behaved in a dishonorable way with relation to his expenses. The by election was called due to him standing down claiming ill health. When the current candidate Margaret Curran was asked about this on TV she tired to ignore the question. She than tried to demonstrate what a strong candidate she was by talking about her own agenda. What she failed to realize was that nobody was really interested in her agenda; they wanted to know about the former MP and his expenses. When repeatable asked whether she had visited the offices of the former MP who was claming it as an expense. She looked most annoyed and carried on ignoring it. She could have done much better to have said the truth. If she did not believe it was ill health than she should have said so. A least people could have warmed to her, or more importantly believed her. Instead she carried on denying it and acting in a most unreal manner. I think it was that moment that people decided they had enough and rightly so. At least with the other party (SNP) they are selling something they believe in.

They are two morals to this story, one sort out your history and two believe in what you are selling.