Eclipse Domain Services Library

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Displaying your domain name correctly on marketing materials, social profiles and other areas is very important. Professionalism counts for a lot on the web and can mean the difference between no clicks or a stream of daily visitors.

In this article I will share some techniques and tips for properly formatting and sharing your domain name. Your domain name can be a valuable marketing tool. Continue reading to see how.

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Marketers should make efforts to use good textual design and capitalization for readability when including their domain name in advertising materials.

An attractive font, typically sans-serif, should be used along with good character spacing and large size for readability.

The beginning of a URL (http://www.) should not be included in ad copy because it distracts from the domain name. It is better to have the keywords read first. The domain extension should prove enough for consumers to recognize a URL.

* Large, attractive font
* Remove http://www.
* Capitalize each word in the domain
* Make it a focal point, if not the center of attention

It is also important to practice the same techniques when marketing your website with Google AdWords and other text and link based advertising. There have been case studies (PDF) proving that generic domain names with relevant keywords receive more clicks.

Logo Design

If you are using your domain name as your brand then it should be represented well in your logo design. This is particularly important if you do not use a .com domain name, which is the most widely recognized and is often assumed.

I believe that businesses which display the full domain name within their logo design, such as Amazon.com and Diapers.com, have a great advantage in direct navigation traffic. That is those visitors who type the domain name directly into their browsers regularly.

Direct navigation traffic can come in from many sources such as business cards, banners, flyers, letterhead, and word of mouth. It is often undervalued because it is hard to track, but represents a lot of opportunity for new leads and repeat visits.

Twitter Profile

Every person on Twitter has the opportunity to display their full domain name alongside their biography. With the new site design, the characters of the URL are not restricted, but it may still be advisable to remove the www. portion of your URL so that your domain name can be read immediately.

This will also make sure that your domain can be seen clearly on all Twitter clients including mobile, which still restrict the character count of your website address.

A clearly visible domain name with relevant keywords will bring in more clicks on Twitter. This is particularly effective when following like-minded people. Your URL is included within the new follower email notice sent by Twitter.

Facebook Profile

On Facebook we can feature multiple website URLs within our profile info page, but I wouldn’t recommend going overboard. Too many choices can be a turn off. Only include your most important web properties. Your first link is likely the one that will receive the most clicks.

Did you know? You can also add a clickable link to the about box directly below your profile or fan page photo. Simply include http:// before your domain and it will automatically become a hyperlink. Unfortunately, the link text is still black and does not feature the typical underline. So, what I do is additionally write “Please visit my blog…” or “Click ->” for further instruction.

Web Copy

When sharing your link around the web, be it comments on blogs, forum posts, articles or blog rolls, you should first think about how you want your domain represented. One of the foundations of SEO is having targeted keywords within link anchor text. So, in some cases it may be best to leave out your domain extension in preference of your keyword phrase.

You should never use full URLs when writing web copy, unless that is the only way to place a link on a certain platform. Use HTML to create a link to your website using keywords, as in these examples:

* <a href=”http://www.eclipsedomainservices.com/”>Eclipse Domain Services</a>
* <a href=”http://askleeasher.com/”>Support Desk</a>

Be sure to use a variety of anchor text keywords and phrases over time.

Sub-Domains

Your domain has infinite possibilities in both folders and sub-domains. You can control what is left of the dot.

One of the most important things to remember regarding sub-domains is that you should decide whether you will include the www or go without. Once you have chosen, stick with it and encourage others to use the same method for linking to you. You can then define your URL display preference at Google Webmaster Tools. Doing so avoids any chance of content being indexed multiple times.

Sub-domains should be as concise as possible, preferably using just one word. Adding unique areas of content and resources on sub-domains can strengthen your brand and reach on search engines.

URL Shortener

URL shortners are somewhat of a trend right now as many popular publications look to capitalize on the masses of traffic being driven by social status updates.

Instead of promoting the domain of the shortening service when links are shared you can instantly have your brand recognized and credited.

To create your own URL shortener you can use a WordPress plugin or subscribe to a service (Bit.ly Pro) to manage your URL shortener and stats.

Email Address

Would you rather promote GMail or your own business name? Not only is it professional to have your own domain as an email address, it’s also easy and virtually free if you have an active web hosting account.

I recommend setting up an email on your domain that forwards to your GMail address. You can then configure GMail to use your default reply-to address. This way your real GMail address will be hidden and secure. Your branded email address will appear seamlessly to those you email.

To do this in GMail, go to Settings (top right) > Accounts & Import > and click the “Send mail from another address” button.

Email Signature

This is some of the best free marketing your domain name will ever get and you may not be taking advantage of it. For email signatures, make sure to include the http:// portion of your URL so that all email clients will convert it to a hyperlink.

Below your salutation and name, type out your full URL and feel free to use proper capitalization of words for readability. You can additionally add a line or two of text describing your website or business.

In Summary

To sum up these techniques, when marketing your domain names you should strive to

* Be professional
* Be readable
* Be clickable
* Be proactive

Work on these points and your domain name will help to deliver more traffic to your website.
How do you market your domain name?

If you have any website marketing tips of your own to contribute, please leave a comment below. We would love to hear how you gain visitors or how you use your domain as your brand.

Thank you so much for reading. Please consider sharing this article if you found it useful.

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Who wants increased web traffic? Everybody! Whether you’re an experienced online marketer or a newcomer to the scene, you’re looking for more traffic to your site. Traffic is the fuel that will keep your business running, so it’s of top priority. While the amount of web traffic you get is important, the quality of traffic is even more traffic. It really does you know good if you’ve got thousands of people visiting, and no one buying or taking the action that you desire.

Ezines are a great way to get increased web traffic, as well as more quality traffic. An ezine is an electronic magazine which is delivered to its subscribers by email either on a daily, weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly basis. Some ezines are free to join and others charge a subscription fee. Either way, they represent a very easy way for you to reach your target market.

And you do that by paying for advertising space in an ezine that is sent out to members of your target market. Not all ezine publishers offer the same advertising possibilities, conditions, and prices so you’ll need to do a little research before choosing one that’s right for you. Obviously, you want to pick one as laser-targeted to your market as possible. You can do this simply by typing in a search on google for ezines or newsletters in your particular market, or by using a free or paid ezine directory. You want to look at the amount of subscribers the ezine has, the frequency that it is mailed to subscribers, and the advertising options and costs.

In general, the most effective ads you can do are called “solo” ads. This means that your ad gets sent out to the subscriber list alone, without and other ads or content, and with your topic in the subject line. Solo ads are also the most expensive type of ezine advertising but you can get them for as low as $10. Be wary, however, of a solo ad that costs very little and is sent out to a lot of subscribers. You will more likely get a better response from a $10 solo ad sent to 500 to 600 subscribers than from one of the same price that is sent to 5,000 or more subscribers. If it seems to good to be true, it is.

Before you place your solo ad, subscribe to the ezine to test out its quality and reliability first. You will also see examples of other solo ads this way.

Ezine advertising is a good way to get increased web traffic and targeted visitors. Start with just one, track the results, and stick with it if they are good. Once you start profiting, re-invest at least half of the profit into higher subscriber base ezines and continue in this direction. Remember to track and tweak your ads in order to really optimize your response rate.

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You can have the best, most attractive website in the world and still not make any money. The reason for this is simple. No matter how attractive your website might be and no matter how great a niche you have, nothing happens until traffic – or people visiting your site. It’s kind of like throwing a great big Mardi Gras party but nobody shows up. How to get traffic.

There are basically two ways to get traffic – paid and free. As you might guess, many marketers choose free traffic because, well, it’s free.

Paid traffic

The non-free way to get traffic to your site is to pay for links to the site. The most common way to do this is by paying for Google ads. Google ads called AdWords and are those little four-line ads you see in the right margin of almost every page on Google.

Advertisers pay to have these Adwords ads put on the appropriate pages. Without getting into the complexities of Google advertising, suffice it to say that you bid on your page position. The more money you are willing to pay for an ad, the better a page position your ad will have. A total of eight Google puts no more than eight of these ads on a page. This means that if you want to be in ad placement 1 or 2, it will cost you much more then if you are willing to settle for position 7 or 8.

The good news is that you don’t pay unless someone clicks on your ad and goes your website. You can also set a daily budget so that you don’t end up logging on to your AdWords account only to find that you just spent hundreds
of dollars.

A second alternative is to buy ads on newsletters. This has fallen a bit out of favor in recent years but can still be a decent way to get traffic.

Third, there is a product called Three-way links. The idea behind this product, which costs $47 a month, is that you put links on your site to other sites and get links back in return. One of the ways that Google ranks your site is based on backlinks. So, the theory is that the more backlinks there are pointing to your site, the better Google will like it and the higher it will rank your site.

Free traffic

The most common way to get free traffic is by writing articles and placing them in article directories such as www.ezinearrticles.com and www.goarticles.com. These directories all allow you to have what’s called a resource box in which you can put a couple of links to your website The downside of this strategy is that your articles usually stay on the EzineArticles or GoArticles front page only about a day. So, to get really good exposure, the article either has to be picked up by a third party newsletter and republished — or people have to see the article, click on the link and go to your site almost immediately.

A second way to get free traffic is through social posting. Here, you post references to your site on Twitter, Facebook, Digg and other social-type sites. If you choose to build your site using WordPress, you can get plug-ins that will automatically post to these sites for you every time you update your site. Third, you can find forums related to your site and post comments with a link in your “signature” back to the site. You can find these forums by searching Google on your keyword plus the word “forums.” For example, if your site has to do with cures for hay fever, you can search Google on “hay fever plus forums.” One word of caution — and that is to make sure that when you comment on a forum, you add something of value. Otherwise, the forum leader won’t allow your comment to be published and may even ban you from any further comments.

Traffic is to a website as blood is to your heart. Without it, you site can lapse into a coma. So if you want to succeed as an Internet marketer, it’s important that you work hard to drive traffic to your site.

Written by: Lee Asher from Eclipse Domain Services.

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