The $18,000 Domain Name

Having previously worked in fast food management, retail, and marketing I’ve come to have a firm understanding of upselling. Whether it’s suggesting cheese or a combo meal, “complete the triangle”, or reccomending high margin accessories, I’ve done it all. In fact, just last month we were remarking how much money the local Thai place could make if they started asking people what they wanted to drink instead of just serving water.

There’s a concept in upselling that I like to refer to as the grab 5 principle. I call it that because as a teenager at Best Buy, the best way to sell somebody an extra ink cartridge with their printer is to reccomend that they buy 5. This way, the most common response is “I’ll take one.” It’s upselling by absurdity – and it works.

When using this technique though, you have to be careful. It IS possible to overdo it. Let’s take a look at how GoDaddy does it.

Earlier today I was looking to buy a new domain name, and gave GoDaddy a try. After finding a name that was available, GoDaddy reccomended to me that I should also buy the .net, .org, .biz, .info, and .us names as well. Since my name is for a potential company, I decided that I needed to protect my brand by registering all it’s variants.

If you look at the image below though, they then suggested 25 more similiar domain names I should buy. I figured that Google does this so that nobody can have a similiar domain, so it’s probably a good idea if I do so too. It looks like they give a nice discount for doing a 10 year registration, and it’s rumored that Google looks at length of registrations as a ranking factor, so I’ll be going the 10 year route.

The next page asks if I want to order the standard (no extra charge), deluxe, or protected plan. Wanting the business registration and expiration protection I opted for the extra $25/year protected plan.

I hadn’t thought about hosting yet, but thankfully there’s the next page full of options.
$29.99/yr takes care of all my email for me.
Add in another $70 for somethign called Traffic Blaster (who doesn’t want traffic right? It’s cheaper than Adwords)
Since I’m taking orders online I might need a merchant account and shopping cart. Luckily, $50 is a good deal compared to the competition.

Since the site isn’t ready yet, and it’s such a great domain name I might as well do the cash parking option. I’m spending a lot so making some money back while my domain sits there useless sounds good to me. Tack on $10 more.

So.. what’s my Total? Well, after adding in everything that GoDaddy suggested to me, It looks like I’m up to….

$18,061.31

1 comment January 17th, 2007

Making Sure Nobody Takes Care Of Your Problem

Here’s a tip to everybody in the business world:  If you want something to get done, don’t CC anybody on the email.

At least 20 times / day I get CCed on an email asking for something to be done, and I’m sure you can guess my gut reaction:  “Mike, Will, or Chris will probably take care of this.”

The problem in this situation is that Mike, Will, and Chris are thinking along the same lines.

If you want to make sure something gets done, make sure you only send your request out to one person – preferably one with the authority to delegate tasks.  This way, there’s a chain of accountability.  It also saves people the extra time of sending emails to everybody involved to see if they already took care of the issue or not.

January 17th, 2007

94% of comments are spam

Of all the good things I like about WordPress, the first thing I noticed when I installed it was how little time it took the spambots to find me.  Within minutes of switching dotCULT over to WordPress I recieve the common “refinance your house while playing poker and enlarging your penis” comments.  I’m sure that sentence will provoke many more.

Anyway, to combat this I installed the Akismet plugin.  It’s doing a good job.  It has caught 11 spam comments so far in the time it took me to type this post – which says something about just how bad the spam problem is.

To further my point, look at This Graph from the Akismet webpage.  It says that 94% of all comments it looks at are spam.  That’s a lot!!

Granted, it’s probably skewed a bit (since the more heavily spammed you are, the more likely you are to use Akismet) but still.

The problem is that every WordPress blog is set up the same way – making it very easy to write a script that posts comments.  Captcha is one way to stop this, however captcha’s are getting very easy to solve.  I’ve even heard of free porn sites where every time you view a video you have to solve a captcha.  It’s ingenious.  When you request a file, the website hits a blog it wants to spam, grabs the captcha, you solve it, it shows you the video and spams the blog – all behind the scenes.

The problem with captchas are simple too – they can all be solved in the same way.  Math captchas may work for now but when it comes down to it, they’re easier to solve.

So what’s the trick?  I’ve been preaching it for years: Do something different.  You’ll notice the old dotCULT had a “type Ryan here” box.  It worked not because it was hard for a computer to do, but because it wouldn’t be efficient to write a program that had to act differently for just my site.  That’s the key to fighting spam:  Don’t be the same as everybody else.

January 17th, 2007