If you’ve ever bought a domain name through Go-Daddy, you know how relentless they are at trying to upsell you on extra services and additional domain names.  In a lot of cases, it makes sense to purchase those extra domain names (the .org, .net, .info, etc) in order to protect your brand name.  After all, if you experience any kind of success, someone is likely going to snap them up later to leech off your success or to sell them to you at a marked up rate.

Once you’ve got them, what’s the best thing to do with them?  Most of the time, people leave them “parked”.  That basically means that they sit there with a bunch of ads.  If anyone happens to navigate to the parked domain name and click on an ad, the registrar generally gets commission on the click - sometimes they’ll share the revenue with the domain owner. 

Having a lot of pages parked is not really very good for you.  Pages like that constitute what might be considered “web spam”, and having a lot of them registered to your name might give someone the inclination that you’re a web spammer, which makes your legitimate domains suspect in that person’s eyes.  Why should you care?  Well, that “person” might be a Google spider, and when your sites are suspect, they generally don’t rank high.  Remember, Google is an official domain registrar, so they have access to information that is not available to the general public.  In fact, they can see through private registrations.

A better alternative is to redirect all the traffic from your additional domains to your main website.  You have to be careful how you do this, though.  There are two basic ways to forward a domain to another domain and there’s really no standard name for each method.  Many domain name registrars refer to them as “masked” forwarding and “unmasked” forwarding, so I’ll use those terms here.

What’s the difference? 

Let’s say I’ve got two domain names - funkychairs.com and funkychairs.org.  The website is built on funkychairs.com and I want to forward funkychairs.org to funkychairs.com.  If I used masked forwarding, then pointing my browser to funkychairs.org will show me the same site as funkychairs.com, but the location bar of my browser will still read “funkychairs.org”.  Got that?  If I’m on funkychairs.org/diningRoom, my browser’s location bar will say just that, but I’ll be seeing the same page as funkychairs.com/diningRoom.

 Okay?

Now, if I used unmasked forwarding, and I point my browser to funkychairs.org, it will automatically forward to funkychairs.com.  My browser’s location bar will always read funkychairs.com.  It’s as though funkychairs.org doesn’t exist.  This is definately the way to go. 

Why?

If you use masked forwarding, it looks like there are two or more different websites with the exact same content.  In other words, there’s a website called funkychairs.org and it’s exactly the same as another website called funkychairs.com.  A casual user or a search engine would have little idea they were actually the same website.  If you use unmasked forwarding, you’re telling users (including search engines) that all the content at funkychairs.org is located at funkychairs.com.  There is only one website containing the content.

Search engines don’t like duplicate content.  It provides a bad user experience.  Imagine if you did a search for something and the first 10 results were all the exact same thing on 10 different websites.  If you didn’t like the first result you got, you surely wouldn’t like the next nine.  So, the search engines tend to filter out duplicate content, such that only one of the duplicate sites will appear in the search engine results.

Still no problem, right?  As long as one of your duplicate sites is ranking well, you won’t be complaining.  That’s true, but another problem is link cannibalization.  My earlier post about keyword cannibalization discussed two or more pages of a given web site competing against each other for the same keywords.  The same theory applies here.  Let’s say 10 people visit funkychairs.com.  They love the content there, so they link to it.  10 more people go to funkychairs.org.  They love the content there, so they link to it. 

Sounds good so far, what’s the problem?

Well, search engines generally look at links from other website as “votes” for the website that they are linking to.  Now, you’ve got two sites with 10 votes each.  Since they have duplicate content, one will be filtered out.  So, now you’ve got one website with 10 votes competing against your competition, which may have 15 votes.  If you use unmasked forwarding, you’ll have one site with 20 votes instead.  All other things being equal, this would be the difference between your competition ouranking you and you outranking your competition.

So, next time you buy a lot of domains, make sure you do the right thing and use unmasked forwarding.  It will save you a whole lot of trouble in the future. 

It is early morning. There you are, standing in your new store. Your first ad just appeared in the local newspaper yesterday and a crowd of people waits outside. You take a deep breath, walk slowly to the doors and open them. The crowd surges forth, lifting you to their shoulders as they gleefully open their wallets and load their arms with merchandise. Then, you wake up.

The reality is that the new ad you ran yesterday probably didn’t bring anybody into the store today. It’s an all too common occurrence for many small business owners to pile their whole marketing budget into one ad or mailing - only to be disappointed by the results.

It’s all a matter of your point of view. To you, the small business owner, the ad probably occupied your thoughts for many days or even weeks. To your targeted prospect, the ad is just another piece of marketing material in a vast sea of marketing material. Yes, great design and wonderful copy should and will help your ad stick out, but then what?

When someone sees or hears your marketing message, it’s called an impression. Studies show that up to nine impressions are required before someone will act upon a marketing message. Worse yet, for every three times you put that message out, a given person will only see or hear it once. A little elementary math tells us that you’re going to have to run your marketing message up to 27 times before you see an appreciable result.

Okay, so your Uncle Bart ran one ad in Car & Driver, and now his high end, neon automobile light kits are selling like hotcakes. Bart was lucky. When a prospect hears or sees marketing materials, it usually takes a few impressions before she begins to think, “I’ve heard of these people before”. After the next few impressions, the prospect begins to think that what you’re offering might actually be worth something. People tend to think that frequent advertising is the result of success.

At this point, the marketing message has been run about 18-20 times. With no great response, you’re probably tempted to pull the message in favor of something else. This is a mistake. The prospect is just beginning to feel a sense of solidity about your business. Stopping the message at this point causes the prospect to lose that sense, and the marketing effort is, indeed, wasted.

After the next few impressions, the prospect is finally starting to think about checking your business out. As the message is seen more and more times, the prospect becomes more comfortable with your business. Finally, the interested prospect contacts you and becomes a paying customer. Now is when your impeccable customer service kicks in, and she tells all her friends about your business.

Obviously, this won’t happen with 100% of the people who see your marketing message. You might be luckier than Uncle Bart if it happened with 10%. The point is that your marketing budget is better spent on a campaign that reaches fewer people many times, rather than a single burst that reaches a lot of people just once or twice. The point is that your marketing budget is better spent on a campaign that reaches fewer people many times, rather than a single burst that reaches a lot of people just once or twice. (de ja vu?)

A lot of patience is necessary when you start a new business. It takes time for people to recognize you and to feel comfortable with your business. Stopping your marketing efforts prematurely is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. Don’t expect sales to pay for your marketing when you first start your business. Plan for a long campaign with little return at first. The sales will come eventually. Then you can widen your efforts.