Archive for January, 2006

Nick Wilsdon has written a good article of interest to anyone involved in SEO, What does Google know about your domain names?

Google became a domain registrar in February 2005. But as Nick points out, it seems that Google didn’t become a registrar to trade in domain names, but to obtain the higher level access to domain information registrars have.

To this end he quotes Google spokeswoman Eileen Rodriguez, as saying “While we have no plans to register domains at this time, we believe this information can help us increase the quality of our search results.”

Nick speculates that Google has built or is building a tool to analyse domain names.

This tool could be very useful for Google. It would allow them to track the age of domain names and connect likely networks and portfolios. They would see when a domain name changed ownership and allow them to adjust the value of that domain in their engine.

They would especially be watching domains which are about to drop (expire) as this would be the likely time they would change hand. The system would be looking for status changes on WHOIS records, such as DETAGGED, REDEMPTION PERIOD, or PENDING DELETE. These would all indicate the registrant had failed to renew their domain. None [of this information] would be hidden by domain privacy contracts.

Read the full article on Jim Boykin’s blog for more details

1. Publish A Free Ezine For Selling Products

You could publish a free ezine or newsletter to promote your own or affiliate products, MLMs, etc. This is the most common format, and to work well requires quality — preferably original — content related to your business and products so that it stands out from the crowd.

2. Publish Free Ezine For Selling Advertising Space

You could publish a free ezine or newsletter to sell advertising spots and exclusive mailings to other businesses. Similar in format to the previous example, except that instead of using the ezine as a vehicle for promoting your own products, you use it to generate ad revenue. This approach is often favored by those new online and / or without their own product, using mainly contributed articles for content and combining the promotion of affiliate programs with ad sales.

3. Publish A Paid Subscription Ezine

You could charge a monthly or yearly subscription to your ezine or newsletter. Unless your annual subscription is fee is relatively little, you will probably make more money with a low monthly fee automatically charged to the subscriber’s credit card. Note that you need quality, highly targeted original to be successful selling ezine subscriptions like this.

4. Publish A Free Ezine As A Lead-In To One With More Value

You could publish a free ezine or newsletter as a “lite” version of paid subscription ezine that offers higher value content. You would simply provide a taste of each piece of content in your free ezine, with “full version” articles of greater depth that provide more details and specialized information, 100% original content, secrets of the trade, etc., available with a paid subscription.

Another variant on this model would be to charge a small subscription fee for an ad-free version of your publication. Some people don’t want to get advertisements in every issue and are willing to pay to get rid off them. Free subscribers would get ads and paid subscribers wouldn’t.

5. Publish A Free Ezine And Charge For The Archives

Yet another way to make money with an ezine is to charge a one time fee for lifetime access to your ezine archives. Obviously, for this to work you’ll need to have plenty of issues archived already, offering substantially original and/ or unique content. They also need to be searchable, which isn’t difficult these days using Google, or at the very least indexed by topic.

6. Publish A Free Ezine And Sell Reprint Rights

You could publish a free ezine or newsletter that has original content and promotes various related affiliate products. You could then package it up into a set with graphics and a sales page and sell it or charge people a subscription fee to reprint each issue and use it as their own ezine. They would just have to change the titles, contact info and affiliate link codes.

In a different twist, you could promote your own products in the ezine and give it away to your own affiliates as a promotional tool. Alternatively, you could still give away your ezine with free reprint rights, but require that certain links to your website or affiliate promotions are maintained for a semi-viral effect.

7. Publish A Free Ezine And Sell A Print Edition

You could publish a free ezine or newsletter and charge for a subscription for a print edition delivered every month. Put additional premium content in the print edition, similar to how you would do a subscription ezine. The added benefit of a doing a tangible print version is that you can charge more for it because the perceived value is higher, plus you can make a little extra on the shipping charges too.

© Azam Corry. “Do it Better. Do it Faster. Do it Right!”

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