How New Zealand Retailers Can Get Online in an Afternoon For Free

I stumbled on this article that was written for Australian businesses, but most of the services  they mention are just as applicable to New Zealand businesses.

"Unfortunately there is still a lot of snake oil out there as well as well meaning but misguided advice from web practitioners as to what is actually required. Many business owners have already been badly burnt with expensive or unusable website solutions.

"Fortunately these days it’s incredibly easy and cheap to set up an online business.

"Solutions such as Weebly allow anyone to setup an online store in an afternoon for free, and there are plenty of other similar free or inexpensive solutions to choose from."

I'd recommend this article to anyone even vaguely thinking of excuses for not setting up an on-line presence for their business.

Full article: How Australian Retailers Can Get Online in an Arvo For Free

The Internet, Open and Uncapturable

"The Internet, Open and Uncapturable" five words that describe one of the core beliefs of Internet NZ, a society of which I am a member. I had cause to think tonight about the meaning of these words and why they are important.

Free Web Templates

I'm not a web site designer. I willingly tell people that I can't design a decent looking website to save myself and happily offer several reference sites to prove this claim. My strengths lie elsewhere, and I feel we should largely stick to our strengths. I've seen several badly broken websites where excellent web designers showed they were even worse at database programming than I am at graphic design. There are exceptions, but generally the better you are at one of graphic design or database development, the worse you are at the other.

I was browsing around for free web templates today. These are a wonderful resource, someone's already done the work to make a site look good and I just need to plug in the content or content generation. Typically they want to be paid for their work with a link back to their for-money web design business, I don't have a problem with this, I obviously like their work enough to use it and giving them a plug is not a problem. The free templates usually aren't as good as the bespoke ones they offer, but they're good enough for my purposes without paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for a unique design.

Today I came across this page of free web design company templates and cracked up. As I'm not a web designer, I have no problems using someone else's design on my sites. The website of a web designer should be a canvas for the best work they can do, a place to show off their skills. A web designer who gets someone else to design his or her own website is a problem though:

• Are they actually not any good at design?
• Don't they trust their own design ability?
• Do they really think that a free and so middle quality template sells their abilities?

But what's more, the terms of the free design means that they need to give a link back to the designer in their page footer, so either:

• They're telling anyone reading to the bottom of the page what they think of their own abilities, or
• They're planning to violate the licence by removing the required link.

Would you really want to do business with someone who matches either of these?

Christchurch Earthquake Community Response

A dedicated volunteer team of Internet people, web masters, programmers, and computer capable helpers have built the New Zealand Christchurch Earthquake Community Response site to coordinate help efforts.

Anyone who needs help because of the earthquake or who can offer help should go there.

2011 Prediction - Freedom of the press and the internet

Freedom of the press was never about allowing anyone to publish, it was about allowing the middle class (who were the ones rich enough to own presses) the right to publish. The USA revolution was a middle class revolution and it was to allow competing voices within the ruling class to be heard.

There's a long history of using pretexts and excuses for suppressing freedom of expression in Democracies (Dictatorships don't need excuses). Advertising has also been a control mechanism ... offend a powerful group and your advertising dries up making it hard to run those expensive presses.

As they slowly wake up to the fact that the Internet allows ordinary people to say what they want to as large an audience as they can attract power slips slowly away from the communications media owned by the ruling classes. With publication so cheap, the advertising lever is no longer as effective.  The Internet has reached the point where it is starting to scare the ruling classes and they are finding pretexts to "regulate" it. Wikileaks, Whale Blubber's vigilante blog, etc give high profile whipping boys and I expect them to find more pretexts like these in 2011 to push for a more highly regulated Internet.

Social networking marketing

There's currently a discussion on social networking going on on the Auckland Linux User's group mailing list.

One of the  posters pointed out that he can write emails to whoever he chooses without having his conversation censored or being data-mined.

Of course you can do this, you can also create a website to broadcast your views to the world such as this blog, but getting an audience is difficult. Before you can email someone you need to know their email address and have some way of knowing that they will want to hear from you. When you create a blog it is always hit-or-miss that people will ever read your words.

To me the real strength of social networking is that it is an updated (more controlled) descendant of what Usenet was beforw it was spammed to death. There you had a large number of small communities of interest that were each composed of people who were all drawn together by a shared desire to discuss a single subject. People who were interested in a dozen subjects joined 12 groups. Usenet was different in that the available topics were coordinated by the server managers, but this coordination was mainly to ensure that there was sufficient interest to merit distributing them while social networking allows people to dynamically generate their own communities of interest.

Social networking covers a range of different techniques, but ultimately it is all about introductions. Referrals from person to person as in Linkedin or of ideas by rebroadcasting interesting posts as happens in Google Reader and Twitter create some quite interesting interpersonal dynamics for the distribution of information. People I know almost nothing about in any meaningful sense point out interesting pieces of information, and by implication point out the sources (direct or intermediate) of that information. Sometimes I not only read the information someone pointed at but also add the author to my personal list of people worth hearing  from(1).

As social networking appears more trustworthy than random surfing (I'm not sure why, but it feels so), marketers desperately want to access this network of trust to promote their products. Small time operators are attempting to flood the channels in the same way that they destroyed usenet and freely published email addresses, but so far the organic nature of these networks where people follow based on recommendation, seem to reduce their effectiveness. Look for the spammers to try harder and harder(2) and try to deply technology to break through the protections. Ultimately deflecting the spammers is the shared responsibility of the users and social networking system owners and it requires a lot of vigilance by the providers of the social networking sites. If they are under capitalised so they can't afford to monitor their systems or simply choose to adopt a laissez faire approach to marketing on their servers I feel they will ultimately gain a reputation for spam-hell and  lose out to those who do have the resources and the will to maintain their systems.

There are people who do manage to market effectively on social networking sites, and they aren't doing it by flooding our inboxes with constant repetition of low quality deals. They do it by offering helpful tips in their chosen field and if they do any actual selling it is infrequent and low key. They are smart enough to realise that their best move is to make themselves authorities in their chosen fieldsand gain a large number of followers so people approach them when they need something in their area. Of course having a large number of followers means that a lot of people actually read their occasional marketing messages.


It will be interesting to see if the small-time marketers can learn some discipline and the big companies can learn to speak to people not at them and engage an audience. History suggests neither group will.

Notes:
1) It can even work for self published sites - I follow Bruce Schneier's blog which largely consists of pointers to security articles he found interesting, he's one of the world's top security experts so his choices are good ones, but Schneier's blog doesn't scale in the same way that social networks do.

2) Even when a marketer has something useful to say, such as product support or genuine product news, they seem to lack control and discipline and end up driving watchers away by the sheer volume of posts they produce

Why Google needs Buzz to be relevant

Google makes its income by selling relevant adverts, originally just on its search pages and that's probably still the major income, but increasingly on its other services so it needs real people to visit it to show them the adverts. Allfacebook.com recently published an article "Facebook Now Responsible For Majority Of Web Portal Traffic" where they point out that

15% of Web traffic to Yahoo, MSN and AOL in Dec 2009 originated from Facebook and MySpace. That 15% was split 13% for Facebook and 2% for MySpace. Surprisingly, Google only provided 7% of traffic, and were even beat out by eBay with 7.61%.

And go on to discuss that with search engines becoming less relevant they need to take on social networking to survive.

Where can we go on this? Firstly, 15% isn't a majority, and portals are ways of finding things (news, links, etc) and not the things themselves, so a good search engine should bypass them and go direct to the full news article, or web page, but I can see why this is bad for Google, as it means people aren't searching on Google for what they want and finding adverts.

There's a certain irony in this. Before Google, to find a site on a topic we relied on reputable directories and links from authority sites. Early search engines were pretty useless as they just counted how well stuffed with keywords the page's meta data and contents were and low quality advertising sites learned to play the system and the search engines were pretty useless. I can remember having to go to page 10 or 20 of results to find what I was after.

Google's pagerank algorithm cut through this, as by counting links from authority sites to rank the importance of pages and if you couldn't find what you were looking for by page 2 of Google you probably weren't going to find it so you revised your search. It worked because at the heart of it, all Google was doing was automating the job previously performed by authority sites and reputable directories.

The owners of low quality sites, of course, learned to game Google and an arms race has been going on ever since. In a way Google has lost as, if you try and search for something on Google you are now usually presented with a large number of relatively low quality advertising or retailer sites. Services like Blogspot and places like Facebook return the web to the ordinary person and individuals find their pool of personally trusted authority sites. Google can use the data created by links from and to blogs, Facebook pages, etc to assign page ranking and, as they show actual visitor traffic by real people, Google Toolbar, Google Adsense and Google Analytics must be godsends to them.

Blogspot (and other blogging services), Facebook, Twitter etc are now all heavily spammed, but real people choose who they follow and when, so depending on how much data it can get from them Google can analyse which social media pages give a degree of "real" authority. Like Google reader and their other services Buzz is entirely on their services, Google knows what's in my Google Reader and they know what's on my Google Buzz page, they must be pretty sure by now that I'm a real person and they have a fair idea of my sphere of interest, so they can rate the links I make and use that as one tiny data point in the calculation of the importance of web sites. Aggregate that over millions of users and Google gains valuable insight into the importance of sites as seen by social media users.

Done well, Buzz will help Google in its arms race to keep search relevant and so keep traffic coming. The owners of commercial websites will, of course, try to work out how to game the new system and I assume that SEO (Search Engine Optimization [sic]) practitioners are industriously trying to work out exactly how to do that right now.

UK ISP offers next generation broadband

The BBC reports that local British company Virgin Media is now offering a 50 Mbps (Megabits per second) domestic broadband service, for UKP 51 ($140) per month, with bundling offers allowing it to be had for less. Another UK ISP Be Broadband offers at 24Mbps service for UKP 17.50 ($48) per month.

Doesn't this make the broadband offerings in this country look sick?

So why are we being served up a third rate broadband service here?

Obviously the cost of international connectivity is far greater for ISPs to provide in NZ than in the United Kingdom, and this is exacerbated as British surfers are far more likely to go for UK domains than New Zealanders are for NZ ones, but my take is that it's mostly a legacy of the period when New Zealanders were forced to accept Telecom's offering of sub-megabit ADSL that was ludicrously claimed as broadband and the former government waiting an unreasonable period before forcing Telecom to allow other ISPs to offer more bandwidth.

If New Zealand isn't to be left behind in the technological world, we need to have a better broadband service and the new government needs to make this its priority.

Biting the hand

The Internet is widely known as the home of scammers, but this one just made me laugh. It's on a .com site called NZDate -- obviously a play on the well known and respected NZDating.com

NZDate has been online since 1997, and boasts over Millions of members from New Zealand. Everyday 1000s of people flock to NZDate to find a date or soulmate. Now, you too can cash in on this multi-million dollar venture by participating in our affiliate program

A quick whois check shows it was registered in 2003, but the real give-away here is the "over Millions of members" claim. Anyone who thinks about the size of the New Zealand population would have no trouble realising that that figure is way too high. Have a quick guess how many members the real NZDating site has ... I've decided I'd have no trouble believing any figure between 100,000 and 250,000 (with probably 10% of those still active) but there is no way that 1/2 our population is on a dating site.

So, what do these people think they are doing with this transparent scam? Obviously they are at least covering their costs or they wouldn't have kept it going for 5 years. The domain name is registered with Wild West Domains which is Godaddy's reseller vehicle, so may have been registered for very little, probably around US$7/year. The hosting is probably bottom of the barrel shared hosting, probably costing under $10/year per domain name, and I'll wager they have domains for quite a few countries all pointing at the same hosting and sharing the same software. So once it's going I guess they only need one of their cheapest sign-ups a year at US$39.95 a month, with the rest being profit. By comparison the non-free upgrade of NZDating is NZ$59.95 for a year.

They are even prepared to offer affiliates 40% to 50% of the sign-up fee. Again if they can find enough stupid people I guess it's money for jam, and if the affiliates can funnel stupid people at them then why not?

I wouldn't have worried too much, except I discovered this little gem while searching out New Zealand affiliate programs for a directory I'm creating. In one of my fits of originality it's called Affiliate Directory. I've built directories from scratch before, but this one is hard going, New Zealand businesses don't seem to have bought into the affiliate marketing model, and unfortunately many of those who do haven't though it through properly. I'm only interested in listing programs that are of use to New Zealand web-masters and that means they have to get paid for their efforts. Aside from obvious scams like NZDate, I'm finding apparently genuine NZ businesses who want affiliates to send them orders, and then pay those affiliates through a US plan that will only pay in US currency ... ever tried to clear a US "check" through the NZ banking system? Some banks will charge up to $50.

Other sites are offering capped commissions. Hello? Your affiliate partner is sending you additional sales you wouldn't have got. If you're prepared to give them commissions on their first few sales, why not on all of them? You're still making the same profit per sale, so why not pay the site that made those profits possible?

The webmasters in affiliate schemes are providing a valuable service for the scheme owners. They are finding ways of sending potential customers to the vendor, and as unlike pay per click, they only get paid when the prospect actually buys something, they are only trying to send qualified prospects through. There are some very serious affiliate webmasters out there who work at it as a full-time job. They work hard and they deserve to be treated as the professionals they have become.

Over the last few days it feels like I've looked at close to 1,000 affiliate scheme sign-up pages, probably only half that in reality. From these I've extracted 50 that I've added to the directory and another 20 where I've queried the scheme owner about the parameters of their scheme. Of the ones I've rejected, there are a few sites that operate under many different names, several foreign schemes that register .co.nz domains but aren't interested in paying in NZ$, quite a few shops with default osCommerce affiliates pages (i.e. no scheme), a lot of schemes that don't seem to understand that they are forging a partnership. In amongst this there are the ones that made the exercise worth while.

Update 7:30 PM

The very next site I looked at after publishing this article is a shining example of how to do it right. eNautical provide home study boating and marine courses and on their affiliate page explain the affiliate process in simple language, including projected earnings for a couple of likely scenarios.

Branding on the Internet

If you have a business you need a unique name for your business and, you need to protect it and promote it. Trademark registration does protect the name within limits and having a website is a great way to promote your business. In not much more then 12 years the Internet has gone from an academic curiosity to a mainstream business tool that allows even small business to affordably promote their products to everyone in their town or even to a world wide audience. Depending on what line of business you are in you may need anything from a simple web site you can build yourself to a complicated on-line catalogue you need to hire a professional to do.

Whatever size web-site you decide you need, you need to brand it, and a part of that branding is you must have your own domain name and one you have it, your domain name is your business' brand, you should use it for all internet communication. Your customers and prospects will recognise you by that name. If you use your ISP's url or email address such as yourlogin@ispname.co.nz, www.ispname.co.nz/~yourlogin/, www.ispname.co.nz/homepages/~yourlogin/ or http://yourname.ispname.co.nz you are damaging your business in three ways

• You are not reinforcing your branding across to your customers
• You are not presenting a professional image to prospects who may wonder if you really are an established business
• You won't get any people guessing your website name and typing it (so-called type-in traffic)
  
• You are spending your advertising money promoting your ISP's brand
  
• If you ever want to change ISPs you have a large and expensive task moving. This will include
• replacing stationary, signs, and signwriting,
• informing existing customers
• redirecting existing links to your new address.

As an aside, under no circumstances advertise a free email address (e.g. NocturnalAviation@hotmail.com) as your business email address. If you must use web based email temporarily (e.g. while travelling) your web host should be able to supply a branded one or forward your normal email to a web based service. Google's Gmail is a free email service you can configure to send emails that appear to come from your normal email address so your replies still carry your branding.

Choosing a domain name

People quite often guess web addresses for businesses and with a well chosen name they may be finding your web site. They might have briefly seen your business name on the side of your van, of a friend may have told them about you. To do this you must choose the right domain name.

A domain name is the part of a web address that does after the "www." or if you prefer the part of an email address that goes after the "@" sign.

Domain names are in two parts: The name you choose and a suffix called the extension. The extension indicates information about the registration and will be something like .com, .co.nz, .ltd.uk, .in. The two together are the domain name and the salient point here is that your domain name is your branding.

• The extension needs to match your intended market, if you are selling in Australia you want .com.au, .co.nz for New Zealand, .co.uk for Britain, and so-forth. The .com extension is important for the US market, and also for the international market.
  

  In every market there are secondary extensions. These get almost no type-in and except in special circumstances they should be avoided.
  

• The part you choose is very important, it is the part people will remember about your domain name, and it should match your trading name. If you trade as Mettal's Emporium, your domain name should start with one of Mettal, Mettals, Mettals-Emporium, or MettalsEmporium; which of these you choose depends on memorability, ease of typing, and your intended market. The general rule is that shorter is better, but there are a lot of exceptions.Take your time deciding and get it right.
  

  You are going to be running your business for a lot of years, and you are going to spend a lot of money promoting your brand. Spend a few days now thinking about the name you will use.

Having more than one domain name
As explained above, there's two parts to every domain name, and you can have variations on both parts of your name, but the reasons why you would do this differ.

You must have the most common extension for your target market, the one that your customers are used to typing. Use .com, not .biz; .co.uk, not .ltd.uk; .co.nz, not .geek.nz. Once you've got that you can also register other variations, when it makes sense. For example, if you are going to run the Hamilton Dance School and have registered HamiltonDance.co.nz it may make a lot of sense to also register HamiltonDance.school.nz and promote that as your branding. Because you own both names, anyone who types in HamiltonDance.co.nz will still find you.

If you can get it, also register the .com version of your name. Although most people will try the locally popular extension, some will try .com, and possibly in years to come you may find yourself trading internationally so why not reserve the name now? Finally, if you don't get it you may find your competition do and you can have an expensive time regaining it.

You can also register variations on your main domain name. In the example above I said you should choose one of Mettal, Mettals, Mettals-Emporium, or MettalsEmporium as your branded domain name. The other three names shouldn't be ignored, if your business will profit from having them you can register all four and arrange for the other three to redirect to your main branding. CocaCola.com and coke.com both redirect to coca-cola.com

The same logic exists for variations on your name. If you are Kawhia Raglan Plumbers ltd you should consider registering

• KawhiaRaglanPlumbers.co.nz,
• KawhiaPlumbers.co.nz,
• RaglanPlumbers.co.nz,
• probably kawhia-raglan-plumbers.co.nz; and
• possibly the .coms as well.

If you are actually Smith and Jones Ltd trading as Kawhia Raglan Plumbers you should register the same names & probably smithandjones.co.nz.

Hyphens or not? Singular or Plural?

There's a perceived wisdom among the internet savvy that having hyphens is a bad thing because people aren't going to type them. Certainly the more internet aware members of the public don't, but there's still a large minority of the population that will type them. Personally I'd go for the no-hyphen version of the name unless it's really ugly. One thing to watch out for is can there be a second meaning to the name if you just join two words together, and even if you always spell it in mixed case, search engines will convert it to lower case. You should probably also register the hyphenated version and redirect it.

The plural versus singular is more difficult. If you are a cake decorator you sell wedding cakes, but your customer probably only wants to buy a wedding cake. On the other hand, to buy their wedding cake they may look for a site that sells wedding cakes. In short, they may try either wedding cake or wedding cakes. Logic suggests you should try getting both names, unless there is some reason in your market why only one name will work.

For this combination register

• WeddingCakes.co.uk,
• WeddingCake.co.uk,
• probably wedding-cakes.co.uk and
  
• wedding-cake.co.uk

(The .com versions of all these are long gone, but if possible grab them too)

Aren't we registering a lot of names?

How many domain names you register is a business decision that should be guided by the same principles as any other decision.

You know your business and how well a sale does for you. If your average sale netts you $1,000 profit, then an extra domain name only needs to bring in one more sale every few years to pay for itself. If your average sale netts you $10 profit, then that extra domain name needs to bring in 4 or 5 extra sales a year to pay for itself. Stop and think what your potential customers will be looking for and try to find the right domain name(s) for them to find then register as many money making names as your budget allows.

What if you have multiple Brands?

Protect all your brands. Market all your brands and have the domain names for them. Each distinct brand should point to a page about that brand. This page can either be a mini-site for itself, or a redirect to the relevant page in your main site.

Register now or later?

If you register your name now you've got it. If you don't somebody else may register it. Once another party has registered the name it becomes much more difficult and often more expensive to obtain it.

Every domain name authority has rules for resolving disputes between the current registered owner of domain names and other claimants. The .nz domain name registry runs a disputes service under its own rules that are similar to the .uk rules and publishes the results on-line. Because of my involvement in .nz domain names I read any new decisions, sometimes they are interesting, and can show that there really are grounds to dispute the claim, but usually it's pretty mundane: someone has registered a domain name for a well known brand (or a close approximation) and doesn't even try to file a defence.

In the most recent decision (pdf, html) the complaint was laid by a large international company that had registered its name as a trademark in New Zealand 13 years ago and acquired a New Zealand subsidiary 5 years ago. The respondent questioned why did the complainant not purchase the domain name relevant to their international branding upon acquiring its New Zealand subsidiary? It wasn't really a defence but it does raise an interesting point.

Because the complainant had a trademark and the respondent didn't have a good defence they were able to regain their name. It cost them a couple of thousand dollars to get the judgement plus whatever fees their lawyer charged them.

If you have a name and intend to brand it, register it now. In an earlier case (pdf, html) a business privately discussed registering a domain name, but didn't act for several months. In the meantime another person innocently registered the name, and the attempt to gain it failed.

In another (unpublicised) case a person was developing a business asset and discussed the name with the wrong person who then went out and registered the name. At the time of writing I have no idea if they will be able to get their name back, but the problem simply wouldn't have existed if they had secured the name when they had the chance.

Another good rule of thumb is don't tell anyone anything about your branding until you have registered the names you are going to want.

Summary

Consider your market and how you want to brand yourself for that market. Pick a domain name that supports that branding and then treat that domain name as your branding. Consider variations on the name that make sense in your market and register those names also, make the extra names redirect to your branded site. Once you decide to use a name, register it immediately and limit who you discuss the name with until you have the registration.

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Copyright © 2008 Julia Clement. All rights reserved.