Monetize your site

Your address says a lot about you.
Consider these examples, and what vision or emotion they provoke:

tbrvcmlq4682@aol.com Does she write in ALL CAPS?
What do most people see when you advertise for AOL?
Anonymous spammer / stalker who changes addresses the
moment the first refund request comes in, and will try to con
you again under a different name.


tweetie456@yahoo.com Lives in the alley behind the
Salvation Army? What are you ashamed of?


mommaathome8765@hotmail.com Stuck in a rut and can’t
afford AOL? Naive newbie, or pretending to be.


bigfanofmaxwellblingblingIII@gmail.com What’s he gonna be
when he grows up? Will he get a legitimate business address
soon, or go broke first?


Do I sound nastier than you?
Awwwww
And you won’t be that cynical for at least another month or two?
Awwwww


Keep in mind that your prospective clients ARE that cynical.


Think way ahead to where you want your business to be
in a year, in five years, in ten years, and project your address
to there!.

Do you want Millions of yahoos and AOLers give you a bad name,
and make you work extra to overcome the hard earned prejudices?

You can keep your yahoo address for cross dressed cyber dating,
or whatever you actually need a yahoo address for,
but for business, use the address you will be using as the CEO
of the megabucks company, that you are building!

Advertise YOUR company in the business address.
Don’t worry, you can keep smoochiepoo69@yahoo.com for
private stuff. Now we are just talking about your
BUSINESS
address.


That brings us to selecting a
domain name.

Look at my address: h@webby.com or the long one,
dearwebby@webby.com

(I’m not worried about spammers, I got MailWasher)


What does that address evoke?
Ohhh, nice, you say, easy to spell over the phone.
Must have gotten
onto the net when the good names were still
available.

"dearwebby@" sounds like a tech support address.

(It actually is the address I use for tech support,
and has been the tech support address for the last 14 years)

Use that as an example. What do YOU want to evoke with
YOUR address?


Forget a name that just promotes somebody else’s business.
That makes you look like a sidewalk pimp, and it’s easy
enough to get around your cloaking attempts.


If you don’t come up with a good name in a week,
brainstorm with your mentor. A good mentor won’t badger you
into using his suggestion, but will coax you into finding a good
solution. I have helped many hundreds of people find a good
domain name over the last dozen years. Quite often suggesting
a humorous and ridiculous alternative triggers the right solution.


A few things to keep in mind for your domain name:
It should be short
memorable
easy to spell
not a typo magnet.


For the acid test, I always suggest
to sing it in the shower.
If it sounds awkward or ridiculous in the shower, it will
sound awkward or ridiculous when you mention it on the
phone, in an elevator, or yell it across a bar.

Have FUN!
DearWebby

Addresses
I realize that it seems to be fashionable to pretend to be
too incompetent to deal with spam. I also know that quite
often that attitude is a real indicator of incompetence.
The rest of the time, it seems to indicate lazyness.

Got more excuses? Keep them. I have heard them all.

It’s time to wake up and look at the situation from
the viewpoint of clients and prospective clients.
When I signed up for AJ’s course, he had a working
email address. THAT is why I signed up, not because
of the windmilling.

I find exactly the same with my clients. They don’t
want to argue with auto-responders or dawdle around
on some forum. They want a real person,
really accessible.

By being instantly accessible via Skype or email,
I can manage the tech support for 50,000 postcard
sites. People can get hold of me before they
complicate their problem with experimenting.
That saves them, - and me - , a lot of time,
and is appreciated all the way around.

If you don’t make yourself accessible, then you are
not serious about wanting to be in business.
People have to know you first, before they can
learn to trust you.

Spam is no valid excuse. Any kid and any granny can
get Mailwasher for about $30. That’s just the
cost of doing business, just like your business license.

Most of the spam these days has your own address
forged in as the sender address. But they don’t forge
in your name. So you simply filter all mail, that has
your address as the sender address, but not your name
in the FROM field, into nowhere, unseen.

The same goes with any other spam. Look what is
common, then make a filter. It’s really not that difficult
to win the spam game.

Mailwasher is by no means the only spam control
program, but for the long run, it seems to be the best
one. No matter which one you use, get comfortable
with making filters. They weed out the bulk, so that
the program only has to deal with the few that don’t
get caught in the filters.

Have FUN!
DearWebby