If you’ve been involved in online marketing for any length of time, you’ll soon discover that a growing number of online properties mask the domain registration data. Way back in the early days of the Web, when Network Solutions was the central registrar for the COM namespace (some DNS lingo for you there :), there was no such thing as WHOIS privacy, or domain privacy as it’s sometimes called If you wanted to register a domain name, you were required to submit your actual name, address, e-mail address, and telephone number for the relevant TLD database. But about the time .COM domain registrations were decentralized (actually it was a little later I believe), registrars started getting clever and added an option for registrees to mask their personal information in return for a small fee.

So is this “WHOIS privacy” feature truly private?

Well, yes and no. Yes, it will keep out most folks from knowing who is behind a website. . A WHOIS lookup against the relevant domain will reveal no personal information. Of course it will do nothing to deter law enforcement or the government from getting at your personal information. I hope you know by now that ISP’s and registrars are often given subpoenas to reveal who their customers are

But not only will it not stop government, it will often not stop the Internet power user either. A WHOIS lookup is just one tool in the bag of tricks to try and find out who owns a domain. Needless to say, there are other tools.

Here’s one for you… And while you may not think this so from reading this, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen the following method work. For some strange reason, oftentimes a marketer will protect the WHOIS data for his domain, but fail to protect that same WHOIS data for his nameserver domain.

While not true across the board, many of the more successful marketers and entrepreneurs will have a dedicated DNS server and domain name that houses DNS data for all of their domains. So while the WHOIS lookup for domain X will be protected, the domains that house the DNS servers for that domain will NOT have WHOIS privacy enabled! So it just becomes a matter of conducting the WHOIS lookup against domain X, finding the two DNS servers authoritative for domain X (from the record output), and then doing a WHOIS lookup against the DNS domains. Like I said, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this discrepancy.

Another method that will give you an even greater chance of success is to perform a reverse IP lookup against domain X using a service like Domain Tools Reverse IP  (paid) or You Get Signal’s Reverse IP Domain Check  (free!). These sites basically crawl the web and note the IP address of the web server. They then simply match up the crawled domain names to the IP’s and start to formulate a datbase. Genius.

There’s one or two more methods I use to find out who owns a domain name, but I’ll save those for a later post… :)

For whatever reason these videos only have like 100 views at the time of this writing..  A rare gem, check them out!

Went to SMX East today – just got an Expo pass as I didn’t even decide to go until the night before the conference started (Sunday October 3rd).  So sort of a last minute thing.  At any rate, this was my first time at an SMX conference and it was pretty good!  With the Expo pass, you’re entitled to walking the expo hall (duh) and talking to the exhibiors there, but they also have these mini (20 minute) presentations you’re also entitled to.  SMX calls those “theater presentations”.  Honestly some of them were quite basic (yes, I know it’s important to write a good subject line when crafting a piece of mail to my opt-in list), but of course there are always good nuggets to be picked up if you’re paying attention.  In light of that, it was great to hear about what PRWeb has been up to these days and how effective press releases can still be (seems like those guys have been around forever).  The speaker cited a few examples of some their clients who have had great success using images and embedded videos to really increase engagement rate…good stuff. 

As always, the folks over at Compete.com also provided a lot of good information.  If you’re looking for a competitive intelligence solution that covers both sides of search (organic and paid), take a look at these guys.  Next time I think I’ll grab a Networking Pass, as this would have enabled me to gain access to many of the other closed door sessions.  For instance, I would have loved to hear what David Szetela had to say about the current state of paid search.  At any rate, it was a good way to spend the day and worth my while for sure.

Anyone else attend?  If so, what did you learn or enjoy?

A few months back I saw this crazy slogan on the back of a commercial van.  This is what it said…

“My Plumber Smells Good AND Shows Up On Time!”

…And then underneath the slogan it had the typical contact informaton of the plumber (name, phone number, address, etc.).  

It dawned on me that this was a great headline…  And as I thought about it, I realized it was great because it offered a particularly strong USP (unique selling proposition).  And I want to talk for a minute about why it’s such a strong USP…  

But first let me ask you a question… What are probably the two most common complaints about plumbers?  And let me give you a hint, it has to do with their timeliness and the odors they give off.  :)  Y

You see, this is a brilliant headline and slogan because it takes that which the average consumer thinks are the more annoying parts of a plumber  and turns that upside down!  Wow, talk about differentiation…  This is a case study on how to do it! 

Notice too that coming up with this slogan was obviously not happenstance–i.e., it took some research on the part of someone to find out what the average Joe dislikes about plumbers…  This is something we *all* need to be doing — researching our market, and in particular — the customers of the market — to find out what their typical objections are…their points of distrust, etc.  And while addressing those issues in a headline won’t work for every market, we need to think creatively about how we can proactively answer the questions our customers might be asking.

Well, to be honest, it’s not *all* a number’s game.  Direct response copywriting, knowing what a target market’s hot buttons are…these are all very important skills for the PPC specialist too.  But once you’ve done your market research and crafted some well-written ads, you need to spend a lot of time looking at the numbers.

What numbers, you ask? 

There are many statistics to be mindful of, but when you’ve first launched a campaign, it’s very important to make sure you don’t have any “stray” keywords that are draining your budget.  A keyword may be stray for any number of reasons – it could be that this keyword is attracting much more traffic than you thought it would.  In this case, a stray keyword can be a good thing assuming it is bringing in targeted traffic that converts.  So the action here would be to increase your (daily) budget.  On the flip side though, a stray keyword could be one that is only marginally related to your offer, but is receiving the lion’s share of the clicks (for any number of reasons).  In this case it may be best to pause the keyword so as not to deplete your budget.

In addition to stray keywords, you also need to monitor your click through rate (CTR).  AdWords makes this very simple to do within their native interface.  Similarly, you should be split-testing two ads per adgroup against each other to see which one brings the most profit.  In many cases, the ad with the higher CTR will also bring in the most profit, however that’s not always the case!  That is why it’s critical to not merely track CTR, but also conversions per ad. 

Other important metrics to keep track of?  Your conversion rate, for sure.  Do you know what your conversion rate should be in your market for a similar offer?  Hopefully you have an idea, but if not it’s time you find out with your own data.  Again, the native AdWords interface makes this quite simple assuming you’re firing Google’s pixel upon a successful conversion (be that an opt-in, sale, etc.).  After you gather some data in your campaign, you’ll want to pay close to your cost per conversion.  Simply put, this is the amount of adspend to acquire a single conversion.  You want to be doing everything you can to continually bring this number down.

This is a very high-level post on the subject.  To many of you this will seem quite basic and introductory, yet I know for many of you this might seem a little technical (unfortunately many advertisers don’t pay attention to metrics).  Rest assured we’ll be doing a follow-up post soon that goes into more detail on specific metrics you should be tracking.

Let me give you some reasons why speed is critically important for the successful affiliate marketer…

When you’re not conciously trying to work quickly, it’s easy to spend too much time on what I like to call “secondary tasks”.  What’s a secondary task?  Anything that does not directly contribute to increasing your revenue.  This would certainly include things like web server setup and software installation, but to a lesser extent can even include things like design and layout.  You can have the nicest looking website in the world, but if you aren’t getting eyeballs in front of it, you won’t make any money.  By contrast, working speedily helps you establish a rhythm…a “groove” if you will…which in turn keeps you motivated and focused. 

Working quickly also helps minimize risk.  In any new campaign, there is always a certain amount of risk involved.  For instance, it’s not always clear if the offer you’re promoting is going to convert.  The best way to find out?  Yup…test it!  And if it ends up *not* converting, the sooner you test it (and fail), the sooner you’ll *know* that and cut your losses.

So how do you operate with speed?  Here are some practical tips…

1) Get the most important things done first and then do everything else.  Basically, you need to prioritize your tasks.  I recommend making a list of tasks that you want to accomplish the night before.  That way, when morning hits, it’s not a question of what you’ll be spending your time on.

2) Automation is your friend.  I have so many things to share with you in terms of automation, as I consider it an important part of my business (and quite underused industry-wide).  There are many ways to automate tasks, and you don’t have to be a programmer to do it.  Ever want to keep a number of text phrases in your clipboard and assign a hotkey to each one for easy pasting?  No problem, have a look at this.  Want to automate a repeitive and user-defined sequence of keystrokes?  No problem, have a look at this.

3) Outsourcing is your friend.  This gets back to the point above about secondary tasks.  You really need to ensure you’re not spending your time (often the most precious commodity of all) on secondary tasks.  But please hear this too – there is a balance…  In other words, don’t be foolish with your money.  If you don’t have any income coming in and you can’t afford to outsource, then don’t do it!  Outsourcing is a great way to grow your business, but there should be a business there to begin with.

Consistency.

Allow me to play Captain Obvious for a moment and spell this out a bit. If you’re not consistent in your efforts to promote other people’s products (or send them leads), then you’ll have sporadic success at best. For the search marketer in particular, there is no such thing as “set it and forget it”. Ever hear that phrase? What’s that? You’ve heard it way too many times? Yeah… Me too. And ‘ya know what? It’s a big fat lie.

Let me say that again:

At least in the context of search marketing (SEO or PPC), “set it and forget it” is a bloody LIE. Follow this foolishness and you will all but guarantee your failure.

You have to *continually* work at your affiliate promotions for a whole host of reasons, not least of which is competition. For SEO, unless you happen to own a well-aged GOV or EDU with tens of thousands of backlinks, prepare to work your butt off to keep your rankings. You simply *must* be better than your competitors. If they’re writing 2 articles per day, you’d better write 4. And while I don’t recommend you spend inordinate amounts of time analyzing your competition, you do need to monitor their workflow. How quickly is Google indexing their pages? How many pages are they adding to their site on average per month? Per week? How many backlinks are they getting on average per month? Per week? And if this level of analysis is too burdensome, then just GET AT IT and keep taking action with your campaign. Keep adding content, keep getting backlinks…. Keep tweaking your salescopy. You want to eventually be at the place where your competition is not even in the rear-view mirror.

And for PPC? Well, consistency is even more important here! With the advent of tools like KeywordSpy, PPC Bully, etc., pay per click competitive intelligence has become a cottage industry unto itself. Thousands of marketers worldwide are perpetually running automated queries against Google, scraping the results and warehousing them in a searchable database. Think I’m kidding? Think again. You *have* to continually monitor your campaigns, as bid prices fluctuate, impression count will fluctuate, quality score can fluctuate, etc (and all of this for any number of reasons which are outside the scope of this post). And if you happen to be cleaning up with PPC, don’t rest on your laurels. Set personal goals for yourself in terms of profit. This is a great industry with a lot of upside, but don’t think for one minute you can be lazy.

When communicating to prospects or customers, you would do well to take the time to be precise.  In particular, be as specific as you can.  Don’t make it confusing for your customer, and never invite questions!!   When communicating with customers or prospects, you should be anticipating any questions they might have and proactively answering them.

You would think multi-million billion dollar companies would get this, but alas….     Check out this piece of snail mail I received this past year from Comcast.  This is how it read:

Dear Valued Comcast Customer:

We hope you have been enjoying your Comcast Cable service.  A recent review of our records indicates that your November 2008 payment was inadvertently credited twice.  Effective with your next billing statement, this error willbe corrected and your account will be charged ont time in the amount of $ XX.XX.

If you have any questions, please call 1-800-COMCAST and a Comcast representative will be able to assist you.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and as always, we thank you for being a loyal customer.

Sincerely,
Comcast

Now you tell me…What do you see wrong the with the letter above?  Besides the fact that a multi-billion dollar company is nickel and diming their customers because of an error THEY made (I’ll leave that lesson for another post), the most glaring thing is the lack of specificity in the dollar amount owed. 

I’ll be charged HOW MUCH?!  $ XX.XX?!?!   What he heck is that supposed to mean?

Now how many disgruntled calls do you think Comcast received because they didn’t at least provide an estimate to customers of the amount?  I’m guessing many, and even some cancellations to boot.  All because they didn’t take the time to be specific and precise in their customer communication. 

Frankly, there is no excuse to get this wrong.  In any business, there are many things outside of your control.  Supplier problems, credit delays, and the link… For example, in the case of Comcast, there are so many technical variables that have to be functioning perfectly in order for their product to flourish.  But customer communication?  This is something we can control, and something that has a major impact in terms of reputation management and branding.  Let’s not screw it up!