Anthony G Adams - Blog

DO IT.  THEN FIX IT AS YOU GO.

Domain Name Buying 101.

by Anthony G Adams

Yesterday, while swimming with some old friends (I would say 'getting a tan' but 'turning brighter and brighter red' is more applicable) the subject of buying web domain names came up after I told them I currently own over fifty of them.  The learning process that has been www.drinkthc.com has given me quite a bit of real world knowledge on the subject.  I did not go to school for web design or SEO and that's probably a good thing.  If you want theory, this is not what you want to read.  These are just my personal beliefs on what works after a lot of trial and error.

www.drinkthc.com started out as www.the-hangover-cure.com (the original site is still up, if you want to get a look at our humble origins and original color scheme) for reasons I will get into in a future blog dealing with SEO and what I believe google page crawlers are actually looking for in your site.  The original site name didn't exactly roll off the tongue, especially when pitching the product to drunks at bars:

"Hey there, dude/lady, check us out at double you double you double you dot the dash hangover dash cure dot com."  Off to a bad start.  We expected some guy with eight shots of Jack in his stomach to remember this the next day.  This is where you do not want to be.  Luckily, there is a better way:

Sound it out.  After you have picked out a potential domain name (godaddy.com can walk you through the process) you want to buy, gather your family, friends, enemies, etc. infront of your computer one by one.  Have them find your site by simply telling them the name.  Do not write it down and hand it to them.  Just talk it out and watch the results.  I recommend using your parents or the less tech-savvy for this litmus test (they are usually one and the same.  Love you mom.) to get an idea of what can go wrong when you have a bad domain name.  Never assume that just because you can find your own site that anyone else can. 

If I told twenty people to go to my cool new site, www.bkoolwidgets.com, the results would be disasterous.  www.becoolwidgets.com, www.bcoolwidgets.com, the potential for human error is enormous.  This usually leads your potential customers to your competitor's site or dead ends.  This is bad and exactly what happened with www.the-hangover-cure.com as people would forget the dashes, or the word "the" and so on.  We now own several variations of www.the-hangover-cure.com as a way to safeguard against this in the future. 

Compare www.the-hangover-cure.com to drinkTHC.com.  It is easy to remember and cannot be confused with anything else.  The success rate of telling someone "We sell The Hangover Cure, like THC?  You just drink it before bed.  Just go to drink THC dot com." and having them find us is obviously much greater than using our old approach I mentioned above.  The Kodak posting below from Paul Arden can give you added insight into this theory.

Keep It Short If Possible.  Wanna go buy a four letter domain name, like digg.com?  You can't.  Unless you are prepared to spend upwards of six figures to secure it.  The story of Digg and how it was founded is a perfect example of this. These domain names simply don't exist any more.  Literally, none of them.  See also: two and three letter domains.  I was in talks to buy binge.com (original name of The Hangover Cure at one point, don't ask) and was told I was getting a deal at $1,000 for the honor of getting a five letter, one word domain name that was easy to say.  And that is on the low end of what you can pay for a five letter domain name.  Thus, you have to be crafty and strike a nice balance between short and easy to remember or spend a lot of money on a domain name.  I prefer the former.

Facebook started out as thefacebook dot com (they have enough incoming links as it is, not adding one more).  I have no idea what they paid for their current domain name and the ability to drop "the" from their url but I am sure it was quite a bit.  Every letter and/or word you can eliminate from your domain name helps.  Keep your domain name short and easy to spell.

Dot com.  Only buy a domain name ending in dot com.  Strange new url endings like .us and .tv confuse people and are cheap for that very reason.  Do not buy them.  Legit sites end in dot com.  Which site would you feel more comfortable spending money on, just looking at domain name alone:

www.microsoft.com or www.micro-soft.us

I have mixed feelings on .net web addresses.  I am currently developing www.youdotcom.net simply because it sounds cool to me when spoken aloud and it was $8.  This is a rare exception though, avoid buying any website that doesn't end in dot com. 

IF YOU DON'T DO IT, IT DOESN'T EXIST.

by Paul Arden

A NEW idea can be either unfamiliar, or silly, or both.

It can't be judged by description.  It needs to be done (made) to exist.

It is unlikely that anyone will sanction the cost of something they don't understand, therefore you have no choice but to do it yourself.  At whatever cost.

You may have to beg, steal and borrow to get it done.  But that's for you to work out how you do it.

It's exciting.  It's difficult and it's fun.  If it was easy anyone could do it.

The film Citizen Kane is a very good example.  It was stolen, not sanctioned.

Orson Welles could not find any backers, but he did raise a small sum for casting.  He begged, borrowed and cajoled people into building sets and shooting full-blown screen tests which eventually formed a third of the film.

IT EXISTED.

Backers could see what they were getting.  He got the money.  Without him doing it when it supposedly couldn't be done, it would be another in the endless list of ideas that never happened. 

The Kane Mutiny.

When It's Right It Just Clicks.

by Paul Arden

In 1881 George Eastman, a junior clerk, left his safe job in a local bank to start a photographic company.

But here is the interesting part.

Seven years later he changed its name to 'Kodak', an odd choice since it was meaningless and in those days nobody gave random names to serious products.

Eastman's reasons for choosing the name were that it was short; that it was not open to mispronunciation; and it could not be associated with anything else.

Even today, corporations cannot think like that.  Only entrepreneurs can.

Cheese.

Ten Rules for Being Human


by Cherie Carter-Scott

1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it's yours to keep for the entire period. 2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called, "life." 3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial, error, and experimentation. The "failed" experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that ultimately "work." 4. Lessons are repeated until they are learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson. 5. Learning lessons does not end. There's no part of life that doesn't contain its lessons. If you're alive, that means there are still lessons to be learned. 6. "There" is no better a place than "here." When your "there" has become a "here", you will simply obtain another "there" that will again look better than "here." 7. Other people are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself. 8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours. 9. Your answers lie within you. The answers to life's questions lie within you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust. 10. You will forget all this.