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“I’ve spent so much time, money and effort on my website and it isn’t doing anything for me. I need someone to show me, in a language I understand, how to fix and get the most out of my website.” An Australian Small Business Owner

Only half of Australian small businesses have a website and of those businesses that have a website, less than a quarter of them feel they use their website and the Internet well enough to get a real tangible dollar benefit from it.

Achieve More Online is part of the Federal Government’s $14M Small Business Online program. The program will help small businesses, particularly those in tourism and professional services – get online and achieve more.

You may already have a website and want it to work harder for you. Or you may be looking to go online for the first time. Whatever stage you are at, the Achieve More Online program has 7 small business specialists who will show you, in simple steps, how to improve your online presence to ultimately put more $$ in your bottom line.

1 day hands-on workshop, 12 locations across WA and NT

In just 1 day, you’ll learn the 8 fundamental building blocks of a successful online marketing and website strategy and have a complete action plan to help you put that knowledge to use.

The 7 small business owners and specialists in their field will show you how to use the Internet to promote your business and create a website that works to deliver real dollars to your bottom line.

From business planning through to optimising your site for search engines and simple online marketing tools, everything you need to know about developing a better online business will be delivered to you in an interactive workshop and 1-to-1 mentoring sessions where we will help you solve your business’ specific problems.

At the end of the 1 day workshop, you’ll understand the 8 building blocks of a well balanced, effective online marketing plan:

• business plan, target market & purpose
• website design
• content building & copywriting
• graphic design & layout
• website imagery & photos
• website traffic generating tools such as pay per click advertising (PPC) & search engine optimisation (SEO)
• website promotion & relationship building tools such as Twitter, Facebook & other social media
• and the often underutilised and powerful email marketing tools you have at your disposal

All it costs is just 1 day and $49

In just 1 day you will have a complete action plan to create or upgrade your small business website and all for only $49.

You’ll know the right steps involved, and you’ll have a smart detailed action plan to get you started. You can contact us for follow-up support if you need further help or guidance throughout the program.

Want more information or to register?

Workshops commence in June across several locations throughout metropolitan and country WA and the Northern Territory.

Visit our website www.businessbalance.com.au/sbo for more details and to register online or alternatively fill out the attached form and fax it back to us to secure your place.

If you have any questions please phone us on 1300 856 274.

We look forward to helping you get the most out of being online.

This is an Australian Government funded initiative under the Small Business Online program

Google has just launched a Public DNS service according to a post on the Official Google Blog. The goal of the service is “to benefit users worldwide while also helping the tens of thousands of DNS resolvers improve their services, ultimately making the web faster for everyone“. On their product page they promise that the service is more secure as well as faster than many traditional domain name service resolved provided by the ISPs.

The OpenDNS like service will as a side benefit Google would also be able to see and track DNS queries of the users on the service and potentially redirect unresolved searches into Google Searches, similar to what many ISPs already do today. The company does promised not to use the data for anything else, but does state that non personal data will be stored for an indefinite period.

Google would also be able to block sites through the service that are for example suspected phishing sites. Depending on adaption the service could even introduce alternative TLDs, comparable to alternative root systems like new.net. For now their policy states that their service “never blocks, filters, or redirects users“. ICANN has recently issued an memorandum speaking out against NXdomain resolution for new gTLDs.

(c) 2009 DomainNameNews.com

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In an announcement making some waves in the SEO world last week, Yahoo announced that they would be ending their paid inclusion program.  SearchEngineLand.com points out access to Yahoo’s paid inclusion sales page has been redirected to their advertising.yahoo.com.

“Both the “Search Submit Basic” program that charged an annual fee per URL and the “Search Submit Pro” cost-per-click program will end as of Dec. 31, 2009.”

Yahoo’s paid inclusion has faced some criticism from those who believe including paid ads in an organic search makes the results biased. At the press conference announcing the Yahoo/Microsoft deal in July the company said “we’ll decide on that later”.  Well it looks like they decided.

This may turn out to be a good thing for PPC on Yahoo. With paid inclusion gone advertisers will be looking for that same traffic and those ad dollars could shift to PPC.  Any kind of uptick in PPC would be a benefit to domain owners parking with Yahoo. We’ll see.

(c) 2009 DomainNameNews.com

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OK, I have had a gut full of people using the phrase “Premium Domain/s” to describe their piece of crap domain names!

Every time I look in forums or on domain blogs there seems to be some dickhead trying to flog their worthless domains to some poor unsuspecting domain newbie that gets sucked into the who “Premium Domain” bullshit. Excuse my French but this reeeeeeally pisses me off.

Trust me on this one, www.i-bloody-great-bullshit-domain-name.biz does not class as a “Premium Domain” in my books.

People who are new to domains and reading this blog, please please please!!! DO YOU RESEARCH before you hand over your cash for these rubbish domains.

I could go and register 100 new hand registered names that are better than 80% of the crap that I see being bought and sold in the domain aftermarket. STOP and THINK! before you buy a name, ask yourself, Is this a generic word or phrase that is being searched on in Google or the other Search Engines or is it just some made up crap that someone thinks is a great idea and is sure to catch on one day or be “Brandable”.

Sorry to rant on guys & girls but this has just gotten beyond a joke and I had to say something.

PS. My above Premium Domain i-bloody-great-bullshit-domain-name.biz is for sale for a limited time only for the bargain basement price of just US$10,000!

Any takers???

Regards

Ed

My guests today on Domain Names Podcast are Paul Sloan & David Carter from www.PlayingTheAngles.com

Paul Sloan is a longtime journalist, who has worked for Fortune Magazine, National Public Radio, CNN and a bunch of other places, on staff and as a freelancer. Paul has interviewed people such as Kevin Ham in that great article that was published in the Business 2.0 Magazine back in May 2007 before the magazine closed down.

Paul has teamed up with David Carter, an Internet Marketing specialist and domain name investor from the UK and together, they plan on building an interactive site, based on interviews and business experiments with some of the world’s finest entrepreneurs.

One of their first guests in Frank Schilling who does not do that many interviews and has some great gems of wisdom in the interview with Paul.

These are two very switched on guys who I am sure will have great success with their new project at Playing The Angles

Thanks to them both for being on my podcast, I hope you enjoy what they have to say.

On this episode of Domain Names Podcast my guest is Patrick Ruddell from www.ChefPatrick.com.

Patrick started his Domain Names Blog only 12 months ago and has built it into a fantastic resource for the domain industry. With its unique blend of Video, Comic Strips & Reviews it stands out from the crowd of often same old same old domain blogs.

Patrick has put a great deal of effort into his WordPress based website and I think he has done a great job for a “Non Techie” as he calls himself.

I hope you enjoy the podcast.

Next week I will have the pleasure of having as a guest on Domain Names Podcast, Johns Wu the original owner / creator of www.Bankaholic.com. For those of you who have been living in a cave without internet for the past 9 months, Johns sold www.Bankaholic.com to www.BankRate.com for a reported US$15 Million dollars after only a few years of the site being created (in WordPress by the way). Nice going Johns!

If you have any questions you would like me to ask Johns in the interview then please email me ed(@)ozdomainer.com or make a comment on this post. Cheers Ed

My guest on this the 15th Episode of Domain Names Podcast is Morgan Linton from DomainVestors.tv & LintonInvestments.com

Morgan has had various websites relating to the Domain Name industry running over the past few years and has a wealth of knowledge on the buying and selling of domains, development on domains, SEO & domain brokerage.

Morgan kindly offered a discount on his services to Oz Domainer Podcast listeners and by simply quoting “OZ 111″ in an email or over the phone to Morgan he will give a 20% discount on his regular fees. This was not a planned thing and just happened during the podcast and I get NO commissions or kickbacks from Morgan for this referral.

I think Morgan is a very smart young guy who has a great business mind and work ethic and will be one of the domainers to watch out for as he is very focused and doing some great work.

I hope you enjoy this podcast.

I was looking over some of my .COM.AU domain names that I own that are hyphenated, I don’t have many hyphenated domains but I still think if the search phrase is a strong one then it is worth having. In Australia I have been surprised to find many businesses online that have the “‘hyphenated” version of the name if the the “non-hyphenated” name is already taken and they build very solid online businesses out of them.

So while I was looking at these names that I own -

www.mountain-bike.com.au

www.mountain-bikes.com.au

www.road-bike.com.au

www.road-bikes.com.au

www.bmx-bike.com.au

www.bmx-bikes.com.au

I came across this website www.bicyclestore.com.au which on its own is a half decent domain name to have, but I also discovered that this same business owned www.mountainbike.com.au, www.mountainbikes.com.au, www.roadbikes.com.au & www.bmxbikes.com.au, which all redirect to his main website, not a bad effort and who knows how many other generic domain names he owns relating to his products and services.

Now without talking with the owners of the business I can never be sure of how much traffic that those names are bringing in but I did a quick calculation using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool set for “Australian” stars and it would be over 360,000 searches per month just on the exact match phrases alone for those names.

So its great to see that more and more businesses seem to be getting a grasp of the true value of generic domain names.

On this episode of Domain Names Podcast I talk with my mate Ben Wilks, Domainer & SEO Guru! Now I do not use the word GURU very lightly as it gets used a great deal where it shouldn’t be, but in Ben’s case it would be an understatement if anything.

Ben has been working in SEO & Web Publishing since his mid teens (he turns 30 this year) so for 15 years or half his life. Now I know for a fact that Ben would more than likely be cringing when I use the word “Guru” as it is something he would never say about himself.

So in this podcast we mainly talk about SEO and its relationship to domain names and cover some of the important facts relating to SEO. Ben has only one client and is not actively looking for more, he uses his talents these days to work on his own domain development projects rather than having to deal with clients.
But as he you will hear in the podcast, if you are very very very!!!! serious about an SEO project he is happy to talk turkey with you.

During the podcast we mentioned a very good SEO Tutorial website Called Hobo Web, here is the link.

Enjoy!