Table of contents for Free Domain Names

1. Free Domain Names: Give Them to Your Visitors and Reap the Rewards - Part 1

Kat’s recent domain give away made me realize the potential hidden in this kind of offer.

After some brainstorming, I came up with a set of tips to help you use domain names as gifts for both your visitors and yourself.

Why would I want to give domain names away?

Your domains cost you money. Your hard earned money. Why wouldn’t you save them for yourself?

Of course you’re entitled—and encouraged—to invest some money in the purchase of domains for your own use. But make no mistake: when you offer domain names as gifts to your readers, they won’t be the only benefited ones. You’ll reap rewards too:

- Traffic (people must visit your site to learn about your offer).

- Increased site activity (depending on what you ask interested visitors to do).

- A good reputation (you’ll be seen as a nice guy/gal).

Remember that site activity and a good reputation lead to more traffic. The 3 items together can help you make more money.

Why would my visitors be interested in getting free domain names?

Domains are very affordable these days. Your visitors wouldn’t be interested in your domain name give away because they can buy URLs for themselves, right?

Wrong!

A minute ago you objected to offering for free the domain names that had cost you (little) money. But if you could grab some free domains for your own use, you’d be very happy, wouldn’t you? Now why would your visitors be any different? Everyone likes freebies, especially when such freebies can help them make more money, as is the case with domains.

You may have guessed that domain name give aways don’t necessarily appeal to all types of audience. In the next installment, I’ll tell you one or two things about adapting free domain offers to various niches. Stay tuned and subscribe to The WebMaster Blog!

~Kat~

They just access a blog, drop a card on the Entrecard widget and move on to the next blog, where they’ll repeat the process. They couldn’t care less for the bloggers behind the pages they visit. They don’t pay attention to the posts. All they want is to accumulate Entrecard credits as fast as possible. However, when other Entrecard users behave the same way, they complain a lot: “How come all those people come here, drop a card and go away? Why don’t they take the time to click on my wonderful headlines and read my precious articles? How can they be so evil to me?” Talk about incoherence!

But do you know what? There’s an easy way to take advantage of this situation.

It’s very easy to beat selfish Entrecard users

If you’re surrounded by a selfish crowd, what’s the best way to stand out and make a difference? That’s an easy one: do not be selfish. Be generous and friendly. Offer the others exactly what you’d like to be offered.

Do you want interested visitors? Subscribers? More comments? You can get it all if you do one simple thing: whenever you visit a blog owned by a fellow Entrecarder, drop your card and leave a meaningful comment on a post.

By doing this you’ll show good-will towards the blogger, whom on his/her turn will likely return the favour. This could be the beginning of a promising relationship. In the end the blogger may become a regular visitor and/or subscriber to your blog. Of course, I highly recommend that you reciprocate.

“This is too time-consuming,” you might argue.

Let me tell you something that shouldn’t be a secret for anyone: there’s no magic way to generate repeat visits for a blog or site. If a traffic generation method looks too good to be true… you know. All effective promotion techniques require time, effort and persistence. This one couldn’t be different.

Besides, it’s about giving people what they want, as opposed to sitting down and waiting for everyone to serve you as if they were your slaves. Be nice to others and many will be nice to you too. It’s that simple.

How the Entrecard-drop-and-comment scheme works

1. You visit a blog containing the Entrecard widget. Ideally, you want to access blogs whose topics you’re familiar with.

2. You drop your Entrecard, as usual.

3. Instead of leaving the blog right away, you choose a post that catches your attention and read it.

4. Finally, you leave a relevant comment on the article you’ve just read. Since you’re familiar with the blog’s topic, it shouldn’t be difficult to come up with a nice message.

Special tip: let the blogger know you’ve found his/her blog via Entrecard. The reason why you want to do this is to show the blogger you aren’t one of those selfish quick droppers. You use Entrecard as a networking tool and you’re genuinely interested in building relationships.

There you have it: you’ve just made a blogger happier–who doesn’t like comments?–and encouraged him/her to not only reciprocate your Entrecard drop, but also pay attention to your posts. There’s no way a quick dropper can cause a better impression than you.

For more Entrecard tips and blogging advice, subscribe to our feed and read the new posts as soon as they’re published.

Your feedback is welcome. Leave a comment and share your Entrecard experiences with our readers.

Karen Zara is a writer who favours relationship building over selfish promotional actions. You can click here to contact her and/or learn more about her SEO writing services.

Then, when you are ready to set up a WordPress Blog, click on over to BlogOhBlog and pick up your free WordPress SEO for beginners eBook. The ebook is short and sweet. It is just 5 pages but the advice is sure to improve the SEO of your WordPress Blog.The eBook also contains links to some very popular WordPress Plugins. The best part, you don’t even need to register or give your email. The ebook is free with no strings attached!

First of all, in the last post, Kat linked to a post on Veritable Life regarding the controversial Section 11 of Google Chrome’s terms of service (TOS). For those who have not read the post yet, apparently in the first version of Google Chrome’s TOS, by using Chrome to post, submit or display any content which belonged to you, you automatically also grant Google worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify and publish the same content.

However, on 4th September 2008, barely a few days after the release of Google Chrome, Google has come out with an official statement saying that Google Chrome’s TOS has been updated, more specifically the content of Section 11 has been altered to:

11. Content license from you
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

The updated Section 11 is rather short but it is effective and simple. Internet users can now use Google Chrome without worry. You don’t even need to download a new copy of Chrome, because this updated TOS is retroactive and will cover everyone who has downloaded Google Chrome since the first day it was launched.

By the way, hot off the stove is the news that SiteMeter has completed its migration and it has a face lift in the way site tracking reports are displayed. Site tracking reports are now displayed with Flash. Check out the screen shot on the right.

One of the most noticable changes is that now you can manage all your tracked sites individual accounts under one primary account with only one login and password required. Previously there was no way for users to link several individual accounts under one primary account, users have to keep many logins and passwords and spend a lot of time just to login, logout and relogin to view other accounts. On top of the primary account, SiteMeter users can also receive Stats by email for multiple accounts.

Premium account users can also enjoy several new features from SiteMeter such as Aggregate Reports, Dedicated Path Report, RSS Activity Report and Most Popular Pages report.

SiteMeter is one of the better site and visitor tracking services available. It is especially useful for webmasters whose host do not provide built-in tracking reports and also those using free blogging platforms such as Blogger which also lacks such a feature. If you need such a tool for your website, feel free to check out SiteMeter.

Question(s) of the day: Have you been using Google Chrome? What do you feel about it? What site statistics tools do you use for your websites?

Do you enjoy our post? If yes, why not take a minute to subscribe to The WebMaster Blog?

Turnip of Power writes an excellent article on why your affiliate links just aren’t paying. You may be surprised. It has nothing to do with the quality of your blog.

Technically Easy has a great post that explains how to recover data from a hard drive failure caused by bad sectors. This is valuable information, because if you spend enough time on computers, you will have a hard drive failure!

And last but not least Veritable Life has a post on why you should carefully read the Terms of Service before you use Google’s new browser Chrome.