2Fish 4Business

If your business has a website, your domain name is one of your most critical assets. It may be tied to your own name (CarolLoganNewbill.com) or it may be tied to your business name (2FishWeb.com). Either way, it’s critical that you own it, with your name (or company’s name) as the Registrant.

To check on the ownership of your domain name, go to Domain Tools and type the domain name into the search box. You will see the registration information of record, as in this example.

You or your business should always be listed at the top as Registrant. It’s perfectly ok if the hosting company is listed under Administrative or Technical Contact — the Registrant is the actual owner and the one who controls what happens to the name. The Billing Contact should be the person or entity that actually pays the domain renewal fees each year. This might be you or it might be your hosting company. Either is fine.

Many hosting companies offer a “free” domain name as part of your hosting package, but there can be a catch.

Now look at this WhoIs information. This is a real domain registration, a domain name that is the name of a real quilt artist. I’ve changed it here to “FamousQuilter.com” for the sake of anonymity.

This artist signed up for web hosting from a large hosting provider which offers a free domain name included with the cost of their inexpensive shared webhosting. After some period of time she became dissatisfied with the hosting account and changed hosts, only to realize that the original hosting company owned her domain name. Her own personal name, and they owned it. Nor would they consider releasing it to her for any amount of money.

She eventually registered “FamousQuilter.net” and set up her new website under that name, but the first hosting company still controls the .com version. Legal recourse is possible but very expensive; the artist must first file a legal trademark for her own name and then, if trademark protection is granted, file a dispute with ICANN concerning the improper use of her trademark. These two actions would cost a minimum of $2,500 and could require several years for resolution.

Note well the annotations I’ve circled in red: “Client Update Prohibited” and “Client Transfer Prohibited.” The artist has no control over her own personal name, and she can’t do anything about it without legal action and much expense.

Not all webhosting companies will hold your domain name hostage.

Many web hosts will offer to register a domain name in your name as a service or as part of a webhosting package. With some hosts, transferring your name to your own account is easy if you later decide to change web hosts; with others it’s a bit more hassle. However, if your name is listed as Registrant, you have final control over the account. And if someone else is managing your domain name(s), you generally don’t need to worry about renewals and other behind-the-scenes minutiae. It’s included in your monthly or annual hosting fees.

Make sure that your webhost offers registration in your own name if you choose to register through them.

How much does a domain name cost, if you register it yourself?

Domain name registrars are permitted to set their own rates by ICANN, the international entity which oversees all domain name registrations worldwide. Here is a sampling of current registration costs for .com domain name from several major companies (all rates are for one year; discounts often available for multi-year registrations):

- GoDaddy $10.69
- DotEarth $25.00
- EnomCentral.com $34.00
- Network Solutions $34.99
- Register.com $35.00

Note that rates for all registrars are increasing on July 1 of 2010, by order of ICANN.

How much is your business name — and your personal name as an artist — worth? Make sure that, whoever registers your domain name, you are listed as the owner/Registrant.

Don’t make a costly mistake in order to save a few dollars at the beginning.

Early in June an interesting brouhaha happened on one of the email lists to which I belong.

A talented writer and artist created a long, detailed blog postabout creating stamps for decorating fabric. Many people praised it and several asked her to release it in e-book form so they could download and keep a copy. Agreeing that it was a terrific idea, she published it as a Kindle book available from Amazon. She immediately found herself in the midst of a storm of controversy.

Some readers felt that she had no right to charge for the information that she had previously given away for free. One even went so far as to say that she now felt morally justified in “stealing” the material by copying and printing off the blog post. Others howled because they did not own a Kindle and thought they would have to buy a $250 reader device to download the book. Others howled because the Kindle is black-and-white only and the photographs that accompanied the article were in color. It’s also not possible to print from the Kindle, so the reader has no opportunity to create a hard copy for future reference.

Her readers were probably expecting a PDF ebook. Amazon ebooks are very easy to create and publish – just upload an HTML-encoded file (in which format the blog post already existed). Links remain links within the Kindle file. Creating a PDF ebook requires a bit more expertise from the author but would probably be worth it to the readers.

The author’s failure here lay in not educating her audience prior to releasing her product for sale. Kindle software which supports color images is available for PC/Mac, iPad, and iPhone, free from Amazon. No reading device is required. (Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem you can print from the Kindle software either.)

Until this little whirlwind occurred, I was not aware of the Amazon Kindle option for publishing ebooks. Creating both a Kindle version and a PDF version that could be sold directly seems to me to be a great pair of options for producing and distributing information products. Do both!

What about the free-vs-pay controversy?

Of course the author is entitled to charge for her work. The Amazon ebook sells for $2.99 and her royalty is about $1.00 per copy. Hardly highway robbery.

My suggestion would have been, once there was obvious interest in the information, to create both a PDF and the Kindle e-book, add a post to the blog about how to purchase them, and then take down the original post.

Those who howled about “no right to charge for it” would of course still howl. Most readers, I think, would have been very happy to pay a small amount to have it formatted and ready to print out without having to copy and paste from quirky blog software.

All it takes is a little education.

Just as your website needs to be maintained, so does your self-hosted WordPress installation. WordPress software has been updated ten times in just the past year, adding new features and closing security loopholes as they are discovered during use. In addition, plugins are constantly being updated and should be kept current as well. Here’s a checklist of what you should be looking for and when to tackle these tasks.

(more…)

One piece of advice you’ll see over and over again (yes, from me too) is to engage your audience with blog posts, newsletters, email, Twitter and Facebook. This means writing in such a way that your ideas are communicated clearly to your readers.

(Puts on hat of Mrs. Spurlock, fifth-grade English teacher)

Grammar counts!

I followed a link this morning to a blog post that looked interesting, on the subject of making your WordPress installation hacker-proof. The first two sentences read:

Today there is more and more security breaches than ever before. Web browsers seems to fall behind faster than they can spell to themselves and this really makes an online business or venture quite hard work.

Web browsers spell to themselves? Who knew?

The entire article was unreadable because of numerous subject-verb number disagreements. Simple homonym problems such as “boarders” when the author meant “borders.” Not to mention the usual suspects of “it’s/its” and “you’re/your.”

I must be fair. Since there was no contact information on the site, I looked up the domain name WhoIs to find out that the site was registered in Sweden. English is obviously not the writer’s first language. On the other hand, if he is writing for an audience who will read in a language not his own, it seems reasonable to have a fluent speaker review and edit the article. This reads like he ran it through Babelfish.

The writer of this blog post failed in his most important task — he did not communicate his ideas clearly. He was so muddly, in fact, that I have made a note not to follow any links to this particular website in the future. It’s just not worth my time to try to puzzle out what he means.

Spelling counts too!

CBS42.com, which really should know better, recently ran a story about former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy and his ongoing battle with the courts over hidden assets.

Attorney for HealthSouth shareholders John Somerville was quoted:

”[The] IRS back in 2003 documented some 300 million dollars worth of property he had and that frankly a lot of it is missing. All the jewelry, 21 carrot diamonds, artwork is missing…”

Although the meaning of the sentence is still clear in this case, the absurdity of the mental image completely stopped this reader’s train of thought.

How many readers are you potentially losing because of unclear writing or poor spelling skills?

I’m not obsessive about keeping track of my Twitter followers, but I do tend to keep an eye on the total number. If I see a big jump all at once, it’s likely that the spammers are out in force again, and I go check to see who I need to block. If I see a big drop all at once, it might be that Twitter is cleaning out the spammers that I didn’t catch… or… was it something I said?

I may regret this, but I just signed up with a service called Qwitter.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The correct URL is UseQwitter.com. If you try to go to Qwitter.com, you’ll end up on a soft porn page.

You don’t need to give your password, just your Twitter ID and your email address. Qwitter watches your followers list and sends you an email like this when someone unfollows you:

John Gruber (gruber) stopped following you on Twitter after you posted this tweet:

What’s the difference between Arial and Helvetica?

I say I may regret it because it might crush my ego that people don’t like me (sniffle), but on the other hand, it could be good information about who thinks I am boring or offensive (although I’m not nearly as potty-mouthed as some of the bloggers I know. Okay, I’m not really potty-mouthed at all. Don’t want to raise false hopes either). This could help me post more useful information for those who do like what I write.

I’ll report back after I’ve had a chance to collect some data. In the meantime, do you keep track of your followers, or let ‘em fall where they may?

Over the past two days, hackers have posted the stolen login information and passwords for thousands of email accounts at GMail, AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo. While Gmail has taken steps to remedy the problem, there are some things that you should do immediately to protect your accounts:

- Check your email account for suspicious activity
- Reset your password NOW
- Don’t use the same password for every login you use.

I’m not going to lecture on why it’s a bad idea to use your first pet’s name as your password. I’m just going to show you one way to choose a secure one that isn’t easily cracked.

If you have other methods, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

(more…)

In one of my earlier work lives as a quilt book editor, I went to just about every major quilt show and festival held each year. We looked for great examples of quilting art and craft to feature in magazines and books… and like everyone else, we shopped a little while there.

Only a little. Those rumors you heard about my not being able to see out the rear view mirror coming home are completely unfounded. I promise.

Because I was there on business and had to maximize the use of my time, I had to develop an efficient way to see everything and then to whittle down to things I was most interested in. I also have a mild sensory integration dysfunction, which means that I get overwhelmed really easily. I needed to create a checklist to keep myself on target.

(more…)

I’m on quite a few newsletter lists. Like most people, I tend to sign up for them and then lose at least some interest in the company. If a newsletter comes in that happens to offer something I am looking for right now, I will probably click on it. Otherwise, I’ll skim the email and delete, which is most of the time.

So this one from American Science & Surplus really caught my eye this morning. (Highlighting added; click to enlarge photo.)

Did I click on that link? You bet I did! I mean, who doesn’t want 25,000 bonus frequent flyer miles if AS&S ever buys a surplus airline?

If I were running this campaign, I would add anyone who clicked to the preferred customer list and just let them all believe that they were in the first 250. I’d have a special landing page that the link goes to, with my very best product deals on sale. Customers have to click on the email link to get the deal — anyone else pays regular price.

Now I have no immediate need for a boxed set of Cosmos DVDs or a robot hamster wheel, two of the items on the sale landing page. But clicking the link got me to their site, where I might find something else I didn’t know I wanted until I saw it on sale, and reminded me again that browsing AS&S is just plain fun. And who doesn’t need a chuckle now and then?

What a great marketing tool!

American Science and Surplus

How can you use information like this in your next customer newsletter?

Yesterday the New York Times published a piece called Networking for the Shy Entrepreneur. It covered the basics: don’t try to sell, be yourself, think of it as “relationship-building” instead of “networking.” Nothing much new there, and nothing that really helps an introverted IT professional when he or she is dragged to the monthly Chamber of Commerce luncheon.

Here’s another tip.

(more…)