* Does it matter whether we have .com , .net , .biz, .org, (etc) for SEO purposes?
* If your main keyword domain has gone, what is the impact of using hyphens?
* Does having a keyword in a broad match domain name have as much value as an exact match keyword domain?
* What is best practice for adding a word to the beginning or end of the domain/phrase – which is better?
* would it be prudent to register a domain name in the top three TLD’s just to keep the competitors at bay?

To answer the questions above NobleSamurai posted two videos made by Kenny Goodman. If you don’t now him, Kenny originally made his money dominating the lead-generation side of some of the most hyper-competitive industries around – Finance, Telecommunications, Nightclubs (promoting Ministry of Sound clubs in the UK) and even Skip Rental (Dumpster Rental). Two of the businesses he’s created to date have been valued at over $10,000,000.

It’s through lead-generation that Kenny honed his skills around SEO, and SEO for domain names.

Domains as “Virtual Real Estate”

At the same time, Kenny also began treating domains like real estate after seeing he could get better returns from his domains than his bricks-and-mortar properties – buying, renovating, and building up the domains – then leasing or selling them for big profits.

* In one recent transaction Kenny bought a $69 domain, and sold it within weeks for $25,000 – a 36,132% Return On Investment (try doing that in real estate!)
* In another, he bought a £500 (UK) domain, got it ranked on the first page in Google, and then sold it for £12,000 (that’s a quick profit of over $17,000 USD, or a 2,300% Return On Investment.)

(He also uses a unique strategy for acquiring domains, then renting them out to big businesses for a monthly fee, earning himself a healthy ongoing cashflow from each domain instead of selling the domain for a once-off fee – but to get that strategy, you’ll need to ply him with a good bottle of red wine.)

Domain Name SEO 101

In his first video Kenny takes us through the fundamentals of domain optimization – Domain Name SEO 101 – what a domain is, and what it is that defines that gap between a good domain name and a bad domain name.

The key focus of this video is the critical difference between Exact Match, Phrase Match and Broad Match optimized domains, and how the search engines give Exact Match optimized domains higher rankings.

Understanding Domain Name SEO – Your Questions Answered

In this second video Kenny will be answering questions taken straight from the recent blog comments – while explaining many of the core concepts it’s important to know about when you are optimizing your domains.

This second video focuses on the questions:
# Which is the best domain name extension – .com, .net, .org, .com.au, etc – does it matter?
# Should you avoid hyphenation in domain names?
# Does “keyword density” affect domain names?
# Adding prefixes and suffixes to domains – what are the right and wrong ways?

In this video Kenny offers his own personal experience around key factors and how they’ve given him better results, and provides guidance around some of the more hotly debated points around domain name optimization.

There are many good questions raised by the NobleSamurai blog readers after watching these videos, in case you have some questions in mind please visit the blog here. NobleSamurai has a product called MarketSamurai. It’s a very good Keyword Research Tool that allows free user to do Keyword Research. Try it, you’ll like it!

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Most digital goods sellers don’t have download protection to protect themselves against free downloads. You probably think it won’t happen to you, or if it happened you can live with that.

Fellow Internet Marketers, maybe you underestimate this illegal action. It will happen to you if it hasn’t already. It won’t be one or two either, it will be a flood of illegal downloads from your site. Let’s look at this scenario: Somebody purchased your product and was directed to the download page after payment processed. Then this person decided to bookmark the download page using the social bookmarking sites such as delicious or others. The default setting for some social bookmarking sites is public and because most people don’t bother to change the setting your download page link will be visible to other people from anywhere in the world, and if they like what this person has bookmarked they can add it to their bookmarks too. If your product is so darn good a lot of people will happily add the download link to their bookmarks. Things can go even worse if the search engines start detecting your download link being shared within the social bookmarking sites. You DON’T want your download page get indexed by the search engines.

Perhaps the scenario above is too extreme and I haven’t found a download page link sitting on the first page of Google yet (or maybe I wasn’t ‘lucky’ enough?) but link sharers do exist and have always been a problem. Some people think it’s okay to post the link to your download page in a forum somewhere, and while most forum owners are honest and will take the post down, sometimes, with a busy forum, it may go unnoticed.

How to Prevent This From Happening?

It is incredibly important that you have the right protection for your product. While you can’t prevent all fraud, having download protection can certainly help.

There are some different options out there for you. One of the outdated options is to simply password-protected the download directory on your server. To do this you have to go into your web host’s Cpanel and select a directory to protect and then give your customers the username and password to access the product. This method is obviously not the most professional way to go but if you can’t afford to purchase download protection this is considered to be an alternative solution.

E-junkie

If you can afford to purchase download protection for your money site you may want to try E-junkie. It offers you a free one week trial and after that you can pay as little as $5 per month.

E-junkie automates and secures the digital delivery of files and codes and has no transaction limit, no bandwidth limit, no setup fee and no transaction fee.

Other E-junkie features:

Customize your checkout page, thank you page and thank you e-mail sent to the buyer.

Limit the number of downloads and validity of secure product download links.

Accept Multiple currency and language support.

Supports Google adwords tracking, Yahoo overture, MSN Adcenter, AdBrite and other tracking programs.

Send out a promotional copies of your products using free download link feature.

Easily re-activate and re-send the download links if required.

View and download your transactions log anytime.

How It Works

Once you register, you can add products from the admin panel. For each product you will get BUY NOW and ADD TO CART / CHECKOUT buttons. All you need to do is to paste either of these button codes in your website. This is the only step you are involved in. Rest of the process is automatic.

Buyer purchases your product using E-Junkie’s buttons and pays you directly in your PayPal, Google Checkout, 2CheckOut, Authorize.Net or ClickBank account using their credit card, PayPal or Google Checkout account. Your payment processor notifies E-junkie’s server.

E-junkie’s server verifies the notification and screens for fraud. Buyer will then be redirected to the download page instantly if the product is digital product. Additionally, an e-mail is sent to the buyer with the download link and your custom message.

SmartDD – Automated Digital Delivery System

SmartDD gives you a fully functioning download protection for the first 5 digital products you sell and you can install it on as many domains as you like, this is not a per-domain licence fee. If you have more than 5 products to protect then you can upgrade the license for a one-time fee of $97. Note that everybody join in as FREE Member initially meaning there is no fee to pay. It is ideal for people like me who just start selling digital products online and want to keep the expenses as low as possible before seeing the money flowing in.

This is how SmartDD automated digital delivery works, in a nutshell.

1. You receive a payment from a customer via PayPal (and now ClickBank too).
2. PayPal sends the details to SmartDD.
3. SmartDD sends an email to your customer with a UNIQUE link to the download page which has their name, email address, and home or business address on it.
4. Your customer goes to the download page and downloads their purchase by clicking on another UNIQUE link.
5. After they’ve downloaded, the link expires.
6. 24 hours after the purchase, it will also send out a personalised follow-up email to your customer which can be an upsell, cross-sell or any message you wish, even an additional unadvertised bonus just to keep their interest.

Cool?

- Rudi

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I’ve been busy this week moving my blog and website domains to HostGator. I used to spread the domains on multiple C-class IP address but I found this hosting plan gave no benefits to my blogs so far. After calculating all the expenses I decided to change hosting to HostGator and I already moved three of my blogs. In addition to the change hosting issue I also get rid of some crap domains that don’t make me any money. I actually should have changed the hosting plan months ago but was very reluctant to do it mainly because I’m not familiar with the process.

The reason I used multiple C-class IP address was because last year I bought a product called MSN loophole. MSN was said to be the easiest search engine to manipulate and we could target high paying keywords with this method to rank on the first page of MSN, something impossible to do with Google and Yahoo!.. I had to build some money sites supported with blogs powered by a script feeding contents to the blogs automatically. The blogs provided links to the money sites and the C-class network gave different IP address to each blog and the money sites, giving MSN impression that the links were coming from different places or servers. Some people hit the first pages of MSN but not me.

Back to the change hosting story, it was quite scary to do this actually but I sacrificed one blog that had less content to see how the process worked. After the first trial I could do the second and third ones confidently.

This is the documentation I made during the process. You may have simpler methods but at least this works for me:

- I FTP all the WP blog folders from the old server to my computer, including the WP plugins, themes and uploads. These files are to be uploaded to the new hosting once we set the new name server for the domain

- I import the WP database to my computer through the wp-admin –> Tools –> Export. This can also be done via my hosting’s cpanel actually but I decided to import the database from the WordPress admin. The database contains my posts, comments, links, categories and tags

- For pages with ads like ClickBank, Amazon or Google Adsense and Google Analytics tracking code I manually copy the codes to Notepad in case I can’t find them after re-installing on the new server. This is absolutely needed for ads placed on the sidebar. Most of the themes use widgets on the sidebar and the widgets carrying the ads codes were reset to blank after installation, at least this is my experience.

- I set new name server for the domain. My domains are registered with DomainRightNow so I have to change the name server from the DomainRightNow website and set the DNS to what HostGator gave me.

- After I confirm that my domain is hosted by HostGator I go to the cpanel and click on the Fantastico icon.
This is to install WordPress on the new hosting.

- After WordPress is installed I upload all the downloaded files (from the old hosting) on my computer to the server using the FTP software. This is including plugins, themes and uploads folders. Uploads folder contains images and other attached files to the blog posts.

- Once all files successfully uploaded to the new server I reapply the theme and reactivate the plugins. This is the best time to update the plugins as well. Then I check the permalinks and privacy settings. Other setting such as Google Analytics code should be checked too.

- My ads dissapeared. If no ads appear on the sidebar the best place to check is the sidebar widgets. On my three blogs I had to copy the links from my Notepad file to the widgets. Other than that everything was OK.

- I do final test by randomly opening some posts with images to see whether they have the picture installed properly. I also check some links including the ads links.

Hope I don’t miss something here. I need to change hosting for this blog soon and I don’t want to make any mistakes.

- Rudi

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