A few days ago I was listing to a US radio station through the Internet. I enjoy listening to talk radio from the US via the Internet, it kind of brings a little piece of home to me here in the Philippines where I live.
The funny thing happened the other day, though, while I was listening. They had a commercial during the program for a company that was selling something through its website. I don’t recall what was being sold, but it was something that I had an interest in, and I wanted to go check out the website. Problem was, I could not understand the domain name that was being said. It was a strange name, not a normal word. The radio announcer must have said the name of the site like 5 or 6 times during the ad, but I never could understand it! I kept waiting for him to spell the name so that people could more easily go visit the site, but that never happened!
Let’s face it, when you are looking for a domain name, a lot of the simple names are already taken these days. You might end up with a name a little more complicated than you would have wanted. The key, though, is that even if the name is not so simple, you have to make sure that people know how to get to your site! If you are telling somebody about your site, make sure you spell the name! Have some business cards printed up with your website address listed there too! A lot of people won’t remember the exact name that you tell them and might end up on the wrong site. But, if you give them a printed card with the domain name, that makes it easy for them to find you.
Does it matter what your domain name is? Well, to some extent it does. In the example I have been discussing, the company had a very complicated name, and it made it impossible for me to find them, resulting in a total waste of the advertising dollars they spent! In other forms of advertising, though, the name means a lot less. For example, if you put up some banner ads, or even text ads on various websites, in these cases people need only click on your ad to end up on your site. They may or may not even notice what your domain name is. So, in this type of advertising the name means much less.
What it comes down to is that whatever your domain name is, make sure that people can get to your site! Don’t pay for advertising that is worthless, because people are unable to understand how to find your site after hearing or seeing your ad!
Hi Bob, I have recently discovered that Filipinos tend to say ‘splashjam’ without the letter ‘H’ in it! They say splasjam, this was a slight oversight I think by me.
Regarding the click-on adverts, I was thinking about using adsense for this but I am unsure as to how much money to pay per month and if it will be worth it given the low number of hits I currently get. For example if I pay $30 per month to adsense do you have any idea of the increase in hits I will receive? Also how much are banner ads?
Finally, do you know what I would need to add music and video clips to a website, is it add on software or a particular type of site.
Kind regards
Phil
Hi Phil – Regarding the domain name, if people are mis-spelling the name a lot, you might want to buy both domains. Then, just redirect the one without the “h” to go to the one with the “h” – pretty simple!
Regarding buying ads, Google AdWords doesn’t work like that – no monthly payments. You bid how much you will pay per click, then they place the ad on relevant websites and you don’t pay unless somebody clicks. Also, you can set a daily budget. If you are saying that you might want to pay $30 per month, just set your daily budget at $1. Once you have spent your $1 for today, the ad won’t show anymore until tomorrow.
Adding music and video clips to your site is not too hard to do. First, though, I need to know how your site is built. Are you using WordPress or some other CMS software to build the site on, is it just straight HTML code, or what? Let me know that, and I will give you some methods to add your video and audio clips.
Hi Bob, thanks for your ideas. The website I used is a sitebuilder wizard from 123reg. I was thinking of doing my next one in wordpress though.
Thanks.
Hi Phil – OK, I am not too familiar with that software… actually I have never used it, but I’ll try to give my best guess on what to do in order to accomplish the things that you want to do.
The video is actually quite easy. What I would recommend is that you should open up an account on YouTube.com. The account is free, so no worries there. Then, you should upload your videos to YouTube. Once you do that, you can embed the Video into your website. Nice thing is that YouTube pays for all the bandwidth used, and Video uses a lot of Bandwidth! So, that will save you a lot of money. It will also help attract more people to your site, since the Video will get views on YouTube’s site too!
For the audio, that is a little harder. If you were using WordPress, it would be an easy matter of putting in a plugin to handle the audio. For your site, though…. I recommend that you do some searching on the net to see what you can find. You should particularly search for “podcasting” since that is pretty much what you are wanting to do.
Good luck!
Thanks Bob, I will try that.