Broadcasting live from the OpenSRS Webinar Broadcast Studios (aka Meeting Room 2)

If you missed the news about that launch, you can check out this post from Adam Eisner – we added dozens and dozens of new ccTLDs to the list of extensions you can sell through your OpenSRS reseller account.

Why ccTLDs? Which Ones Should I Offer? What are the Key Differences?

In the webinar, Adam talked about how we ended up adding all these new cTLDs, including some very open and transparent discussion about why we chose the ones we did.

He also provided some great advice on how you should approach bringing new ccTLDs to your customer base – that included thinking about your location, and the markets you serve.

Plus, he took a few minutes to fully explain some of the differences between these new ccTLDs and the rest of the TLDs we offer.

The webinar runs about 30 minutes with some questions and answers. As with all of our webinars, we recorded it (video and audio) so you can watch it when it’s convenient for you. You can access the recording here.

Another Great Webinar in February!

While we’re talking about webinars, we do have another one already lined up and on the schedule for the first week of February. We’re super excited to have Phil Shih from Structure Research in to provide a look at the hosting industry in 2012. This is exclusive to OpenSRS and promises to be an excellent session.

Find out more about that here, and of course, registration is free.

There is a real opportunity to be the trusted provider for your customers – and the provider they trust for everything they need, whether that’s domain registrations, hosting, email or whatever else you might offer them.

Do your customers know that you want all of their business, and do you go out of your way to help them move it to you?

Don’t Forget About Domain Transfers

One of the realities of getting started as an OpenSRS Reseller is that a lot of people already have a domain name. That reality makes your life easier because you don’t need to explain to them that having a domain name for their business is important.

Your customers and potential customers already know the value of a good domain and that opens the door for you to start selling things like a mobile website, hosting, web design, email and trust services to them.

But make sure you don’t overlook that domain when you bring the customer on board. Help the customer transfer their domains to you in any way you can so that you are able to offer a complete, end-to-end set of services.

Pro tip: Our retail division actually offers a concierge service that takes care of transfers for their customers. It’s something the customer is often happy to pay for, and it ensures that the transfer is taken care of successfully. Consider offering transfer concierge services to existing customers to get them to move their existing domains to you.

Helpful Resources

We provide a bunch of step-by-step guides that you can use to help those customers get their domains transferred to you. Transfers can sometimes be tricky and it’s important that you help the customer through the process so they don’t get frustrated and give up. You can grab the guides here.

Our Marketing Resource Center is full of helpful resources for domains, trust, email and publishing there for your use. Check it out.

Having the right information is a great help in making sure you get all the business that your customers want to entrust you with.

Thanks to Flickr user TerryJohnston for the photo, released under a Creative Commons license.

The video is embedded below (and you should feel free to embed it in your own site or blog if you are participating in the .XXX launch – grab the embed code from YouTube).

Want More Information?

For even more information on the launch and how you can help your customers, regardless of whether they are part of the adult community or not, we have a webinar coming up next week Thursday with Patrick Donaldson, Registrar Liaison, ICM Registry.

He’ll give you all the information you need to make an informed choice about whether you want to be a part of the launch. Adam Eisner, our Director of OpenSRS Product Management will also be there to talk about how OpenSRS will support the launch.

Like all OpenSRS webinars, this is a free event.

There’s More to the Launch of .XXX Than You Might Think
Date: Thursday, August 25, 2011
Time: 9:30 A.M. and 2:00 P.M. EDT (13:30 and 18:00 UTC)
Register now

The videos take viewers through the various steps they need to take to make video that stands out from the crowd – from choosing hardware, prepping content, shooting, editing and finally sharing the finished product.

As an OpenSRS Reseller, you are free to use the video series however and where ever you wish. No attribution is required. We tried to keep the look as generic as possible and as with all of our marketing materials, you can add your own branding or logo if you want to make it your own.

Available for download and on YouTube

All five parts are available on our YouTube channel but you can also download the videos in .mov format so you can upload them to your own video host, add your own logo or whatever else you might want to do. The videos and other .TV marketing resources are available on our .TV Marketing Resources page.

Video content is a great fit with .TV domains. Remember that we also have a .TV pricing promotion happening right now through the end of the year. More details on that promo and the signup form are here if you aren’t already taking advantage.

Part one of the series is embedded below to give you a sense of the content and also the production values:

One of the requests was for us to craft some content around the positioning of free vs paid email accounts using domain names for end users. We took a couple of stabs at it, and along with input from you, we’ve produced this one pager you can use however you like. It’s available in our email marketing resources section.

Go ahead and customize it for your own brand, copy and paste into you website, whatever you like. And don’t forget we’re always here for you… tell us what you need and we’ll get on it!

Disclaimer right off the top: this isn’t your usual “you need a blog” blog post. You do need a blog, but the truth is that beyond needing a blog, what you really need is a content strategy. In the spirit of openness around sharing with our Resellers, I’ll tell you this – we’re still learning about content and marketing ourselves, just as you are and I’m super excited about some of the insights I picked up today at BlogWorld.

I’m not going to go in depth on anything right here, but I do want to cover off a few of the big things that I picked up in sessions today that I think will be of use to you in your business. If you want to check out some of my notes from the sessions I attended today, I’ve opened up that part of my Evernote collection to you. Check that out here. And if you have any questions, hit me in the comments, through my personal Twitter account or through @OpenSRS (I’m ^JK).

I’ll give you three neat things that made me go “Oh, wow!” today when I heard them:

1. Having a content strategy is key. It’s not enough to have content. You need to create the right content. That means thinking about and identifying what your core subject is, then finding some related topics, your passions, and even looking at content that’s already out there that you can use. There’s more in my notes for “Building your Content Bubble” with David Murray. Great session – follow @davemurr on Twitter and check out his blog for lots more.
2. Pick a niche and dominate it. Identify your customers, figure out what they want and then target keywords and categories to provide content that they will find through searches. They have problems, you have the solutions – use your content to help them find you and it will lead to customer acquisition. There’s lots more in the notes from “Dominate Your Niche with Social SEO for Blogs” with Lee Odden. Lee blogs as well, and can be found on Twitter @leeodden. Worth checking out.
3. Social Media can drive customer acquisition big time. No, seriously – it can. And you can measure it and prove it. Case studies showed how you can induce your customers to create the right content for you, then leverage that content to drive more potential customers to your site. The secret to getting people to share content is to let them share their content. I just about fell off my chair at this point..of course! Lots more in the notes for “Using Social Media Marketing to Drive Acquisition” with Chris Baggott including those real-world case studies. Check out Chris’ posts at Compendium.com and follow him on Twitter @chrisbaggott for more.

More to come!

I’ll be taking notes again tomorrow and sharing more thoughts throughout the day both through Evernote, here on the blog and on my Twitter account, @jameskoole. No worries – I don’t live tweet sessions! You won’t be annoyed, I promise.

Almost all of the findings of the study apply to the hosting/domains industry, although the testing looks like it was done primarily on sites that sold physical goods. There’s a ton of overlap regardless of whether you are selling and shipping a widget to someone’s house, or taking them through a checkout for a domain name and hosting package.

Assume Nothing About Your Customers

Reading through the article, I found myself surprised by what I perceived to be a lack of general knowledge about “how things work” on the part of the test subjects. On more than a few occasions, I thought, “Seriously? They didn’t know how that works?” I also realized that it’s very easy to make assumptions about how users will interact with websites when those building them are used to the process.

This article is definitely worth a read if you are looking for ways to improve your overall customer experience and minimize your rate of cart abandonment.

Click here to read the article

Thanks to Flickr user Wiedmaier for the shopping cart image and for releasing it under a Creative Commons license.

Mobile Email Configuration Guides

To help your customers get email configured on their device, we’ve put together a collection of mobile email configuration guides for the most popular mobile devices. These are white-label docs with text and screenshots that will walk your customers through the process of getting email setup.

Feel free to download and use them as is, or grab the content and adapt it to your specific domain name with your branding. As with all the documentation and marketing materials we provide, it’s free to use and adapt if you are an OpenSRS Reseller.

Download them here

What do you think?

We’d love to hear your feedback on these guides as well. Is there anything you’d change? Have we missed a popular device? Do you want them in a different format? Drop us a line in the comments and we’ll see what we can do.

Right now we have three price promotions going on, including great promos on .TV, .MOBI and .CO domains.

Our .TV promotion has been running since late last year, while the .MOBI promo was just recently extended through to the end of June! We’re just rolling out the .CO promo; it’s similar to the very successful Superbowl-related promotion we ran with .CO back in February. Check it out and signup to get a big discount on .CO domains this month.

How Our Domain Promos Work

Our promotions are usually done in conjunction with the registry operator for the domain extension in question. They extend special pricing to us, and we pass the savings along to you. Generally the registries are looking to lift sales of the extension and as a result, they usually require that you do some active promotion of their extension to your customer base.

That promotion can take the form of an email campaign, banner ads on your homepage, or even something like a Google Adwords campaign to drive traffic to your site, and to the specific domain extension that is on sale.

We try to make this as easy as possible for you by providing marketing materials like logos and banner ads when we can. For example, for the .TV promotion, we’ve provided a pretty complete package of marketing assets for you to use, including some videos that explain the unique value of .TV domains.

Signup Now

If you haven’t yet signed up for any of the ongoing promotions, head over to our promos page. As mentioned we have a trio of promos on right now:

• .TV domains are just $12 until the end of May, 2011
• .MOBI domains are available for only $6.17 (that’s a registry cost of $2.99) until June 30th, 2011
• .CO domains are only $15 for the month of April (and now May as well)

Thanks to Flickr user “The Justified Sinner” for the pic.

Six Videos in All

There are six videos all together, including four interview-style videos with some interesting people who are using their .TV domains to do some really innovative things with web video. The other two videos in the series are tutorials – the first helps explain the unique value of .TV domains in identifying sites with video content, while the second provides some great tips and techniques for your customers to consider so they can put their .TV domains to good use.

As you’d expect, these are unbranded, white-label videos that are ready to be used in your marketing efforts around .TV domains.

Visit the Marketing section of the Resource Center to see what’s available and download the full set. Look for the .TV Marketing Videos section.

Here’s a sample video to give you a sense of the content you’ll find:

Get .TV Domains at a Great Price

Keep in mind that we also have a .TV domain pricing promo going on right now. Last year we lowered the cost for new .TV domains to $19.00/year through the end of May, 2011 (regular price is $35/year, and that discount is paid through a monthly rebate). But in addition to that promotion, we also rolled out an opt-in promo that allows you to save even more. Sign up and do some promotion around .TV domains – and these videos are a perfect way to do just that – and you’ll get new .TV domain registrations for just $12/year!

Click here for full terms and conditions and to signup for this promo.