Posts in: Reseller Resources

Leveraging Content to Drive Acquisition

I’m at BlogWorld Expo in New York this week learning all about the relationship between content and marketing, and how you can turn your content, and your customer’s content into a tool to grow your business.

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:

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.
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.
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.

Lessons Learned from Online Shopping Cart Usability Testing

Is your checkout process working for you, or working against you? We came across a great article on Smashing Magazine this week that we thought was worth sharing. It talks about the good, the bad and the ugly of e-commerce checkout design.

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.

New End-User Mobile Email Configuration Guides Available

Did you know that OpenSRS Email Service works great with the latest smartphones and other mobile Internet devices? Thanks to the fact that we offer IMAP support standard with all mailboxes, end-users with iPhones, iPads, Android devices and BlackBerries can access their OpenSRS Email Service mailboxes natively on their chosen device.

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.

OpenSRS Domain Promotions

Are you taking advantage of our domain price promotions? These limited time offers are a great way to drive sales either within your existing customer base, or as a way to attract new customers to the fold.

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:

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

.TV Marketing and Promotional Videos for Resellers

Did you know that we have a series of excellent promotional videos for you that will help you explain the value of .TV domains to your customers? We worked closely with VeriSign, the .TV domain registry operator, to create these great videos that explain why .TV domains are the best choice for hosting video content online. They’re available to download and use for all OpenSRS Resellers.

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.