Numeric and Short .TEL Domains Now Available

Starting today, June 14, 2011, the .TEL Registry has begun to allow certain numeric-only and also some two-digit, short .TEL domain registrations.

OpenSRS is ready to support these new .TEL domain variants and they are available to anyone on a first-come, first served basis at standard .TEL pricing of $8.00 plus ICANN Fee ($0.18) and your OpenSRS Management Fee.

What is permitted?

Domains containing up to seven numbers or a combination of up to seven numbers and hyphens will be permitted. Additionally, certain two-character .TEL domains are now allowed.

Some examples of permitted domains:

1234567.tel
123-456.tel
40404.tel
411.tel
aa.tel
a1.tel

What is not permitted?

For short domains, single digit or two digit .TEL domains that are current ccTLD country codes are not permitted. Domains with a combination of numbers and hyphens totaling eight or more characters are not allowed.

Some examples of domains which are not permitted:

12345678.tel (more than seven characters)
123-456-7890.tel (more than seven characters)
1.tel (single digit domains are not permitted)
a.tel (single digit domains are not permitted)
uk.tel (uk is the country code for the United Kingdom)
ca.tel (ca is the country code for Canada)

How can I market these new .TEL domains?

Telnic, the .TEL Registry operator, says these new .TEL domains are great for a number of different uses including:

Companies with 2-letter or all-numeric brands or trademarks
Vanity number operators or those wanting to get keyboard-numeric versions of their names
Individuals who want to be known by their initials or with a penchant for lucky numbers
Businesses using SMS shortcodes for marketing and support services

Read more about .TEL domains on our .TEL marketing and information page. We have further information about how to market and sell .TEL domains including marketing kits and other resources for you to use.

One Million .CO Domains

Congratulations to .CO Internet on reaching 1 million .CO domains under management!

It was less than a year ago, on July 20th, 2010, that .CO launched globally and OpenSRS was on board as one of 10 .CO-accredited registrars.

Thanks to our resellers, who saw the opportunity that .CO provided, we’ve played an important role in the .CO success story and are now the number one wholesale .CO registrar.

It was then, and continues to be our firm belief that .CO would be a huge success. Seeing one million domains registered in under a year speaks volumes about how our resellers and the public has reacted to .CO.

Still Growing!

In the past year we’ve seen widespread adoption of .CO right across our reseller channel and the growth in .CO registrations continues. Our resellers, from the largest hosting companies to web designers and other Internet service providers, heard the message about the opportunity that .CO offered and brought the .CO story to their customers.

Tucows’ President and CEO, Elliot Noss notes that one reason behind the success of .CO is that people saw the obvious value in what .CO offered.

“The incredible success of .CO demonstrates without a doubt that there continues to be a need amongst Internet users around the world for highly brandable and intrinsically valuable domain names.”
- Elliot Noss, President and CEO, Tucows

As Juan Diego Calle, CEO of .CO Internet noted today, getting to one million domains in less than a year is an impressive achievement for .CO that speaks to the strength of the .CO domain, the team they assembled at .CO Internet, as well as to the work of the registrars and reseller partners who made it happen.

“To hit this milestone in less than a year is a great testament to the hard work and dedication of our team. From our retail and business partners; to the trademark and domain communities; to all the people, businesses and brands who are building their futures on .CO – we owe you a million thanks!”
- Juan Diego Calle, CEO of .CO Internet

The whole team at .CO really showed the industry that there was an alternative to existing domain extensions and that a long-term marketing and awareness plan coupled with excellent technology and a great brand, a new entrant to the domain name space could be wildly successful.

Congratulations to .CO Internet and thanks to all of our resellers for making our first year offering .CO domains one to remember.

More about Selling .CO Domains

If you aren’t already taking advantage of .CO in your business, it’s not too late. Visit our .CO marketing page in our marketing resource centre. You’ll find .CO banner ads, email and web copy, videos and more to get you started.

And for those already offering .CO domains, don’t forget we have a great .CO promotion going on right now – in fact, it was just extended through the end of June! Do some marketing around .CO domains and we’ll knock the wholesale price down to just $15 (from $25). Read the details and sign up here.

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.

Meet our Reseller: UsableWeb

We’ve added another great “Meet our Reseller” profile – this time around we’re making the trek over to Greece, where OpenSRS Reseller UsableWeb Ltd is the market leader in hosting and domain registrations for both business and consumers. The operate under two brands: pataki.gr and TopHost.gr.

I spoke with Usableweb founder Dimitris Anthoulakis and he graciously explained UsableWeb’s approach, talked about their partnership with OpenSRS and provided some really good insights on the Greek hosting market in general. From talking to him, it’s clear that Dimitris sees lots of opportunity for growth in Greece.

“More and more businesses are realizing the importance of an online presence and the Greek market will grow significantly the coming years,” he says. “The fact that Greece ranks 23rd in Europe in terms of Internet penetration means that there are huge opportunities for growth for our company.”

We’re super happy to be working with UsableWeb in Greece!

→ Click here to read Meet our Reseller: UsableWeb

The Untold History of the RWI

A few weeks back we rolled out the long-awaited OpenSRS Control Panel in a preview for all Resellers. This was the first chance for most of you to dig in and see what the Control Panel could do, and the response has been overwhelming positive. Thanks for that – we really do listen and you’ve already come back with some great ideas.

With the preview underway, we wanted to tell the story of how the Control Panel came to be. It turns out that it owes a lot to the Reseller Web Interface and its history.

I sat down with a couple of the key people behind the Control Panel to chat about it. This first post will delve into some on the thinking and philosophy behind the Control Panel – Ken Schafer, our EVP Products is responsible for a lot of that.

Those looking for a tech slant should stay tuned – in a couple of weeks, we’ll focus on the dev side with Paul Tichonczuk, Senior Web Application Developer. He’s the perfect person to fill in all the geeky details about some of the neat stuff that’s hiding under that fancy new interface.

Back to the Beginning

One of the key objectives in developing the Control Panel was to provide a simple-to-use interface that was still able to handle the complex tasks associated with registering domain names and other services with consistent metaphors and a unified look and feel.

In talking about how the Control Panel ended up this way, it only seemed natural to start by talking about how the Reseller Web Interface came to be.

It turns out that the idea of a web-based control panel wasn’t thought of as core to OpenSRS back in the early days. Ken explained that when OpenSRS was first launched, it was primarily an API, offering a way for resellers to connect to us, and in turn, to connect to the various registries we had an accreditation with.

“When we started out back in 1999, if you wanted to sell domains, you would have to go to a Registry and they would give you an API to integrate with as an accredited registrar.

“But OpenSRS came along and invented the wholesale model where rather than having you go out and become a registrar at a whole bunch of different registries, and do separate API into all of them, we said, ‘why don’t we do that work for you?’

“We would have one API and one agreement and that would give you access to all those Registries.

Just to be clear: it’s not that the RWI was an after thought. Rather, as Ken explained, it was merely thought that a reseller would integrate with the API and make their own interfaces (both customer-facing, and also for their own internal support staff and processes). In Ken’s words:

“In the early days we pretty much said, ‘Here’s the API…away you go.’ Except early resellers quickly started saying things like ‘Do I really have to build my own control panel for my own support staff? That seems like overkill’”

Our assumptions about what our Resellers wanted and needed turned out to be a bit off the mark and the RWI was born.

Restoring Simplicity

Over the years, OpenSRS grew in complexity, and the RWI came along for the ride, often kicking and screaming. We added bunches of gTLDs and ccTLDs, products like SSL Certificates, DNS, blogging tools, a site builder and more. The RWI started to look like a house with a bunch of additions bolted on rather than a single cohesive control panel. Ken explained:

“The RWI that we’ve lived with for the past ten years has grown organically from ‘you don’t need one’, to ‘there’s a few things you might want to do’, to ‘you might want to be able to do quite a bit.’

“In the early days it was a few domains. But we added SSL, and expanded into Trust, we added email, and publishing tools. The service evolved to let you sell multiple things. And a lot of those services ended up having their own control panels and ended up presented to the world as separate services.

“In short, we made it too complicated. And over the years, it became harder and harder for new resellers to come into it. We found a whole class of resellers like IT consultants, web developers, web designers who didn’t need an API integration at all. What they really needed and wanted was a good control panel to manage domains and other services for their customers.”

Where the RWI often made things complicated – like registering ccTLDs with specific residency requirements – the Control Panel should make it simple. Even though it’s a complex task with sophisticated logic and rules, the Reseller shouldn’t have to care and the Control Panel should handle it all behind the scenes.

Next up: The Techie Stuff

A lot of thinking went into the Control Panel in an effort to take what are very complex tasks and requirements and make them seem simple. We’ll dig deeper into some of the advanced web technology that’s at the heart of the Control Panel in the next post in this series. Stay tuned!

Control Panel: In-Depth Webinar

For those wanting even more information on the Control Panel, including some power tips and an advance look at some of the web technology, we’ll hosting a webinar on Thursday, May 19, 2011.

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