Chris Porter

Old school brand squatting was big business and even bigger lawsuits. In a nutshell (no, this is me in a nutshell!) you’d register the name of a company or a trademark as a .com domain and then wait for the company to come along and either sue you or buy it from you. The risks weren’t too big and the rewards could be huge.

Then came along the “Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act” which took steps to stop that kind of activity and ICANN’s policy and process for allowing a trademark owner to get ownership of a domain.

ICANN’s process typically costs $2000-3000 dollars which still gives speculators wiggle room for profit. Would you rather pay $500-1000 for a quick purchase from a squatter or go through the red-tape and extra expense? Most will go for the easy life.

But today your official website is typically the least important web presence you have.

Online marketing is about interaction.

And the easiest way to interact is through social sites. Be it facebook, youtube or twitter most social sites give you the chance to own your own customised URL. Find me on facebook at facebook.com/porter.im

Introducing, for the want of a better catchphrase – social brand squatting.

It’s not always done for profit and probably mostly done by fans but the desired social url’s are being grabbed up quickly. Out of the 72 most popular social sites the vanity keyword ‘Metallica’ is only available on less than 20%.

Metallica don’t have active accounts on all those sites. But someone has registered them – and that could create a problem. From impersonating the official brand to spreading negative press under an official moniker.

Apple have become the victim of brand squatting as you can see here:
MySpace (/apple) = DJ Apple. Brand Fail.
Twitter (/apple) = Squatter. Brand Fail.

Protect your brand over every site (even if you don’t use it) or squat on some company names late to the game and see if you can profit and collect lawsuits. I use NameChk.com to quickly see the availability over many social sites quickly and then register.

Creating sites for affiliate marketing? Social site profiles rank quickly with few links. Create a hub page on a social site to promote a product and you’ll find you can get search traffic for little effort.

I have a couple of hundred “crappy” domains – domains that have terrible keywords and only real value lies in the fact at some point in the past they were owned by a company who then let it expire for one reason or another. This usually means they have links and traffic.

Domain names is something I’ve got into quite heavily since June of this year after spotting a marketplace of domains completely untapped. I started hunting for domains with value to sell on and created SavedNames.com – I’ve found selling to the end-user directly can be a quick way to flip domains without too much initial investment.

A while back I bought a domain company-llc.com at auction for $20 and parked it. The old owner had shifted to companyllc.com (not something I realised at the time) and didn’t care about the hyphenated version anymore. At some point we email corresponded and they rejected my offer to sell them the domain for $100.

I later realised not only did the domain rank first for their company name (with the non-hyphenated version nowhere to be seen) but after, what I can only assume was some new marketing campaign or piece of press, the domain received 1129 visitors in one day. Resulting in 142 clicks and $72.08 revenue for the day. It’s quickly dwindled down but this month alone it’s earned over the $100 I was asking for it.

And it still ranks first for the company name.

Maybe it’s time to offer them the domain again.

The use of scantily dressed women to attract advertising clicks is nothing new but some titles just shouldn’t go with some pictures.

An ebook on ‘how to PIMP yourself out in 5 easy steps’ anyone?

… I didn’t click the ad, so maybe they were selling that. Time to research a new niche?

I just got a delivery from UPS and wasn’t expecting anything. I checked he had the right house number and name before I took the large parcel.

Now I’m like a kid at Christmas! A surprise delivery and it’s way to big to be a lawsuit, good times. I open it up and it’s an early Christmas gift from one of the affiliate companies I send most of my online dating traffic too. Thanks to Huge Traffic for the ..eerrr.. beer cooler thingy with cool LED display.

This is typical of being an affiliate at Christmas. If you do good amounts of sales for a company they’ll keep you sweet with a present but listen ‘Huge Traffic’, a little tip – next year just send me the beer (or a macbook pro).

I’ve been a fan of Tim Ferriss since the 4-hour-work-week, a book about being more productive with your time and becoming part of the ‘new-rich’. Tim does experiments in lifestyle design, from outsourcing your life to firing your customers.

What really interest me about Ferriss is his insatiable desire to learn how things work or maybe more specifically, how we learn. He is fluent in 6 languages and has some rather unorthodox methods for learning that he claims can make you fluent in as little as 3 months.

And Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.com among other things (rev3, pownce) – the fresh faced poster boy of web development.

I’m not sure how Tim and Kevin came together to do this video series but I’m glad they did. In this video Kevin explains how he got scammed by some Chinese ‘art students’.

China Part 2a from Glenn McElhose on Vimeo.