Web Hosting Resource Kit – Editor’s Opinion 5/2004
Hello everyone,
The labor day week is over – back to work.
| “Every …. customer is entitled to 25 FREE .INFO domains (1-year registrations). In fact, anyone who visits Dotster is entitled to this deal. Tell your friends, tell your neighbors, tell everyone!” |
This week was the week of free .info domain name registrations all over the place. The offer itself is very compelling and interesting. Go and get your name registered while it lasts. 😉
Overall – this special offer is just part of the overall trend that we see in the domain name registration business. Discount prices wherever you look. 1 & 1 offered $2.99 .us registrations – an offer even below their rock bottom prices for normal domain name registrations ($5.99). Yahoo dropped its domain name registration fees significantly, too.
What does this mean to us web hosts? Well, if the broad masses hear about this offer we could see a significant need for more business. 🙂 But before you order the next server – let’s have a look at this whole domain name thing first.
Are you offering domain name registrations at all? Do you give your .info domain names away for free? Do you offer special incentives for .info customers? Are you hunting down those .info customers? If your answer has been “No” to these questions you need think about how to get these new clients to your website. You also need to consider that not every newly registered .info name needs hosting or that the customer is not a professional related to web hosting or web design himself. But there is more – why are the names given away for free at all? Is it just that the .info registry wants to increase its presence? Or will the large registration providers who offer tons of services (domain pointing, domain parking, email hosting, etc.) be the winners of this special offer. Most likely they will. If you register 25 new names – how fast can you actually turn them into websites and develop them? In most cases you just register a name to have it. Then those clients will think about what really to do with the newly registered name. So, the impact to the normal web host will be very limited.
But here is something to learn from the situation. The message mentioned above spread through several forums on the Internet in light speed. Imagine how many new .info domain names were probably registered in a few hours. Got some dollars left in your marketing budget for 2004? Why not set up a nice marketing campaign with free domain name registration.
A domain name costs around $5 – $9 to register – depending on where you buy them in wholesale. Now spread the word in some forums where Internet freebies are discussed. Example: Limit the number of available free domain names to 100 or 200 – depending on you word your marketing campaign you should be able to get tons of visitors to your website. Now also offer a special web hosting package – no matter if it is a new domain name or an existing.
The above exercise could also be done with a $1.00 domain name registration special to keep the advertising cost low. But in general – the cost to get customers to your website is very low and you will actually receive very targeted traffic.
So, by looking at the big guys playing their games you can easily use a similar approach to start a great marketing campaign. 🙂
Let us know how that works out.
Until the next time …
Regards,
Christoph
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