For content-based domain affiliates, taking note of your domain portfolio and potential copyright conflicts are an ongoing concern, especially if you’re planning to be in the game for the longterm.
I own a domain which contains the term “ebay” in it. Although I feel anyone looking at the domain probably wouldn’t mistake it for an eBay property that a name like eBayMarketing or eBaySupplies might convey.
Nonetheless, I received an email from enforcement@ebay.com from “Edith, eBay Legal Department” which however nicely written, amounts to a cease and desist notification, and I am supposed to “Please confirm in writing that you will agree to resolve this matter as requested. If we do not receive confirmation from you that you will comply with our request, we will have no choice but to pursue all available remedies against you.”
“Edith” further mentions that “We have filed several successful federal court actions in the United States against companies and individuals employing the famous eBay trademark in their domain names, as well as more than six proceedings before the United Nation’s World Intellectual Property Organization’s arbitration panel. eBay prevailed in each case and the domain names at issue were all ordered to be transferred to eBay.”
And “the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”) has recently denied registration of the mark “ebaysecurities” by a third party. Like your domain name, “ebaysecurities” incorporated the entire eBay trademark, adding only a generic term to eBay’s famous mark. The USPTO recognized that eBay is a famous trademark and denied registration of ebaysecurities. eBay is concerned that any use of the domain name in question, will cause confusion as to whether you or your company’s activities are authorized, endorsed or sponsored by eBay when, in fact, they are not. ”
The domain is one in my portfolio and I haven’t developed it yet, so letting it expire isn’t a major issue.
I would think that eBay would be more forward in replying to the email seeking clarificatons I’d sent about 2 weeks ago, to date I haven’t received a reply.
Having dealt with lawyers previously, I would guess that (more…)
In the course of your Internet marketing journey, you might hit the occasional speed bump and find a plateau. You might identify with Josh who writes:
“Hi Andrew,
I’m an affiliate marketer and have been having success with my affiliate marketing efforts, I use PPC and free traffic means (primarily articles) to generate leads.
Lately, my sales have been stagnating…
How can I ensure more stability in my affiliate income?
Thanks.
Josh”
–
My answer:
Having worked with a number of Internet marketing veterans, I’ve noticed a couple of best business practises that I’ve seen these successful and experienced marketers use.
The Micromanaging trap
There’s the Internet marketers “day trader” mentality that you’d want to avoid.
It’s something I used to do when I first started out – typically seen in behavior like staying logged in to your affiliate account all day and hitting the refresh button every hour to see if more sales have come in.
In this edition of the Friday Podcast, I look at how the worlds of work and play can come crashing together in the realm of social networks and social networking. Tune in below…
The Google Adwords team has published a number of tips for optimizing your campaigns across 3 verticals: retail, entertainment and automotive.
Here’s a couple of techniques to bump your CTR (clickthrough rate) and conversions:
Behavioral-based bid management
Research shows that consumers are surfing shopping sites and doing price comparisons during work hours. Bump your ad positions during office hours to get better ad positioning (and consequently, higher conversions).
Match your consumers stage in the buying cycle
Your keywords determine your websites’ visitor profile. For buyers early in the buying cycle, they’d be looking for information, product reviews, so create an appropriate content site.
Buyers in the later stage, primed to buy, will be looking for coupon codes, bonuses, and other goodies, so a coupon site or inventive site will convert better for that demographic.
Highly targeted landing pages
Spend more time focusing on targeted and highly relevant keywords. Instead of “holiday events”, shoot for (more…)
If you’ve recently upgraded to WordPress 2.3.1, you could have either the best blogging experience if you’re a new user, or one of the worst, if you’ve been using WordPress for some time.
A key reason is mentioned on the WP-Testers list by Ryan Boren, one of the developers:
“The big schema change is the dropping of the categories, post2cat, and link2cat changes in favor of the new terms, term_taxonomy, and term_relationship tables. Any plugin that queries against the old table will break horribly.â€
What this means is that the new WordPress has shifted its data structure from a category-basedsystem to a new taxonomy.
If you’ve extensively used category-based plugins to enhance your SEO or social marketing efforts, you’ll bang into lots of error messages, as anyone who’s posted a comment on this blog will attest to.
Given the number of social-based plugins I’ve installed, and the extent to which they interface with the old (now defunct) category-based data strcuture, you can expect to (more…)
Here’s a straightforward Monday Question:
“Now that you’re starting to do more PPC (pay per click) traffic. How has it been? Isn’t it a waste of money to pay for traffic, and it doesn’t generate much income, does it?”
– My Answer:
There’s a lot of FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) being spread, especially by marketers who aren’t using paid traffic, typically certain members of the Web 2.0 fraternity.
Yes, you can lose lots of money, and not generate a single sale, but only if you don’t have a plan in mind. I was in that category before, bidding on low competition keywords, having subscribed to the “long tail keyword” strategy.
The fact is that with quality score playing a dominant role in Google AdWords, you will need to bid reasonable prices to get the conversions.
I have a stock portfolio which generates 10-20% on an annualized basis. If you’ve refined your PPC campaigns and are able to generate at least 50% on a monthly basis, you’ve outperformed most of the mutual funds and equity funds in the market.
So let’s look at some PPC newbie pitfalls:
Not enough keywords in your adwords campaign
If you’ve only 20-200 keyphrases in your campaign, it might only generate a handful of clickthroughs and even fewer sales per day.
