Most new websites tend to look for a domain name with a .com or .net tld (Top Level Domain). They feel this gives the site a more professional appearance and will appeal to a more international audience and in many cases this is true. However, it can also be beneficial to look at purchasing a domain name with a country specific tld.

There are a number of benefits that can be gained from choosing a domain name with a country specific tld, especially if you conduct your business primarily in one particular country.

Search Engine Benefits

Most of the large search engines will give you a higher search ranking for a site that has the tld of the searchers country. For example, if someone from the United Kingdom is performing a search for widgets, a search engine will often rank widgets.co.uk higher than other sites selling the same product but only have a .com tld.

Having a country specific tld will also allow you to be included in a lot of great country directories that stipulate that your domain name has a certain tld. Getting your site into these directories can be a great way of improving your search engine ranking as these are 1 way links from authority sites for your chosen subject. These kind of links are graded much higher than reciprocal linking.

Buyer Confidence

Having a domain tld will often give the buyer more confidence when making a purchase as they consider the site to be local, therefore governed under the same laws as the buyer. This makes it easier to follow up and sales and make complaints if any problems occur during the purchase of the product. It also helps to settle any nerves if the buyer is able to see a street address that they recognize, rather than a foreign address.

Sometimes the best policy is to purchase both a .com and a country tld. This allows you to appeal to both international and national customers. The potential sales that you can get with a country domain tld should not be overlooked as a small investment in an extra domain can bring big returns for you and your business.

Gather information about your customer before they start browsing

Another benefit of having a country domain name is that you already know where your customer is likely to be from. This means that you can display products for that particular customers region without having to ask the customer to select which geographic area they are in. When a customer types in their country domain, you can forward them to your main domain name but display only products that will be of interest to them and have all the prices in their own currency. This gives the site a local feel and will again bring that buying confidence that is so important when trying to make a sale.

Summary

I hope you’ve seen the importance of not overlooking this great opportunity to bring in extra customers, simply by choosing a country domain name or simply adding as an extra name that points to your main domain name.

About the Author
Steve Ashton is a programmer and web developer. He runs two popular websites, Web Hosting Guide and Domain Names Center.

Over the last seven years, I’ve bought website hosting from several different companies. I noticed that the majority of webhosts make the mistake of thinking they are in the webhosting business. They only offer website hosting and, maybe domain name registration. As a marketer, I see huge missed opportunities to make more profits.

Some website hosts see these opportunities. They realize that they have gold. They have a group of clients who crave something more than hosting. What do hosting clients want? To make sales from their websites.

Knowing this, these webhosts create backend Profit Centers so they can make more money with their clients. A Profit Center is an area of your business that brings more cash to your bank account. Webhosts who bring in lots of profits offer their clients useful information, tools, software, audios and more to help their clients become successful. It doesn’t have to be difficult or labor intensive. First

ASSESS YOUR CURRENT PROFIT CENTERS

In your website hosting business, you may have these current Profit Centers:

Website hosting, of course
Domain name registration, an easy tie-in
Website design
Higher level programming services
Search Engine Optimization services
Search Engine submission services

If you don’t have all of these Profit Centers, remember you don’t have to provide these with in-house talent. You can joint venture with other quality businesses and get referral fees. This is a wise way to go because you don’t have the up-front investment and risk if it doesn’t sell. If a service DOES sell, you may decide to later offer it in-house.

And this is just a beginning. There are more Profit Centers your business and your clients can benefit from.

NEW PROFIT CENTER IDEAS

You can add new Profit Centers to your webhosting business. Some of them require a few hours up front, then they run automatically for months or years with minor updating. You decide how much time you want to put in. The key is to ask yourself – Does this help my clients make more sales?

Three new Profit Center Ideas are:

*An upsell on your check out page. This works because it catches them when they are already buying.
*A mini-marketing course sent by sequential autoresponder, offering solid information and products to help them achieve their website marketing and sales goals.
*A Resource Center webpage that’s available only to your clients.

Remember, each Profit Center needs to be more than just a pitch. I must warn you…
you can do all of the above and STILL fail at creating Profit Centers that go ka-ching. How?

Imagine, a man wants to get married. A friend tells him to start on the road to marriage by simply finding a nice woman and asking her for a date.

Will this work? It CAN, but you and I both know there are many factors that make a difference…

WHO he asks, WHEN he asks, HOW he asks, WHERE he asks, and WHAT he says

All this makes a difference to him (and her) and it makes a difference to you when you’re building Profit Centers. Profit Centers need marketing finesse. You may remember Beta videotapes. It was a superior video format, but it failed because it wasn’t marketed as well as VHS.

CONSIDER THIS WHEN BUILDING NEW PROFIT CENTERS

WHO you make the offer to – are they a good match for the product or service? If they are not in the market for what you offer, it’s very unlikely they will buy.

WHAT offer you make – will this offer make a difference for your clients or do they feel like you’re pitching them for your own benefit?

WHEN you make your offer to them. Before they buy hosting? After they buy hosting? Once their site is live?

WHERE will you make the offer – on your website or in an email? Either can be successful.

WHAT will you say? This is crucial. You can have a useful product or service and still may not make sales.

What you say makes a huge difference. Use poor copywriting and people will click away from your offer like water jumping off a hot skillet. Great copywriting can inspire people to GO FIND THEIR WALLETS. That’s the level of copywriting you want – compelling.

To start building your Profit Centers, test your offer on a group of clients. See if it sells, and if not, analyze why not. Edit your Profit Center until it consistently helps your clients and brings your website hosting business more money

About the Author

Resource: Author and Marketing Specialist Raynay Valles produces New Profit Centers for website hosting businesses – upsells, mini-courses and resource pages, customized for your business and complete with proven copywriting. Just plug in and start profiting. For more information email her at webhostingprofits@jawdrop.com

Tips for choosing a web hosting company.

When choosing a web hosting company there are many factors to consider.

1. Does the company offer telephone support?

Email support is always nice to have available, but you may already know how long it takes some people to reply to these. Getting someone on the ‘phone when your site goes down will instantly make you feel better and get you the answers you need as quickly as you need them. A lot of bigger web hosting companies offer free support and often are available out of hours too. Phone support is a great benefit for any web hosting client.

2. What sort of history does the company have? How long has this company been in business?

Web hosting companies that have been in existence for less than a year may not be the best choice for you or your website. A hosting company with a proven track record and many happy clients is certainly a good sign and might work well for you. A lot of the larger hosting businesses will post customer testimonials on their site to reinforce the message.

3. What software does the company offer?

This varies widely between web hosting companies. Now that I have used Cpanel I wouldn’t want to be without it, mainly because I am used to it and now know what features it has and how to use most of them. It’s a lot easier to stick with something you know than have to try switching to a new User Interface.

Are you designing your site with Frontpage?. If so, check your host supports this, as not all do.

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To choose the means whereby we put our products on the world-wide-web, we proceed by a process of elimination.

The chief criteria for judging a shopping cart is the number of credit card processors and shipping services it supports, and the number of people that support *it*.

Why? Because credit card processors and shipping services mutate all the time, and thus your cart will require updating. Which service works today may go out of business tomorrow, and leave you with the orders piling up.

Other important criteria are how easy it is to set up, and add products, and how easy it is for the customer to use.

(May I say parenthetically that I was introduced to Perl programming unwillingly by an early version of one of the carts below; it had a bug, and I had to learn some Perl to fix it. A shopkeeper should not have to learn bricklaying in order to open his store, therefore a bit of research is time well spent. )

When you set up your shop test it using a wide variety of the oldest and buggiest browsers you can find. If your web store works under them you’re home and dry.

So, having taken all the above into consideration, what are the options?

Having gone though twenty-plus different sub $500 shopping cart software solutions, I now present, in order of preference, the cheapest, simplest, and most effective solutions:

1. Oscommerce (free) – http://www.oscommerce.com

A very good, full-featured, cart. Uses Php and MySQL. Not easy to set up for a ‘newbie’. Cookies are used to track the order. If you have PhpMyAdmin installed in your web account, it’s easier. Requires a customer to register before they can make a purchase. Supports a wide range of credit-card processors and shipping services.

Bad point: Technical support is limited to the Oscommerce forums, which are not helpful to newbies. You may need to pay a few bucks to an expert via a freelance site like Scriptlance.com, if you run into difficulties.

Also, it may be a while before an update is available to a payment module. These are done by unpaid enthusiasts.

Good point: Oscommerce is supported by thousands of unpaid enthusiasts; this means updates do eventually arrive, and it’s less likely to go out of business, unlike a commercial cart.

2. X-cart (commercial) – http://www.x-cart.com

Similar to Oscommerce. Commercial. Requires a customer to register before they can make a purchase. Lots of features and add-ons. Supports a wide range of credit-card processors and shipping services. Has an affiliate program add-on, and lets others sell products though your cart.

3. Dansie Cart (commercial) – http://www.dansie.net

A well specified cart. Supports a wide range of credit-card processors and shipping services.

Bad point: Apparently the Perl code is obscured, to make it harder to copy, which is annoying if you want to customise it.

3. Interchange (free) – http://www.icdevgroup.org

A version of the old Akopia / Minivend carts. Complex product with lots of files and a lot of setting up to do. A complete solution, and includes the option of third party credit-card real-time order processing. Encrypts orders.

4. Agora (free) – http://www.agoracart.com

A Web-Store/Commerce.cgi hybrid.

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