One of the big reasons “I joined Tucows”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2006/03/24/ken-schafer-joins-tucows earlier this year was the company’s strong desire to build a “new marketing” team within Tucows.
The company gave very few resources to the small overworked marketing team they had in place for the last few years and, frankly, it’s amazing they got as much done as they did. Kudos to Jacqui, Adam, Scott and those that were gone before I got here.
But now the cracks are showing and the company knows it’s time to rethink the “if you make it, they will come” approach to marketing (unfortunately common to many tech-heavy companies). And so I was brought in to rethink what marketing means for “Tucows”:http://resellers.tucows.com/.
That was music to my ears and I’ve taken the tune to heart. I’m rethinking not only marketing at Tucows, but how marketing in the 21st century would be done if we were given the chance to hit “reset” and start all over again.
Category: Best Practices
I’ve seen far too many friends and colleagues accidentally lose their Website domain names by forgetting to renew them in a timely manner. This can have catastrophic results, but it doesn’t have to happen to you. In fact, it can be easily avoided by following my list of seven simple steps.
Why not take a few minutes right NOW to reduce the likelihood of losing your domain name?
Seven Easy Steps to Protecting Your Domain Name
Step 1: Identify who your domain name registrar is.
If you are not sure who your registrar is, use a WHOIS directory like Allwhois to determine the name of your registrar (the company you registered the domain name with).
Step 2: Determine your registrar’s contact information.
Using the WHOIS record information, make note of the email and phone coordinates for the registrar (sometimes listed under "Technical Contact") and file this information in a safe place. And the registrar has to have a Website, so make sure you bookmark it.
Step 3: Confirm your domain name expiry date.
Also using the WHOIS record, check to see what "Renewal" date is listed. This is your expiry date and you MUST renew your domain name before then.
I’ve got a bit of a fondness of the custom “we’ll be right back” messages some sites post when they are temporarily down for maintenance.
Last year I pointed out “Bloglines’ Plumber”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2005/06/26/i-love-the-bloglines-plumber and this spring I pointed out super-apologetic “Backpack Error Messages”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2006/05/18/helpful-error-pages. Flickr’s downtime message is so popular it’s become a “meme”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2006/07/31/the-meme-epidemic-a-case-study onto itself (do a Google search on “is having a massage”:http://www.google.com/search?q=+%22is+having+a+massage%22 if you’re not hip to the jive).