Dealer Dan, pictured here with WWE Superstar Mick Foley, has been in internet marketing since 1996. He likes hugs, long walks on the beach, and making money while wearing his jammy jams. For more information, you can read all 
If you haven’t seen it yet – Godaddy CEO Bob Parsons is catching a bit of heat due to video showing him shooting an elephant. Here’s a video from a news station on it:
There’s no doubt that this was a stupid move from Parsons. In this day and age you have to be really careful what you do when you’re a CEO simply because people are ready to crucify you and take offense at anything and everything. News like this travels fast on the internet, and it can really hurt your business.
Personally I think it’s much ado about nothing. People ignore the actual reasons behind it and simply get up in arms because that’s the way society is these days. The majority of people will ignore the reasoning behind it, complain on Youtube, Twitter etc – then go tuck into their pork chops and steaks tonight without even a trace of irony.
However it was still a mistake from Parsons – you’d think he would understand the way society and this generation is. However I have to give props to Namecheap, who immediately sent out this e-mail:
Subject: Transfer for $4.99 and Help Save The Elephants
It’s not often that we would disagree publicly with a competitor, but we at Namecheap are very disturbed by this video of a competitor killing an elephant for sport. Check out the ABC News Report (Warning: Very Graphic!)
We’ve decided to throw our support behind our Elephant friends by offering domain transfers at a price where we actually lose money.
Show your protest by saying BYEBYEGD again and transfer your domains to Namecheap for $4.99 for the next 24 hours through 11:59pm EST on 3/31/11 (limit 10 per user, valid for all com/net/org domains).
On top of that, we’ll donate $1 for each transfer to Save The Elephants at https://www.savetheelephants.org/
Use coupon code BYEBYEGD and let’s help the Elephants together!
Regards,
Team Namecheap
This is incredibly smart – Namecheap know that a lot of people will be up in arms about this, and saying that they’ll transfer their domains away from GoDaddy. Of course a lot of people may not actually do it – however Namecheap are being pro-active about it, and getting themselves a ton of publicity in the process.
This is a very strong case of capitalizing on your competitors mistakes. It’s not as prevalent in the affiliate world but it’s still there – someone forgets to renew a domain, and you immediately snatch it up. Someone clearly buys paid advertising and you rate them out.
It’s also smart because it’s taking advantages of peoples emotions, one of the easiest types of marketing. People are outraged, people are upset…people are there for the taking 🙂
So props to Namecheap for being so fast at getting this e-mail out and taking advantage of this situation. Even better they put a time limit on it so that people will rush to do it – limited time offers are smart.
If you want to sign up at Namecheap I recommend them strongly based on their service alone – click here. I used to use GoDaddy but have started buying new domains at Namecheap and find their service a lot better as they don’t try and sell you 9000000 things per page, or hit you with 300 domain renewal e-mails per day.
This article was written on March 31, 2011 however all articles are looked at on a monthly basis and updated to keep them relevant.
If you need to contact Graeme, please see his Contact Page. If you are an affiliate manager wanting promoted please see this page.
