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Over the years, I’ve became a really simple person.
And yes – just typing that, I know how silly it sounds.
But really – simplicity is the best way of life in my opinion. I think this all came from when I worked for the Government. Just seeing all this wasted time, conference calls that stretched for hours, people flying in or taking the train in from Kingston, various consultants being brought in etc – it was just so much wasted time and money.
It makes work a lot easier. Right now I’m in the process of building a sports betting tips site covering all sports. It’s one of those sites that could have so much to it and be absolutely massive – when I sat and planned the site out I must have sat there for about 5 hours coming up with everything the site would have etc.
Very easy to get overwhelmed.
But instead with the simple approach – I take it a step at a time. What do we need first? Content. Okay – let’s get the content going. Once that’s done I’ll start thinking about a design etc. Just keeping it simple, one step at a time.
I apply it to life too. Like when the XBone and PS4 came out. I wasn’t sitting there debating whether to buy one or not, and then which one to buy. It was a fairly simple decision: “I’ll wait until Fallout 4 comes out then decide”. Otherwise I’m quite happy playing the 360 and my backlog of games.
Then a few weeks ago, my friend said he’d like to have weekly online sessions drinking beer and playing NHL 15. Okay great. I’ve seen the XBox One with it’s “Snap Skype” stuff – let’s go with that then I can flip the bird at him when P.K. Subban scores a hat trick. Easy enough – I want it for one thing, so I’ll go with that.
Plus it saved me from having to wade through forum after forum, thread after thread, blog post after blog post of PS4 fanboys as I try and decide which one to get. In all my years, I don’t think I’ve seen a fanboy group quite as obsessed as they are.
“K.I.S.S.” isn’t just a neat acronym. If you’re feeling overwhelmed or stressed – take a minute to break it down. A nice simple, step by step guide to whatever is bugging you.
You’ll be surprised how much easier that can make handling problems.
Domain Extensions:
I might have talked about this before – can’t remember – but wanted to talk a bit about all those domain extensions that are coming out these days. .tattoo, .tips, .bargains, .marketing etc.
Personally from a branding perspective, I think it’s fantastic. I mean imagine being a tattoo agency in Toronto, and owning the domain Toronto.Tattoo ? That is freaking COOL. They haven’t really taken off yet – but I think with time, they’ll be massive.
Of course on the other hand – part of me wants them to be a colossal failure. The reason is because of the stats released – out of all the domains sold so far, it looks like over 90% of them are your typical freaking domain hoarders. I mean spend some time at sedo.com just checking them out – hey we own tele.boutioque please pay us 10,000 Euros for it. Or dealz.blackfriday.com – please bid 9,999 Euros on it. Wow.
SEO is another thing entirely. It seems Google absolutely hate the domains, while Bing loves them. I’ve got personal research on that too – for example, I launched the website F1Betting.Tips this year. For it’s primary keyword it’s currently #3 in bing. Google is convinced it doesn’t even exist.
It’s still early days of course – but SEO wise, they’re not very appealing at the moment. Which is fine – personally, I think they should be used primarily as forwarders for branding purposes only. They function better that way.
Speaking of Domains:
Man, did I have some frustrations launching a new website recently.
I live in Kingston, Ontario. We have a lot of events going on here – various bands playing, comedians etc, lot of sports. But you wouldn’t know about them. It’s a disaster – to find every event in Kingston, you pretty much have to visit 30 websites, as well as follow about 150 different businesses on Facebook/Twitter. And even then that isn’t too helpful because of all the noise their account produces.
So I started a new website. If you use Twitter, you’ll know that most people use their airport code for their city. Ours is #ygk. So I started YGKEvents.com. Nice name.
One problem: – if you click that URL, you’ll actually be forwarded to KingstonOntarioEvents.com.
Wassup wit dat?
Two things.
(1) Search engines are currently useless when it comes to “Airport Code = City”. Despite Twitter making airport codes so big, a search for “ygk” or “ygk businesses” or “ygk events” will bring up anything with YGK in it. So from an SEO perspective – that really, really sucks.
(2) Most people don’t know the airport code for our city. I was surprised when I conducted a survey – 9 out of 10 people had no idea what our airport code was, or what YGK meant. Even better – 4 out of 10 people didn’t even know Kingston HAD an airport. Wow. So if people who LIVE here don’t recognize YGK as Kingston, that could cause issues with people browsing the search engine results thinking YGK = spam site or something.
But then it goes back to “K.I.S.S.” right? I like the YGKEvents.com domain. But using that, as opposed to KingstonOntarioEvents.com, is going to be very bad for business both from a search and user perspective. So it was a no-brainer.
SSLOL:
Finally, I just want to say how funny it is to see all these random websites getting SSL certificates. I’m actually convinced at this point that if Matt Cutts told people to jump off a cliff to increase rankings, they would do it. Just amazing.
I can’t wait for Google Domains to come out of beta, and see the first rumours of “Having a Google Domain is better for SEO” pop up. It’s going to be like printing money for Google.
Alright – I have some actual work to do now. My friend John over at Gaffg.com has completely ripped off the idea of T_IM and started his very own #KickstartMonday. So be sure to head on over and read that as he has a lot of great talk on CRO.
This article was written on August 25, 2014 however all articles are looked at on a monthly basis and updated to keep them relevant.
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