Without a shadow of a doubt 1and1.co.uk (not to be confused with their counterparts 1and1.com)
Now I know why I have always spread my hosting around! This has been a Nightmare weekend! Yesterday afternoon about 3pm I sat down at the desk with a plan in my head of what I wanted to do. I needed to quickly check something on one of our domains and then it started to unfold! There was obviously something wrong and as I investigated it became clear that something was seriously wrong with, I discovered by late last night, over a 100 of our main domains! 1and1.co.uk had for reasons known only to their incompetent selves decided to do something on the server which had completely messed up many of our income earning domains. Their indifference to the problems they had created through rank incompetence and unbelieveably inept procedures angered me to the point that for the first time in many a year I found myself utterly lost for words!
So the last 36 hours have been spent putting right the problems they created. I have also discovered that they want to charge me exorbitant amounts of money to transfer this set of domains away from them. To cap it all they then had the nerve, and you may find this as unbelieveable as I did, to send me an email with a standard “Please give us feedback on helping you to resolve your problems” type questionnaire
I had been getting increasingly dubious about them since I discovered that whilst one can obtain a .com domain from 1and1.com for circa $6 their UK counterparts charge £8.99 + VAT so circa $21!
1and1.co.uk - well as we say over here - they couldn’t organise a party in a brewery!
September 4th, 2006
I wanted to do something to celebrate the 500th Member to join our five week old site! So I thought I would share some thoughts with you on how we have gone about making an impact in one of the large niches we operate in.
So here goes it’s not so much a “step by step” but more an overview….hope it helps someone to dominate one of their niches!
So what exactly have we done? Well we have taken a site from new to top 10 placing for the phrase myspace alternative on www.google.co.uk and www.msn.com; created quite a stir in the niche; been interviewed by four of the leading UK Magazines with features over the next few months and gained over 500 very active members.
How did we do it?
Market Research
To start with we tried to determine whether there was space in the marketplace for a MySpace Alternative for this particular niche. It’s a niche which has some fairly big players in it already and in which we have also been active for some time providing high quality information and turning a reasonable level of profit. What I didn’t want to do was create something which didn’t meet a need! So I started to post a few questions in appropriate forums, talked about it on one or two of my blogs and invited comments and feedback through an allocated email address. I also picked up the ‘phone to the editor of one of the main UK magazines in the niche and asked him “what do you think to a MySpace type site?” – he gave a very positive response when I started explaining to him what it would look and feel like. I also talked to our existing customers/subscribers in the niche and asked them what was missing from the current sites they used.
Setting The Site Up
Now this was an interesting experience. I looked around at what was available to support this sort of site or whether I wanted to have something separate developed. This was early on and it was only shortly after I had committed to going with Alstrasoft that I read how problematic it could be and how dire their support could be!
That left me in a bit of a quandary at the time and I decided that the best way forward was to establish a really good working relationship with the hosting company that Alstrasoft push. That has really turned out to be beneficial and as well as providing amazing levels of support during and since the installation I am developing a JV with them which will see some significant benefits to both parties – so don’t forget in your rush to get things done there is enormous benefit to developing relationships with key partners.
I am not going to post an affiliate link (that wasn’t the aim of this posting) but if you do go with them at any point tell them Paul Duxbury referred you! They will probably go running for the hills! No seriously they will look after you!
Once we had the site set up and the graphics designed by a Warrior the next thing to do was to test the site out in a form of UAT (User Acceptance Testing) period. For this I gathered together a group of about 20 people with the instruction to really put the site through its’ paces. These people came from those who had submitted comments about the idea and a few were moderators in some of the key forums in this niche. The feedback from them was immensely helpful in terms of ensuring that we were meeting the needs of our target audience. They have also become evangelists for the site and have helped us achieve in excess of 500 subscribers (who are hungry for products in our niche) that we have gained to date. Now those 500 members have come from publicity which doesn’t include the major magazine features which are planned between now and the New Year – which is the major period during which people in this niche are active online.
Publicity
We have been able to gain a lot of publicity already through a number of medium which I would certainly recommend to you:
• PRWeb – a paid release at $80 saw an enormous amount of interest with us being featured on the major blogs in the niche as well as being discussed in lots of forums.
• Blog Postings – posting across a number of my own blogs, ensuring that I was tagging and pinging has been very helpful. Placing appropriate and meaningful posts on other blogs in the niche with a link back to the site has also been helpful.
• Forum postings and signature links as always have been helpful in generating interest.
• Creating some controversy in the niche by creating a petition on a subject which does spark diametrically opposed views has generated a lot more discussion in the really big forums – and of course the petition has links back to the site!
I haven’t actually sought very many link exchanges to see what happened. I checked a little while ago and there are literally hundreds of links back to us.
So there you have it! An introduction or overview to how we have achieved over 500 members in 5 weeks and they all want to spend in our niche on products that meet their needs.
September 4th, 2006
