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A Great Domain for Freelancers and Entrepreneurs? Try .ME

June 22, 2020

Today, personal websites function as a calling card that can help your customers showcase an online portfolio, house their resume or blog, and find creative ways to establish their personal brand.

.ME is a great option for entrepreneurs, hobbyists, and professionals looking to do any of the above. And as more and more of these potential customers hop online, adding .ME to your lineup is a no-brainer.

Why you should add .ME to your TLD lineup

.ME is easy to market

.ME simply makes sense for “about me” pages, online portfolios, freelance business websites, and professional profile pages. Plus, the .ME registry provides tons of resources for those looking to build a personal brand — content that you can draw from in your marketing efforts.

.ME has big market potential

Having a stand-out online presence is becoming increasingly critical for freelancers and professionals looking to showcase their work or grow their businesses. .ME gives you a great option to offer this growing segment. There are no restrictions for the TLD, and “Me” is a word commonly understood by non-English speakers, which gives it a broad, global appeal.

It’s competitively priced (and currently on sale!)

.ME is competitively priced against popular legacy TLDs (.COM, . NET, .BIZ and .ORG), and right now, you can take advantage of $10 promo pricing.

.ME is a solid .COM alternative

Some people are able to snag theirfirstandlastname.com, but the vast majority of us don’t have a terribly unique moniker. .ME provides a short, fresh alternative when your customer’s .COM is taken.

.ME domains are memorable

We all want our websites to stand out and stick in the minds of our visitors. .ME has a novelty factor that causes people to take note. Plus, most of us would agree that websites that feel personal are often more memorable. What’s more personal that .ME?

.ME shows solid customer stickiness

.ME has a high renewal rate. The majority of .ME registrants hold their registration for many years. Customer stickiness can be further improved by combining the domain purchase with value-added services, like SSL and Email.

Marketing .ME domains to your customers

Getting creative with .ME domain names

Website owners can use their .ME to create a space that says “this is who am I and what I want people to know about me.” Some .ME registrants demonstrate the value of simply using their name alone, like medical illustrator, chinamimichaels.me. Others opt for a playful approach that takes advantage of keywords, like UK blogger, thelondoner.me.

In both cases, .ME supports the site owner’s goal of telling their story and presenting their work in a professional, yet unique and individual way.

But .ME is also employed in more surprising ways by big names like PayPal. Check out their creative use of paypal.me to simplify transactions for their users.

.ME resources you can use

The .ME team actively helps new freelancers, recent grads and small businesses to get online and stay connected to the world. Transitioning from a full-time job or directly from the classroom to a freelance career can be stressful, and often these customers spend a lot of time researching their next steps.

The .ME blog is full of resources and advice on personal branding and how to launch a freelance career. Whether it’s tips on choosing the right domain or which elements to include in a freelance portfolio, the .ME blog is full of content that can be used to help support your customers.

Bandzoogle: website builder for musicians

June 1, 2020

Featured, Fun, Industry Insight, Resellers

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Bandzoogle CEO Stacey Bedfor plays guitar in her home.

Stacey Bedford, CEO of Bandzoogle

The Enom team has enough musically inclined members to form at least two in-house rock bands, so we’re geeking out pretty hard about highlighting Bandzoogle on our blog. The Montreal-based SaaS company calls itself the easiest all-in-one professional website platform for musicians and bands. They target a unique vertical, one that their team is hugely passionate about, and they really know their customers: their platform is very much created for musicians, by musicians.

Here, Bandzoogle CEO, Stacey Bedford, provides some insight into how and why they’ve been so successful in supporting their customers and steadily growing the company.

What features are you most proud of? Which do the musicians that use your platform rave about?

Bandzoogle's Technical Support Manager, Adam, sits in his at-home production studio.

Bandzoogle’s Technical Support Manager, Adam, is also a music producer.

Commission-free direct-to-fan sales tools. Bandzoogle provides musicians with the eCommerce tools necessary to sell anything you can imagine: digital goods like albums, singles, EPs, song sheets, tickets, download codes or videos; physical goods like merch, CDs, or vinyl; and services like music lessons. You can even sell recurring subscriptions by tier and set up a crowdfunding campaign or preorders.

Bandzoogle does not take a cut of any sales, and we have a SaaS model. This is just one component of the tools we offer as an all-in-one platform. Regardless of our robust toolset, our members absolutely adore our customer support team. They’re your band’s roadie, your web tech. Our response time and quality of support is the best on the planet. Best of all, most of our team members are musicians.

How are you supporting your artists during COVID-19?

Within the first month of the pandemic, our team launched commission-free live streaming ticket sales, event ticket refunds, a tip jar feature, transaction history exports and filtering, and a comprehensive guide to musician resources during a pandemic. Every week, our team meets to discuss what has changed in the last week and how we can help. We have quickly adapted our processes to stay on top of artists’ needs.

To what does Bandzoogle attribute your success?

There are a few things I can note here as being key to our success. As you can see, we are constantly building new features and designs that are relevant to artists today. But more than that, we always put our staff and members’ needs first. We have grown into a sizable company but we’ve never strayed from our core values.

At Bandzoogle, our members can expect a very high level of service and an honest partner. It is a streamlined set of pro features, but you’re dealing with a small family vibe.

Lastly, we’re fully bootstrapped— we’ve never taken external funding, and we’ve always made decisions on our own terms, without putting a focus on turning profits. Doing the right thing by our members has resulted in great success.

How do you build an artist community and connect with your customers?

We do a lot of proactive outreach with our customers. This includes webinars, free website reviews (even for non-members), member meetups in different cities, and you’ll also see some of us at different music tech events. We are a small team with a big reach. Part of that reach includes teaming up with other music verticals that hold the same strong values, like CD Baby, Bandsintown, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, and ASCAP.

Meaningful relationships with ethical music businesses are important to our business model; as a business, you won’t get very far if you don’t venture off the island. Building bridges is important to grow your artist community and connect with your customers.

What have been your major milestones as a company?

The Bandzoogle team poses for a group photo at one of their annual retreats.

An otherwise remote team, the Bandzoogle staff gets together for annual retreats.

Our members’ success is our success: last month, our members hit 62 million dollars in commission-free sales. In May, we also grew to 50,000 paid active users, with additional thousands of active trial members on any given day. Another huge milestone was growing our executive team. We have a fairly flat organizational chart, but we promoted Colin Mitchell to CTO and Dave Cool to VP of Strategic partnerships. We are leading this incredible group of individuals and for me, it’s a huge win to be able to foster so much professional growth within our small team of 29.

Are there any .COM alternatives that you guys like or that resonate with musicians?

As bricks and mortar stores become less pertinent, .COM TLDs have become a scarce resource. You’ll see many artists soon find out that long-winded .COMs leave too much room for user error, and alternative TLDs can be less costly and easier to remember.

Because of this, we see many artists branching out and using .ROCKS, .BAND, and some old, trusted, but still available, .ORG and .NET options for their band. Bandzoogle plans include many TLD options across all 3 plans, from $9.95 to $14.95 per month.

Are there any exciting plans for the future you’d like to share?

I can tell you that the world is changing rapidly, and, for any business, finding a way to monetize globally is paramount today. We’ll see so many advancements in the tools available to both businesses and artists over the next year, it’ll be a different landscape. Businesses that are adaptable will do well, but it’s about to be a wild ride.

Make Money Selling .ORG

March 18, 2020

Advice, Fun, Industry Insight

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Missed our .ORG Webinar? We’ve got you covered. Below you’ll find a recording of the live presentation as well as links to the downloadable .ORG Toolkit and Webinar PDF.

Watch the .ORG Webinar

Download your .ORG resources

Download the PDF presentation

Download the .ORG toolkit

Tucows Celebrates 20 Years in the Domain Industry

January 22, 2020

Featured, Fun

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As of this month, our parent company, Tucows, has officially been in the domains business for 20 years. They introduced OpenSRS (Enom’s then-rival, now-sister company) in 2000, not long after Enom was born. Tucows lifers share a lot of nostalgia for this era; though Tucows has grown to become the largest wholesale registrar and ventured successfully into Fibre Internet and Mobile, a unique fondness for OpenSRS’ early years remains. So what made those early years so cool? Michael Goldstein, Director of Marketing at the time, laid it out for us:

I am intentionally googling none of my recollections about the early days of OpenSRS so they will almost certainly be romanticized, exaggerated or just plain wrong. A few themes jump out at me.

We felt like we were part of a revolution

In a little corner of the world, Network Solutions was an evil empire. A government-sanctioned monopoly was getting fat and greedy and the product that they controlled (domain names) was quickly becoming more crucial to many millions more end-users around the globe. The channel (Web hosts, ISPs, IT consultants) was overcharged and underappreciated. We believed so strongly that these managed service providers (as we liked to call them at the time) knew the end users best and would take the best care of them if they just got the tools and pricing they needed.

It was fun to be a hero to that very narrow target. It was fun to offer a 70% price break from what Network Solutions was charging. It was fun to witness hypergrowth. In fact, you could argue that our unspoken tagline, “OpenSRS, we’re not Network Solutions!” was so successful, Tucows has really just imitated that same model and re-lived that sort of revolution again and again. Hover, we’re not GoDaddy! Ting, we’re not AT&T or Comcast!

We really enjoyed ourselves

When trends and forces are all delivering customers to your doorstep, it’s pretty easy to think you are clever. We ran magazine ads that said, “You can get a lesser product, lousy service and a bad attitude. But it’ll cost 3 times more.” (Oh, fun fact! Andy Berndt, the guy who wrote that ad for us as a freelance copywriter, is now in charge of all creative output at Google as founder and Managing Director of their internal Creative Lab. He also played Duke basketball for a season as a walk on.)

We couldn’t get enough cow references

We built the .MOO top-level domain to demonstrate our registry management solution. I also personally gave away two cows at ISPCon in San Diego to celebrate our two-millionth (I think!) domain name registration. The prize was actually a choice between two cows, a year supply of milk or the cash equivalent. We bet heavily on the winner taking the cash.

I rented the cows from a nearby dairy farmer for just one hour and paraded them across the plaza outside the conference center to chants of Who Let The Cows Out! (If that reference isn’t immediately familiar to you, I’m not going to explain it.) If I remember right, we intended to also highlight the winning registered domain name in our promotional materials and media outreach but chose not to because it was pretty shockingly pornographic (like the thousand domains registered before and after it). Good times.

We weren’t thinking about 25 million domains

Everything we did was done to quickly solve a problem or seize an opportunity. We listened well. We hustled. But we never expected that we would be using the things we built twenty years later. We certainly never imagined that we would eventually acquire and integrate half the other challengers that launched at the same time we did. Now we’re all growneded up. We are building an integrated platform that can accommodate over 25 million domain names and over 40,000 managed service providers (or whatever we call them these days) around the world. We proudly offer a huge selection of TLDs, from .ABOGADO to .ZONE. We talk about scale and efficiency. We brainstorm and measure site usability. I think we ultimately do a better job for our customers today than we did back then. I don’t think we’ll ever be quite as cool .

Hostnet: Finding Success with New TLDs

December 9, 2019

Fun, Industry Insight, New TLDs

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Founded in 1999 by two students offering web-design services, Hostnet has grown into one of the largest and most customer-friendly hosting providers in the Netherlands. Today, they offer domain names, website hosting, a website builder, and other business services to a growing number of customers. Since 2000, they’ve used Tucows to power domain registrations and management for a large part of their business.

Here’s a snapshot of our conversation with Bas Schouten, Product Manager (Domains), Hostnet BV. We touch on Hostnet’s successful journey and how their partnership with Tucows (Enom’s parent company) has helped them create value for end-customers and capture growing business opportunities.

1. Tell us about your journey from a two-man web design company to the Hostnet of today?

In the beginning, Hostnet was selling hosting and domain names from an attic. This was back in the days when customers placed their orders via fax. Needless to say, it involved a lot of manual work. A lot has changed over the years. For one thing, orders are no longer sent via fax, but via the Hostnet webshop. Requesting and registering a domain name is now automatic. But we’ve also expanded our product offering. In addition to hosting and domain names, we’ve added solutions such as email, Microsoft Office 365, and various other Managed Services.

In 20 years we have become one of the largest and most customer-friendly hosting providers in the Netherlands. During this time, we grew to a 50-person, then 100-person company. Along the way, there have been milestones in the number of registered domains and active hosting packages we have under management.

2. What role has Tucows played in this journey?

Hostnet has been a Tucows reseller since 2000—nearly 20 years. Tucows is our valued partner in areas such as domain registration and SSL certificates. By working together with Tucows, Hostnet has been able to offer registrations under multiple top-level domains (TLDs) since 2000. Tucows also helped us effectively expand our top-level domain offering when the new TLDs became available, starting in 2014.

3. What’s your perspective on new top-level domains? How have they impacted your business, and how do your customers perceive them?

With the right marketing, new top-level domains can be the biggest opportunity (growth rate wise) at this time, which is great. I think, in general, customers like new domains, although there are many new extensions that are just too long/niche to be actively used. The beauty of new extensions such as .SITE, .ONLINE and .TECH—all of which are popular in the Netherlands—is that domains in these zones are so valuable when the more traditional options (like .NL or .COM) are already taken. This has already begun to happen to a large extent.

4. Which domain extensions do you think most resonate with the Netherlands market?

I’d say .ONLINE and .SITE are quite popular in the Netherlands. In fact, .ONLINE is currently Hostnet’s best performing new domain extension and tops the charts in terms of sales volume and growth rate. I believe that .ONLINE is the largest new extension in the Netherlands.

With the eCommerce market booming, we are also seeing a good uptake for .STORE, with live websites from our customers growing consistently on this extension.

Other than that, .NL and .COM are well-known in this region.

5. How have you taken advantage of Tucows’ promotional TLD pricing? What success or changes have you seen as a result of TLD promotions?

We have made the most of Tucows’ promotions mostly by reducing the pricing to our customers for those TLDs, in some cases paired with marketing initiatives such as Social Media posts or mentions in newsletters. In addition, some registry partners, such as Radix, consistently put forth content that has helped us keep the offers fresh and exciting for our customers. These efforts, in most cases, contributed to a significant rise in sales.

6. If you could select a few new TLDs to recommend to other companies not currently selling them, which ones would you pick and why?

My recommendations would definitely include .ONLINE, .STORE, .SITE, .SHOP and .APP. All of these are great TLDs. .ONLINE and .SITE are more generic, while the other three clearly state what they’re used for.

7. Other than pricing, what value do you think new TLDs bring to your customers?

New extensions definitely offer a lot more options to choose from and allow people to register a domain that may be unavailable under the more conventional .NL and .COM TLDs. More importantly, new domain extensions are an opportunity to state more clearly what your website or product is all about.

8. What aspects of your business are you most proud of?

I am most proud of the exceptional service we provide to our customers. We’re professionals who are reachable by phone, chat, and email most of the week and are committed to assisting our customers with any problem, as thoroughly as possible. Hostnet is definitely a customer-first business and that has significantly contributed to our growth and success over the last two decades.

This post was sponsored by Radix. Many of their TLDs, including the super popular .ONLINE, .STORE, and .TECH are on sale now through Enom. Learn more.

Fun Category

Why you should add .ME to your TLD lineup

.ME is easy to market

.ME has big market potential

It’s competitively priced (and currently on sale!)

.ME is a solid .COM alternative

.ME domains are memorable

.ME shows solid customer stickiness

Marketing .ME domains to your customers

Getting creative with .ME domain names

.ME resources you can use

What features are you most proud of? Which do the musicians that use your platform rave about?

How are you supporting your artists during COVID-19?

To what does Bandzoogle attribute your success?

How do you build an artist community and connect with your customers?

What have been your major milestones as a company?

Are there any .COM alternatives that you guys like or that resonate with musicians?

Are there any exciting plans for the future you’d like to share?

Watch the .ORG Webinar

Download your .ORG resources

We felt like we were part of a revolution

We really enjoyed ourselves

We couldn’t get enough cow references

We weren’t thinking about 25 million domains

1. Tell us about your journey from a two-man web design company to the Hostnet of today?

2. What role has Tucows played in this journey?

3. What’s your perspective on new top-level domains? How have they impacted your business, and how do your customers perceive them?

4. Which domain extensions do you think most resonate with the Netherlands market?

5. How have you taken advantage of Tucows’ promotional TLD pricing? What success or changes have you seen as a result of TLD promotions?

6. If you could select a few new TLDs to recommend to other companies not currently selling them, which ones would you pick and why?

7. Other than pricing, what value do you think new TLDs bring to your customers?

8. What aspects of your business are you most proud of?

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