Zen Zoomie’s Place: Chronicles of a (Wannabe) Pro Blogger

There aren’t very many books that can stand the test of twenty-six centuries of scrutiny. So when and if you find a book that has passed that test–you can bet it’s worth a read. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, is one such work that has managed to hold up rather well. Sun Tzu’s principles are one of the first things future military leaders learn about in formal training, and his lessons are applied extensively throughout the ultra-competitive business world. Perhaps old Sun Tzu can teach us a thing or two about Blogging as well…

Sun Tzu and the Art of (Blog) Warfare

You shouldn’t be surprised to learn that, as your fledgling website or blog grows in popularity, some people in the world will seek to capitalize on your success. Or worse yet, they may take direct actions to limit your success.

I’ve found that Bloggers as a community are a somewhat of an exception–there are always individuals who are willing to lend a helping hand as you venture into the unknown of Blogdome, but by and large, as with any business venture, it is a world of survival of the fittest. And for-profit Blogs or other Web-based enterprises are, at their core, businesses!

Thinking of your competitors as adversaries when developing your marketing and revenue-building strategies, and applying Sun Tzu’s principles of warfare, can be an enlightening exercise. The better you can anticipate your adversaries’ moves, the better you can plan your own strategies to avoid or counter those actions.

Now the general who wins a battle makes many
calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought.

The general who loses a battle makes
but few calculations beforehand.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 6th Century BC

Protecting Your Domain Name and the Art of Blog Warfare - Cyber-Squatters and Typo-Squatters

Thinking ahead of time about what you can do to defend your up-and-coming business is something every aspiring web mogul should do. Particularly if you know where and how your enemy is going to attack, there is no excuse for being under- or un-prepared when it happens. It has been proven time and again that one place you will be taken advantage of is your domain name if it is not sufficiently protected, but luckily that turns out to be one of the easier things to plan for up-front. Let’s look at two of the more commonly known adversaries…

Cyber-squatters and Typo-Squatters

Cyber-squatters and typo-squatters are two types of individuals that would love to take advantage of the popularity of your domain instead of having to earn the traffic themselves. According to Wikipedia, cyber-squatting is the practice of:

…registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad-faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. The cybersquatter then offers to sell the domain to the person or company who owns a trademark contained within the name at an inflated price.

Even though the practice of cyber-squatting in bad-faith is illegal in much of the world, it still happens extensively. A variation of cyber-squatting called typo-squatting (also known as URL hijacking), is just as bad:

…a form of cybersquatting which relies on mistakes such as typographical errors made by Internet users when inputting a website address into a web browser. Should a user accidentally enter an incorrect website address, they may be led to an alternative website owned by a cybersquatter.

As an example, take Technorati–one of the most popular blog directories and social bookmarking sites in existance. How would you spell Technorati if you’d never been there before? Try going to www.technoratti.com and see where it takes you. Or try www.johncow.com instead of www.johnchow.com.

Not all of those who want to capitalize on the future popularity of your domain name are as "innocent" as the above two examples, and many will direct the resulting traffic to websites that your target audience may not approve of. Adult sites commonly use typos, sound-alikes, etc. to "funnel" traffic to their own websites, which is obviously a concern if your site’s reputation is important to you.

Maximizing Traffic

Even if you’re not worried about the -squatters stealing your traffic, there’s at least one other good reason to consider registering a few of the most-likely variations of your domain-name. As your website or blog’s popularity grows, more people will hear about your site through word-of-mouth, podcasts, or just try to get there from memory when they don’t have a bookmark or link handy. More guessing = more near misses of your real domain name. But if all the phonetic sound-alikes and common misspellings of your domain name lead to your website instead of to your adversaries’ sites, you’ll maximize direct traffic from those sources.

So the best way to protect yourself against squatters and to maximize traffic from user mistakes or poor memories is by registering the most-likely variations of your domain name and redirecting them to your site!

Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 6th Century BC

Booting a squatter out of a related domain can take time, effort, and sometimes significant legal fees. So it is far better, if you have any inkling that your website will become a significant contributor to your livelihood in the future, to do what you can now to protect yourself in the future. If you’re interested in the long-term success of your website or blog, you should think about what variations of your domain name are likely to be targets of these types of attacks early on and register the most likely victims yourself. If you arrive ’second to field’, well…not much has changed in the last twenty-six centuries.

Deciding What Domain Names to Register

There are all sorts of potential variations on any one domain name. Ideally, you would want all of the most likely variations to lead to your website. Of course you need to exercise some level of reason when deciding how popular you believe your site will eventually become and registerring only the most likely variations. Bill Sweetman at OneDegree.com provided a good overview of what variations you should consider in his post The Seven Deadly Domain Name Variations, which I’ve summarized and tweaked below. Try a few of the examples and you’ll quickly see the difference between the domains that have adequately protected themselves and those that have not.

• Sound-alike / Phonetic Variations (technoratti.com vs. technorati.com)
• Mis-spellings / Transposed Letters (goolge.com vs. google.com)
• Punctuation / Hyphenation (micro-soft.com vs. microsoft.com)
• Domain Variations (slashdot.com vs slashdot.org)
• Adjacent Letter Variations (scotrade.com vs. scottrade.com)
• Nearby Keyboard Letter Variations (hoogle.com vs. google.com)
• "Sucks" Variations (microsoftsucks.org)
• Plural Variations (greeting.com vs. greetings.com)

Protecting Your Domain - Now or Later

It may be a long time before your site is popular enough to attract the -squatters, but if you are interested in a successful long-term business it’s something you need to consider now. Spending $8-10 to register the domain now instead of waiting and buying it back for several thousand dollars or a long legal battle seems like a pretty good investment. Especially since many hosting services such as bluehost.com host unlimited domains at no increased price. Insert some practicality into the process when deciding how successful your web-based business will be in the future, and assess the cost now vs. the cost later (both time and money!) when deciding how extreme you should be in your guardianship of your domain name.

In my next post, I’ll talk about how to implement domain aliases in a search engine optimization (SEO) friendly way. (Yes, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it!).

Until next time,