So, I had a few people moaning about how they won’t read my book online, so Mark gave me the heads up on Lulu.

You can now buy the seo book as a proper paperback directly online for just £9.99

Lulu is a great website. Upload your print-ready PDF, chose a format and decide on your price.

I may have mentioned before that I have a villa in Pervolia, Cyprus.

As part of my web strategy, I have created a content-rich website with advice on things to do and lots of local information. That’s stage one. That could be enough - it’s optimized.

I have focussed my content on one small village rather than the country and I have added in the largest local town of Larnaca as part of the overall strategy, although I would be naive to think I could attack that market as well.

I have focussed on one smaller market with a view to dominating a niche.

So, as the next steps I have:

• Created a Squidoo page.
• More recently created a Facebook group. This requires log-in, perhaps I should have created a Facebook Page?
• I have engaged locally to create a community website.

I have created the web offering with a real intention of offering value for everyone, especially the village where my villa is. I’m not looking to make money out of that in itself, but what this approach will allow me, if I can deliver my intention of filling rental weeks, is additional local leverage.

I will take the Google approach - let’s work out how to monetize it later.

All the lonely websites, where do they all belong?

Many individuals and companies have great enthusiasm when their web site is launched, but if they don’t deliver they soon get forgotten.

Code breaks (for one reason or another), technology moves on, news is way out of date and the website never get any visitors… it must feel so lonely.

I was just looking through my company database and couldn’t work out one of the contacts was, so I visited their website…

“Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name…. Nobody came”

I run a local business news website for my home town of Basingstoke. The idea being that any local company can forward me their press releases and they can get exposure. Meanwhile I create a relevant source for local business news, and a local business-to-business directory.

It’s never going to be a website with so much traffic to monetize and I run Adwords on it just because I can, rather than to make money. . It’s a bit of a labour of love.

That said, it seems to really annoy some people that it is localised to Basingstoke and that I won’t accept stories or directory entries from outside of the town and the local phone code.

I had an e-mail from a ‘marketing’ person in Andover (about 15 miles away) this morning:

I would welcome the opportunity to add our details to your directory. Unfortunately you will not allow companies in Andover to register. We have a number of clients in Basingstoke and would like the opportunity to contribute to the Basingstoke Business News.

After replying with an explanation why, I got this sarcastic reply:

We have decided to start our own Basingstoke Gazette web Site for Non Basingstoke Companies. Please encourage your non Basingstoke Companies to forward their Non Basingstoke news to us. We are also contributing to the non Southampton Directory and the non Portsmouth Directory.

Thank you from a non Basingstoke company.

Firstly, it’s not a Gazette website, that’s here. Secondly, this person is in ‘marketing’.

I love it when people don’t understand it. Especially when they are potential competitors.

This is a tale of caution for any small business owner. Probably one of THE most important parts of your online management - taking ownership and control of your domain.

I often sit in meetings for new web projects with clients and I slip in the question, “So, who manages your domain?”. Often, with a coy and bewildered look, I get one of the following three responses:

• “Not sure, our IT guy set it up and he’s left now”
• “Our web designer, the one we’ve fallen out with, sorted it out for us”
• “I bought it using one of those online superstores. I got it very cheap. Can’t remember which one though”

It’s infuriating to think that their biggest online asset it not being monitored, managed or controlled. I don’t get angry for me, I just can’t understand how anyone would not want to control their prized asset.

An old client of mine once bought a .TV domain online through Easily, using an e-mail account to register it that he rarely checked. The domain expired. It then cost him a lot of time, 90 days and £160 to get it back. That doesn’t include any lost business through no e-mail or website for three months.

What Is a Domain?

Your domain is like a prized personalised number plate. Mine, is craigkillick.co.uk and I use it for my web address on www, for this blog on blog.craigkillick.co.uk as well as for my e-mail address.

If I decide to move my hosting, I can just manage my domain to point it to a new server, a bit like taking a number plate and putting on a new car.

Also, as any domain I own, admittedly not this one, increases in value, it is imperative that the right legal entity owns it, whether that be a Limited company, or an individual. What you don’t want is for your domain to be legally owned by your web agency, hosting company or your IT guy that left - YOU need to own it.

Who Owns Your Domain?

You can check who owns and manages your domain using WhoIs web search tools - I tend to use www.swhois.net, but you should be able to Google “whois” and find other versions.

At the very least you need to make sure you are the owner of the domain. If you don’t you need to take steps to get it. The administrator is the first person to go to and their details should be on the Who Is information.

Managing Domains

Yes, you need some technical know-how to manage your DNS and Nameserver settings and I am not the person to go into that in great detail.

I do however use 123-reg to buy and manage my domains. I’ve never had any problems with them. It is easy to buy your domain and manage it in a control panel, transfer it to other hosting companies, or, if you have the know-how you can point your sub-domains and e-mail to any server you choose.

That said, finding a good hosting company - now that’s a whole ‘nother story.

I love it when you get a bit of feedback on a website. This isn’t about me, but I found Goldcoaster ranting and I agree with what he says. It’s just nice to hear it from someone else once in a while and know I’m not alone. It’s worthwhile visiting his site and seeing his comments as well but paraphrased, they are:

1. Pop Ups
2. Extra software to view site
3. Registration required to visit the site
4. Slow pages
5. Outdated content and dead links

snoskred chips into the comments and Snap - Yep - I agree with that too - although I did need to go through my testing stage of course.

I guess it comes down to cost versus value but I have had two episodes in the past 24 hours that highlight potential issues with using online services and have given me a crappy day to boot.

1. One of our web hosting companies facilities went down last night at 7.30pm and went back up again at 8.50am this morning. Worst part is that we couldn’t get hold of them to sort it out. It’s the second time it’s happen this year and at £395 per month I may start looking for a new solution. (ASP managed server if you know anyone in the UK).
   This just so happened to coincide with my first Facebook group e-mail - bugger!
2. I love Campaign Monitor for e-mail marketing, but it’s the first of the month, I have three e-shots waiting to go and the system isn’t working after some ‘routine maintenance’. I’ll be fair to them as it’s a great system and very cheap to use but it puts me in a hole right at this moment.

To be fair to both of these issues, it’s cost and systems versus value. I can’t afford to write my own e-mail system and host my own websites, and even if I did, I couldn’t guarantee that it would be working 100% of the time.

As for my hoster’s 99.9% up time guarantee, that’s been blown, but having seen the Service Level Agreement, it would be hard for me to do anything about it anyway. I bet they keep on advertsing their up-time though!

Gee’d On By John Chow, I’ve bought a couple of pages on Million Dollar Wiki.

The logic’s there in terms of short term exposure for a couple of high-end words (I’ve bought “beauty” for TS Beauty and “candles” for a new project) and also longer term link building potential.

I’ll link in the pages and give you an update in due course…