Domain name growth in China

China - Map Online activity is stronger than ever in China as the CNNIC and the IWOSC show that the .cn domain name extension registrations in China have exceeded 1M, for 2005.

You can view the report here (.pdf format).

By the end of 2005, China had a healthy 2,592,410 domains registered, in all (including .com, .net and other TLDs). This represents an increase of over 40% compared with the same period, in 2004.

Not too surprisingly, the longer .com.cn suffix has been largely surpassed by the shorter and easier to remember .cn.

Overall, China has about 94M users and roughly, 30M access the web using leased lines (LANs connected to the Internet), 52M use dial-up, just over 6M use ISDN and 42M use broadband (either xDSL or cable modems).

This means there’s a real opportunity to register quality .cn domain names that are still available. Here’s a quick list:

China - Federal Building If you missed the .com goldrush a few years back, this may be your time to add valuable domain names to your portfolio, in the .cn realm.

You can also take a look at the .com.cn suffix if you’re doing business in China since it’s usually linked to corporations.

If you’d like to check for the availability of any other domain name, in the .cn extension or any other, just visit this domain registration web site and enjoy very low prices.

Google Co-op Beta should be added to your bookmarks

Four new offerings were announced at Google Press Day: Google Trends, Google Desktop version 4, Google Co-op, and Google Notebook.

Google Co-op Beta Although you might have missed it, Google Co-op seems to have a huge potential impact on the way we search for relevant content as the service allows users to subscribe to other people’s “bookmarks” in hopes that search results will be more accurate.

“In other words, if you subscribe to feeds managed by people who appears to be experts in their fields, you’ll get extra links in your regular Google searches, coming from your subscriptions.”

This all translates into a credible path to creating a giant, worldwide bookmarking community. Google Co-op even has the potential to transform the way we think about SEO and SEM.

You can subscribe to my Google Co-op bookmarks that will grow over time and of course, you should create your very own profile so I can subscribe to it, in return.

Eyetracking web usability helps understand online users’ true behavior

Box blindness... The members of the Nielsen Norman Group are user experience pioneers. They advocated user-centered design and usability before it became popular to do so.

NN/g is preparing for their San Francisco Edition of the Usability Week 2006, from June 19-24 at the InterContinental Mark Hopkins.

The people behind NN/g are Jakob Nielsen, a guru of web page usability, Donald A. Norman, another guru in workable technology and Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini, arguably a leading authority on software design.

Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice Coyne are going to give a full-day tutorial on Eyetracking Web Usability or, for newbies, analyzing where your eyes glaze, on a web page. If you ever wondered if anyone was looking at your Google AdSense zone, this is the way to know, for sure.

The tutorial addresses major issues, such as homepage and page design, banner and text-box blindness, navigation, search, people’s interactions with content, the type of pictures people pay attention to and how multimedia is perceived. Basically, it covers the bulk of what we’ve always been wondering and never knew how to scientifically measure, until now.

Jakob Nielsen has previously documented a rather common F-Shaped Pattern for readins web content, such as two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe. In Mr Nielsen’s own words:

"F for fast. That’s how users read your precious content. In a few seconds, their eyes move at amazing speeds across your website’s words in a pattern that’s very different from what you learned in school."

This is major news since were talking about a dominant web page reading pattern across a sample of over 200 users who accepted to be analyzed.

If you’re interested in making your web pages even more interesting for your visitors, while increasing your changes of converting your pixels into sales, perhaps you should follow these guidelines. The content is easy to understand even for web development newbies.

It’s largely based on common sense.

Easier checkouts using SecureNetShop

Selling online is a rather complex process for many people, especially the small entrepreneurs who are just starting out.

For instance, the store can be nice but it also needs a solid shopping cart and an easy to understand checkout process. Solutions such as PayPal can do wonders for emerging business people who love the fact that it’s free and wildly popular. It can work well for a while but over time, it might lack a bit on the customization front.

Keep in mind that lots of e-consumers like to pay using their credit cards and while PayPal can be an ideal interface in some mom-and-pop shops, nothing looks more professional than a commercial grade shopping cart system closely integrated to your e-store’s look and feel.

If you believe your e-business is ready for an upgrade, it’s time to take a look at a company called SecureNetShop. For a cool $229 per year, you get your very own secure shopping cart system, capable of processing all major credit cards. There are, as always, some small transaction fees but other than that, you’ve got yourself a rock solid setup for a very low price.

Nice features are offered as options to the base package, such as real-time UPS, USPS and FedEx shipping rates, order status manager, unlimited tech support by phone or e-mail and even the possibility to sell digital goods. These add-ons can make a huge difference to the quality of your online B2C retailing.

By helping your customers through a comprehensive checkout process, you’re investing in your future profits because chances are your satisfied customers will come back for more!

Increase your blog revenues with Text Link Ads

Although Google AdSense is still an excellent way to monetize your web sites, new alternatives like TextLinkAds might yield stable, monthly revenues, depending on your web destination’s profile.

Becoming a publisher is free and truly painless. Just submit your web site and voilà! TextLinkAds will quickly get back to you with their answer as to wether you’re approved or not. Chances are, you’ll be approved so let’s take a quick look at the advertising model.

There’s a nifty little ad space value calculator that is useful to see how much you could get from the different ad spaces on your web site. You can enter web sites like Google but you’ll get a notice such as “More Than You Can Afford”, so it’s better to try smaller web sites, like yours or those you like to surf to.

Simply put, the ads showing up in your web pages will provide you with a flat monthly revenue which varies depending on factors like traffic, theme, ad position, and link popularity. Once the advertiser has purchased his monthly exposure, he can get an unlimited number of clicks without ever being turned off. That’s right, it’s very different from the pay-per-click model.

It’s a relatively new program but it looks interesting. You’re free to signup as a publisher and start making some extra money with your hard online work!

Sharpen your SEO edge using business blogs

Business Blogging at the Office Business blogging is a new way to interact with the world and thank goodness, it doesn’t involve showing an über-costly 30 seconds ad during the SuperBowl.

Most business people, with exciting offers for their customers, don’t have national-TV advertising budgets so looking for an affordable alternative to reach out to potential customers makes perfect sense. Case in point, Search Engine Optimization benefits a lot more from a well maintained business blog than a few seconds on the tube.

It’s common knowledge that effective marketing is all about “a good message” repeated several times over but, in this wired world, the message must be adapted to countless situations.

For many, the almighty business blog is opening up an attractive window of opportunity to post usually short, frequent and chronologically ordered updates about your commercial offerings and how they relate to the world. SEO has everything to do with opportunity so allowing yourself to operate a business blog should turn out to your advantage, especially over the long term.

“Don’t just state that you offer products or services.

Everyone can do that.

You need to add value to become unique.”

Business Blogging at the Office The oldest method in the book is to crosslink two “old” ideas for the first time. For instance, say that your “safety products” would’ve helped save lives at a local hospital where a safety problems occured lately. Another example would be a web designer blogging about the news while advertising web development services at the top of every page.

Quality content + smart placement = tangible results.

One line of advice: don’t overdo publicity in your blog. Overselling your offers may turn off lots of visitors so bite the bullet and work hard into building engaging blogging destinations so that, over time, visitors who appreciate your unique, relevant and useful content may be tempted to also enjoy your products or services.

In some ways, it may seem like a long loop from the time you advertise to the time a profit is made but look at the big picture and you’ll see where a good business blogs fits for the ongoing financial health of modern corporations, big, small and microscopic.

Google Trends is awesome!

Google Trends Up to now, it was possible to know which keyword set was use more often but you needed specialized software to chart trends and even then, it didn’t provide much perspective, especially for multi-year charting. There had to be a better way than to compile mountains of historical data on an individual basis.

To make things worse, if you wanted to compare different keyword sets between one another in a comprehensive way, it got to a point where so much disk space was needed that you had to uninstall you favorite video games, which was, of course, unacceptable!

Google Trends History In comes Google with the single most exciting online trend tool to hit the web, ever. The web service is called Google Trends. If you’re into domain marketing, search engine optimization, search engine marketing or web site promotion, you’ll litterally fall in love with the awesome power of this service.

For instance, let’s say you wanted to know how the following keyword trends look like, just enter them separated by keywords, such as “domain names,seo,sem,site promotion,web marketing” and voilà! You can view the “Searches” and “News” trends.

Look a little further down on the page and you’ll see the trend charting is accompanied by “Cities”, “Regions” and “Languages” profiling. Is your blood pumping faster already?

Google Trends - Languages Google does put out a word of warning:

“Google Trends aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. It is based upon just a portion of our searches, and several approximations are used when computing your results. Please keep this in mind when using it.”

Okay, whatever! 99.999% of the people using the service can live with that. The trends, shown to everyone who requests them, are impossible to find elsewhere (for free).

Some information is better than no information.

In this case, Google Trends provides abundant information for just about any subject you may think of so unless you’re working for Microsoft or Yahoo!, you’ll agree this new Google tools is “permanent bookmark material”.

Opportunities in the “dot fm” namespace

Dot FM Domain Names If you’re open to domain names outside the gTLD namespace of heavyweights like .com and .net, perhaps you’d like to know major domain names are still available for registration in cTLDs like the ".fm".

As of today, the following "dot fm" domain names are still looking for owners:

Sure the ".fm" domain names cost a little more than ".com" counterparts but given the fact major generic domains are still available, this may prove a valuable investment. Keep in mind the letters "F" and "M" can mean other things than just "Frequency Modulation".

The Federated States of Micronesia might not ring a bell to you either but nevertheless, you can register all the ".fm" domain names that you please without ever establishing a presence there.

Thinking outside the box, it’s worth noting that buying ".fm" names is a sound way to financially help the generally poor people living in Micronesia since a share of every sale is given back to that local government.

Go ahead, check cool names to see if they’re still available!

The evolution of 2CheckOut

If you sell your offerings online, you may have already noticed the international customers are more active than ever and that’s why new features, like 2CheckOut’s GEOIP are so important.

GEOIP delivers true convenience for your customers. If their IP is traced to a country where 2CheckOut local preferences, such as currency, the payment page will automatically be adjusted therefore increasing the chances you make a sale.

Of course, if a customers from another country still prefers to pay in USD, he can simply click on the US Flag for instant conversion.

Another nice feature is the fact a customer asking for a refund and obtaining it will get back the exact same amount paid, for the 6 months following the transaction, even if the local currency is traded at a different rate. Locking the currency’s value for 6 months is more convenient, from a customer’s perspective, than PayPal’s standard 30 day refund.

But that’s not all, vendors can now emit coupons to interest customers who respond well to that kind of promotion. Nothing motivates a sale like a 75% off coupon, online or off!

The legal documents have all been updated, the customers services which was already impressive has been upgraded and the overall interface for managing the account looks fantastic. Maybe a few things, here and there, could be polished up but in general, 2CheckOut’s e-commerce partnership proposition sounds like an awesome deal.

There’s a one-time 49$ fee to become a vendor but from my experience, it’s been a profitable investment.

PayPal still offers top of the line payment services for web site owners and managers but 2CheckOut’s sustained rate of innovation could help it score a large number of new customers.

Click here to learn more about 2CheckOut.