The Business of Digital Podcast

After a recent story about a popular web service not keeping a domain registered the guys thought it was a good time to talk about domains. The guys dig into some reasons why you should own your own domain, ways to prevent losing it (i.e. forgetting to renew, losing it due to old credit card, someone leaving a company and missing alerts, etc.) and some other tips and tools to help you manage your company’s domains.

Below are some great resources that were mentioned in this episode along with more details on the Marketo domain dropping story:

There are scams and too good to be true offers every day that you will receive. We highly encourage you to ask questions, think about if something is “too good to be true”, and make sure you kick the tires. The guys will give you several examples and ways to kick the tires of offers that want to give you 100s or 1000s of followers on social media, guarantee rankings in Google and Bing, and even go into some offline examples (decks, HVAC, roofing scams).

While we all get many of these a day (and more for each additional domain/website you have) we thought we would highlight a few that came in just days before we pushed this episode live. It seems recently that much of the “offers” I (Dave) has received this week were around videos for my websites.

These are just two quick examples but others that we often see are for 99$ domain renewal emails, 100 links for $10, emails you get from random people about how they found your site (typically very vague and always some random Gmail account with design in the name) claiming top rankings in just days or some other cheap too good to be true offer. A fair number that I (Dave) personally get are through a contact form on one of my sites but the rest are email blasts.

During the show Mat made reference to an example and here it is! It is a great example of email offers for SEO and Social Media that you may want to avoid. You likely get emails very similar to this one and hopefully they are flagged as spam or just end up in your junkmail type folder.

Lastly here is another example recently received that was selling social followers and engagement for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and even SoundCloud.

If you have any examples or have seen any similar emails please drop describe it a bit in the comments so others can see additional examples.

In this episode, the guys talk about some reasons to avoid stock photography and some alternatives to using it. Stock photography is great and can fill in gaps for category pages, service pages, and landing pages but often it is over used and not the best choice for most companies. Mr. Photography Mat gives some tips and suggests some ways to take your own photos so that you can own your own content and leverage the photos across every channel. From owning your own photos, to having brand consistency, to showing who the people behind the business are, and to avoiding lawsuits there are many reasons to take your own photos. Lastly the guys tell about a recent story (link below) of a photographer that went against a company that was using his photos on their social channels without paying or permission – just another reason to take your own photos whenever you can.

Here are some examples of where you can find some (Unsplash and more), when Hollywood gets involved (Vince Vaughn), and the article that spurred the idea for this episode.

In October Mat is not only giving a keynote but is the opener for Swivel Marketing Conference #SwivelNow. Oh, and Dave will be doing a training too so look for them both. This episode will give you a quick version of the great story of a project that Mat and his son made on a 3d printer for a conference – all in 3 or 4 days.

Mat being a photographer of course started to take photos and document the whole process. While documenting Mat took a wide range of Boomerang videos, slow motion videos, tons of photos, GoPro time lapse and many more. Suddenly Mat became a documenter! The guys then jump into other ideas and examples of how a business could look to also documenting something they do and thus creating a ton of content for their site and social media.

Here is a quick link to where you can see the full keynote and Mat’s recent post about taking everyday life and turning it into content (i.e. documenting content!).