Most businesses today would find it hard to function without a website. And the first step toward creating a compelling site is to register a catchy domain name. The process of domain registration itself is simple and straightforward. But before you can go to this step, it is important to determine the domain name that’s most suitable for your business!

The domain name can mean the difference between mediocrity and success on the World Wide Web. With this fact in mind, it is not surprising that some of the best domain names available have already been taken up. But don’t let that stop you. A bit of creativity can go a long way in helping you find a great domain name – below are a couple of tips:

.Com is Still King

Many types of extensions are available these days including .org, .net, and country level domains. Despite these, .com is still king if you want your business to have a “global” feel. On the other hand, those who want their sites to attain a local flavor can opt for .co.uk domain if you operate in Britain or .com.au if you operate in Australia, etc.

Catchy vs. SEO Friendly

When it comes to choosing a catchy name vs. an SEO friendly one, there’s definitely no right or wrong answer. It depends on the purpose of your website as well as the specific industry. Each has its own pros and cons. For instance, catchy names like “Yahoo!” have definitely made it big. On the other side of the equation are websites like “hotels.com”, “auto.com”, etc. that have gained success by virtue of their domain name as well.

Make sure you pick a domain name that matches your branding, is creative, but also clear about what your business does. A compelling and effective website can make or break a business, so choose your domain name carefully.

1. Unifies Branding

A good toll free number should unify your branding. That means having a vanity number that matches with your business name and Internet domain name. Checking the availability of all three before you reserve any is important.

2. Keyword Search Tools

At least one of the leading toll free number providers now offers a keyword search tool for looking up toll free numbers based on keywords in your branding, whether it is your business name, Internet domain name, product, or service.

3. Check Out The Competition

See what the competition is doing. What is working for them? What companies are dominating your industry and is it because of their toll free numbers?

4. Differentiate

Once you have researched your competitors, analyze what you can do differently. What niches are being left under-served or what direction can you go in to become more appealing to consumers?

5. Reverse Lookups

If there is a toll free number already in use that is ideal for your organization, you may wish to perform a reverse lookup to discover who owns the number in question. You may still be able to acquire this number, although it may be wiser to employ the services of a third party to negotiate the best deal for you.

6. Shared Usage

Shared usage of toll free numbers can be a great way to get use of a premium vanity number at a fraction of the cost. This option is perfect for businesses that are operating in only a few select areas as opposed to nationwide or globally. For example, you could possibly reserve a premium vanity number like 800-MORTGAGE or 800-HOMELOAN for use just within the one or two states where you are licensed to do business.

7. Testing

If you are still having a hard time deciding on which toll free number is best for your business, perhaps you will want to test out several. You can test by simply bouncing the ideas off of different focus groups or polling. Or you could even try out different toll free numbers in PPC ads, and different pieces in direct mail campaigns to see which pulls in the highest response and closing ratios.

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The beauty of transferable numbers is that you can select the toll free numbers of your choice and transfer or move (port) them to any phone carrier you wish whenever you like. This flexibility means you do not need to be stuck on the phone with your normal business phone line carrier for hours on end trying to figure out a winning toll free vanity number for your company. Instead you are free to acquire your 800 numbers from the leading toll free number providers who offer the best and easiest search tools.

Look for those that allow you to search by keywords and return multiple great 800 number suggestions in seconds. You should also find that the best toll free service providers include a certain number of free minutes each month if you choose to keep your toll free number management with them. Additionally, you should expect to receive online faxing, advanced routing capabilities, email notification for voicemails, and even online access to call details for monitoring your 800 numbers and metrics.

Using transferable 800 numbers means, of course, that you can port your number anywhere you want, but make sure you do a little research before moving phone carriers. While some of the biggest names in the telecom industry constantly bombard you with advertising on TV, you may find that they are not quite all they are cracked up to be when it comes to toll free number management. You need to ensure that you are able to move your 800 number again quickly if need be, that response times will be rapid in the case of technical problems, and that you have access to flexible routing options to maintain a superior level of service and seamless operations. Only then can you be confident that you will be able to retain the competitive advantage over others in your industry.

Get optimal flexibility by getting an international toll free number! Whether you’re an entrepreneur, corporate executive, freelancer, creative artist, or a business owner, there’s no doubt you’ll benefit from an international toll free number – especially when traveling! It allows you to attend to pressing matters even while on vacation, at a conference, or on a business trip.

Aside from giving you freedom, an international toll free number also contains a wide range of features including the following:

• Simultaneous Call Processing – toll free numbers can accept multiple calls at once without using busy signals.
• Ability to Change Call Forwarding Number – by simply logging into your online account, it is possible to change your “ring to” number immediately. The service is available 24/7.
• Flexible Device Compatibility – the virtual number can be accessed on any mobile phone in almost all countries.
• Low Rates and High Quality – by choosing an excellent international toll free number provider like CustomTollFree.com, you can get the best of both worlds: low rates and high quality.
• Customized Greeting – customize a message for callers to play to them prior to their being forwarded to your “ring to” number.
• Responsive Customer Care – we prioritize customer support. All agents are trained to provide the best possible service to clients.

So the next time you’re traveling outside the country, consider the benefits of an international toll free number. It can make the trip a lot easier and more convenient for you!

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Even the jet set crowd can benefit from flexible and low cost phone service. There’s simply no point in paying more for the same service if you can get the same thing for less. Phone service tips can help you get better value for your money. Beyond looking at cost, there are also other considerations you need to look into. Here are some of these aspects:

Time of Day Routing – this is a relatively simple service. An example would be to route a call to a designated phone at a certain time of day.

Day of Week Routing – also referred to as Day of Year routing, this feature is basically the same as the Time of Day routing except that calls will be routed to another phone on a certain date (as opposed to time).

Exchange Routing – wherever you are in the world, toll free calls can be routed to you. This enables you to stay in touch with friends, family, and business associates.

Routing preferences are just one of the many factors you need to consider when getting toll free numbers. Many other phone service tips can help you get the best deals in the market.

Surely you already know that using a vanity phone number for your direct response marketing can provide dramatically higher response rates and even closing ratios, but the benefits of having a vanity phone number for your bottom line don’t end there.

Vanity phone numbers can actually improve the advertising effectiveness of all of your marketing campaigns from your website to your PPC advertising. Clearly, maximizing your marketing ROI is going to give you higher profit margins and will not only enable you to rocket your business to success faster, but it will have an immediate positive impact on your bottom line.

Many advantages derive from having a vanity phone number, but you must remember that if you do not put it to its highest and best use, you are not going to realize all of the power it truly offers. That not only means making sure you include your toll free number on all of your communications including emails and business cards, but also making sure you are utilizing the best in toll free number management. Choosing an Independent Resporg for managing your vanity phone number means you can be confident that your business phone lines are being routed correctly, and you can take advantage of the best routing and toll free forwarding options. This advantage in turn will allow you to streamline your business processes so you can benefit from lower labor costs and improved customer service as well as shortening your business cycle. The results can add thousands of dollars, if not much more, to your bottom line every month.

What you do with the savings and increased revenues you realize from using your vanity phone number to its maximum potential is up to you. You can amass reserves to build a stronger business, take a nice bonus to travel and escape reality for a while, or use the extra capital to invest in more marketing to grow your business even further.

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Web monitoring analytics offer one of the most powerful tools for improving your online advertising ROI. In fact, web monitoring analytics are essential for guaranteeing the maximum performance of your Internet marketing campaigns. Web monitoring analytics can be used to monitor all of your website traffic, which means being able to test the advertising effectiveness of your different campaigns and how much traffic they are bringing you, the flow of your website, and it’s ability to convert leads into deals.

Web monitoring analytics allow you to track which of your online marketing campaigns are bringing you the most visitors, and more importantly, which one is actually producing the most sales through your individual domain names. You may even be surprised to find out where your visitors are coming from. It may not be the campaigns you think. In this case, you are wasting thousands of dollars in the wrong direction. See which advertising channels are the most productive and optimize those, while scrapping or revamping those that are not producing results.

Next, use your web monitoring analytics to track the flow of movement through your website and identify what is the biggest barrier to prospects taking the action you want. If they are spending too little time on the first page they arrive at, it suggests that either your design is unattractive or your ads are not really reaching the right prospects. Just getting traffic by itself is no good; you want to drive in traffic that you can monetize. Use your web monitoring analytics to watch the flow of your traffic around your site. If visitors spend too little time on a long page and quickly leave, perhaps you are giving too much information and boring them, or if they make it to your closing page but do not acquire your product or service, perhaps your pricing is too high. Or perhaps you need to add more credibility by including your toll free vanity number on your website. Continually strive regularly to use your web monitoring analytics and constantly improve all aspects of your online advertising and you will watch your ROI and profit margins rocket!

Testing before you launch any advertising campaign is essential, and it is especially essential for PPC advertising. In fact, PPC advertising is ideal for testing the viability of the launch of almost all new services and products even if you intend to branch out into other forms of marketing later.

So how should you be testing your PPC advertising? PPC advertising systems like Google Adwords let you find ideal keywords in seconds. However, the real testing is what you put together for your text and image ads. Start by using at least three to four variations of your ad. For text ads, you should be testing your headline, ad copy, and even your Internet domain name. Note that you can use several web domain names, and if you haven’t yet acquired a domain name that includes your toll free vanity number, you may find that having one offers much more volume. When it comes to PPC advertising with image ads, you can also try out different shapes and sizes from animated squares to static or flash banner ads. Try testing different colors in addition to the items above.

A good place to start before even trying to create your PPC ads is to look at other ads that come up for your search terms and see which ones you think are most attractive for customers and how you can differentiate yourself from the competition. You can easily create your own ads in a few minutes in almost any PPC advertising platform, whether it is Google, Yahoo, YouTube, or Facebook advertising, or you can use inexpensive programs like Banner Designer Pro for ads you can use anywhere on the web. Or if you are working with an established company that offers an affiliate program, you may find they have winning ads already created for you to use. You can even take a lesson from one New York Times best selling author and hold a competition that involves having others send your their ad ideas in exchange for providing some sort of free marketing back to the person or company that comes up with your best performing ad. Run your ads for a week, axe the ones that are not producing, and replace them with new ideas. Keep repeating until you have an arsenal of extremely powerful and productive ads that produce big results.

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Without a strong brand image and a unified brand, your business does not have a solid foundation to grow on. We all know the story of The Three Little Pigs and what happened to the homes made out of straw and sticks! Core to building a solid brand is making sure your Internet domain name, toll free vanity number, and business name all match and blend together. If they are different, you will find that you are losing a lot of business from customers who can’t find you and come across your competition instead.

Not having a domain name that matches your business name can be an easy mistake for new entrepreneurs and small business start ups. However, it can also be an extremely expensive one, not only from having to secure different Internet domain names, or toll free numbers, or changing your business name, but also in terms of new research that will need to be done and redrafting marketing campaigns.

So before you go too deep into the planning stage of a new venture or spinning off a new division, make sure you can reserve and secure the appropriate matching business name, vanity number, and Internet domain names. Just making sure that they are available isn’t enough. Hundreds of new businesses and websites are created each day. Lock in your Internet domain name early if you want to succeed.

Another factor that is often overlooked by those rushing to register new companies and web domain names is checking to see whether your proposed business name is in use in another state or has been used recently. If the name has been taken, you may want to spend time checking out the reputation of that company name. The last thing you want is to secure a new Internet domain name and launch a business only to find that one with a similar name was just shut down for fraud!

Do you need affiliate software to make money online? Technically, you could operate some type of an affiliate program without affiliate software, although it would be rudimentary at best. In short, trying to run an online affiliate marketing program without using some type of affiliate software just wouldn’t make sense. The purpose of affiliate software is to provide tracking and reporting of actions that trigger commissions at a minimum. So without a system, you will, at best, be burning through masses of man hours to make sense of things and will have a hard time keeping track of payouts and earnings.

If you are just starting out, there are discount types of affiliate software that can do the basics for you that you can find for just a few hundred dollars. However, if you really want to make serious money online and build a sizable group of affiliates who actually produce revenues for you, then it is best to tap into large and established affiliate marketing networks and platforms like Commission Junction that host affiliate software and do all of the hard work for you. Promoting your products or services through affiliate software giants like Commission Junction also offers instant credibility and separates your company as a trustworthy and established organization that can be relied on and is in the same league as companies like Dell, Ring Central, and Newsweek.

The idea of starting an affiliate network is to work smarter rather than harder. So why would you want to put in all of the effort to try and put together an affiliate marketing network without doing it right? Good affiliate marketing programs can definitely produce large revenues and take your enterprise to the next level. However, if done haphazardly without effective affiliate software, you can find that you are spending your time running in circles without a dime to show for it.

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