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Launch of Oahu.com gives Honolulu Businesses New Marketing Opportunity
Oahu.com set up to help Hawaiian Businesses Obtain $5.5 Billion in Tourist Spend
HONOLULU, HAWAII and MAPLE RIDGE, BC, CANADA – October 11, 2011 – Left of the Dot Media has announced the launch of Oahu.com; a new authority web site and directory focused exclusively on this Hawaiian island. The site features Left of the Dot’s innovative Marketing Name technology that allows small businesses to lease sub-domains from Oahu.com for use in their own marketing and advertising campaigns.
Oahu.com lists more than 35,000 businesses from across Oahu and caters to both locals and tourists alike who are seeking information and deals from Oahu-based businesses. Oahu is the most populated of the Hawaiian Islands with 953,000 residents, 75% of the state’s population, and in 2010 catered to 4.3 million tourists. Visitors spent more than $5.5 billion in 2010 and Oahu.com will help local businesses attract more of the tourist spend, connecting them with the more than 10 million web users who search for Oahu-related search concepts every year.
“We chose Oahu.com to be the first, geo-based name launched on the Left of the Dot platform,” says Chris Jensen, CEO Left of the Dot Media. “For the first time, businesses can use our brand and lease sub-domains direct from the website, examples of which include Hotels.Oahu.com, Golf.Oahu.com, or Tours.Oahu.com.”
Continued Jensen, “When a business uses one of our Marketing Names, they get an instantly memorable website address that can define an entire category. Marketing Names can boost click-through rates for online advertising, contribute to search engine rankings, be used as a landing or splash page for any marketing campaign, and even used to brand an entire web presence for a small business struggling to find the right domain name to use with their business. We are pleased to be able to help Oahu businesses build more awareness and generate more sales.”
Not only can a business be listed within the Oahu.com directory (including a free 7 day trial listing), businesses can purchase a premium membership which highlights their business to all website visitors, attracting more attention and more sales. Premium Marketing Names are available now to qualifying businesses.
For more information, visit Oahu.com or call 1.808.638.4085.
About Left of the Dot Media
Left of the Dot provides an alternative to domain parking and changes the way domains are monetized. The company enables leasing of sub-domains off a premium domain name to substantially increase the traffic, search engine relevance (SEO), and inherent value to the overall site—resulting in sustainable income for its clients.
Not only does the company focus on client satisfaction, the end-results of Left of the Dot’s many projects also benefit the end-consumer. The company creates industry go-to destinations, aggregates quality content, and allows SMBs to get online, get found and conduct business online. For more information visit: www.LeftOfTheDot.com
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Re-post: "The role of ‘Trust’ in the Re-launching of the Importers.com B2B Marketplace"
The following is an excerpt from a Guest Blog post that I wrote for Elliot Silver at Elliot's Blog. Click here to read the full post.
- John
First off, thank you Elliot for giving Left of the Dot the opportunity to tell you a bit more about our re-branding and our re-launching of Importers.com.
Whenever we take on a brand, we look at several factors before we begin development: what is the natural business model implied by the name, what is happening within the name’s specific vertical, and who are the big players within the domain’s market category.
With Importers.com, we discovered a market that was filled with fraud and uncertainty. Trading partners did not trust trading partners. Scandals were plaguing the incumbent market leaders (See: The Economist “Alibaba and the 2,236 Thieves”). And the brand perception among potential consumers was that they “all look the same and seem sketchy”.
For us, this spelled opportunity, and it was clear that if we were going to differentiate Importers.com in this market (and resurrect what should have been a dominant global brand before being abandoned by its previous owners), we needed to emphasize the concept of ‘Trust’ first and foremost.
Many Domainers already know that a good generic carries with it a certain amount of implied trust. If you have a category-owning concept – be it Importers.com, DogWalker.com, or Villa.com – your name provides you with multiple benefits, each of which stems from this implied trust:
- You get better click thru rates on your paid search advertising. This increases your quality score and lowers your cost of new customer acquisition. And if it costs me less to get a customer on Importers.com than it does for an upstart brand that nobody has ever heard of… I win.
- You get ranked higher in search engines. Initially, this was entirely dependent on keyword match, but with the Panda release, how customers or peers perceive your site has become much more of a factor (think of the +1 as a trust endorsement).
- Customers (and strategic partners) are more willing to listen to you and give you the benefit of the doubt.
With this knowledge in our back pocket, we decided to play to our strength. The name “Importers.com” conveys a trusted brand in a market that is screaming for somebody to trust...
Click here for the full post.
Left of the Dot Gives New Life to Importers.com B2B Marketplace
After a full year of research and development, the once-abandoned Importers.com has been successfully restored into a thriving business community
MAPLE RIDGE, BC, CANADA – August 23, 2011 – Left of the Dot Media Inc. has announced that it has re-launched Importers.com, as an online B2B marketplace for businesses looking to trade with G20 partners. The project was started in 2003 but day-to-day growth and management of the business was ceased by its previous owners in 2007. Despite a lack of leadership and support, the community continued to expand to over 400,000 members. In cooperation with the new owners, Left of the Dot has created an attractive, well-organized and safe new trading environment and the international business community is responding by signing up at the rate of over 800 per week for the import export marketplace. The site is now able to offer a realistic, North American-centric alternative to online B2B behemoths Alibaba.com and TradeKey.com.
International trade is now hugely dependent on web-based services and Importers.com was one of the first sites that allowed Small Medium Businesses (SMBs) to find international partners. Over the past 9 years the internet has changed dramatically and importers and exporters need a modern service that allows them to promote themselves online, find trade partners and know that they can trust the person they are dealing with. After considerable consultation with SMBs the new Importers.com allows businesses to get online via Marketing Names (e.g., HardWood.Importers.com), get found via search engines (hundreds of this domain’s existing Marketing Names rank in the Top 3 results on Google, Yahoo, and Bing), find customers via Trade Leads, and establish credibility via rigorous Trust Certification.
The domain name Importers.com was purchased in 2010 by an investor strictly for the inherent value of the name itself. The original intent was to switch off the business and replace it with a parked page showing advertising. Perceiving the risk of a missed opportunity, Left of the Dot partnered with the new owner and took the initiative to restore and rebuild the business.
“A memorable generic name like “Importers.com” is equivalent to quality real estate, the Park Places and Boardwalks of the domain industry”, says John Lyotier, Co-Founder at Left of the Dot, “Importers.com represented the virtual equivalent of renovating an entire city centre and giving businesses all the tools they need to grow and prosper – it’s good for each business and good for the community. The key for us is enabling importers and exporters to lease their very own sub-domains (Marketing Names) off the Importers.com brand so that they can become a valuable part of the community.”
“With Alibaba.com currently valued at an estimated $10.8B and TradeKey.com at more than $2B, the market opportunity is huge and Left of the Dot will compete by allowing the SMB community to create its own success stories on the Importers.com brand.”
ABOUT LEFT OF THE DOT MEDIA
Left of the Dot provides an alternative to domain parking and changes the way domains are monetized. The company enables leasing of sub-domains off a premium domain name to substantially increase the traffic, search engine relevance (SEO), and inherent value to the overall site—resulting in sustainable income for its clients.
Not only does the company focus on client satisfaction, the end-results of Left of the Dot’s many projects also benefit the end-consumer. The company creates online industry go-to destinations, aggregates quality content, and allows SMEs to get online, get found, and conduct business online.
www.LeftoftheDot.com
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SEO and Sub-domains
The impact of sub-domains and SEO took an interesting turn in recent weeks with coverage in the Wall Street Journal about how HubPages has had a material improvement in their organic rankings by leveraging a sub-domain strategy. Of course, they had been hit hard by the Panda search algorithm update, so any sign of improvement must have been welcome news to them and their shareholders.
It has been interesting to read some of the comments and thoughts of those in the SEO space about what this means, but I think that Aaron Wall of SEO Book wrote is probably the most accurate: we will soon see millions of people pour into sub-domains as a way to get ahead of Google (Read: Google Says "Let a TRILLION Subdomains Bloom").
But we believe the reality is that Google hasn't changed their position: sub-domains are still treated as separate websites, each being able to rank independently with good or bad content. Ian Lurie over at Conversation Marketing has described this well...
Panda considers the quality of all content on a subdomain when making ranking decisions. If you’re, say, HubPages, and 50% of the content on www.hubpages.com is basically brain snot, that hurts the ability of every page on your site to rank. So the other 50% of content—the arguably decent stuff—gets zapped out of the rankings. The bad content becomes an anchor, dragging everything down.
That’s why subdomains helped HubPages. They used subdomains to separate the crappy stuff from the good stuff: crappy.hubpages.com versus good.hubpages.com. I made those up, by the way. But you get the idea. With subdomains, HubPages was able to move the bad content ‘anchor’ to a whole other site. That helped the good stuff move back up, because Google doesn’t let subdomains directly pass ranking factors back-and-forth.This is not a change
What HubPages describes is exactly how Google has always treated subdomains. It’s not a change in their algorithm. It’s why I’ve always said putting your blog on a subdomain is a bad idea: Subdomain authority and relevance doesn’t directly transfer to other subdomains.
Apparently, the same holds true for quality.
What it comes down to is that you have to have good content on your website. Will the other factors like having the exact match concept influence your ranking? We believe so... but not if your website has nothing original or relevant on it to attract Google's eyes in the meantime.
Left of the Dot at Community Job Fair
On Thursday, Left of the Dot did a little community outreach and participated in a local Maple Ridge job fair focused on the youth of the community. While most of the audience may not have been appropriate to hire within our company today, hopefully some of the youth (e.g., those in University or recent high school grads) get some exposure to the changing landscape of the local economy and emerging opportunities that will be available to them.
However, it should be noted that aside from a handful of the 200+ attendees, the youth today are not prepared for the professionalism that the "real world" requires. While our office environment is quite casual, the attire of most of the youth at the event was disdainful: from shorts and flipflops, to baggy jeans with their pants only half-covering their ___. Resumes (if they had more than one to hand out) were frequently wrinkled, covered in coffee stains, and poorly written.
Note to youth: if you are out applying for jobs... whether for an internship at a high tech company, or for a local clothing store, you should look like you care... just a little bit.
What does HomeAway's IPO mean for Villa.com?
Last week, HomeAway the parent company to VRBO.com (and the key player in the Villa rental space) filed for their IPO. At the time of writing this post, their valuation had increased from its IPO price of $27 to $37.74, giving it a valuation of more than a $3 billion in market capitalization.
What does this mean for Villa.com and the brand that it can become? This can only be positive.
HomeAway's filings indicated that it produced revenues of $167.9 million in 2010, and that at present, it has approximately 500,000 listings across all of its properties. For those scoring at home, this equates to an average annual revenue of $335 per listing and a $6,000 per listing contribution to their overall valuation.
Key to their growth is targeting the 6,000,000 villas and vacation properties that exist right now. And it appears that a key part of their growth strategy is to use some of their raised funds to grow through acquisition.
As we build out Villa.com properly, turning it into a real business, we will definitely have to introduce ourselves.
ADDENDUM:
It looks like iStopOver has acquired Vacapedia. Terms are not disclosed, but it shows more M&A activity in the space.
Any Web Software Developers Available in Maple Ridge?
THIS POSITION HAS BEEN FILLED; HOWEVER, WE DO VALUE GREAT TALENT AND CONTINUE TO ACCEPT OUTSTANDING APPLICATIONS.
Wanted: Talented and enthusiastic website developers who want to help build the next generation of the Internet
At Left of the Dot Media, we’re an emerging company that is building and marketing a new domain monetization program for high-quality, million-dollar domain names. This is achieved by leasing out sub-domains and websites direct to end users (e.g. Tuscany.Villa.com) and building real businesses for the primary domain name. To help us grow and meet demand for our services, we need some passionate and driven website developers and web application specialists to help grow our new platform and our business.
Our office is waaaay out here in Maple Ridge. The way we see things… Maple Ridge is a growing, vibrant community filled with talented technologists who are sick and tired of wasting 500+ hours on the West Coast Express every year. And if you are like the company’s founders, who are Maple Ridge locals, you would like to use those the time you would have spent commuting on perfecting a work/life balance, or on building some really cool websites that have the potential to transform the Internet at its very core. If you are from Maple Ridge, Pitt Meadows, Coquitlam, Surrey, Langley, etc… you owe it to yourself to explore the opportunity.
So if this sounds intriguing and want to try and build something spectacular, then keep on reading.
About you…
Personality:
- You must be a risk taker who has a passion for entrepreneurism
- You must love to code and execute on a project
- You must be a self starter and able to manage yourself and your projects
- You could be fresh out of school, or been around the block a few times… either way, you are enthusiastic and driven to make things work
- You should be someone who gets carried away simply by building something really cool, only to emerge in a couple of years and say, “Wow! Look what we’ve built together”
- You must want to work in a startup
- You must believe in the mantra of “work hard, play hard.”
- You are not satisfied with “It’s OK I guess”, but understand that sometimes you just got to “Fish or cut bait”
- You must be able to laugh at yourself and roll with the punches
Essential Skills
- 3 to 8 years of website or website application development
- Degree in Computer Science or equivalent technology program, plus practical experience
- Good understanding of PHP and modern application development
- Able to make WordPress sing and dance by programming custom templates, widgets, and data bases
- Great at building mashups and connecting APIs together with scripts and magic
- JavaScript + jQuery; Ajax
- XHTML, CSS
- MySQL
- Strong familiarity in Object Oriented Programming / Software Engineering
- Agile Development methods
- Able to work collaboratively with other programmers whether at the next desk or around the world
- Understanding of best practices for web-based architecture, design, and SEO friendly code
Useful Things
- Knowledge of GitHub and Yii Frameworks
- Knoweldge of WordPress
- Knowledge/curiosity of DNS and Web Architecture
- Knowledge/curiosity of Domain Names and Internet Marketing
- Knowledge/curiosity of Website Design (not essential as this is usually done by a professional)
- Knowledge (and willingness) that sometimes it requires we work around the clock -- not because someone is poking you with a sharp stick, but because you want to.
- Knowledge that you don’t know everything and that we don’t know everything, but if we put our heads together, we can probably figure it out.
About the Job
- Coding in PHP on the back end of our website monetization platform
- Implementing/building widgets used across our growing network of websites
- Jack/Jill of all trades when it comes to coding and technology
- Help build really cool stuff that you will be proud to show off to your friends and family
Compensation & Next Steps
- While your salary will be competitive and based on your experience, we believe that as we build this out together, we can all share in the upside and increase compensation as revenues increase
- If you are on EI and FutureWorks eligible, then this may be a perfect fit
- If you are interested in charting out into the unknown, then please send us a recent resume (online link is fine) along with your salary expectations to careers@leftofthedot.com
- Thanks in advance for considering us, and while we thank all those who apply, only those who are being considered may be contacted.
Learn more about us at www.LeftOfTheDot.com
Website under development
We had been neglecting our own site while we work on our portfolio sites. Stay tuned... this site is under development.
Good interview between Left of the Dot and Sully's Blog
Mike Sullivan has posted an interview with Left of the Dot co-founder Chris Jensen. A good read and describes what we are doing pretty clearly. Good job Chris!
"It has become increasingly clear that great domain names need to be turned into profitable business units if they are to realize their true potential and value, you can’t rely on parking any more. Experience shows that Domainers are hardly ever the best people to build out these sites because they are not subject matter experts and they do not live and breathe that business vertical. What Domainers really want is a low resource, low risk, high return business that has multiple sources of reliable revenue and which increases the value of their domain name. In a nutshell that is Left of the Dot."
Read the full interview here.
Frank Michlick Joins Left of the Dot Media Inc. as Chief Technology Officer
- NEWS RELEASE -
Domain Evangelist to Help “Drive the Bus” for New, Premium Domain Name Service
VANCOUVER, BC, JANUARY 19, 2011 – Left of the Dot is pleased to announce that Frank Michlick has joined the company’s executive team to help build and grow the technology behind the new domain name monetization service that enhances premium, multi-million dollar domain names.
Left of the Dot has developed a platform to enable premium domain name holders to lease sub-domain inventory to small businesses, creating significant new, recurring, revenue streams for the domain holder. The monetization service leases these “Marketing Names” along with a fully-equipped, ecommerce-ready website to small businesses giving them a highly-brandable web presence. An early example of such an implementation is the generic domain name www.Villa.com that is presently under development by the company. At this website, villa owners and agents can lease premium sub-domains, such as Tuscany.Villa.com, Bali.Villa.com, or Luxury.Villa.com. For many of its domains under management, Left of the Dot builds out the entire website for the generic domain name, converting the once parked page into a real and sustainable web business.
Said Left of the Dot co-founder, Chris Jensen: “I am delighted that Frank has agreed to become our CTO. We were looking for someone to drive our technology hand in hand with our rapidly growing business; Frank brings a skill set and business understanding that few people in the world can match. Not only does he possess a great technology mind, strong character, and immense passion, but his knowledge of Domaining, domain registrars, and the entire domain ecosystem is second to none.”
Frank Michlick, best known within the domain name industry as one of the founders and lead contributors for Domain Name News, began to work with Internet technology in 1993 and registered his first domain name in 1995. His company, CyberTeam, helped many big European brands build their first internet presence. From 1997 to 2000 he worked to shape one of the biggest German Internet Service/eBusiness providers. During his 5 years at the largest wholesale registrar (Tucows/OpenSRS) he enabled many domain name portfolio owners, registrars, hosting companies and resellers to better manage, monetize and grow their domain names. Most recently, Frank’s entrepreneurial pursuits led him to found DomainCocoon, which provides services in the areas of domain name management, custom registrar creation, and ICANN & ccTLD accreditation consulting.
“Like many Domainers, I learned about Left of the Dot when the company was pitched successfully during the Test Track event at the June 2010 T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference in Vancouver. When I learned that the company was seeking a CTO and technology evangelist and spoke in detail with them, I knew that the company was the right fit. Together, we have an opportunity to create something special and unique for the domain industry while building something of lasting value. I look forward to the adventure and journey ahead.”
**About Left of the Dot **
Left of the Dot is combining successful website building technology with advanced SEO practices and high-profile multimillion dollar domain names to change the rules for businesses that need to be online. The Left of the Dot platform appeals to owners of generic domain names, seeking recurring revenue for selected assets. To learn more visit: www.leftofthedot.com.
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Media Contact
John Lyotier
Email: john [at] leftofthedot.com
Phone: +1.604.454.7935