A new service called leasethis.com hopes to help marketers obtain the use of great keyword rich domains for a fraction of the buying price. From an inventory of 551,000 domains online and over 3.5 million domains offline

You can receive instant access and full real time URL control of the domain with leases running from 3 months to 24 months. Some domains you can lease for as little as $20

What’s the catch if any?

The below if a preview of a typical leased site. Notice the owner area at the top and the leased section in the middle. You lease the domain and control the url and the contents but not the header of the site.

This can create a few problems for a lessee- your site must integrate seamlessly with the header of the site and flow from page to page. What are the alt tags for the header image and/or URL’s embedded in the header

You can even preview an existing domain or website by inputting you URL and dimensions into the preview tool to get a feel for how your website integrates.

I think leasing has a place in the domain name world and could be quite useful in certain circumstances. Short run campaigns, holiday campaigns or seasonal events this could be a easy way to leverage a great domain name and make some $$$.

For longer term projects running more than 1-2 months you have to be under the belief that the domain name is the most critical aspect of your potential success after the design and promotion of the site itself.

If I build a site using these domains then end the lease I am not able to redirect the domain traffic and potentially lose all the indexing and seo benefits of my work. So If I don’t purchase the domain do I have to start all over?

Why wouldn’t I search for a domain or expired domain with my target keyword in the URL and build a site from there. There are lots of arguments for and against. I think leasing is a excellent option for short term projects and bad for long term projects unless you are prepared to buy the domain at the end of the lease

More problems I see, and remember this service is currently in beta and subject to change, what is the price at the end of the lease? You build a site on a domain you lease and the end of the lease how much to acquire the domain? If I lease a car I know exactly how much it will cost me at the end of the lease? I generally will make that buyout amount more at the end to lower my payments during the lease does it work the same way with domains?

either way this is something to watch and consider in building out sites for clients

Tags: domain leasing

Technorati Tags: domain leasing, southwest seo

Post from: SouthwestSEO.com

I know you seen about 50 reviews so far of the next internet millionaire’s first episode mostly good and few less kind. The show is an exact replica of the Apprentice but with an internet marketing spin.
I loved the Apprentice and watched every episode it suffered in later years but was still entertaining even in the last season when they made the losers sleep outside in tents

Here’s the problem with the show so far:
If you have never watched the Apprentice chances are you wont get it. I watched the first episode and was clueless about several items until the end of the episode

1. What were the e-commerce chips?- You get 10 but then you can use them for different things like buying time shouldn’t there be standard rules for the chips rather than Joel coming in and telling you. hopefully the rules are layed out in episode 2

2. 2 people get kicked off the losing team this wasn’t clear until halfway thru the boardroom scene. I was expecting one not two

3. Sandbox penalty- I loved this concept but hopefully it is pulled off correctly in the next episode how do you compete if your in the sandbox and can only observe. How do you earn your way out and can you use the e-commerce chips

It seems this show is marketed to people in internet marketing it will be interesting to see how the show progresses and how the show is used to market other products. Even though there are people that will thumb their nose at this show and copying the apprentice it is still very ambitious and I hope they pull off a great success

My favorite character so far is the guy from Costa rica that carries around the stuffed monkey with him let’s see how far he gets

Tags: next internet millionaire, search engine marketing, affiliate marketing, search engine marketing

Technorati Tags: next internet millionaire, southwest seo

Post from: SouthwestSEO.com

Every time I send an attachment that is more than 5 megs or even close to 5 megs it’s 50/50 the other person either gets it or receives it or the message isn’t blocked for size reasons. While it is true there is Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail that can get around these limits most people use Outlook to send from their personal email accounts.

How many times have you had to resend files?
How many times have you had to resize pictures to send multiple pictures?
How many times have all these files sat in your outbox for some unknown reason?

I did discover one annoyance with the service it’s not 100% compatible with Safari. Hopefully during the Beta the size limit increases a couple of gigabytes

Tags: Windows Live Skydrive

Technorati Tags: Windows Live Skydrive, southwest seo

Post from: SouthwestSEO.com

Would you rather have Leopard early and buggy or sit there with your 8 core MacPro running Photoshop thru Rosetta? Let’s also not forget the development that is continuing in virtualization with Parallels and VMware Fusion. Have you run Vista on a MacPro with parallels? it’s amazingly fast and responsive. The only feature missing is Aero which is promised by the end of the year

I’m going to Apple a pass on this one

Leopard Delayed Until October:

From an AP feed issued seven minutes after the close of the stock market, Apple has said it will delay Leopard until October. Apple stated that the iPhone project drew resources away from Leopard, slowing the operating system’s development. “We think it will be worth the wait,” Apple said.

There is no press release available at Apple’s site at this time, but there is a static version listed in Apple’s Hot News.

A million Mac geeks subsequently cried into their blogs. Some took a positive tack and wrote about how the delay would be worth it, but even they were reportedly biting their pillows as they wrote.

Technorati Tags: southwest seo, tech

Post from: SouthwestSEO.com

I use Skype to talk to friends around the world and I’m often asked for assistance in everything from I can’t print to how do I set up an adwords campaign. I usually want to access the remote persons desktop and while I’m on video chat move the cursor on their screen in their browser setting up or fixing whatever they have requested. This introduces all sorts of problems like can I get thru your firewall?

There are some excellent add-ons to Skype that work great that I have tried on a limited basis but it requires a subscription and the client installed on both sides.

Are you listening Microsoft I know your ears are burning- all those windows users have remote access and instant messenger built into windows. Is this feature coming in the next version of instant messenger and could it be (gasp!) cross platform with the mac. I hope so I love Skype and think its great and going to come out with all sorts of great features in the future but including shared desktop with the client or bundling it with a third party solution would be a killer app. Why pay for something built into Windows and Vista

Skype Prime™ Beta — introducing the global expertise marketplace:

Today, we put out an update of Skype 3.1 beta for Windows. Download here. It contains the typical bugfixes and such from the previous release — thanks to everyone who’s been helping us with the reports. Keep them coming.

In this version, though, there’s one new feature that deserves more attention, since I believe it is really important, interesting, useful and fun. That’s a lot, I know. But bear with me. The feature is Skype Prime Beta. And I think it’s one of the most important innovative things that Skype has put out in quite a while.

What is Skype Prime?

In short, it enables paid Skype-to-Skype voice and video calls. You can charge other people for calling you either a one-off fee or by the minute. Conversely, if you are the caller, you can call experts who charge for their services, and you can then pay the fee and access the expertise that the other call party provides.

Tags: Skype, Southwest seo, tech, instant messenging, voip

Technorati Tags: instant messenging, voip, skype, southwest seo, tech

Post from: SouthwestSEO.com