Please.

Collectively – just shut up, and think about what you want to say. Just take a second.

{        }

Thanks. This greatly improves our chances of connecting in a meaningful way.

I recently saw a writer jump into a very tech-savvy crowd and pitch a very low-level eBook. Worse, the writer used an inanely simplistic marketing method. “Buy this color-by-numbers book,  because I say I am a writer.”

This crowd and their normal discussions of online marketing were light years beyond this pitch. If it had not received the wall of indifference it ran into, this pitch may have easily been seen as a little insulting.

But the pros there did not say a thing about it.

Like a tiny fart on the breeze, this pitch was unwanted, ignored, and quickly forgotten.

Oops

The young writer unknowingly torched their own cornfield here. An inabilty to shut up about the obvious became the lasting impression only because this writer did not take the time to accurately understand the landscape.

Not only were no eBooks sold, but this connection was burned to the ground for this unknowing young writer because these tech-savvy folks remember bad pitches as much or more than they remember good ones. No contracts, no contacts, no progress.

Wasted spend all around, mainly because this rookie was too green to realize the useles e-book they were (re)selling was more-or-less the repackaged ideas of the very people being sold to here.   

Ooops.

If you are new to the trade, chances are good you should probably shut up for a while. Same goes when you are brand new to a forum, group or association. 

Read more, do some homework, and develop an understanding before you pose question one. Before you freak on that one, let me clarify.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions, even if they are unorthodox - logical questions quickly rise to the top of conversations, and for good reason. Good questions can literally build good communities.

But these are always good questions, asked after diving into the deep end once or twice to find your own pearls.

Break a few of your own eggs before you start demanding omlettes from others.

Don’t go into a new place, and just start yelling, or pitching, or spewing. Go in, feel it out, and take time to understand the natural flow. In this way, when you ask a question or offer a pitch, you are adding to what is happening, not impeding it.

Shutting-up for a minute helps.   

And don’t underestimate the true reach of your online neighborhood. Anonymous nicknames can hide lots.

Just saying. This poor young writer has no idea how much potential was pooped on here.

Shutting up for just a minute first may have meant the difference – turning this lesson into a different one entirely.

In business, as in your personal life, who you deal with is of crucial importance. It might even make you end a title in a preposition if you’re not careful.

Knowing who you are dealing with on the web is a little unlike anything else - the methods to mask identity are not complex. If you want to sneak in and out of the Internet, you can. People do.

I don’t.

I work in a pretty transparent way – I am who you see. My comments, when signed by me somewhere out there, are my thoughts. Still, I feel you should know more about who I am and why you should trust me.  

So what better way, than to introduce you to my finest hair moment. Meet 17 year-old Marty Lamers, and his freelance mohawk.

Freelance SEO Copywriter and Passionate Thin Cotton Tie Endorser, Marty Lamers

My glasses are now a lot smaller (as if larger ones are possible), and my bald spot negates the possibility of this work-retardant hairstyle ever working the same way for me again. Though trying it today would be interesting, for sure.

Ahhhh, setting gel and cheap hairspray: the clumsy magic that was 1983.

I am sure I would still have that tie too, if my wife didn’t have the good sense to intervene when she did.

There you have it – now you know. I make no apologies.

I have the unfortunate experience to have a lot of domains hosted in GoDaddy.

There are many reasons I don’t really like using them, but the fact remains I have a lot of domains there.

But I have seen one thing they do that I want to warn everyone about – beware of GoDaddy scamming your domain.

Here’s What Happens

Let’s say you have a domain registered in GoDaddy, and want to set up a blog in Blogger. Cool – Blogger gives you instructions on how to change the C record and the A record to make it work.

So this is what I did. And when I looked at my site an hour later, it looked like this, which was good:

Everything cool. The blog worked, the domain seemed ok and the instructions from Blogger seemed to do the trick.

So I thought, anyway.

What I found a few weeks later when I was getting ready to return to this site was pretty shocking.

You see, I wanted to go to the site but I forgot to type in the www. Simple mistake. And usually, if I am setting up a site in normal situations (not using Blogger), I set both the www and non-www to work seamlessly.

But no – I saw this – and if you don’t know what this is, it is a PPC page. This means it is something GoDaddy set up to run  on my domain. 

What it does, is display ads that other people pay to have displayed on certain keywords. The domain I had concerned small business money, so look at how it matches the subject matter.

Needless to say, I was pretty shocked. This was not a parked domain mind you – it was live. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, but figured it must have been my fault somewhere in the settings – I was not terribly used to Blogger, so I could have missed something.

Nope.

The GoDaddy Sham Deepens

There was something wrong with the canonical set-up, but I had it set up correctly, as you can see to the left here. Blogger makes it so you can correct any canonical errors – meaning, the www and non-www versions of the site would be the same.

This made me more concerned. If I had this set up correctly, and my A and C records were properly set up, why was this happening?

I looked at the source code and found:

Now I realize most people don’t read code, so this means that GoDaddy placed an AdWord campaign directly on my domain, targeting relevant keywords in a broad match manner. Since my domain was about business money, the ads were about business money-so my competitors can suddenly get clicks from MY DOMAIN. GoDaddy gets paid for every click.

Keep in mind too – I bought “myDomain.com” not the www version. GoDaddy was using the domain I bought and set up as my blog.

The GoDaddy Response (or Lack Thereof)

So by now, I am pissed. I write an email to my rep – and I have an executive rep over there because I have so many domains. I kinda feel sorry for him really – he is new to my account, and this was really our second interaction.

But since I was mad, I write the email and let it sit for 4 days. I had all the same images I have here – just not blurred out – and basically, but very directly, asked for an explanation.

I send it, and wait for my response. And wait. And wait.

A week later, I re-forward my original complaint  and demand a response.

Finally get a one-line email saying I need to go into the account and delete the C and A record settings and forward the domain to the www to make it work. My original complaint asked about whether or not I now needed to check my other 100+ live sites to make sure this is not happening everywhere – crickets.

Every bit of my complaint ignored – handled by this one-line response. Pathetic.

Why This is So Shady 

The reason this chaps me so much, is not for my own situation but what it represents. GoDaddy is a huge registrar…and they do more aggressive advertising than any other. So they’ll attract people who know nothing about the web, but want to get started.

I know what I am doing more than a lot of business owners would, and still did not catch this canonical error. By the time I did, this scam had been running for months. When I looked for help, I was ignored. I had to demand a fix.

GoDaddy was paid for my domain. They then hijacked it, and profited further by sending potential leads I might have received to my competitors.

Shameless.

It makes you wonder how many sites are unassumingly being compromised and swallowed by GoDaddy’s greed?

I have had a website for Articulayers since 2002.
This one is my fourth now for this company…each one I think, gets a little stronger.

I am now on Wordpress with a modified theme by Thesis – a far cry from the “every stroke must be mine” approach shared by the first three efforts. Now, I am into steamlining. Quick is quicker now.

But this site was not meant to be released quite yet – so I am in a scramble trying to get things back together.

See, I have had my site hosted by this company down in Australia for the last 6-7 years. But they were getting increasingly problematic to deal with. I could never reach anyone in the support, and when I did, they rarely understood what I wanted.

After a couple years running with hassles that were mounting, but none big enough to make me leave, my site went down for about 6 hours. I finally got mad, and cancelled my credit card information – this was last spring.

The hosting plan actually ended in August, but they did not shut me down until last night. I did not really see it coming, so “Surprise!”

Now, I was in the process of building a new site (as you see here) and had it on another domain, almost ready. I was playing around, testing and tweaking for the last few weeks. This morning, I saw that the crappy Australian host had finally pulled the plug, so I scrambled all day to move some stuff over here.

This site is by no means ready, but it is world’s better than the one I had I think.  I believe I am going to lose a lot of my rankings, but I am fine with that. I am actually going to recapture them now a little more purposefully.

So welcome to the new site. I may have been a bit rushed today to get some things out here, but over time, I think it is going to be a wonderful thing.