My FREE Ebook on IDNs

[rolf]

Hey all,

I think I mentioned this in an earlier thread, that I was writing a book aimed at internet marketers who know nothing about IDNs but actually this book is useful for anyone who knows nothing about IDNs.

I was originally going to sell it (there is a well established market for internet marketers selling ebooks to each other) but in the end I made it a free ebook. You can send it to friends and associates, put it on your site etc. as long as its not modified (the full rights are listed in the book).

Now most of you know I am revisiting IDNs and let me make it clear - I am definitely no expert. However, you don't have to be an expert to write a basic guide to IDNs, after all. I fully expect that there will be a few errors that many IDN experts here can point out so please don't crucify me over this.

However, I think this makes a good introduction to IDNs and that's why I made it free, so people can spread it around and get the word out about IDNs (I freely admit that there are also a few affiliate links in it too). It's a bit like a super sticky topic on a forum that can be emailed to someone or whatever.

So I think this could be a good read for anyone who wants to get a basic idea and learn what IDNs are all about whether it's friends, business associates, potential investors etc. - they have all the basic info in one place, in a pdf that they can easily print out and read on the bus or whatever.

I know that some people don't see the value in convincing others but I do, I think IDN has enough momentum as it is but more and more exposure cannot hurt. If anything, I think that IDNs have suffered from underexposure compared to where they should be.

I would love to hear any comments you guys have, please not just criticism about a few harmless errors in the book (I do intend to update it though) but I hope you also appreciate the several hours of effort I have put into this spread over several days and now offering for free.

Click below to download:
IDN On Steroids (http://www.profitswithchris.com/blog/free-book-idn-on-steroids-a-guide-to-internationalized-domain-names/)

Cheers

[blastfromthepast]

Giving info away for free and cutting into other people's ebook profits is wrong.

[rolf]

You're welcome to your opinion but there are many books available on the internet, both paid and free. And surely there is nothing wrong in being a philanthropist? By the way, I see no other books around on IDNs because these books simply don't have any current commercial value (I know because I tried) so I can't see this eating anyone else's profits either.

[Rubber Duck]

Giving info away for free and cutting into other people's ebook profits is wrong.

I can't see it is wrong, but then I probably won't subscribe anyway!

[zenmarketing]

It's a very well written and comprehensive guide.

they simply don't have any current commercial value

BTW, this is a ridiculous statement. If you believe this, please push me all your names. I will pay you $20 for your time.

[rolf]

It's a very well written and comprehensive guide.



BTW, this is a ridiculous statement. If you believe this, please push me all your names. I will pay you $20 for your time.

Hi Zen, thanks for your comments. By the way, when I said "no commercial value", I meant in an IDN ebook, not IDNs themselves, hehe, of course not. Corrected my post just now to clarify.

[blastfromthepast]

You're welcome to your opinion but there are many books available on the internet, both paid and free. And surely there is nothing wrong in being a philanthropist? By the way, I see no other books around on IDNs because they simply don't have any current commercial value (I know because I tried) so I can't see this eating anyone else's profits either.

There are several, including a couple in Japanese, and one English ebook that has turned a good profit that has been promoted on this forum.

There is nothing wrong in being a philanthropist when what you are doing is charity work.

IDNs are not charity work, but profit driven and you are cutting into other people's vested interests.

[zenmarketing]

I think www.idnebook.com does some sales, so I'm not sure about that either.

[jose]

Giving info away for free and cutting into other people's ebook profits is wrong.

WOW. Even China doesn't think like that anymore. It's a free market world. Let people choose what to read, when to read and how much to pay for it.

So, Wordpress was wrong? They killed Movable Type, but check now: Movable Type is going free also and we all win. How about Linux? Poor Micro$oft.

[alpha]

quote: So how do your domains and your IDNs in particular get traffic? Especially for IDNs, 99% of the traffic is coming from type ins.

*cough bs.. cough *


IMO if you have an opinion thats fine to say it. But if you quote numbers, then back it up with some science & evidence.. otherwise when people read it they will think all your stats are BS.. just like the one above.

[Pete]

Hey Rolf,

I think it's an excellent initiative.
It certainly beats sitting on big IDN portfolios and wondering when the ball will start to roll.

I intend to do a marketing brief myself in a couple of months, because it's time to be proactive about this. Browser support is no longer much of an issue for latins and I don't see the point of being secretive about what domains I have because ... there's hardly anything left to reg. In French, at least.

I'll look into yours more in detail soon, but right now I have this suggestion: make a short version of it as well. 50 page of pdf will lose a lot of readers...

Cheers,

[blastfromthepast]

Yup, there's hardly anything left to reg. Your best bet is the secondary market now.™

[alpha]

couple of glaring points:

1. typein i mentioned earlier
2. you don't have to be a resident to own a .cn
3. .TV is not a strange TLD in fact in some parts of the world very popular, and its a cctld anyway ;)

[rolf]

quote: So how do your domains and your IDNs in particular get traffic? Especially for IDNs, 99% of the traffic is coming from type ins.

*cough bs.. cough *


IMO if you have an opinion thats fine to say it. But if you quote numbers, then back it up with some science & evidence.. otherwise when people read it they will think all your stats are BS.. just like the one above.

Thanks for the feedback Alpha. I intend to make corrections for the 2nd version.

btw are there any more accurate stats out there that I could use?

Cheers

[clipper]

Good for you. Excellent effort.

The one thing I noticed was that bit on pages 13-14 about ICANN mapping .com and .net. Your rhetorical questions aren't very persuasive (e.g. "Do you think ICANN would risk leaving people who have invested millions..." – ICANN has nothing to risk; they are the only game in town).

IMO, there's no telling how or when TLD's will be available worldwide in local languages. No reason to mislead people into thinking that logic will prevail.

Overall, though, good work. Not charity work, though, as goodwill is priceless to any business enterprise. Turns out, free can be very profitable.

[blastfromthepast]

As well, unlike RD, I think that most people in the IDN business prefer to keep a low profile so that they can quietly build up their portfolio without attracting other investors into the field. I and many other people are grateful to RD for his outspokenness, as that is what has alerted us to this opportunity.

Priceless. Replace RD with Rolf and a free IDN book and the same point can be made.

[rolf]

Thanks for the construct criticism guys, comments are always great as long as they are constructive so please keep 'em coming. I intend to correct the innaccuracies within a couple of weeks.

Cheers

[bramiozo]

Good effort Rolf, I'll host the pdf on idntools, free resources are always welcome.

Let me know when you update it.

Can you not place the video on youtube ?

About the type-ins, SE traffic is normally dominant over type-ins provided the site is mature; the site is indexed, it has inbound links and most of the type-ins will probably originate from returning visitors. I have heard numbers of 70% SE/links,30% type-ins, somewhere in that range, the better the term, the higher the type-in/SE ratio and the more likely your term will end-up in SE's to begin with.

For parking pages (IDN or otherwise) this means that in normal circumstance ALL of the traffic is type-in traffic since maturity is effectively zero, exceptions are of course parked domains with a history, i.e. those who have remaining inbound links or SE ranking. The strength of IDN's lies in the strength of their translations, they're high potentials for local brands and they all smile at the search engine spiders.

About the video, I saW[edit] you were using an excel sheet --> domainsite --> excel sheet combo operation to extract available domains, however this can be done by simply using the sort function of my bulk status checker plus you don't need to add the extension.

[rolf]

Hi bramiozo, thanks for the hosting and the comments, I shall definitely let you know when I update.

I have put the video on Daily Motion and need to split it into 5 parts before uploading to Youtube which I'll do later.

http://www.dailymotion.com/profitswithchris/video/x4943v_idn-internationalized-domain-names_business

[Drewbert]

Giving info away for free and cutting into other people's ebook profits is wrong.

Dude, go for a job interview at a telco, oil or drug company. They LOVE people with protectionist ideals.

[TrafficDomainer]

Great work Rolf. Very well written ebook. A few things I could add are:

1) About aliasing you could add the fact that there are short-cut keys (i.e. crtl+enter) that auto completes IDN names. It helps local users in the sense that they don't have to switch from their local languages to English when typing IDN.com names.

2) In the emerging market section, you could consider adding Thai to the list which has more internet users than Vietnam and far higher resale records.

3) You could cite a few examples of developed IDN sites and how these sites have benefited from the traffic surge with the help of SEO values in the domain names with appropriate relevant contents.

[mulligan]

Mostly a nice job .. congrats .. :)

[bwhhisc]

Mostly a nice job .. congrats .. :)
Agreed...very nicely done.

My 2 cents: You portray Japanese IDNs, especially .jp getting good traffic. That is not the case overall,
but there is improvement over the last year but still just a trickle. There are exceptions, mainly adult names
and some generics especially related to video games etc. Developed Japanese .com and .jp minisites have
have good success with those sites getting traffic once they got page ranking. Reportedly the recent change
in yahoo algorithm has knocked many of those back off page 1.

[mgrohan]

Nice work on the ebook. Good Job!

[domain_trader]

2) In the emerging market section, you could consider adding Thai to the list which has more internet users than Vietnam and far higher resale records.

Actually, there are more than double the number of Viet users (18,226,701) than Thai users (8,465,800). Vietnam has one of the highest internet use ratios per population in the world. They can't get enough of the Internet.

http://www.internetworldstats.com/asia.htm

[Rubber Duck]

Actually, I would advise everyone to watch the Videos. Even I have been learning one or two Excel tricks, and I though I was pretty good.

Not sure about when I will get around to looking at the Ebook, but the Video could be Iconic if only enough people actually got to see them!

[rolf]

Hey cheers guys, this is great stuff, lots to update which is a good thing. Thanks for both the praise and the constructive criticism.

I'll be uploading the video shortly to youtube which should get it the audience it deserves.

Now youtube is notorious for being able to attract a large audience, especially if you stuff a lot of "related words" as tags and in the description.

Just wondering what kind of keywords I can use, aside from the usual IDN related and domain related......to get the audience that we would wish to get more interested in IDNs....."foreign investment" maybe?

[Drewbert]

You want more people interested in IDN's?

I thought doing a version of the video in some languages OTHER than English would be an obvious thing to do?

[rolf]

You want more people interested in IDN's?

I thought doing a version of the video in some languages OTHER than English would be an obvious thing to do?

Yes, although unfortunately I don't speak any other language and I have no spare funding for translations.

But I am open for translating if anyone wishes to do so they can PM me. Already I have discussed this with one person for one language, for the book at least.

[khurtsiya]

Actually, I would advise everyone to watch the Videos. Even I have been learning one or two Excel tricks, and I though I was pretty good.

Not sure about when I will get around to looking at the Ebook, but the Video could be Iconic if only enough people actually got to see them!
Yeah, the video is good :)

Many good Excel tricks there.

Are such tricks in OpenOffice Calc?

[alpha]

Yeah sweet excel tips.

btw easier concatenate method. =a1&b1

[rolf]

yeah cheers, Open Office Calc tries to replicate Excel as much as possible, even to shortcut keys. So there should be an easy equivalent in Open Office although I can't say I have tried.

Yeah for some reason I like to spell out "concatenate". It's a habit, lol

Those string and text manipulation functions I use again and again. It's worth getting to know advanced filtering in Excel too and vlookups. I'll have to do another video some time...

[alpha]

.. and vlookups. I'll have to do another video some time...

vlookup is prob THE most powerful aspect of excel.

I recently had thousands of names appraised in a variety of different ways.. ovt, google hits, native translation, adsense stats, comments from various ppl etc.. all coming in in different spreadsheets.

with vlookup you just whack em into new tabs and then pull it all together into a single row with vlookup.

I do the same things with parked traffic stats.. each month i download the nd report and paste it as-is into my portfolio spreadsheet and the vlookup pulls it all out and formats it nicely.

its also an essential drop catchers tool. if you have lots of dictionaries and stats already compiled, a simple copy&paste of the drops and a vlookup and again its all to hand.

v powerful indeed.

and the funny thing is i knew nothing of any of this before my IDN days :)

[jacksonm]

Yeah for some reason I like to spell out "concatenate". It's a habit, lol

It's useless use of cat!

.

[jose]

Nice new post, rolf:

http://www.profitswithchris.com/blog/how-to-sell-a-premium-domain-name/

[rofsjan]

Great initiative, rolf.
The links refering to the video are no longer valid. You might want to update them.

[Asiaplay]

Hi Rolf (alias Chris),

Great to see someone go full steam with the e-book idea (worked well for SEO book - so why not for IDNs!).

Overall I agree you have a great writing style that is clear and "generally" well balanced - so great effort! :up:

There are a few areas which could be clearer or more accurate and I agree with Alphamale on his comments (and add to them) - perhaps address these before you release this e-book (as some make you look misinformed - no offence meant).

a) Page 27 .cn - one does not need to be a local or even have a China address to register .cn (you can buy them at dynadot in English using any address) The discussion on .cn really should be that it perhaps is safer to use a "company" to register .cn (as this is the present rules of CNNIC who oversees .cn). But saying this, I recently was successfully allowed to transfer a .cn to my own name and not just a company (however I quickly changed the owner to be a company - as prefer to play safe and stick to the "present" rules). If you want to use an example of a IDN.ccTLD where one needs to be a local, then .fr is probably a better example (and then point out that their are registrars that allow you to use their address for an additional fee - so you can still register them).

b) Page 13 "what happens if you already have an IDN.com..." - this reads to be a little misleading to me (since it immediately follows discussion on ccTLD and IDN.IDN i.e. I read it initially as what will happen if IDN.IDN happens for ccTLD (e.g. Korea) and I have IDN.com - then one will automatically get the IDN.IDN ccTLD (which of course is wrong, as the governing bodies are not related)... know this was not your point - so perhaps make it a little clearer.
I also agree with Alphamale that ICANN could not care in the least what happens to IDN.IDN for .com or .net (this is Verisign's own issue) - also who knows if the present owner of IDN.com or net will be given the rights to IDN.IDN versions of .com or .net if they ever come to exist... I think it is wrong to paint this as a given or implied given (and therefore .com and .net will obviously be a safe bet for IDN.IDN - recent developments show this is less likely than before... so balance this comment or drop it perhaps).

c) Page 48 Summing up statement - "and remember that no country wants to upset the current holders of IDN - it is not just a bunch of foreign speculators..." - in my own opinion, countries do not care who they upset e.g. China will continue to offer .com.cn and .net.cn... and they will remain 2nd tier country domain names as they are now (this point is also referenced on page 27) and a country sees this as being their own right to do so... so argument in my opinion is totally unfounded (and dare I say incorrect).

d) USA jurisdiction (referenced several places) - I wouldn't push this so hard (it sounds like paranoid fear that any country being democratic and lawful apart from the USA, is not possible - not totally true lol... and the type of localised thinking that is the reason IDNs were ignored for so long by ascii investors in the USA i.e. ignorance in the reality that exists outside the USA).

e) Page 41 "... IDN is such an immature market at the moment that there have not been any significant test cases that I know of..." Perhaps "significant" is debatable - but some have happened e.g. for Chinese domain dispute decision details in English please see http://dn.hkiac.org/cn/cne_decisions.html

f) Page 34 - example on what you understand to be the Chinese word for "cars"... perhaps use a better keyword here as the example i.e. 汽车
Logic being:-
汽车 = car(s) (baidu shows 汽车 to have ~ 22480 searches per day)
轿车 = sedan (baidu shows 轿车 to have ~ 698 searches per day)
Even 车市 = abbreviated auto market gets ~ 878 searches per day i.e. is higher than the sedan (轿车) example you gave... and of course there are other words which mean car / auto etc. as well... you will look smarter if you change this example!).

g) February 12th - you are very game thinking MS will stick to a date (but good call as well perhaps)... only comment really is there any reason you did not put February 12th "2009"?
Aside from this perhaps also mention Opera, Safari and Google browsers being IDN compatible (mentioning only IE and Firefox is only part of the picture).

Aside from this the E-book of could of course go further (and I am sure over time it will) e.g. discussion on use of "hypen" and plurals for Asian, Arabic and other languages, the fact that .ccTLD will always appear in country search engine results (whereas TLD might be blocked for certain countries due to it being a "reserved" IDN under country guidelines) etc. etc.

For tools I would also perhaps put in the appraisal tool one of members has developed i.e. idn.bz (http://idn.bz) (as many find it useful as a guide) and links to alternatives to overture (which is dead really) perhaps e.g. google tools, baidu, yandex etc. options... and perhaps debatable to some, even though it does hold valuable IDN discussion as well (idnchannel.com).

Cheers all (and good job so far Chris) - Asiaplay