HOW TO: Choose and manage domains when you’re an entrepreneur

choosing a domain
Proper domain management can save you time and money

If you’re like me and own lots of domains for more than one business interest, you know that it can be challenging to keep everything organized (not just with domains, btw).

I’ve learned some valuable lessons about managing a portfolio domains. These are simple, but they’ll save you time and money down the road as your business interests grow and, ultimately, make it big.

1. When in doubt, buy them out
This one’s not so much about management, but it’s worth passing along. When your company is in the spitball phase of trying to come up with a winning name, buy every single domain you think has a chance of being the final pick. Here’s why: first, don’t ever leave it to chance that the domain will be available tomorrow. You never know who is watching. The last thing you want to do is to have to go pay someone for the domain you really want. Second, you may forget. Sounds dumb, but that stroke of genious you have can easily vanish into thin air because you’re attention got drawn to some other important detail. Buy that great name before it leaves your brain.

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Startup Lessons: Find the Right Financing Partner & Test Before You Invest in Marketing

Today’s post is the latest installment of our Q&A Series – short interviews with talented, experienced, and successful entrepreneurs who are on the front lines of running online businesses.

new river innovation

My guest is Reed Humphrey. Reed’s an experienced entrepreneur having cofounded or led marketing at four start-ups, including a tax services firm that grew revenue by 100-fold under his direction. Currently he leads the marketing and public relations functions for New River Innovation/easyIRS.com, including advertising, social media, partnerships, news and media.

I think you’ll like this discussion because Reed is a smart, experienced guy who is right smack dab in the middle of the startup experience. He’s got a lot of good input on financing and marketing. And his company is working on a pretty cool idea that I think could be huge.

Here’s our discussion:

B5: The name of your company, easyIRS.com, probably says everything. But just in case, tell me about what the company is all about.

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Startup Lessons: Guard Your Equity and Make Every Day Productive

Here’s the latest installment of our Q&A Series – short interviews with talented, experienced, and successful entrepreneurs who are on the front lines of running online businesses.

My guest is Curt Dalton, founder of the new search engine NowRelevant.com – yeah that’s right. I said new search engine. I had a chance to chat with Curt this week. He had a lot of great insight’s about the entrepreneurial game and the search business. He’s got an interesting idea.

This interview is super interesting because of the industry involved – one that’s obviously occupied by giants that we’ve all heard of. Here’s our discussion:

B5: Before we get into your new venture, tell me about being an entrepreneur.
For me it has always been about how you think about a problem and how you look to solve it.  I have always been the “I can create a better mouse trap” type thinker.  So, you will strike out some, but you if you stick with it and be persistent you will find success on a project sooner or later.

new search engine

B5: So tell me about NowRelevant.com.
NowRelevant.com is a new search engine that shows you everything about a subject, but just for the last two weeks. We want to give users relevant information on topics without having to sift through 55 million results that date back to the beginning of time. We’re able to remove spam and SEO dummy sites from the users results as well.

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Lessons From a Startup: Adapt to What the Market is Telling You

This the latest installment of our Q&A Series – short interviews with talented, experienced, and successful entrepreneurs who are on the front lines of running online businesses. I’ve always believed that it’s a big mistake to not at least listen to those who have worn the same shoes that we are putting on every day. I hope these interviews prove to be as informative to you as they have been for me.

Today’s guest is Wray Rives, founder of NeedaCFO. I had a chance to chat with Wray recently. He had a lot of great insight’s about year one of his newest venture.

Here’s our discussion:

B5: Talk a little bit about what NeedaCFO is all about.
WR: For several years I have worked with medium-to-large companies providing C-Level management support, mostly in the financial (CFO/COO/Controller) type roles.  At the same time, I have had a few fairly small business clients that I mostly do tax compliance work for.  I saw the need with the small business owners to have a senior level business advisor like a CFO or COO, but most of them cannot afford a full time person. Even if they have in-house accounting and finance staff, many small business owners end up performing the CFO role themselves, because the in-house staff is focused on day to day accounting duties and is not really looking at the business in a “big picture” way.

In my experience, small business owners tend to fall into two groups a) really good at some technical skill or b) really good sales people.  Very few of them are really good CFO’s. I felt like they needed somewhere to go and get solid business advice.

need a cfo

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