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Do you want to have an increase of registrations and interest for .tel domains? Obsolescent |
Great idea. But surely it would need to wait for the new templates to arrive from the last competition. I have about 10 personal, family member names, that Are sitting idle. Well, I have tried to encourage them to fill them out, (no point me doing it) but there's no interest unfortunately. If I said there was a competition, that would spark interest and use. Sure of it. |
Tel Contest Idea Jens, thanks for bringing this up. I'm all for a contest, but it can't fail like the past. The purpose of any contest is to expand the brand, hence .tel needs to get plenty of volume exposure and many new domains sold to be effective. Foremost, the public needs to see the benefits of owning a .tel domain. If the message is about centralized contact info, then that won't be enough because that benefit just doesn't seem to be of significant impact. IMO, what the contest needs to do is capture the attention of small business and the benefits of owning one, namely local exposure for businesses in getting new prospects to find their products and services. The theme of the contest should be around small business being more competitive and more successful. Get SMB to use their tel to generate more interest in the contest which in turn leads to more sales. Use Easter Eggs What follows are a few different ways of having a contest all based on the concept - randomly embedded "easter eggs". "Easter eggs" are little hints or images randomly embedded into a tel domain when it is rendered and only performed by the proxy. Of course inserting easter eggs into .tels is at the discretion of both Telnic and the owner. Only Telnic has have the power to do that en-masse when actually rendering a page. But the use of easter eggs is an intriguing promotional method that only the .tel TLD - and no other TLD - can take advantage of because Telnic controls the proxy. Tel is the only TLD in existent where the registry can insert content - something to be used to a great advantage. I don't know if easter eggs would be even allowed by Telnic, but they sure could promote the brand. Visual Contest One idea is to have a visual contest, where tels get on the map, visitors explore the map to find tels near them. As tels are visited from the map, they would get the occasional "easter egg" inserted at random by the tel proxy. Perhaps Telpages would be part of the easter egg to help search for such some sort of clue related to a current easter egg. For this kind of contest, tels would require a map location. Cross-Site Scavenger Hunt Another idea is a virtual, real-time scavenger hunt with small images of items randomly inserted into participating tel domains. To participate in this kind of contest, a domain must have valuable content, ie developed or it won't be found in Telpages. Development of course benefits the tel owner in many ways. Visitors would deposit their unique items into an account set up for the contest. Tel Quiz Embed quiz questions as notes or dynamic images. To find the answer, the visitor would need to either go to another .tel domain and find the related word or phrase, or use Telpages search to find a tel. The answer would be either a word or phrase or the name of a tel page. Visitors would respond through an account set up for the contest. Simple Click Contest Spot the easter egg and click on it. Points for most clicks. Click opens a new window with a random participating tel site. Click is registered by IP. IP connected to registered user (?) - keep it simple. Extra traffic to other site. Contest Opt-in by Owners All owners interested in a contest would opt-in to allow "easter egg" insertion. Registrars could notify owners of the contest through mass email to their customers, tel and not tel alike. Contest Account for Participants Participants would need to register to play. So as they come across an easter egg, they would get instructions to either login or register before depositing their item, answer, coupon or other response. Easter Egg Content Perhaps the easter egg is as simple as replacing the Telnic logo with a link to another tel domain or better yet, the insertion of a random record containing a link to a scavenger item or clue or site. The random record would go to another tel domain, or provide a scavenger item or question. That way many tel domains can gain exposure. Participants in the contest would traverse across domains, picking up clue or items. In the process, subliminally they would learn about the advantages that tel offers. This would encourage purchase. Easter eggs would have a lifespan of one rendering. That way, no one would be able to use the answer/result more than once to gain more points. Easter eggs would need to be dynamically generated to be unpredictable. Because easter eggs are rendered totally at random, there should be no way for anyone to cheat in advance. An easter egg can appear on any participating domain at any time. It can only be rendered when physically visiting a page through a browser. ... continued ... |
.... continuation ... Increased Traffic and Exposure Finding scavenger items or answers is one thing, but the domain owners would get exposure from additional traffic. And the tel owner can still insert all sorts of content to attract the visitor to his business, products and services. Prizes In order to sell more domains, one of the response items could be a discount coupon from a sponsoring registrar and even the occasional free domain coupon to new owners. When bought, the domain would become part of the contest at the owner's discretion and the owner would have an incentive to expose his domain to more people. The more people that visit his domain in relation to a contest, the more traffic the domain owner gets. Telnic(?)/Registrars could even sponsor discounts from its customers. If traffic counts in the contest, even more reason for the owner to promote his domain. Incentivize Owners No matter which approach, the domain owner needs to have an incentive to attract prospects with a coupon or voucher. That requires coupon/voucher support from Telnic. So how does one win? Depends on the contest. Owners would win, but visitors should also get a chance at winning prizes. For a map-like contest, the winners could be the owners that attracted most visits (clicked on an easter egg). For a scavenger hunt, the winners could be both owners with most visits and visitors with most items. For a quiz, most correct answers wins, lose points for incorrect guesses. Contest Promotion Promote through registrars and Facebook. More ideas Hoping others can expand on an easter egg theme. And hoping Telnic can be encouraged to look at any contest idea. Mark BTW, as another idea, if easter eggs aren't an option for Telnic, those owners with hundreds of tels (myself among them) should be able to link tels together into some form of contest. Programmatically we could create a network of tels that could be used in a contest with thousands of subdomains available. Easter eggs could be popped into domains, life span one hit, automatic deletion upon click thru API. Traffic generation idea? Just a thought in need of expansion. |
