Case Study: Today’s Date
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Original Post
Hi all future Millionaires & Old Time Millionaires,
I am the CEO (for what its worth!) of GHB the holding company for TodaysDate.co.uk Ltd. We recently purchased a domain for every day of the year e.g. www.26th-april.co.uk and a generic domain, www.todaysdate.co.uk . I, and my fellow Directors have spent the last couple of months looking to raise some investment. We had been going to meetings with the likes of BDO Stoy Hayward and Rothchilds, on an angle of our site(s) being a lifestyle portal, which will revolutionize the way information is found on the internet i.e. date specific searches, simply type the date you want the information from and all the information you find at that URL is relevant to that specific date .e.g. want a flight on 30th April rather than searching all the cut price flight sites, and going in circles, type www.30th-april.co.uk click TRAVEL then FLIGHTS.
Looking for date specific B2C uses is easy. However date specific B2B applications is a harder thing. With the date being intrinsically as generic as you can get, I want to find numerous B2B applications which are able to evolve on the internet using a date specific format. Any ideas? I am also writing because I had a meeting with a PR company last week and they suggested looking at starting the project with a more streamline site. Not life encompassing, not necessarily a portal site. They said it would be easier to get off the ground, and I agree in some ways. Research says that to be a market leader you must start at or around the top. I want TodaysDate.co.uk to be a site which is used by people everyday, whether in work or at home. Should I sacrifice areas of the site to get the project running quicker? I believe in this more than I can describe, but I am inpatient!!!! Finally, I am looking for affiliations with companies which use the internet. Have you got one ? Know somebody who has one? The site has all the information. Thanx Marvin Baker P.S A VERY basic site is currently online, however we should have a visually pleasing site up this time next week. P.P.S. See you all Tuesday! CEO GoldmanHodkinBaker
Reply
1. I think you need all variations, ie 26april, 26-april, 26th-april, 26thapril 2. Why .co.uk? It would be so much stronger as .com 3. If you can’t get all the dates and variations as .com, I’m not sure the domains for individual days add much value. The concept is good imo, regardless of the domain names, but I’m not too sure about the domains. Don’t apologise for being impatient, that’s a big plus. I think your PR firm are right though, unless you can raise zillions of pounds very quickly. It’s easier to get famous for one thing and then expand your offer to your customer base from there (cf Amazon). How about putting together historical dossiers for corresponding dates for the last 80 years or so, then offering a novel version of e-cards where users could send links to a “what happened the day you were born” page for peoples birthdays (they might send them for interest, even when it wasn’t the receivers birthday). I think that could be a great viral marketing devise.
Reply 2
You need to be aware of third level domain names – This can greatly reduce the potency of owning dates of the year. For example www.26April.today.com. Any second level domain name can be turned into a third In fact uk.com is a good one to describe as it is being talked about by the FT group. It works like this 1′st level domains:
- .com
- .co.uk
- .net
- .org
2′nd level domains: (these are what we buy)
- www.uk.com
- www.uk.co.uk
- www.uk.net
- www.uk.org
Now people with the knowledge and the name servers can turn these into 3′rd level domains with no extra cost to themselves other than time and the know how! 3′rd level domains:
- www.april5.uk.com
- www.april5.uk.co.uk
- www.april5.uk.net
- www.april5.uk.org
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