The Pokemon Problem
One of the most common mistakes people make when they are looking for
something on the web is misspelling the site name. This happens constantly
and can mean a big loss of revenue if you don't take it into account.
For example, Pokemon has been one of the most popular search phrases on web search engines for months. But unfortunately for Nintendo, the owners of the Pokemon franchise, a lot of people don't know how to spell Pokemon correctly! Lycos recently published their raw information for a week of searches, and Pokeman (with an a) came up higher than Pokemon (with an o).
What does this mean for Nintendo? It means that a ton of their fans ended up at the Pokeman site instead of the Pokemon site! That means Nintendo is losing out on a lot of money because of people's simple mistakes.
Capitalize on people's mistakes by anticipating them. Brainstorm all the ways one someone could misspell your company name, product or site name. Take the most common misspellings and use these words as keywords when you develop your site meta tags, and consider registering additional domain names for the misspelled versions. This will direct a lot more visitors to your site. Think how much more Nintendo could be making if they had done this!
The White House Sex Problem
No matter where you look nowadays, dot-com jumps out at you. You
see it on the sides of busses, in magazines, on TV, everywhere! Because of
this, most people assume that if you have a web site, it is a .com web
site. Many people don't even know that .gov, .edu, .net or other top-level
domains even exist.
The entrepreneurs at www.whitehouse.com (warning-adult subject matter) knew this. They took advantage of the White House name and have turned it into a huge draw for their adult site. Anyone looking for the real White House ( www.whitehouse.gov) that stumbles upon the adult site is in for a shock
You can use this type of mistake to your advantage by registering .com versions of your domain names if you haven't done so already. This is especially important for .net, .org and foreign
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