Dot Tel Buzz (i.e. what is .tel anyway?)
Dec 1, 2009 Online Marketing TIPS for your Business
A few weeks ago I was reminded of a type of directory website called .tel offered by Telnic Ltd. (and available through several re-sellers worldwide). This is a very basic-looking website that serves as a home-base for all of your contact details online and offline and allows others to find you easily.
Here’s a clever .tel commercial that got me excited about owning my very own little piece of internet real estate:
After I saw this, I went out and bought terridavies.tel, thinking that it could be beneficial in multiple ways:
1) If I get caught in a situation where I don’t have business cards on me (heaven forbid!) I can just say “go to terridavies.tel and you’ll see links to my website, blog and social media”
2) Since even my business card doesn’t have links to everything I do online (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube etc.) it’s nice to have a central location for people to find this info.
3) Having an additional inbound link from .tel to my website and blog can’t hurt (and could help) in terms of their Google rankings. Plus, .tel might actually ranks all on its own one day for those searching for info about “Terri Davies, Victoria, BC” (since I’m not listed in the Yellow Pages).
However, even after all that I am still unsure that I am actually going to reap the benefits of owning this account. I’ll really need to direct people there if it’s going to be effective (like Ben in the commercial), and that sort of defeats the purpose because why not send them to our Sunstar Creative website? It would be good if I didn’t have my own website….but for a web-savvy business owner I have yet to see the real benefit. I also found that the look was really boring and I am craving the ability to get into the code and modify it!
The cost of securing my dot tel name was about $45 ($44.56 if you want the exact figure) for two years through one of the Canadian resellers called Webnames (other resellers include TuCows, Sibername.com, DomainPeople, Netfirms and more ) and this included the domain registration and hosting. What do you think? I’m happy to hear any ideas you have of how .tel can be beneficial. Here’s what Telnic Ltd. has to say in their Telegraph eNewsletter I received today (it looks like some business are trying to make it work, but it seems like a stretch to me…)
December 3rd, 2009 at 2:20 am
Hi Terri,
you may want to read my presentation on how to do effective SEO and take control of your brand with your .tel. It’s available as a link on http://henri.tel.
December 3rd, 2009 at 3:58 am
Hi Terry,
Like your post! The .tel extension has several great aspects. Of course you can suggest people to visit your website for your personal details, but by saying ‘just go to terridavies.tel’ you make it extremely easy to them to contact you (if that’s what you want, of course: you can choose to make information accessible for friends only). Your contact information will always be up-to-date i.e. your contacts don’t need to adapt the information they have to your new phone number, new social network, etc. You can find both instructive and pleasant videos via http://about-tel.edje.tel.
You certainly can promote your seo via your domain name, folders and keywords. See for instance Henri Asseily’s recent presentation at http://ow.ly/G9n4. Several .tel domains have a page 1 score on Google.
Kind regards,
Edwin
December 3rd, 2009 at 10:07 am
Don’t have doubts about the benefit of TEL’s.
They are out in the market only for a couple of month.
The real success will start when they become mainstream. Because then it will make the communication between people much easier.
And yes, TEL’s look kind of boring. But think about the upcoming features! Wouldn’t it be great to type terridavies.tel into your phone instead of +12505882877?
What is easier to remember?
Best,
Jens
December 3rd, 2009 at 11:19 am
Henri – your Slideshare presentation was excellent. I really appreciate your humour throughout it. I’ve changed a couple things on my dot tel page as a result of it, so thank you!
Edwin – you are right that with the right strategy it seems dot tel pages can rank quite well. I’ll take a look at your videos. Cheers!
December 3rd, 2009 at 11:24 am
Jens – I agree that when/if .Tel becomes mainstream it could be very useful for the reasons of convenience and ease, but it might also be very confusing since there are multiple people in the world with my name – how will people know it’s me from the limited info on my TEL page?
Another question I have – has there been any problems with data mining of .tel pages for phone number info? I want to put my number up, but don’t want solicitation calls…
December 4th, 2009 at 12:45 am
Terri, That is a good point. I doubt it will be confusing, since you will be able to search any name via http://www.telpages.com and other search engines. So it would not be necessary you carry your name inside of the domain name. (Not everyone will have this luxury.) It will be enough to mention the name in the header.
Data protection is a very important issue. Luckily you can protect your personal phone number and hide it from the public, so only confirmed friends (with http://www.telfriends.tel) will be able to see it.
Of course the benefit of it all will be only visible as soon many people start using TEL domains. But be patient; the distribution as well as the technical development just started and we will see a lot of new features in the future.
December 4th, 2009 at 2:18 am
Terri, if you thought there was humour in the slides, you should see my delivery. :p
There is absolutely no problem with data mining because:
1- phone solicitations are very much frowned upon, especially mobile phones. There are laws against that.
2- email harvesting is a non-issue: either you have a good spam filter or you don’t. If you do, then nothing changes. If you don’t, you’d better fix it.
FYI I’ve experienced no data mining issues and everything I’ve put up on henri.tel is public. You can of course make the stuff private using the TelFriends system, but I haven’t seen the need.
(and before anyone harps on wanting to “obscure” an email address via JavaScript or pictures, that doesn’t work with .tel because the data is in the DNS)
December 5th, 2009 at 10:58 am
Henri & Jens – I have posted my phone number on .tel as you have dispelled my concerns. :0)
Thanks for your comments everyone.