Facebook gets TONS of traffic. Seriously. If you aren’t doing some sort of advertising on Facebook for your business (or providing a Facebook service for local businesses in your area), you are missing out. Take a look…

• 45.5 Million Uniques in May 2010
• 245 Million Video views in May 2010 (5.4 video views per viewer)

…and growing. It’s something you just can’t ignore.

To top it off, businesses have seen the value of Facebook in their marketing – and it is something that smaller, local businesses can’t ignore either.

So, here’s a tip: Start offering Facebook Fan Page services to small businesses in your area. They don’t know how to do this stuff, they just want more business to come through their doors. Fortunately, my friend Jason Fladlien put out a video series on how to make cash with these fan pages. And it’s cheap…and you can take the knowledge and make money with it.

Grab the videos now!

Seriously, for less than 10 bucks you can’t go wrong.

1. You are transferring your domain away from your current registrar;
2. The prices to renew are quite uncompetitive ($30 for a year? That is SO 1998);
3. They got your contact information by harvesting WHOIS information.

You’ll get these urgent-sounding letters well in advance of your domain name’s actual expiration – sometimes up to 6 months before.

What you can do:

1. Write the Federal Trade Commission and complain…and hope they do something about it. (They’ve already been there once before…)
2. Simply rip it up and throw it away.
3. Type up a similar fake letter explaining that their domain, droa.com, is about to expire and send it to them – and that you’d be happy to renew it for $500 per year.

OK, the third one is a touch vindictive. Don’t renew your domain through these people. The more people that know about this, the less will fall for it and DROA will slip silently into nonexistence, or at least straighten up their business practices.

Oh, one more thing…Domain Registry Of America is a CANADIAN corporation. Hmph.

Would you do it? There’s usually no monetary gain from promoting a forum, unless you own it. You won’t really gain much traffic to your website or your product…or will you?

My answer to the question was yes, I would promote the forum. And here’s why.

While any promotion of a forum is good for the forum, it also benefits you. If you write an information product (or blog post for that matter) that points the reader to a forum you actively participate in, it gives them another place to “see” you and interact.

Forums are more than just areas to discuss topics, they are relationship builders. If someone reads your ebook and then goes to the forum just to see many more helpful posts by you, they are going to be inclined to trust you more. They know that they can drop in to that forum and ask you a question mono y mono.

So think about that next time you write a blog post or ebook. Is there something relvant at a forum you belong to? Link to it, and start forging those relationships with your customers.

*sigh* I see this all the time.

From time to time (especially if you already have a domain name) you’ll get a very nice looking letter in the mail from certain domain registration companies. These letters -look- like invoices, but they really aren’t. They are just glorified advertisements trying to get you to switch to their registration services. I’ll say this once: DON’T PAY MORE THAN $15 A YEAR FOR DOMAINS. I don’t care what goo-gaws the registrar is offering (most of them offer the same thing – free email forwarding, free parking, a free landing page…just like everyone else) .

A long time ago, there was only one place to register domains. Network Solutions. There were only three TLD’s you could register – .com, .net, and .org. Network Solutions was happy to charge 35 bucks a year for the name. And just the name…no fancy stuff. I know of companies who charge $50 a year for a .com. It’s a joke, friends. Stick with the Enom’s and the GoDaddy’s, and save yourself some cash.

-Dave