For your convenience, we have tried to identify as many common and relevant questions as possible, to make your experience better, and help you find the right name and marketing support for your business.
Interesting Fact:
In the early 2000s, Volkswagen launched a super sedan called the Phaeton, with specs that rivaled the Bentley Continental at half the price. It was the very best VW could offer. But sales fell very short of expectations... You would think that an established brand like VW, at a far lower price, would take away Bentley’s business. But Bentley’s sales were relatively unaffected. The reason is because Bentley is a very strong brand in the segment of luxury cars, where VW is not.
Interesting Fact:
Kraft Foods was sued over the trans-fat content of their Oreo brand cookies. They agreed to change their recipe to remove the health-risk in their product, only to find an enormous outcry from their loyal customer following, who did not want any alteration whatsoever to the product they loved so much.
Interesting Fact:
In old cowboy movies, the good guys wore white hats and the villains wore black hats. Today those terms are used as a metaphor in Search Engine Optimizing (and in programming in general):
- White Hat SEO - Improving relevance and quality of content, building organic site traffic, attractiveness of result links, user engagement and user experience. Things that add value to guests of the site.
- Grey Hat SEO - The use of legal tactics, but whose sole purpose is to target the algorithm to boost a less worthy site in rankings. Things that do not add value.
- Black Hat SEO - The use of tactics that are against the rules of search engines, to hack an unworthy site into the results. Things that are deceptive in nature.
Interesting Fact:
In feudal times, people were named after their profession. That is the reality behind many common last names like "Carpenter", "Smith", "Barber", "Mason", "Hunter", "Bowman" etc.
Interesting Fact:
There has been an interesting debate among branding professionals regarding the mattress manufacturer “Purple” using of such a generic word. Some say the brand is strong regardless of the generic name and others that the name is not distinctive enough to promote branding. The reality is simple: You put enough marketing resources and uniqueness into a product and you can brand practically any name. Purple can catch as a brand. The problem they will have for choosing a generic name is that “color coding” is a standard and reasonable practice. Many companies do it with products and sales events. If Purple decides to take a competitor to court over the use of the color “purple” or even the word in some contexts, they may find it hard to protect their brand. The fact that the generic packaging in retail outlets is the same color pattern as the top branded product in their category, means this debate has already been lost in court before.
At Max Branded we do not put much weight on existing traffic, because it can often be counterproductive. A previous use of the name would likely have been with a different application, and when visitors arrive expecting a solution related to the previous application and don't find it, they quickly leave the site. This bounce metric can give search engines the impression that your content is not good and harm your rankings. Some backlinks are also not good because they can be associated with spamming tactics and having them can also hurt your search rankings. Buying a name with 10,000 backlinks can actually be a challenge and a time-consuming chore for SEO purposes. We feel that in the vast majority of instances, it is best to start your backlinking strategy for your new application for your domain name, from scratch.
But overall, having people see your new site is a good thing, and if there is a lot of traffic, and the visitors are indeed interested in your new site, it could be fantastic, but that is certainly not a reasonable expectation of a domain at any age, it is mostly unrelated to the backlink count, which is a standard metric for the value of traffic in the domain industry, and is extremely difficult to assess for several reasons like:
What needs to be assessed Value of traffic has a lot to do with the demographics and preferences of the actual visitors related to the new application of the domain, and that information we cannot possibly know, since it has to do with a possible future application of the name, and is often expensive and time consuming to obtain because it is not readily available.
Link quality The value of each link also has to do with the credibility and prominence of the site at which the link originates, and the relative exclusivity of the backlink at the page in the source. A site with 3 good backlinks could be a great purchase, but even those might be unrelated (causing SEO issues), and are unreliable at best, because they will likely be lost once the source realizes the link destination has changed.
Backlinks often do not bring traffic or add credibility Backlink count on its own can be very misleading, as many old SEO tactics involved high volumes of garbage links, and even good SEO tactics that are relevant today create backlinks whose benefit can often be lost over time. A domain with 10,000 backlinks could have well over 9,000 of them offering zero value.
But when a domain has years of being registered and has not been used in a manner that would get it banned, search engines will tend to rank the domain higher because it is less likely to be a problematic site.
There is a phenomenon that challenges data. It is the opposite of Murphy's Law, and could be expressed as "If the business can be successful, it will be." And it relates to the drive of the entrepreneur. It is a severely underrated marketing influence. The passion to bring something new into the world, the strength of courage, facing competition, and uncertainty, while carrying the weight of responsiblity for employees and the effects of the business in the community. It is sheer will power, and it is fueled by belief. When you, as an entrepreneur, feel a name is right, and you know it down to the core of your bones, you just know…
As a rule of thumb, our price is much lower than what we feel the monthly marketing budget should be for a venture. With that in mind, over the first 5 years, the price of the Brand Bundle is less than 1.7% of the marketing budget, which is nothing in comparison to the benefits it is expected to bring. The reason our pricing is so far below what we feel is attainable, is because our mission is to help new business ventures succeed in today's challenging market conditions. Discounts will not be considered unless there is a reasonable and fair cause to take the time to consider a discount.
Assessing return on investment is the responsibility of the entrepreneur / investor. If you agree that the return for the price of a domain will be great, then there is no valid price objection.
Making financial arrangements to cover business expenses and cashflows is another important job of every entrepreneur. If any of our Brand Bundles is truly unaffordable to any entity, then the chances that entity will be successful using the Brand Bundle are minimal, simply because the entity lacks the financial resources to launch successfully. They will struggle to afford employees, essential services, inventories, R&D, startup costs, overhead up to the breakeven point, and the myriad of unexpected expenses that are sure to arise in the course of business. From our perspective, with our high value proposition, there can be no valid affordability objection.
The Brand Bundle price for each domain is listed next to the domain name, and is payable to Max Branded via Escrow.com. It is our compensation for releasing the ownership of the domain, and delivering Brand Bundle items for the domain, which include:
- Release of the domain(s) ownership to buyer.
- Purchase Protection Warranty. If you do not receive the domain, you pay nothing.
- Logo in .eps format (Scalable Vector).
- Website logo icon set in a variety of sizes in .png format.
- High resolution square and horizontal logo .png images, without slogan, over clear background for light, dark, and color placement.
- Business card template image.
- List of the brand colors used in both RGB (digital displays) and CMYK (printing).
- List of recommended fonts for brand.
- Branding guidelines for using fonts, images, and colors.
- Some domains include bonus items which are specified in their listing.
Note: The Brand Bundle price does not include custom alterations to the marketing materials.
Please refer to terms and conditions and our privacy policy that govern the release and delivery of the bundle items.