This is the three-month anniversary of a low point in my life.
90 days ago today, everything went dark. It was like taking this switch and turning it to OFF.
What happened?
After attempting for months to recover our domains without success, on this day in August a rinky-dink little CRM software company in Florida called A p l i c o r (we put spaces between each letter so a human can read it but Google cannot) ‘re-purposed” all our domains.
In one instant, our website went disappeared, our blog vanished and email went off. Find New Customers was instantly completely out of business. We had, in effect, disappeared from the face of the Earth.
How did we recover?
On principle, we refused to pay ransom to the thieves at A p l i c o r to get FindNewCustomers dot net and Fearlesscompetitor dot com back. Instead, we simply purchased:
- FindNewCustomers.com and
- FearlessCompetitor.net and
- set up new email addresses, such as [email protected].
They may have stolen our domains, but fortunately, we still had all of our wonderful content on B2B marketing and demand generation such as How to Find New Customers, Definitive Guide to Making Quota and Moving from Transactional to Conversational Email Marketing - plus podcasts, webinars and e-books. And we still had all of our fans and supporters. So all the thieves got was a URL or two. Big deal.
But how do people find us at these new domains? For instance, our grade in Hubspot’s Websitegrader.com plummeted from 99 out of 100 to just 49. All of our links were gone. All SEO “juice” was lost. Traffic was zero.
With the help of wonderful friends and supporters like many of our readers here, in just 90 days we’re back and better than ever. Our website grade is now close to where it was - well above what the company who stole the domains have. Our SEO is better than ever and companies are finding us again. And in just 90 days, we’ve developed over 1,500 inbound links - which is astounding.
What’s the moral here?
One can take domains, but one cannot take spirit and drive. So all I have to say to A p l i c or now, is “good riddance.” I also invite you to check out the horrible websites they created with our domains - clearly written for search spiders and not human beings. Thank you to our loyal friends and clients for your support.
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“Jeff has the uncanny ability to synthesize a tremendous amount of information and cut to the core of what’s important. As a B2B marketing thought leader, Jeff brings boundless energy and enthusiasm to bear on his work. He is a strategic thinker and I would consider him an asset to any marketing team.” Ahmed Taleb, Bulldog Solutions
Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is President of Fun and Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple” Check out the online show every Friday at 11am ET, “Laugh and Learn with the Fearless Competitor.”
Find New Customers helps businesses develop and implement demand generation programs to improve the way they find and acquire sales leads using best practices in lead generation.
“Jeff has an amazing insight in making the efforts to identify demand requirements and to build credible funnels of qualified sales leads look effortless.” Ed Lemire, Executive Vice President, Acteva
