V - for Victory!!!

[draggar]

Well, how about a victory as the US's "victory" in the revolutionary war (England just gave up).

Last fall I met an industry expert (in a niche of mine) who knew very little about the internet (other than checking email). At first we exchanged a few emails about our common interests in this niche.

Being an industry expert, I noticed that there was a (hisname).com and I asked him about it. Turns out, it was someone else who he had an affiliation with in the past but the relationship turned very sour after this person stole thousands of dollars from my friend. He sold the domain that my friend had (or just parked it) and put up the (realname).com site. He was also selling illegal copies of my friend's books.

With his permission, I registered the .org, .net, .info, and .us along with his old site's domain in .org, .net, and .info. I pointed them all to (hisname).org and set up a site for him (at no cost but I do get a comission on each book sale).

We both discussed how we could go about getting the .com. Neither of us had the money for a WIPO case so we started what we could do best, a campaign to educate people who would go to his siate that the .com was *not* him and any copies of his books bought though there would not benefit my friend in any way. We also let people know that the .org is his "official" site and set up cross links with a few other sites that have his permission to reprint his articles.

Within 2 months my .org site was out ranking the .com site in many common keyword sets in Google (yay!) and traffic (and book sales) was steadily picking up. I have no idea how this campaign affected the traffic to the .com site but something must have worked.

The .com expired and I was able to jump on it though a backorder (NJ). This will be the best $70 I will spend in a while. I even set up a Wordpress blog with a nice template that I am continually adding this and that. The acquisition was shaky for a while when I got an email from someone else claiming that they owned it and wanted to sell it to me (even though I had already paid NameJet for it) but it finally went though (5 days after I won it) and now have the .org pointed to the .com (how often do peolpe do this?).

My friend is very happy and my wife is currently working on a press release that we can send out with this good news.

It's good to see the good guys win once in a while.