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What our fight over “.au” domain names has taught us about digital marketing

SEO expert Jim Stewart has been a vocal participant in the debate surrounding the introduction of “.au” domain names, and it’s taught him a thing or two about digital marketing.
Jim Stewart
Jim Stewart

We’ve been focusing on the “.au” campaign lately, and the topic even made it into the Federal Parliament. But, there’s been a bit of criticism of me now for pushing this domain names issue, with trolls coming out all over. One of the biggest claims was that I’m just doing this for the backlinks, or it’s just a marketing campaign.

Yes, this has become a marketing campaign in my business, and it’s teaching me a lot. But it’s got nothing to do with backlinks. We don’t want backlinks. I’m very passionate about this subject, and I have a really good incentive to want to stop it from happening, so it would be stupid of me not to look at the data and how it’s affecting my business. I need to see if we’re getting the message through. And frankly, I’d say that getting the topic into Parliament is a pretty good indicator that we’re getting the message across.

We also knew the subject’s was coming up on ABC TV, so we targeted Canberra with a series of targeted ads. I’ll talk about more details later, but the ads are targeting the people in Canberra, so that when they see this topic on the news, they’re familiar with what it is.

Another thing I’ve learned this week is that I need to spend more time on LinkedIn. If you want to get a message out, you need to put it on the platforms where your audience congregates. And for this topic, that’s LinkedIn for a lot of the people responding. I want to have a look at their ad products more closely, and think it should work better now than it has in the past.

This article was originally published on stewartmedia.com.au.

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