SEOfrancois

ICANN has revealed the list of applications they have received for the new generic TLDs.

It's interesting to look at the extensions for which they have received several competing applications. Those will probably be of high interest in the future. It also gives an idea of where the investors currently are...

Here are the gTLDs with some competing applications:

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Sometimes I wonder why I ever chose the "seofrancois" nickname... Oh right, those guys at a conference kept pressing me for a twitter handle! But still, SEO is just a little part of what I'm interested in as far as making money, ahem, I mean as far as Internet Marketing is concerned.

I believe everyone doing SEO should keep in mind that SEO alone is useless. Optimizing a site for search engines doesn't do much, unless you're doing an SEO contest, maybe... but I'd still argue that doing an SEO contest doesn't do anything useful either.

If you're doing SEO, ask yourself: what's the point? More specifically: what happens next? People find your site in web engines. Some click through. Now what?

Below are some additional topics you may want to think about. (No, I'm not talking about PPC!) And what's more: contrary to SEO, those topics still have a lot of margin for improvement in many verticals, even the juicy ones:

• Copy writing
• Landing page optimization
• Navigation optimization & site usability
• Branding
• Customer loyalty
• Customer experience
• Trust factors
• User engagement
• Community building (onsite)
• Facebook & co.
• Mailing list buildings
• Email deliverability
• Mobile browsing

Email deliverability, for example, can be quite an interesting topic for SEOs; there is definitely a parallel to be drawn between how many factors influence your position in search engines and how many factors influence whether or not your email is going to be delivered to the recipients' inboxes, spam boxes or not delivered at all... (You guys should do email deliverability contests to Hotmail for a change! :p )

But beyond that, the list above contains areas which are less technical but require more creativity instead. I believe these are the areas where you will find the most growth in 2012.

Sometimes it's interesting to do a reality check on your own little domain portfolio...

Here are the top 10 domain sales in 2010:

1. Sex.com - $13,000,000
2. Slots.com - $5,500,000
3. Dating.com - $1,750,000
4. Photo.com - $1,250,000
5. Flying.com - $1,100,000
6. Zip.com - $1,058,830
7. Poker.org - $1,000,000
8. Credit.fr - $851,875
9. Guns.com - $800,000
10. Ringtones.com - $750,000

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There has been this awesome study in the late sixties about how 4 year olds would resist temptation and delay gratification. What's really awesome about it is that the researchers later found out there was a correlation between their ability to delay gratification and their later success in life.

One quick and entertaining way to grok that study is to watch this short TED video:

You can find more info in this article from the New Yorker.

If you read through it you will learn that one secret to resit temptation, delay gratification and reach higher goals is to stop thinking about the gratification and focus on something else. Better yet, it seems actually possible to train your mind to do just that...

I guess one immediate reality check for you out there is: can you delay playing X-Box or watching Lost in favor of finishing this new project today? In other words D.I.F.N? I know I can... but that's only because I have no X-Box and I don't like Lost... It was a whole different story at the times I was hooked on Boston Legal... ;)

If you have multiple Twitter accounts and/or Facebook fan pages, you have probably cross-posted content or retweeted yourself more than once already... That may be fine but at some level you also  run the risk of annoy your followers with too many duplicates and you will lose some of those hardly aquired fans & followers...

Of course it's up to you to decide how you want to address your followers and fans but I recommend you really think it through before you spam them away by mistake... Here are my own rules of thumb on the matter:

1. Your product/service specific accounts should talk only about that product, not about your personal life or rants (unless you *are* the product!)
2. You can retweet some major product news/milestones on your personal profile but you should avoid RTing personal stuff on your product profiles.
3. Use the "selective tweets" app on Facebook in order to not overpipe stuff from twitter to FB
4. Make sure you never have duplicate content/status updates/RTs on facebook. Noise is more commonly "accepted" on Twitter than on Facebook.

Finally, remember that overloading your followers with promos will give good results in the short term but it will also burn your followers out! And in many markets, you cannot replace your current followers with new ones of equal quality indefinitely...