This is going to be a quickie, but critically important tactic to avoid a traffic pirate from stealing 20 to 50% of your blog traffic. It takes less than 5 minutes and costs less than $10 to bullet-proof yourself.
Make sure you have all the variations of your BLOG URL registered and re-directed to your blog. In some cases, words are spelled (spelt?), with one or two Ls (Jeweller/Jeweler), with our without a u (color/colour), with an s or z (personalised/personalized) and many other variations.
Domain squatters do this for a living, trolling the Internet for inadvertent oversights and buying the domains and waiting for you to realise your mistake. When you do, they’ll make you pay.
In one instance, when I noticed a friend/colleague didn’t have the North American version of her site (She spelt it in ‘Australian’…) to get the .com she had to pay a whopping $1,000!
Owch or is that Ouch?
Of course if you want to be really ‘safe’ make sure you get the localised vernacular variations as well as the hyphenated domain names.
When you’re blog gets really popular, people are going to try to steal your traffic, that’s just the way it is.
This is one easy way to reduce the poaching, it costs less than $10 to register a domain name. After all, your traffic has to be worth $9.95/year…
Do it as soon as you think it’s worth it – if you wait too long, you will pay the price and it may be very, very costly.