What is BillHartzer.com?
BillHartzer.com is the personal blog and news site of Bill Hartzer, CEO of Hartzer Consulting. Bill Hartzer is a blogger, writer, and marketer with a passion for writing content that people want to read. BillHartzer.com does not publish articles about fluffy rainbows and feel-good, shareable funny cat photos. You can read those articles and see those posts on other websites, like BuzzFeed, or Bored Panda.
What you’ll find here is content (in many different forms) about the stuff that really matters: topics that help you understand the internet, understand how the web works, and how to do your job better. If you’re a marketer like me, you have a passion for everything internet, everything tech, and everything that’s the latest “gadget, app, website, or technology”. We’re early adopters, and want to know.
Bill Hartzer with Matt Cutts, formerly head of the Web Spam Team at Google.
Who is Bill Hartzer?
Bill Hartzer is a classicly-trained technical writer, with a passion for everything web, and everything internet. He started writing computer software manuals on an IBM Mainframe back in the early 1990s. Stared coding html websites back in the mid 1990s, started creating websites and buying & selling domain names. Did “search engine optimization” on his own websites so they’re rank well in the search engines. Well before it was even called “SEO”. It was all about showing up well on Altavista, Excite, and Yahoo! well before Google even existed.
As a writer, he started BillHartzer.com, the website, in 2001, and started blogging on the site around 2003. Ever since, BillHartzer.com has been the place to find snarky, thought-provoking articles, with the occasional breaking news type article or post that made you say “wow, I didn’t know that”. You can learn more about Bill Hartzer by vising Hartzer.com.
“When it comes to getting noticed on the web, if someone loves it, hates it, think it’s funny, or the content you create is controversial, then most likely they will link to it. Links are good for websites.” – Bill Hartzer.
Steve Wozniak, the Co-Founder of Apple Computer, with Bill Hartzer
Domain Name Studies and New TLD Research
In 2014, Bill Hartzer published ground-breaking research related to the search industry and the New gTLD domain names. He wanted to know if these new Generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) domain name endings, such as .diamonds, .attorney, and .luxury, provided an significant improvement or ROI over the traditional .com, .net, and .org domain names. The results of these search engine marketing studies proved, time and time again, that using a keyword rich New gTLD domain name (a Not Com domain name) provides better ROI. For example, the following is part of one of my studies:
“Back in May 2014, we found that domains of new extensions were converting at about 34 percent, and .COMs were converting at about 52 percent. It cost more to advertise using a .COM than a new domain extension. However, over a year and a half later, that has all changed. New domain extensions are converting at about the same rate–but .COM domains are converting now at a record low, of nearly 20 percent. It still costs more to advertise using a .COM domain name than using a new domain extension. Here are some quick stats from our updated research:
Results: Average CPC
3Carat.Diamonds: $.77 Sept. 2015 vs $.69 in Jan 2015 vs. $.77 in May 2014
3CaratDiamonds.com: $.83 Sept 2015 vs $.82 (vs. $.81 in May 2014)
Conclusions:
23% Conversion Rate on .COM, 35% on .Diamonds in September 2015.
Previously, January 2015: 31.76% Conversion Rate on .COM, 29.11% on .Diamonds
Previously, May 2014: 52% Conversion Rate on .COM, 36% on .Diamonds”
Search Marketing Study: How New gTLDs are Beating .COM https://globerunner.com/search-marketing-study-how-new-gtlds-are-beating-com/.