F.W. Woolworth's. Bennigan's. Pan Am. The XFL.
Sometimes it's just time to move on.
When I first changed the name of my company to flyte new media, I tried to secure the domain flyte.com. It was taken, but it didn't look like it had been updated in a while and I made an offer. It was rebuffed. I made a counter-offer. It too was rebuffed. And so were several more.
Interestingly, I don't believe the website has changed since 1999 when I first approached the owner.
I settled on flytemedia.com and also bought up flytenewmedia.com as a redirect.
When the dot biz domains were released I gobbled up flyte.biz and redirected all of my domains there. At first, dot biz domains had the reputation of a place for spammers…a bad neighborhood on the web.
I awaited the inevitable gentrification.
Unfortunately, it never really came. And I believe that our dot biz domain is hurting our email deliverability, even though I have no hard proof this is true.
Searching for a dot com domain.
Over the years we've played around with the idea of having your marketing or your business “take flyte,” so recently I wondered if the domain takeflyte.com was available.
I discovered it was claimed but not being used. I reached out to the company that controlled it, and in a true act of generosity, they offered it to me free of charge. They thought we were a cool little company doing well, and just gifted it to us.
Even with the takeflyte.com domain under our control, I was concerned about the hit we would take at the search engines as we migrated the content from both flyte.biz and our 2,000 plus posts at our blog, flyteblog.com, to the new domain.
We could minimize the impact with 301 redirects, the most search engine friendly way to change a domain, but we'd still suffer a loss of traffic for a time.
I went over to the High Rankings forum, a discussion group on SEO (search engine optimization), and one of the SEO experts over there said it best: business considerations trump search engine considerations every time. (Like that? Tweet it!)
That was the only thing holding us back. It was time to redesign our website and refocus our message.
What happens to all of your content?
It's all still here. Every blog post, every email newsletter that we archived on our website, has been moved to takeflyte.com/blog. Because of some fine 301 work, every incoming link should redirect to the post's new home.
Do you still have separate lists for your email newsletter and your blog?
No. We decided that content was content. To that end anyone who was signed up for our email newsletter, flyte log, or signed up to receive email updates from our blog will be merged into one list. If you were on both lists, bless you. And, you'll only receive one going forward.
Will all your flyte.biz emails still work?
Yes, although we're going to start using our takeflyte.com emails effective immediately.
Will you stop neglecting your blog?
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! We're developing our editorial calendar for the rest of the year now, and we plan on regularly posting new content to help you increase your online visibility, drive more qualified traffic to your site, and convert more of that traffic into leads and business.
In short, to help your business take flyte.