If you have a website — which is nearly everyone and their grandmother — and have not implemented a newsletter or mailing list sign up form, then you are totally missing out on a good monetization opportunity.

And if you carelessly shrug your shoulders at the thought of possibly monetizing your website, then at least think about the opportunity of growing organic traffic.

Executing a sound popup form upon scroll, entry, or exit, or a sidebar, footer, or header sign up form is a MUST for every website I develop. Why?

Recently I was contacted by a customer inquiring about what steps they should take to improve their website speed.

This customer was adamant that their website ranking was greatly suffering because of it. While I don’t disagree with their assessment, let me be clear that ranking on page one of Google or any other search engine was not solely because of website performance, or lack of.

Website performance is a factor, but not in the case of this customer. In fact, this customer’s overall website performance and SEO health puts their competition to shame upon further review of keyword ranking, backlink profile and domain authority.

Nevertheless, I discussed and walked the customer through a step-by-step process for what to check for to determine how to improve website performance, checking the following:

Emoji domains burst onto the scene over a year or so ago with a handful of domain investors, speculators, and hobbyists registering nearly 21,000 .WS emoji domains and a few hundred .TO emoji domains.

While the emoji domain craze has subsided with just under 1,500 .WS domains registered (best guess) and mostly single-character, the market for emoji domains has started the journey towards emoji marketing education and usage.

Per release statements from Apple and Windows, more than 70 new emoji are soon to hit devices worldwide in their latest software updates starting October 2018, spanning the next month or so.

While there are only a few new top-level domain extensions that have captured my attention and a few investment dollars, there aren’t many likely to stand the test of time.

While there are thousands of new top-level domain extensions to choose from, there are only a handful of industry professionals I’d be willing to put my money on being and building a profitable success.

It’s been one week since I boarded a plane from Orlando heading back to good ole’ Austin, Texas.

I thought I’d take a moment to share a few thoughts and interactions from my MERGE! 2018 experience.

As the 2nd Annual MERGE! comes to a conclusion in it’s final day, there were many sessions, keynotes and connections to be had and made from Day One, Day Two and Day Three.

Conferences like MERGE! tend to move at a lightening speed in person while it can be perceived as a long time when seeing the outlay of time on paper.

Nevertheless, the final day of MERGE! kicked off with a pasties breakfast bar and keynote from Stefan Pretty, CEO Subbly.co, entitled “Bootstrappers do it better”.

Although many points were about about bootstrapping, one of the key takeaways from Stefan’s presentation was how bootstrappers should constantly ask the following 4 questions at every twist and turn in their journey: