During this past week I’ve had an experience with a domain name that can only be described as a nightmare. I found myself with a domain stuck in a “no mans land” between two registrars, the registry and a bunch of crazy policies. So what happened?

The domain name in question was simcast.com and one that I have personally owned for nearly two decades. We’ve been building some really awesome tech at ParkLogic and decided to use this domain as the flagship lander for a lot of traffic. Since it was in my personal name, I decided to transfer it from my personal registrar account at Epik to the ParkLogic Enom account.

I should say that the ParkLogic Enom account only existed due to legacy reasons and I was just trying to tidy things up. During the testing process we discovered that the domain was no longer resolving for a growing number of nameservers…..one of which was Google’s public DNS. This wasn't a really good situation because if the domain went live we could be losing a lot of a traffic....plus one for testing!

I must admit that I’d never seen behaviour like what we were seeing before and assumed initially that it was due to some weird DNS propagation delays. I waited 24 hours and assumed the Internet would sort itself out. Things didn’t improve, in fact, they only got worse.

I contacted the Enom support desk and listened to really bad 80’s music for about 30 minutes while on hold. Seriously Enom, you really need to get some better music! The support person told me that despite what I could prove that everything was fine…..essentially they were clueless.

Last night I had the privilege of being in the audience for the play, “My Fretty Friend”. The entire performance was conducted by two actors and was absolutely hilarious while at the same time packing a punch about mental health. So why is it that this so was so special for me?

For a start, the two actors were my son Timothy and his wife Ruth. They wrote, acted, directed and produced the entire production. They backed themselves with their hard-earned cash, took the risk and decided to make the performing passion of their lives come to life on stage. I was so proud of them at multiple levels…..what I didn’t expect was just how impactful the show would be.

The play focused on a teenager named Amy who had severe anxiety problems. The character of Anxiety was brilliantly portrayed as Amy’s thoughts and this sense of getting an insight into how Amy was thinking was further enhanced by a rope linking both the characters.

I found the play helped me get a much deeper insight into what it means to suffer from anxiety. A surprise occurred when the character of depression was introduced after a school team sports star suffered a debilitating injury. This further opened what is often seen as the “taboo” subject of mental health.

During the performance the audience was laughing one minute, and the next I could see tears trickling down their face as the aspects of “anxiety” and “depression” took shape on the stage. The ninety minutes seemed to fly by as we became wrapped up in Amy’s journey of wrestling with her “Fretty Friend”.

One of the most difficult things in life is making decisions. You only have to reflect on the number of times you’ve broken a New Year’s resolution or diet to get a glimpse into the fact that many of us are really bad at following through on our decisions.

The result of our inability to make a decision is often or not empowering other people to make them on our behalf. For instance, if you are struggling financially you can either take the difficult road of reducing your expenses or let the bank make the decision on your behalf.

Let me share with you a story from my life. Just under twenty years ago I had a thriving business, was worth millions (on paper) and thought the world was my oyster. Within the space of twenty-four hours I went from hero to zero when an investor reneged on a commitment. My wife and I were instantly thrust into dire financial circumstances.

We immediately examined all our expenses, sold our cars, bought a cheap buzz box so that our expense line was massively reduced. We jammed ourselves and our three kids into a bright yellow Mazda 121 and even though we copped a lot of ridicule we knew that it would only be temporary. It was a difficult decision to stay the course, but we continued moving forward.

Have you ever wondered why advertisers keep on paying for domain traffic year after year? Despite all the naysayers out there saying that domain traffic monetisation is dead it seems to keep on getting better….yes, you just heard me right.

Domain monetisation isn’t just about views, clicks, RPM and the like. Domain monetisation is all about matching advertising to user intent and this is why it’s so valuable for advertisers. When a person goes to a domain name, they have an intent behind their query about what they are looking for and this is incredibly powerful. The user has already passed from wondering what to look for to seeking to find.

The great majority of people who are in a seeking to find mode are wanting to purchase when they find what they are looking for. The difference between looking up something on a search engine versus domain traffic is that a person looking up something on a search engine is seeking information while a person typing in a domain name is seeking to buy.

Many years ago, I read a report that Google produced outlining that domain traffic produced better results for advertisers compared to search traffic. It was at a time when Yahoo reigned supreme in the domain space but it wasn’t long before Google aggressively went after the domain industry as the traffic converted for advertisers.

Facts can be scary things, especially when you don’t want to know about them. One of the reasons why things are called facts is because they are unequivocally true and yet, so many people take an ostrich approach to life by burying their head in the sand to escape them. The question I would ask is, “Are you a seeker of the truth or a large bird?”

A couple of years ago I found myself in a meeting planning for a leadership conference and I asked the question, “What’s going wrong with the organisation?” Several weeks later one of the leaders pulled me aside and expressed that she was really offended by the question. I must admit that I was a little perplexed by this response.

After listening to their concerns I explained that if you wanted to run a training session for the leaders of the organisation you needed to know the facts so the training could target the issues. I then shared with them that a leader should never be afraid to expose the facts of any situation.

One of the reasons why many organisations fail is due to the leadership punishing those people that are seekers of the truth. It doesn’t take very long before these people are isolated, ostracized and eventually take their talents elsewhere.

If you’re in a leadership position in an organisation then people that seek to find the facts, however unpleasant they may be, are like gold. What you will also discover is these individuals will often put their own position and career on the line for the sake of uncovering the truth of a situation.