An idea. Like dropping mentos into the coke bottle of your brain. It starts as a whisper from our cerebrum as an answer to a problem. It’s quiet, a thought, and can be dismissed rather easily. Sometimes, however, it grows. Hitting the echo chamber that is our amygdala. Bouncing off the walls of our mind becoming louder until we are convinced its the greatest idea ever. And of course it is, right? It’s our mental validation that our unique perspective is valuable. We believe ideas are so valuable in fact that, the mere mention of an idea to someone else could have them lost to us forever. So what do we do?
After coming to the conclusion that the world would be crippled without our brilliant insight, we proceed in bringing it to life. Growing up, we’ve been on the receiving end of years worth of: I’m loving it, Just do it, and the best or nothing. We know a few things: we need a name, we need a slogan, we need a domain, and we need a logo, in that order. If we are going to bring our baby to life the first thing we need to do is name it. But... name it what? What single word or phrase can encapsulate everything this product is, and what it can be for the person using it. We need something catchy and clever, but also direct and descriptive. It can’t be too long because users need to type it into the address bar. It can’t be too short because the domain name needs to be available.
At this point, we’re frantically Googling synonyms to words that describe our business and translating them into Latin. Coming up with the perfect name just to find out the domain was registered 20 years ago. We continue at this for hours until we burnout. But we can’t stop now! This is the name. We need it to be the guiding searchlight for our business. A two-syllable masterpiece with a great story and meaning. But it’s no use, we’re stuck. Greater men have tried and failed at this endeavor and we are no better. Sadly, so many ideas die at this stage. Day’s of quiet searching until you eventually stop looking. It’s a tragedy, but not a new one. Who knows how many more ideas would have died before they began if Jack Qiao didn’t create Namelix.
Now Jack is an adroit entrepreneur. He has solved all four of the problems listed above. For now, we will focus on Namelix. When you open the page you see a deep blue background under white and grey text. Everything on the page beckons you towards the lone textbox in the middle labeled “Enter Keywords“ and a button to its right labeled “Generate“. It’s simple, clean, and not an ad in sight. If you searched it from Google the title reads “Namelix: Business Name Generator- free AI-powered naming …“. Free huh, we don’t buy it. We remember all of the supposedly free things the internet promised over the years. There’s a catch, there always is. So, skeptically, we move through the website waiting for it. But … it never comes.
Instead, we are met with something unfamiliar, a promise kept. We enter keywords about our business, we pick from 3 choices of name length, and from an assortment of name styles. Eight in all, but we only read a few. Brandable names such as Google and Trulia. Misspellings like Lyft and Flickr. Even Rhyming Words like SubHub and FireWire. Pressed for time we pick Brandable Names because it has a small tag to the right that reads “popular“. Wisdom of the crowd. One sick animation of the website name drawing itself later. . . A sea of endless name suggestions populates the screen. Rows of cards printed with names stack on top of each other, five to a row. A variety of colors and fonts adorn each of them.
It’s beautiful, it’s clean, and it delivers what it promised. So ... What does Jack get out of it? Well, it’s simple. Hovering over a name card reveals a black bar towards the bottom. The bar takes the full width of the card and about one-third of the height. At the bottom left-hand corner sits a small, grey button that reads “register“. Clicking on the button opens a tab and brings us namecheap.com. With the domain name we selected loaded up and ready to be purchased. This is called affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is defined as a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. In other words, bring me customers and I’ll give you a share of their purchase. It’s business at its purest; An alignment of interests to reap the mutual gain.
To best utilize affiliate marketing you have to understand a Customer’s Journey. Essentially, whatever your business solves is one stop on the road towards your customer’s ultimate goal. In the case of Jack Qiao, our goal is to bring our business to life. Creating a name is just one step towards that goal. Thinking ahead, he saw the next step after creating a name would be securing a domain for it. Namecheap has an affiliate program that offers 20% of the user’s sale to the referrer of that sale e.g. if you buy a $100 domain on Namecheap after clicking on one through Namelix, Jack makes $20.
The best part about it is, you were going to buy the domain anyway. It was the next step towards your goal. But, that helping hand just made him $20. Now let’s get into numbers. A report from SimilarWeb shows an estimated 740,000 visitors to the website last month. Assuming just 5% of those users picked a domain and clicked through to NameCheap, that creates 37,000 referrals. Let’s lowball and assume only 20% of them purchased a website. He makes 20% of 7,400 of referrers purchases. Depending on the domain name the price ranges between $6 -$2000. Big gap. Let’s say the average is around $10. Making Jack’s commission $ 2 per sale. $2 multiplied by 7400 reffers equals $14,800.
$14,800 a month helping people come up with names. Let me be the first to say these aren’t exact numbers in either direction. It could be more, could be less. However, a 1 percent conversion rate isn’t generous. WordStream.com reports the average conversion rate across industries at 2.35%. Potentially doubling the number we just came up with. The fact of the matter is, he didn’t charge us a dime to earn it. He understood his customer’s goal and lead them to it.
So the next time you’re thinking about building a big addition onto your website which will take a year to build and all your savings; take a second to zoom out. You don’t have the build the entire road to make money or charge them an arm and a leg to do so. Think about the next stop on your customer’s journey, and how you can help them get there.