430 – Who’s Your Daddy?: Tom talks GoDaddy

Episode 430 - GoDaddy
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode four hundred thirty of Screw the Commute podcast. And you know what? Love it or hate it, right? GoDaddy is a force to be reckoned with. Now, most people that have been around for a while would tell you it's aimed at beginners. And I'm here to tell you now, these are my opinions only about GoDaddy and and why I think it's not so hot for beginners or anyone else, for that matter. It's OK to buy domain names, but that's about it. That's what we're going to talk about today. Now I hope you didn't miss episode 429 Victoria Wieck. Oh, my goodness. She came to this country as a penniless immigrant with a family of seven and has sold 500 million dollars worth of jewelry, so don't miss her inspiring story. And of course, when you want to listen to a back episode, go to screwthecommute.com forward slash and then put the episode number. She was 429. Now, how'd you like to hear your own voice here on Screw the Commute? Well, if the show's helped you out at all in your business or giving your ideas to help you start a business, we want to hear about it. It's at screwthecommute.com and look for a little blue sidebar that says send voicemail, click on it, talking to your phone or computer and tell me how the show has helped you put your website in there so we can give you a big shout out on a future episode of Screw the Commute.

[00:01:50] While you're over there, pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app. You can put us on your cell phone and tablet, take us with you on the road. But what you really want to grab is a copy of my automation ebook. Oh my goodness. I'm going to just say you're welcome right now, because if you just take part of this book and implement it, it's going to save your workload like crazy. It's really allowed me to react lightning fast to people and save me millions and millions. We actually figured it out millions and millions of keystrokes. So grab it at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And I want you to really consider and think about who you know that belongs. In my school, I have the only licensed dedicated Internet marketing and digital marketing school in the country, probably the world. And it's at IMTCVA.org. We've got people making money before they even graduate because it's hard core skills that I have been living and teaching. I've been living it for 27 years and teaching it for 23 years. And you need these kinds of skills.

[00:03:05] It's more obvious than ever. I mean, I've been preaching this forever, but, you know, in the last couple of years with this pandemic, everybody's seeing like, oh, well, I guess that's right. You should have been able to sell at home. So check it out at IMTCVA.org and I'll tell you how you can get a scholarship to that school that you can either use or gift to someone if you're in my mentor program, which we'll get to later.

[00:03:34] Now let's get to the main event. GoDaddy. And again, the things I'm going to talk about are simply my opinion. But if you check around, you'll see that what I say is corroborated and and is pretty much common knowledge among advanced marketers. But let me start off by saying this. Any time you see a company that sells Web services advertising massively on TV. Two examples of this would be and GoDaddy and others, I mean, you can pretty much bet the Farm Service is designed for people that don't know any better. These companies concentrate on you being able to bring your creative idea to life, which is focusing on the benefits to you, which is a great sales technique, I admit. But that doesn't mean buying their services is the best for you to achieve those dreams that they're dangling in front of your face. Most of the time, the tools you see on TV ads are done to make it easy on you to do things that, let's say aren't necessarily in your best interest.

[00:04:46] They know the bulk of the people that deal with them don't know any better. I will give them credit in that they are great marketers. Right, well, I'm going to let me change that a little bit. A great marketer to me is a person or company that is great at attracting your attention and getting you to buy, but also protects you from yourself and doesn't sell you substandard things at inflated prices. So I guess I better call GoDaddy an OK marketer and an OK still means they have 20 million customers and nine thousand employees, slightly more than me. Yeah, just a little bit more. All right. Next section, I'm going to call bombs away. All right. Well, what I want to warn you, I warn you of is, is that once a company like GoDaddy gets their hooks into a beginner, they bombard them with services that are either substandard, like their website creator, and and they connect you to even other services. I think they even offer bookkeeping services. Now, how GoDaddy could be good at all. This stuff is beyond me. I do understand they want to make money from affiliate relationships, and I do, too. But there's got to be a limit to what products and services one company can legitimately vet and know that they're good and that will help you. Now, if they don't care about the services, knowing that they have millions of other beginners coming into their system, well, I think he can see how much they're actually interested in your success.

[00:06:24] That's why I've tied my success to your success in my mentor program so nobody can can complain and say that I'm not you know, I'm not trying to make you money because I don't get my big money unless you make money. I'll tell you about that later. Now, I also call them the daddy of all trades instead of the jack of all trades. I mean, they sell some kind of code signing service that I don't even know what it is, and I've been doing this since the beginning of the commercial Internet. I've never heard of it before. I don't know anyone that uses it or what it even does. It has something to do with giving people, supposedly giving people confidence in your downloads. But like I said, I never heard of it. And in my shopping cart system, the card takes care of that kind of stuff. They sell email marketing again, this is something like my shopping cart and other companies do really well at a professional level. Most of the reviews overall at GoDaddy say they target beginners, like I said earlier. So beginners to me means they don't know what they're doing and they're very susceptible to hipsters, again, focusing on some ridiculous benefits while keeping you in the dark about how their software and services couldn't hold a candle if compared to professional grade Internet tools.

[00:07:50] Now, I'm not trying to tell a beginner to spend a fortune on professional grade tools they will never even learn how to use, but I do want to teach them to use quality tools that can get the job done that the beginner doesn't even understand what the job is yet. Now, that's one of the values of my mentor program, I don't even allow one of my students to spend any money unless they ask me first. One thing I can say about the people at GoDaddy and and thousands of other Internet tool developers is that they are usually good copywriters and they can make a piece of dog poop look like you must have it or your business is going to fail. I'm telling you to guard your wallet. So there are much better tools for email marketing available now. Another section I want to talk to you about is don't buy stuff you don't need or understand. I've been joking for years that at GoDaddy you go to buy a two dollar domain name and your bill is 400 dollars every time you check out. All right. Now, let me let me read you a quote from money Inc.com, GoDaddy, I'll have the link in the show notes for you. This is and I quote, You need to watch out for their overselling practices, it's apparent that GoDaddy is in the habit of overselling products and services, even if all you're interested in is a domain name. They're constantly trying to sell domain extensions that are not necessary by the majority of users.

[00:09:25] These include dot info, dot net and org. They also push add ons for promoting extra services to go along with your domain name, unquote. That was Money Inc. What was it? Hold on a second. That was money, inc.com, GoDaddy. Now, I've never personally bought anything but the basic domain, and I don't do any of the add ons, occasionally I may do a multi-year purchase, but that's about it. I've only bought a few domains at GoDaddy and I have I have no problem with you buying domains there. So long as you don't get sucked into buying a bunch of things you don't need. For instance, it's cheaper to have a post office box that you can use for lots of purposes than to pay extra for private domain name purchases. You're also you're also making it harder on people to offer you to buy your domain if you ever want to sell it. And I've had lots of ideas that I felt I would develop, so I bought the domain, but later got rid of it because I just never got around to developing the idea or I came to my senses. I realized it was a dumb idea in the first place. But if nobody knew how to find me, if they were interested in the domain name, they'd have to go through the service and then I'd have to pay a commission and all this stuff.

[00:10:56] So I get a darn post office box. And by the way, you don't actually own domain names. I don't know if you realize that it's not yours permanently, you register it on a yearly basis or you can prepay it, I think, for up to 10 years. But it's not permanently your. I know that next thing is customer support. Well, it used to be something I would even brag about if a student came to me and they were already ingrained in GoDaddy. OK, well, at least if you have trouble, you can get somebody on the phone. They can help you. Yeah, and they were great if they could, you know, fix anything with regard to their service. But lately I've heard that that has been sliding considerably. Maybe they're blaming it on covid like every other big company like Verizon. I don't know if you saw a YouTube video ad titled Verizon Are Idiots, but but anyway, you know, when you need help, you need help. And if it takes an hour to get it instead of five minutes, then, you know, that's a lot of time wasted. Now, let's talk about hosting by people in the know GoDaddy is the last place we would ever host a website. And here's just a brief thing you need to know about hosting the actual files from your website, all the pictures and text and layout are stored on an actual computer along with tons of other people's websites. That's where the hosting services this is called shared hosting and is the reason you can get hosting rather cheaply.

[00:12:33] The problem is hosting companies don't want to buy extra computers to hold all these websites, so they keep putting more and more people's websites on the same computer until it's virtually overload. When dealing with beginners, the beginner doesn't know the load speed of their website and and when you've looked at your own website more than once, it will load fast for you, since most of the files have been what they call cached on your computer. In other words, your browser remembers your website and has a bunch of the files and loads that fast. So you think your website is just fine. But since it's lumped in with thousands of other beginners on the same hosting service computer, anyone else that goes to look at your website needs a calendar waiting for it to load. OK. This also means Google will see how pitiful your site is and your chances of getting a good ranking are slim and none pretty much because Google demands you have a fast load speed for visitors so that the visitor to your website has a good experience. So avoid hosting it places the target beginners or learn how to evaluate your site so you can complain effectively what I say next, no one is going to admit it, but if you complain loud enough, they might move you to a server that's not overloaded just to shut you up.

[00:14:04] So knowing most of the other beginners would never even know how to complain or to complain, and before they move you, you can be sure they're going to try to sell you upgraded hosting where you are on a faster, more modern computer. I mean, hosting can be a complete episode, but I'm just warning you about places that cater to beginners. Remember, if they're advertising on TV, God help you. And one more thing, while we're on the subject of hosting GoDaddy is not the cheapest and according to Websitetooltester.com, which we'll have in the show notes, as of October 2020, they don't even meet the industry standard uptime. Ratings uptime is how long your Web site is up without something going wrong. In other words, the hosting service has a trouble and it's down now. They're still above 99 percent. But to pay a premium price for less than industry standard uptime just doesn't make sense to me. And I'm going to have my latest recommendation for hosting and you can be sure it'll be an affiliate link right in the show notes. And if you don't believe me on any of this, just read the reviews that this link I'm going to give you for the website Tool Tester, it's a long link. So you just have to go to the show notes and look at the reviews of the customers that GoDaddy, what they have to say about it. Oh. Oh, boy. All right, next topic is the website builder they have it is so rudimentary, I'd be embarrassed to have young kids using it.

[00:15:39] We promote the Thrive website builder, it's only 19 dollars a month to create World-Class websites and they have add ons. All these expensive add ons are included in the deal. Just amazing. And this is what I have all my students using. And if you buy through my affiliate link that's in the show notes, we give you free training to get you going. So it's a great deal. You can create world class websites. They have tons of themes and all these extras and the website builder is easy to use if we tutor you on how to use it. But it's professional level. You can have world class looking websites with it. Now, with lots of these Dumphy tools, you can't do the things necessary for your actual success. Yeah, you can make a pretty Web site at Wix and GoDaddy's builder. That looks pretty, but everybody else looks the same. I think that's how it works. But but just you and your mother and your cousins will be the only ones, see, unless you hit hit it hard with paid ads because you can't even get into some of the areas that you need to get into for to do the basics of search engine optimization. You know, um, I'm not a big fan of that anymore, but I don't want you to not be able to get free traffic because you can't do even the simplest search engine optimization that you always should be doing.

[00:17:04] And I still do myself. So, yeah, that's what these these crappy tools, you know, and they they throw tools at you all the time. A lot of hosting says all you can have a shopping cart for free. Why would you get Tom kick card and pay for it? Well, I'll tell you why. Because there is a piece of crap. That's right. And and there's just I mean, there's a million things I think Episode 10 goes over all the things you need to know about shopping carts, but they lure you in because they want your hosting and they know you don't know any better. They just know it. They can tell in two seconds on the phone with you if you know any better. Say so. So just guard Udaan wallet with these people. Now, generally, people that don't know any better can be pretty satisfied with GoDaddy, but people in the know sure have had lots to say and and they formalized it in a site called No Daddy, No Daddy Wired.com. And the site doesn't exist anymore because somehow GoDaddy wrenched it away because it was very negative against GoDaddy. But you can see it back many years at the Wayback Machine if you've not heard of this. This is an archive.org. We'll have all this in the show notes, but you just type in any site and it'll be any domain name.

[00:18:22] And you can see it's history as long as it's existed. So, I mean, the only funny thing about it is like Antion.com existed before the Wayback Machine existed. So so you could only see my site going back so, so long. Now, the check this out before I let you go here, this is also from money, Inc.com says GoDaddy. Your domain may be stolen if you forget to renew it. This is a quote from that article, one common complaint that has been lodged against GoDaddy by former customers is that is that some forget to renew their domain name and those sites that have good traffic and a good domain name discovered that the domain was wasn't deleted. Instead, the company placed it on auction and sold it. And it's not illegal to do it, but it's not, according to these people, very customer oriented for certain, and I'll go along with that, you know, so so, wow, what an underhanded thing to do. So so anyway, overall, I don't have anything against GoDaddy. I just have a different philosophy about how to take care of beginners to protect their money and make sure they have good quality tools to help them be successful. I mean, I have no problem if you get your domain names there. But and by the way, where you buy a domain name is called a registrar. And I'm going to throw in another thing that'll save your butt one of these days is that don't ever let your web designer go ahead and get your domain name for you, because a lot of them will act as the registrant.

[00:20:04] Well, the registrant is the real person in control of the website. So I've had so many people over the years come to me and say, hey, Tom, my web designer, we had a fight, they took off or they disappeared. And now I can't get control of my Web site. What am I supposed to do about here's what you do about it. You spend five thousand bucks for an I can ICANN dispute and go get yourself a lawyer for another 5000 to go fight it out. I can get get back control of it. No, don't screw up. You be the registrant. You buy the domain name, you be the administrative contact. And you can let a web person be the technical content. But do not let somebody else be in control of your website and your whole business because they got you over a barrel. Well, you know, I own the domain name Killyourwebdesigner.com. All right. But you just don't want to have somebody else in charge of your stuff. Because if you get in a fight with them, if they cheat you, if even if they're really nice, but they disappear, you know, I've had them really nice people get pregnant, have complications, and then just not answer any, you know, their clients anymore and just disappear off the face of the earth.

[00:21:27] Well, you know, I feel bad for that person. But the thing is, it's you messed up by not taking control and learning how to take control, which is what we teach, of course, in my mentor program. So there's plenty of quality services out there. I got a dragged on GoDaddy a little bit, but I mean I mean, you can't knock their success. But, you know, I'm just not a person that will go for success at somebody else's expense. We're going to build it together. If you're with me and and both enjoy success. It's not just one way. But anyway, there's loads of quality services out there in cyber land. They're ready to give you quality services at reasonable prices, but you just have to find them. And that's, of course, again, what I do in my mentor program, which is at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com. And that's also where if you're in the mentor program, you get a scholarship to the school. You get a trip to the retreat center for an immersion weekend. You have one on one with me and my entire staff to tutor you. You know, you're not lumped in with a bunch of people more advanced or less advanced than you. So it's the longest running, most successful, most unique ever in the field of Internet and digital marketing. So check it out at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com, and I will catch you on the next episode. See ya later.

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