Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone! We at Xavier Media hope to see you all soon again after the holidays and we’re planning some new cool services for you all during 2008 so keep visiting our sites.

You have still time to join our contest in our blog where you can win free advertising credits from EntreCards. Check out the Xavier Media Blog for more information on that.

You also got a few days to get your own domain names at discounted prices from eXavier.com. So if you got the time and want to save a few bucks, check it out.

/Andreas

Why should you blog? If you got something you’re selling or something you want to promote (like affiliate programs) then you should definitely blog about it. I for example are blogging about domain names, hosting and other webmaster related stuff at the Xavier Media blog where I’m publishing most of my posts is packed with ads for my companies products. By blogging you also show your new and existing customers that you know at least something about your area of expertise (you’re blogging so you must know at least something about what you’re writing ).

Posting quality articles in your blog is also a fantastic SEO technique since the search engines will find your blog posts. When I’m posting something new in one of my blogs I usually get an email from Google Alerts that Google has crawled my new post in less then 15 minutes from the time of posting. That’s really impressive and also something really good for your company (the more quality pages the search engines got about you and your company, the bigger chance new customers will end up on your site ).

So how do I start blogging? Well, it’s easy. There are several free services out there on the Internet like Blogger and Wordpress, but I prefer to use my own domain name for my blogs instead of subdomains to domain names owned by someone else. That’s because then I can move my blog anywhere I like and I can also do whatever I like with the blog. It’s also better to use your own domain name when you’re building your own brand or trademark and it looks much more professional.

When you register a domain name for as little as $1.99 at eXavier.com your also get a free blog ("QuickBlog").

/Andreas

I saw a post about that some time ago in a webmaster forum. Since I myself own a couple of .us domains and I also got a lot of other country code domain names I started doing some research on this subject.

Field study 1: I started my research by visiting one of the biggest .us sites, del.icio.us, and selected the first two keywords I could find on their site: social bookmarking. I then pointed by browser to Google and entered “social bookmarking” (without the “”) in the search field. As number two in the search result I found del.icio.us, so I guess that’s acceptable.

Field study 2: I visited another big .us web site, mon.itor.us, and did the same thing as with del.icio.us but using the keywords “free websites performance”. The results where almost as good as in the case of del.icio.us because I found mon.itor.us as number three in the search results. I did another search, but this time for just “websites performance” and mon.itor.us was found as number four in the results.

These two field studies show us that it’s possible to build a successful and high ranking website using a .us domain name . It shouldn’t be any different if you use a .uk, .se, .dk, .eu or whatever top level domain for your site.

If you got more examples of successful and high ranking .us websites, please feel free to let me know

/Andreas