A new brand emerges from the ashes
So now I owned the coolkiwi.co.nz domain but how was I going to make sure that emails sent to coolkiwi.co.nz were delivered where they were supposed to go – to the corresponding coolkiwi.com accounts?
Unfortunately, Everyone.net could host only one domain name per webmail provider account. I had thousands of existing users who needed to continue receiving emails at their coolkiwi.com addresses and I couldn’t expect them all to switch to coolkiwi.co.nz. If they did, they would still be missing email sent to their existing webmail accounts.
I scoured the internet for solutions and eventually I discovered a DNS service called ZoneEdit that would host my coolkiwi.co.nz domain and allow me to set up mail forwards which would seamlessly forward emails sent to coolkiwi.co.nz addresses to any email account I specified. Best of all, the service was free for up to 5 domains and 200 megabytes of traffic per year. So I went for that option. By the way, I don’t have any affiliation with ZoneEdit whatsoever, except as a user of their free DNS service and as a satisfied customer.
I had to set up all the mail forwards manually, which was a bit time consuming. But it was well worth the effort.
My webmail customers were delighted that they could now also have a coolkiwi.co.nz email address for their webmail account, and the former owner of coolkiwi.co.nz was also delighted she had made a profit! But how does this case study relate to smarter affiliate links you ask? Don’t worry, I’m getting there…
Gmail changed things
The market for webmail changed with the launch of Gmail. Suddenly web-based email services were offering massively more storage than my webmail service was offering.
Previously, CoolKiwi.com had been offering more storage than most other webmail services. Suddenly Cool Kiwi was offering less than many of the major webmail suppliers. A significant number of my New Zealand webmail customers started to switch back to the biggest players in global free email, despite the fact they preferred the “Cool Kiwi” name.
[Editor’s note: The kiwi, a flightless bird, is a national symbol of New Zealand and New Zealanders are often called Kiwis.]By now I had a large list of coolkiwi.co.nz email holders, with permission to contact them regarding service upgrades. So I notified all these members that if they changed their email service provider they could now take their coolkiwi.co.nz email addresses with them. Many chose to do so and were delighted that they could remain “Cool Kiwis” and still choose any email service of their choice! (I also retained the customers on my opt-in list whereas otherwise I would have lost them forever.)
The coolkiwi.co.nz free email forwarding service became so popular that many New Zealanders who had never used my Cool Kiwi.com Webmail service began to hear about coolkiwi.co.nz free email addresses through word of mouth. I hadn’t even linked the domain coolkiwi.co.nz to a website – I was forwarding it to coolkiwi.com at that stage.
I set up a website to promote coolkiwi.co.nz as a “portable email” service in its own right. Although my domain wasn’t linked directly to a hosting account, I was able to set up unlimited “web forwards” as easily as I could set up “email forwards” for coolkiwi.co.nz. And I could “cloak” these links so that the domain name “coolkiwi.co.nz” would appear in the visitor’s browser window no matter what web page I forwarded to. I could also specify keywords, titles and descriptions which the search engines would read for my “cloaked” web forward pages. All this was possible courtesy of the free DNS service which I was using with my coolkiwi.co.nz domain.
I now had a fully-branded email forwarding service that didn’t depend on anyone else. I had full control over the email service, the hosting, approval and forwarding of the email addresses … everything. I could add new “top level” domains such as https://signup.coolkiwi.co.nz and https://contact.coolkiwi.co.nz within seconds and forward them to any web address I wished to.
I could update these web forwards any time I liked, instantly through an easy web-based control panel. And here’s where I finally realised the key to smarter affiliate links!