I was confused when I got to work this morning and people were moving through the halls of Tucows with an unusual accessory: slices of delicious, bakery-fresh pie. There was talk of apple, cherry – maybe this was some pre-spring enthusiasm meant to cheer up a chilly gray day in Toronto?

As another slice wafted past, attached to a grinning owner, I’d had enough. I wanted answers. I asked someone what was up with the influx of pastries and was given the most obvious of answers: “Because Kari, it’s pie day.”

Pie day?

“Three point one four.” 3.14? March 14. Not pie Kari, pi!!! It all came together. Clearing the smoke from around my head I couldn’t help but laugh at this, the geekiest of holidays I’ve ever had the pleasure of celebrating. Turns out Pi Day has been a big thing since Larry Shaw started it at the San Francisco Exploratorium in 1988. Albert Einstein was born on March 14 and if you’ve applied to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lately, today is the day to expect your acceptance letter.

So to all our readers we raise a slice and wish you a very happy and healthy Pi Day!

Thanks to flickr user hhwlib for making the delicious photo, available under a Creative Commons license.

We know online identity for your business or yourself starts with a domain name, but what if you have the perfect name and can’t get a domain to match? Most single English word domain names are registered already, so it can take some serious thought to come up with something that sticks and is available. Scott over at HalfAgain Internet marketing has some tips and suggestions for you if you’re looking for that perfect name. He starts with domain availability:

Domain availability is possibly the biggest hang-up to ever happen to naming. Sure, you can come up with great potential names, but can you come up with great potential domains that are available? I won’t spend much time on this because it’s pretty simple. If you’re creating a name for a product or business that will require a .com, be patient, keep trying and you’ll start to get a feel for names that are more likely to be available than others.

The problem is that many domain search tools give a yes or no answer when you query a domain. If you happen to type in a name that is free, you pass through the gates to registration but if not, you’re stopped in your tracks. It doesn’t need to be frustrating if you use the right domain registration service.

Tucows has a couple of domain search tools that help people find quality domain names. The first is name suggestion. Our resellers provide ideas for other names based on the terms you enter in domain name search box.

Really good .com names are getting scarce. Tucows offers access to hundreds of thousands of high-quality domain names that are already owned but available for a one-time fee. These are offered in our Premium Domains service. If you’re a rocker who wants heavymetal.com, you’re S.O.L. But, heavymetalalbums.com is available in our Premium Domains service.

Tucows domain resellers have free access to Name Suggestion and our Premium Domains service. Try it out for yourself, and happy naming. Oh, and last week Adam Eisner gave a reseller webinar about our domain search tools, the video archive of that presentation is available here.

What: Domains Search and Sell web seminar When: Thursday, December 6, 2007 at 1:00 p.m. ET

Tucows resellers are invited to join Adam Eisner, Product Manager, Domains as he explains how you can increase your domain name sales by rethinking the domain search process. Adam will demonstrate how using tools like name suggestion and Premium Domains offer better, more relevant search results that lead to more domain name sales. Adam will also discuss Tucows’ Parked Pages and Expired Domains programs - two easy ways for you to make money without lifting a finger.

This 30-minute web seminar, exclusive to Tucows resellers, will take you on an interactive, guided tour of the innovative tools you should be using to provide your customers with the best possible domain purchasing experience.

Click here to register.

ISPCON day two had a diverse lineup in the business track of its conference: after analyzing decision making processes and hiring procedures, the day ended with Guerrilla Marketing for Service Providers, led by Larry Loebig, director of the Guerrilla Marketing Association.

Larry had everyone in the room thinking twice about their current marketing plans by the end of his session. He reminded us that “marketing is everything we do to communicate about our service, products or business.” He focused on the objectives of marketing - prospecting, raising awareness - and bucking the traditional plans of putting together some advertising, sending out a direct mail shot and waiting for the phone to ring. Larry explained the need to use a broad mix of guerrilla marketing tools if you want to cut through the noise of the other 2,999 marketing messages the average consumer is hit with in a day and make yourself stand out.

A proper marketing mix hinges on first identifying your company’s differential advantage:

• What makes you different
• How do you stand out from the herd
• Mindshare - how you capture and retain the attention of your customers
• WIFM (”What’s In It For Me?”)
• Core Story - the essence of what you can offer your customer that they can’t get anywhere else

Guerrilla marketing is about process, not events. It’s based on psychology, not guessing. You need to invest time, energy, imagination and knowledge to craft a sustainable way to communicate your message. Guerrilla marketing offers up to 200 weapons (everything from marketing plans to logos to community involvement) that companies can use to maximize message delivery and retention. Speaking of marketing plans, here are the core questions Larry recommends every seven-step marketing plan cover:

• What is the purpose of your marketing?
• How will you achieve your purpose?
• Who is your target audience and what do you want them to do?
• What marketing weapons will you use?
• What is your niche in the marketplace and what are your differential advantages?
• What is your identity?
• What your marketing budget as a percentage of projected gross sales?

My first day of the ISPCON conference ended back in the area of hosting, at a session called Strategies for Growing Your Hosted Business. It was co-presented by Ravi Agarwal, CEO of groupSPARK and Rich Bader, president and CEO of EasyStreet Online Services.

Both Ravi and Rich shared insight into the evolution of their businesses, giving hints about what helped them along the way. Rich promoted the outsourcing of services – like email – to partners to help efficiently provide services to a growing customer base. He also talked about maintaining a presence in the business community (EasyStreet does it through their business blogger and event sponsorships), to stay connected to the group of people that helped propel the company’s growth in its infancy.

Ravi spoke about the growing market of SaaS (Software as a Service) applications and how they will continue to broaden the opportunities in the world of Web 2.0. He also spoke about the benefits of exchange hosting and enterprise messaging:

• Exchange Hosting:
  • Anywhere access to full Outlook data
  • Collaboration accomplishes more
  • Gives peace of mind
  • Better ROI than on-premise management

• Enterprise Messaging
  • Growing suite of apps
  • Add $20/user/month of new revenue
  • Start selling fast

Mid-morning brought an inspirational business session titled Choosing to be Great Instead of Big, led by Layne Sisk, president of The Plus Group. His talk was about focusing your efforts on satisfying key groups of people rather than appealing to mass audiences. Layne used five ways to be “great” to illustrate his point:

• Great in your customers eyes
  • Not just in customer service, be great from their perspective
  • Make the relationship personal
  • Make your customers a branch of your marketing department

• Great in quality
  • If you don’t believe in quality, you’ll never produce it
  • Get customer feedback to gauge quality levels

• Great in community
  • Participate in/set up community involvement programs
  • Get involved in what you truly care about

• Great place to work
  • Promote a culture of intimacy
  • Make pay a secondary reason for people to work for you

• Great for you
  • Make your business something you love; it becomes like your second family

I’m new to Tucows and am in San Jose attending my first ISPCON.

The first morning of ISPCON Fall 2007 began with a series of sessions focused on the themes of wireless, hosting, technology, VOIP and business. Opting for a post-breakfast hosting topic, I headed to Using Social Networking and Web 2.0 to Market Your Business, led by Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc., who was replacing John McKown, president & CEO of Delaware.net.

Peter’s seminar revolved around exploiting the opportunities within the world of Web 2.0 to raise the profile of your business. As he put it, “Web 2.0 is 15 minutes of fame that lasts a little longer.” Here are some of his key tips:

• Use tag words in blogs and profiles that are appropriate for your business – and repeat them for greater traction
• Residential ISPs need to provide a community for users to give them a reason to keep coming back (eg. After logging off of webmail, auto redirect users to your home page)
• Leave commenting enabled on blogs if possible – it encourages community
• Use applications internally before selling them to customers
• There is power in strategic partnerships – they can help strengthen your business as innovation progresses
• Never assume things are intuitive – always seek to share knowledge
• Always think from the customers’ perspective