Which comes first… the open door or the closed door?
I told myself I would try and keep my philosophizing to a bare minimum on this blog but it’s always been my belief that the first post on any blog has to be special. You can’t just jump right in and dump the marketing stuff on people as soon as they walk in the door. At least, I can’t do that (which is probably why after ten years of playing this game, I’m not the super-successful marketer I should be).
And speaking of doors…
It came to me the other day that the old saying “when one door closes, another one opens” is not always the way it happens. Sometimes the new door opens first, and all that’s left for us to do is close the old one on the way out. After all, logically speaking, you have to have a door already for opportunity to knock on it, right? (That’s probably a good thing for me to learn because I’ve always been one of those “burn the bridge, the boat will show” type of people.) And of course this presupposes that: a) you’re alert enough at the time to recognize the new door; and b) you’re willing to take the action needed to make sure it stays open long enough for you to get through it.
Why am I telling you this here?
Well, that’s pretty much how this site came into being. And the timing of it was just so cosmic that I had to write about it. Lucky you, eh?
Last week I spent three days reviving an old site to use as a base for my Moving East plan. (More on that later.) I gathered up all the plugins I needed, installed wordpress, configured everything, wrote the first post, and then…
During those three days I also had to renew the main company domain and a couple of others that we’ve had for awhile. While I was doing that the registrar was nice enough to inform me (love those upsells) that ritchiemedia.com was available. Thinking about branding and that we really should have the .com version of the company name, I decided to register that one while I could still get it, and worry about what to do with it later. At that point I was firmly focused on making sure my new plan was firmly in place and moving forward (or eastward, as the case may be).
Did you see that door open?
Back to the old site… Finally, I was ready to post my first post. On a whim I decided to check the old domain in Google to see just how many pages were still hanging around that would need to be redirected to the new blog. Thinking there might be a page or two from an abandoned blog, what I found absolutely shocked me.
The domain had pretty much been unused for about two years, but there were about 100 listings warning people that my domain was a spam domain. It seems that a pack of spammers have been using my domain name to send out their offers. By me letting it sit idle for so long, I guess they thought it was fair game to appropriate the name and use it as their “from” name. I’d never gotten any spam complaints from anyone, so never even considered that this would be done to me.
Once I saw that, it didn’t take me long to realize that if I tried to start a mailing list from that domain, my deliverability rates would pretty much suck. So I decided that if I was making a fresh start on my life, then I should have a fresh domain to go with it.
Instead of trying to revive an old domain, I would take the opportunity to close a door that should have been closed a long time ago, and step through the new door that had opened during the process. Had the new domain name not appeared when it did, and had I not taken the opportunity to register it at that moment, I have no doubt that I would still be trying to restart an essentially dead domain.
It feels really great to have a fresh, clean site to work with. And it’s a wonderful new beginning to my new life!
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I still think that Chief Blogger and Bottle Washer has a better ring to it, but I thought that would make me sound like all I do is sit at my computer and drink all day. Except for when I’m washing out the bottles, of course.