Are you a Regular Domainer?

Jeff Fields owns stayregularnow.com along with his wife Neda. They live in Austin, TX where Jeff works on the business full time and Neda works in the IT field. Both of them have a passion for naturopathic medicine and the ways it can bring healing to the body.  On a side note, Jeff contacted me because he was pretty busy during the interview process.  His exact words were, “I’m a little backed up.”

Mike:  Tell me how you became involved in this line of work?

Jeff: Our business was born out of an interest in helping people that suffer from chronic constipation. We had several friends and family members that complained of not being “regular” and having painful cramping and gas. The doctors they visited often just prescribed additional fiber or diagnosed them with Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

Our knowledge of natural solutions for this issue led us to send our friends several bottles of different supplements in the mail. We called it giving them the “Gift of Regularity”.  Sure enough, about a week after the bottles arrived, we started to get feedback that things were going “smoothly”, if you will. We decided that if we could combine the ingredients together into one holistic supplement, we could help a lot of people that had limited options. We bid out the project to different facilities that complied with Certified Good Manufacturing Processes (cGMP) and StayRegular was born!

We are a new company, having started full operations in the summer of 2010, though our site has been online since 2009 in one form or another. This is because we did micro-testing without the product being available to establish baseline levels of demand prior to ordering the product for manufacture.

Mike:  What characteristics were you looking for when selecting a domain for your business?

Jeff: We wanted to have the name of the product (StayRegular) in the domain name, but found that the name itself was already taken and the owners wanted a decent amount of money for it. At the time we were just starting out (the product hadn’t even been produced yet) and so we decided to just add “now” to the url and buy that fairly inexpensively.

In retrospect it might have been good to purchase a hyphenated name or a name with more keywords in it, but we felt it was important to build up the brand, even if it took meant more work on the SEO side initially.

Mike:  Can you share the volume of traffic that your site receives?

Jeff: Since the site is fairly young our traffic is increasing every month. But last month we had about 1,000 unique visitors and it continues to improve as we rank for more keywords and continue to build content on the site.

Mike:  You offer a 110% money back guarantee on your product.  Has that worked well to help those customers that might be unsure about making a purchase?

Jeff: Absolutely – we say “no questions asked” and we mean it. The guarantee shows the trust we have in the product and the extra 10% is effectively a “thank you” to the customer for trying the product, even if it didn’t work for them.  We’ve had a very low return rate so far so I think the pros have outweighed the cons.

Mike:  How are you marketing the website?

Jeff: We started with some PPC ads but found that they were expensive and didn’t convert as well as organic search efforts. Since then we have focused primarily on SEO. Our strategy mainly revolves around building up good quality content on the site that will be useful to people seeking help with this issue.

Mike:  Any advice for start ups, small business, or business of any size for that matter on choosing the right domain name?

Jeff: Try to choose the right one the first time because once you’ve put the SEO work into a domain you won’t want to throw that ranking authority out if you switch to a new domain. I think you can either go with the branding URL like we did or find a keyword with decent traffic (and low competition) that hasn’t been bought and go for that to get a jump on your SEO.

Mike:  Do you think you would be willing to sell your domain at any point?  Have you ever received any unsolicited offers?

Jeff:  We probably won’t sell it without selling the whole business  (which is currently all direct sales), which we are not looking to do anytime soon.

Mike:  Any other information you’d like to share?

Jeff: One of the best things about working in this particular sector is the plethora of puns that are available to have fun with. When I walk through a crowd at a party and here someone saying something like “Your full of sh&%!”, I just hand that person a business card and I’ve done my good deed for the day 🙂