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  • Bandzoogle: website builder for musicians

    June 1, 2020

    Featured, Fun, Industry Insight, Resellers

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    Views: 1727

    Bandzoogle CEO Stacey Bedfor plays guitar in her home.

    Stacey Bedford, CEO of Bandzoogle

    The Enom team has enough musically inclined members to form at least two in-house rock bands, so we’re geeking out pretty hard about highlighting Bandzoogle on our blog. The Montreal-based SaaS company calls itself the easiest all-in-one professional website platform for musicians and bands. They target a unique vertical, one that their team is hugely passionate about, and they really know their customers: their platform is very much created for musicians, by musicians.

    Here, Bandzoogle CEO, Stacey Bedford, provides some insight into how and why they’ve been so successful in supporting their customers and steadily growing the company.

    What features are you most proud of? Which do the musicians that use your platform rave about?

    Bandzoogle's Technical Support Manager, Adam, sits in his at-home production studio.

    Bandzoogle’s Technical Support Manager, Adam, is also a music producer.

    Commission-free direct-to-fan sales tools. Bandzoogle provides musicians with the eCommerce tools necessary to sell anything you can imagine: digital goods like albums, singles, EPs, song sheets, tickets, download codes or videos; physical goods like merch, CDs, or vinyl; and services like music lessons. You can even sell recurring subscriptions by tier and set up a crowdfunding campaign or preorders.

    Bandzoogle does not take a cut of any sales, and we have a SaaS model. This is just one component of the tools we offer as an all-in-one platform. Regardless of our robust toolset, our members absolutely adore our customer support team. They’re your band’s roadie, your web tech. Our response time and quality of support is the best on the planet. Best of all, most of our team members are musicians.

    How are you supporting your artists during COVID-19?

    Within the first month of the pandemic, our team launched commission-free live streaming ticket sales, event ticket refunds, a tip jar feature, transaction history exports and filtering, and a comprehensive guide to musician resources during a pandemic. Every week, our team meets to discuss what has changed in the last week and how we can help. We have quickly adapted our processes to stay on top of artists’ needs.

    To what does Bandzoogle attribute your success?

    There are a few things I can note here as being key to our success. As you can see, we are constantly building new features and designs that are relevant to artists today. But more than that, we always put our staff and members’ needs first. We have grown into a sizable company but we’ve never strayed from our core values.

    At Bandzoogle, our members can expect a very high level of service and an honest partner. It is a streamlined set of pro features, but you’re dealing with a small family vibe.

    Lastly, we’re fully bootstrapped— we’ve never taken external funding, and we’ve always made decisions on our own terms, without putting a focus on turning profits. Doing the right thing by our members has resulted in great success.

    How do you build an artist community and connect with your customers?

    We do a lot of proactive outreach with our customers. This includes webinars, free website reviews (even for non-members), member meetups in different cities, and you’ll also see some of us at different music tech events. We are a small team with a big reach. Part of that reach includes teaming up with other music verticals that hold the same strong values, like CD Baby, Bandsintown, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, and ASCAP.

    Meaningful relationships with ethical music businesses are important to our business model; as a business, you won’t get very far if you don’t venture off the island. Building bridges is important to grow your artist community and connect with your customers.

    What have been your major milestones as a company?

    The Bandzoogle team poses for a group photo at one of their annual retreats.

    An otherwise remote team, the Bandzoogle staff gets together for annual retreats.

    Our members’ success is our success: last month, our members hit 62 million dollars in commission-free sales. In May, we also grew to 50,000 paid active users, with additional thousands of active trial members on any given day. Another huge milestone was growing our executive team. We have a fairly flat organizational chart, but we promoted Colin Mitchell to CTO and Dave Cool to VP of Strategic partnerships. We are leading this incredible group of individuals and for me, it’s a huge win to be able to foster so much professional growth within our small team of 29.

    Are there any .COM alternatives that you guys like or that resonate with musicians?

    As bricks and mortar stores become less pertinent, .COM TLDs have become a scarce resource. You’ll see many artists soon find out that long-winded .COMs leave too much room for user error, and alternative TLDs can be less costly and easier to remember.

    Because of this, we see many artists branching out and using .ROCKS, .BAND, and some old, trusted, but still available, .ORG and .NET options for their band. Bandzoogle plans include many TLD options across all 3 plans, from $9.95 to $14.95 per month.

    Are there any exciting plans for the future you’d like to share?

    I can tell you that the world is changing rapidly, and, for any business, finding a way to monetize globally is paramount today. We’ll see so many advancements in the tools available to both businesses and artists over the next year, it’ll be a different landscape. Businesses that are adaptable will do well, but it’s about to be a wild ride.

    Read More

  • Avoiding COVID-19 Cyberattacks with Security Best-Practices

    April 28, 2020

    Advice, Featured, SSL

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    Views: 2792

    security lock and credit cards on keyboard

    Most of us that work in Tech are familiar with security best-practices, but for many people, including your customers, being thrust into working remotely and conducting more daily activity online can bring with it security risks. Now is a great time to support your customers with tips on how to stay secure online and avoid COVID-related cyberattacks.

    We’ve partnered with one of our trusted Security providers, Digicert, to provide you content that can be easily recycled and shared with your customers.

    Staying safe online, during COVID-19 and beyond

    The ugly reality is that cybercriminals will exploit any vulnerability they can find. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people are increasingly active on social media, email, apps and SMS (texting) as we look to stay connected with one another and alert to new information. Some malicious parties are taking advantage of this by using these technologies as a means to distribute malware. Often, these scams involve fraudsters impersonating healthcare officials or organizations.

    What can you do to stay safe?

    1. Be suspicious of emails and messages about COVID-19 by:

    • Inspecting the subject line and sender. If you don’t know the sender, or the subject line seems odd, don’t open the message and most importantly, do not click on any links.
    • Subject lines about a cure or vaccine for COVID-19 are most definitely scams. Don’t open the message.

    2. Look for common signs of fraudulent emails. These include:

    • Poor grammar or spelling
    • Poor design
    • Unreliable contact information
    • No Terms and Conditions provided
    • Deals that seem too good to be true
    • Suspicious forms of payment (like sending money to a random PayPal account or paying with cryptocurrency)

    3. Don’t download unknown email attachments

    For example, the map below — made to look similar to a legitimate map created by Johns Hopkins University — was circulated by scammers via email. The map often included links to malicious sites disguised as official communication.

     

    4. Get familiar with known scams related to COVID-19

    The Canadian Anti-Fraud centre is keeping an up-to-date list of known scams, and we encourage you to check for similar resources being provided by your local government.

    5. Keep your browser up-to-date and watch for security indicators

    One easy way to protect yourself is to ensure you’re using the latest available version of your browser. We also recommend checking that the websites you are browsing are encrypted with SSL.

    Digicert has a great guide on how to identify authorized sites. This is particularly important if you are providing any kind of personal information or making a financial transaction.

    6. Always check for additional trust indicators

    Asking yourself a few of the following questions can help you better determine whether a website is trustworthy:

    • Do they have Terms and Conditions or a return policy listed?
    • Do they have a secure site seal?
    • Are there grammar and spelling mistakes?
    • Do they have reviews?
    • Do they have a social media following?
    • Is there contact information listed in case you need to get in touch with the company about your order?
    • If you arrive at a website via a link contained in an email, take extra care sure to make sure the site you’re on is the company’s official website – not an imposter.

     

    Questions like these do not guarantee that a site isn’t a scam, but they are helpful guides in determining whether or not you should trust a site.

    The reality is, it’s impossible to completely safeguard against online threats. But just like handwashing and social distancing offer a basic line of defence against COVID-19, the best-practices outlined above will help protect you and minimize risk online during these challenging times.

    Read More

  • Tucows Approaches to COVID Related Domain Registration

    April 9, 2020

    Industry Insight, News

     Like

    Views: 20926

    From an early point in the current global crisis, it was clear to Tucows (Enom’s parent company) that we were going to need to do something new and different in how we responded to COVID-19 related domain registrations. Many of these domains are registered for good, helpful purposes, such as community organization, dissemination of healthcare information, and recording people’s experiences through this pandemic. Others, however, purport to sell COVID-19 cures, vaccines, or tests, none of which are legitimately available on the market today and all of which pose a significant health risk to the general public.

    This blog post is going to run through the what, why, and how of our response to problematic or abusive COVID-19 related domain names and provide suggestions as to how our resellers and other hosting and CMS companies can help.

    Before we dive in, we want to emphasize that this global pandemic is an exceptional situation, requiring Tucows to explore approaches we would not consider in other circumstances.

    In helping to develop the DNS Abuse Framework, Tucows spent substantial time considering how domain names may be used to cause a threat to human life, and this work has been immensely valuable within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is also important to note that our response to each and every issue that we find is contextual and dependent on the specific circumstances. We expect to return to our regular procedures as the pandemic and corresponding risks subsides.

     

    Our actions

    There are three major components to our COVID-19 related activities: identification, assessment for harm, and stakeholder engagement.

    Identification

    Tucows uses a relatively simple keyword search on all domains registered since December 2019 to flag relevant domains for manual review. We are also matching domain names on our platform to a number of externally-sourced COVID-19 related blocklists. Every day, members of our Compliance teamwork through our list of COVID-19 related registrations.

    Assessment for Harm

    As we mentioned above, a considerable number of COVID-19 related domain registrations are doing good and important things. We’ve seen many official websites from communities, hospitals, and other organizations come online over the past few weeks. Often, it is faster and easier for these organizations to use the website builder products offered by our reseller partners than for these organizations to host and build a site on their own infrastructure.

    As Tucows is primarily concerned with domain names that represent threats to human life, we are prioritizing looking for those that resolve to websites purporting to sell COVID-19 tests or cures. We are deeply worried about the possibility that someone could take a fake test and then, based on those results, continue to spread COVID-19 in their community, endangering many others. We have found very few of these sites so far, but when we do, we ask the registrant for documentation that proves their legitimacy and authorization to sell. This is very similar to our standard practice for addressing reports of harmful online pharmaceuticals.

    At this time, we have yet to see a site offering an unambiguous (albeit fake) cure that presents a risk of imminent human harm. We have seen cure-adjacent sites, purporting, for example, the (dubious) benefits of high-doses of vitamin C and the practice of alternative medicine. We’ve flagged these for review, but have not removed them from the DNS at this time.

    Other types of Harm

    We have also seen a number of COVID-19 phishing, botnet, and malware abuse issues; fortunately, we already have clear and well-established practices for dealing with these. For reports of misinformation, disinformation, price gouging, or fraud, we are working with regulators and law enforcement wherever possible to address these websites as we do not have the appropriate tools or experience to assess these independently.

    Engagement with Stakeholders

    An important component to all of the above has been communicating consistently with a variety of different stakeholders. This has included a number of our reseller partners who have seen large numbers of COVID-19 registrations. It has also included conversations with different law enforcement agencies, governments, and regulators. Our goal in these conversations is both to be transparent in what we can and cannot do and to ensure that the work of assessing website content is handled by those who are appropriately trained and empowered to do so wherever possible.

     

    Why Review?

    At least one major registrar has effectively blocked incoming COVID-19 related domain registrations. Tucows has chosen not to do this for a number of reasons; the primary one is that the Internet is an immensely powerful tool, especially in times of crisis where coordination is essential. The amazing sharing of information, mashups of data, official sites and even art that we’ve seen in our review is a daily reminder that allowing for creation is important. We think it’s important that registrants are able to respond as they see fit to the crisis, without impediment or delay. This approach vastly increases our burden and puts us in the uncomfortable position of having to assess the level of harm represented by a COVID-related domain and the website to which it resolves. However, we feel these circumstances are exceptional and are determined to do our part.

     

    Steps our resellers can take

    Hosting companies, CMS providers, and ecommerce platforms are in a better position than domain registrars to address content-related issues. Tucows resellers who offer these services may have the ability to remove specific pages or items from online stores whereas registrars have only one very blunt tool: we can take down the domain. To this end, we are also encouraging our resellers to monitor their registrations and platforms for COVID-19 related content. Now is an excellent time to review your Terms of Service and consider how you might apply them in the current circumstances. If you’re a Tucows reseller and would like assistance identifying COVID-19 related registrations, please reach out via help@enom.com.

     

    Report COVID-19 Related Abuse

    If you would like to report a COVID-19 related domain registered with Tucows that appears to be problematic, please submit an abuse complaint here: https://tucowsdomains.com/report-abuse/

    Lastly, like all complicated problems, COVID-19 requires a regular review of our processes and iterating where possible in a very short amount of time. We, like you, very much look forward to a return to normalcy.

    Read More

  • Make Money Selling .ORG

    March 18, 2020

    Advice, Fun, Industry Insight

     Like

    Views: 814

    Missed our .ORG Webinar? We’ve got you covered. Below you’ll find a recording of the live presentation as well as links to the downloadable .ORG Toolkit and Webinar PDF.

    Watch the .ORG Webinar

     

    Download your .ORG resources

    Download the PDF presentation

    Download the .ORG toolkit

    Read More

  • Enom’s Response to COVID-19

    March 17, 2020

    Announcement

     1

    Views: 1770

    The health and safety of our customers, partners, and employees are of the highest priority to Enom. With the heightened concerns about the spread of the COVID-19 virus (Coronavirus) and the unpredictable nature of the virus, we have taken precautionary steps to reduce its potential impact across our offices globally.

    We want to assure you that we are fully prepared to continue providing uninterrupted services and that your services continue to receive dedicated attention from our team of engineers around the clock.

    We have restricted business travel and in light of that, we have requested that our staff work from home wherever possible. Even with our work-from-home policy in effect, the Enom team remains available for remote meetings, and there will be no change to our business and technical support hours.

    We continue to keep a close eye on the recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) as they pertain to the latest developments on COVID-19. In following their guidelines, Enom is taking the following additional measures to reduce the likelihood of impact:

    1. Extended remote and distributed workforce – you have the same access to your sales or customer care rep for assistance.
    2. Business continuity measures in place and contingency staff at the ready.
    3. Implementation of travel guidelines and remote work options for our employees.
    4. In the event that the situation worsens, Tucows (our parent company) has a comprehensive pandemic disaster response plan in place to ensure business continuity.

    We are doing everything in our control to ensure your critical services are fully operational and safe while you focus on keeping your employee base and their respective family members healthy.

    We encourage you to also read Tucows COVID-19 Statement.

    As always, the Enom Support team will be there to provide help whenever it is needed. Contact our customer support team by calling 1-855-600-0886 or by emailing help@enom.com.

    Read More

« Previous 1 2 3 4 … 22 Next »

FEATURED POSTS

  • How to Win by Treating Your Customers as Members

    August 13, 2020

  • A Great Domain for Freelancers and Entrepreneurs? Try .ME

    June 22, 2020

  • Bandzoogle: website builder for musicians

    June 1, 2020

  • security lock and credit cards on keyboard

    Avoiding COVID-19 Cyberattacks with Security Best-Practices

    April 28, 2020

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