Is this Guerrilla Advertising or Taking Advantage of an Opportunity?
This morning my fingers tripped over the keys typing in the address for ActiveRain.com and I stumbled onto Trump University. Hmmm...Interesting.
My first reaction was "Wow". I had no idea ActiveRain was selling "Front Page" advertising. I scrolled down the bold advertisement, because I was not interested in what the Trumpster was selling. I could not find the NEXT button or CONTINUE button to take me onto ActiveRain. I thought to myself, "Did Donald buy ActiveRain?"
Since scrolling down and looking around didn't find me the door to where I wanted to go, I looked up at the address bar. Sure enough, "wrong address" and Donald Trump had opened up office there and was capitalizing on ActiveRain Bloggers. http://actverain.com/.
Spellcheck is a fantastic tool. But, there may be profitability in typos. If the ActiveRain owners purchased the misspelled domain originally and sold it to Donald, well, that was pretty smart and visionary!
This just added between phone calls: (A little of my own investigating)
Domain Name: ACTVERAIN.COM
Registrar: GO DADDY SOFTWARE, INC.
Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com
Referral URL: http://registrar.godaddy.com
Name Server: PARK33.SECURESERVER.NET
Name Server: PARK34.SECURESERVER.NET
Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Status: clientRenewProhibited
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Updated Date: 14-feb-2007
Creation Date: 09-jul-2006
Expiration Date: 09-jul-2007
I emailed Inman News, because I thought this was real estate newsworthy:
This is what they teach you on The Apprentice?
If real estate professionals are already questioning your ethics for teaching people to use their credit cards to make down payments on investment properties (see discussion on REliberation.com), do you really want to further antagonize them by "typosquatting" ActiveRain Real Estate Network? Apparently not a concern for Donald Trump (or maybe one of the people he hired through "The Apprentice"?), whose Trump University has taken up residence at actverain.com (ActiveRain.com without the i in Active). ActiveRain blogger Rhonda Ruthman ended up there the same way they hope you will -- by accident.
UPDATE: How many ways can you misspell ActiveRain? These will all take you to Trump University:
ACTIERAIN.COM
ACTIVEAIN.COM
ACTIVERAI.COM
ACTIVERAN.COM
ACTIVERIN.COM
ACTIVRAIN.COM
ACTVERAIN.COM
Where I found these variations.
--Matt Carter, Inman News
Note: Earlier this post was edited because I mentioned I saw Donald Trump's photo in the ad on Actverain.com. But, when I went back to the site his photo was not there. Did I imagine that? Does just his name invoke a picture of his face in your mind? ....Spooky.
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