Canadian Outreach?

Well since Lee posted that domain name question earlier, a tangential question popped into my head.

A seperate post claimed that it would be beneficial if you purchased other country domain names in addition to your primary website address, in order to pull in traffic from other countries.

Looking northward --- maybe I should give Canada a whirl. Question - are you guys more likely to click into .ca domains? Let's say you are looking for Clint Eastwood movies to buy on DVD. Are websites with .ca going to have a priority in your search engine searches? I guess people in Toronto would want to click into a site that ships to Toronto. How do you get a search engine to show you Canadian sites, or sites that ship to Canada?

So if I owned and operated pastywhitetwinks.com --- I suppose I'd therefore register pastywhitetwinks.ca So next question - where do you buy this ca domain? Can I just stroll into Verisign/Network Solutions' website and purchase it?

Has anyone had success with this?

Thanks,
Steve

I'd get a buncha .ca mirrors but quite frankly have no desire to translate all my sites in to French. ;)

I think with a mail order site it could definitely come in handy, especially with it plainly obvious on the site that items can indeed and will indeed be shipped to Canada and the site has experience doing just that - selling to Canadian customers.

As far as the search engines go, though... I see the exact same results returned on Google.ca as on Google.it as on Google.co.uk and every other one. =\

Actually, buying country specific domain names with alternative TLD extensions is a good business practise IF potential traffic levels warrant such purchases.

For example a year or two ago we purchased adultwebmasters.ca on a whim just for shits and giggles, we pointed the domain to an ip on our server and in 2 years we amassed a total of 2000 hits to it LOL

That being said, if you own shoes.com, it would definately be a prudent move to grab as many other shoes.tld domains that you could find :)

Also, if you are planning on branding a domain, either now or, in the future, by snagging the more popular extensions of that domain you are guaranteed that traffic you work for, you get to keep.

The problem arises however, specifically with .ca domains [unless this has changed in the last 2 years] that you nee to have a place of residence or business in the Canada. The same i also true for a variety of other countries around the world.

I beleive there are a couple of articles on this topic in the Tutorials + Articles forum of GWW as well as in the GWW Directory :)

Regards,

Lee

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Originally posted by desslock
pastywhitetwinks.com

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Lol, now that's a site I would never visit.

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Originally posted by BDBionic
I'd get a buncha .ca mirrors but quite frankly have no desire to translate all my sites in to French. ;)

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French?? there are 31,946,316 in Canada and only 6.8 million francophones so thats about 4 or 5% of us.

There are over 100 languages recorded in Canada.

As for search habits... I never seem to look for a .ca unless I am searching to purchase something canadian or research a canadian news event etc.

When you purchase online its much easier to purchase from a Canadian company for the obvious reasons.

-----> ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) <-----

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Originally posted by susanna
French?? there are 31,946,316 in Canada and only 6.8 million francophones so thats about 4 or 5% of us.

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Unless I'm doing my math wrong, that is over 21% not 4 or 5%.

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Originally posted by Xstr8guy
Unless I'm doing my math wrong, that is over 21% not 4 or 5%.

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Your doing your math right.

Quote:

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Originally posted by Xstr8guy
Unless I'm doing my math wrong, that is over 21% not 4 or 5%.

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your right I divided it the wrong way. rush rush rush. Even 21% is not very impressive in my books.

21% is a HUGE minority ;). It's almost 1/4 of your potential customers.

21% is large, but keep in mind a large per centage of them speak English very well.. when they want to..:presley:

Just for the record, in case it was lost on anyone, the "translate in to French" comment was facetious.

You may now carry on with your discussion on the Francophone minority as a percentage of the overall Canadian population.

Thanks for the replies. Well that's helped me think through some things. Brian is correct in noting that searches on google.com, google.ca, etc yield the same results. Therefore a simple "mirror" would be useless. You would want to customize the existing site specifically for Canadians on your .ca address.

If anyone else has any additional experience in this, I'd love to hear. .au domains??????

Steve

desslock,

Here's my take on Canadians. When it comes to entertainment, communication, the Internet, we're not that different from the U.S. In fact, you could basically say that we're really just one big country that way.

Your Hollywood is our Hollywood. Sure Canada has a few entertainers that we identify with, but because we don't have the population base, an entertainer really has to move south to make a lot of money.

We watch American movies. They're released usually the same time as they are south of the border.

We watch American television. We have several Canadian televisions stations and networks, but largely, they play American programming. There are content laws that require them to play a certain percentage of Canadian-made content.

We read just as many, if not more, American books. And a great deal of our magazines come from the U.S.

Sure, we differ in our politics, in our approaches to health care, in fact, we differ in a lot of significant ways. But in many other ways, we just melt together.

The .ca is a thing that never really took off here. And I think that's largely because we speak the same language. A .de domain says to a German, this site is probably going to be in German, a .com site says, this is probably American.

Personally, I think a .ca domain would be a waste of time. Companies I think should have them, don't. Companies that do, I think, why? You might do better with .au or .uk domains, I don't know.

99.9% of the time when I'm guessing at a domain name (i.e. just typing in what I think it should be) I end it with .com

Cheers
Dzinerbear

Thanks for the reply Michael. Well what you say pretty much corroborates my own experience with marketing to Canadians. I can see how frustrated other comapnies have felt.

Yes I have always had easier success with Europeans and even the Australians. So I dunno - back to square one.

Regarding Television - I've taken to watching Trailer Park Boys on cable here. I find it to be very funny. Probably the most entertaining thing I have seen come out of Canada since David Cronenberg's 1981 movie Scanners.

:bush:

Steve