Stumble Rush Is Now Called Traffic Rush
Some observant people have already spotted that I changed the name of my Stumble Rush course to Traffic Rush yesterday. This has also involved a domain change. In this post I’ll explain why it has been changed, the implications for students and affiliates and also cover some of the technical details of domain redirection.
Why The Name Changed
StumbleUpon weren’t happy with the use of the word ’stumble’ in the name of the course and also of the use of the logo. Although they are happy for people to sell guides, courses etc about the use of StumbleUpon to drive traffic they want to ensure that there is no possibility of people thinking that these products are actually produced by them. I added a disclaimer to the site but it wasn’t enough so I had to change the name and the domain. Luckily, it was very easy and quick to do.
I remember when I first held the naming competition I did wonder if I might run into legal problems but then dismissed it as I assumed that seeing as the word ’stumble’ is a regular English verb that it would be fine. If I produce another similar product such as a Twitter course or something, I would contact the company involved beforehand to check that they approve of the name before I went ahead.
The new name is Traffic Rush and the new url is http://www.traffic-rush.net/ Traffic Rush is probably a better name anyway as at least it gives a hint as to what the course is about! Stumble Rush doesn’t really mean anything unless you already know that the course is about StumbleUpon.
Students Of The Course
For those students on the free course, the links to the lessons are delivered by email. I have changed the links in the autoresponder sequence to the new domain so any new messages sent will now have the new name and url’s. However all of the old links still work as they just redirect to the same location on the new domain so I haven’t bothered doing a broadcast.
For those who purchased the full course the story is the same. The old links simply redirect to the new ones so it doesn’t matter if they continue using the old ones. The graphics are all the same as before so I suspect that most people won’t even notice so I’m not going to send out new links as it might lead to confusion.
Affiliates of The Course
I modified the link in E-Junkie to point to the new domain so that all existing affiliate links will continue to work as before. However, one thing that you might want to do is update your graphics. I’ve had all of the banners and cover graphics re-done but if you copied the graphics to your own server you can grab the new ones here:
http://www.traffic-rush.net/affiliates/
Video Watermarks
Currently the videos are only distributed via the amazon S3 server that I setup for it. One of the mini projects I am going to do shortly is to distribute the videos that accompany the free lessons to a whole bunch of video sharing sites such as YouTube, Revver etc so I’ll re-encode them with a new watermark when I do that. However, where I’ve talked about Stumble Rush I can’t change that heh - well I could do a voice over but I won’t bother lol!
Technical Details
The first job was to transfer the actual website to the new domain. This was simplicity itself - from the WordPress dashboard, click Manage and then Export. This allows you to export your entire website as a single file and then you import that to your new installation. This only took a few minutes and everything was preserved including things like the password on the lessons.
The second step was to point the old url’s to the new ones. For this I used something called a 301 redirect which says to Google that this redirection is permanent. This is achieved using an .htaccess file.
I used this in two ways. Firstly for each of the lessons I did an explcit redirect just to make sure that a lesson link from the Stumble Rush domain would automatically load the same lesson from the Traffic Rush domain. Here is the redirection rule for the first lesson:
Redirect 301 /introduction-to-stumbleupon-126373828/ http://www.traffic-rush.net/introduction-to-stumbleupon-126373828/
Then I used a blanket redirect which grabs anything from the old domain and points it to the new domain. This is two lines of code:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^.*stumblerush\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.traffic-rush.net/$1 [R=301,L]
That’s all there was to it, pretty simple really. Let me know if you notice any links that haven’t been redirected properly.
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Stumble it!
Coqui
August 27, 2008
Surpised that you had to change the name, but at least it sounds like you have it all worked out for the new domain.
Coquis last blog post..10 Lighthouses of Puerto Rico