Archive by Author

Convenient List of 30 Dayers

Posted on June 4, 2008 by in 30days

Mike W has banged up a nice chart summarizing who is doing what for the 30 Day Sprint.  Check out the bottom of his blog post.  (I love it when people do things I was meaning to get to… less time typing means more time…. typing.)

On the agenda for tonight: BSG episode, set up local Rails environment, develop first proof-of-concept widget.  (It will read an RSS feed and display the last five articles in a list.  Got to start somewhere…)  I’m also aiming to get to bed a little earlier than usual because I’m tuckered out like crazy for some reason.

Reflection on Development Schedules

Posted on June 3, 2008 by in 30days

This was much easier last time, when I was at the job which got out at 4:30 and has a 20 minute commute, rather than the one that got out at 9:00 with the 2 hour commute…

While I didn’t get anything done for myself today, I did manage to put some of the finishing touches on the best 800 lines of code I’ve ever written.  Sadly the day job owns it so I can’t go around showing it off, but darn, when all six hundred automated tests worked it was a beautiful, beautiful thing.  Its probably one of the few times where I actually got to put my CS degree qua CS degree to use, rather than just using programming skills.

Let’s see, what would have the same complexity.  OK, imagine you own a zoo.  The zoo has many families of animals.  Each family is composed of several individual types of animals.  The zoo has to fill certain exhibits, given constraints like “This exhibit needs at least one animal from the family of cats, one animal from the family of turtles, and two animals from the family of rodents of which at least one is not a rabbit”.  Each exhibit is in an enclosure, of which the number is strictly limited.

Certain animals eat each other, and as a result can’t be placed in the same enclosure.

Your tasks:

#1 — I give you an exhibit and a list of animals the zoo has on hand.  You tell me what animals I can put in the exhibit to satisfy it.

#2 — As #1, except there are 2 exhibits with 1 enclosure and a limit on space, and your solution must be correct for any possible exhibit (and correctly report “impossible” as well).

#3 — Here’s the freaking zoo.  Enumerate all possible states of it.

I’ll admit — I stayed a little later than I was planning not so much because this was urgent to get done today but because I was so close to beating the stupid thing.

Sketches and not much else

Posted on June 2, 2008 by in 30days

After getting out of work at 8 PM (early) and back home at 12 PM (typhoon) I find myself with not an amazing amount of productive energy for today.  I sketched out a few interface screens but don’t will probably trash them before I even get to work tomorrow, so there is no reason for digitizing them at the moment. 

Seen On Other Projects:

I hope folks are following the other 30 Dayers as they’re all worthy of your support and many of them are doing very interesting things.  So far, one of the projects which has really caught my imagination is the poker graphing utility that Steve McLeod is working on — not so much because I like poker or gambling (I only do either in Puzzle Pirates — arr, matey, and I have lost enough booty that way to field a virtual flotilla), but because I’d be interested in seeing how he plans to promote something cleanly in an online field saturated with scum and villany.

Alright, to bed with me — I’m hoping to get to work early tomorrow, leave early, and have a few hours to myself to start cranking out prototypes.

Kickoff of 30 Day Sprint: One Lazy Day

Posted on June 1, 2008 by in 30days

Well, I would like to say that I had a very productive day today, getting down 6 pages of notes, a few hundred lines of code, and 3 great marketing ideas.  That didn’t happen.  What did happen was I got up late, had breakfast at about 6 PM, and then saw a late showing of 21 (capsule review: don’t bother).  But I’m now a heck of a lot more rested and relaxed than I was yesterday, and have a page or two more in the development notebook than I did, which is a modest start to a modest project.

The Big Picture:

Pretend for a moment you’re a small business.  (This should not be a great leap of imagination for most of the people reading this).  You have a niche, full of people who are constantly talking to each other about what matters to them — and, in your ideal world, what matters to them would be what matters to you.  But the world isn’t ideal, and while you have a few dedicated fans out there, they’ve got precious little reason to spread your message and no easy ways with which to do it.

Enter the Internet.  It makes spreading ideas much, much easier than before — anybody can put up a web site, a web site can reach anybody, and the costs involved are so miniscule in comparison to the old way of doing things you wonder if people are being serious.  (I pay about twenty two cents to get my software in front of people.  If you had said that to an AOL exec in the nineties, he would have paid me a few hundred million and told me to print enough CDs to wallpaper every home in Africa.)  But all is not easy in Internet-land.  Because while its gotten easier for you to push yourself, the real trick on the Internet is getting other people to be interested in you of their own accord, and that is tricky.  Seth Godin might say that the problem is getting to care — that in an age of zillion of choices of businesses, products, charities, blogs, etc, you have to find some way to work above the din, some way to get your message out, some way that your fans get heard above the noise.

It’s deeply tricky stuff.  And its a really, explosively big topic.  And I really hate dealing with really, explosively big topics, so let’s zoom in a bit closer to the ground.

The Problem:

On the ground, there is this one small business (or charity or political campaign or person who spends their days writing letters to the editor about the importance of flouridated drinking water, but for sake of brevity we’ll say its a business) with a website.  They put an awful lot of work into the website, and more is happening all the time.  And, wonder of wonders, some people actually like what they’ve done, and once in a while their best stuff — that tech demo, that blog post, the tutorial — makes its way out of obscurity and gets spread around the place.

Linking.  Its the most foundational building block of the Internet. Its so foundational, so ingrained into the soul of us tech folks, that we forget how difficult and limiting it is.  Its difficult because it requires that you master a special form of black magic — you must mutter all manner of ache reph incantations — and limiting because, if you manage to do it right, all you get is little blue text with a line under it. 

Its apparently magic blue text, because when people see it they try clicking it (admit it, you tried, didn’t you?). 

That is pretty much the state of the art of customer engagement on the Internet.  If you do everything right, your customers will reward you with magic incantations and little blue lines.  Many of them will fail at the incantations.  Many who succeed will end up giving you links which are less than wonderfully descriptive of the content behind them, mooting their value to you.  After all that effort spent in getting your fans to care about you, we consistently fail at giving them the tools to show the world they care. 

Maybe, if we’re lucky, we tell them how to copy/paste the right incantation. 

We Can Do Better:

There are a bunch of ways to do things better.  We could, for example, give our customers pretty badges to link to our sites with.  That would be a blast from the past, since businesses have been doing it since at least 1998, but it is difficult to get people to put up your badges just like it is difficult to get folks to slap their logo on the side of your car.  (People do it, don’t get me wrong — there was a Coca Cola sticker on my fridge in college just because we had a fridge and a sticker and the combination looked obvious at the time — but for now we’re talking about advancing the art.)

Recently, there has been a development on the Internet called widgets.  A widget is, basically, a piece of web content which is embeddable in other pages — its a technological artifact that carries a communicatory message, sort of like a link.  Except they’re typically richer than links, in that they provide their own reason for spreading (the person who puts the widget on their page gains something from it) and the widget contains its own little wizard who will happily tell you the incantation to put it on your page.

And what did mankind come up with once it started embracing widgets?  Well, a lot of Would You Survive The Zombie Apocalypse quizzes and What Kind of My Little Pony Are You badges.  But there is the potential for so much more.

Consider, for example, consider this widget:

Firefox Get It Now Widget

That widget tells two stories in the blink of an eye.  #1, all the cool kids use Firefox, and you can be a cool kid if you just click the text.  #2, supposing you were not just a cool kid but the kind of kid who was so cool he was concerned other people knew it, you could click that second little link and show off how cool you were on your blog. 

(If you don’t see the commercial applications for this, let me hum a few bars: you’re providing something of value to customers, in this example something psychic but potentially something of actual utility for their site or readership, and in return they give you permission to both spread your message and they assist in spreading your marketing via the widget’s built-in virality.  Its a lot like AdSense, except minus the ad blindness, the constricting limitations of that ad format, and, oh yeah, the cost.)

So why don’t we see that all over the place?

It took me about two minutes to knock that graphic up in Paint.NET, and it probably shows.  So why don’t we see a lot more stuff like this on the Internet?  Well, its pretty bloody hard to do — to actually take that from a static JPG image to a widget, capable of not lying in the first sentence, showing the right alternative to folks who have Firefox already, spreading itself, and doing the math necessary to collect the statistics necessary to do the calculations to substantiate the claim, you have to have a bit of programming expertise.  Web app, backing database, Javascript, AJAX, uh oh.  Most people, including most businesses and most folks trying to spread a message on the Internet, don’t have that available.

So here’s my business proposition

I think you can make some subsets of widgets easily.  Click a button and BING the computer takes care of the magic for you.  I think that folks, after they see the results and how successful widget-marketing could be, would be happy to pay for a subscription to the website that makes it all possible.  (Why a subscription?  A bunch of reasons, most acutely “It makes me more money that way”.  Plus, integrated statistics tracking and widget serving makes the service much more valuable to my potential customers at a rate which far outstrips its cost to me.)

The basic, early-in-development idea is that I provide a bunch of pre-coded building blocks (Data Sources, Presentations, etc) and that folks can snap them together in minutes or seconds as opposed to paying contract programmers several thousand bucks for coming up with the same thing, minus the hosting infrastructure.  This appeals to me as a businessman because after I have the basic platform set up improving it is just a matter of bolting on new Data Sources/Presentations/etc, giving me an easy built-in development path.  Additionally, controlling access to particular Data Sources/Presentations via a tiered pricing model will help move folks from the inevitable free plan up to the $10 or $100 a month plans.

Now, if I were a Silicon Valley entrepeneur I would say “We’re looking at the potential of 100,000 customers by next year, giving us a valuation of $8.7 billion”.  Happily, I don’t live in Silicon Valley, and thus have more modest aspirations.  Here they are: I’m going to start by getting myself a customer.  Then I’m going to get 10.  Then I’m going to get a hundred.  And then I’m going to get a few hundred.  And then… then there is no then, because a few hundred paying subscribers translates into enough revenue to support me indefinately.

Why this project?

This is a scratch-my-own-itch project in a few ways: I wanted to make it possible for teachers to embed things like the list of popular bingo cards on their own pages.  Then I realized that to do that I would have to learn more Javascript than I am currently capable of doing, and then I would have to come up with a good way to explain how to do the embedding to an audience which does not have an outstandingly high level of average technical skill.  Plus, it gives me a chance to develop a bona-fide web app outside of work, and while all sorts of this scream “positive technical challenge” I’m fairly certain that I can come up with a minimum working solution before I get bored or frustrated with it. 

Now all I have to do is design, implement, and market this sucker… in 29 days.  Wish me luck!

Incredible Interest In The 30 Day Sprint

Posted on May 27, 2008 by in 30days

I was sort of expecting maybe one or two folks to actually get back to me about the 30 day June cooperative development sprint that I proposed the other day.  There are, hmm, substantially more than two folks interested.  Well, great, the more the merrier. 

In the interest of not totally overwhelming everyone and also keeping the amount of administration to an absolute minimum (I will be, shall we say, sort of busy that month… ;) ) , Sohail (fellow BoSer who wanted something like this to get organized) and I are going to set up a unified RSS feed.  (Basically, its like PlanetMicroISV except it only contains posts about this project, and it doesn’t have a dedicated website.  If you don’t know how to use RSS yet, I recommend http://reader.google.com)

We encourage you to subscribe to the RSS feed and post here with the category or tag level feed for your own blogs which is specific to this challenge.  For example, if you were me, and you were diligent about filing these posts under the category 30days, your feed address would be http://www.kalzumeus.com/category/30days/feed .  This will hopefully keep the signal to noise ratio of the unified RSS feed fairly high.

Participants In No Particular Order

(If your name isn’t on this list but you got in contact with me, it is either because I wasn’t quite sure if you wanted to be publicly acknowledged or I missed it in the torrent of email.  My apologies.)

Scott Kane

“I Hate Integers”

Steve McLeod

Sohail

Simon Shutter

Peter Row

Marcus McConnell

Bracken Mosbacker

Tarek Demiati

Joel Marcey

Yakov Vorobyev

If I missed you or you have a feed URL which you’d like added, kindly drop it in the comments to this post.  Akismet, the WordPress anti-spam package, sometimes doesn’t play well with links in comments.  Rest assured that even if it doesn’t pop up automatically I’ll be hunting to make sure it doesn’t get lost.

Alrighty, thats all the time I have for today.  Come back on the 1st for the official kickoff of my project, and hopefully my first of many comments on what other folks are coming up with.  See you in June!

More Talking and More Doing

Posted on May 25, 2008 by in 30days

I’ve been quiet for far too long, as mentioned in the last update.  Recently, in the continuing quest to take over the world one set of bingo cards at a time, I ran into a snag.  I can solve the snag, that isn’t the problem.  Thinking about how to solve the snag, however, made me realize that :

  • it requires programming effort
  • it is really difficult for a technically disinclined person
  • it affects a lot of link-chucking people, like bloggers
  • it gets in the way of some people making money
  • it has a solve-once apply-anywhere model to it. 

So, basically, it screams “I Am A Viable uISV Problem“.  And its got an obviously achievable minimal solution and an iterative improvement path which could keep me busy for quite some time.

When I realized this, I got that far-away look in my eyes, and I started to see code and database schematics and promotional schemes.  (Hey, THAT certainly didn’t happen last time… guess I’m learning…)  I just have to do this now.  So I snapped up a catchy domain name (might not end up using it, but at the moment I’m liking the branding potential) and will shortly grab my sketchbook and start capturing design documents.

I’m crazy busy at work and can’t do another one week long coding binge to get this accomplished, so it will be a longer term project.  Artificial deadlines work very well for me, and there has recently been a bit of a buzz about something called the 30 Day Challenge on the Business of Software forums. 

I’ve got little interest for anything which purports to be for complete Internet-commerce newbies, as it smacks of Make Money Online and I have my sights a little higher than $10, but I love the idea of a peer group and a deadline.  So I’ll make any of you readers out there a deal: I’m going to start developing my new project starting on June 1st.  I will offer it to paying customers on July 1st — exactly 2 years after BCC, come to think of it.

In the meanwhile, I am going to be posting about everything and the kitchen sink, like I usually do: a bit of code, a bit of design, a bit of marketing, etc.  If you also have an itch that needs scratching, and you get in touch with me by the 1st, we can informally develop and blog in tandem.  This will be very informal — no rules, no mandates, just a bit of community and some of that lovely “Its early and rough but at least the page displays, let me show you my new toy” interaction that we’ll surely need after long nights and missed weekends.  Rather than develop a separate domain for the purpose, I’ll just post my contributions to the discussion on my blog — I suggest folks try that as the barrier to entry is nothing and we’ll have plenty of issues building websites without having to build a website about building our website.

This offer is open to as many people as want to take me up on it, for whatever you want to do.  (Within reason — I’m not going to devote 3 seconds of my life to considering the merits of Porn Collector 2008 or Payday Loanz4u).  I’m interested in seeing what you come up with, and can’t wait to show off my new baby as well.

Come back to the blog on the 1st for the first of many posts on the topic.  (Ideally I’ll be blogging daily but can’t commit to that.)  I plan on unveiling at least the problem domain and general gist at that point — having done this once I’m much less worried about getting cloned these days than I used to be.

What I've Been Up To

Posted on May 18, 2008 by in Uncategorized

Hideho everybody.  Its been about a month since I updated the blog, which as you’ve probably surmised means I’ve been pretty busy with real life.

Day Job — We have about 7 non-Japanese speaking Indians arriving from our sister office.  They’re here to learn Japanese business practices and be better able to lead our outsourcing efforts in India.  Given that I’m the only person at the English who speaks English and doesn’t answer to “Mr. President”, it looks like I’m going to end up being their manager one way or another, so I’ve been doing preparation for them so that they can both get some work done once they get here and enjoy their stay.

Bingo Card Creator — Answering emails and not a whole lot else.

Next Project — Doing some research.  Its a long, long way off at the moment.

Bonnie Lass — Going through some adjustments, particularly as she just started working.  I’m torn by a desire to be supportive when she says “I was grading homework until 6:30 last night!” and a desire to remind her that I’m a Japanese salaryman and that 6:30 is practically a day off.  (Speaking of which, did anyone see the NYT article about Japan having a shortage of engineers?  The NYT blames cultural factors and malaise.  I have a simpler explanation: there is no pay premium for engineering over a normal college degree, which means that the starting salary for a computer programmer is about $24,000, and you’re more or less required to work 12 hour days at a minimum.)

Hobby — The last several years I’ve seen my interest in video games declining, but Senjou no Varukyuria (Battlefield Valkyrie) has brought it right back.  Its difficult to describe… let me try: its World War II Europe in an alternate universe where the I-can’t-believe-its-not-Japan country that looks more like Holland has an army populated by bread bakers who moonlight as Norse goddess killing machines.  That is actually pretty close to normal for a Japanese game.  Despite the heaping helping of weird, the plot and characterization is better than anything I’ve ever seen in a game or movie (I was crying at one point), and it actually functions really well as a game.  (Its hard to describe — strategy RPG with FPS elements, whose boss fights resemble intricate ballet, with bullets being exchanged.)  Plus the entire thing looks like its hand-drawn in colored pencils despite being full, gorgeous 3D.  I promise you, you’ve never played anything like it.. 

So basically, when I get home at midnight and have two hours to kill before going to bed, its generally been here instead of the ISV.  But I’m on the last mission so things should be getting back to normal soon.

I'm starting to feel the itch again

Posted on April 19, 2008 by in Uncategorized

It was weird — while showing one of my coworkers the beauty of famfamfam icons for possible use in sprucing up one of our online applications, I mentioned that every time I see a good, pretty icon set I get the urge to make an application just to be able to use them.

“So why don’t you?”, he asks me.

And lately, I have not been able to come up with a good answer for that question.  I mean, work is killing me but I have enough time to waste it on browsing the Internet.  I certainly am not hurting for startup funds this time around, and I know what needs to be done to get a business up and running. 

So I’ve started kicking around some ideas.  Of course, I’m not exaggerating on work is killing me, so it will have to be something where I can see progress with a bunch of 2 hour mini-sprints after getting in the door around midnight.  That suggests it should probably be a web application.  Alas, Java, I knew ye well…

I have also been having persistent dreams of a particular application.  They’ve gotten so vivid as to include database schema…  but the waking me knows that the business model is terrible.  Just asking for total failure.  Nobody could ever pay money for it.  And yet, I would really want to see this get made…  We’ll see.

Further updates in the usual space.

Speaking of which, I haven’t been blogging much lately, part for lack of energy and part for lack of ideas.  I have been considering doing some severe surgery to the blog to collect much of the information in a more permanent, sensible manner — so that you could, say, click on a category listing for SEO and then get material about that in an organized order rather than just seeing my random thoughts on it arranged by date.  That would be a large project, though, and at the moment I want for time.  So if you have ideas for shorter things that you’d like to read in the meantime, drop me a line in the comments.

The Big Book of Getting People to Link to You

Posted on April 8, 2008 by in SEO

Today, on the Business of Software forums, a newer software developer asked how I managed to get people to link to me.  The motivation in getting links is both to get visitors directly from the websites you are linking to and to influence the search engines into prefering your site over the other fifty zillion on the Internet when they decide “Who is worthy of this searcher?”, on the theory that someone who has convinced unrelated webmasters to link to them must be doing something right.

But getting links can be a little challenging for some small businesses.  For one thing, us software developers don’t typically start with massive amounts of marketing or sales talent, and getting a link is effectively selling someone on the proposition that you’re worthy of them spending their time, attention, and social capital on you.  

As my anonymous questioner points out, “it is quite difficult to get people to link to a website which is selling a product.”  There are a variety of reasons why many people believe that to be so — one is that many people who are otherwise free with links resent the commercialization of the Internet.  Another, I feel, is that folks who make money with websites are not that great at explaining the value of linking to that website to people who will not see money from the link.

Let’s see if we can’t fix that.  I’ve been successfully building links to Bingo Card Creator for going on two years now.  Apparently my ideas on the matter were consistently interesting enough to convince Aaron Wall (a SEO and marketing professional of some note, who writes SEOBook) to give me a free subscription to his service if I kept posting them there.  (So I guess that is one way to get a free link — flatter folks and give them stuff for free.  Guess what, all joking aside, this works great!  But I digress.)  So I want to walk you through some of the things I’ve done which I have found successful and which I think you can adapt to your own businesses.

1)  Make some friends, fans, or fans into friends.  A while ago I had this idea that all anyone really needs to succeed in business on the Internet is to have about 1,000 fans.  I was going to blog about that and then got beaten to the punch by 1,000 True Fans, which is just an excellent article.  The author talks about how 1,000 people buying what you write, be it music or software, is enough to support an independent IP creator.  

I want to approach the idea of how fans can support you in a bit of a larger sense.  One way a fan can support you, without ever spending a dime, is by considering you worthy enough to tell their friends about.  For example, your fan might have a blog with a readership of a handful, a few dozen, or a few hundred people.  If your fan were to develop an emotional attachment to your success, for whatever reason, they might decide to blog about you just to share their passion with people that they care about, because that is often what we do with our friends. 

For example, my participation in the uISV (small software makers) community has gathered me a handful of very good friends and fans.  Vanishingly few of them will ever need what I sell, but they like the advice I give on this blog, they like that I am generally generous with my time for helping other folks trying to start up businesses (even in the cut-throat, dog-eat-dog market of selling bingo cards to elementary school teachers), and hopefully they like my personality.  So many of them will, for example, cheer when I have successes and actively try to bring them about.  One way they can is by spreading my ideas (i.e. linking to me), and they often decide to do that with no special prompting from me.

Truly an amazing phenomenon, that, and this is one absolutely anybody can participate it.  Find your local community, for any value of local you can name, and engage in it.  Use all of that collected wisdom from kindergarten — share, play well with others, don’t pull little Suzy’s ponytails.  Give folks a reason to like you, and the links will follow it.

2)  Blogging for your customers and people like them.

Blogging for your customers is different than what I do on this blog, most of the time.  For example, the typical elementary school teacher will never understand the value of getting their personal page linked at — it just does not advance them towards a goal that they value.  But suppose I got around to fulfilling my many-times-postponed resolution about opening a teaching activities blog on Bingo Card Creator. 

This would immediately make the site more linkable — blogging is quintessentially about having a conversation on the Internet with the basic utterance containing hyperlinks.  Its like they invented a form of communication to line up with what Google thinks is a sign of value.  Since your blog will typically not be commercially focused, but rather focused on providing value to your customers and/or people like them, it avoids much of the difficulty of getting folks to link to your product pages.  There is easily explainable value to linking to a post which is useful (“My readers will find this useful”), emotionally resonant (“Wow, this is emotionally resonant and I want to share this experience with other people”, well-written, funny, etc. 

(Incidentally, the only difference between your customers and “people like them” is that the second group hasn’t given you money.  Yet.  I say have an optimistic point of view about things.)

3)  Create resources your customers/people like them can use.

The very first thing I ever did to get links to my site was to create a list of Dolch sight words.  In brief, that is a piece of information that almost all my customers understand the value of (all you need to do is say those five words, bam, they think “Ooh, I want!”) but that few of them have memorized or written somewhere convenient in their notes.  Generating them was trivial, as they’re in the public domain.  Writing them up nice and pretty took me an hour.  That page has been linked to about 65 times according to Yahoo, probably half of them by people other than me.  These include school districts, libraries, teacher blogs, a government agency or two, and other folks who Google (in its infinite wisdom) decides to value the opinion of highly.

(Speaking of which, a particular competitor of mine had an interesting twist when he copied this idea: he bought an available domain just for that one resource, which makes it look like the official place to find the information and gives a pretty sweet bonus for ranking for the exact query [dolch sight words] in Google.  I think that tactic is worthy of the most sincere form of flattery, particularly if you know a resource is going to be very popular.  Domains are cheap, bordering on free when you consider how many thousands of people you’ll be showing your software to every year if you own the right ones.)

4)  Creating resources that other people like to use.

This next one is a bit of a mind-bender for many folks: while topical links are the best kind of link, in general, links which are not topical are still worth something, too.  Potentially a lot of something.  Thus, particularly when you are in an industry which is naturally link-poor (say, something in which the typical customer doesn’t own a blog and where most websites are 5 pages large, hosted on Geocities, and have Under Construction signs on them), you can get a lot of value out of expanding the reach of your offerings to include folks who are link-rich.

There are any number of folks who are link-rich.  Most readers of my blog are programmers, and we tend to be near the bleeding edge of the tech adoption curve.  If you find folks who are near the bleeding edge of the tech adoption curve for programmers, the odds that they give out links on a regular basis approaches 1.  (Heck, they probably have already gotten bored of some Web 3.0 ways to do so which I haven’t even heard of yet.  Maybe you can telepathically insert links directly into the eyeballs of anyone who has ever used Twitter to access Facebook through an iPhone these days.)

On group which I happen to belong to is Rails programmers, and when I write useful information on how to solve business problems in Rails (such as how to make Rails even more friendly to search engines than it is out of the box), they flood me with links.  (I think that page has gotten about 100.)  Granted, it doesn’t go direct to my product pages, but it increases my domain’s overall trust and I can control the links on the page to channel some link juice wherever I want it.

5)  Do it with style.

Always remember that there are, according to rigorous scientific studies, approximately 53,234,324,658,342,190 web pages out there that people could be looking at rather than your site… and those are just the ones that include pictures of cute kittens. 

Visually engaging your readers works.  The Internet, I swear, it sucks the literacy straight out of people, but arresting photography, stunning site design, cute icons, and the like make it much easier to rise above the Don’t Care threshold and get folks to recommend you to other people.  You subconsciously trust almost anything more if it is presented in an attractive fashion, and in some cases you might decide to share something just because it is pretty.  (It certainly worked for Clicky getting a link from me earlier this week.  Looks like it has now worked twice!  Just a pretty, solid site design there.)

Speaking of sharing things for the sheer beauty of it, it is sakura season here in Japan.

Photo of Sakura in bloom (mankai) taken in Gifu City, Japan

(I took that one two years ago in a park in Gifu City.)  We now interrupt your photo viewing enjoyment to continue with an important message from the article proper.

6)  Do it to scale

Imagine you have one really good idea for a resource to attract links.  Maybe it is one beautiful picture of sakura.  Now imagine that you could expand that to pictures of a hundred sakura, all beautiful, organized in some effective manner which both shows folks the ones that are most beautiful and hints at the richness which is only a mouseclick or two away.  Do you think you would get linear returns to the extra photos, i.e. 100 times the worth of one photo?  No.  I think this strategy is super-scalar — if you are good with information architecture, and site design, and in quickly communicating the value of what you have to the reader, I think that doing things in larger numbers turns you into something qualitatively different instead of just quantitatively different.  When you need a picture of beautiful sakura (and who doesn’t?), you don’t go to the guy who has one picture.  You go to the guy who has a hundred pictures, because he has established himself as the Authoritative Source on Pretty Cherry Blossom Photos.  (That title may be copyright and trademark of this lady I found on Flickr earlier.  Simply stunning.  More broadly, the whole “we aggregate a few million pictures, most of them are stunning” thing has certainly paid off for Flickr, since when I wanted to find someone with pretty flower pictures I went straight to Flickr to search because even artistically-disinclined me knows that Flickr is the place to go when you want pretty pictures.) 

Its not just pictures.  One resource which, oddly enough, helps you sell a Bingo Card Creator is having a large collection of printable bingo cards.  Accordingly, I have a few hundred on my site and am adding more all the time.  I can, and have, elaborated on how specific choices of my site design work to convey the richness of the offering to prospective visitors and linkers.  More on that on another day.  It is working out fairly well for me, and as you can see from this handy graph my visitors love it and it is getting more popular all the time.  (I don’t have a graph of inlinks as a result of that resource but if I did its shape would be similar.)

7)  Make your content easy to share

You might not have noticed, but that kitten photo above was built with the Lolcat Builder, because I am a lazy bum and do not want to get out Paint.NET just to make myself a one-liner.  My sloth is their gain, because the straight-line path to getting that joke onto your screen is to link to the image hosted at Lolcat Builder. 

Most of you are programmers.  With just a little bit of ingenuity, you can make your content easy for your customers to embed on their sites.  This could range from anything from programatically composing linking directions (see, for example, the instructions I give to folks for share these cards on my site) to making a widget that lets people get even more goodness out of your content.  (Heck, the widget itself could be the content.) 

For example, Delicious (I hear there are periods in there somewhere — and, darn it, I refuse to use them) makes it really easy for you to embed Delicious links in your site.  Something like, say, this one, which if you click on it will let you bookmark this article. 

 
Whoopsie, WordPress.com has decided to protect me against Javascript injection by not letting me post this widget here. Grr. See here for instructions on how to do it on your site, or you can take a look at my site where I have examples running.

You might find that useful — if you do, please, go right ahead.  If not, marvel on the fact that without any coding whatsoever I was able to add functionality to my blog post by doing Delicious a favor, and do some thinking on how you can get this dynamic to work for you.  (One of Aaron Walls suggestions to me was that I make widgets to distribute my most popular bingo cards to teachers with blogs and the like.  That is definately on the list of things to do after I achieve any level of expertise with Javascript.)

8)  Write like an Authority

In any field where the cost of replicating a success is zero there is going to be one far-and-away winner and then there is going to be a massive cliff separating them from second place.  Content creation on the Internet typically fits the bill pretty well — winners win, because why would you go to the second best place to get something you need when the first best is, well, better at the same price (free). 

(This does not mean first place is necessarily actually better than second place.  Wikipedia is quite rarely the best single resource on the Internet for something you want to know about, but it is often the first that springs to mind, and thus it is the best at being Just Good Enough For Right now, which is apparently a market segment worth owning.)

This is the basis for the Filthy Linking Rich phenomenon — the page which achieves authoritative status for a particular concept, query, or idea will typically tend to achieve self-reinforcing authority for it.  I am linking to Filthy Linking Rich because I was explained the concept by someone (who I have forgotten!) who used Filthy Linking Rich to explain the concept that someone else (who I don’t know!) used Filthy Linking Rich to…  etc etc, the rabbit hole goes pretty deep, and that article will continue getting backlinks until the end of time.  (October 2004 — that is practically antediluvian in Internet years.  Yikes, back in 2004, we didn’t even have Youtube, did we?  And yet there is that article from Internet prehistory still merrily humming along.)

I like to call content which tends to stand the test of time evergreen content.  While there is some merit in producing things which will be almost useless in a week (like many of my holiday bingo cards — nobody wants St. Patrick’s Day bingo cards 50 weeks out of the year), particularly if you can be the first or best or both at it, most of the longterm value is in the evergreen content.  (Or being the authority for breaking news, because the authority status you earned is evergreen itself, as long as you keep writing — I think I’ve been visiting Instapundit for 7 years now because Glenn Reynolds is to me what newspapers were to my grandfather’s generation.)

I’ll write an article on writing like an authority later, hopefully sometime this week when I have a bit of time to spare.  If you’ve got any particular questions about it, or any of the other points here, please feel free to drop a comment.

Pretty, New Competitor To Google Analytics

Posted on April 5, 2008 by in Analytics

For those of you who are a little askance with the idea of handing over your information to the Google Borg, there is a new analytics package out there you might like: Clicky.  Having used it for a day or two, it doesn’t offer all that much unique from Analytics which is useful to a uISV, but it has some usability wins (no need to tag URLs on your website, automatically tracks downloads and inbound/outbound links, etc), and there are features to stalk particular folks across your site if you’re into that sort of thing.  Personally I wouldn’t suggest it but if you had a webapp with a privacy policy which allowed it it might be a useful support tool.

One thing folks sometime neglect when making a webapp, and I’m certainly guilty, is making it look gorgeous.  Clicky does not have that problem.  I’ll be honest: I signed up precisely because it had the “new car smell” to it.

Older posts
Newer posts