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Ranking For An Arbitrary Organic Search Query

Posted on May 30, 2007 by in Kalzumeus, SEO

This was posted on May 30th, 2007, Japan time. If it is after June 5th where you are, I predict that I’m pretty high on Google for the search arbitrary organic search query. I know this mostly by construction — I looked at the results before writing this post, observed that the competition is very weak for that query, used those words in my title, and will easily leapfrog over the weak competition.

What does that have to do with microISVs? Well, indulge me in a little meandering around the world of SEO for a moment. Roughly a fifth of my traffic at Bingo Card Creator comes from obvious and highly competitive search terms like “bingo cards” or “bingo card maker”. You know how many people have a substantial monetary interest at being #1 for bingo cards? Plenty of them, and most aren’t selling to elementary school English teachers, if you catch my drift. (Ironically, most of us who actually rank highly are. Go figure.)

Then I get another chunk of traffic from less obvious search terms, which I know because I know my niche well. Dolch Sight Word Bingo, for example. The amount of people searching for that won’t make me rich but they easily justify writing a page about it, which pays off month after month.

Then I get a huge percentage of my organic search traffic, about 60-70%, from arbitrary organic search queries. The majority of them are never repeated by another person, which gells with Google’s observation that 50% of search queries are unique (that is a “remembered factoid”, treat it with a grain of salt). Some are simple typos, many of them are natural language searches (“how can i make a bingo card for a third grader”), and then the rest are just unique because they’re… unique (“kasmir pulaski day spanish bingo” — yes, by the way, Bingo Card Creator will meet your needs). I like to mentally think of these as snowflake queries — every one is unique but if you look at a lot of them at once they certainly look a good deal similar.

I have actually been looking at snowflake queries and doing some work based on them. I’ve been doing some minor optimizations to my website for months, gradually including more content (which has a tendency to grab snowflake queries just because educated writers use synonyms and from Google’s perspective third grader != third grader != grade three != beginning English student) and adding in specific vocabulary which I wouldn’t use naturally but which my searchers do for whatever reason. For instance, some people call bingo cards “bingo boards”. Who knew? Certainly not me, as I went through my entire life without hearing that usage, but my search logs do not lie. This is the reason “bingo boards” is now bolded on the front page of my website and sprinkled on a few of the sub pages.

However, I had a bit of a brainstorm recently: this sort of optimization is nice and demonstrably effective, but what would happen if you took it to the next level. The trigger for this was when I wrote the blog post Increase Your Software Sales, I mentioned that it would rank pretty highly for “increase software sales”, which would be a nice thing if I cared about that keyword. When I said that, it was mostly a minor boast which I thought of little importance in the scheme of things. But it sent me to thinking:

1) Hey, wait a second, I can rank for a snowflake query with a really trivial amount of work. Put query in title, use in body text, don’t spam, done.

2) I have pages and pages of snowflake queries. Many of them have strong commonality in either words or theme.

3) These queries make me money. Snowflakes account for more than half of my organic search conversions.

And this got the wheels of my head turning. What if, instead of doing the haphazard optimization to grab some of the words in these queries that I wasn’t targetting already (like “bingo boards”), I just data-mined the bejeesus out of the suckers. Say I found 100 strings from there that were reasonably close to each other, distilled that down into 5 main words and 5 supporting words or variations, and then wrote my next resource page or blog post about them. Why, that page or post would probably rocket to near the top of 100 queries. That is worth pure gold, since people will write dozens of minor variations of each of those minor little snowflake queries. And my page or post would suck them all up in one big snowball of goodness.

I was briefly very, very excited about the idea, and started working on a gawk script to start clustering my snowflakes. (Incidentally: by training, I’m a natural language researcher. I know this to be a hard problem and yet hacky solutions to hard problems are fun for me — thats why I got into natural language research in the first place.) Then I slapped myself silly, figuring that somewhere on the Internet somebody smarter than me has already had this brainstorm and developed the same tool. I should really pay them the money for the tool and spend my time actually writing the text which will clump up the snowflakes (which only I can do, since I’m the guy who presumably has the domain knowledge) rather than reinventing a solution to a Certified Hard Problem and then using it to squeeze out an extra sale or two of a $24.95 app a month.

Anyhow, after a bit of searching, it turns out that the guy who already solved this problem made a webapp called HitTail. It has the broad thrust of the features I wanted: tracks what queries get people to find you (unnecessary, I can do that already), and then selectively picks queries out which (the site claims) hit a cluster of snowflakes and are not currently very competitive. I’ll be taking it for a test drive this week.

This is of particular interest for me for my next project (Kalzumeus, for regular readers of this blog). It is adjacent to a market space which is extraordinarily competitive and has many established firms with Big Budget$ To $quash uISVs. I don’t see them as particularly competitive for my niche but I do see them camping on some major keywords (both for organic search and AdWords). Time to go around the obstruction rather than running straight into it. I think I’ll see how far I can get with optimizing for snowflakes, well, once I have something to optimize for at any rate.

A Note About Startups Outside the Valley

Posted on May 29, 2007 by in Uncategorized

I am strongly tempted to take this article, translate it into Japanese, and pass it around the office, because what works in Columbus, Ohio is also very true for life in Central Japan.  Even Nagoya is more of a Detroit than it is a Silicon Valley.  (Incidentally: nobody here knows what Craigslist is, either.  Most don’t even know Mixi, which is Myspace for Japan.)

I have one of my book length pieces in the works on how uISVs, like startups, can milk web apps for everything they’re worth.  My mental title for it is “The Beauty of Being Small”.  I suppose I should wait until I’ve actually got a web app to be giving advice about how to make web apps, though.

How To Rename A Web Page

Posted on May 27, 2007 by in SEO

I renamed my Free Resources page, which is the #3 most popular page on my site, to Printable Bingo Cards, which both more accurately describes what is available there and is a much better title for SEO purposes.  This required some slicing and dicing in all of my HTML files because that is a link which appears in my navigation bar.  Luckily, bash was adequate for the task as always.

for htmlFile in *.htm
do
  sed s/free_resources\.htm/printable-bingo-cards.htm/ $htmlFile > temp1.txt
  sed “s/Free Resources/Printable Bingo Cards/” temp1.txt > temp2.txt
  mv temp2.txt $htmlFile
  rm -rf temp?.txt
done

I also redid the title tag (“Free Resources from Bingo Card Creator” to “Printable Bingo Cards from Bingo Card Creator”), updated the site map with the new URL, and added a RewriteRule for the old URL to my .htaccess so that I don’t break any links from the blogs and schools who linked to it.  This is a fairly key step for any change you make that affects a popular page.  If you do not do it, not only are you hurting user experience on third party sites which trusted you with a link, you’re squandering PageRank that you’ve worked so hard to gain.  Adding in another rewrite rule takes like 5 seconds, so do it!

## put me somewhere near the top

RewriteEngine on

## put me in the big block of rename rules you’ll be creating

RewriteRule ^thanks-for-downloading\.htm$   http://www.bingocardcreator.com/thanks_for_downloading.htm [R=301,L]

printable-bingo-cards.htm is, by the way, pushing it on how many words I would suggest you have in a filename.  I’m fairly sure that is under the threshold to get penalized because one or two of my competitors use three word filenames, sometimes after having the same three words in a directory listing.  That is a bridge too far in my book, and I expect Google will smackify it sometime soon.  Repetition in the URL gives no useful information to human users, and it is not a “natural” design technique for a website either, so I suspect that Google will eventually toss it out as a useless SEO technique, the same way they habitually ignore overly-long-file-names-stuffed-with-keywords-like-this-one.htm .

Finally, don’t forget to resubmit your updated sitemap to Google.

Community-oriented Marketing — Forums, Usenet, Mailing Lists, etc

Posted on May 26, 2007 by in customer service, marketing, popular

“So what did you think of the Season Finale of Heroes?””Dude no spoilers I haven’t seen it yet.”

“Oh, alright, highlight the following to see what I thought: *start highlight* The fight scene between Hiro and Sylar, which was supposed to be the highlight of the entire series, was over in less than two seconds.  He stabs him, the end.  What a let down! *end highlight*”

“Hi forum people!  Buy cheap Lost DVDs at spammerplanet.com for only $49.95 per season!  Free shipping!”

“Spam!”

“Spam!  Reported!”

“Where are the “#”#%ing mods?  I tell you, this forum has been going downhill since Tommy stopped running it.”

Recently, in the Business of Software forum, somebody made the observation that I have never posted to Usenet about Bingo Card Creator, and they reasoned from this that posting to Usenet about consumer software is unpopular.  (For those who may not know me: Bingo Card Creator is software which produces bingo cards for teachers.  I wrote and sell it as a small business.)  I’m both flattered and frightened that I’m supposedly representative of good marketing practices.  However, I think the conclusion should be a little broader than they one they drew: it is ineffective to directly market to a community which you are not a part of, be that a forum community, a mailing list, or a Usenet group, regardless of what you are selling.

What Community-Oriented Marketing Is

The key thing about Usenet or a PHPBB forum or your local school’s teacher mailing list is not the technology that is used to drive them.  The key thing is that they have a community, quite possibly a very tight knit one which has built up over years.  That community has its little social rituals, in-jokes, standards of acceptable behavior, shared history, friendships, rivalries, dramas, a whole tapestry of meaning for its members that you, the outsider, know nothing about.

If you attempt to sell something directly to the members of a community you are not a part of, you risk a great chance of falling afoul of community norms and an almost certain chance of wasting your time.  Many communities are quite opposed to the commercialization of what they perceive, correctly, as their shared social space.  Some have debates rage for years about whether its appropriate or not to put AdSense ads on a forum sidebar (sidenote to board admins: please don’t.  Regardless of whether its appropriate or not nobody will click them.  They’re coming for the community, not to be marketed to.  The only way to use AdSense on a forum is to put interstitial ads between posts and harvest misclicks.)  Some of them are filled with Slashdot-esque folks who are fundamentally opposed to people other than themselves making money for any reason.  Some are filled with folks who either do not have money or should not be spending it if they do have it.  If you’re not a member, you will not know the lay of the land, and you might step directly into one of the minefields.

Legitimate Ways To Market To A Community You Are Not A Member Of

Of course, there are a variety of approved ways to drop an advertisement in a community.  You could, for example, buy an AdSense ad there — see above, though, its tremendously unlikely to be effective.  Some communities have established Advertising boards — this should be a pretty big hint to you that they really would not appreciate an ad in their main forum.  Of course, traffic to their advertising board is a bare fraction of what it is to the main forum (if everyone wanted to see ads they’d be accepting of ads there!).  I spent about 2 hours when I started up Bingo Card Creator running around the Internet, finding ESL forums, looking to see if they had an advertising board, and dropping in a tasteful and honest ad for Bingo Card Creator if they did.

The Relative (In-)effectiveness Of Direct Marketing To A Community You Are Not a Member Of

The best performing ad out of those sends me a total of perhaps 10 visits a month, resulting in 2 trial downloads.  Think of that: one hour per trial download per month (TDPM — many marketing expenses are evergreen on the Internet, so its handy to watch how a one-time investment continues sending you traffic as opposed to watching the one-time spike of traffic immediately after posting).  By comparison, there are many, many better ways to deploy one hour of my scarce time.  One way would be to work at McDonalds, because a trial download is only worth about fifty cents to me.  But thats no fun.

Writing my Squidoo page took me 2 hours.  That was worth 5 TDPM.  Already thats doubly effective.

Writing a list of Dolch sight words for my website was “slightly” more effective.  It generates about 200 TDPM, partially from organic search and partially from folks who pass the link to their friends.  That page took, yep, about an hour to write and we’ll call it another hour work of linking from my blog over the last year.

Writing a single blog post about Free Bingo Cards took me about 15 minutes.  That generates about 150 TDPM.  (Note: I had quite a bit of help on that post thanks to an impromptu brigade of friends who decided to link to it.)

Oh, and in my portfolio of marketing efforts, there is one community link that sends me 20 TDPM.  It cost me 0 minutes to write, because I didn’t write it.  If I had written it, it wouldn’t have sent me a single hit.  The reason the link is so effective is because someone who was trusted in their community put their reputation on the line and said “Hey, check out this site, it will help you educate your children”.  It wasn’t an anonymous fly-by-night posting from some Internet entrepeneur (sadly, half of the world now thinks that is a euphemism for “spammer”), it was a recommendation given to the community by their childrens’ teacher. 

Trust Is Key

That is what community-oriented marketing comes down to: trust.  If you don’t have it, then building it up will take quite a bit of time, and you have much better options for marketing in terms of time spent per marginal exposure gained.  (See the above list for some ideas.)  If you are trusted somewhere, you might be able to effectively market there, based solely on your existing trust.

I personally haven’t used that method.  I am trusted, for example, in a community of ESL teachers close to where I live.  I know I could send out a email to the list and get 50 downloads of Bingo Card Creator in a day.  However, I’m trusted precisely because I have not been a self-promoter for the last three years, and I see no reason to throw that trust away now for a piddling amount of money.  On the other hand, I was a volunteer translator for a major Japanese ESL textbook, and they were kind enough to throw me a link from my biography (on the acknowledgements page) to Bingo Card Creator, which can’t possibly hurt.  That is marketing, but it is marketing which enhances my trust in the community rather than detracting from it. 

I strongly suggest that you do the same — don’t aggressively push your product at anybody who knows you and could possibly use it.  That makes you into the Internet equivalent of the Mary Kay lady, somebody who aggressively tries to promote her business to all of her soon-to-be-former friends to the exclusion of anything approaching a real, honest relationship with them.  Instead, continue going about interacting with your communities just like you do right now, and the marketing will more or less fall into your lap.

Finally, continue providing an excellent product and service to customers.  Customers are the first, last, and best marketing team you will ever have.  They are already trusted in more communities than you can even conceive of, and when they plug your product for you their words will be trusted and their consciences will be unburdened, because they are doing it to help their friends rather than to help themselves.  Its a win-win situation for everyone involved.

And, yes, I was severely disappointed with the last episode of Heroes.  Grr.  They’d better improve for next season. 

Summer Is Upon Us

Posted on May 23, 2007 by in Uncategorized

One of the unfortunate facts of the education market is that it has pretty severe seasonality: sales drop to close to nothing when school is not in session.  I have had roughly a week without a sale now, and expect that sales will remain severely depressed until roughly August 15th (when I’m going to probably have a burst of activity — start of the new term means cash money).  Oh well, more time to improve the website, marketing, and there is that minor issue of finding myself a job by July 25th… 

More Web Site Tweakage (Link Colors, Download Buttons)

Posted on May 19, 2007 by in Uncategorized

I just changed my links to the default colors.  I have been told that having them other colors (they were previously colored to match my website’s color scheme — an inviting orange for unvisited links and a burnt orange for visited ones) has a tendency to confuse people who are used to the convention that anything blue and underlined can be clicked*.  We’ll see if this doesn’t make people more likely to click on the links I want them to click on.  My bounce rate is slightly higher than I’d like it to be on the front page.

On the other hand, the new buttons on the download page are performing admirably, even without having the prohibited logos in them.  You can click on the image to see a larger version of the appropriate portion of my CrazyEgg heatmap.  That Download Windows Free Trial button is, incidentally, the most incandescent place anywhere on my website. 

Redesigned Download Buttons Were Strikingly Successful

* Admit it, you tried to click it, didn’t you?

May 2007 Mid-Month Stats

Posted on May 17, 2007 by in AdWords, stats

Capsule summary: Sales have been nicely juiced by my crusade against usability bugs these last two weeks.  In particular, higher CD sales will likely lead to higher absolute sales numbers and slightly lower profits since I subsidize every one by about fifty cents relative to downloads.

 Through the 15th:

Sales: 10 downloads, 5 CDs (1 download refunded when they decided they wanted a CD instead)

Gross Sales: 399.25 USD

Expenses:

GoDaddy: $7

e-junkie: $5

CrazyEgg: $9

AdWords: ~$50 through end of month

AdCenter: ~$10 through end of month

CDs: ~$27 so far

Paypal: ~$7.15

Expenses: ~$88

Profit: ~$312

Visitor stats and all that jazz: they’re borked due to my website redesign, since I changed exactly how conversions are being counted. 

AdWords: twenty-two cents a trial download these days.  Twenty.  Two.  Cents.   (My ideal price target was 30 cents.)  I’m trying to tweak the campaign to increase number of clicks now because at $.22 it costs me about $7.30 to buy a $24.95 sale.  As you might expect, I’m happy to do that all day long.

65,000 spams on the wall, 65,000 spams…

Posted on May 16, 2007 by in blogging

… take one down, pass it around, 65,000 spams on the wall…

Akismet, the anti-comment-spam WordPress plugin, has just caught spam number 65,000.  That compares to 701 legitimate comments on 250ish posts.  Thank goodness for Bayes filters or I would never get any work done.

A Few Followups

Posted on May 16, 2007 by in blogging, SEO, web design

Increase Your Software Sales proved to be fairly popular. I hope that it covered the basics of “Phase Two” of the uISV development process well enough to give struggling beginners some ideas. In particular, take note of what I said about SEO and blogging. In that article I predicted I would be on the front page of Google for the string “increase software sales” within a week. It actually took about 48 hours and I’m number two. That is a fairly competitive (30 million results) search which has obvious economic possibilities for at least some people (payment processors, etc). Your niche also has competitive search words which a decently popular blog article could crack fairly quickly. (Why so high so fast on Google? WordPress makes the URL and title tag reflect the keywords, which were repeated in the body text. I also got linked by two high pagerank WordPress pages which automatically collect the highest traffic blogs and posts of the day. Luckily WordPress has recently changed their site design so that those posts are now static. The traffic which got me onto those was about fifty-fifty from a link I placed on joel.reddit.com and from other sources.) I anticipate the post will probably fall to somewhere lower on the front page as it ages.

I redesigned the icons on my website again after I was informed they violated Microsoft’s and Apple’s guidelines for trademark usage. Its my personal opinion that their guidelines are poorly considered and substantially broader than the rights the law actually gives them, but I’m following them as a professional courtesy. You can see the new icons on Bingo Card Creator‘s purchasing page. It wasn’t a total loss — the new buttons seem to be a little less busy than before.

e-junkie‘s Fat-Free Cart is currently incompatible with CrazyEgg on Firefox, which is unfortunate. CrazyEgg’s script causes all the links on the page to lock up if you dismiss the cart. As the incompatibility was potentially costing me money I disabled CrazyEgg and sent them an email. They got me a response within 48 hours and are looking into it, yay. Separately, e-junkie has applied a fix for the usability issue I noted earlier.

A personal note: I had a job interview yesterday with a smallish Japanese software company (250 employees) and it went extraordinarily well (the 3 decisionmakers called my boss to chitchat about me immediately after the interview was over, and the call included the line “He’ll be a great fit here”). Not only did I have a strong base in the skills their current divisions need (primarily Java, experience in both Windows/Unix environments, and being bilingual), they also have dreams of Web 2.0ifying a few of their properties and were extraordinarily pleased to hear that my “extracurricular interests” had me learning Javascript, Rails, and MVC frameworks. I will hear the results and if applicable get a written offer on Tuesday. It is easily the most attractive of my current day job employment options for August, which has taken a load off my mind. The last interview, which I thought had gone well, ended up in “You’re a very good candidate but we don’t have a position for you. Best of luck”. I have a half-dozen other applications wending their way through various employment bureaucracies.

Increase Your Software Sales

Posted on May 14, 2007 by in marketing, microISV

Here is a question which comes up all the time on the Business of Software forums.

Hello, my name is XXX and I created an application N months ago which sells for $Y. I have gotten Z sales so far. What can I do to increase sales?

First off, congratulations on finishing an application that real people think was worth spending money on. That’s an accomplishment. It is also the easiest part about running a software business, and you’ve got a long road ahead of you. Lets get cracking.

Actually, first, the obligatory disclaimer: everyone’s markets are different. Everyone’s goals are different. Everyone’s strengths are different. I sell to technically disinclined B2C customers and make enough money to nicely supplement my dayjob every month but could not go full time on Bingo Card Creator (a good thing, too, as 1-2 hours of work a week would leave me with far too much free time). I’ve also only been doing this for, hmm, coming on 10 months now. This isn’t the Bible of Internet Software Marketing, its just things that I have found effective and advice passed along from people I trust.

1. Install Analytics. It is critical that you have enough data on how your business is working to make informed decisions. Analytics software (I like Google Analytics and CrazyEgg) lets you know how many people are visiting your website, how they got there (in particular, what search engine terms got them there), how many of them go on to download your free trial or purchase, what pages are most of interest to them, etc.

2. Start Search Engine Optimization. Ideally, you’ll have had your website domain up for a significant portion of the time you were developing, packed full of keyword-rich content gradually aging like a fine cheese and convincing Google that you’re not some fly-by-night spam site operator. Didn’t do that? Don’t worry, I didn’t either — its a great thing to have done but for first projects it is a great idea in hindsight for almost anyone. Anyhow, age is one factor which gets you out of the Google sandbox, which is where sites languish without getting headway on competitive search terms.

However, even if your website went up 2 months ago, you can still start SEOing actively. Concentrate first on making your website very useful for people who land on it. This involves sharpening your pencils (or WYSIWYG editors) and writing some compelling content. Its shocking the number of folks who come in for advice on the forums who have less than 100 words of content on their website in total. Google can’t read minds, folks — if it isn’t on the page or in referring links they have no clue your web page is about that. So start writing.

Write about what your customers care about in language similar to what they use. You know that plastic marketing speak that large companies seem to produce far too much of? Introducing a new paradigm in best-of-breed B2C customer empowerment synergies? Nobody writes “new paradigm in best-of-breed B2C customer empowerment synergies” in Google! They write things like “How do I deal with abusive customers?” (natural language search is very scarily common among non-technical users, incidentally). If you write your page like they write their search queries, you win. (Simple example: My original title for this post was “So You’ve Got Sales. What Now?”. That is how I talk, but its certainly not a natural search string. “increase software sales” is, however, and this post will probably be on the front page of Google for that query within a week.)

Don’t neglect the technical end of onsite search optimization. There are stupidly simple five minute fixes which will improve your rankings dramatically. Use your title tags. Use h1 and bold to call out the important bits of your page (that helps Web readability, too). Add descriptive alt text to your images. Use this really easy trick I shamelessly stole from Nick Hebb (who makes flowchart software, which he handily describes in a terminology box) and include a sidebar box listing synonyms for your key search terms. Its not obvious to Google that I sell a bingo card maker without the bold callout on my frontpage saying so.

3. Start getting links.

This is the other side of the SEO puzzle. I have tried buying links and, well, that was a crushing failure. (I ended up paying $40 to get mentioned on a Chinese forum and a spam site… thank you sir, may I have another.) Its the links I didn’t lift a finger to get that are actually worthwhile to me in terms of traffic and SEO juice.

Well, “didn’t lift a finger” understates the efforts a bit. Sites don’t attract links. Content attracts links. A person who tosses you a link from their site, blog, livejournal, email to Mom, newsletter, whatever, has taken a bit of time out of their day to promote something you have done to people whose trust they have built up. They really value that trust, and they don’t waste it by wasting people’s times with links to useless pages (and God knows there are enough of those on the Internet). Rather, they send links to pages which are interesting, topical, useful, etc.

So how do you get links? Write content which is designed to be linked to, sometimes called linkbait. Sure, you’ve got your software to sell, but unless you’re exceptionally lucky people won’t wake up one morning and decide their blog readers need to hear about your product. However, folks in your niche have a variety of common interests, and they’re always eager to hear about that. For example, elementary school English teachers are some of my best customers. One thing they really like is having lists of Dolch sight words, which form the basis of early English instruction. They pass them around to colleagues, print them out and hand them to parents, include them in the classroom’s weekly newsletter, link them from the Early Readers Homepage, etc etc. Writing that one page, which does genuinely provide value to people in my niche, took a few hours but pays off every single day of the year.

By the way, notice the instructions at the top on how to link to the page? This is a fairly important thing for non-technical customers, who might not know what a URL is. Blogging software, etc, makes it easier than every for folks to provide links to things. For folks not using it yet, I try to make it as easy as possible for them to help their friends out while in the process helping me. Putting up a simple HTML sample helps quite a bit for that.

4. Blog.

In the category of providing useful, easily linkable content, blogging has few equals. If you talk about what your customers care about, people toss around links like candy. The culture and technical nature of blogging strongly encourages links. You can capitalize this by having a customer-focused blog on your site. (This blog is neither customer focused nor on my site, yet it sends me 10% of my traffic and a few hundred dollars worth of sales. Please, do better at following my advice than I do. :) ) I strongly prefer http://www.mysite.com/blog over http://blog.mysite.com and http://myblog.myblogprovider.com in terms of SEO benefits. Oh, a word on software — WordPress just works. I have heard good things about MovableType, too, but WordPress is good enough for me.

Andy Brice (he makes software that does table plans for weddings and also has a very interesting series on marketing methods on his blog) is of the opinion that blogging rapidly diminishes in relevance, so it is a constant time commitment. I agree for blogging as practiced by many technically inclined folks, where you are perpetually identifying the New and Shiny or the controversies of the day and commenting on them. TechCrunch, for example, has archives which are stale mere days or weeks after the posts are written.

So don’t write like TechCrunch.

I like to think of blogging in terms of producing resources for readers. The best resources are evergreens — they’re good today, they’ll be good tomorrow, they’ll probably be good in years. Some of my more popular posts here, for example on software registration systems, would have been topical ten years ago and will probably be topical ten years from now. That post picks up links, visits, and comments six months after being written. Writing evergreens is like investing in yourself — it is a way for today’s labor to pay dividends tomorrow and every day thereafter.

Blogs also foster a sense of community. Having communities of your customers online is nice. It allows you to hear useful feedback on how to improve your product, gives you a built-in base of passionate folks who spread the word for you, and folks eventually get to know you personally and are nice to you because of that. For example, there is a vibrant little uISV community on the BoS boards and in a wee little circle of blogs, and within that community there are both passionate users (I have been described as the local sales rep for e-junkie before, and this blog has probably sold more copies of Direct Access than it has Bingo Card Creator) and lots of folks who help each other out. One example: I’m not sure exactly who started it but Ian Landsman and a couple folks noticed when I was writing about Free Bingo Cards and decided to spread the word.

5. Eliminate barriers to checkout.

Presumably if you’ve got sales you’re already capable of processing credit card payments through at least one processor. Good. Can you offer another one, for example if folks don’t trust Paypal? One of my favorite features of e-junkie (watch me sell them again — I swear, I really don’t make any money doing this ;) ) is that you can get Paypal and Google Checkout working for the same amount of work (i.e. not much). Some folks already have Paypal accounts, some have heard horror stories and will never trust their credit cards with them, and never the twain shall meet. Checkout is a useful (and cheap) safety valve for those prospects.

Also, make sure your prospective customers know you can process credit cards and checks. “Pay here through Paypal” doesn’t provide useful information to customers who don’t know what Paypal is (they exist, trust me). Mention that “Paypal is a trustworthy company used by millions (including eBayers) which processes your Visa, Mastercard, or checking account so that you can buy things online” and watch your conversion rate go up. There are a variety of possible checkout logos available or you can roll your own, but for goodness sake put the credit card logos on or near the button. Its one of those no-brainer “having logos beats not having them by 3-1″ type decisions.

Is your checkout process instant? No? Fix that. None of this “You’ll get your registration key in 24 hours” nonsense, particularly not for B2C apps which may be impulse or time-sensitive purchases (I get LOTS of customers who need to make cards for a bridal shower tonight). Also remember, you don’t get the benefits of having your process be instant if you don’t mention them to your customers before checkout! Make sure they know they’re one simple 30 second form away from having shiny new software!

6. Offer a money-back guarantee prominently.

Don’t have one yet? Fix that. Really, what needs to be said has been said.

7. Work on your AdWords campaign.

I have poured dozens of hours and hundreds of dollars into my AdWords campaign (my #1 business expense by a factor of lots), and had my fair share of months where it cost me more money than it made and where Google had me pulling my hair out. The bottom line though? You can make it work, and when you figure out how to its free money. (My cost per trial is trending down from the profitable $.30 to the noticeably wealth-producing $.20-$.25, and its a nice hedge against fluctuations in organic search rankings.)

SharewarePromotions has some nice articles about AdWords optimization, and my archives have quite a few as well. Many of the improvements you make to your site at large, like improving landing pages and putting important keywords in your content, will help AdWords out. Other than that, use AdGroups well (focus them by theme), keep search and content networks in separate campaigns for ease of use, prune nonperforming or overly expensive keywords religiously, keep your eye on the cost per conversion number while keeping CTR at the back of your mind (keep it above about 1% on search ads or you’ll get penalized harshly by minimum bids which take MONTHS to work back down, and keep trying different ad texts/landing pages until you find copy that sells.

8. Take a break.

Really, don’t knock yourself out. Improving sales (warning: overused cliche alert) is more of a journey than a destination and the test, observe, retest, observe, cycle can take months or years. Don’t burn yourself out by trying to do it all in one day, and don’t get discouraged if you can’t make a $10,000 a month in 6 months after starting. Consistent sustained improvement is the key to long-term success. Set some goals for yourself, measure progress towards them, and have fund enjoying your hard-earned successes. (I’m blowing my revenue goals for this year, sadly, but my recent round of website improvements has my conversion rates and level of understanding of my customers up nicely.)

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