Thanks much for all the help guys.  After several days of plugging away at outstanding little niggles I think both the PC and Mac versions are in a releasable state — and particularly with regards to the Mac folks in the audience, I couldn’t have done it without you.

I’m pumped about seeing my results in the coming months — with 400+ new cards, improved functionality (including one of my most-requested features), and general improvements, I think this could quite possibly kick me up another notch or three.  I’m also interested in seeing whether natively compiled .exes beat Java-requiring versions in a head to head test.

If you want to go to http://www.bingocardcreator.com and check to make sure I haven’t done anything stupid for your system, I would be obliged.  Here is an example of something stupid: four days ago, I used svn update to upload a  controller (the C in “MVC framework”) file to my site to fix a bug on one of my sidebars.  I neglected to notice that the same controller also implemented the split test for windows downloaders, which broke downloading the free trial for 4 days.  Argh.  Oh well, no sense crying over spilled milk.

I also went ahead and did something I’ve been threatening for a long time now: raised prices.  Or, rather, announced that I will be raising prices in about a month.  We’ll see how that works out.  And, as always, I’ll keep you posted.

Now after 14 hours of day job and pushing out a release in the same day I richly deserve a nice warm shower and a few minutes of the new Naruto game before bedtime.  (It’s awesome.)  Good night!

Hideho everybody.   Thanks for the help with the beta testing.  This is a quick list of the issues that were reported and which I have confirmed fixed.  I’d be obliged if Mac users could try executing the app again and see if the permissions got kept by the zip file this time.  If Windows users want to kick in any comments, I’m always obliged.

Windows version (requires Java 1.4+ installed)

Windows version (native — doesn’t require Java)

Mac version (shouldn’t require anything you don’t have)

• Purpose of plus/minus buttons is unclear.  Rewrote description of functionality on main page of app.  (Both buttons were already mentioned, but if you guys didn’t see it that is my fault.)
• Two included bingo cards, written in Spanish and Japanese, could not be loaded properly.  Fixed.
• Mac menu bar does not appear where Mac users expect it to be.  I believe this to be fixed.
• Windows resize when wizards are selected.  I appreciate the feedback, but this is by design.
• Resizing the window such that the sample card is not totally visible, then resizing it again, causes text on the sample card labels.  This is related to the Swing library’s implementation.  I will study the feasibility of fixing it later, but at the moment it is a cosmetic issue which is easily recovered from and happens only in edge cases.
• Changing word wrap causes the sample card to shuffle.  I appreciate the feedback, but this behavior is by design.
• Mac users do not expect to use the Ctrl key, but the program does.  I believe this to be fixed.  
• Mac users do not expect mnemonics.  I’m sort of loathe to remove functionality, particularly functionality that a few hundred paying customers may be using already.  I’m not exactly a Mac UI partisan and most of my users aren’t, either, so I’m going to put off changing this one.
• “Upgrade to full version now?” dialog is wider than my screen.    Fixed.
• The text in the Advice frame is selectable with the mouse.  Hard to fix due to Java implementation of text boxes, no impact on customers, postponing until I am very bored.
• Small screen + extraordinarily long words on card (e.g. names of famous plays) = card extends off screen.  Low impact and rare circumstances, but I will address this eventually.
• Save/Open defaults to application folder, should be elsewhere.  Suboptimal but kept for backwards compatibility.  You may be interested in knowing that applications can write to Program Files in Vista.  Really, try it — MS hacked around their own security system to avoid breaking legacy apps.

nota bene to Ant users: the zip tasks discards permissions.  If you need them to come out intact, you need to put the files requiring extra permissions in <zipfileset filemode=”755″> blocks.  In particular, if you are zipping a distribution which includes a jar wrapped up as a Mac application, the JavaApplicationStub file needs to be marked as filemode=”755″.  Much love to the testers that discovered this before my users did.

So for the last several years, I’ve had a free trial which generated the majority of my sales.  The free trial includes the following three restrictions:

1. It can’t import text files (except the free cards provided by me).
2. It can’t save files.
3. It can’t print more than 15 cards.

New in BCC 2.5, which should be out in the next few days, I’m adding a new difference between the free trial and the registered version: the registered version entitles you to automatically download new bingo cards as I release them.

So that’s the background.  What is the oversight?  I have, for a long time, tracked whether people get to my purchasing page via coming from the trial or not — but I have never tracked from where in the trial.  It could be because they hit the Purchase Now button, or it could be at one of the prompts which pops up every time they hit one of the restrictions.  It would be very, very helpful for me to know which of those restrictions are most effective at driving the sales… but I never thought of tracking it before, at least not enough to spend the 8 minutes it took me to add that in.

Do you know what drives people to upgrade from your trial?

Hideho everybody.  After a week of being truly swamped at work I’ve managed to get back to my computer and, hopefully, fixed the errors that borked the Mac and (native) Windows builds last time.  If you could take a moment and confirm that they run as expected, that would be great.

The easiest way to check is to install the program, run, select any Wizard, and then print one bingo card.  If everything works, great.

With particular regards to the Mac version: I’m in the very unenviable position of having to release Mac software without a) having touched a Mac in 10 years and b) without having access to a Mac to test on.  That fact that this is even possible is near miraculous (yay for Java), but if you notice any niggles (window opens at wrong place, etc) I’d love to hear of them from you prior to hearing of them from my customers.

Windows version (requires Java 1.3+ installed)

Windows version (native — doesn’t require Java — and a honking 13 MB install means that this time I actually included the right stuff!)

Mac version (shouldn’t require anything you don’t have)

What is new:

1)  Windows version only: shell integration with .BCF files (finally!)

2)  A few improvements under the hood  (“write once, debug everywhere” oriented)

3)  Everything from previous post

On Friday a customer reported a bug with UTF-8 files, which had creeped in literally months ago.  Since that was blocking her from getting work done I had a fire lit under my behind this weekend, and spent all three days of it coding like mad.  And wow, I was more productive than I’ve ever been in my life:

• It is now possible to put words under consistent columns, a common user request.  Previously it you were playing, say, US States bingo, Alabama could appear under any one of the five columns, which in my professional opinion is better as a teaching tool in most cases.  But some of my customers had less proficient readers (younger kids and ESL students, etc) so they want to only have them search a single column — thus, you should be able to call “Alabama — its under the B!”  Which took a bit of effort to accomplish.
• The Wizards menu got totally reworked.  I’m psyched about this improvement, because it includes my best 200 lines of code ever in terms of cleverness and it produces massive value to my customers and I.  Previously BCC shipped with a few dozen word lists, so as to not overwhelm the user looking at the Wizards menu.  However, I’ve paid for 507 (and counting) lists to be written, so why not ship them all?  However, just splitting them into categories just doesn’t cut it when you have 60+ categories, and I didn’t want to have to change my website’s architecture just to support subcategorization.  So instead I made some pretty nifty, configurable logic which conglomerates categories together and then automatically decides whether they need to be further aggregated into subdirectories or not.  Hopefully this will make the Wizards menu easier to use and increase the perceived value of the program.
• I’ve improved the updating functionality.  Previously I forced users to do a reinstall to get new word lists from me, which is a) inefficient in terms of my time (I have to keep making new builds) and b) total overkill.  So I incorporated the ability for the program to connect to my website and collect new lists by itself, as needed, after my freelance writers have written them.  Tada!  Double the bang for the buck out of money I was spending on marketing anyhow.  Plus now I am able to sell updates to the word lists — currently I’m just using that as a bullet point for the $25 program but I think I might eventually charge folks something nominal ($10 a year or so) for updates.  
• Shamelessly stolen from inspired by my friends at Skybound, who make the best visual CSS editor on the planet: if you copy/paste your Registration Key at any time when you have the Enter Registration Key menu open, even if you’ve got it copied with a lot of other things, the program will register itself.  This lets me give simpler directions and cuts down on errors in users fumble-fingering registration keys.
• A fairly uncommon request finished at last — you can actually type in the number of cards wanted on the print page, rather than selecting it with that scrolling control.  (Finally I join the 1960s of user interface design.)
• Bug fix for saving and then loading UTF-8 files.
• Native version in the works.  The folks at Excelsior got in contact with me and asked if I’d be interested in doing a case study with them to see whether eliminating the dependency on Java increases sales.  I’m always willing to  do an A/B test in the service of making me money, and if it helps them out so much the better.

If you’re interested in being a beta tester I’d appreciate the help — test if you can actually open the sucker up and print a bingo card from a Wizard, that excercises almost everything except the update feature:

Windows version (requires Java 1.3+ installed)

Windows version (native — doesn’t require Java)

Mac version (shouldn’t require anything you don’t have)

I’m kind of scratching my head at this one so if anyone has any insight, please, I’d love to hear it: several hundred people have started downloading Football Bingo all of a sudden.  Not that I mind, of course, but I can’t square it with what I know about my target users.  I can’t seem to find any inlinks that would account for the traffic, either — like when a Jane Austen fan found my page and her readers went gaga for it.  It seems to just be organic search traffic, and a whole mess of it.

I only noticed this because I’m writing one of my longer, “evergreen content” pieces on the nature of the Long Tail (and how to extract money from it) and I’ve been chasing down some of the anomalies in my data.

There are a few apps that I typically recommend people run away from, largely because the market for them is flooded.  Backup apps.  Photo organizers.  Product management web apps (which is overrun largely because Basecamp is amazing and the code to it practically writes itself in Rails, since Rails is after all “Basecamp, minus the domain expertise”).

The trouble with getting into an uber-crowded market, in a niche which is essentially a commodity service, is making yourself heard above the din.  So instead of being Generic Photo Organizer #1278, maybe you could be World’s Best Photo Organizer For Wedding Photographers.  This allows you to carve out a little niche which is addressable (i.e. you have some way of reaching them, for example when they Google [photo organizer wedding photographs]) and which will leap at the chance to pay you money.

I saw a beautiful example of this, which was just released this week: ProjectThingy.  It is *yawn* project management software.  But it is project management software which you can embed in your own website, and I’m convinced that makes all the difference in the world to a certain population of technically disinclined SMEs.  

The author (Chris Ritke of 49things.com) also has a stable of other embeddable applications.  One of them is UploadThingy, also swimming in a crowded, crowded market (crikey, I think at least four of those have come through the Business of Software boards alone), against competitors with great PR like DropSend and a few startups with millions in VC funding.  

I predict he goes on to make a mint with that selling point.  And indeed, the UploadThingy already has 100 paying customers, which is probably somewhere in the vicinity of $3,000 a month in revenue (I worked from DropSend’s published statistics about plan uptake rates and projected it to 100 total customers).   A (very) nice sideline for the moment and with two sister-apps just launched he should be raking it in by the end of the year.

Images are thumbnails, click to see the larger versions.

Background info: I sell software called Bingo Card Creator which makes educational bingo cards, largely for teachers.  Much of my marketing revolves around receiving attention for things I give away for free on my website which interest people who are good fits for my product.

This blog usually chronicles my successful efforts to promote my software more than my failures — I typically stop those in mid-stream and promptly forget about them.  But, in the interest of keeping myself humble, my Great Big Idea For December (“set up a mini-site for a seasonal Christmas promotion, go viral, win”) has been a qualified failure as of this posting.  I thought I’d write it up as a post-mortem so that other folks wouldn’t have to repeat my mistakes.

If You Fail To Plan, Plan To Fail

I spent what is, to me, quite a bit of money to set up the Christmas Bingo Cards mini-site.  My goal was…  well, I’m not entirely sure what my goal was, which is one early indication that the plan may have a few flaws in it.  The vague idea was something along the lines of “Every year there are tens of thousands of parents looking for free Christmas bingo cards to play with their kids.  I sell a program which makes bingo cards, which parents overwhelmingly do not buy because it is more expensive than their alternatives, but which teachers buy plenty of.  Why, if I could just use the non-paying parents as a marketing resource to reach the paying teachers, I would make a lot of money.”

This might sound a little quixotic but its just a simple variation on most of my marketing: I give away something that is good for many purposes and almost perfect for your purposes and then charge some portion of the population for the removal of the word “almost”.  Free bingo cards, free articles, free trial of software, whatever — its all the same to me.

But when you get down to the nitty-gritty of “How do I turn attention into marketing?”, what you are really asking is “How do I get links for this?”  It is the Internet, after all.  It is relatively easy for me to get links to teaching resources on my website — teachers have classroom web pages, teachers see things they want to share with colleagues or parents, teachers link to them, Google sees link, Google decides I’m a useful contributor to the Internet, I smile.  However, parents don’t have quite the same incentive structure.  

If you’re a busy mom trying to find a family activity for this Christmas, and you find it, you’re happy!  You’ll tell your kids and your husband.  But you don’t necessarily immediately think “Oh, I should really tell the Smiths about this, too.”  And, of course, you have better ways to communicate with your children and husband than through your blog.  Hopefully.  Which means a net total of no publicly-visible recognition, which the type I can most easily springboard off of.

Additionally, in a bit of an “Uh oh, spaghettios” tactical error, I gave out the cards as PDFs.  For those of you who are not familiar with running a website for non-technical people, let me teach you something: PDFs aren’t for whitepapers, they are for flypapers.  If a non-technical user enters a PDF, they overwhelmingly do not exit.  This is especially true if seeing/printing the PDF achieves their immediate goal: OK, I have what I came to the website for, I’m done!  Great news for them, bad news for me.

My first draft of the website required two clicks to reach the PDFs instead of one (for an obscure WordPress-related reason that you don’t care about).  This is terrible behavior from a user-experience perspective as the first click just brings you to a no-value page with a comment form.  And the comment form got FILLED with comments from people thanking me, presumably while they were busy downloading the PDF.  When I replaced that with the user-utility-maximizing “click here and it opens up directly in your browser” workflow, user interaction with the site plummeted.  (I still have comments on my main page, and I got them, but at a rate about 1/20th of the rate I was getting before.)

So if you can’t get people to do the extra work to leave a comment expressing thanks, the extra quantum of work to blog about you is a bit of a stretch.

Time-Sensitive Promotions and SEO Don’t Mix Well

Here’s another issue — I launched this site on roughly November 25th, and I know (based on prior year’s results) that user interest in what it offers peaks at December 15th and then declines rapidly.  It is absolutely critical, then, that if the site is to rank in the search engines it rank by December 1st and continue ranking for 3 weeks, after which it is markedly less critical.  I know a bit about SEO so I should have seen this coming: that timetable is FAR too aggressive, as most sites will take months to rank, unless they go viral.  And, as we’ve discussed, the combination of users and site design was a pretty good antibiotic.  

Here’s what actually happens: Google happened to rank a page on my main site fairly decently for the related search terms.  I thought I shouldn’t compete with my own promotion, and 301 redirected that page to my new domain, additionally switching internal links on my site over.  I am pretty sure that, eventually, that will work out pretty well.  However, it tends to cause rankings to bounce around for a while, and I really didn’t have “a while” to wait.

As you can see, traffic starts out fairly low (due to residual marginal rankings from the 301ed page) and then crashes, as Google spends some time deciding what to do with me.  Bad time to crash, dude.

Google Dominates All Search

It used to be that Google overwhelmingly dominated search among the technically literate, but Microsoft and Yahoo had significant share among people who think that the little E icon is synonymous with “the Internet”.  Those days have passed.  I have top-three rankings on both other search engines for the terms of most interest to me, and they send in an absolute trickle relative to Google: top organic rankings on MSN and Live simultaneously can’t do as well as top paid rankings on Google, even on search terms which play to their strengths.  (Paid search typically gets the snot beaten out of it by organic rankings.)

On This Wisdom Of Paying To Give Things Away…

I had a bit of a chicken and egg problem — how to get people to the site, and hopefully link to it (and thus fix its rankings) when it was not ranking well?  Many Internet businesses have the chicken and egg problem.  I used some appropriate countermeasures, like nepotistically linking from my other properties, but that didn’t do it, so then I decided “Well, if I just spend a little money advertising it, I’ll get a paid traffic to free snowball”.

This could, potentially, have worked in theory.  It was a crashing failure in my case.  It was even more of a crashing failure because I did it so darn well.

You want to know the recipe for a high click-through rate on an AdWords ad?  (I have edited the image to make what the user sees clearer.  Nobody reads on the Internet, remember, they scan.)

1)  Headline of ad promises exactly what they’re searching for.

2)  Strong call to action which gets them to what they want.

3)   Domain name which screams I’ve got what you want.

Blam!  11% click through rate to a paid listing.  (That is pretty darn high — usually I’m lucky to get 2%.)  Which means Google gives me the top spot (since I’m making them the most money per impression), and I get to have the maximum opportunity to give my money away for nothing.

*sigh* Doh.

AdWords Is Still A Good Deal

The nice thing about paid search advertising is that it captures user intent like nothing else does.  When someone searches for “christmas bingo cards” and then clicks on a link to christmasbingocards.com, you know what they are looking for?  Christmas bingo cards.  Sounds obvious, right?  That blazingly, achingly clear intent is present in no other search mediums.  This is why display advertising is such a bad proposition for most advertisers (except big brands who want to burn money because their advertising agencies say that it is tradition to burn money if you’re a big brand, and that they will manage the burn for only 10 cents of every dollar).

But anyhow — if you pay eight cents for a click on that search term (like I was — obscenely low but that is what happens when you have a high CTR on a term of fairly low general commercial utility), you get something for your 8 cents.  That isn’t generically true of Internet advertising.

Enter Stumbleupon

 So in the “try to make it go viral” brainstorming phase, recognizing my core customers are not quite the type that dig blogs (to say nothing of Digging blogs), I though I would try to reach out to the more technically inclined folks.  I started an advertising campaign on Stumbleupon, targetting Stumbleupon members who were 25 through 99, female, and interested in activities for kids.  (I picked these because they are essentially my target market.)  So I largely got in front of the right people, but not necessarily at the right time.

That was pretty effective for a while at getting Thumbs Up, which is a stumbler’s seal of approval.  But most of them are only on a website for 2 seconds or less, and the hoped-for stumbled-it-to-blogged-about-it transition did not quite happen.  *sigh*  So instead of paying 8 cents for someone who was intensely interested in what I had to offer (and spent an average of 2+ minutes on the site), I paid 5 cents for 2 seconds of attention from someone who was merely interested in browsing through a few dozen sites to flit around and, perhaps, see something to capture their fancy for as much as 10 seconds.  Sadly, but probably predictably, a few thousand stumblers did not translate into a single link.  (The thumbs up did translate into getting many free stumblers in addition to the paid ones, but then you’re back at square one: paying nothing for traffic of no value is still not a good deal.)

Stumbleupon: channel surfing for the Internet… or ADHD with an API?  I’m not quite sure.  What I’m quite sure about is that I won’t make the mistake of paying for advertising there again.  I should mention that some people I respect have had success with it, for example Dharmesh Shaw (as seen in comment here and post here).  So I guess I feel like it the way I know a lot of people feel about AdWords: works for other people, did not quite work for me, might be because I botched the implementation or might be because my market is a poor fit, not interested in spending further money/time to narrow that down though.

Directory Listings

On the advice of Aaron Wall, who generally recommends jump-starting SEO campaigns with a few paid directory listings from high quality directories, I bought a pair of listings.  I could have done more but didn’t quite have enough confidence in the project to warrant it…  funny how things look cheap when you’re buying them in 8 cent increments but expensive when you’re buying them in $40 increments, even when the 8 cent promotion method is ultimately more costly.  Incidentally, I’m not unhappy with the directory’s performance — I consider it sort of a cost of doing business (like the domain name) and am reasonably sure I will eventually get #1 for my target terms, just outside of the time frame I needed.

Final Tally

I give out financial numbers so I’m not, in principle, ashamed to mention this, but crikey is it embarassing:

Domain name: $240

Transfer of domain to GoDaddy: $7

Server: free at the margin (had one already)

Google AdWords: $140

StumbleUpon: $130

Directory Listings: $80  

Total: $600

And what did I get for my six hundred bucks?  Well, about $50 in marginal sales and almost no link loving from my customers.  So that’s the bad news.  I got half a dozen emails thanking me, about 50 comments to the same effect, and did help a couple thousand people with their Christmas planning… so I’ve got that going for me, as Bill Murray might say.  (I can’t remember what movie, sorry.)

That doesn’t include my time setting up the mini-site, which was fairly substantial.  I was able to leverage OSS and existing resources to cut down the time substantially but ultimately I’m not a very visual person and tweaking CSS templates and content, which were both required, ended up being huge time-sucks.  Memo to self: next time, use freelancers, they’re cheaper than I am.  (I actually have one lined up.)

What I’m Doing Differently Next Time

I’ve already registered the exact match domains for most of the other bingo card sets that are high value to me, and I plan on iterating on this experiment until I get it right or am convinced that it doesn’t work.  What I will do differently:

1)  Start earlier for time-sensitive promotions.  1 week lead time means you need a lot of advertising to get over the hump, and advertising costs money.

2)  Make the content more easily shareable.  I have a few concepts on what to try… we’ll see what works.

3)  Move the focus off of “download this PDF and cease interaction with my site”.  I’ll probably need to bulk up the sites a little more.

4)  Give away a little less.  Typically, on my main site, I give away 8 bingo cards for any set (on the theory that parents will rarely need more than that) and make people download my free trial for 15 (one step closer to conversion) and pay money for as many as they want.  This market-segmentation-by-demonstrated-need works very well for me.  This time, I gave away 32, which I chose to be high enough for almost anyone’s uses, including my core customers.  (Not entirely sure what I was thinking there, I have to admit.  That decision got made at about 2:30 AM and it sounded like a good idea at the time?)

5)  Cut unproductive advertising expenses.  Sorry, Stumble.

6)  Leverage my main site more.  I ended up sending a lot of people from my well-monetized main site (where I have spent 2.5 years learning to convert visitors) to my poorly-monetized promotional site (where I have no experience and was, indeed, almost passively hostile to making money).  Next time, I’m going to give myself enough time to think through the funnel on both sides and try to push value in the right fashions (attention is valuable among poor prospects, trial downloads and sales are valuable among good prospects, channel them accordingly).  

Conclusion

Well, that hurt like the Dickens.  I feel better for having written it up, though — that gives me more confidence that I at least learned something for my six hundred bucks.  Hopefully you all did, too.  

This is probably going to push me close to my first monthly loss for the business ever (December is a very slow time of the year for me traditionally).  We’ll see.  Ahh well, there is always next year.

About two weeks ago Andy Brice got in touch with me about throwing some blogging support behind a programmer-focused charity drive he started this year. I thought, hey, why stop at blogging — it would probably work better with a dedicated website, some linkbait, a little Flickr integration, and the like.  So we put our heads together and came up with something — not bad for two guys who have never met and live about 9 time zones away from each other, eh?

(You know, in the annals of offshoring, this may well be the first time somebody from the UK “hired” an American in Japan on the behalf of “clients” in India.)

Programmer T-shirts is now open for business charity.  I’ve also posted a fairly substantial essay on how both open source software and the principles animating it can be helpful to charity, which will hopefully be a hit with the Slashdot set.  That essay includes tips at the bottom on how you can help out, both monetarily and by giving generously of your time and/or attention, the non-monetary alternate currencies of the Internet.  

Merry Christmas!