Mid-month Stats Update

I seem to have fallen into the pattern of doing these every two weeks or so.  Seems reasonable.  Same disclaimers as all the other stats: these have analog accuracy in a digital world, my customers are across the date line from me so there might be edge effects with other stats updates, my accounting practices are horrific, yadda yadda.

Sales:

Full price: 14, +1 refund (customer purchased twice)
Bits du Jour promotion (40% off): 2

Gross sales after refund:  $354.25

Net sales after Paypal/Bits du Jour commission:  $332.06

Expenses:

Hosting: $5.01 (half of $10.02, my GoDaddy bill every month)

AdWords: $37.47

Subtotal: $42.48

Profit: $289.95*  

Well, that’s certainly a sliiiiiight increase from my last two months ($25 and -$2, as I recall).  And the month isn’t over yet.  I also expect to spend approximately $50 on getting my software onto Tucows, but they seem to be having verification trouble with my credit card at the moment so I suppose I’ll have to sort that out first.

My goal this month is to break $600 in sales and profits of about $450.  This might be a little on the aggressive side, but I think I can do it if the Mac version gets up on the major download sites inside of a week and starts kicking booty.

Oh, here’s a fun progression for you: my sales every two week interval since launch.

1, 2, 6, 8, 16.

Unfortunately, I think the “it will continue increasing geometrically!” assumption you might have from high school algebra is a tad aggressive.  But I think I’m well below the maximum amount of sales I can get with reasonable effort — I’ve got more promotions to try (getting my Halloween bingo page ready this weekend so it gets search engine rankings in advance of the actual day), more advertising campaigns to run, more tricks up my sleeve, more products to launch (I’m rolling out Bingo Card Creator on a CD this week — you can actually buy it now if you want), and more optimizations for my website (the purchase page is not as much of a tour-de-force as I want it to be, so that will be getting changed).

* While normally I’m not a very spendy person this is already earmarked: I’m increasing my payment on my student loan by $300 so I can afford to pay $300 less in October (when, incidentally, I will be paid off in full — yaaaaaaaaaaay, debt free).  Then that $300 which would have been transferred home in October gets to stay in Japan with me until December 2nd, when I will exchange it for a Wii.  So expect blog posting in December to be very, very light.  :)

Comments Off

Mac Version Doing Fairly Well

As an afterthought, while programming v1.04 I had it append a variable saying what OS it was running on to all queries it makes to my website.  This lets me track the relative popularity of the OS X version versus the Windows version.  Now, as stated previously, I give customers the option of not telling me anything so these two numbers are fractions of what the true values are, but in the last seven days I’ve had 66 requests-for-updates from the Windows version and 6 from the Mac version (those are unique counts), not counting requests from folks with the registered version.

That would put my Mac popularity at about 10% of my windows one, which is pretty phenomenal given that a) my Mac version isn’t on the major download sites yet (still working on getting it on Download.com and versiontracker.com) b) I make it almost painfully difficult to get the Mac version and c) 2% of my visitors use Macs.

I think I might have to revisit that whole “make getting the Mac version painfully difficult” thing.  Here’s what happens: I’ve got exactly one button to initiate a trial download, and at the moment it opens up a web page which starts a download of the Windows .exe installer.  There is a note in bold telling Mac users “Sorry guys, that download is useless to you, click here”.  Why do it this way?  I figure my users are not exactly savvy and having multiple download buttons confuses more users than the Mac downloads are worth.  While I still think that, inconviniencing 10% of my user base doesn’t sit well with me, so I’m going to add a bit of Javascript to that download page and redirect Mac users to the correct package.

Comments Off

Update on AdWords

Warning for everyone else currently a happy AdWords customer: go through your lists, look for words which are under 1% CTR, and *scrub*.  My best performing keyword has, over the past month, 1.75% CTR.  It dipped for about a week below 1%.  Random fluctuations, you would think, but Google responded by quadrupling the cost of it.  And even if I pay that for weeks to rehabilitate the keyword there is no guarantee that the minimum bid will ever go down.

Comments Off

AdWords Kicks Me In The Shins

After finally achieving 30 cents per download (where AdWords is actually profitable) and keeping it there for a week my CPA creeped up again to 37 cents. Since I hadn’t made any big changes to my campaign and my market is pretty stable this time of the year I investigated what was up. It turns out that Google turned off half of my words in the vocabulary campaign, requiring a minimum bid of 15 cents for what used to cost 7-9.

This leaves me less than happy.

Some of the words were pretty borderline when it came to click-through rates, in the 1-2% region. Of course, they were also getting 3rd/4th position so I’d consider that decent. The other words were nothing like borderline: I got my cost doubled on “Dolch sight word bingo”, of all things, which is a) 6% CTR on a bad day and b) my landing page for that is human-generated and about as responsive to the query as you can possibly get.

It could possibly be eBay et al upping their CPC prices across the board (my only competition for AdWords is people bidding on gigantic portfolios, ranging probably in the millions of search strings), which means I just got priced out of the market, but unless their computers really like increments of 5 cents I’m guessing it was Google assessing the low-quality penalty rate. Which is indescribably irksome. I’ve sunk dozens of hours into optimizing that campaign to get it where it is, and I don’t think its even mathematically possible to make it have positive returns at the new-and-improved CPC rate.

Comments Off

Another Plug for e-junkie

Yesterday I mentioned that my customers suddenly had a lot of trouble getting mails from e-junkie. Besides posting it on my blog, I also dropped e-junkie a note to advise them of the problem — it seemed like the right thing to do since if their outgoing mail server ended up on a RBL that would have been, well, a pretty bad thing for their business. They had a response within 2 hours that said they had gotten my note, checked everything, and it looked to be in order. But they kept following up regarding the specifics of which ISPs were misbehaving and whatnot, which is already above and beyond the call of duty.

I then asked whether I could possibly request a feature. Yesterday, I faced down the unpleasant prospect of having to *gulp* code Perl to fix this problem, by embedding my registration code in the post-sale confirmation page. e-junkie currently passes that page ~4 parameters when they send a customer to it, but none of them is the registration code, and I would have to generate the registration code on my server to make sure the code on that page and in the email were the same. Then I would use the parameters they passed to look up the registration code I had generated. Aside from this involving evil Perl code (is there any other kind?), there were some potentially nasty timing issues involved (pop quiz: what happens if the customer arrives before I have the request from e-junkie to generate the registration code? What happens if the customer arrives after the request to generate the registration code but before that request has caused the flat-file database I was contemplating to be updated?)

So I asked e-junkie if it were not too much trouble could they possibly pass the registration code along with the other parameters. If they did that, fixing this problem would be a matter of writing ten lines of Javascript. (The URL query string is stored in window.location.search. Code for parsing out a particular value from it is trivial or you can copy/paste from the Internet. Then just output this to something visible.)

Anyhow, I figured that they would probably “We’ll take this feature request under advisement”. I definately wasn’t expecting the next email to say “We were going to mail you back when this was implemented, but it turns out our engineering team will require 24 hours to get to it. Sorry for the delay.”

Sorry for the delay!

So there you have it: e-junkie, the best $5 per month I ever spent. (Obligatory disclaimer: opinions in this post are my own and I receive no compensation for them.)

Comments Off

Once Is Chance, Twice is Coincidence, Third Time Is A Pattern

(Actually, the person I learned that from said “Third time is enemy action”. But thats neither here nor there.)

Recently, I’ve had a number of customers who have had some difficulty with receiving their registration keys, which are automatically emailed to them when they complete the transaction. The page they are redirected to states this pretty clearly, and also states what they’ll need to do in case they don’t receive the email (contact support@ etc). I had been expecting to deal with one or two of these mails a month. My first arrived two weeks ago.

Then I got another this week, only when I attempted to respond to it my @bingocardcreator.com address got bounced by an incredibly restrictive school district spammed firewall (505 — “This message will be archived and *may* be presented to the recipient”, surely one of the least informative error messages of all time). I ended up having to use my @college.edu account to try to ensure delivery of the registration key she hadn’t gotten. Strike two.

Then today, I woke up to You’ve Got Money (1 sale on a Saturday is a very good Saturday given my target market) and… wait a minute, didn’t this gentleman already purchase from me? A quick check of paypal records said, yep, he had bought Bingo Card Creator from a different email address 48 hours ago. I can imagine a couple of reasons for doing that: the first is being conscientious about licensing and needing a new copy for whatever purpose, the second is “Maybe my transaction didn’t go through, I never got that email with my code”. Thats obviously a critical event for me to catch because if I don’t I’ll be humming along happily to myself until about a month from now and then BLAMMO double chargeback to my Paypal account. So I sent him an email asking which of the two it was.

If its the first one, I’m going to retroactively credit him $6 because I do have a purchasing-in-bulk discount. (If this ever happens to you, trust me on this, aside from being the right thing to do this is the right call from a business perspective. Every additional copy of my software sold is free money. A customer who has already demonstrated their willingness to purchase *two* copies from you, on different days no less, has a huge likelihood to purchase a third, which will pay for that $6 discount 3 times over. And the jawdroppingly excellent customer service you’ve just provided them makes them feel all warm and fuzzy inside and likely to drive a fourth, fifth, seventy-second purchase along your way.)

So in any case I want to rely less on the automated email reaching my customers, which means displaying their registration key inline in my website. This is going to actually take some web programming, which I hate with a burning passion (Perl still gives me hives). But I feel that over the long-run it will decrease customer discomfort and save me time supporting stuff that has nothing to do with the quality of my product.

Comments Off

Bits du Jour update

End result of the Bits du Jour promotion: 2 sales, which was exactly what I had been expecting. Ahh well, I am a wee bit niche, after all. I also had 5 sales from “regular” customers on the same day, which is an all time record, and I’m not sure some of them weren’t caused by a) downloading my executable straight from Bits du Jour b) using the purchase now button within the executable and c) neglecting to notice the fact they were getting charged $24.95 instead of $14.95.
I’m going to give it a day or two for Google Analytics to catch up with all the conversions (its been crazy slow this week for me) and then decide whether to credit all the ones I don’t have a positive identification of the source for or just credit them all.

Oh, incidentally, I got perhaps 60 hits from Bits du Jour during the promotion. For those of you who sell a somewhat less niche product, Bits du Jour could potentially make you a nice bit of money.

Comments Off

Bits Du Jour

Wow, the pressure of getting through a deadline at work this week made me completely forget: its now (barely) Friday in America and that means the Bits Du Jour promotion will be going on today!  (I talked about how I ended up saying yes to this promotion after an e-mail out of the clear blue sky several weeks ago.)  I was reminded of this by a sudden anomalous order in my mailbox — who orders Bingo Card Creator at 2 AM in the morning local time?  Apparently, someone who saw the 40% discount and just said “I gotta have it!”

I think Ellen did an absolutely superb job of writing the advertising copy.  She originally started with what I had on my website as a base, then made a slight addition at my suggestion, and then went on to “embrace and extend” my market to places where I hadn’t even considered it would be useful (and where it might not have been useful at $24.95, but was swingable at $14.95 — yay for smart market segmentation).

Let me take the liberty of reproducing this copy here since I guess its probably going to vanish into the ether after today is over.  Its, as I said, excellent (if a little more aggressive about getting the sale than I would be — then again, I guess that makes sense with the time-sensitive format).  I had originally been expecting about 2 sales but given that I got one of them at 3 AM in the morning I’m thinking Bits Du Jour is going to significantly outperform my expectations.  Its a pity I don’t have a bit wider of a niche, but for folks who do I recommend taking a half an hour one day and seeing whether you and Ellen can’t come to a mutually beneficial arrangement.  I’m always willing to take total losses on 30 minute experiments.

Check back tomorrow for the gory details of how many copies were sold exactly.  Maybe I’ll even make a chart — I’m very interested in whether these customers are going to look like my normal customers (teachers generally buy on their lunchbreak, shortly after school ends when planning lessons for the next day, or between the hours of 9 and 11 pm at night which I think is shorthand for “after I have put the kids to sleep”) or not.

Roll Your Own Bingo Cards

Bingo Card Creator

Regular price: $24.95
Bits du Jour Today Only price: $14.95
You save: 40%

If you’re a teacher – especially if you’re teaching younger children, or if you’re teaching a language – you’ve probably used Bingo playing as a great teaching aid.

But if you’ve ever tried making your own cards, you know how tedious it is. And if you’ve tried buying cards, you undoubtedly haven’t been able to find all the cards you wanted, or haven’t wanted to buy a whole set just for a limited-time use.

But you don’t have to be a teacher to enjoy this great program. If you’re a parent, you’re probably always on the lookout for a good game to play with your kids. But how great would it be if you had a game specifically tailored to their interests, or to recent vacations or upcoming activities? And daycare providers, retirement community workers and other professionals can almost always use a fun, personalized activity for their groups.

Bingo Card Creator lets you easily make and print your own Bingo cards.
  • Save time: Print Bingo cards for your entire classroom with your own computer and printer in mere minutes. Writing cards by hand takes hours. Let your PC do the tedious work for you.
  • Save money: Why spend $10-$15 on buying single activity sets from traditional publishers, when you can make an infinite number of your own.
  • Tailor your activities: There’s no need to limit yourself to stock Bingo card sets. Make your own cards, matched exactly to your lesson plan and your students. Teaching math? Make cards where the numbers are the answers to the questions you’re asking. There’s no limit to what you can do.
  • Keep their interest: What’s harder than competing with TV and computers for your students’ – or childrens’ – interest? But what about animal Bingo right after a trip to the zoo? Or landmark Bingo for that upcoming road trip? Or Christmas Bingo for that long week before the holidays?
  • Teach any subject: If you can type it on your computer, you can put it on a Bingo card. Answers to questions, vocabulary lists, translations, math facts, social studies facts, student names (great for first day jitters), famous people — the choices are unlimited.
  • Not just for parents and teachers: Use Bingo cards in retirement communities, at parites, or for corporate events. Read sample uses.

Who Needs Bingo Card Creator?

  • Teachers – It’s a great tool for teaching young children, languages (including ESL), and even older ages. You don’t have to call out words on the cards; you can have the answers to questions, translated words, or even class members’ names.
  • Parents – Do your kids get bored in the car, or shopping? Make cards they can fill in during trips and events. And make your own party game cards for birthday or other parties. Play Harry Potter Bingo, SpongeBob Squarepants Bingo or BratzBingo!
  • Daycare Providers – Here’s an activity you can do with a whole group, but tailored to their specific interests, the time of year, or anything else you think of.
  • Retirement Center or Group Home Workers – A Bingo Card Creator customer who works in a retirement community wrote that the residents are “absolutely thrilled to be able to play a brand new game of bingo every week”.
  • Corporate Event Coordinators – Get people introducing themselves quickly with Bingo Cards with attendees’ names. Or keep them paying attention in sessions with “Buzzword Bingo”.
Comments Off

A Good Day

Aside from being genuinely useful at my day job today, I woke up to a bit of good news this morning.  A huge influx of Thai pirates?  Well, OK, I woke up to that too, but as for the good news:

Between September 1st and September 6th I sold approximately $100 worth of software, which was fantastically good considering there was a holiday weekend in there and when school isn’t in session my sales trend to close to zero.  I stashed it away in my bank account to cover this month’s AdWords bill ($90, give or take), and then everything I made for the rest of the month would be gravy, since I don’t have any capital purchases planned.  (My hosting is covered through December, and the only other expense running my business aside from my time is $5 a month for e-junkie.)

So last night I went to sleep obscenely late after a hard night of eating dinner, blogging, and working on one fantastically interesting puzzle (I love puzzles, incidentally).  And when I woke up in the morning, it was to the lovely sound of You’ve Got Money!

And it was, relatively speaking, a lot of money.  Not like Daddy Warbucks a lot of money or even “I just sold a $500 developer component” a lot of money but definately “Hmm, I think I will get a Wii on launch day afterall” a lot of money.  Here’s a comparison for you: frequently, my father has remarked that I could just teach English lessons and make more money than this project, which is strictly speaking probably accurate at the moment (although its hard to find students who want to study between the hours of 10 PM and 2 AM, where a lot of my development hours were spent).  My one class a month that I currently do as a favor for a friend runs about 3 hours and I get paid $40 (below the market rate but, again, I only teach it so my friend can take one night a month off and spend some quality time with her new husband).  If I were really serious about getting my own students and all the hassle that would entail, I suppose it would be closer to $80, and it would still involve the opportunity cost of doing absolutely nothing interesting on a Saturday night.  Well, aside from teaching English, which I do enjoy but which is not the most enjoyable use of most of my Saturday nights.

And this morning, well, I earned rather more than $80 for… sleeping on a Friday morning, and firing off two emails when I got up (“Sorry to hear that, I’ve refunded your money” and “Que los estudiantes aprenden bien de eso juego de bingo interesante!”*, if you must know).  Elapsed time, four minutes and thirty seconds (I watch the clock in the morning because I am in perpetual danger of being late to the day job), not counting the sleeping.

And in the near future I hope to be taking a young lady out for a plate of sushi and the business will happily continue running itself while I do.  Yay.

This whole “do a little work once and keep getting paid for it for a while” passive income thing certainly has its benefits.

* The last time I addressed a customer in a language which wasn’t spelled out in my job description, at a job a number of years ago, it required: HR to be conferenced on whether I was the best person available, my boss and group manager to be briefed on the situation, a call to the help desk to make sure my phone’s automated recorder got turned off because Legal was unsure they were covered with respect to this customer, and VP level approval for a deviation from the standard operating procedures with “unpredictable legal and marketing consequences”.  All of that for a three minute phone call.  (I won’t mention who I was working for at the time, but suffice it to say the customer was offered cookies as our way to apologize for the delay.  Even great companies, and I am convinced that employer was and is a great company, have their hangups.  Had they been less of a great company, their VP would have taken the easy “Permission denied.” way to kill off a troublesome order worth less than his hourly salary.)

This is one of the lovely things about being a teeny-tiny slip of a company: you can outmaneuver the guys who have sixteen levels of managers to report to before anything as significant as a pleasantry can be exchanged.

Comments Off

Writing a Customer-Focused Blog

This is most definately not a customer-focused blog.  Why?  Because essentially none of you want to buy Bingo Card Creator, nor am I hoping to convince you otherwise.  My typical reader is, I think, either running a uISV or thinking about doing so, or someone who is in general interested in the business of software.  You know who Joel Spolsky is, can provide a pronunciation that goes with “/.” , and have at least some idea of what AJAX is.  My typical customer, on the other hand, has no clue who Joel Spolsky is.  She thinks “/.” is what happens when her kitty or 6 year old start banging away on the keyboard.  AJAX is either a cleaning product or, if she is of a literary bent, a hero of the Trojan War (my typical customer is quite intelligent, she’s just not technical, and woe unto the uISV who thinks this is a contradiction in terms).

Why did I just belabour that point for a paragraph?  Because I’m about to tell you that despite my total lack of experience doing it, you can write a customer-focused blog, and it can be a great marketing tool.  And better than tell you, I’m going to show you.  I was inspired to do this by a post on the Business of Software earlier today.  I think the general tone of that thread is mistaken: in the first place, I think the majority of the advice you’ll find on that forum is excellent or at least good to hear even if I wouldn’t follow it myself.  In the second place, there is a lot of tension between people who want “specific” answers to their questions who won’t put out specific statements about what they’re doing.  Many people have their reasons for not being very detailed about their own situations, and I respect that choice, as I respect the choice of folks to ask vague questions like “My software isn’t selling enough.  How can I fix this?” as long as they understand that the answers they get are going to be vague, too, like “Try blogging.”

But, seriously, try blogging.  Writing a bog about and for your customers, as opposed to about and for your business, is a great marketing investment.  It humanizes you, it gives you “street cred” within your community (people above the age of 25 call this “goodwill”, which I don’t use because its defined in the dictionary as “Money spent on marketing which we can’t prove was wasted and so want to claim as a success to the boss”), it drives qualified traffic straight to your website, and it is mana from heaven in the Search Engine optimization game.

How blogging works: Yeah yeah, I know, you know how blogging works.  You’re here, after all.  In fact, I’d give 50-50 odds that you got here from either a feed reader or a blog or other information gatherer you read every single day, the same way my father reads the Wall Street Journal.   But indulge me as I present to you the Pyramid of Participation, a concept which has been done to death before by smarter people and so which is perfect to hold off on.

The Pyramid Of Participation

This artistic masterpiece represents sort of the Power Law of Blogging: of any given blogging community, 1% of the population actually blogs.  Those are the creators.  10% of the population contributes to the blogs — they comment, they tag, they submit their favorite stories to Digg/Slashdot/Reddit, yadda yadda.  And the rest of the folks have lives.

Why is this critically important for you to understand?  Because most bloggers consistently pitch their blog to Creators or Contributors, because most bloggers want links and recognition and those folks contribute that in spades.  You, however, want cash money for your blogging efforts and as a result you’re going to want to pull a Seth Godin and invert the pyramid (he calls it “inverting the funnel”).  Fear my massive Paint.NET skills:

Pyramid of Participation Inverted

Basically, what you really want to do is encourage those folks who are really only passively engaged with your blog to become actively engaged in it.  How do you do this?  You give the people what they want.  What do the people want?  Your call, you know your audience far better that I do or ever will.  In the vast majority of cases.  There is exactly one uISV out there I feel qualified to comment on besides a certain outfit that makes bingo cards.  Its Declan Software, which as a fraction of their business produces resources to help Japanese students study.  Been there, still there, done that, still doing that, got the battle scars to prove it.  And conviniently Ethan, the owner, wonders if blogging would work for all markets.  Well, lets talk about that.

Blogging is for bloggers.  Ever noticed how poetry is for poets?  Really, if you find anyone who has even a passing interest in poetry these days, I guarantee you they have a scrapbook somewhere where they’ve got some free verse just waiting to see a publishing offer if they only had the time.  This is because the poetry community is insular and inbreeds intellectually far more often than is healthy — and if the connection to blogging doesn’t immediately jump out at you, you need to develop more of an ability to laugh at yourself (yes, I’m talking to YOU, Mr. I Only Have 15 Feeds In My RSS Reader).

Anyhow, blogging is traditionally for bloggers.  And this is bad, because unless you’re pitching products to the 53,651 members of the Silicon Valley echo chamber, who probably run an average of 16 blogs apiece, not counting the Squidoo Lenses and other “I can’t believe its not blog” innovations which I haven’t heard about in rural Japan yet.  Because it means lots of people who would buy from you, but don’t blog, won’t hear about you.  Unless you give people an incentive to tell their friends about you, or let them find you on search engines.

Yeah, like that will work: It will, if you can convince twenty people that your blog has something useful to say.  Plus or minus two.  Twenty people all tell a couple of friends, and then one of their friends posts you to a message board, and then five people on the message board tell your friends, and you get picked up on another message board, and then somebody posts you to #INFLUENTIAL_SITE_IN_YOUR_COMMUNITY, and then suddenly BOOM your blog is popular and you have to feed the beastie every day.

Yeah, heard it before, its a pipe dream:  Well, I only know what I know, but I’ve got a pretty amusing graph sitting somewhere on my WordPress interface showing a trickle of hits, then me hitting about twenty visitors, then sustained (and pretty spiky) growth until I hit 20k uniques a month.  In, hmm, two months.  While I was writing as an idle hobby about a business I run as a mostly-idle hobby on top of holding down a day job.  For folks who are serious about using your blog as a promotional tool, I think you can make my 20,000 hits a month look like chicken feed.  You just have to give people what did they want.

So what did we want?  Well, I’m guessing most of you came in because I had a combination of something almost nobody else did (a transparent business — not a big business, not a successful business, just a transparent business) and a few articles which folks actually found genuinely useful.  Maybe, oh, I don’t know, a dozen over two months.  About 20 people were intrigued enough by the initial concept to keep coming, blogrolling and linking followed, and with just a tad of promotion on my part I started ending up on the front page of WordPress a couple times a week.  Now, I’m helped by the fact that my blog is interesting to a community which has a lot of mechanisms for getting the word out (the Business of Software boards, lots of blogs, joel.reddit.com, Digg, Slashdot, yadda yadda), but the Internet is a very wide open place nowadays.  I get hits to my actual business site from sites with x0,000 users whose common interest is teaching elementary school English: its like Dick Slashdot Jane in their community, everybody who is online knows somebody who makes it a daily routine to check the buzz on that site.  (Do you know where your user base hangs out?  Because if you don’t, I’m worried for you.)

So how do you get folks on that really large site to come visit your site and buy from you?  Well, an introduction from somebody they trust helps wonders.  Ah, problem is, they don’t trust you and you don’t know anybody they do trust.  So start up a blog, and give folks a reason to start trusting you.  One way to do this is by giving them stuff.

Folks love getting stuff for free: You’ve got a trial version so you understand this concept: have pain, have widget which partially alleviates pain, induced to spend money to buy Premium Registered Widget which completes the promised pain relief.  Guess what, information can be a widget, too.  If you write stuff of use to your target audience, how-to’s, things they are genuinely interested in hearing, etc, they will beat a path to your door.  I have taken the liberty (without permission — mea maxima culpa) of writing two articles plugging Declan Software’s product, in the course of providing stuff which is genuinely useful to people, like me, who are studying for a very difficult exam this December.  (I do use their software, and I like it, and I’ve plugged software I liked before here, so might as well have an ulterior motive for the plug).  These could just as easily have come from a clearly marked staff blog — not saying that Declan Software should have a blog, but saying that if they thought it would make sense for them I bet it would turn out well.

Here’s one reason: Google loves blogs.  Can’t get enough of them.  WordPress shows me what search engine queries hit my blog every day, and I end up on the first page for random, high-value queries sometimes shockingly fast even when not trying to do so.  e.g. “teach yourself kanji” after writing a post tangentially about the Japanese language some weeks ago, back when this blog had no reason to be Google-ranked for anything and certainly not that.  Somebody searching for “teach yourself kanji” is a pretty good prospect getting to know Declan Software, or at least their Japanese department.  You don’t have to get him to buy in that browser session — just try to get him to take a positive action to you.  Maybe induce him to come back tomorrow, by promising a Kanji of the Day, or answer a burning question he has, like “What do I need to do to pass the JLPT this December?”  (The second of these is a much harder sell than Kanji of the Day — I think you should probably have a mix of both on your blog.)  You start ranking for queries quickly, too — less than 48 hours ago I started talking about registration systems and now I’m getting rather more hits for “how do I break shareware time limit” than I rather care to think about.

And then get him to tell other people.  Japanese language learners and enthusiasts (the anime crowd) are typically young, high-school to college, and they congregate online in all sorts of places.  Chat rooms, Facebook, what have you.  They practically live on instant messenger and the word “hyperlink” does not scare them.  And everybody who is studying for the JLPT knows somebody else who is, probably several someones (misery loves company).  So when you produce things which are genuinely of use to somebody, like answering “Hey, how many points do I need to pass this test?” (come on, you were a college student once, do you give good odds that you would have found your application packet and hunted for the answer or would you take the shortcut and ask Google or a buddy?), they might pass it around to other folks they know.  Who might stick around for other interesting things you’ve got on the page.  And pretty soon, you’ve got your twenty.

Speak your customers language: You blog needs to have a voice, and it needs to sound like your customers.  The easy explanation for why this is important is “Because Google is scarily good at long-tail queries, and you’re much, much more likely to rank on these if you write like your customers write than if you don’t”.  The other reason is because people are much more likely to introduce their peer group to people who they know are already peers.  On this blog, I can occasionally be jocular and I sling the tech jargon with the best of them.  On my actual website, I speak like an elementary English teacher (note: I hope I authentically sound like an elementary English teacher, because I was one for a couple of years).  Your customer likely does not care about the technology you are using, the difficulties of porting your code to .NET, the bug that nearly wiped out your version control system.  Your customer likes to hear about themselves, and their interests, and every once in a while how your product helps them further their interests.  Which is why my test-postings for ReadWrite Kanji barely mention the product at all, except at the end.

Have a goal in mind for every post: You can tell my blog isn’t that much more than a hobby because I definately don’t do this.  A lot of my posts are like “Here, I have something to say.  Alright, I said it.  Well, tata, see you later.”  If you are writing a customer focused blog, “Tata, see you later” is a waste of your customer’s time unless its the sort of “See you later” that means “I will pick you up at 7:00 this Friday and I hope you like Pirates of the Carribean because thats the movie we’ll be seeing”.  The sample posts have clear goals: Kanji of the Day wants to be Japanese blogging crack.  I want a portion of the readers who see it to be enlightened and intrigued by that post, and to make a note to themselves “Wow, I want to come back tomorrow, when I will get another kanji to master”.  Studying for the JLPT wants to generate a trial download for ReadWrite Kanji and, perhaps, an authorative mention to a friend or community the reader is a part of: “I saw this post earlier about the 2-kyuu.  Good stuff here!  Check it out.  God I hope I pass.  What was the assignment for tomorrow?”  Notice how I end both posts with a call to action and include relatively little extraneous stuff that could draw folks away from my site.  (Now, one place I’d suggest a link is near the top — folks who are just getting into your article don’t want to click away from it quite yet, so might as well send a kickback to whatever source you’re using and just as imporantly end up on their list of Trackbacks so that they can see this nice person who Cares About What They Have To Say.  Bloggers love that.  I’ve got a soft spot for this, too — probably 70% of the incoming links I get in an article get me to respond to the article in some fashion.)

Offer a mix of content:  You don’t limit yourself to one type of pitch on your AdWords, and you don’t have just one take on your product page, why have a blog which is a one-trick pony?  Experiment, and let people know you’re doing it and offer to engage them in a conversation about what they find useful.  More short posts?  More long posts?  More link roundups from their community?  More “original reporting”/punditry?  Whatever the answer to the question is, the fact that someone is answering means they have an investment in you that they will protect by coming back — you just have to invest in them so that they feel inclined to join the 10% of the world that will ever post a comment, etc.  A regular schedule of content lots of folks find regularly useful with occasional change-ups keeps folks coming back for more, too: Instapundit, for example, is 99% “I find a good article my readers will like and give a pithy 2 sentence summary” and 1%, sporadically, “I demonstrate the penetrating insight that makes folks really love my 2 sentences of pithy commentary enough so that they follow me for years and learn what in-jokes like ‘Heh’ and ‘Indeed’ mean.”  I’m sure if you think about it you can identify the things in any random community you belong to that are the familiar sights of home: “+1 for X” on Business of Software, hot grits, yadda yadda.

And some percentage of the folks who come to your blog every day or every week to check up on what you’ve got to say will read the tasteful, clearly marked ads you’ve got interspersed with the content (maybe thats not the right way to say it — the ads are content by then, because your blog is about things your customers like and find useful and your customers are obviously interested in what you have to sell), and then you get to print money hats.

Or there is the distinct possibility that I have no clue what I’m talking about.  It wouldn’t be the first time.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, got some studying to do.  (P.S. Look, ma, no call to action!  Yep, this blog is going to remain happily unmonetized.)

Comments Off