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Testing a New Marketing Strategy: Email

Posted on July 10, 2009 by in marketing

Since all of the users of BCC online give their email addresses to sign up, I thought I would start with some email marketing.  I’m using MailChimp, chiefly because their website is pretty and I had heard good things about their API.  With the help of the hominid gem it has only taken me about 4 hours to get up and running with my first email.

Emails I’ll be sending:

  • Transactional stuff (lost passwords, purchase confirmations, etc — pretty boring, not through MailChimp)
  • Monthly-ish newsletters, to the people who request them.  Since an absolutely ginormous portion of my business is seasonal, this will let me get in touch with the thousands of users who will sign up before Halloween again at Halloween, and remind them that they can have a great activity ready for only $30.
  • Hints & Tricks: customers who request it will receive a pair of emails, 1 one day after signup and 1 six days after signup.  The first covers basic how-to-use instructions and is just to jog people’s memory that they signed up.  The 2nd is to show some of the more advanced features of BCC and it will probably include a strong suggestion that they buy it… maybe a coupon, too.

The emails run me 2 cents apiece, so I’ll be looking to see if they generate enough marginal business (about 1 sale per every thousand) to justify.  I’m fairly sure I can do at least that well, but we’ll see.  One more lever to optimize…

How To Successfully Compete With Open Source Software

Posted on March 7, 2009 by in marketing, microISV

(This post recently got linked on Japanese blogs.  英語より日本語の方が楽な方：これを和訳しようとしています。日本語版はこちらです。)

Every once in a while, somebody on the Business of Software forums asks whether there is any point to trying to compete with open source software (OSS — essentially, software anyone can use and modify without needing to pay money or receive permission).  This is very possible, as folks such as Joel Spolsky pointed out in the ensuing discussion.    I particularly liked one comment on Hacker News about how to compete as Enterprise software.  However, relatively few people in the discussion mentioned B2C (Business To Consumer — you know, the stuff that isn’t paid for by an expense account) software, which people often tell me is doomed, doomed, doomed.  Seeing as how I run a small B2C software business, and am experiencing a crushing shortage of doom, I thought I would explain why this is possible.

My bona fides: I run Bingo Card Creator, which makes educational bingo cards for teachers and parents.  It is about as B2C as you can get.  Sales last year were in the $20,000 range, sales this year are up substantially, and I expect profits will exceed my day job salary/benefits/etc by the end of April.  I started the business in July 2006, when there were already at least two OSS projects which did roughly the same thing: BingoCardMaker and bingo-cards.  (You can tell we really spend a lot of time thinking about naming in my niche, can’t you.)

Thus, my comments are about the other 99% of OSS projects, the low-profile projects which a) do useful things for people and b) you have never heard of.  All OSS is not Firefox in the same way that all proprietary software is not Microsoft Office.

I like OSS, too: I make extensive use of OSS in my business and at my day job.  I routinely contribute code to projects, OSS my own software when it makes competitive sense (you can download my shopping cart), and generally love the stuff.  I don’t see OSS and proprietary software as existential threats to each other.

Thus, when I give developers advice on how to compete with OSS, its not in the sense that I want to trample over the movement’s corpse, burn their homes, and hear the lamentations of their women.  I just believe in getting people to the right tools for the right problems, and often, that tool is going to cost money.  (Nothing wrong with that!)

Places Where Software Developers Can Outdo OSS:

1)  Marketing

Software solves problems.  Customers have problems.  Customers do not know that their problems are sometimes solvable with software.

Less than 1% of customers perceive their problem as a software problem: Whether your software makes bingo cards or drafts table plans or helps people improve their poker game, all it is doing is helping someone get around a problem they had long before they sat down at the computer.  After getting frustrated with their existing attempted solution to the problem, they probably Googled something pretty generic like [how do I make bingo cards].  Empirically, only about 800 people out of the 147,000 who found me from Google in the last year were specifically looking for software.  Add in another 1,600 who were looking for a download, and that’s still 97% who had a bingo problem, not a software problem.

OSS concentrates on the software, not the problems the software can solve: Take a look at an OSS site, any OSS site.  You’ll see a whole lot of talking about the software, the implementation of the software, the source code for the software, how you can contribute to the software, etc.  You’ll almost never see anything about the problem domain — the assumption is that, if you’ve stumbled upon the site, you already know you have a software problem.  

If your marketing is premised around your user knowing they have a software problem, you won’t SEO to capture people looking for solutions for the issues in their problem domains.  Your evangelists will talk with other people who are enthusiastic about software, not with people who consider software about as intrinsically interesting as toasters.  (Many of my most enthusiastic customers despise every minute of using their computers.  They put up with it because it gets them back to their kids faster than any non-computer alternative.)

2) Design

OSS projects, particularly the 99% that are relevant to this discussion, routinely do not allocate resources to creating attractive designs.  For whatever reason, opened source graphical work is still rather rare, most developers (myself included) have the artistic skill of inept mole rats, and the obvious pay-somebody-who-does-it-better solution runs into the problem that the typical OSS project has no budget and no patience to deal with “unfree” licenses, which are the only kind commercially available stock icons have.

This results in a lot of OSS software looking something like:

That design is nice and clean.  However, it looks like the properties dialog box in Eclipse — lots of functionality optimized for packing as many things onto one screen as possible.  There is little thought given to incorporating color into the design, giving the program its own logo or visual identity, or arranging the 13 controls in a user-centric fashion.  Even with those criticisms, this is a good design for OSS software.  I have seen far, far worse.  But we could do so much better, and when we have an incentive to, we do.

The importance of design: I don’t personally use Macs but I think everyone in B2C software needs to take lessons from Apple and the Mac community.  They have proven, again and again, that people will pay a premium for products which are attractive.  Often in B2C the first glimpse of the software makes the sale and everything after that is just justifying to the customer that their gut decision was the right one.  (Same with publishing, incidentally: people really do judge books based on their cover.)

Example: I doubled sales of Bingo Card Creator waaaaay back in August 2006 by adding some more attractive stock icons to it than the fairly staid Java icons I had been using previously.  (That first link has the before/after shots if you want to see it.) 

The workflow is fundamentally different than BingoCardMaker (more about that later), but you can see that this design makes use of bright, pleasing colors.  (Its absolutely amazing how a few bucks worth of icons makes a bog-standard Swing app look so little like a Swing app, isn’t it?)  This is more inviting to the primarily non-technical users who make up the core of my market: it promises to be fun, not painful, to use.

3)  User Experience

“User experience” is easiest to define as “that touchy-feely stuff that Apple does really freaking well”.  The more formal description is that all stages of interaction with the software — from downloading it, to installing it, to using it the first time, to using it the 400th time, and all points in between — should induce joy and contentment, not frustration and rage.

Here’s a bit of homework: find yourself a non-technical person.  Tell them the name of a piece of software on, say, Sourceforge.  Then tell them to download and run it.  Stay in the room but don’t help with completion of the task.

This is so frustrating to most users that the test should probably not be allowed by the human subjects board at most universities.  Somebody might get killed.

Here’s a true story for you.  BingoCardMaker supports one feature which my program does not (picture bingo cards), and which I have no intentions of adding, despite the fact that it is the most requested feature by far.  Accordingly, I used to tell customers who needed that feature “I’m very sorry I can’t help you, but this software can — why don’t you try it?” and I would direct them straight to the download page.

One customer (who is by no means unintelligent) was furious because she spent fifteen minutes on the page unsuccessfully trying to download before deciding it was broken.  Here’s the section of the page: can you tell me what went wrong?

Those words architecture or operating system are pretty confusing, but the word “download” is not.  My customer knew she had to “download”.  So she clicked it, and “the screen blinked away”.  (Clicking download takes you to a list of packages published by the product — totally obvious to a non-technical user, right?)  Then she got back and clicked on options, figuring that it would offer “options for downloading”, but nothing she clicked there worked either.  Finally, frustration mounting rapidly, she clicked Bingo Card Maker because that was what she wanted… and the screen “blinked” again.  (It collapses the tree of options for that package, causing the BingoCardMaker-5.5.1.jar link to vanish.  That link is the one you have to click.  This is quite obvious if you are a Java developer — not quite so obvious if you hold a PhD in English Literature.)

Do not bury the goal: I should mention that if you’re coming from the project page at Sourceforge, the above is three clicks deep after clicking download.  By comparison, downloading Bingo Card Creator takes one click for most people — its the big, blue button that says Download Free Trial.  Folks whose browsers don’t support that are showed the following: 

That was once described as “big pancake buttons” by one of the international developers on the Business of Software forums, and the name sort of stuck.  Pancake buttons work.  They are far, far, far more effective at helping users complete their task (downloading the software) that unobtrusive text links or smaller download buttons — the pancake buttons outperformed by smaller buttons by a factor of 3, and those buttons were themselves much improved successors of my original buttons which had outperformed plain text links by a factor of two.

Wow, it sounds that I’m saying that most prospective users of OSS can’t even manage to download it.  Let me be clear: that is exactly what I am saying.  It isn’t their fault — when our users can’t use our software (and websites are just a special case of software), that means we have failed in our jobs, whether we’re proprietary or OSS developers.  

On to installation: User experience scarcely ends with the download.  Oh no, the opportunities to frustrate and enrage are just beginning!  For example, that JAR file they just downloaded got dumped in a downloads folder somewhere and… well… that is about it.  To execute it, you need to be able to find your downloads folder and double click on it.  The next time you want to execute it, you have to do that again.

By comparison, if you were downloading Bingo Card Creator, you’d get a prompt from your browser asking if you wanted to run it.  It would then take you through a Windows installer which, in a very simple fashion with sensible defaults, would put links on your desktop and start menu to the program, then start it up for you.  At no point do you have to learn any irrelevant trivia like “JAR files are special things created by Java which are sort of like programs, except when they aren’t, and sometimes double clicking on them runs them, except when it causes nasty errors.”

There is a JAR file sitting at the heart of Bingo Card Creator, too — and if my users need to know that then I have failed.  Incidentally, if you do desktop Java development for Windows, please use JET or Launch4j or something.  Java developers deploying to Mac should use the JAR bundler.  (You can even do this from a Windows machine with an OSS ant task.  It is a lifesaver for all of us committed Vista users who need to deploy to OS X.)

User Experience never ends: All interaction with your program, with your site, with your community has user experience implications.  There are many, many opportunities to flub it.  I can’t cover all of them in this article, but I hope to expand on ways to not flub them at a later date.

4) Speaking the users’ language

In keeping with the “Users do not have a software problem” and “Users do not care about your technology choices” points covered above, users fundamentally do not talk like developers.  See this description for one of my OSS competitors:

GPL bingo card printing program (numeric, letter bingo and picture bingo). Also prints a calling sequence (equivalent to the output from a barrel full of balls). XML output for later linking to multimedia engine.

Let’s try that again with the technobabble removed:

GPL bingo card printing program (numeric, letter bingo and picture bingo). Also prints a calling sequence (equivalent to the output from a barrel full of balls). XML output for later linking to multimedia engine.

Those two surviving sentence fragments are all the publicly available description of this program.  Yep, that’s it.  You might have heard that OSS is weak on documentation?  That is only a problem if there is enough of a reason to suspect that the program will work for you in the first place, and two sentences is probably not enough to do it.

I want to quote a real customer of mine, who captures the B2C mindset about installing software very eloquently: “Before I download yet another program to my poor old computer, could you let me know if I can…”  Painful experience has taught this woman that downloading software to her computer is a risky activity.  Your website, in addition to making this process totally painless, needs to establish to her up-front the benefits of using your software and the safety of doing so.  (Communicating safety could be an entire article in itself.)

Incidentally, the Internet sucks the literacy out of people, so be prepared to explain the same thing several times to get the message across.  The most common question I have is “Is every bingo card unique?”  Yep, they’re randomized — that is the only reason you’d use the program and that feature has been the core of it since v1.0.  That fact is mentioned twice in bold on my front page, printed on the main UI of the program itself, etc.  And people still manage to ignore all that, find my email address, and ask me.  

Can you imagine how confused users would be if key features were documented only in blog postings distilled from commit logs, and present nowhere on the product site itself?

(I’m looking at you, Rails.)

5) Support

If you’ve been around OSS for any length of time, you know that almost every community has members who are caring, helpful, and patient.  Unfortunately, they’re not the only people handling support.  I get a lot of questions which sound something like “I clicked the button and it didn’t work” or “plz help can’t print” or “I downloaded the program to my printer and now my screen is grey.  Did you give me a virus?”

(If you don’t understand the significance of the screen being grey, look at the photo here.)

You can probably imagine how well those would go over on the typical OSS mailing list.  To say nothing of basic computer operation questions like “I bought a new computer last week and need to put your software on it.  What do I need to do?  Its not the old computer, which has your software on it, its a new computer.”

Most customers with B2C software — in my experience, about 95% as of late — don’t actually need to ask a question of you, ever.  You can handle all of their needs with well-thought-out automatic processes, FAQs, help files, rigorous improvement of any part of the software that routinely causes confusion, and the like.  However, users like know that there is someone who will be happy to help them out if they need it.  That is the main purpose of offering customer support — decreasing the perceived risk of using your software by demonstrating that there is a safety net.  (This is one reason you should write your support page with an eye to it being seen by someone who isn’t even using your software.)

6)  Technical superiority

You’ll notice I’ve been concentrating mostly on the 90% of the software busines that happens outside of the IDE.  However, there is no reason to assume that OSS is superior on a technical front, either.  I know, a million eyes makes all bugs shallow, yadda yadda yadda.  Back in my reality:

  • the median number of developers per OSS project hosted on Sourceforge is 1. 
  • Perhaps one project in five will ever leave beta.
  • All software has bugs, OSS is no exception.
  • The average software, commercial or OSS, is a usability nightmare.
  • Many programs have not been updated in years and lack the benefit of significant improvements in the state of the art made recently, from modern interface design to first-class integration with the Internet.  
  • Some OSS tries to be everything for everybody and ignores niche markets with pressing specific issues.  
  • Other OSS is hyper-adapted to the problems of a handful of developers scratching their own itches and is unusable by anyone with other requirements.

In other words, you can compete with OSS on a technical level the same way you compete with proprietary software on a technical level: execute better.  There’s really no magic to that.

Conclusion

All of these are opportunities for commercial developers to compete with OSS.  

The world is changing all the time, but plain-ol’ commercial desktop software still has a place in it.  Don’t get worried — concentrate on doing what you do well, from development to marketing to support, and the market will take care of the rest.

If you found this article interesting, try looking around the blog or signing up for the RSS feed.  There’s a lot more where this came from.

Steph Grenier On Generating Traffic For Your Website

Posted on March 20, 2008 by in marketing, microISV, SEO

I think I mentioned that I don’t really like ebooks the last time I reviewed one.  Please incorporate that total hatred by reference here.  Nonetheless, I gave that ebook, which was written by a professional colleague, an unreservedly positive review, because I sincerely think it will help many of my readers sell software.

Now I’m in sort of a conundrum — I received a copy of another e-book to review.  I respect the author greatly.  The other author who I already gave a positive review to praised the e-book lavishly.  So what’s my problem?

Well, frankly, I can’t imagine the book being all that useful to you, with the exception of three pages that are absolutely dynamite.  (It very well might be useful to some folks who don’t read this blog.  Why write a review for them, though?)

The story in 60 seconds: Steph Grenier of LandLordMax  wrote an e-book on How To Generate Traffic To Your Website.  (I also contributed a chapter to a real on-dead-tree book that Steph is getting published later this year.  The project is unrelated.)  The e-book includes 136 pages, with quite a few full-page annoted screen captures of Google.  We’ll call it about 120 pages of content, in which he covers 11 chapters, from SEO to Blogging to AdWords.

If you do the math there, that is about 11 pages per subject.  Now, supposing you were trying to explain blogging in 11 pages or less to someone who had never heard of the concept before, what do you think you could write before running out of space?

Well, maybe a good introduction to blogging for someone who is never heard of it.

And that is, in a nutshell, what about 95% of the e-book is.  A good introduction to SEO, AdWords, or blogging, for someone who has never heard of the topic.  At all.  If you have done any significant reading on the topics, this e-book will not teach you much that you don’t know.

Example excerpt from the chapter on Blogging:

[One reason why to blog is that it] can personalize your business. Instead of being just another faceless website it can give your website a second personality. It can give it that personal touch that people like. A lot of sales are through emotions, and people like to connect with people they like and trust. If you’re honest and real on your blog, and not just writing what you think people want to hear, you’ll create a personal bond with your customers. This will create long term traffic.

That paragraph is true.  It is fairly well-written.  It just doesn’t teach you anything you don’t already know if you habitually read blogs.  If you have ever read a blog post about why to blog, which are legion, you know it already.  If you already have a blog, you know this in your bones.  This section is also representative of the depth this book goes into on almost all subjects.  If you’re a non-technical small business owner who reads email but isn’t quite hip on this whole Internet thing yet, you might well learn quite a bit from this chapter.  If you’re running an ISV, this is almost certainly going to be akin to having a computer programmer sit through a middle school Algebra I lecture (“OK, class, I’m going to introduce a deep concept — sometimes, instead of a number, you can do math using a letter!  We call this a variable.”)

Topic Selection

I’m somewhat interested in SEO and linkbait, as long time readers of this blog know.  I really can’t recommend the chapter on SEO that much — if you have read almost anything on the subject you already know everything written here, and the topic selection leaves much to be desired.  For example, it covers Keyword Density (a metric which is, frankly, useless because it leads to no actionable insights on how to write your pages) at multi-page length.  Meanwhile, it almost ignores methods of getting links.  (Which is a shame, because this would have been a great time to mention the next section.) 

Three Pages I Really Loved

Pages 52-54 are, far and away, the best part of the book.  It provides a case study (incredibly rare in this book — most of it is basic techniques unconnected with any real examples) of how Steph used a free calculator on his website to double his traffic.  If this had been written elsewhere in the book, the level of detail would have been something like:

Freebies do attract traffic. Unfortunately it’s not always good traffic, some people will only come for the freebies and leave, but many will also stay and re-visit your website in the future (and possibly tell others about it). If you’re a blogger, they may read your other blog posts, buy your services, etc. If you’re a company they may look through your website for other interesting pages, they may tell others about what they found, etc. Freebies have always been a great way to attract attention and traffic. The key is how well you can convert the traffic coming from the freebies.

(Actually, the chapter on Freebies does start out like that.  Nothing you didn’t know already.)  But when grounded in the case study, the chapter suddenly becomes much more useful.  It examines the calculator from multiple points of view — promoting the freebie (which I’d call linkbait, incidentally, and mention REPEATEDLY in the SEO chapter because I will *guarantee* you this did more good for Steph than all his metatags could ever hope for) with a press release, for example.  If the entire book was like these three pages I’d be telling everybody I knew to go out and buy it today, but sadly they are an anomaly.

A Trend I’m Not That Fond Of

One of the reasons I hate e-books is they have a distressing tendency to turn into MLM schemes, with folks writing e-books to promote e-books to…  you get the general idea.  So when I see affiliate links in an e-book, that generally sends my spidersense tingling.  It means that the reader is paying for the privilege of reading an advertisement.  Moreover, unlike say an advertisement in your favorite magazine, rather than being adjacent to the content and clearly marked as not influencing the editorial judgement, these these affiliate ads are built into the content.  Example:

Today what we’ll attempt to do is give you an overview of the most effective SEO techniques at your disposal. I can’t hope to cover everything SEO related, there’s too much material. Indeed, I’d recommend the SEO Bookby Aaron Wall as further reading. I bought his EBook about 2 years ago and I still continue to personally reference it as a great resource. And as new SEO techniques surface and others expire, Aaron continues to update his EBook.

I broke that link intentionally.  Now, SEOBook is a great resource, I’ll agree.  I joined Aaron Wall’s (the author’s) training program for $100 a month, and feel I have gotten enough out of it to justify my first month (ask me about the second in another month).  But if you had found the chapter on SEO a little lacking in the useful detail department, and clicked on that link to go from the beginners’ class to the intermediate one, you’d have caused Steph to pretty much double his money on selling the book to you. 

This troubles me — not because making money on the Internet is a bad thing or anything, but once you start down this road, it becomes difficult for the reader to differentiate between the advice that you’re giving because it is solid advice and the advice you are giving because it offers a solid commission.

Similarly, Bob’s review also uses affiliate links for both Steph’s book and the inline reference to SEOBook.  And we’re off to the Internet Marketing races.  Instead of focusing on selling products of value to customers, we start down the merry path of cannibalizing members of our community for revenue by selling them on the dream of being a successful uISV.  They, in turn, then get to make money by selling the same products to other folks dreaming of being successful uISVs.  Who get to sell the same products to others hoping to be uISVs.  Instead of being an involved community of software entrepeneurs, it would be a community of MLM hucksterism, which does not bring value to anyone and doesn’t generate any revenue from outside the pyramid.

This concern is why I don’t put affiliate links on my site.  Keep in mind that I have the utmost respect for both Steph and Bob, I just think this trend is not in the long-term best interests of this community.

Review In Ten Seconds

Steph Grangier: great guy, successful uISV.  This book: not so hot for most uISVs.  If you buy it: save time, read and implement pages 52 to 54.

Google Features Bingo Card Creator

Posted on January 24, 2008 by in AdWords, marketing

I’m sorry, this post was due a week ago but I have been a combination of sick and busy.

Regular readers of this blog might remember that, around September, I started using Conversion Optimizer on my Content Network campaign and had a lot of successwith it.  My success came to the attention of the project manager for marketing Conversion Optimizer, and after a bit of discussion we agreed to cooperate in the production of a case study.  Google published that case study fairly recently — it doesn’t include much that you didn’t already read in the above posts and the followup, but it might be interesting to see how their take on it is subtly different than my take on it.  You’ll note, for one thing, that they don’t mention that the prevailing view of the the Content Network is that it is a “hive of scum and villainy”.  I can’t imagine why.

I don’t have definitive knowledge as to why Google chose to select me for the case study.  I have theories, though.  The first was that I took an early lead in staking out the topic area when it was released, and it made excellent sense for Google to talk to someone who was already ranking high for their own product name.  It couldn’t have hurt that I was largely positive and transparently willing to share the exact statistics, which is great for someone who doesn’t want to waste their time going through 15 levels of corporate officers and ultimately failing to get the go-ahead to release the numbers.

I also think that authenticity mattered.  On an Internet which is chock-full of scam artists and folks wanting to make a fast buck at others’ expense, you can stand out pretty easily just by bucking the trend.  If you have 15 competitors and you’re the only one who is radically transparent about your business, then for many opportunities you have no competitors.  You’re sailing in a Blue Ocean, and you’re the only ship there is, from one side of the horizon to the other. 

I think uISVs should make use of this, not necessarily by being radically transparent, but by running businesses which stick out because they are meant to stick out.  The software can be cloned, the keyword lists duplicated, the advertising imitated, but no one has come up with a copy machine which can Xerox the soul of an organization that has one.  If your differentiating factor is a sense of humor, fanatical devotion to customer support, personal expertise in your domain, an emotional connection to your niche, or just the bare fact of being the little guy, that helps you stand out in a sea of mediocrity. 

OK, that is enough of the theorizing.  So, further thoughts on Conversion Optimizer: it still rocks.  I pay about 24 cents for trial downloads from the Content Network these days and, after someone corrected my mistaken impression that you couldn’t use it for search, my search campaign has had a solid three months below 30 cents (which was my gold-standard for execution back when I was hand optimizing).  This has also freed up well in excess of four hours a month, which I have been using to convalesce (boo!) and plot my next improvements to my website (yay!).  I really can’t recommend it enough.

Full disclosure: Google gave me a laptop bag as a thank-you gift for participating in this case study.  Some folks might think that compromises my objectivity.  I don’t think it compromises it nearly as much as helping me make a few thousand bucks, because that buys me an awful lot of laptop bags.  (Although those wouldn’t get me stopped at customs — “Oh, you work for Google!?  ARE YOU FEELING LUCKY?!  Sorry, sorry, I tried to make a joke.  Was it funny?”  Frankly, we need more good bad jokes to pass the time at airport security.)

Fantastic Article on SEO For Bloggers

Posted on November 28, 2007 by in marketing, SEO

This article on SEO for bloggers is just amazing.  I highly recommend anyone with a blog who doesn’t already consider them past the intermediate stage on SEO read it.  I recommend absolutely everyone read the followup on how the original article was designed and marketed as a stunningly effective piece of linkbait.  (Some might say that this makes the original article cynical.  I disagree — it was and is very useful to many people, and there is no reason you shouldn’t promote things which are useful to your audience for your mutual benefit.  Rails is another project which has proven that just because you’re professionally marketed and designed to go viral doesn’t mean you have to suck.)

If you’re interested in SEO for bloggers, the author of that piece and I will both be contributing chapters to Steph’s book on blogging.  You might find them of interest.  If Steph lets me I’ll post an early excerpt from my chapter as an early Christmas present to you all.

P.S. Speaking of Christmas, I know you want to play Christmas bingo with your family, right? 

Putting the Green in Evergreen

Posted on November 18, 2007 by in blogging, marketing, SEO

If you have a post which ranks very highly for a particular query of high value to you, you can use it to springboard additional products in conceptually related spaces. 

Most blogs which add value are eventually going to have a few evergreen posts.  An “evergreen” puts the lie to blogs being a medium which only covers breaking news and the controversies of the day — they keep producing value forever, typically by ranking highly for search terms of consequence.  However, as evergreens age you can find that, while they still provide value to your business, they tend to gradually fall in the search engine rankings and become less and less useful at achieving your business objectives.

You can get a lot of value out of a nice, aged evergreen post.  My best example of this is Free Bingo Cards, which ranks extraordinarily highly for, uh, [free bingo cards].  It is #2 on Yahoo and in the top 10 on Google, and gets about 2.5k hits a month.  Not shabby.  That is about 1/4 of the hits my Bingo Card Creator site gets, and I promote that relentlessly whereas the hits just roll on in for that post.  (This is largely thanks to several of my blogging buddies who, without me asking for it, linked it when it came out.  It collects links on an ongoing basis too from my users — in the Internet and in most economic activity, winners win.)

Left alone, Free Bingo Cards would gradually slip from 2.5k hits a month to 1.5k hits a month or so, and while that would still be a hundred dollars or so in marginal revenue there are higher and better uses.  For example, I recently launched Daily Bingo Cards and have been desperately seeking a method to get it a core group of early users to spread the word for me.  Hard to get visitors without ranking, hard to get ranking without links, hard to get links without visitors — it’s a vicious cycle. 

I learned around Halloween that if I edited Free Bingo Cards to include both topical information in addition to the material that has been on it forever, it would both be refreshed in the SERPs (extending shelf-life — new info must mean relevance, right?) and give me a stream of traffic to strategically redirect to my new project, to get it off of the ground.  I did this for Halloween and got several hundred visitors, including about five folks who most be as hardcore about bingo as any raider is about WoW, to judge by their usage patterns.  (Now if only more of them blogged about it, too.)  I’m doing it for Thanksgiving as well, and it has been working out well so far.

Here is a hint which I’ve learned through CrazyEgg’ing every page I have access to: the first link in any long bit of content gets the lion’s share of the clicks.  The search engines are biased towards content earlier on the page, too, but not nearly as much as searchers.  Thus, if you want to deck out an evergreen without worrying about losing its wonderful aroma, I’d suggest adding a simple paragraph at the top with a link in it.  Presto-changeo, you now have a steady stream of traffic for any related project you currently have on your plate.

Obviously, you will not want to use this to send traffic to an unrelated page.  Non-motivated traffic is worthless to you, and you’re not developing the sort of repeat users that you want for your site(s).

Developing Linkbait For a Non-Technical Audience

Posted on October 21, 2007 by in marketing, SEO

Meet The Linkerati 

The old computer science joke has it that there are 10 kinds of people in the world: those that understand binary, and those that don’t.  There are 10 kinds of people on the Internet, too: those that link, and those that don’t.  Those that link are called the Linkerati, and they have the power to make your business vast sums of money, if only you show them the way.  This post is a wee bit theoretical, a wee bit how-do, and a wee bit of a direct inducement to the Linkerati themselves.  Or, as my college friends would say, “Dude, its, like, meta.”  I promise that they were not under the influence when they said things like that, unless postmodern theory counts as an intoxicant (then again, it probably should).

The Linkerati (what a wonderful word — I believe it was coined in an amazing blog post at SEOMoz which you should read) is the fragment of the online community which disseminates ideas.  I’m a Linkerati — look at us, here I am telling you to go read an amazing blog post and, what’s more, because you trust me and you trust my judgement you’re probably inclined to go off and do it.  Linkerati use Digg, Reddit, and the other social services.  Linkerati own blogs.  At the shallower end of the pool, they IM their friends and email their colleagues links.  They are tremendously influential online, owing to the biggest Linkerati of them all: Google.  Offline, perhaps you would call them “opinion shapers” or “early adopters”.

Google orders its search pages based on a variety of factors, and between the meta tags and URL structure and inbound links they all boil down to this: trust.  Trust is the currency of the web and the currency of SEO.  Linkerati gain trust from their circles of Internet friends, from the one-on-one message in an AIM window to the blogger with a million RSS subscribers, and Google sees physical artifacts of trust (i.e. links) and attributes a bit of that stored trust to the guy on the other end of the link.  This results in you getting higher positioning in the search results for keywords of interest to you, and that translates pretty much directly into money in your pocket.

So what does this have to do with linkbait?

Linkbait is, simply, the act of putting something online to influence the Linkerati.  Typically the desired action is to get them to link to it, write about it, talk it up with their friends, etc.  People who are much smarter and more effective than I am have talked about doing linkbait for the Digg demographic to death.  You know who I’m talking about: 16-24 years old, male, plays World of Warcraft, owns an iPod, can’t tell you what Steve Ballmer’s title is but know he once threw a chair in a meeting, yadda yadda.  This article won’t talk about them because, frankly, they’re not too valuable to me. 

Linkbait For The Rest of Us

I sell simple software which makes bingo cards for elementary school teachers.  Teaching eight year olds to read is crashingly dull to the Digg demographic.  My target demographic is older, 90%+ female, highly well educated, and as a bit of a generalization not extraordinarily technically-minded.  There are Linkerati in my demographic, though.  The challenge is reaching them.

When I was just starting out, I created a few pages of free resources which I knew would appeal to teachers, in the hope that they would come across them and pass them around to folks they knew.  This worked well, but there were some stumbling blocks: because I was engaged in laboriously hand-crafting the free resources, I only ever produced about a dozen of them, and they could be consumed in a single browsing session.  Indeed, 60% of the visitors to my site flitted out within seconds after finding what they were looking for (such as Dolch sight word lists, for example), most never to return.  So one of the main goals of my linkbait project was to make it sticky — to have something which screams to the primordial teacher soul I want to come back here.  Most things which are good enough to come back to are worth recommending to your friends, after all.

Positioning:

Linkbait needs to quickly communicate its value both to the general user and to the Linkerati.  Both demographics consume Internet content at quite a clip and if you can’t grab them in the first thirty seconds you have probably lost them.  Accordingly, you want to have a positioning for your linkbait which informs everything you do: its more than a title, it is the core essence of what you are offering boiled down to a thought fragment.

Ideally, I would love teachers to come visit me daily.  Thus the positioning: Daily Bingo Cards.

Those are three simple words which quickly get across what I am offering: it’s bingo cards, and you want to come back tomorrow because there will be new ones tomorrow!  (Note that I just took 17 words to explain a concept covered in 3 words.  This is why I abandoned my childhood dreams of becoming a newspaper columnist.)

Build Something Remarkable: 

So you’ve got something which grabs the attention of your targeted Linkerati in the first thirty seconds.  Now you’ve got to get over the hump of getting them to burn a wee bit of their trust with their audience and link to you.  You  do that by providing them something of value which they can’t get elsewhere. 

Back when I was starting out, “something of value” was free bingo card activities and free word lists.  Those are indeed valuable to my niche.  However, they’re not very remarkable — the Internet is full of them, and if the selection at a particular site is limited to a half-dozen you can decide “Eh, not quite what I was looking for” in an instant.  What took “Eh” to “Yeah!” was the decision to take things to an industrial scale.  The idea hit me when I was coming home on the train: what if, instead of handcrafting each set of cards and each page myself, I could somehow create hundreds of cards, for hundreds of activities, of every type and description.  That is, after all, what Bingo Card Creator is all about: an infinite diversity of possible lessons (well, as long as the lesson includes a bingo game), made quick and easy. 

So I created a system to automate the production of web pages about the resources, and I hired a team of freelancers to help me write good word lists.  That let me scale from 15 word lists (what I was able to write myself in a year — obviously not fully devoted to this one aspect of my business) to 70 word lists at launch and a new word list, you guessed it, daily.  (I suppose I could have dribbled them out one at a time, in keeping with the name of the site.  However, why waste the first two months having a site with a handful of word lists when I can just scale straight to the point where the site is remarkable?  No need for foolish consistency when fudging the name a bit makes life better for everyone.) 

The general idea is to so overwhelm my visitor with abundance that they think “Wow, I can’t possibly take it all in right now, but I’m going to remember this place because its sure to come in handy later!” 

On Breadth over Depth:

Like I mentioned, there are hundreds of free bingo activities on the Internet.  Most are collected in ones and twos scattered across a variety of sites, from the extraordinarily influential to the smallest Mrs. Smith’s First Grade Class Home Page.  For some microniches, like Halloween Bingo Cards, the search rankings are quite competitive.  For others, like Astronomy Bingo Cards, they are not competitive at all.  You mark my words, I’ll be in the top 3 on Google for that phrase in a matter of days or weeks.  And I’ll stay there for, well, probably forever, happily picking up a wee little trickle of search engine traffic.  Multiply a wee little trickle by hundreds of parallel pages and it isn’t a trickle anymore.

That is, in my humble opinion, the secret which differentiates linkbait for non-technical audience from linkbait for the Digg crowd.  The Digg crowd has the attention span of an ADHD squirrel on illegal substances and has negative a billion interest in yesterday’s news, with the possible exception of classic Nintendo games. 

You can practically write a mathematical formula for the number of links a post on Digg gets you: 2D/ r  * L, where D is the number of Diggs received, r is the ratio of people visiting to people Digging (so 1/r has the effect of multiplying — incidentally, a ballpark figure is r=.01), and L is how linkable the site is (think a lot less than L=.0001, typically). 

Note the term that isn’t present: time.  Very few Digg posts are relevant 48 hours later.  However, people will play Halloween Bingo in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, etc etc.  That page will essentially never get old.  It will just continue quietly helping searchers out, collecting links, and making me money.  It is an evergreen of value.  If you have a non-technical audience, you are in the evergreen farming business.  Plant them, water them, and watch them grow.    

Of Snowflakes and Snowballs:

Earlier on my blog I talked about snowflake queries, the totally unique but still generalizable search engine queries that comprise the Long Tail of search.  There might only be one teacher in the world searching for “4th grade astronomy bingo” (and, if so, she downloaded Bingo Card Creator yesterday).  However, presenting her with an entire site full of things tangentially related to the thing which directly stimulates her interests might induce her to link to it, or otherwise recommend it.  That link to that one individual resource lifts all of the other pages on the site a wee little bit, and in turn as they rise in the rankings they will attract links themselves, and eventually the site is not a collection of a hundred snowflakes, it is a massive snowball speeding downhill.  It might never be in the top 5 for the competitive “bingo cards” search (I actually hope not — I would hate to out-compete myself!) but it will roll over and crush sites which are not trusted or particularly optimized on those Long Tail queries.  That attracts motivated potential prospects directly to my product.

Shouldn’t You Put This On Your Main Site? 

If the goal of linkbait is to get hundreds of inbound links, it would certainly make a lot of sense to put it on your main site.  I didn’t, this time, largely to have the freedom to play around with Daily Bingo Cards without worrying about jeaprodizing the business proper.  You see, it is possible to over-do on-page SEO, and I’m probably coming pretty close to the line.   Consider my Halloween bingo cards page:

  • Title is “Halloween Bingo Cards”
  • H1 tag is “Halloween Bingo Cards”
  • Halloween Bingo Cards is bolded
  • The word “Halloween” is on the page six times
  • The alt tag for the image mentions, yep, Halloween bingo cards
  • The URL for the image does, too
  • Did I mention the URL is http://www.dailybingocards.com/bingo-cards/holidays/halloween ?

Yeah, I might be pushing it just a wee bit.  Then again, the page really is about Halloween Bingo Cards, and hopefully Google’s algorithms will understand and appreciate that, rather than deciding “Oh, he is a spammer not contributing value, let us put him in the supplemental index”.  Links from real people are one way to get trusted enough to avoid that.

Should I step over and get all those results kicked out of the main index by Google, I really don’t want that to cost me $1,000 a month.  Six months from now, if the site takes off, I can always 301 redirect it to a subdomain of my main site.

Make It Linkable:

Help the Linkerati link to your site.  The very first barrier is making sure it can be linked to — putting linkbait behind a sign-on or on a page which requires a session ID means you fail, period.  The second barrier, and one which trips up a lot of people, is giving the page a good, accessible URL.

What does accessible mean?  Well, here is a wonderful article by Bob Walsh, who I’m only picking on because he is generally brilliant, is a professional colleague, and has mentioned a few times that he doesn’t get why this is a big deal:

http://www.47hats.com/?p=476

Now quick, without actually reading it, tell me what that article is about.  Kind of a tough task, right?  But that is exactly the kind of link you get when a non-technical person just copies and pastes the link into their blog or IM window, and it tells their audience nothing useful.  You don’t feel any need to go read it right now and miss out on this article, right? 

Now, without clicking on this link, tell me what it offers you:

http://www.dailybingocards.com/bingo-cards/people-and-careers/celebrities

Not a very hard task, is it?  Not only can you tell what is there (hey, bingo cards!  And about what?  Celebrities!  Celebrity Bingo Cards!), but Google and the other search engines give major weight to the words printed in the URL.  Better for your users, better for the Linkerati, better for the search engines — take the extra time to make pretty URLs, you will be happy you did.

As an added bonus, those URLs work exactly how the folder metaphor on the computer has taught people to think that they work: chop off celebrities and you get

http://www.dailybingocards.com/bingo-cards/people-and-careers/

which, like you would expect, gets you bingo cards about People and Careers.  Chop off people and careers, and you get bunches and bunches of Bingo Cards sorted into categories, letting you build your way back to an individual card.  How I did this is an interesting little implementation detail which I will cover in another article later.  (Since that little implementation detail is specific to Ruby on Rails, whose community is absolutely overflowing with Linkerati, I’ll put that article actually on the Daily Bingo Cards site and promote it directly within the community.  Win for them, they learn a good way to improve their own websites, win for me, I get free link juice.)

(Sidenote: If you run WordPress but your URLs look less than helpful, you can do something similar for yourself in thirty seconds: log into your control panel, click Options, click Permalinks, and select “Date and Name based” then hit confirm.  Presto-changeo, instant link readability.)

Grease the skids for repeat visitors:

I want people to bookmark my site and send it to the friends.  Adding “Bookmark this site!” and “Save to del.icio.us” buttons at appropriate places was very easy, and my copy actively encourages folks to come back tomorrow.  Did you know every save on del.icio.us is worth a (minor) inbound link?  I sure wouldn’t mind ending up on the popular bingo card page, and the barrier to getting there (precisely BECAUSE the delicious-using teacher population is tiny) is pretty low.  All I need to do is make a website, add in a dash of discrete text links, and let simmer for a few months.

Promotion:

If a tree falls in a forest but no one is around to hear it… I forget how the rest of that quote goes, but I am pretty sure it does not continue “then the Linkerati will blog about it”.  Just putting up a site about Daily Bingo Cards doesn’t mean anyone will actually visit it.  However, and here is the meta part of the blog post, I happen to have a decently well-read blog which has many blogging readers and many more transient searching visitors looking for things like Free Bingo Cards.  And if you want free bingo cards, well, you know where to get them!  That is enough to get my snowball rolling… but why do things by half measures.

  • Prepare a sitemap for Google and the other engines (they crawled me on the same day I submitted one, and I’m already in the index for at least the term Daily Bingo Cards (#1), with exactly ONE inbound link in the entire world prior to this post).
  • Talk to your existing customers.  I suppose I technically could mail the 400 people who bought Bingo Card Creator in the last year and say “Hey, I love you guys!  Here is a site full of free bingo cards which you can use with Bingo Card Creator.  Enjoy!”  However, I promised not to spam them and that is pushing it.  I came up with a compromise — when they get bugged to update their software to Bingo Card Creator 2.0 (which includes the daily bingo lists), the page the upgrade takes place on will mention the site and suggest they link to it.
  •   Use niche social sites — like Digg, for people who don’t find 37 Improbable Devices To Run Linux On to be very interesting.   For example, there is a site called qoolsqool.com which is, against allexpectations, actually populated by educators.  I’ll be typing up a brief entry there.  Then a Squidoo lens, yadda yadda you get the drill.
  • Blog it.  It helps if you have readers already, happily, I do.  The “secret” to that is basically linkbait writ small: produce things of value, repeat at regular intervals.

Ditch the ads:

An acquaintance of mine suggested I put AdSense ads on Daily Bingo Cards.  I can’t see how this could possibly be worthwhile: first, to have decently performing AdSense ads you have to either a) have a site which functions as a glorified search engine or b) break your site so that people want to leave it as quickly as possible.  This is not compatible with my overarching strategy, to get people to come back tomorrow!  Much of the Linkerati is also a wee bit anti-commerce (a feature they share with many teachers) and they don’t want to be “tricked” into linking to a billboard.

It is funny, though — the whole site is one gigantic advertisement for how Bingo Card Creator makes your life easier, and I plug it on essentially every page.  But it doesn’t look like what you expect an ad to look like, and the very act of consuming the marketing message is intensely valuable to my target customer!  That has to be the holy grail for marketing — people so want to be marketed to that they’ll come to you for that express purpose and tell their friends!

Finally, while I could extract CPMs in the $2 or so range by selling advertisements to competitorsof Bingo Card Creator (that is what I pay Google for my own advertisements, after all), if this page performs as well as my existing free resources page I’ll have an effective CPM of about $40.  $2 vs $40… not a hard call.  Plus, I expect the page to significantly outperform my free resources page.  If you’re a budding uISV wondering whether you can achieve big profits through advertising, you certainly can, but remember: every cent spent on advertising on the Internet comes out of a dollar that someone made through something that was not advertising.  You can have the cent or you can have the dollar — choose wisely.

Postscript:

I have been putting off this blog post for two weeks.  Every additional delay had a good reason: I was wretchedly ill, I was busy, I was swamped at work, I was entertaining a friend from out of town.  However, I’ve decided to go to back to my core foundational principle and say “You know, when all else fails, launch the sucker.” — it makes little sense for a marketing experiment to go into week four when the product I’m marketing was launched on schedule on day eight!  So consider the sucker launched. 

Now begins the battle of inches, where I test, iterate, and refine while the resource keeps helping people out. 

If you found this article valuable, feel free to tell folks about it.  If you want updates on whether all this theorizing actually amounts to anything, subscribe to the RSS feed because I’ll be giving regular updates on how the site performs (with real traffic numbers and the like — I’m very big on transparency, so if Google hits me with the banstick you’ll see the implosion in transparently painful detail!)  And if you know anybody looking for bingo cards for class, you know where to send them.

Programming Productivity Up By 10%… Yowza

Posted on June 7, 2007 by in Kalzumeus, marketing

Direct AccessI have tried expressing my love for Direct Access before.  Really, its hard to describe until you’ve tried it.  However, Andrea was smart enough to include an automatic logging feature in the newest version, which demonstrates exactly how much time it saves you.  (Memo to self: scrape user accounts for Kalzumeus, generate similar ROI-proving eyecandy, and put at the top of the Upgrade Your Account screen.  Its brilliantly simple salesmanship.)  For me, that number is scary.  Lets focus on yesterday, shall we.  Here is a shot of Direct Access on my home computer, which was on yesterday from 7 PM when I got home to 2 AM.  Of that, 3 solid hours was programming time, after doing battle with SVN fruitlessly for far, far too long. 

During programming time, I’m typically opening folders and programs left, right, and center.  Copy this to there, grab the backup of that, nuke those sources, where the heck was my Rails API reference, need to open Thunderbird to retrieve my SVN password, that sort of thing.  Apparently I do this more commonly than I had thought:

Direct Access Stats

I generally estimate 20 seconds to accomplish any random opening from staring at my IDE window.  For example, to get to the Rails API, that would generally be Start -> Internet Explorer  -> Google (my home page) -> Rails API -> I’m Feeling Lucky.  (Why type as opposed to using my bookmark?  Faster, less requirement for right hand, gets autocomplete.)  Given the need to take my hands off the keyboard and the lingering pain in my right hand, thats a good twenty seconds.

Well, thats a bit shorter, isn’t it. 

rrrTAB (used to be railsTAB, but I found myself typing it a lot) gets me a command shell opened to my Rails application directory.  sshTAB gets me a Putty window set to automatically log into the server I’m most frequently using.  All the power of the command line and autocompletion… from anywhere.  Bwahaha.  You can keep your OS X, vim, and bash, I’m puttering around in a deliciously iconoclastic Windows XP… at Unix sysop speeds.

I also love the autotext for hammering out boilerplate code… that turns out to be a heck of a lot less useful in Ruby than it was in Java, though, since a) I write less boilerplate and b) I’m not sufficiently well versed in the boilerplate to have prepared it as a macro yet.  In Java, on the other hand,  I know I will have to do intconvertTAB again, writing out a try-catch block to surround a very prosaic String to int conversion. 

try {

replaceMe = Integer.parseInt(cursorStartsHereAfterIHitTab);

} catch (NumberFormatException e) {

// Handle if string was passed by user, safe to ignore if string came internally.

}

The third time I type the same freaking snippet out it goes in Direct Access with a memorable abbreviation.   I have twenty of them for Java now, and a few for Rails, mostly for migrations and to act as quick references for syntax. 

You wouldn’t think shaving a few seconds here and a few seconds there would really matter that much, but the stats don’t lie.  A 165 minute programming session was a 180 minute session purely thanks to Direct Access.  Not bad.  I really wish they hadn’t forced me to uninstall my copy at work — “Well, Patrick, you see, we have a new security policy…”  Suit yourself, boss.  I get paid regardless of whether I’m being productive or not at the day job.  When I’m the boss, heck, time spent clicking is time spent not doing more important things.

If you don’t have something like this… get it.  Really.  Its a no brainer. 

As usual, product placements on this blog are 100% uncompensated.  I like it, I use it, it saves me time and money, I blog about it.  I do not solicit, accept, or envision folks giving me money for anything other than the products I sell.

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. 

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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