Kalzumeus Software

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

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

If You Fail To Plan, Plan To Fail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time-Sensitive Promotions and SEO Don’t Mix Well

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

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

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

Google Dominates All Search

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

On This Wisdom Of Paying To Give Things Away…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*sigh* Doh.

AdWords Is Still A Good Deal

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

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

Enter Stumbleupon

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

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

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

Directory Listings

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

Final Tally

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

Domain name: $240

Transfer of domain to GoDaddy: $7

Server: free at the margin (had one already)

Google AdWords: $140

StumbleUpon: $130

Directory Listings: $80  

Total: $600

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

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

What I’m Doing Differently Next Time

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

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

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

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

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

5)  Cut unproductive advertising expenses.  Sorry, Stumble.

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Merry Christmas!

Andy Brice, man of many talents, is putting together a Christmas drive to make t-shirts for programmers and donate the proceeds to charity. Sounds like a swell idea — particularly the donating to charity bit, as my office will let me wear a T-shirt the day after I get elected Prime Minister of Japan.

Who Benefits:

Jaipur Foot: A charitable foundation which provides support to the disabled and needy in India, including by providing low-cost prosthetics.  

Sightsavers: A charitable foundation which provides surgery and other medical care to people at risk of losing their eyesight due to mostly easily treatable conditions.

What You Can Do To Help Out:

1)  Buy a T-shirt, naturally.  I like “Be Nice: I have a blog” personally.  

2)  Help spread the word about Andy’s charitable drive.

3)  Donate to the charities directly (links are available on their websites, mentioned above).

What I’ll Do To Help You Help Out:

Take a picture of yourself wearing one of Andy’s T-shirts.  Alternatively, if you just straight out donated, take a picture holding a sign with a funny programming joke.  (Or something which would approximate funny if programmers had a sense of humor.  I suggest “I’m in your world debugging your illnesses!”)  

Inform me of the photo in some manner — comment, trackback, email, skywrite your TinyURL over central Japan, whatever.  For every person who does so by Christmas, I’ll chip in $30 direct to the charities.  (We’ll set a sensible limit for the matching grant at, say, the first ten folks who take me up on it.)

Because We Wouldn’t Be Programmers Without An API Call:

What It Lacks In Subtlety It Makes Up For In Lack Of Subtlety!

Every year around Christmas time, I get literally thousands of requests for Christmas bingo cards.  I decided to do something a little special this Christmas and throw up a website about them — so if you want your Christmas bingo game, you can go there now.  

If you aren’t a small businessman, there is likely nothing else of interest in this blog post.  I suggest clicking on the above link to get your bingo cards.

If you’re a microISV, keep reading: this is an experiment.  For the last several months I have been particpating on Aaron Wall’s SEObook community forums, and he preaches the gospel of Exact Match Domain names as a tool for ranking sites quickly in Google and the like, even allowing them to cut past other older sites that have scads of links.  I have actually seen one of my competitors dip his toes into doing this, too — after I talked here many times about a particular keyword he registered keyword.org and now ranks #3.  Spiffy for him.

I get scads of traffic for all seasonal related bingo cards — if you remember my graph of different categories on my website, Holidays accounts for almost a quarter of cards downloaded by visitors.  The top few holidays account for the lion’s share of that — Halloween, in particular, is the reason October is invariably the best month of the year for me.   

So I decided, hmm, why not try an experiment this year and see if I could drive rankings for just a few head terms instead of doing my usual rank-for-everything-under-the-sun strategy (Crustaceans bingo, ho!)  That could involve getting a few dozen links to my site, but it is fairly difficult (though by no means impossible) to get people to link directly to a commercial site.  Instead, I thought, I’d make a mostly non-commercial mini-site focused like a freaking laser on giving people exactly what they wanted, and making it as easy to link to as humanly possible.

Step #1: Identify my keywords.  I already know them, in this case — the next big holiday which gives me suitable time to get ready is Christmas.  The #1 keyword is Christmas bingo cards.  I can look at my website logs and find 15 variations of that to play with.

Step #2: Buy the exact match domain.  Somebody had actually registered [Christmas bingo cards] before.  Oh well.  He was amenable for selling at the quite reasonable price of $149 — then I paid another $8 to move it to Godaddy, my registrar of choice.  (Is this reasonable?  Well, consider that I spend 25 cents to drive one download of Bingo Card Creator, or roughly $15 per sale, when I’m paying on AdWords.  I’ll spend more on AdWords this week alone than the domain cost me, and as of next week its like that money was never spent… but the domain stays up for years.

Step #3: Install WordPress.  You really can’t beat WordPress for making attractive, small sites with a minimum of time investment.  They don’t even have to necessarily look like blogs, if you choose your template well.

Step #4: Find an attractive template.  This is honestly one of the most important steps.  You’re creating a site to be the One Canonical Source On The Internet for your little subniche — it should look the part.  An attractive site makes it very easy for it to collect links from your customers saying “Hey, Ethyl, I just saw the best site on the Internet for Christmas bingo cards.  You should check it out.”  You can either outsource this to your favorite designer or use an OSS template.  Happily Smashing Magazine (a blog devoted to, hmm, beautiful things?) covered an absolutely outstanding Christmas wordpress theme last year.  It took me maybe 5 minutes with Stylizer to smooth some rough edges.  (Needs another 5 minutes for the sidebar in IE.)

Step #5: Supplement with pretty graphics.  Stock photography and stock icons make everything better.

Step #6: Write the content.  I wrote several blog posts and pages about the subject, in my usual voice.  This took more time than everything else put together, and it isn’t done yet — I eventually hope to have perhaps 5 or 10 pages on the site when it is ready.  Tips: You probably want to use WordPress to replace the front page with a Page rather than a listing of your most recent posts.  You also probably want to remove much of the blog-specific cruft, as the site will probably not be receiving year round regular updates so why lead people to expect that?  

Exactly what the content says is up to you.  I didn’t try to sell very hard at all — many of the folks who find this site are going to be parents, and parents don’t typically buy Bingo Card Creator.  But parents are quite capable of leaving links.  (Teachers, on the other hand, may decide to actually purchase BCC.)  Plus, because the site looks like the #1 destination on the Internet for christmas bingo cards (look at the design!  look at the domain name!  look at the Zen-like purity of purpose!), it should probably pick them up from authoritative sites as well.

Step #7: Make it scale.  If it works… why stop at one mini-site?

Hideho folks.  I’m taking a bit of a break from progress updates on the 30 Day Sprint (not progressing as much as I wanted to but I have Saturday blocked off with a designer buddy to get some stuff together) in order to answer a common question. 

I love e-junkie, the service.  So much so that I have been called Robin’s local sales rep.  And that is probably closer to the truth than I would like it to be.  But I really, really can’t stand the name — it says absolutely nothing positive to my customers about my business.  So I go to some pains to avoid them seeing it.  Since it will help other uISVs and e-junkie, I thought I’d give a rundown.

Issue: Customer lands on e-junkie page after checkout, to receive CD key

Resolution:

1)  Go to your e-junkie product settings. 

2)  Click the box next to “Product Requires: … Redirection”.

3)  Click Next.

4)  Fill in the Redirection URL.  Point it to a page on your own web server.

5)  On the page on your web server, you will want to display the CD key and instructions for installing it, plus regurgitating all the other stuff you put in your thank you mail.  (Make it big and bold because people do not read this page unless you give them a darn obvious reason to.  Getting them to read it saves you support costs, trust me.)  You can handle the content.  If e-junkie has a CD key, for example if you uploaded a list to them or they run a script to generate one for you, they’ll put the CD key in a URL variable “key”.  So if your URL was http://www.example.com/thanks.htm, your customer will end up seeing http://www.example.com/thanks.htm?something=here&somethingelse=here&key=yourkey .  Your mission is to get that key onto the displayable page.  If you can do server side programming, for example in PHP, this is pretty trivial.  If you can’t, you can grab it with a bit of Javascript. 

Either way, please secure your website against ye-olde insert-arbitrary-content-by-rewriting-the-URL trick.  You’ll thank me later.

Issue: Customer’s mail server is throwing out your mail

1)  e-junkie generated mail originates from one of (as of the last time I checked) three e-junkie.com servers.  It carries your name as the sender.  Bad news bears, this means that many automated checks on that email will say “e-junkie.com is spoofing honestmicroisv.com, oh no, its spaaaaam!”  What you need to do is publish an SPF record telling the world that e-junkie.com is a legitimate source of email for you.

2)  You’ll probably want to read the docs for your individual web hosting company on how to do an SPF record.  GoDaddy‘s interface is rather sweet.

Issue: You have links to www.e-junkie.com all over your page.

1)  You aren’t using the Fat Free Cart?  OK, fix that right now.  (And watch your conversion rise!)

2)  You might be worried about folks seeing the links by looking at their address bar really closely after clicking on the links.  Personally, I doubt my customers are nearly that savvy, but maybe yours are.  What you need to do is publish a CNAME DNS record, aliasing store.bingocardcreator.com (example) to www.e-junkie.com .  Then, every time the GoDaddy docs say e-junkie.com, you just subsitute your local alias.  This will not work with https (customers don’t know what that is, either) but it will get rid of the e-junkie.com in the URL bar in most browsers that I am aware of (some might resolve the CNAME and then update — I don’t know which off the top of my head), and it will get rid of the URL on hover in every browser.

And that is your tip for the day.  Check back this weekend, I’ll be back to coding and writing up a storm.

Don’t Wreck My PC.  While I personally really appreciate the ability to have keywords in program name, because it will be far and away the most common anchor text, for sheer brandability and selling the program, that name just rocks.  (Your program name is also your USP.  Sweet deal) 

I also love the logo — bright and colorful does great things in B2C.  Suggestion: skin the app so that it uses this same color pallete and general style for buttons & etc.  Oh crikey does that help conversions (by about 50% when I made my app look more Fisher Pricey).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So why don’t you?”, he asks me.

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

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

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

Further updates in the usual space.

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

Its time for a little spring cleaning and I’m (finally) clearing out the cobwebs around here.  As a result, I’ll be moving my blog from WordPress.com to a self-hosted WordPress installation, changing the theme a bit, and reorganizing things substantially.  Your old bookmarks and links will continue to function because WordPress is redirecting the old URL to here, but I’d suggest you update them to http://www.kalzumeus.com anyhow.

Exceptionally diligent readers will remember that Kalzumeus was the code name for my webapp which did not end up actually making it to production.  Sadly, I just got too busy with the day job to get it out the door, and I lost faith in the business model.  Plus tweaking Bingo Card Creator has given me plenty of opportunities to play around with Ruby on Rails under the hood.  I swear, even in the all-Java, all-the-time world of my day job I find myself dreaming in Rails (as you would be, too, if you had just put in a 60 hour workweek doing a partial reimplementation of ActiveRecord and having to fight the environment every step of the way to make it happen).

Anyhow, I am generally pretty poor at naming things.  Kalzumeus is hard to spell and not exactly the most natural of words, but I picked in it a fit of self-indulgence from a character I wrote into a story many years ago.  He was a sarcastic, intelligent, and slightly hyperactive dragon, and makes as good a mascot as any.  More importantly, he is the very first bit of IP I came up with while old enough to understand what the word meant, and I have a little bit of nostalgia for the moment of creation.  I think I’ll get a picture done of him for the masthead… 

For branding purposes, eh, I expect most people will continue to find this blog through bookmarks or Googling variations of “Patrick the bingo card guy” for the time being.  If you’re just starting out your uISV journey, do as I say and not as I do here: obscure in-jokes which are not easy to spell are probably not the best of ideas.

This reminds me: I have had the papers lying around for incorporating Kalzumeus LLC for a while but have never gotten around to it.  Ahh well, one of these days when I have a reason to do so…

(Speaking of which: I finally found out how to move a blog off of WordPress without screwing up all your readers and search engine juice.  First, purchase a domain of your choice.  Second, point the domain’s DNS at ns1.wordpress.com , ns2.wordpress.com, ns3.wordpress.com for about a day.  Third, go to your WordPress control panel, click upgrade, click domain, click add the domain, pay WordPress $10 through Paypal, and then they will set up the new domain as an alias of your WordPress.com blog.  This isn’t quite what you want.  Go back to the domain panel and click the selection to use the new domain as primary, which will redirect yourblog.wordpress.com to it.  You’re now paying WordPress $10 a year for, essentially, a 301 redirect from your old blog to your new blog, and for blog hosting, but you can cut them out of the second half of the equation.  After you’ve announced the change and waited a month, cut your DNS settings to the hosting provider of your choice, where you have a WordPress blog set up with your old WordPress.com postings pre-loaded.  Nobody will even notice the second changeover, including Google.

 Why would you want to do this?

• Control over the domain — you can now install whatever you want on it
• A somewhat more visually distinctive design than the oh-so-wonderful WordPress blue
• Branding, if you’re into that
• Gets rid of WordPress AdSense ads on your site
• You can commercialize your site, if you’re into that stuff
• You can integrate your blog with other content on the same domain.  I’m planning on doing some fun stuff later, after I get the new site changed over and looking pretty (likely at least a month from now). 

Folks ask this once in a while on the Business of Software boards: exactly how important are download sites to a uISV’s promotion strategy? 

Confirmed Installs By Download Location in March 2008:

Any questions?

(OK, it isn’t quite that cut and dried.  I’d still recommend doing submission via Robosoft for the SEO benefits of the backlinks it will get, particularly for a new uISV.  However, in terms of driving downloads, download sites are all but worthless.  It is easy to figure out why if you watch users looking for software: rather than going to www.download.com and searching for it, they just Google it to start out with.)