Kalzumeus Software

As you might have noticed, December is generally pretty busy for me and I haven’t had my usual diligence in updating the blog.  I just got back yesterday to Chicago for my annual get together with the family and am severely jet lagged now, but I’m going to have a wonderful two weeks with my loved ones.  Merry Christmas to all, and I wish you a wonderful holiday and upcoming year with your own families.

See you in early January for my announcement with Google, the official launch of Bingo Card Creator 2.0, the year-end wrapup for 2007, and (possibly, depending on the amount of time I have) a redesign of the Bingo Card Creator and Daily Bingo Cards web sites.  Until then, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

 P.S.  Hiya, Google searchers : You’re probably looking for Christmas bingo cards or maybe New Years bingo cards.  Yep, I’ve got them and yep, they’re free — just click the underlined blue text.  Feel free to pass those links around.  Merry Christmas and I hope you have a wonderful holidays with your families, too.

Hideho, folks on the Internet.  I run a small business which sells software that makes bingo cards, and every time a holiday runs around Google sends me a couple thousand people looking for holiday bingo cards.  So you know what?  I decided to make some early for Christmas this year, and give them away.  Merry Christmas.  There are couple varieties which you can find on my holiday bingo card page.  Feel free to use them for any purpose you wish, print them out, play them with your family or class, whatever you want to do.  And please, it’s Christmas — give them to anyone you think would want them.  All of the card sets can be run off at your printer and come with instructions.

Now, having once been a teacher, I know that schools, businesses, and the like handle Christmas holidays That Winter Thing differently.  Personally, I prefer to spend Christmas with my family, have a nice dinner, go out to Mass, and in general have the whole wonderfully American package of loving family and friends, deeply moving religious experience, and a wee bit of tinsel and presents mixed in.  But every year we hear about how some grinch saw a creche which didn’t have the requisite plastic elf next to it and decided to sue everybody in sight.  So I broke the Christmas lists into two: on the one hand, we’ve got the traditional Christmas bingo cards which cover the Christmas story that I’ll be hopefully hearing at midnight Mass, and on the other hand we’ve got the ACLU-approved reindeer & Santa Christmas bingo cards.  And, in the spirit of further giving (and hopefully a little peace over the holidays), there is the mixed Christmas bingo cards.

P.S. I’m a little late for our Jewish friends but I did do some Hannakah bingo cards as well.  Hopefully you’ll find a use for them the next four days.  Let me know if I screwed anything up, as my honorary so-Catholic-he’s-almost-Jewish card that I got in high school is expired and I’m finding it difficult to renew these days (I live in Japan and, well, if you thought you guys were a minority in America…*)

*Funny stories abound on this topic, actually.  Ask me about the Orthodox Jewish Japanese girl some time.

P.P.S.  For the curious, wondering about which type of Christmas is big this year, take a gander at the list of most popular bingo cards, which my website keeps constantly updated.  All of the Christmas lists are probably going to be on there until January, if history is any indication. 

You’ll see the order — the consolidated Christmas list is called “Christmas bingo cards”, the Christmas story version is “Christmas (Traditional) bingo cards”, and the Santa at the Mall version is “Christmas (Seasonal) bingo cards”.

A gentleman by the name of Ezell apparently told his friend that I had made a successful business in a ridiculously short amount of time, so it must be possible.  The friend disagreed.  Ezell said “I’ll prove it!”, and has decided to one-up me in the process, by shaving a few days and dollars off my schedule.  I personally think he will be able to do it, and am rooting for him.

The program is going to be called BabyAid, running in a niche roughly similar to TrixieTracker.  I previously commented on the Business of Software message board that I believe this is a very underserved niche which one could really do a lot of good in with the right offering. 

Incidentally, the friend was disagreeing as a result of his experience as a independent game developer.  I agree, for a game developer to produce a game worth paying money for, 8 days and no budget for art or music assets will probably not cut it.  Personally, I think that developing videogames is an excellent hobby if you like it (I have contributed to OSS ones in the past) but it makes a very poor choice for someone wanting to start a business.  Maybe I’ll go into why on another post.

Steph Granger, of LandLordMax fame, is editing a book about how to succeed in blogging.  It will be composed of essays and interviews contributed by guest authors.  There are a bunch of big names participating (Seth Godin, John Chow), quite a few folks from our little uISV community (Andy Brice, Ian Landsman, etc), and for some strange reason I was asked to contribute a chapter.

If you’ve got anything you’d like to see me cover, feel free to drop me a line in the comments.  Given that there are marketing folks aplenty on the author list I was thinking of covering some of the technical nuts&bolts of blogging, probably from an SEO angle, but that is hopefully not the only thing I know how to talk about.

I run a business which sells software that makes custom printable bingo cards and every time a holiday comes around people come out of the woodwork looking for them.  Seeing as how Thanksgiving is about a week away I thought I would put up some cards I had made to make everyone’s life a bit easier.  You can either download a free copy of Bingo Card Creator from the above link and make your own custom boards, or you can mosey on over to Daily Bingo Cards and download 8 premade Thanksgiving bingo cards .  Yep, they are indeed totally free.  Feel free to use them, print them out, pass that link on to your friends, blog about it, whatever you like.  If you need more than eight, download a free trial of Bingo Card Creator and you can print up to 15, or purchase the full version and print as many as you like.

The cards have only words on them.  I suggest if you have little kids letting them decorate their cards with markers — drawing turkeys is always fun, but watch out for that darn brown ink, it has a bad tendency to seep through paper straight onto tables/hands/clothes.  (Between working at an office supply store and then being a teacher of young students I have learned far, far too much about the personality of various types of markers.  Brown is a royal nuisance, but black, black is the killer.)

The instructions for playing Thanksgiving bingo are on that site as well, but given that it is a holiday you might be wondering how you can spruce things up a little bit.  Personally I’m a fan of giving everyone their cards before the big cooking marathon and letting them get a free space on the card for any dish that they help prepare.  (You might to stick a little thumb on the scale for the little ones — it is unlikely they can make cranberry sauce but they can certainly help you wash cranberries, so give them credit for it by marking off the cranberry sauce section.)   Then you can play bingo after dinner or, if you’re not exhausted from cooking, do it before dinner and let the winner carve the first slice off the turkey.  (Especially popular with little ones, although I’d imagine you’d want to assist them with the carving.) 

I hope you all have an enjoyable holiday with your families.

Capsule summary: Powered largely by several hundred dollars in sales driven by conversion optimizer and the effect of a Halloween advertising campaign which I didn’t plan but the machine ended up executing anyhow (a story which is getting its own post tomorrow — its truly amazing), I had my best month ever, beating my previous best month ever (September 2007) by about a factor of two.

Sales: 77 (includes 1 refund, 33 CDs)

Gross Sales: $2,036

Expenses:

GoDaddy: $7

e-junkie: $5

CrazyEgg: $9

AdCenter: $15

AdWords: $407 (oof, that number would give me heartburn most months!)

SwiftCD: $175

Freelancers (Daily Bingo Cards writers — I pay sort of generously): $315

Slicehost (what Daily Bingo Cards runs on): $20

Daily Bingo Cards domain (2 years) : $20

Total Expenses: $974 (heartburn!)

Total Profit: $1,062 (first month over $1,000, woohoo)

Selected Assorted Stats:

Visits: 20.5k

Trial Downloads: ~3.5k

Happiest Moment: I got mentioned as saving the day on a fourth-grade teacher’s Xanga

As you can see by the above, my major ongoing expense is AdWords, as usual.  The majority of the charges associated with Daily Bingo Cards are not going to be recurring, although I do have agreements with two of my freelancers to provide me 30 bingo cards a month at $2.50 each, so that is an ongoing commitment of $150.  That is slightly more than I had been paying when I started but I was pleasantly suprised at the quality I was getting and am willing to pay for it.  Plus, look at it this way — I only have to pay to get the cellular biology activity written once, but it will be up for years happily collecting downloads.  At my typical 2.5% conversion rate, I break even on a bingo card which delivers about four trial downloads.  Several have already done so.  Other than the cards, my only ongoing cost for DBC is the Slicehost hosting, a steal at $20, so the first sale a month goes to hosting/domain renewal fees and it is all gravy after that.

I will have a more detailed update on the stats of Daily Bingo Cards later, but it is showing the nice sort of snowflake trapping power that I wanted:

It is often said by quite knowledgeable SEOs that you can’t rank for anything of importance in less than about a year and a half.  That is probably quite true if your definition of something of importance is [California mortgage] or [buy wii] or something else with obvious commercial relevance.  For my business, queries like the ones you see above (and the 80 I’m not showing you because stitching together JPEGs is not an effective use of my day) are the important ones.  Let other folks fight it out over [bingo cards] and its 8% conversion rates — my snowflakes do about triple that, you can rank for them in a week, there is no competition, and the volume will be quite nice after I start ranking for even more of them.

I’m going to try something a little bit different this week and actually schedule blog updates in advance.  In addition to giving folks some indication of which days are skippable, this will help me avoid a massive crunch on this Sunday, caused by having to do all of the following: church, family time, Java bug squashing, three blog posts that I have in the queue, 3,200 word essay for a teacher-esque activity (not bingo related), my weekly volleyball game, and aquiring and enjoying Mario Galaxy.  Anyhow, something had to go and God, family, Galaxy, customer satisfaction, health, and professional duty won out over timely blog updating.

Anyhow, here is the agenda for the week.  All days are US time, for the convenience of the majority of my readers.

Sunday: October Stats Update & DailyBingoCards 2 weeks update

Monday: Why Google Optimizer is AdWords’ Killer App

Tuesday: Nothing.  Tuesday is Heroes night.

Wednesday: Recommended Vendors for things a starting uISV needs (apologies to the three folks I promised this one to for the delay)

Thursday: SQL Optimization for Ruby on Rails

Friday: Possibly, an update on some new changes to DailyBingoCards and whether they are working well or not.

I’ll admit, I laughed my keister off.  (Funny and topical for the site!)

I probably shouldn’t laugh so much about the About.com joke, considering I sent them about $100 to put an incredibly high performing ad on that page sitting at #1 on “Halloween bingo cards”.  More on that story later this weekend when I tell you why Conversion Optimizer put about $500 in my trick-or-treat bag.

• Halloween Bingo at Daily Bingo Cards exceeded all expectations, getting me about 2k search hits on this blog and several hundred downloads.  The links, bookmarks, etc are starting to roll in, and Daily Bingo Cards has started to rank for some queries.
• The most popular query is, at the moment, about cheese bingo.  Oh, Internet, I love you so.
• Google made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.  As to the exact specifics of which, more on that later.
• $2,000 in sales in October.  Double September.  Main drivers: Halloween and Conversion Optimizer.
• If there were a 5th bullet point, I really would be late to work.

I just implemented the popular bingo cards feature on Daily Bingo Cards.  There are about a hundred cards on there, 30 of them just uploaded five minutes ago.  In two weeks, with very little promotion on my part, that has generated about 300 downloads.  If you want to see the distribution of how many of those are due to the top five pages and how many are not, why not mosey on over. 

Fair warning: At the moment, because my caching logic is apparently broken, that page is regenerated for every request.  Since doing that requires it to iterate over hundreds of objects in Ruby, it is slow.  (It about five hundredths of a second to grab the data from the DB,  a second to chug the math, and another five hundredths of a second to render the page.  Yeah, I know, I know, fix the cache or do the math at the DB, but I’m lazy and its late.)  You won’t notice unless you have the misfortune to hit it when several other people are hitting the site, thankfully.