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That Shouldn't Even Be Legal

So I was checking today whether Daily Bingo Cards has started to pick up any search traffic, and aside from the name it is starting to rank for some long tail queries, including #5 on “bingo cards make yourself“.  I was kind of suprised that it did that, because while that is certainly a snowflake query it is one that I have seen before on my other sites.  So I Googled it to see if there was any major competition for the term, and yep, there apparently is — me, myself, and I…

Google Search Results

 This is not overwhelmingly significant from a commercial standpoint, since there are only about 10 of that particular snowflake every month.  However, I get eight of them, which provides me with a bit of amusement.  I also chuckled that, for at least a minute on an insignificant query, I totally controlled the above-the-fold part of a Google SERP. 

Multiply this by a couple thousand different snowflakes and you have my marketing strategy for Daily Bingo Cards in a nutshell.  Fifty billion snowflakes all I need is one…

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Halloween Bingo Cards

Hideho everybody.  It is going to be Halloween shortly and Google is sending me hundreds of people looking for free Halloween bingo cards.  They are probably doing this because I own a small business which sells software that makes bingo cards.  You can certainly use it to make yourself some Halloween bingo cards, but I’ve already done the work for you: you can get a free set of eight Halloween bingo cards over at my other site.  Just download and print, pretty easy.

I presume if you’re looking for this you already have an idea of what to do after you’ve printed your cards, but here are my suggestions:

1)  Decorate the cards with your children using Halloween-themed stickers, which you can find just about anywhere this time of year for about a dollar a package.  Kids love stickers.  Or you could have them draw a ghost or pumpkin on top.

2)  Play Halloween bingo after trick-or-treat, as it is a good nighttime activity for continuing the festivities after you might not feel comfortable with the children being out.  You can use candy as markers for the spaces which have been called — young kids, in particular, love this one.  It is also a sneaky little way to prevent them from overindulging on the candy they have collected, since they’ll need it to play bingo with.  An alternative to using candy is using a halloween stamper, which you can find at crafts shops for about $2 when you include the ink.  (This doesn’t scale as well as candy — you’ll need about one stamper for every two bingo players.)

3)  You probably want to give a prize out for bingo, but your children are going to get far too much candy for their own good anyhow, so you can give a “prestige” prize: the winner gets the very first candied apple, for example, or the winner gets to design one of the jack o’ lanterns.  They’ll be happy that they won, but everyone else won’t be crushed as they get the same thing, just a minute or two later.  (I am a former teacher, and we can be downright devious when it comes to incentivizing competition without crushing the spirits of the folks who don’t end up first.)

Have a fun and safe holiday with your families, and remember, candy keeps for essentially forever so you don’t have to eat it all today.  (You can mentally imagine me wagging my finger.)

[Apologies to my regular readers, but I was getting a hundred search hits a day.  Back to your regularly scheduled content tomorrow.]

Need To Borrow A Mac User For A Minute

If there are any Mac folks in the audience, could you take a quick run on by www.bingocardcreator.com/files/preview/BingoCardCreator.zip and verify that it (hopefully!) doesn’t explode when you try to run the included application?  And if anyone knows a service which lets me remote desktop into a Mac to do this myself I will be your best friend forever if you tell me about it.

As folks might be guessing, this does mean I intend to push out Bingo Card Creator 2.0 this weekend, along with my linkbait project.  No sense not getting things started with a bang.  Of course, I’d appreciate it if I could get the Mac users to bang along…

Firebug — Pretty Darn Good CSS Tool

Firebug is an addictive little addon to Firefox which lets you inspect the CSS properties of essentially anything you can click on and modify them in real time.  This lets you easily simulate what would happen if you actually changed the properties, except without needing a page refresh cycle.  If you play around with it, it can help answer the big (and befuddling) questions like What Line In My 2,000 Line CSS or HTML File Makes This Box Go Here, which throw non-designer me for a loop.

I used Firebug for ten minutes to make some changes to Bingo Card Creator’s site that I’ve been putting off for over a year now.  People would actually mail me to say “You know, your header doesn’t actually go the entire width of your content area — the menu on the right juts out a little” (twelve pixels, as it turns out).  I always thanked them for the comment and made a mental note to do something about it, then (when I actually opened the CSS file) got lost and gave up.

It also gives me a feeling of ownership of the design, which (since I am not a designer and have the artistic acuity of a nearsighted mole) I generally treat like holy writ that I am not fit to alter.  While I was on a roll doing pixel-perfect accuracy, I changed something that has been a nuisance forever — teeny tiny font in my H1 and H3 headers (11 pixels for a page header… not a quality choice!  But I put up with it for forever).  I think they are both more visible and more aesthetically pleasing now.

If you have any comments on the new design I’d love to hear them.  It isn’t a quantum leap in quality, obviously — just an evolution of inches, like most of the things I do.

10,000 bucks… Yowza

I’m stupefied by the number, I just crossed into the five figures category today… and sales are accelerating.  Let’s bust out a graph, shall we? 

Monthly Sales for Bingo Card Creator

(Edit: It belatedly occurs to me that I took that screenshot in the middle of a mouse hover.  This is what I get for operating a computer after a night of karaoke.  Ahh, well, the Japanese won’t kill you.)

The October 2007 figure is an extraordinarily conservative estimate.  (I quoted $1,500 but I’ve already sold $1,250 and the month is only 2/3rds over, with a holiday and a version upgrade coming around the bend.)

Profits are somewhat less impressive, as I’ve shelled out ~$250 in one-time expenses to get the linkbait which I will launch this weekend ready.  Check back tomorrow for details.

Sorry for lack of posts

Got something in the works but I have been dying of a combination fever/cold/flu thing the last few days.  Hopefully I’ll have something up around Wednesday.  It will be regarding the linkbait I have been working on for a week now, and how you can get linkbait to work for you.

Yikes, that was overwhelming

I think it has been about twenty hours since I posted the job request for folks to help me out with a random task for my uISV.  I succeeded far, far beyond my expectations in finding folks willing and able to get the job done.  I look forward to seeing the output from the experiment, and I’m sure that even though I’m going to end up buying a few more bingo cards than I was budgeting for for starters that it will be at least as productive as the giant amount I spent on AdWords last month.

If you’re wondering “Hey, I wonder what the heck he is going to be doing with dozens of PDFs and GIF files of bingo cards?”, make a little mental note to check back this weekend.  Assuming at least some folks are done with the  deliverables by then I should be able to roll out my little brainstorm.  (This also assumes that I will be able to successfully code to save my life on Sunday, which is doubtful as Saturday is the annual Old Boys/Old Girls get together in Kyoto and I fully intend to be karaoke-ing to the break of dawn.)

Not Sweating The Small Stuff

A customer recently emailed me that they hadn’t gotten their CD key in the email and also needed to update the address on their CD delivery.  I sent them the following:

It appears that your main email account (redacted@redacted.com) is full of emails and as a result cannot receive any more.  I am sending this to your secondary email account in the hope that it reaches you.  You will find your Registration Key and instructions beneath my signature.

I will contact the company which processes shipping for me and make sure they send the CD to

123 Main Street

Apt #123

Anywhere, US 12345
instead of to your address in Big City.

Regards,

Patrick McKenzie
Dear (customer),

Thank you for your purchase of Bingo Card Creator. This email contains your registration code — please save it for your records. If you ever lose your code, you can contact us at support@bingocardcreator.com or through our website and we’ll happily look it up for you.

You have also purchased a CD. We will attempt to ship this within the next business day. After that, it generally takes 2-4 days to arrive depending on where you live, if you are in the continental United States. If you are not, send an email to support@bingocardcreator.com and we can give you a better estimate as to when it will arrive.

You will need to enter this registration code into your software to unlock its full functionality. You can do this by selecting Purchase Now from the menu bar, and then select Enter Registration Key.

Your Registration Key is BINGO-12345-12345 .

Assuming you were previously using the trial version of our software, you don’t need to download anything, but if you wish to make sure your software is up to date go to our website (http://www.bingocardcreator.com) and click “Download Free Trial” and follow the onscreen instructions. Note that if you have already put in your registration code no matter how many times you use that installer your software should stay registered, so feel free to update it at your leisure.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at support@bingocardcreator.com . Thanks again for your business.

Regards,

Patrick McKenzie
BingoCardCreator.com

Now, I think that is a fairly easy to understand email.  It should resolve the problem.  So imagine my suprise this morning when I get another email from the same customer saying “Well, I cleared out my email and checked again, but couldn’t find the registration code.  So I ordered it again.  Could you cancel the first order?” 

I’m sort of loathe to yank back the order from SwiftCD (a manual process) not 12 hours after having to yank another order from them (the first, due to the botched address).  No sense making too much extra work for them.

So I’m out an extra $5 for the second CD, because my customer apparently did not understand that my first email resolved their issue.  That is irksome… and I haven’t mentioned it to the customer, and won’t, aside from to say “Of course I can do that for you.  You will end up receiving two CDs — feel free to discard the one you don’t need.”  A certain amount of minor irritations and miscommunications are par for the course.

Sidenote: SwiftCD has been incredibly understanding of my support needs (which include periodically yanking orders and retroactively changing addresses) and unfailingly fast and professional in dealing with them.  If you need decently priced CDs stamped and shipped off to anywhere, they get my unwavering recommendation.  As a bonus point they integrate directly with e-junkie so the amount of work I do on 95 out of 100 CD orders is… nothing.  It just happens and I get a bill at the end of the month.

Before I Try RentACoder… [Edit: Got My Help, Thanks!]

Thank you to all of those who responded.  Due to overwhelming interest, I’m going to have to withdraw the offer for additional people to work on this, or I will be unable to pay everyone who has offered to work (and everyone who has, until this point, offered and produces acceptable work will be paid). 

… I thought I would mention this here.  (What is the purpose of RentACoder and similar?  To connect money with talent while bridging the trust gap.  I’ve got money, you’ve got talent, and if you are reading this you presumably know me to be an upstanding sort.  Given that, I see no reason to pay RentACoder a 10% finder’s fee for finding you.)

I have a task I need done for my small business.  It requires basic computer skills, a good command of the English language, a bit of creativity, and a whole lot of drudgework.  I work crazy hours at a Japanese company and, frankly, while I have expectations that this venture will pay off handsomely for me I have very little desire to do drudgework after I get home at 10 PM.  I estimate the task will take approximately two hours, and will pay $30 for it.  There will be significant opportunities for further work at similar rates if you do a good job.  If you are an enterprising individual who thinks that sounds interesting, read on:

1)  Create 20 lists of approximately 25 words or short phrases, one word/phrase per line, in plain text format.

Specifications of what lists are acceptable appear below.

2)  Open each list of words in Bingo Card Creator.  This step will require a registered copy, which if you are working on this project you can obtain from me at no charge.  (My email address is (my first name)@bingocardcreator.com)  The free copy is yours to keep.

3)  Using software such as PDFCreator(freely available from Sourceforge, it is a virtual printer which you print to and out pops a PDF) and the like, create 1 PDF file of 8 cards printed 4 to a page.  The cards should have the column headings BINGO (see the Options Menu).

4)  Create one GIF of one card printed alone on a page, of any consistent resolution less than or equal to 575×600 at which a)  the card is centered and b)  all words on the card are clearly legible.  The cards should have the column headings BINGO (see the Options Menu).When I have done this process by myself, I have used step #3 to create a PDF file, then opened it in Acrobat Reader, taken a screenshot, and manually cropped the shot in Paint.net to the specification.  If you can devise a more efficient manner of doing this, by all means go right ahead.

5)  All files should be named descriptive-name-of-list.txt, descriptive-name-of-list.pdf, and descriptive-name-of-list.gif.  )Separate words with hyphens.  (Example: romeo-and-juliet-characters, important-european-cities, etc)  They shall be clustered into directories named after the categories you choose, which will be described below.  When delivering to me, zip them up.

Desired Characteristics of Word Lists:

  • Lists should be words which are strongly relevent to each other and related to a specific theme which is appropriate to primary or secondary education.  Examples of possible themes: words about Valentine’s Day, capitols of the United States, periodic table symbols, characters from Romeo and Juliet. 
  • Lists should be exactly 25 words unless the list is of a defined set of things which would be incomplete with 25 elements (for example, capitols of the United States), in which case include them all.
  • Characterize lists by subject matter.  You have wide discretion in what subjects to use and what falls under each category, but please try to ensure that all categories have at least 3 and no more than 5.  For example, if you do Romeo and Juliet characters, you might decide you have a Literature category and will need to fill it out with at least 2 other Literature lists.
  • All words and topics should be appropriate for use in a classroom.  If in doubt, throw it out.
  • Spelling and factual accuracy are absolutely critical.  Please use modern standard American spellings for all terms with multiple alternatives (e.g. Kyoto not Kyouto, color not colour, Beijing not Peking, etc).  These words will eventually be used in an educational setting, and we can’t have children learning that Berrlin is a Major European Capitol.
  • No overlap between lists.
  • No overlap with lists already provided with Bingo Card Creator (check the Wizards menu if you are unsure).
  • You can have one category be math problems, if you’d like.  If you do, make the types of problems diverse (for example, 5 lists of multiplication questions will not be acceptable, 1 list each of addition, multiplication, subtraction, and division problems would be acceptable).
  • You must not violate anyone’s intellectual property rights to compose these lists.
  • You must not look at other bingo card sites (other than bingocardcreator.com) on the Internet to develop these lists.  I am imposing this requirement out of an abundance of caution, to protect both you and myself from claims that you are infringing on another’s intellectual property.

It takes me approximately 6 minutes to prepare the above requirements for one list of words.  Accordingly, 20 lists is approximately 2 hours of work.  You may well be able to accomplish it faster if you more diligent than I am or if you automate the image generation.  I am willing to pay $30 for the above deliverables for 20 sets of words, so you should end up making $15 an hour, which is half again my best paying part time job from my college days.  If you already make much more than that, this offer will likely not interest you, but feel free to refer this opportunity to a bright young nephew or starving college student of your acquaintance.   

I will commission the above work from at least three sources.  If I am particularly impressed by the quality from any source, I will a) pay them a bonus at my discretion and b) offer them the same rate on a MUCH larger order(s) of lists.  This could potentially reach into the several hundred, pending our mutual agreement on the matter and continued performance.

Quality:

Since you’re probably angling for that bonus and additional work, in addition to doing the job you’ll want to do it well.  Here are the subjective things I would like to see.

  • Broad coverage over a wide variety of disciplines
  • Word lists which are subjectively interesting to teachers/students (for a biology list, “varieties of flatworm” is far inferior to “parts of a cell”)
  • Bingo cards which are aesthetically pleasing — the words are clearly readable and of similar font sizes (they are automatically resized to fit if they are too big, but the effect can be jarring if some words are HUGE and others phrases are tiny).  Bingo Card Creator performs best on relatively short words and phrases, and looks substantially less nice on words longer than, say, “Massachusetts”.  If something doesn’t come out quite right, try playing around with the font size a little bit.  Bonus points if you use non-default font types or sizes in a way which enhances the card (see my Harry Potter card for an illustration of the technique — its a vaguely mystic free font).

Legal Stuff:

  • I will pay you on receipt and acceptance of the deliverables.  (Typically, as a freelancer, you should be asking for something upfront to ensure you will be paid.  However, if you’re reading this you presumably trust me to make good on my promises.)
  • If you are otherwise capable of doing the work, it doesn’t matter a whit to me where you live or what language you grew up speaking. 
  • Payment will be by your choice of either Paypal or, if you reside within the United States of America, a paper check.  I will attempt to make payment “very darn quickly” after receiving and accepting the deliverables, but for form’s sake we’ll say 3 days if by Paypal and delivery of the check to your door within 14 days if by check. 
  • I consider you to be an independent contractor.  Taxes and any paperwork, if there are any in your locality, are your responsibility.
  • You represent to me that you are legally eligible to work where you are working.
  • As this is work for hire, you agree to assign all rights in the deliverables to me.
  • Fair warning: I will be blogging about the results of the project that I use your work in.  If you don’t want to be mentioned by name, tell me so or I will assume otherwise.  (Conversely, if you want a free link out of the deal, it is yours for the asking.)

If you’re interested, and have read this far, send me an email to inform me that you would like to try this and to request your copy of Bingo Card Creator.  I’ll greatly appreciate a descriptive subject line.  This offer expires on October 15th, 2007 or earlier should I call it off (at my discretion).

Thank you to all of those who responded.  Due to overwhelming interest, I’m going to have to withdraw the offer for additional people to work on this, or I will be unable to pay everyone who has offered to work (and everyone who has, until this point, offered and produces acceptable work will be paid). 

Google's Conversion Optimizer… Rocks

Earlier this week I mentioned that I had started using Conversion Optimizer, Google’s new thingamagig where you bid Cost-Per-Action (CPA) on the content network instead of Cost-Per-Click (CPC) and let their black magic sort it out.  The preliminary results are in: this is the best thing to happen to AdWords since AdWords.  Not only is it a totally automated smackdown of the most egregious spam sites (and quite similar to a solution I proposed a few days ago), it has drastically cut my advertising expenses while not hurting revenue that much at all.

Pre-Optimizer Daily Spend: $10-12

Post-Optimizer Daily Spend: $5-6 (down 50%)

Pre-O CTR: .8 to .95 %

Post-O CTR: 1.1 – 1.2 %  (up 50%)

Pre-O Clicks Per Day: 100 to 120

Post-O Clicks Per Day: 60 to 80

Pre-O CPA: 45 cents to 50 cents

Post-O CPA: 25 cents (down 50%+)

Twenty five cents.  Twenty five cents.  Wow, has it been a while since I’ve seen that number. 

Lets do the math here, shall we?  Assume that all trial users are equally likely to convert, which I cannot substantiate but believe to be more or less accurate when we’re talking in aggregate.  My conversion from a trial to purchase is, in round numbers, 2.5%.  If I pay 45 cents for a trial, then I am paying $18 to make a sale worth approximately $24 to me.  I still make money, but Google and the content publisher get most of the value from the sale, and I do all of the work.  Boo that!  And if I’m paying 50 cents for a trial, then I pay $20 for a sale worth $24, and at that price I might as well just not run the ad at all. 

If, on the other hand, I get trials at 25 cents, then one purchase at the margin costs $10.  Much, much better.  That doubles my profit margin without me lifting a finger, other than to turn Conversion Optimizer on.  Google and the content provider also are getting decent returns, which ensures that both will want to continue doing business with me.  For once the interests of Google, the content provider, and the advertiser are in perfect alignment here: I get the best CPA on sites which are closest to my niche, which means the readership is more motivated, which raises their CTR on my ads.  (This is because visitors at Mrs. Lindle’s Reading Tips are much more likely to want to play bingo today than folks reading snazzygurl413’s MySpace page.)  A higher CTR means that Google gets more for the same amount of ad inventory.  It also means that Mrs. Lindle gets more money, because they are putting high performing Bingo Card Creator ads on her site instead of the random garbage that Google usually fills low-CPC niches with, and even MySpace benefits, because they are no longer “selling” me 10,000 impressions a week which never generate so much as a single 8 cent click. 

When Google does things right, wow, do they do things right.

What is the downside?  Well, if you’re the tinfoil hat sort, you can worry about this one: to do this, Google needs to know exactly how much a conversion is worth to me.  That would, theoretically, allow them to achieve the holy grail of monopolies: perfect price discrimination.  That describes a situation where the consumer surplus (extra value you capture because you pay less for a good than what you value it at) vanishes, and this maximizes the firm’s potential profits.  Joel Spolsky mentioned that the market effect of two competing firms bidding on AdWords does exactly this, and classical economics predicts he is right.  With the information I gave Google to sign up for this option, there doesn’t even need to be a competing firm for them to intuit how high my maximum price is.

But, for the moment, I’m extraordinarily happy, as my advertising has gone from barely above water to, what is the vernacular, making money hats.  (Lets see, 25 conversions a day is 750 a month times 2.5% is about 20 additional sales for $300 profit.  Not bad for a business which typically profits about $700 a month.  Not bad at all.)  I’m really praying the preliminary results hold up.