Word of Mouth

I have been diligently trying to get my blogs to show up higher in the Google search engine results pages. This has been an uphill battle. For some specific phrases I can come up on topic. But when using the main keyword or two in a search, my blogs are nowhere to be found. Users still somehow end up at my blog. But the traffic had been low low low. I actually don't care about the traffic stats per se. However I do care that my AdSense click through profits have been disappointing.

Then I started taking a new strategy. I have been mentioning my blogs to other software developers that I know. And I bring up the work that I am doing on the blogs and promoting the blogs with them. The result is that some small portion of people I know want to check out my blogs. And then I have found that some ads interest them and I get some click through. Now this isn't making me rich or anything. But at least the results are better than before.

I am not sure how to proceed. My original goal was to show up at the top of the SERPs and get a lot of traffic and clicks. I would still like that to happen. However I am finding a better payoff by promoting my blogs through other means like networking. Perhaps it is time for a shift in strategy. I will continue to network with other software development professionals to see if word of mouth advertising can scale up. As usual, I will keep you posted on the results.

Professional Appearance

I had been clicking around the web. Landed on a site for database performance monitoring. This topic was interesting to me. But since I run a company myself, I wanted to determine how well this site's marketing was.

So I checked out the sites FAQ web page. They required that I have an Oracle database to collect information about the performance monitoring. This was so even if I was trying to monitor a different type of database such as Microsoft SQL Server. Not encouraging.

Then later in the FAQ page I spotted a grammatical error. Now I see errors like this all the time, so I was able to decipher what they meant. However misspellings or grammar problems make me think that care was not exercised when creating the web site. And if care was lacking there, it makes me wonder if care was lacking in their product.

I ended up not even downloading a trial of the product. The thing that most swayed me was the database requirement. I don't want to have to install a database just to try out a product. Perhaps they had no choice to introduce this dependency. But they lost a potential customer.

The important thing is to take this lesson to heart with my own products. So far I have strived to make my applications easy to install and run. In fact, my applications do not even have a separate install step. You just run the executable. No environment setup is required. Considering my potential customer base, I wanted it to be as easy as possible to run my application. Let's hope this pays off in the end.

Marketing for Sale

I got an e-mail from a new software download site. They said that they offered a full line of features on their site to help highlight my software. Here is cost for assorted services:

• $6.00/week : screen shot
• $15.00/week : download page
• $9.00/week : top in category
• $18.00/week : premium search
• $24.00/week : hottest download
• $22.50/week : highly recommended
• $45.00/week : premium listing
• $75.00/week : header spotlight

This is quite amusing. I guess these guys are trying to make some money. But I don't even pay for services from the big download sites like Download.com or Tucows. So I do not think I will be taking them up on their offer.

What I wonder is whether anybody is paying for these services. Maybe I should visit their site to check out who is taking advantage of the extra services for pay.

Web Host Closing Shop

I got an e-mail today from ZendURL. Apparently they are going out of business and cannot do web hosting any more. They will close up shop in 4 days. To tell the truth, I did not even know I had an account with them. Must have set it up when I was trying out free web hosting. But this got me thinking. What is my current web host shuts down? They serve up all my applications to the public. Maybe it is time to have a backup plan before any real emergency starts up.

The funny thing about the e-mail from ZendURL was that they tried to spin the bad news by saying they were doing me a favor by informing me about the shut down. What??? If I actually hosted my files on their server, and they wanted to do good, they should stay in business. However I understand that sometimes you have to call it quits. This was the icing on the cake though. The e-mail was signed "ZendURL Admin & Support Team". Classic. Got an e-mail from a nameless team saying they were doing me a favor. I guess in the end you get what you pay for.

Sad Spammers

I am sure you all have heard about the Nigerian bank scam e-mails. However I continue to be amazed at the spin offs of this scam. The real funny thing is the return e-mail provided in the latest spammer scams. Here are my two favorites:

(1) Got an e-mail from a member of the sub committee of finance in South Africa. They want to send me some left over money from their Olympics fund. OK so far. But guess where I need to send my correspondence? w_muyeke35@hotmail.com

(2) It gets better. I get an e-mail from the UK Online Lottery stating that I am a winner. In fact I have won 450,000 pounds. Not sure how many US dollars that translates to. But to claim my prize I have to e-mail mr.pinketgriphin@yahoo.co.uk

Can't these spammers get something more respectable looking that a free Hotmail or Yahoo e-mail account? LOL. I almost want to e-mail these people back. Maybe if they are that dumb they can be tricked into giving me some free links to build page rank.

Boom Boom

Recently I discovered the SEOmoz web site. There is a lot of good stuff in their blog. Seems they have a staff which frequently posts entries of interest. I like reading up on Search Engine Optimization. In fact I want to use some of those techniques to increase my ranking of the SERPS.

One such SEOmoz post was by Rebecca. Her posts are interesting. It helps that she always has a picture of herself next to her posts (and it is a good picture of her). Anyway she was reporting about the feud between founders of RocketBoom. Yeah. Never heard of it either. But after seeing a picture of Amanda Congdon, host of RocketBoom, I understand what the "boom" was about.

So now I think I need to get more boom in my web sites, blogs, and products. I already have a couple applications which download and display images of starlets. However pictures of Britney Spears only bring you so far in the business world. Check out the picture of Amanda I had included in this post. She is an unknown, but is looking good. How can I harness that image or video power for my business? This is a good question to ponder.

Writing Books

In the past, I have given some thought to authoring a book. This seemed like a time intensive task. However the best selling authors must be making some bank. How do you get a book published? And how do you make money on such a venture?

These days I suspect it is easier than it seems to publish a book. You can probably get low volume runs of books for small initial costs. Or you could pay to get the books published on a copy by copy basis. This is how Lulu works I believe. And this method was good enough for the book "Getting Real" by 37Signals. So it appears to be a legitimate avenue.

Currently I am pumping my thoughts into a number of blogs as opposed to books. We shall see where this goes. One warning that made me doubt the ability to make a living on books was some comments from author Charles Petzold. I consider him the father of Windows programming. At least he wrote the seminal book on Windows 3.1 programming. In his blog, Charles says, "I can not longer rely on book royalties to keep me afloat". And if a legend like Petzold cannot make ends meet as an author, I figure I have not chance.