What tools do you use for planning? You seem to have a great grasp of both the marketing actions, new features down the pipe and a real sense of project planning and product management. I my self seem to get myself locked into doing something that I realize later wasn’t a priority.

So are there tools or techniques you recommend for the aspiring mISV?

By the way I’m a part time student at the U of M MBA program in MN and you describe real applications to marketing that the best have difficulty articulating and well proving out. Love the blog and congrats on going solo.

1) Inbound links, regardless of topical affinity or anchor text, tend to increase one’s strength via providing a signal of trust. People *vastly* overstate the amount they have to matter with the “subject” of your site — look at any site which has no identifiable subject (Amazon, Wikipedia, the typical blog) and see how they increase its SEO.

2) It would make a lot of sense to have the blog on the business domain, and if I could send myself back in time to 2006 I probably would tell myself to do it that way. I don’t do it like that because while the blog is about the business it is not really about my customers’ interests, and the blog has been separate for its entire existence anyhow.

In your previous post, you used A/Bingo as an example of a great way to get inbound links. However, I would guess that most people that link to A/Bingo are talking about split testing, not bingo. So, presumably, that will increase your website search rating for “split testing”, and not anything bingo related.

Is it worth it to get inbound links from unrelated sites to a page that doesn’t have anything to do with my main product?

Second question: you host your blog under a different domain name. Would it make sense to host it under the main domain to get the same effect as you do with A/Bingo for all of your blog pages?

Hope this makes sense.

Thanks!

I am very, very aboveboard about this: they’re all obviously owned by me, they say as much, they’re interlinked in a transparent fashion, and all of them are hosted at my Slicehost account on whatever server is more convenient to me for technical reasons. The primary goal is not passing link juice to the main site, it is ranking for their subjects on the strength of exact match domains, laser-focused content, etc. After they rank they just feed well-qualified prospects into my main site by convincing them that rather than downloading a set of bingo cards they should customize their own.