Gabriel Weinberg, the entrepreneur behind the search engine Duck Duck Go interviewed me earlier today for his upcoming book on getting traction. The video, which runs about an hour in length, is available here.
I always look for a summary of contents prior to committing myself to a video (since they’re so much longer than reading a post), so here you go:
- An outline of Bingo Card Creator’s SEO strategy including…
- using mini-sites
- using widgets
- using scalable content generation
- My thoughts on conversion optimization
- A/B testing
- The multiplicative effect of improvements in your funnels.
- A wee bit of “How do I do it all?” while previously being employed (outsource, automate, eliminate).
- “How’d you end up in Japan, anyhow?”
In fact, I was so convinced that I’d rather read videos than watch them 99% of the time that I took the liberty of transcribing it, with Gabe’s permission.
Some links to things mentioned in the interview:
- The Conversion Optimizer case study Google wrote about me.
- A/Bingo, my OSS Rails A/B testing library.
- Hacker News and the Business of Software boards, who are the smartest minds about online software businesses anywhere, and keep me sane. (I went down to City Hall today and filled out a bunch of paperwork, and the clerk’s response on hearing I was a software developer was “Web applications? Wow, you’re an iPhone developer?!” sigh It is nice to have people who speak your language, and I don’t mean English.)
- SEOMoz and SEOBook. (P.S. I’m not sure if I adequately communicated this when speaking: both are great and I recommend them.)
In somewhat related news, I have an interview scheduled with Andrew Warner of Mixergy.com for April 30th at 11:00 AM Pacific time. Andrew tends to do his interviews live, so if you have any questions you want to ask, be sure to tune in to the live chat. Andrew has told me that he hopes to focus on my business biography, so I assume there will be less technical/marketing/SEO content and more storytelling — it should be fun.
Speaking of which, it looks like he has Peldi from Balsamiq booked for April 28th. I highly recommend all the uISVs in the audience watch that one — Peldi is near the top of our profession in every way, and quite generous with his insights.
I’m absolutely floored that I’m appearing on guest lists next to folks like the 37Signals crew or Eric Ries, who rank among some of the largest influences in how I run my business. Crikey. It is an honor.
You should start getting used to appearing on lists like that; I’m not sure you’re fully aware of how much of a legend you are becoming to a ever-growing group of people you have in turn influenced.
Great interview, by the way.
Thanks for promoting your upcoming Mixergy interview. Looking forward to having you on!
Great interview Patrick! I was really impressed with the amount of useful info you gave during the interview (I had to pause a few times to digest). I’m also a big fan of Andrew’s work so your upcoming interview on Mixergy is something that shouldn’t be missed.
Why don’t you switch your payment processing over to Clickbank and have an affiliate program? You could explode your $$ without much extra effort…
I’m glad you transcribed it. I don’t know what people have against the written word nowadays.
To cut to the chase, in the transcription you mention long tail searches. Now
I’m not convinced that the long tail aspect of your business which (mini-sites aside) appears to account for the majority of your sales is so accessible for many small software vendors. Obviously it is possible in any niche but with exponential effort depending on your market and this isn’t always an option depending on the time available.
My next product (and I don’t mean the above which is an experiment with rails, S3 and the long tail) will have easily accessible long tail searches as a prerequisite. I’m pretty sure this is the way to go for small uISV’s who want an easy life in ‘bingo card creator’ type niches.
In the interview, you said:
What sort of events have you had trouble with? I know in GA you can provide a mock URL so it can track an event as a pageview, is that the painful part?