I'm starting to feel the itch again

Posted on April 19, 2008 by in Uncategorized

It was weird — while showing one of my coworkers the beauty of famfamfam icons for possible use in sprucing up one of our online applications, I mentioned that every time I see a good, pretty icon set I get the urge to make an application just to be able to use them.

“So why don’t you?”, he asks me.

And lately, I have not been able to come up with a good answer for that question.  I mean, work is killing me but I have enough time to waste it on browsing the Internet.  I certainly am not hurting for startup funds this time around, and I know what needs to be done to get a business up and running. 

So I’ve started kicking around some ideas.  Of course, I’m not exaggerating on work is killing me, so it will have to be something where I can see progress with a bunch of 2 hour mini-sprints after getting in the door around midnight.  That suggests it should probably be a web application.  Alas, Java, I knew ye well…

I have also been having persistent dreams of a particular application.  They’ve gotten so vivid as to include database schema…  but the waking me knows that the business model is terrible.  Just asking for total failure.  Nobody could ever pay money for it.  And yet, I would really want to see this get made…  We’ll see.

Further updates in the usual space.

Speaking of which, I haven’t been blogging much lately, part for lack of energy and part for lack of ideas.  I have been considering doing some severe surgery to the blog to collect much of the information in a more permanent, sensible manner — so that you could, say, click on a category listing for SEO and then get material about that in an organized order rather than just seeing my random thoughts on it arranged by date.  That would be a large project, though, and at the moment I want for time.  So if you have ideas for shorter things that you’d like to read in the meantime, drop me a line in the comments.

Comments Off

The Big Book of Getting People to Link to You

Posted on April 8, 2008 by in SEO

Today, on the Business of Software forums, a newer software developer asked how I managed to get people to link to me.  The motivation in getting links is both to get visitors directly from the websites you are linking to and to influence the search engines into prefering your site over the other fifty zillion on the Internet when they decide “Who is worthy of this searcher?”, on the theory that someone who has convinced unrelated webmasters to link to them must be doing something right.

But getting links can be a little challenging for some small businesses.  For one thing, us software developers don’t typically start with massive amounts of marketing or sales talent, and getting a link is effectively selling someone on the proposition that you’re worthy of them spending their time, attention, and social capital on you.  

As my anonymous questioner points out, “it is quite difficult to get people to link to a website which is selling a product.”  There are a variety of reasons why many people believe that to be so — one is that many people who are otherwise free with links resent the commercialization of the Internet.  Another, I feel, is that folks who make money with websites are not that great at explaining the value of linking to that website to people who will not see money from the link.

Let’s see if we can’t fix that.  I’ve been successfully building links to Bingo Card Creator for going on two years now.  Apparently my ideas on the matter were consistently interesting enough to convince Aaron Wall (a SEO and marketing professional of some note, who writes SEOBook) to give me a free subscription to his service if I kept posting them there.  (So I guess that is one way to get a free link — flatter folks and give them stuff for free.  Guess what, all joking aside, this works great!  But I digress.)  So I want to walk you through some of the things I’ve done which I have found successful and which I think you can adapt to your own businesses.

1)  Make some friends, fans, or fans into friends.  A while ago I had this idea that all anyone really needs to succeed in business on the Internet is to have about 1,000 fans.  I was going to blog about that and then got beaten to the punch by 1,000 True Fans, which is just an excellent article.  The author talks about how 1,000 people buying what you write, be it music or software, is enough to support an independent IP creator.  

I want to approach the idea of how fans can support you in a bit of a larger sense.  One way a fan can support you, without ever spending a dime, is by considering you worthy enough to tell their friends about.  For example, your fan might have a blog with a readership of a handful, a few dozen, or a few hundred people.  If your fan were to develop an emotional attachment to your success, for whatever reason, they might decide to blog about you just to share their passion with people that they care about, because that is often what we do with our friends. 

For example, my participation in the uISV (small software makers) community has gathered me a handful of very good friends and fans.  Vanishingly few of them will ever need what I sell, but they like the advice I give on this blog, they like that I am generally generous with my time for helping other folks trying to start up businesses (even in the cut-throat, dog-eat-dog market of selling bingo cards to elementary school teachers), and hopefully they like my personality.  So many of them will, for example, cheer when I have successes and actively try to bring them about.  One way they can is by spreading my ideas (i.e. linking to me), and they often decide to do that with no special prompting from me.

Truly an amazing phenomenon, that, and this is one absolutely anybody can participate it.  Find your local community, for any value of local you can name, and engage in it.  Use all of that collected wisdom from kindergarten — share, play well with others, don’t pull little Suzy’s ponytails.  Give folks a reason to like you, and the links will follow it.

2)  Blogging for your customers and people like them.

Blogging for your customers is different than what I do on this blog, most of the time.  For example, the typical elementary school teacher will never understand the value of getting their personal page linked at — it just does not advance them towards a goal that they value.  But suppose I got around to fulfilling my many-times-postponed resolution about opening a teaching activities blog on Bingo Card Creator. 

This would immediately make the site more linkable — blogging is quintessentially about having a conversation on the Internet with the basic utterance containing hyperlinks.  Its like they invented a form of communication to line up with what Google thinks is a sign of value.  Since your blog will typically not be commercially focused, but rather focused on providing value to your customers and/or people like them, it avoids much of the difficulty of getting folks to link to your product pages.  There is easily explainable value to linking to a post which is useful (“My readers will find this useful”), emotionally resonant (“Wow, this is emotionally resonant and I want to share this experience with other people”, well-written, funny, etc. 

(Incidentally, the only difference between your customers and “people like them” is that the second group hasn’t given you money.  Yet.  I say have an optimistic point of view about things.)

3)  Create resources your customers/people like them can use.

The very first thing I ever did to get links to my site was to create a list of Dolch sight words.  In brief, that is a piece of information that almost all my customers understand the value of (all you need to do is say those five words, bam, they think “Ooh, I want!”) but that few of them have memorized or written somewhere convenient in their notes.  Generating them was trivial, as they’re in the public domain.  Writing them up nice and pretty took me an hour.  That page has been linked to about 65 times according to Yahoo, probably half of them by people other than me.  These include school districts, libraries, teacher blogs, a government agency or two, and other folks who Google (in its infinite wisdom) decides to value the opinion of highly.

(Speaking of which, a particular competitor of mine had an interesting twist when he copied this idea: he bought an available domain just for that one resource, which makes it look like the official place to find the information and gives a pretty sweet bonus for ranking for the exact query [dolch sight words] in Google.  I think that tactic is worthy of the most sincere form of flattery, particularly if you know a resource is going to be very popular.  Domains are cheap, bordering on free when you consider how many thousands of people you’ll be showing your software to every year if you own the right ones.)

4)  Creating resources that other people like to use.

This next one is a bit of a mind-bender for many folks: while topical links are the best kind of link, in general, links which are not topical are still worth something, too.  Potentially a lot of something.  Thus, particularly when you are in an industry which is naturally link-poor (say, something in which the typical customer doesn’t own a blog and where most websites are 5 pages large, hosted on Geocities, and have Under Construction signs on them), you can get a lot of value out of expanding the reach of your offerings to include folks who are link-rich.

There are any number of folks who are link-rich.  Most readers of my blog are programmers, and we tend to be near the bleeding edge of the tech adoption curve.  If you find folks who are near the bleeding edge of the tech adoption curve for programmers, the odds that they give out links on a regular basis approaches 1.  (Heck, they probably have already gotten bored of some Web 3.0 ways to do so which I haven’t even heard of yet.  Maybe you can telepathically insert links directly into the eyeballs of anyone who has ever used Twitter to access Facebook through an iPhone these days.)

On group which I happen to belong to is Rails programmers, and when I write useful information on how to solve business problems in Rails (such as how to make Rails even more friendly to search engines than it is out of the box), they flood me with links.  (I think that page has gotten about 100.)  Granted, it doesn’t go direct to my product pages, but it increases my domain’s overall trust and I can control the links on the page to channel some link juice wherever I want it.

5)  Do it with style.

Always remember that there are, according to rigorous scientific studies, approximately 53,234,324,658,342,190 web pages out there that people could be looking at rather than your site… and those are just the ones that include pictures of cute kittens. 

Visually engaging your readers works.  The Internet, I swear, it sucks the literacy straight out of people, but arresting photography, stunning site design, cute icons, and the like make it much easier to rise above the Don’t Care threshold and get folks to recommend you to other people.  You subconsciously trust almost anything more if it is presented in an attractive fashion, and in some cases you might decide to share something just because it is pretty.  (It certainly worked for Clicky getting a link from me earlier this week.  Looks like it has now worked twice!  Just a pretty, solid site design there.)

Speaking of sharing things for the sheer beauty of it, it is sakura season here in Japan.

Photo of Sakura in bloom (mankai) taken in Gifu City, Japan

(I took that one two years ago in a park in Gifu City.)  We now interrupt your photo viewing enjoyment to continue with an important message from the article proper.

6)  Do it to scale

Imagine you have one really good idea for a resource to attract links.  Maybe it is one beautiful picture of sakura.  Now imagine that you could expand that to pictures of a hundred sakura, all beautiful, organized in some effective manner which both shows folks the ones that are most beautiful and hints at the richness which is only a mouseclick or two away.  Do you think you would get linear returns to the extra photos, i.e. 100 times the worth of one photo?  No.  I think this strategy is super-scalar — if you are good with information architecture, and site design, and in quickly communicating the value of what you have to the reader, I think that doing things in larger numbers turns you into something qualitatively different instead of just quantitatively different.  When you need a picture of beautiful sakura (and who doesn’t?), you don’t go to the guy who has one picture.  You go to the guy who has a hundred pictures, because he has established himself as the Authoritative Source on Pretty Cherry Blossom Photos.  (That title may be copyright and trademark of this lady I found on Flickr earlier.  Simply stunning.  More broadly, the whole “we aggregate a few million pictures, most of them are stunning” thing has certainly paid off for Flickr, since when I wanted to find someone with pretty flower pictures I went straight to Flickr to search because even artistically-disinclined me knows that Flickr is the place to go when you want pretty pictures.) 

Its not just pictures.  One resource which, oddly enough, helps you sell a Bingo Card Creator is having a large collection of printable bingo cards.  Accordingly, I have a few hundred on my site and am adding more all the time.  I can, and have, elaborated on how specific choices of my site design work to convey the richness of the offering to prospective visitors and linkers.  More on that on another day.  It is working out fairly well for me, and as you can see from this handy graph my visitors love it and it is getting more popular all the time.  (I don’t have a graph of inlinks as a result of that resource but if I did its shape would be similar.)

7)  Make your content easy to share

You might not have noticed, but that kitten photo above was built with the Lolcat Builder, because I am a lazy bum and do not want to get out Paint.NET just to make myself a one-liner.  My sloth is their gain, because the straight-line path to getting that joke onto your screen is to link to the image hosted at Lolcat Builder. 

Most of you are programmers.  With just a little bit of ingenuity, you can make your content easy for your customers to embed on their sites.  This could range from anything from programatically composing linking directions (see, for example, the instructions I give to folks for share these cards on my site) to making a widget that lets people get even more goodness out of your content.  (Heck, the widget itself could be the content.) 

For example, Delicious (I hear there are periods in there somewhere — and, darn it, I refuse to use them) makes it really easy for you to embed Delicious links in your site.  Something like, say, this one, which if you click on it will let you bookmark this article. 

 
Whoopsie, WordPress.com has decided to protect me against Javascript injection by not letting me post this widget here. Grr. See here for instructions on how to do it on your site, or you can take a look at my site where I have examples running.

You might find that useful — if you do, please, go right ahead.  If not, marvel on the fact that without any coding whatsoever I was able to add functionality to my blog post by doing Delicious a favor, and do some thinking on how you can get this dynamic to work for you.  (One of Aaron Walls suggestions to me was that I make widgets to distribute my most popular bingo cards to teachers with blogs and the like.  That is definately on the list of things to do after I achieve any level of expertise with Javascript.)

8)  Write like an Authority

In any field where the cost of replicating a success is zero there is going to be one far-and-away winner and then there is going to be a massive cliff separating them from second place.  Content creation on the Internet typically fits the bill pretty well — winners win, because why would you go to the second best place to get something you need when the first best is, well, better at the same price (free). 

(This does not mean first place is necessarily actually better than second place.  Wikipedia is quite rarely the best single resource on the Internet for something you want to know about, but it is often the first that springs to mind, and thus it is the best at being Just Good Enough For Right now, which is apparently a market segment worth owning.)

This is the basis for the Filthy Linking Rich phenomenon — the page which achieves authoritative status for a particular concept, query, or idea will typically tend to achieve self-reinforcing authority for it.  I am linking to Filthy Linking Rich because I was explained the concept by someone (who I have forgotten!) who used Filthy Linking Rich to explain the concept that someone else (who I don’t know!) used Filthy Linking Rich to…  etc etc, the rabbit hole goes pretty deep, and that article will continue getting backlinks until the end of time.  (October 2004 — that is practically antediluvian in Internet years.  Yikes, back in 2004, we didn’t even have Youtube, did we?  And yet there is that article from Internet prehistory still merrily humming along.)

I like to call content which tends to stand the test of time evergreen content.  While there is some merit in producing things which will be almost useless in a week (like many of my holiday bingo cards — nobody wants St. Patrick’s Day bingo cards 50 weeks out of the year), particularly if you can be the first or best or both at it, most of the longterm value is in the evergreen content.  (Or being the authority for breaking news, because the authority status you earned is evergreen itself, as long as you keep writing — I think I’ve been visiting Instapundit for 7 years now because Glenn Reynolds is to me what newspapers were to my grandfather’s generation.)

I’ll write an article on writing like an authority later, hopefully sometime this week when I have a bit of time to spare.  If you’ve got any particular questions about it, or any of the other points here, please feel free to drop a comment.

Comments Off

Pretty, New Competitor To Google Analytics

Posted on April 5, 2008 by in Analytics

For those of you who are a little askance with the idea of handing over your information to the Google Borg, there is a new analytics package out there you might like: Clicky.  Having used it for a day or two, it doesn’t offer all that much unique from Analytics which is useful to a uISV, but it has some usability wins (no need to tag URLs on your website, automatically tracks downloads and inbound/outbound links, etc), and there are features to stalk particular folks across your site if you’re into that sort of thing.  Personally I wouldn’t suggest it but if you had a webapp with a privacy policy which allowed it it might be a useful support tool.

One thing folks sometime neglect when making a webapp, and I’m certainly guilty, is making it look gorgeous.  Clicky does not have that problem.  I’ll be honest: I signed up precisely because it had the “new car smell” to it.

Comments Off

Blog Has A New Address

Posted on April 4, 2008 by in Uncategorized

Its time for a little spring cleaning and I’m (finally) clearing out the cobwebs around here.  As a result, I’ll be moving my blog from WordPress.com to a self-hosted WordPress installation, changing the theme a bit, and reorganizing things substantially.  Your old bookmarks and links will continue to function because WordPress is redirecting the old URL to here, but I’d suggest you update them to http://www.kalzumeus.com anyhow.

Exceptionally diligent readers will remember that Kalzumeus was the code name for my webapp which did not end up actually making it to production.  Sadly, I just got too busy with the day job to get it out the door, and I lost faith in the business model.  Plus tweaking Bingo Card Creator has given me plenty of opportunities to play around with Ruby on Rails under the hood.  I swear, even in the all-Java, all-the-time world of my day job I find myself dreaming in Rails (as you would be, too, if you had just put in a 60 hour workweek doing a partial reimplementation of ActiveRecord and having to fight the environment every step of the way to make it happen).

Anyhow, I am generally pretty poor at naming things.  Kalzumeus is hard to spell and not exactly the most natural of words, but I picked in it a fit of self-indulgence from a character I wrote into a story many years ago.  He was a sarcastic, intelligent, and slightly hyperactive dragon, and makes as good a mascot as any.  More importantly, he is the very first bit of IP I came up with while old enough to understand what the word meant, and I have a little bit of nostalgia for the moment of creation.  I think I’ll get a picture done of him for the masthead… 

For branding purposes, eh, I expect most people will continue to find this blog through bookmarks or Googling variations of “Patrick the bingo card guy” for the time being.  If you’re just starting out your uISV journey, do as I say and not as I do here: obscure in-jokes which are not easy to spell are probably not the best of ideas.

This reminds me: I have had the papers lying around for incorporating Kalzumeus LLC for a while but have never gotten around to it.  Ahh well, one of these days when I have a reason to do so…

(Speaking of which: I finally found out how to move a blog off of WordPress without screwing up all your readers and search engine juice.  First, purchase a domain of your choice.  Second, point the domain’s DNS at ns1.wordpress.com , ns2.wordpress.com, ns3.wordpress.com for about a day.  Third, go to your WordPress control panel, click upgrade, click domain, click add the domain, pay WordPress $10 through Paypal, and then they will set up the new domain as an alias of your WordPress.com blog.  This isn’t quite what you want.  Go back to the domain panel and click the selection to use the new domain as primary, which will redirect yourblog.wordpress.com to it.  You’re now paying WordPress $10 a year for, essentially, a 301 redirect from your old blog to your new blog, and for blog hosting, but you can cut them out of the second half of the equation.  After you’ve announced the change and waited a month, cut your DNS settings to the hosting provider of your choice, where you have a WordPress blog set up with your old WordPress.com postings pre-loaded.  Nobody will even notice the second changeover, including Google.

 Why would you want to do this?

  • Control over the domain — you can now install whatever you want on it
  • A somewhat more visually distinctive design than the oh-so-wonderful WordPress blue
  • Branding, if you’re into that
  • Gets rid of WordPress AdSense ads on your site
  • You can commercialize your site, if you’re into that stuff
  • You can integrate your blog with other content on the same domain.  I’m planning on doing some fun stuff later, after I get the new site changed over and looking pretty (likely at least a month from now). 
Comments Off

Download Sites: Important or Not?

Posted on March 25, 2008 by in Uncategorized

Folks ask this once in a while on the Business of Software boards: exactly how important are download sites to a uISV’s promotion strategy? 

Confirmed Installs By Download Location in March 2008:

 Download Sites Are Useless

Any questions?

(OK, it isn’t quite that cut and dried.  I’d still recommend doing submission via Robosoft for the SEO benefits of the backlinks it will get, particularly for a new uISV.  However, in terms of driving downloads, download sites are all but worthless.  It is easy to figure out why if you watch users looking for software: rather than going to www.download.com and searching for it, they just Google it to start out with.)

Comments Off

Speeding Up Web Page Rendering

Posted on March 25, 2008 by in web design

I have the good fortune to be on a fast, fast, fast Japanese connection and as a result don’t typically wait too long to view webpages.  This makes me forget sometimes that the rest of the world doesn’t get nigh-instantaneous page loads, which means I don’t often design with this factor in mind.  However, somebody pointed out that the new sidebar buttons were loading last for them, and as my front page can potentially take 4 seconds to load (longer than a significant portion of visitors stay!) I didn’t want that.

Why is a bit of a long story.  First off, the sidebar is literally the last thing in the HTML body element (with the exception of various bits of Javascript).  This is to push up the main content area in the document, because search engines treat stuff near the top as more important and I want pages to rank for their own content not the content of pages they happen to link to on the sidebar.  This means that, if you parse the webpage starting at the top and going down, you come across those IMG tags pretty much dead last after everything else on the page.

Now, how do browsers download assets (images, Javascript, CSS, and whatnot)?  Basically, there is a FIFO (first-in, first-out) queue maintained per host name.  For example, if I have the web page reference 10 images on www.bingocardcreator.com, then those are listed from first occuring to last occuring in the queue.  The browser then, following HTTP specifications, starts downloading two at a time per queue.  This means that if you have, say, 25 objects to grab from your own domain and 1 offsite Javascript the offsite Javascript will start downloading about as soon as its discovered while the last object from your domain waits in line.

So that is the technical explanation.  What was happening was my front page loads 2 fairly sizeable screenshots totaling 200kb of the total 350kb required to load the page, and as these are both ABOVE the sidebar when you’re reading HTML linearly, they were blocking the download of the buttons.  That is certifiably ungood, particularly as one of the screenshots isn’t even visible when you open the page (it is far below the fold, most people won’t even see it!)

However, since the queue is maintained per hostname, if I could only host on a hostname other than www.bingocardcreator.com, I could have things download in parallel.  Happily, my webserver (Nginx) makes it really simple to set up extra names like, say, images1.kalzumeus.com which are essentially the same as the main domain in every way except they are, well, named differently.  Thus tricking your browser to download from them in parallel.  I set up 4 domains this way and used that to do a bit of manual queue optimization to ensure that the images with the highest payoff (big beautiful buttons!) load fastest. 

And to think I was wondering why so few folks tracked in CrazyEgg were hitting the images compared to before.  Now I know — they were waiting so long they had already found a text link before engaging the image.  The results are visibly different even on my monster Japanese connection.  (Its like the Godzilla of latency… in a good way?)

Rails offers a way to do this automatically, but I wouldn’t recommend it if you have only a few pages to hand optimize.  The reason is simple — randomizing access to domains results in good average case load orders but if you can hand-optimize things you blow it out of the water.  (For example, there is about a 40% chance that the large image would block one of my conversion buttons with random host names.)

Comments Off

Still More Graphical Fiddling Going On

Posted on March 23, 2008 by in Uncategorized

Now that Easter is over and the accompanying surge and then dearth of traffic has passed I thought I would get cracking on the graphical twiddling.

The site, as it looked five minutes ago:

Old Header And Buttons

 The site, as it looks now:

New Header and Buttons

There are also buttons in matching styles on the card download pages.  You can see it on the page about, say, a set of bingo cards about Japanese customs.

This set of logos is all done by Logo Samurai, including the header (with integration work by Gursimran).  Since it is technically difficult to split test the header on my current setup I’m going to have to sort of fudge it (i.e. look at the metrics for the next two weeks and see if it causes major changes or not).   Not the world’s best experimental design but oh well…

Comments Off

Insights On Blog Optimization

Posted on March 20, 2008 by in Uncategorized

My little brother, with the blog set up to sell his eventually-going-to-be-published superhero novel, has started some pretty hard-core-for-a-college-student optimizations to make his writing more sticky.  This post is probably of genuine interest to uISVs, as it involves changes in header art which essentially make the blog’s USP (Unique Selling Proposition) more comprehensible and the blog connect better to the target readership.  This has apparently caused about 25% more readers to stick around and actually keep reading when they’re drawn into his copious linkbaiting efforts.

He also found that rewriting old evergreen content to make it better bears some fruits.  That is a good idea you could probably adapt for your business, too.  I do wee little experiments with my most popular pages quite frequently to see what I can do to increase their popularity and also increase the amount of value they pump into the rest of my business.  I can vouch for my brother’s finding on “adding by subtracting” — decreasing the number of free bingo cards offered on one page greatly increased the percentage of visitors who downloaded, and increased the amount of time spent on site substantially (like, by a factor of two substantially).  It also drove many folks from a conversion to a card (low value — measured in pennies) to a conversion to the trial (much higher value — 60 cents or so).

Food for thought!

Comments Off

New Blood in the uISV Blogosphere

Posted on March 20, 2008 by in blogging

I don’t link out to uISV bloggers often enough and when I do it is often to the usual suspects.  However, recently, I’ve broadened my reading horizons and discovered that there are a couple of newer uISV bloggers out there who are very worthy of your time.  I thought I would feature a few:

Optimization Blog — Are you an A/B test junkie, or recovering junkie?  Have you ever decided to A/B test whether customers respond better to the #0000FF or #0000FE as a link color?  Then you just might like this blog.  Topics of note include placement above the fold, Big Freaking Download Buttons, and buttons versus textual links (the results will not suprise you if you’ve been reading this site for a while, but I have them in my feedreader on the chance they come up with fun new stuff).

MicroISV Class of 2007 — Tracks a collection of uISVs started in 2007 through their sophomore year.  Good luck to all!  (Some of them are pretty impressive, although I don’t know if I would spend quite so much effort on WebsiteGrader.  There is a point after which optimizing for metrics not measured in dollars or other objective measurements of customer interest ceases to be productive.  But I like pretty charts as much as the next guy, so I keep tuning in.)

Planet MicroISV — The world’s best collection of uISV blogs, now with a new and improved interface (from Styleshout, who have a wide variety of free Web 2.0-y themes if you’re looking for one — if you have a blog or linkbait project that needs to look pretty in a hurry I highly recommend them).

If you’ve got another blog the community should be reading, drop a comment.  Feel free to drop a link to your own blog, unless it is PartyPoker-HighestPayouts.co.ru.

Comments Off

Steph Grenier On Generating Traffic For Your Website

Posted on March 20, 2008 by in marketing, microISV, SEO

I think I mentioned that I don’t really like ebooks the last time I reviewed one.  Please incorporate that total hatred by reference here.  Nonetheless, I gave that ebook, which was written by a professional colleague, an unreservedly positive review, because I sincerely think it will help many of my readers sell software.

Now I’m in sort of a conundrum — I received a copy of another e-book to review.  I respect the author greatly.  The other author who I already gave a positive review to praised the e-book lavishly.  So what’s my problem?

Well, frankly, I can’t imagine the book being all that useful to you, with the exception of three pages that are absolutely dynamite.  (It very well might be useful to some folks who don’t read this blog.  Why write a review for them, though?)

The story in 60 seconds: Steph Grenier of LandLordMax  wrote an e-book on How To Generate Traffic To Your Website.  (I also contributed a chapter to a real on-dead-tree book that Steph is getting published later this year.  The project is unrelated.)  The e-book includes 136 pages, with quite a few full-page annoted screen captures of Google.  We’ll call it about 120 pages of content, in which he covers 11 chapters, from SEO to Blogging to AdWords.

If you do the math there, that is about 11 pages per subject.  Now, supposing you were trying to explain blogging in 11 pages or less to someone who had never heard of the concept before, what do you think you could write before running out of space?

Well, maybe a good introduction to blogging for someone who is never heard of it.

And that is, in a nutshell, what about 95% of the e-book is.  A good introduction to SEO, AdWords, or blogging, for someone who has never heard of the topic.  At all.  If you have done any significant reading on the topics, this e-book will not teach you much that you don’t know.

Example excerpt from the chapter on Blogging:

[One reason why to blog is that it] can personalize your business. Instead of being just another faceless website it can give your website a second personality. It can give it that personal touch that people like. A lot of sales are through emotions, and people like to connect with people they like and trust. If you’re honest and real on your blog, and not just writing what you think people want to hear, you’ll create a personal bond with your customers. This will create long term traffic.

That paragraph is true.  It is fairly well-written.  It just doesn’t teach you anything you don’t already know if you habitually read blogs.  If you have ever read a blog post about why to blog, which are legion, you know it already.  If you already have a blog, you know this in your bones.  This section is also representative of the depth this book goes into on almost all subjects.  If you’re a non-technical small business owner who reads email but isn’t quite hip on this whole Internet thing yet, you might well learn quite a bit from this chapter.  If you’re running an ISV, this is almost certainly going to be akin to having a computer programmer sit through a middle school Algebra I lecture (“OK, class, I’m going to introduce a deep concept — sometimes, instead of a number, you can do math using a letter!  We call this a variable.”)

Topic Selection

I’m somewhat interested in SEO and linkbait, as long time readers of this blog know.  I really can’t recommend the chapter on SEO that much — if you have read almost anything on the subject you already know everything written here, and the topic selection leaves much to be desired.  For example, it covers Keyword Density (a metric which is, frankly, useless because it leads to no actionable insights on how to write your pages) at multi-page length.  Meanwhile, it almost ignores methods of getting links.  (Which is a shame, because this would have been a great time to mention the next section.) 

Three Pages I Really Loved

Pages 52-54 are, far and away, the best part of the book.  It provides a case study (incredibly rare in this book — most of it is basic techniques unconnected with any real examples) of how Steph used a free calculator on his website to double his traffic.  If this had been written elsewhere in the book, the level of detail would have been something like:

Freebies do attract traffic. Unfortunately it’s not always good traffic, some people will only come for the freebies and leave, but many will also stay and re-visit your website in the future (and possibly tell others about it). If you’re a blogger, they may read your other blog posts, buy your services, etc. If you’re a company they may look through your website for other interesting pages, they may tell others about what they found, etc. Freebies have always been a great way to attract attention and traffic. The key is how well you can convert the traffic coming from the freebies.

(Actually, the chapter on Freebies does start out like that.  Nothing you didn’t know already.)  But when grounded in the case study, the chapter suddenly becomes much more useful.  It examines the calculator from multiple points of view — promoting the freebie (which I’d call linkbait, incidentally, and mention REPEATEDLY in the SEO chapter because I will *guarantee* you this did more good for Steph than all his metatags could ever hope for) with a press release, for example.  If the entire book was like these three pages I’d be telling everybody I knew to go out and buy it today, but sadly they are an anomaly.

A Trend I’m Not That Fond Of

One of the reasons I hate e-books is they have a distressing tendency to turn into MLM schemes, with folks writing e-books to promote e-books to…  you get the general idea.  So when I see affiliate links in an e-book, that generally sends my spidersense tingling.  It means that the reader is paying for the privilege of reading an advertisement.  Moreover, unlike say an advertisement in your favorite magazine, rather than being adjacent to the content and clearly marked as not influencing the editorial judgement, these these affiliate ads are built into the content.  Example:

Today what we’ll attempt to do is give you an overview of the most effective SEO techniques at your disposal. I can’t hope to cover everything SEO related, there’s too much material. Indeed, I’d recommend the SEO Bookby Aaron Wall as further reading. I bought his EBook about 2 years ago and I still continue to personally reference it as a great resource. And as new SEO techniques surface and others expire, Aaron continues to update his EBook.

I broke that link intentionally.  Now, SEOBook is a great resource, I’ll agree.  I joined Aaron Wall’s (the author’s) training program for $100 a month, and feel I have gotten enough out of it to justify my first month (ask me about the second in another month).  But if you had found the chapter on SEO a little lacking in the useful detail department, and clicked on that link to go from the beginners’ class to the intermediate one, you’d have caused Steph to pretty much double his money on selling the book to you. 

This troubles me — not because making money on the Internet is a bad thing or anything, but once you start down this road, it becomes difficult for the reader to differentiate between the advice that you’re giving because it is solid advice and the advice you are giving because it offers a solid commission.

Similarly, Bob’s review also uses affiliate links for both Steph’s book and the inline reference to SEOBook.  And we’re off to the Internet Marketing races.  Instead of focusing on selling products of value to customers, we start down the merry path of cannibalizing members of our community for revenue by selling them on the dream of being a successful uISV.  They, in turn, then get to make money by selling the same products to other folks dreaming of being successful uISVs.  Who get to sell the same products to others hoping to be uISVs.  Instead of being an involved community of software entrepeneurs, it would be a community of MLM hucksterism, which does not bring value to anyone and doesn’t generate any revenue from outside the pyramid.

This concern is why I don’t put affiliate links on my site.  Keep in mind that I have the utmost respect for both Steph and Bob, I just think this trend is not in the long-term best interests of this community.

Review In Ten Seconds

Steph Grangier: great guy, successful uISV.  This book: not so hot for most uISVs.  If you buy it: save time, read and implement pages 52 to 54.

Comments Off
Older posts
Newer posts