Happy New Year

Posted on January 3, 2008 by in Uncategorized

Hideho everybody, and welcome to 2008.  If you’re still reading this after me taking nearly a month off to crunch at work and visit my family, I owe you a double-plus helping of good wishes for the new year.  So, let’s see, what is up for Bingo Card Creator and this blog in January:

1)  Bingo Card Creator 2.0 will be officially released sometime this weekend.  The major improvements include a tweak in the printing code which has resulted in making most cards much more readable and the addition of close to 200 extra word lists to the product, derived from the Daily Bingo Cards project.  As they say: if you’ve got it, flaunt it. 

2)  I am also increasing prices at that point, although the Back to School sale will take the edge off of them.

3)  I know I have said this before, but the big announcement with Google should actually happen next week.  (I just tell you what they tell me.)  You can keep an eye peeled here or you can keep an eye peeled at the AdWords blog, as I’ve been informed they’ll be cross-posting the announcement there.

4)  I have one of those meaty blog articles in the works about competitors.  The short version: I recommend having them, but mostly ignoring them.  It will be posted here when it is ready.  I’m also working on a longer elaboration of my remarks about choosing a name for your product/uISV.

5)  I’d post more, except there is a bonnie lass who I haven’t seen in a few weeks as a result of going back to America.  Sorry, gents, but I have my priorities in order.

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Merry Christmas to other uISVers!

Posted on December 22, 2007 by in Uncategorized

As you might have noticed, December is generally pretty busy for me and I haven’t had my usual diligence in updating the blog.  I just got back yesterday to Chicago for my annual get together with the family and am severely jet lagged now, but I’m going to have a wonderful two weeks with my loved ones.  Merry Christmas to all, and I wish you a wonderful holiday and upcoming year with your own families.

See you in early January for my announcement with Google, the official launch of Bingo Card Creator 2.0, the year-end wrapup for 2007, and (possibly, depending on the amount of time I have) a redesign of the Bingo Card Creator and Daily Bingo Cards web sites.  Until then, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

 P.S.  Hiya, Google searchers : You’re probably looking for Christmas bingo cards or maybe New Years bingo cards.  Yep, I’ve got them and yep, they’re free — just click the underlined blue text.  Feel free to pass those links around.  Merry Christmas and I hope you have a wonderful holidays with your families, too.

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Free Christmas Bingo Cards

Posted on December 8, 2007 by in Uncategorized

Hideho, folks on the Internet.  I run a small business which sells software that makes bingo cards, and every time a holiday runs around Google sends me a couple thousand people looking for holiday bingo cards.  So you know what?  I decided to make some early for Christmas this year, and give them away.  Merry Christmas.  There are couple varieties which you can find on my holiday bingo card page.  Feel free to use them for any purpose you wish, print them out, play them with your family or class, whatever you want to do.  And please, it’s Christmas — give them to anyone you think would want them.  All of the card sets can be run off at your printer and come with instructions.

Now, having once been a teacher, I know that schools, businesses, and the like handle Christmas holidays That Winter Thing differently.  Personally, I prefer to spend Christmas with my family, have a nice dinner, go out to Mass, and in general have the whole wonderfully American package of loving family and friends, deeply moving religious experience, and a wee bit of tinsel and presents mixed in.  But every year we hear about how some grinch saw a creche which didn’t have the requisite plastic elf next to it and decided to sue everybody in sight.  So I broke the Christmas lists into two: on the one hand, we’ve got the traditional Christmas bingo cards which cover the Christmas story that I’ll be hopefully hearing at midnight Mass, and on the other hand we’ve got the ACLU-approved reindeer & Santa Christmas bingo cards.  And, in the spirit of further giving (and hopefully a little peace over the holidays), there is the mixed Christmas bingo cards.

P.S. I’m a little late for our Jewish friends but I did do some Hannakah bingo cards as well.  Hopefully you’ll find a use for them the next four days.  Let me know if I screwed anything up, as my honorary so-Catholic-he’s-almost-Jewish card that I got in high school is expired and I’m finding it difficult to renew these days (I live in Japan and, well, if you thought you guys were a minority in America…*)

*Funny stories abound on this topic, actually.  Ask me about the Orthodox Jewish Japanese girl some time.

P.P.S.  For the curious, wondering about which type of Christmas is big this year, take a gander at the list of most popular bingo cards, which my website keeps constantly updated.  All of the Christmas lists are probably going to be on there until January, if history is any indication. 

You’ll see the order — the consolidated Christmas list is called “Christmas bingo cards”, the Christmas story version is “Christmas (Traditional) bingo cards”, and the Santa at the Mall version is “Christmas (Seasonal) bingo cards”.

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Six days. Twenty Dollars. One New Business.

Posted on December 2, 2007 by in Uncategorized

A gentleman by the name of Ezell apparently told his friend that I had made a successful business in a ridiculously short amount of time, so it must be possible.  The friend disagreed.  Ezell said “I’ll prove it!”, and has decided to one-up me in the process, by shaving a few days and dollars off my schedule.  I personally think he will be able to do it, and am rooting for him.

The program is going to be called BabyAid, running in a niche roughly similar to TrixieTracker.  I previously commented on the Business of Software message board that I believe this is a very underserved niche which one could really do a lot of good in with the right offering. 

Incidentally, the friend was disagreeing as a result of his experience as a independent game developer.  I agree, for a game developer to produce a game worth paying money for, 8 days and no budget for art or music assets will probably not cut it.  Personally, I think that developing videogames is an excellent hobby if you like it (I have contributed to OSS ones in the past) but it makes a very poor choice for someone wanting to start a business.  Maybe I’ll go into why on another post.

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Fantastic Article on SEO For Bloggers

Posted on November 28, 2007 by in marketing, SEO

This article on SEO for bloggers is just amazing.  I highly recommend anyone with a blog who doesn’t already consider them past the intermediate stage on SEO read it.  I recommend absolutely everyone read the followup on how the original article was designed and marketed as a stunningly effective piece of linkbait.  (Some might say that this makes the original article cynical.  I disagree — it was and is very useful to many people, and there is no reason you shouldn’t promote things which are useful to your audience for your mutual benefit.  Rails is another project which has proven that just because you’re professionally marketed and designed to go viral doesn’t mean you have to suck.)

If you’re interested in SEO for bloggers, the author of that piece and I will both be contributing chapters to Steph’s book on blogging.  You might find them of interest.  If Steph lets me I’ll post an early excerpt from my chapter as an early Christmas present to you all.

P.S. Speaking of Christmas, I know you want to play Christmas bingo with your family, right? 

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Because You Can't Quite Get Enough Transparency…

Posted on November 26, 2007 by in Rails, stats

I really wanted to post how Daily Bingo Cards was doing statswise today, but probably will not have the time.  (The short version: the snowflake queries are loving me and owning a top 10 spot on every possible variation of “thanksgiving bingo cards” is worth 1.5X owning the 11th spot on [thanksgiving bingo cards] itself.  Don’t ask me how you can rank for a phrase that competitive in less than 2 months of work.)  While I know the analysis is the really interesting bit, for the stats geeks in the audience I decided to make my website stats public in real time.  Enter a Rails plugin named Sitealizer, about five minutes of work, and powie, stats for anyone.

Want to take a gander?  Daily Bingo Cards stats.  At the moment it should be showing search queries, referrers, and the like for about the last 24 hours.  You’ll note that it is hardly as tricked out as Google Analytics (one nice feature Analytics lacks: it tells you what crawlers are hitting your site and at what rates), but it is good enough to keep me more or less honest when discussing traffic numbers.

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Exploiting New Niches

Posted on November 24, 2007 by in AdWords, blogging, SEO

I’m currently the #1 result on Google for the [conversion optimizer] search which is not actually controlled by Google, as a result of a pair of posts on the subject.

That is largely the result of a combination of a niche which was new, my early adoption of it, and radical transparency.  There are, approximately, a billion Internet marketing and search engine watching blogs out there.  Many of them are much, much higher profile than this blog.  Many of these covered the launch of Conversion Optimizer, but I was (to my knowledge) the only person who backed up the first impressions with numbers, and as a result I attracted just a few more links than the next guy and, wham, the search engines think I’m the expert on the topic.

I mention this for two reasons: One, it is quite useful to know how to convince the search engines you are the expert on a particular topic.  For niches which are brand spanking new (say, hmm, Blackberry spam filters after the introduction of the Blackberry), the combination of there being zero pre-existing links, less than a full Internet of competition, and massive first-mover’s advantage means that you can snag the top spots quite easily if you move reasonably quickly with something compelling.  It’s not just enough to be there first, you have to be there “firstest with the mostest” — I think my first post on Conversion Optimizer was weeks after launch but the “real numbers” hook is extraordinarily more compelling than the “news you already read from Google’s blog” hook.

After you’re already on top, you’ll probably stay on top, because the guy on top becomes the canonical result to refer to the subject when anyone else just needs to introduce it.  (This phenomenon is described in Filthy Linking Rich, probably the most worthwhile article from 2004 for a business owner in 2008.)

Aside from it being a useful business skill to learn how to position yourself as the expert on an emerging topic (and, for what it’s worth, I’m hardly the expert on this subject, just expert in the eyes of the computer algorithm that people trust to identify experts these days), this opened up a nice opportunity for my business.  I hate to be coy, but it will be another week or so before I can say exactly what it was.  For now, I just wanted to get this post timestamped so that I can refer to it for a before-after comparison in the wake of the announcement I expect to be making.

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What the Duplicate Content Penalty Looks Like

Posted on November 22, 2007 by in blogging, SEO

Someone on the BoS board asked a question today about how to execute linkbait well.  I have an article on this blog about that, and wanted to paste a link, so I used my usual link repository — Google.  I have a photographic memory for titles and can’t remember URLs to save my life, for some reason.  Anyhow, the exact query was [developing linkbait for a non-technical audience], which as an exact match for the title Developing Linkbait for a Non-Technical Audience should be a cinch for Google.

And, indeed, it was.  Every one of the first ten results was about the article.  The problem?  Well, take a look: (photo slightly edited — I moved the query over from the right side to the left side so it would fit in my wordpress theme)

 Duplicate Content Penalty 

Yep, that is right — all ten results on the first page are about the article, but the article itself doesn’t appear at all.  Welcome to the Duplicate Content penalty — Google thinks I am plagiarizing one of those results and, as a result, assumes my blog is not a relevant result for the query.  Oofdah.

What can I do about it?  Not much.  This post may well cause that query to rerank.  Luckily, it isn’t a commercially significant query for me.  I’m mostly pointing it out to demonstrate what it looks like to get your site penalized by Google — any time you can punch in a title verbatim and have folks who linked to it appear before the article itself, you can be positive you’ve been penalized.  Luckily, the penalty does not appear to be applied to my site at large, as I still rank for the title of my blog, and obvious strings for which I’m the canonical result that don’t appear on the page itself.  (Patrick McKenzie blog, Bingo Card Creator blog, etc)  Those are the tests you’d want to perform if you suddenly see yourself de-rank for something you should rank for, by the way.

What caused this?  Well, if I’d have to guess, it was either the Sphinn (a social network for SEOs) post (a decent bet, since that is the #1 result) or perhaps one of the verbatim copy/paste jobs from those .info spamblogs.  Really freaking irksome, either way.  Since you can’t control people scraping or linking to you, I recommend not worrying about it, but should this happen to you on a page you care about, an inbound link or three from a trusted site will generally cure it.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody. 

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Rails SEO Tips 90% Completed

Posted on November 19, 2007 by in Rails, SEO

Too many projects, too little time.  I got most of my Rails SEO hints page completed tonight, after finally implementing more of the suggestions I was making in Daily Bingo Cards itself.

The Table of Contents

The page is still a bit of a work in progress, of course.  I intend to keep it updated and continue gradually expanding the content.  Plus it is 2 AM and I really have no effort to do make the code samples more pretty (what can you expect — I built them by hand in notepad — lots and lots of ampersands, let me tell you). 

If you have any comments about the article, feel free to leave them here.  If you know any Rails developers who might be interested in the resource, please feel free to pass it on to them.

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A Side-Project You May Be Interested In

Posted on November 19, 2007 by in Uncategorized

Steph Granger, of LandLordMax fame, is editing a book about how to succeed in blogging.  It will be composed of essays and interviews contributed by guest authors.  There are a bunch of big names participating (Seth Godin, John Chow), quite a few folks from our little uISV community (Andy Brice, Ian Landsman, etc), and for some strange reason I was asked to contribute a chapter.

If you’ve got anything you’d like to see me cover, feel free to drop me a line in the comments.  Given that there are marketing folks aplenty on the author list I was thinking of covering some of the technical nuts&bolts of blogging, probably from an SEO angle, but that is hopefully not the only thing I know how to talk about.

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