marketing

Wufoo + Free Incentivization = Cheap, Effective User Surveys

The prototypical customer of Bingo Card Creator is a woman between the ages of 30 to 50 who plays bingo with her classroom. I like to think of her as Martha.  However, unlike most statements I make here about my business, this is far more a guess than it is a fact substantiated by data.
I can [...]

Engineering Your Way To Marketing Success

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I visited Thomas Ptacek and the gang at Matasano (who are developing a firewall management product) over Christmas break and had a very productive discussion about marketing.  One of the things Thomas mentioned was that I should probably blog out how you can use engineering resources to improve your marketing.
In Which I Have A Revelation

Have you [...]

How To Do A Seasonal Promotion for Your App

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Many software/web-app developers naively assume that demand for their product is roughly static year-round, despite the fact that this is true for very, very few industries. Retail (in-a-box) software lives and dies by its Christmas numbers. B2B software often sees spiky behavior around the accounting periods and business cycles of its target [...]

Testing a New Marketing Strategy: Email

Since all of the users of BCC online give their email addresses to sign up, I thought I would start with some email marketing.  I’m using MailChimp, chiefly because their website is pretty and I had heard good things about their API.  With the help of the hominid gem it has only taken me about [...]

How To Successfully Compete With Open Source Software

(This post recently got linked on Japanese blogs.  英語より日本語の方が楽な方:これを和訳しようとしています。日本語版はこちらです。)
Every once in a while, somebody on the Business of Software forums asks whether there is any point to trying to compete with open source software (OSS — essentially, software anyone can use and modify without needing to pay money or receive permission).  This is very possible, as folks [...]

Steph Grenier On Generating Traffic For Your Website

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 [...]

Google Features Bingo Card Creator

I’m sorry, this post was due a week ago but I have been a combination of sick and busy.
Regular readers of this blog might remember that, around September, I started using Conversion Optimizer on my Content Network campaign and had a lot of successwith it.  My success came to the attention of the project manager for [...]

Fantastic Article on SEO For Bloggers

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 [...]

Putting the Green in Evergreen

If you have a post which ranks very highly for a particular query of high value to you, you can use it to springboard additional products in conceptually related spaces. 
Most blogs which add value are eventually going to have a few evergreen posts.  An “evergreen” puts the lie to blogs being a medium which only covers [...]

Developing Linkbait For a Non-Technical Audience

Meet The Linkerati 
The old computer science joke has it that there are 10 kinds of people in the world: those that understand binary, and those that don’t.  There are 10 kinds of people on the Internet, too: those that link, and those that don’t.  Those that link are called the Linkerati, and they have the power [...]