I had been wondering what happened to the Antair guys. It appears they’re striking out for the big leagues, moving in to brand new digs and everything. Why don’t you go over to wave and congratulate them on their successes?
I remember back when Andrey was still comparing his sales to mine to see if he was on a good track. Suffice it to say that he’s since made it necessary for me to play a wee bit of catchup.
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.
One of my uISV buddies, Ethan (king of language learning software), took me to task earlier today for spending so much time optimizing my download page when I could just eliminate it entirely and link the download direct to the download button in most cases. I had always had these issues with that solution:
Examining Ethan’s code made it really easy to avoid the first two issues:
function SetUpRedirect()
{
var destination = “http://www.bingocardcreator.com/free-trial.htm“;
setTimeout(“window.location=’”+destination+”‘”,3000);
return true;
}
If you stick that in the OnClick attribute of a link pointing at your favorite executable, three seconds after clicking the link and having the download initiate, the user’s browser goes to the download page in the background. This causes no security warning, scores them as a download conversion with the appropriate code on the page, and presents graceful fallback behavior if they don’t know what to do with the window that just popped up, since you can give them instructions.
Ahh, but what to do about the difference between Windows and Mac computers, which need different installers? First, we make a controller method to handle it in Rails:
def free_trial_download
if request.user_agent.downcase =~ /mac/
send_file “public/files/BingoCardCreator.zip”, :type => “application/zip”
else
send_file “public/files/BingoCardCreatorInstaller.exe”, :type => “application/exe”
end
end
That essentially says “If I’m positive you’re using a Mac, initiate a download of the zip file. Otherwise, initiate a download of the exe file.” (Obviously since 92% of my downloads are PC users I want to err on the side of caution.)
Then, with a simple route added to routes.rb:
map.downloadFreeTrial ‘free-trial/download’, :controller => ‘static’, :action => ‘free_trial_download’
we get a simple URL which is platform agnostic and which decides, on the server side, which version of the file to give them. You can then decorate your links to the platform-agnostic URL with the code to redirect the page to the download page in the background, with Analytics click tracking, and what have you. Easy peasy! One less step in the conversion funnel, and instantaneous recovery of a large portion of the 20% of folks who bounce out of the funnel at the download page.
WARNING: send_file will cause your Rails process to block while that IO transfer takes place under certain older versions of Rails (not in 2.0 in my testing). This will cause requests coming to the same Mongrel after the download to wait until the download completes to start, which if you have a 56k modem user could potentially cause your basic site access to be delayed for minutes. Not good news!
My site has two Mongrels running, very few dynamic requests, and very small executables. If your site doesn’t have this profile, instead of using send_file, 302 redirect the browser to the appropriate file and let your web server handle the request before Rails does.
WARNING NUMBER TWO: You don’t want bots hitting that action, so its time for a good-old robots.txt exclusion of it. Note that deploying this sitewide will cause your free trial page to lose quite a bit of the juice you’re sending to it. However, given that that page is typically linked far and wide on the Internet and doesn’t include much interesting content on it (which would distract from the conversion to the trial!), you can probably live with that tradeoff.
Quick request: if you run an obscure browser or a Mac, kindly use my OS-agnostic link and tell me if it works for you. (You should get a prompt to download BingoCardCreator.zip )
I just paid ~$16 to the excellent Robosoft folks to renew my subscription to their updates for the submission service, and lo and behold, it seems that Regsoft is now doing the same scam that SWREG got into hot water for earlier:
To add insult to injury, they put my order through extended verification because they’re afraid that I’m trying to scam them. (This happened when I purchased Robosoft the first time — IP address in Japan + billing address in America = fraud screening. I need to remember to use my US proxy server next time, so that my profile looks like a smart crook rather than a dumb, legitimate customer.)
(For those of you who haven’t heard of this before, the scam is that if you hit that Continue button or the link right next to it, your credit card gets charged $9 a month until you call up the number on your statement to cancel it.)
And if it were anybody but Robosoft, and would probably have called Visa already to report a probable fraud in progress.
Capsule: I made it past the $1,000 mark in sales, finally. Net profit was significantly below that due to heavy experimentation with AdWords. It should hopefully be healthier this month.
Income:
Sales: 41 (1 refund due to customer error, 12 CDs)
Gross Income: $983 + $25 in Canadian + 26 pounds = ~ $1,061
Income Net Paypal: ~$1,039
Expenses:
GoDaddy: $7
CrazyEgg: $9
e-junkie: $5
SwiftCD: $71
AdCenter: $18
AdWords: $325 (Yowch!)
Total Expenses: $435
Total Profit: $604
Commentary: Yes, as you can see I lost an awful lot of money figuring out what worked and what didn’t with AdWords. Not all of that is “lost” so much as it is temporarily negative cashflow — there are literally thousands of my trial versions now installed as a result of that expenditure, and some portion of them are going to convert in the future. I learned a few lessons: #1 you have to watch the content network like a hawk but #2 if you do, especially using their new Conversion Optimizer, it can be amazing. (I am paying something like 24 cents a free trial now for the last week. That implies a cost of less than $12 per additional $24 profit sale. Do a little dance, make a lot of money, get down tonight.)
It seems like it has been a while since I posted updated Analytics stats, so here we go. Note that the free trials is slightly borked at the moment (it conflicts with Website Optimizer, for some reason — was someone not paying attention to their own product line at Google?):
Visits: 16,000
Trial Downloads: 2,000 + download sites (conversion is about 12.5%, lower than the 20% I was getting last year due to both large numbers of uninterested prospects from the Google search “bingo cards” and also because I am much stricter in counting “conversions” now)
Known Good Trial Installs: 615 (6.5% of them bought, although this is slightly skewed by the fact that the easiest route for buying will automatically flag their trial as a known good install)
Biggest Source of Traffic: The Big G, with 46% of my traffic
Head of the Line or Long Tail?: Long Tail! Google keywords averaged three hits apiece. The top 10 keywords counted for only 40% of the total and it falls very, very rapidly from there.
What are the top few? Same as usual. Bingo cards, dolch sight word list (#2, first time ever I think), printable bingo cards, bingo card maker, bingo card creator.
How is the blog doing? That Free Bingo Card post gets about 1.5k hits a month now, translating into 500 clickthroughs to my site, and about 50 trials or ~ $35 a month in revenue. ($50 this month, actually.) Not bad for one single post, and I will finally get off my duff and launch the Bingo Card Creator blog this weekend.
Biggest Vexation? Google only finds about 60% of my sales, and I remain clueless as to what percentage of AdWords referrals actually go on to buy. I have a good lower bound for it (which makes my campaign borderline unprofitable) but have no clue what the actual number is — could be double, could be better. Anecdotally, I definately see the sales numbers go up when I increase AdWords spending, but I’m not sure if the increase is .9x or 1.5x since the data is too darn noisy and limited to boot.
Somebody on the Business of Software forums took it upon themselves to survey 96 uISVs on a variety of topics. The preliminary results of the microISV survey, primarily about demographics, are now posted on their blog. While I think that most folks are waiting with bated breath for the sales results, anybody who does that much work for the community deserves links early and often. (Hint, hint for all you bloggers out there.)
Seen on my login screen today: E-junkie is now processing more than a Million U.S. Dollars worth of transactions per month! Now that deserves a hearty congratulations, for a fellow scrappy little uISV which delivers a great service at a great price. Now I just need to get back to the business of getting them closer to two million a month. :) (At $425 in 15 days, I’m almost a whole tenth of a percent of their business. Woohoo!)
Bob Walsh, who literally wrote the book about uISVs, has opened up a software consultancy for uISVs with the suitably Web 2.0-y name 47hats. Not sure I would go for that name myself but, hey, not my business on the line. While I have occassional disagreements with Bob about the relative ranking of priorities for the uISV*, he has contributed a lot to the community and one more resource for uISVs trying to cross the chasm from $0 to $1 in revenue is always a good thing. (And there are plenty of chasms after that one, too.)
* Two examples: I think he places more emphasis on incorporation and legal documents than is warranted for many uISVs, and I think some of the recommendations he makes in his super-helpful series of website reviews for uISVs are based more on intuition than on data, and I suspect the intuition is flawed.
Speaking of his book: while I somehow managed to avoid reading it, my understanding is it would have shaved a heck of a lot of time off my first week of nailing down administrivia decisions like payment processors, bank accounts, hosting, etc.
Capsule Review: Easily my best month ever, and its summer vacation. I’m really looking forward to the start of the term in August.
Sales: 36 (1 refund, customer was unhappy with font sizing)
Gross Income (less refund): 918.25
Expenses:
SwiftCD $54
AdWords $49.27
GoDaddy $7
e-junkie $5
AdCenter $19.59
CrazyEgg $9
Paypal: $18.04
Total Expenses: $161.90
Net Profit: $756.35
Selected Web Stats:
Visitors: 8,400
Visits: 9,200
Free Trials Downloaded: 1,017 from my site, several hundred from other sites.
Known-good Free Trial Installs (clicked a tagged link from within program): 354
Trial to Purchase Conversion: ~2.5%
Visits to my Purchasing Page: 402
Percent of folks who purchased after reaching purchasing page: 9%
Biggest Coup This Month: Snowflake queries. I rewrote one page of mine, which had previously been very underused, to snap up more of them. Handily, that rewrite was completed on May 30th. During June, that page saw 5,600 page views (or about 27% of my total). During May, that was 2,700 page views, or 12% of my total. The “extra” 3,000 page views were a major part of the reason that, despite the fact traffic on my major teacher-related search terms declined since teachers are out of school, my overall traffic stayed mostly flat while my sales increased markedly. I can’t wait to get some time to write some more content and catch myself some more snowflakes.
I sometimes take a bit of guff from other uISVs for not using a “real” payment processor. Some folks believe Google Checkout/Paypal are “unprofessional” or “hobbyist”. I respect that opinion. However, if the recent events at SWREG are any indication, I’ll wear that amateur label proudly. They recently introduced a new upsell item in shopping carts of the uISVs they serve, and its one that makes one recall the many alternate definitions of the word professional.
Andy Brice has got the story covered and the BoS forums are buzzing about it, but in brief, SWREG has placed a button labeled Continue after the last page after the checkout funnel. If you click the button, you will be billed $9 a month to your credit card, silently, until you figure out who the heck is billing you and try to cancel. This is orchestrated by an outfit called Reservation Rewards aka WebLoyalty.com aka TravelValuePlus aka BuyersAssurance.com aka AnyoneWithSixDBAsIsTryingToScamYou.com. Theoretically, they send you coupons in return for your $9 a month. Many, many folks report never getting the coupons, never receiving a single of the multiple emails they steadfastly claim to send, and never having done the double opt-in gymnastics that they claim isolates people from getting locked into their service without wanting to be.
See, here’s the rub. There is a nice feature of the Internet that folks learn early: if you don’t give your credit card details to someone, they can’t bill you. Entering your credit card details is a signal both of major trust and of the fact that you understand that, absent you taking some action, you’re about to authorize forking over some money. WebScamInc could never get “millions of satisfied customers” to authorize the $9 for nothing purchase with their lack of service, so they piggyback on the trust the customer has in you.
And THAT, more than anything else, is what burns my biscuit about this. It is bad enough that a business would abuse their own customers enough to facilitate theft by fraud from them, and some large businesses did this quite often in the Wild West days of the Internet. What makes it particularly galling, though, is that a customer at SWREG is not SWREG’s customer — he’s the customer of some uISV somewhere who stays up nights toiling away writing emails, polishing web copy, and smashing bugs to earn the trust of people he has never met over the Internet. And what does the customer get for being foolish enough to trust him? He gets stabbed in the back by someone whose only purpose in life is to be a convenient CGI interface to a merchant account.
Oh, but it gets better. Over at Andy’s blog, Jessy from SWREG has this explanation of why they allowed a scammer to take up residence on their service. Its… well… here, read it.
Hello,
The offering is a perks offering for customers. In no way are they tricked into using this, and it is clearly disclosed what they are signing up for. The signup page looks nothing like the order form or SWREG clearly differentiating it from the product purchase.
Customers are also very easily able to cancel the perk offering at any time. They can choose to pay the fee and receive great discounts at very popular, well-known brands/stores within their country.
SWREG has made this optional for our clients. These are offerings used at Amazon and EBay, nothing new or out of the ordinary for customers.
If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Thanks,
Jessy
(Email address omitted by me.)
This is willfully obtuse. Yes, if you read every word on the SWREG order page, you will indeed realize that the 8pt font says you are submitting your data to a third party and authorizing them to debit your credit card. The 24 point font on the blue button, however, says “Yes. Click here now”. And SWREG, as an e-commerce merchant, should darn well better know that Internet pages are not made to be read. They are made to be scanned — readers evaluate, in a period of seconds, whether or not anything on the page has interest to them and then they drill down into that content, either by reading it or interacting with their interface.
A large block of small text font on a web page, placed against a blue button with a strong call to action, isn’t asking to be read. Its asking to be missed. It is exactly where any web site designer worth their salt would say “You know, if I put that in CrazyEgg or did a real heat map study, that area would be a deep blue dead zone. I sure hope the content writers don’t put anything important there.”
There is also the context to consider. This is important — if you are in the middle of a transaction, and you have already gotten over the mental “Give this vendor [i.e. the uISV] money” barrier, then everything from the start of the funnel to the end of the funnel reads Click next to continue. If that button had said, in 48 point font, “Click here to format C:\” I still could have gotten 5% conversion with it! Its like putting something on the second to last page of an installer — we all know that nobody reads anything, they just mindlessly click next until the application pops up or they are dumped to their desktop because our industry has trained them for decades that nothing they are about to see is important. That is why, when we design web applications, we put destructive actions behind popup confirmations, and we put really destructive actions behind things which are designed to jar the user out of their GUI induced fugue, like “Type d-e-l-e-t-e to drop the database”. Spending money is customarily put behind a similar speedbump, entering credit card details, and this scam is designed precisely to circumvent that safety valve.
Oh, but spending money isn’t necessarily destructive, as Jess points out. Maybe folks like the discounts they’re getting at a wide variety of establishments in their country, for the low, low price of $9 a month.
Tell me, do the one thousand, nine hundred, and seventeen customers who commented on just one of the “Reservation Rewards is a scam” thread sound like they are satisfied customers happy to have received discounts? Lets review a couple of these comments, shall we?
Daniel said
wow i cant belive this i just noticed these same charges on my account and only noticed because it made me overdraft in my debit account. i called the bank and they told me that it has been going on since july thats $54 that they have talken with out me knowing i have no idea where they got the info tho i always shop through paypal but makbe that is the problem all i know is that this needs to be stopped it is wrong.
Matt said
Thanks for putting this up. I just got off the phone with these guys. They claimed they “were making an exception to the rules” when they refunded 4 months worth of charges to me. I asked where they got my CC# and they claimed it was from ebgames.com, a site I sometimes buy stuff from. I’m filing a complaint with the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection and will be taking the issue up with ebgames.com customer service and perhaps the Pennsylvania Bureau of Consumer Protection if that doesn’t work out well.
(You can feel free to add this to the SWREG defense: Well, if Reservations Rewards is good enough to scam ebgames’ customers, then it is good enough to scam ours!)
Don said:
I am currently serving in Iraq, have been for 4 months, and noticed that I have been recieving charges from WLI for $7 (am I a lucky one to get off so cheap?). I have gone to their webpage with an unloaded weapon—you see, you have a logon & password to see “your” account information. Beings I did not know I was a member, needless to say I do not have that info. So I e-mailed them my name as it appears on my credit card, told them to cease, desist & refund….. Hoping for the best.
You know what lack of capital letters, fractured syntax, and a certain lack of savvy about e-commerce reminds me of? Oh, yeah, a significant portion of my customers. (Even English teachers “let their hair down” when they are writing emails, sometimes.) Unlike any significant portion of my customers, these folks are howling for blood. And if you’re using SWREG, they are howling for your blood, because despite the fact that you are the little minnow and SWREG is the multi-million dollar corporation to the extent that anyone realizes you are in fact separate entities (and most don’t) the presence of SWREG’s website wrapped within a mere portion of your own makes it look like they’re working for you. And, hey, with them getting a sliver of the transaction, that is what the relationship really is.
Which is the problem from SWREG’s point of view. They can’t increase their cut of the transaction size, or you will flee to one of their competitors, or decide to go to e-junkie/Paypal. You can get a customer to purchase from you multiple times to increase your revenue, but that is only an option for SWREG to the extent that you stay one of their vendors. So they are constantly on the lookout for new revenue streams, and both aggressive cross-selling to your customers and selling them down the river to scumbuckets.com are apparently options on the table.
So, what to do about it? Well, if you’re not a customer of SWREG, great. Celebrate your good fortune… and give your e-commerce provider a jaundiced look and a quick assessment of whether they would ever stab your customers in the back. If they would, make preparations for your inevitable separation as soon as that provider makes the decision that your future loyalty is worth less than the amount they can extract out of your customers today.
I came very close to giving Google Checkout the boot once, on Earth Day. They proposed to cross-sell my customers into a $10 carbon offset. It wasn’t nearly this scummy — the carbon offset was clearly marketed as a separate item, it would have required another separate checkout process to buy, and of course the only reason you would actually click on a button saying Click Here To Buy a $10 carbon offset is if you wanted to actually buy an indulgence offset. Google’s saving grace was that they realized this was going to be controversial and offered me an opt-out. (It really should have been an opt-in. I have no strong opinions either way on begging for alms soliciting charitable contributions but impair your customers’ experience to do it, not mine. I don’t see any “Thanks for searching for flapjack recipes on Google. While you’re here, interested in buying a carbon offset?” cluttering up your famously minimalist interface.)
And if you are a SWREG customer? I think Tom Rath on the BoS boards said it best:
Now I need to spend the next few days alerting my customers of this con, apologizing profusely to those who found themselves roped into it, and write cheques to cover whatever expenses have been incurred by those foolish enough to trust my company’s judgment.
I don’t know what Tom Rath sells off the top of my head, but whatever it is, that paragraph makes me want to buy one on general principle. Those are the words of a man you can trust. That is the tone that we strive to strike as little honest fish in a stormy ocean filled with unscrupulous sharks trying to take a bite off of anyone doing business on the Internet.
And SWREG? Well, suffice it to say that the W in the name is looking like a dorsal fin to me at the moment. Duh duh, duh duh, duh duh duh duh duh duh…
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