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Regsoft Picks Up the SWREG Scam

Posted on March 9, 2008 by Patrick in microISV

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.

September 2007 Stats, Or, You Make $1k a Month on WHAT!?

Posted on October 3, 2007 by Patrick in microISV, stats

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.

Preliminary uISV Survey Results Up

Posted on September 14, 2007 by Patrick in microISV

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.)

Congratulations to E-junkie

Posted on August 16, 2007 by Patrick in microISV

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 Launches Consultancy

Posted on July 13, 2007 by Patrick in microISV

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.

June 2007 Stats

Posted on July 7, 2007 by Patrick in microISV, stats

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.

Conflict of Interest: Payment Processors vs uISVs

Posted on July 5, 2007 by Patrick in Checkout, customer service, microISV, Paypal

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…

A Happy Milestone

Posted on June 21, 2007 by Patrick in microISV

Since I started using e-junkie almost 9 months ago (has it been that long?), I have gotten three automated emails every time someone purchases from me:

1) Copy of the payment receipt from Paypal or Google Checkout

2) Copy of the IPN information, from e-junkie

3) Copy of the customer’s registration email

That worked pretty well for a long time, and I always had a brief catch in my breath when I saw Thunderbird downloading “1/3 mails on the server”. However, with the numbers of sales I’m getting this month (26 at last count on the 20th — keep in mind 30 is my best month ever), it was starting to get a little excessive. Not that I mind every other email I received telling me that I had money, but it was getting harder to spot the mails which actually required action from the ones which were just for my reference.

So I turned off one of the three notifications. If my sales go up about 25% more, I’ll be going down to one email per transaction.

Stats in Pretty Pictures

Posted on June 14, 2007 by Patrick in microISV, stats

Images may be truncated by WordPress. Feel free to click them to see the whole thing.

I had been planning to post these on my first year anniversary but somebody asked for them early so here they are. Same disclaimers as normally: these were prepared for a blog post, not the IRS, and I did not exactly go to the extra mile to ensure their accuracy. (They understate my July to December expenses as reported to the IRS by about $80, which I think is an artifact of cash accounting for the IRS and accrual accounting for the blog posts I grabbed most of this info from. For example, when I pay for 12 months of service in advance to the IRS that all gets expensed in that tax year but in my blog posts I break it out on a per-month basis.)

Keep in mind that the Google tracking, despite being mechanized, still depends on me not borking the tracking code, which I used to do on a semi-regular basis. That is the main reason I’m not showing conversions on the graphs here.

Actual totals:

Sales: $6,333

Expenses: $1,720

Profits: $4,613

Visits: 63,429

OK, pretty picture time:

Visitors:

Both Slashdot and the Joel on Software mentions were of my blog, not of my product site, but they resulted in a few clickthroughs to the main site. (Incidentally: the blog gets about twice as many hits as the product site.) You’ll note that the dog that didn’t bark is “Why is Patrick not seeing a trough of visitors (and sales!) now that school is out for summer, much like he saw troughs at Christmas, Easter, and every single US public holiday?” Thats a good question, and I’m mulling some potential answers, but we’ll know more about them in about 2 weeks.

Notes on December: I don’t have a blog post for stats in December so I guesstimated my expenses by hand with a cursory glance at my credit card statement and Paypal account. The sales stats are accurate — thanks, e-junkie. Again, you’re not the IRS, so please don’t audit me. It is in the right ballpark if I take the number claimed on my schedule C and subtract out the months I do have exact numbers for, remembering that my quixotic accounting standard screws up that comparison a bit.

Notes on June: Its the 14th of June as I posted this, and I did the uberscientific “multiply sales and expenses by two” to estimate income for the month. That was probably overly aggressive for both numbers. Ask me in two weeks.

Increase Your Software Sales

Posted on May 14, 2007 by Patrick in marketing, microISV

Here is a question which comes up all the time on the Business of Software forums.

Hello, my name is XXX and I created an application N months ago which sells for $Y. I have gotten Z sales so far. What can I do to increase sales?

First off, congratulations on finishing an application that real people think was worth spending money on. That’s an accomplishment. It is also the easiest part about running a software business, and you’ve got a long road ahead of you. Lets get cracking.

Actually, first, the obligatory disclaimer: everyone’s markets are different. Everyone’s goals are different. Everyone’s strengths are different. I sell to technically disinclined B2C customers and make enough money to nicely supplement my dayjob every month but could not go full time on Bingo Card Creator (a good thing, too, as 1-2 hours of work a week would leave me with far too much free time). I’ve also only been doing this for, hmm, coming on 10 months now. This isn’t the Bible of Internet Software Marketing, its just things that I have found effective and advice passed along from people I trust.

1. Install Analytics. It is critical that you have enough data on how your business is working to make informed decisions. Analytics software (I like Google Analytics and CrazyEgg) lets you know how many people are visiting your website, how they got there (in particular, what search engine terms got them there), how many of them go on to download your free trial or purchase, what pages are most of interest to them, etc.

2. Start Search Engine Optimization. Ideally, you’ll have had your website domain up for a significant portion of the time you were developing, packed full of keyword-rich content gradually aging like a fine cheese and convincing Google that you’re not some fly-by-night spam site operator. Didn’t do that? Don’t worry, I didn’t either — its a great thing to have done but for first projects it is a great idea in hindsight for almost anyone. Anyhow, age is one factor which gets you out of the Google sandbox, which is where sites languish without getting headway on competitive search terms.

However, even if your website went up 2 months ago, you can still start SEOing actively. Concentrate first on making your website very useful for people who land on it. This involves sharpening your pencils (or WYSIWYG editors) and writing some compelling content. Its shocking the number of folks who come in for advice on the forums who have less than 100 words of content on their website in total. Google can’t read minds, folks — if it isn’t on the page or in referring links they have no clue your web page is about that. So start writing.

Write about what your customers care about in language similar to what they use. You know that plastic marketing speak that large companies seem to produce far too much of? Introducing a new paradigm in best-of-breed B2C customer empowerment synergies? Nobody writes “new paradigm in best-of-breed B2C customer empowerment synergies” in Google! They write things like “How do I deal with abusive customers?” (natural language search is very scarily common among non-technical users, incidentally). If you write your page like they write their search queries, you win. (Simple example: My original title for this post was “So You’ve Got Sales. What Now?”. That is how I talk, but its certainly not a natural search string. “increase software sales” is, however, and this post will probably be on the front page of Google for that query within a week.)

Don’t neglect the technical end of onsite search optimization. There are stupidly simple five minute fixes which will improve your rankings dramatically. Use your title tags. Use h1 and bold to call out the important bits of your page (that helps Web readability, too). Add descriptive alt text to your images. Use this really easy trick I shamelessly stole from Nick Hebb (who makes flowchart software, which he handily describes in a terminology box) and include a sidebar box listing synonyms for your key search terms. Its not obvious to Google that I sell a bingo card maker without the bold callout on my frontpage saying so.

3. Start getting links.

This is the other side of the SEO puzzle. I have tried buying links and, well, that was a crushing failure. (I ended up paying $40 to get mentioned on a Chinese forum and a spam site… thank you sir, may I have another.) Its the links I didn’t lift a finger to get that are actually worthwhile to me in terms of traffic and SEO juice.

Well, “didn’t lift a finger” understates the efforts a bit. Sites don’t attract links. Content attracts links. A person who tosses you a link from their site, blog, livejournal, email to Mom, newsletter, whatever, has taken a bit of time out of their day to promote something you have done to people whose trust they have built up. They really value that trust, and they don’t waste it by wasting people’s times with links to useless pages (and God knows there are enough of those on the Internet). Rather, they send links to pages which are interesting, topical, useful, etc.

So how do you get links? Write content which is designed to be linked to, sometimes called linkbait. Sure, you’ve got your software to sell, but unless you’re exceptionally lucky people won’t wake up one morning and decide their blog readers need to hear about your product. However, folks in your niche have a variety of common interests, and they’re always eager to hear about that. For example, elementary school English teachers are some of my best customers. One thing they really like is having lists of Dolch sight words, which form the basis of early English instruction. They pass them around to colleagues, print them out and hand them to parents, include them in the classroom’s weekly newsletter, link them from the Early Readers Homepage, etc etc. Writing that one page, which does genuinely provide value to people in my niche, took a few hours but pays off every single day of the year.

By the way, notice the instructions at the top on how to link to the page? This is a fairly important thing for non-technical customers, who might not know what a URL is. Blogging software, etc, makes it easier than every for folks to provide links to things. For folks not using it yet, I try to make it as easy as possible for them to help their friends out while in the process helping me. Putting up a simple HTML sample helps quite a bit for that.

4. Blog.

In the category of providing useful, easily linkable content, blogging has few equals. If you talk about what your customers care about, people toss around links like candy. The culture and technical nature of blogging strongly encourages links. You can capitalize this by having a customer-focused blog on your site. (This blog is neither customer focused nor on my site, yet it sends me 10% of my traffic and a few hundred dollars worth of sales. Please, do better at following my advice than I do. ) I strongly prefer http://www.mysite.com/blog over http://blog.mysite.com and http://myblog.myblogprovider.com in terms of SEO benefits. Oh, a word on software — WordPress just works. I have heard good things about MovableType, too, but WordPress is good enough for me.

Andy Brice (he makes software that does table plans for weddings and also has a very interesting series on marketing methods on his blog) is of the opinion that blogging rapidly diminishes in relevance, so it is a constant time commitment. I agree for blogging as practiced by many technically inclined folks, where you are perpetually identifying the New and Shiny or the controversies of the day and commenting on them. TechCrunch, for example, has archives which are stale mere days or weeks after the posts are written.

So don’t write like TechCrunch.

I like to think of blogging in terms of producing resources for readers. The best resources are evergreens — they’re good today, they’ll be good tomorrow, they’ll probably be good in years. Some of my more popular posts here, for example on software registration systems, would have been topical ten years ago and will probably be topical ten years from now. That post picks up links, visits, and comments six months after being written. Writing evergreens is like investing in yourself — it is a way for today’s labor to pay dividends tomorrow and every day thereafter.

Blogs also foster a sense of community. Having communities of your customers online is nice. It allows you to hear useful feedback on how to improve your product, gives you a built-in base of passionate folks who spread the word for you, and folks eventually get to know you personally and are nice to you because of that. For example, there is a vibrant little uISV community on the BoS boards and in a wee little circle of blogs, and within that community there are both passionate users (I have been described as the local sales rep for e-junkie before, and this blog has probably sold more copies of Direct Access than it has Bingo Card Creator) and lots of folks who help each other out. One example: I’m not sure exactly who started it but Ian Landsman and a couple folks noticed when I was writing about Free Bingo Cards and decided to spread the word.

5. Eliminate barriers to checkout.

Presumably if you’ve got sales you’re already capable of processing credit card payments through at least one processor. Good. Can you offer another one, for example if folks don’t trust Paypal? One of my favorite features of e-junkie (watch me sell them again — I swear, I really don’t make any money doing this ) is that you can get Paypal and Google Checkout working for the same amount of work (i.e. not much). Some folks already have Paypal accounts, some have heard horror stories and will never trust their credit cards with them, and never the twain shall meet. Checkout is a useful (and cheap) safety valve for those prospects.

Also, make sure your prospective customers know you can process credit cards and checks. “Pay here through Paypal” doesn’t provide useful information to customers who don’t know what Paypal is (they exist, trust me). Mention that “Paypal is a trustworthy company used by millions (including eBayers) which processes your Visa, Mastercard, or checking account so that you can buy things online” and watch your conversion rate go up. There are a variety of possible checkout logos available or you can roll your own, but for goodness sake put the credit card logos on or near the button. Its one of those no-brainer “having logos beats not having them by 3-1″ type decisions.

Is your checkout process instant? No? Fix that. None of this “You’ll get your registration key in 24 hours” nonsense, particularly not for B2C apps which may be impulse or time-sensitive purchases (I get LOTS of customers who need to make cards for a bridal shower tonight). Also remember, you don’t get the benefits of having your process be instant if you don’t mention them to your customers before checkout! Make sure they know they’re one simple 30 second form away from having shiny new software!

6. Offer a money-back guarantee prominently.

Don’t have one yet? Fix that. Really, what needs to be said has been said.

7. Work on your AdWords campaign.

I have poured dozens of hours and hundreds of dollars into my AdWords campaign (my #1 business expense by a factor of lots), and had my fair share of months where it cost me more money than it made and where Google had me pulling my hair out. The bottom line though? You can make it work, and when you figure out how to its free money. (My cost per trial is trending down from the profitable $.30 to the noticeably wealth-producing $.20-$.25, and its a nice hedge against fluctuations in organic search rankings.)

SharewarePromotions has some nice articles about AdWords optimization, and my archives have quite a few as well. Many of the improvements you make to your site at large, like improving landing pages and putting important keywords in your content, will help AdWords out. Other than that, use AdGroups well (focus them by theme), keep search and content networks in separate campaigns for ease of use, prune nonperforming or overly expensive keywords religiously, keep your eye on the cost per conversion number while keeping CTR at the back of your mind (keep it above about 1% on search ads or you’ll get penalized harshly by minimum bids which take MONTHS to work back down, and keep trying different ad texts/landing pages until you find copy that sells.

8. Take a break.

Really, don’t knock yourself out. Improving sales (warning: overused cliche alert) is more of a journey than a destination and the test, observe, retest, observe, cycle can take months or years. Don’t burn yourself out by trying to do it all in one day, and don’t get discouraged if you can’t make a $10,000 a month in 6 months after starting. Consistent sustained improvement is the key to long-term success. Set some goals for yourself, measure progress towards them, and have fund enjoying your hard-earned successes. (I’m blowing my revenue goals for this year, sadly, but my recent round of website improvements has my conversion rates and level of understanding of my customers up nicely.)

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