Category Archives: internet

StumbleUpon Advertising Review

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I’m always looking for new avenues to get the word out about FlowBreeze, so recently I ran an experiment using StumbleUpon’s advertising program. If you’re not familiar with StumbleUpon, basically it’s just a random site re-director. StumbleUpon users are served up random pages based on their preferences and demographics. If they like a page, they can give it a thumbs up, tag it for their personal bookmarks, or write a review. On the other hand, if they don’t like a page, they can give it a thumbs down. The more thumbs up a page gets, the more frequently it is served.

Occasionally they are served sponsored pages, which is how the advertising program works. They charge $0.05 per visit with a 100 visit per day minimum. When you sign up for StumbleUpon advertising, you can specify the following (see image below):

- Target URL.
- Category. (I tried both the Software and Shareware categories)
- # Visits/day (100 minimum at $0.05 / visit = $5/day minimum).
- Demographics (male/female/both, age, country, state, and city)

StumbleUpon Ad Setup

My Stats:
- Visits: ~500
- Downloads: 0
- Purchases: 0

My Reviews:
- 3 thumbs up.
- 5 thumbs down.
- Telling comment made by one reviewer: “Boo proprietary software.”

Why I Did It:
1. Because I love StumbleUpon. Of all the social bookmarking sites, it’s the only one I truly use and dig (pun intended).
2. I have actually purchased items from pages I’ve Stumbled.
3. BreezeTree.com has been Stumbled in the past and vistors have converted.

Key Downsides:
- Targetting is too broad.
- Audience probably looking for freebies.
- Targetting is limited to one country or all countries. There is no subset for a single campaign.
- Ads start running at midnight, so targetting global visitors will eat up your visits before the U.S. wakes up for breakfast.

Who I Would Recommend It For:
- People with a lot of money to throw around.
- Sites trying to build a buzz.
- Sites that offer free or cool content.
- Site hoping to gain gain backlinks.

The Bottom Line:
My $25 would have been better spent lighting a $5 cigar with a $20 bill (or better yet, a $20 cigar with a $5 bill).

Excel vs. Google Spreadsheets – The Ecosystem Factor

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In my last post I kind of took a pot shot at Microsoft’s focus on SharePoint Services, insinuating that the internal push was driven in part by competition from Google Docs and Spreadsheets. But I don’t think that Microsoft really has much to worry about. Yeah, Google Spreadsheets are still kind of kludgey. But I’m sure they’ll improve, so that’s not the reason I say this.

The thing they’re lacking is an ecosystem like Microsoft’s. Microsoft’s applications not only allow them to make money, but they allow others to leverage off their systems to make money as well. Nowhere is that more evident than Excel. I had no idea how big the Excel ecosystem was until I developed a commercial add-in for it. But if you read the Google Docs and Spreadsheets terms of service, you’ll see that Google just doesn’t get it. Here’s an excerpt:

“Subject to the Terms, Google grants you a personal, non-transferable and non-exclusive right and license to use the object code of its Software; provided that you do not (and do not allow any third party to) copy, modify, create a derivative work of, … unless such activity is expressly permitted or required by law or has been expressly authorized by Google in writing.”

Pretty scary words for an OSCON sponsor. To be fair, I don’t think many of the OSCON sponsors truly open their source code to customers, but that’s another topic. Regardless, as a developer I stay away from things that requires me to get express permission (or a lawyer) before I can touch the keyboard.

If Google really wants to challenge Microsoft, they need to provide terms of service that allow 3rd party developers to leverage off of Google Spreadsheets. And make money doing so. There’s a lot more being done with Excel then a simple grid with graphs. I’ve seen some first class database reporting tools, dashboards, financial analysis packs, statistical packages, and many other add-ins developed in Excel. These are the sorts of things that tie users to a product.

Microsoft’s web based spreadsheet is comprised of three parts – Excel Calculation Services (the engine), Excel Web Access (the browser interface), and Excel Web Services (the API). The fact that they brand the whole package as “Excel Services” shows that they “get” it. Maybe someday, Google Spreadsheets will have a friendly license, like Google Gears does. But until they do, I just don’t think they’ll never be able to fully challenge Excel.

Traffic, Downloads, and Sales – Search Engines Compared

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Everyone knows that Google is king when it comes to generating traffic for your website. In fact, many webmasters practically disregard Yahoo and MSN altogether in their SEO efforts. And software download sites? Their time has passed, right?

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t agree with those statements. I look at my stats everyday, and the traffic from Google dwarfs all other sources. And download sites? I barely see a trickle from them. But most of the time when I look at my web stats, I’m looking at daily or weekly snapshots. I hadn’t run any long term numbers in a while, so tonight I decided to look at the year-to-date stats then slice and dice the data. What I found surprised me:

Traffic, downloads, and sales

Looking at just traffic and purchases, I assumed there was a gap in the data because Google visitors came back at some later point, after trying the software, and then made the purchase. But when I added the Download stats to the chart, the equation changed dramatically. MSN and Yahoo remained consistent between the three metrics, but Google dropped off significantly. This is a complete reversal of my last long term stats look-see.

And what’s the amorphous blob called “other”? Google Analytics doesn’t let you track external referrals for downloads, but luckily the stat package provided by my web host does (SmarterStats, in case you’re interested). Surprise, surprise. In the Downloads data, “other” is made up mostly of download site referrals and the rest is direct traffic.

I’m not going to jump to any conclusions yet, but I thought the data was interesting enough to share.

The Voice of the Customer in Online Marketing

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There’s a basic concept in Six Sigma called Voice of the Customer. When you’re defining a project, you need to identify the critical-to-quality (CTQ) elements in your process that matter to the customer. Too often though, the voice of the customer isn’t heard until _after_ they become a customer. What about potential customers?

Taking a step back for a second, here’s a worthwhile quote from Jack Welch…

“One thing we have discovered with certainty is that anything we do that makes the customer more successful inevitably results in a financial return for us.”

Products and services sell because they solve people’s problems. They make customers more successful. And the only way you can solve their problems in the first place is if they become aware of your product, understand your product, and see the benefits. So the voice of the customer needs to start with marketing.

In his recent post on MicroISV.com, Dave Collins touches on this. He makes the point that software vendors should sell the benefits, not the features:

“Customers get freaked out by features. We don’t like them, they sound intimidating, and they do nothing to make us smile. But we love benefits. Save time, save money, use more for less. Lovely. Music to our ears.”

Stepping back into the voice of the customer mode, want do customers really want to know when they visit a site? It’s simple really, they want to know:

  • What the product is.
  • How it will benefit them.
  • How much it will cost.
  • How credible the offer is.

Notice that I wrote “How it will benefit them”, not just “the benefits”. It’s a fine distinction, but an important one.

When you get into the business of running an online company, “sell the benefits” is one of the mantras that get chimed over and over again. Emotion sells more than logic is the copywriter’s motto. Dave’s a smart guy and runs a successful software marketing firm, so I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about. But the problem is it’s a concept that gets misconstrued and taken to the extreme.

I’ve seen too many software sites that get so focused on the benefits that it’s hard to tell what the product actually does. Microsoft’s Silverlight page is a perfect example of this. Most enterprise software websites are even worse.

In any product genre, you can find numerous product sites all claiming to “save time, save money, use more for less.” But that’s not enough. What you really need to do is connect the dots between the benefits and the features in order to be credible.

Do customers really get “freaked out by features”? Not me. In fact, they’re typically the first thing I look for. When I’m buying a product to solve a problem, I need to know whether the product has the capability to do so.

Sure, I’m an engineer, so that may seem like a quirk. But the majority of my support time is spent on pre-sales inquiries. Are these people emailing me about the benefits? No, they are asking if the software supports one feature or another. That’s real data that proves to me that customers don’t get freaked out by features.

So the next time you work on your company’s marketing, put on your Jack Welch hat and think about how your product will make your customers more successful. Drill it down to how each of the features in your product will benefit your customers. The end result should strike a nice balance between “sell the benefits” and “sell the features.”

10 Essential FireFox Add-ons for Internet Entrepreneurs

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If you use FireFox on a daily basis, no doubt you have your own list of favorite add-ons. But who has the time to constantly be on the lookout for new ones? So, this list was put together for anyone who does business online and needs tools to help you be more efficient.

The Top 10

1. InFormEnter

What it is: When you turn it on, it adds a little button next to all the form fields on a web page. Clicking the button pops up a list of all the phrases you’ve saved:

Why you’ll like it: It’s a great time saver for any web forms requiring name, address, email, product description – you name it.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/673

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2. ScrapBook

What it is: A tool that takes snapshots of the current web page. You can organize your scrapbook items in folders and access them through the menu or a sidebar:

Why you’ll like it: From a business perspective, it’s good for recording receipts of online purchases. Plus the edit page capability allows you to erase elements, making it easy to clean up a page for printout.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/427

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3. Firefox Extension Backup Extension (FEBE)

What it is: This extension allows you to save all your FireFox data, including passwords, bookmarks, themes, extensions, preferences, and more:

Why you’ll like it: If you do enough business on the internet, eventually your find that a lot of mission critical information is stored in your browser. Backing up this data becomes crucial.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2109

[Note, this extension has a companion extension – CLEO that will combine all your extensions into a single .xpi file for easy reinstall: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2942]

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4. ViewMyCurrency

What it is: A tool that will convert any amount on a page to your selected currencies. Click the status bar button and any currency values found on the page will be changed, as the following before and after pictures show:

Why you’ll like it: This is probably more useful for those outside the U.S., but it’s handy for anyone that wants to save themselves a trip to www.xe.com to get convert prices into your local currency.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1854

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5. WorldClocks

What it is: A tool that shows you the current day and time for selected cities around the globe. Clicking on the status bar display, it pops up a list of all the cities you’ve added. You can either use the built-in list of cities or set up your own.

Why you’ll like it: It’s great for figuring out when someone halfway around the world is likely to be at work.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3010

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6. Fetch Text URL

What it is: A tool that allows you to right-click on a non-linked, text URL and fetch it in a new tab.

Why you’ll like it: It saves you added typing.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/518

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7. SearchStatus

What it is: A SEO tool that sits in your status bar. You can see the Google Page Rank and Alexa rank, and you can access the robots.txt, archive.org (aka, Wayback Machine), and whois of the current site via the popup menu.

Why you’ll like it: Unlike other SEO toolbars, it’s unobtrusive and provides quick access to information.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/321

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8. RankQuest SEO Toolbar

What it is: A full featured SEO toolkit (accessible via toolbar or context menu) that provides a number of analysis tools for webmasters. Included are speed test, a lynx viewer (how does the Google bot see your page), meta tag analysis and generator, keyword density analysis, text ratio calculator, and many more tools.

Why you’ll like it: It packs a lot of tools into a single toolbar. But, toolbars take up page space so this one is better off hidden most of the time, and SearchStatus (above) is more convenient for day to day info.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1471

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9. Web Developer

What it is: A toolbar with a wide assortment of tools to provide you with info about the current page. It has too many features to cover here. The snapshot below left is the information panel shown when clicking on any page element. The snapshot below right is an example of the CSS editor (in this case, in the left sidebar).

Why you’ll like it: This list is for Internet Entrepreneurs, not web developers, but this is a handy tool for anyone who owns a web site. It’s helpful for debugging CSS layout problems. Added bonus, too many sites today think it’s cool to have low-contrast text. No problem. With the Web Developer toolbar you can simply identify the element containing the text and then edit the CSS in the side bar and have the page style updated instantly.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

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10. PwdHash

What it is: An automatic password generator.

Why you’ll like it: Security, security, security. With this tool, there’s no excuse for using the same easy to remember password for forums as you would for your online banking account.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1033

[Note: The author of Allow Right-Click, listed below, also has an "Always Remember Password" add-on that lets FireFox save passwords for sites that normally don't allow it: http://roachfiend.com/archives/2005/03/03/always-remember-password/]

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5 Honorable Mentions

Yoono

What it is: A sidebar toolbar that shows related web sites for the one you’re currently on.

Why you’ll like it: This is incredibly handy for both topic research and seeking out sites for back links.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1833

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Allow Right-Click

What it is: Overrides any web scripting that disables right-clicking your mouse and getting the context menu.

Why you’ll like it: If deal with web pages (or control panels) that disable right-clicks, this add-on will let you context menu item.

Link: http://roachfiend.com/archives/2005/03/03/allow-right-click/

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Image Zoom

What it is: Right-click on any image and zoom in via the context menu.

Why you’ll like it: Bigger is sometimes better.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/139

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IE View

What it is: Opens the current page in Internet Explorer. (Note there is also IE Tab add-on, which runs IE in a FireFox tab. Both work equally well.)

Why you’ll like it: Some websites are still operating in IE only mode. This tool will make swear at the screen less.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/35

Introducing the Worlds First Website Created with Excel 2007

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It may sound nutty, but I decided to use Excel 2007 to re-design my website. OK, the title of this post is a bit misleading. I didn’t actually design the web pages themselves with Excel 2007, but I did use it to create all the new graphics.

The Excel 2007 development team did a wonderful job re-writing the Office Drawing Tools from the ground up. The new AutoShape formatting capabilities are really impressive. Not only are the default formats stylish, but they also allow you to add some nice effects, including reflection, drop shadows, glow, 3D, and more.

Since BreezeTree Software is build around the convergence of data and (most importantly) diagrams in Excel, I wanted to emphasize the graphics capabilities of Excel on my site. So what better way than to use Excel 2007 itself to create the graphics. The re-design started out as a proof of concept, show casing that you really can create professional and stylish flowcharts in Excel. Then I decided to go for it. Hopefully I pulled it off. :-)

How to Improve Your AdWords Campaign in 10 Simple Steps

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Overwhelmed by all the advice you read about running an AdWords campaign? Here’s a simple and concise list I’ve gathered from several reliable sources:

  1. Break your campaign in groups of 10-20 highly related keywords.
  2. Use exact matching or phrase matching, but avoid broad matching.
  3. Use negative keywords (e.g., -free) to improve CTR & lower cost.
  4. Put keywords in the headline and repeat them in the body.
  5. Body: 1st line = descriptive benefit and 2nd line = a feature, offer, or call to action.
  6. Create separate landing pages for each target keyword group and make content relevant to keywords, putting the landing pages in sub-directories named after target keywords and making sure the sub-directory is included in display URL: www.blah.com/keyword.
  7. Find tangential keywords. **
  8. Always run 2 ads side-by-side. ***
  9. Run different campaigns for different geographical regions (e.g. US vs. Europe).
  10. Search Search Network and Content network ads in separate campaigns with lower CPC and daily budgets.

Notes:

* Make sure to disallow duplicated pages in your robots.txt file to avoid Google’s duplicate content penalty.

** Example of tangential keywords: I make flowcharting software. I targeted the keywords “E-Myth” and “EMyth” because I figured entrepreneurs who were standardizing their business processes might want to flowchart them. It worked.

*** Shuffle the word order, capitalization, try synonyms, price vs no price, etc. Run a week at a time and always replace the poor performer with a tweaked version of the good performer.

What Every Online Vendor And Consumer Should Know About AVS

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One of the more frustrating things about selling online is dealing with AVS mismatches. Sometimes you get an email from a customer complaining that your payment processor won’t accept their credit card. Most of the time, though, the sale is lost without notice – unless you’re scanning your transaction logs daily.

So What is an AVS Mismatch?

AVS stands for Address Verification System. It’s a system used to defer credit card fraud by checking the customers billing address versus the address filed by the credit card company for that account.

Seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? So why is it a problem?

The problem often comes from customers buying with corporate credit cards. I’ve experienced this problem a number of times, and every time so far the problem is that the customer assumes that the address of their work facility is the same as the credit card billing address of record. Often it’s not.

Three Common Scenarios

Here are three common scenarios I’ve had first-hand experience with AVS mismatches:

Small Businesses: With small businesses, sometimes the owner will register the card with their home address used for billing. That’s fine, but they do need to realize that their business address is not going to be the same as their billing address when doing credit card payments on-line.

Medium to Large Businesses: Another common case is when the buyer is located in one state and the corporate headquarters is located in another. Their billing address is usually the address of the headquarters – not their local shipping address.

Parent Companies: This is just another variation of the same thing. If a company has corporate credit cards issued in the name of the parent company, then the buyer needs to know the billing address that the parent company uses.

What Can Be Done?

If you’re a customer, then it’s pretty simple. Find out your corporate billing address and use that.

If you’re a vendor, then there are several things you should do. First, put a small note on your order pages for customers using company buying cards. Second, periodically monitor your transaction logs, looking for AVS mismatches. Third, if a potential customer emails you about a credit card problem, use the advice given here to determine whether this may be the cause of the problem.

AVS Is Good for Everyone

Now all this may seem like a hassle – especially if you’re a customer. But online credit card fraud is a rampant problem, and e-commerce providers take fraud detection seriously. So they really are helping businesses with these extra security measures.

But customers benefit too. You and I are all potential victims of credit card fraud. Online, the fraudulent buyer doesn’t even need your card – just the number, expiration date and usually the 3-digit verification on the back of the card. So AVS checks are a simple way to ensure that one avenue of abuse is cut off, protecting us all.