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 […]

Until this past week, I’ve never been able to tell whether AdWords was paying for itself or not. Somewhere between my ads and the payment processors, my tracking lost its way. It all hinged on a) the tracking working through the payment processors or b) the customer clicking the link to return to the BreezeTree […]

Fireclick has published some interesting numbers on software conversion rates on their site:
http://index.fireclick.com/fireindex.php?segment=9
Fireclick is a web analytics company owned by Digital River, which owns a huge chunk of the payment processing market for software vendors. The data is compiled (anonymously) from all of Fireclick’s clients across different sectors. The software sector includes benchmarks for overall […]

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, […]

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 […]

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:

Break your campaign in groups of 10-20 highly related keywords.
Use exact matching or phrase matching, but avoid broad matching.
Use negative keywords (e.g., -free) to improve CTR & lower cost.
Put keywords in […]

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 […]

I wanted to say Thanks! to all the BreezeTree customers who have made this a great first year.
The first six months were a little slow, but after the release of FlowBreeze 1.2, sales really started to pick up. FlowBreeze (a Flowchart Generator for Excel) has benefited from a lot of word of mouth marketing. Plus, […]