The importance of our selling strategy?

OK, VERY important is my answer.

I've been looking at registry problem fixing programs and found a website which is reviewing each of the main programs. It must be the developers of the program at the top of this list who have developed. So thats one thing in their strategy.

All of the programs listed are free to download and all of the websites don't mention that your have to pay for the full version. One site says absolutely free and does a scan and says it will only fix the free items then you have to pay for it to do the rest. The other programs make it more obvious that you have to pay.

But all hide try to hide the fact that they aren't free to some degree.

Maybe its one developer who has slighlty different looking programs, maybe.

But it really makes me think about my approach, I still think my programs need more work to make them work better. But I also need tonnes of work on my strategy.

Comments.

by JM

What questions do customers actually ask?

I'm writing some FAQ pages for my web sites and I've just noticed I've answered mainly technical questions.

Sure, I've said my order form is secure and how to contact me if theres a problem.

Actually I've only done stuff my program sites, haven't got any content for my shop sites.

I guess this content will be useful to all sites ??

Hmmm

Oh my refund / exchange policy.

My money back guarentee stuff.

Erm, oh delivery method, timeline.

But what else?

by
JM

Using allintitle: to measure the competition for a keyword

If you are looking for a rough and ready way of measuring the competitiveness of a set of keywords, there's a number of methods you can user. You can use Google's Adwords keyword  tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to give relative indications of how much competition there is for a particular search term. I always find the measure provided by the Adwords tool a little confusing though since you never know what the values displayed actually mean. If the competition bar is set at 75% blue what does this mean compared to a bar at 25%? Is it a linear scale for example meaning that 3 times as many sites are optimising for the 75% term compared to the 25% term?

Another way of gauging how much competition a keyword has is by using the Google allintitle: operator. The allintitle operator shows how many web pages have ALL the words in the keyword/ phrase in their title. Since a webpage's title is possibly the biggest SEO factor, this gives a rough measure of how many pages are competing for the term. Checking out some terms which I'd expect to be very commonly used on Google - allinttitle:web design - and - allinttitle:seo - I get the results:

titles containing web design: 10,300,000 results
titles containing seo: 13,600,000 results

Contrast these results with a term that we wouldn't expect to be very commonly used - harpenden decorators

titles containing harpenden decorators: 6 results

Or something middling common - software promotion

titles containing software promotion: 79,800

When looking for keywords for a new website, balancing the keywords to aim at against their competitiveness is tricky. The temptation is to aim for those that have the highest search volumes. However, this may be setting the target too high. Using tools like Google's Adwords Keyword research tool and the allintitle: operator, you can try and find a balance between keywords that have a reasonable search volume and those that are not too competitive.

by ML

Selling CDs online, on eBay and the future of their licensing scheme?

For sometime now Blue and I have been selling crap on CD on eBay.

I've also put my CDs on my maths shop. However about 6 months ago I decided I'd improve the content of my maths program and make it possible for the software to be downloadable instead.

You can sell downloadable software on ebay anymore, so CDs are the only option.

We do still sell a number of CDs each week making it worthwhile to do so. However in the new year eBay are making yet more changes (something they do every few months, it seems) this change will mean less exposure for items. Previously and at present, you can list about 15 items in the "Buy it Now" format for 30 days.

I've always written the users license to the CD and therefore burn a specific CD for each customer. This has been a real pain and I had planned to produce a key code along with the user details, in a box and have the user enter all these details. Thus allowing me to create all my CDs before hand.

However with these forthcoming eBay changes I'm not sure where its going to be worth it.

The fact that people still buy CDs amazes me, but they do, so I am tempted to put the work into this new licensing approach, but I fear it will be a waste of time due to this lack of exposure on eBay.

I may be able to sell these CDs online via my shop, but I'm just not sure. eBay has a niche, where items seem like their cheap and in a jumble sale, but site probably won't come across like that.

I guess I could finish of my downloadable programs, but this will shut the door for me on eBay, apart from selling / burning cds for eBay customers as I do now.

Thoughts?

by
JM

What to put on a FAQ / Customer Help page?

I think I'm missing a vital feature in my marketing machine.

I recently bought some software, in fact when I think about, my last few software purchases, I've had to look around the site to find certain information before I was ready to buy.

So what things should I have on this page.

- Details about the ordering process, what will happen when they pay.

- I guess in my case what to do with your license key when you get it.

- How soon you will get your license key.

- Volume licensing information.

- What to do if theres a problem, I guess this will just be a link to a contact form, unless I'm describing a specific problem.

- How to get support for the program.

- A list of different contact methods or say that you only accept emails etc.

- Another big thing, which may even need to be on a separate page, comparison between versions, trial vs full etc, I can't believe I've never added one of these before :(

- Any licensing restrictions, I guess I would also mention royalties if I had any to mention here.

- I guess I could also have some tips, how to do certain things.

- Mention future updates / upgrades policy.

- Order form is 100% secure etc

I guess I've always been concerned about having pages with hardly any information on them, but if I use this page for sales and support help, including tips, this page could be very informative and useful.

Thoughts?

by
JM

How to schedule / automatically test a contact form?

I've been setting up a scheduled tasks to let me know if I have a large number of transactions to process on Softtester, this is a simple count of the emails in the que, I get an email if its over a certain level.

This test will tell me if I've been spammed or if the pad spider program has failed.

I'd like to test my contact form, maybe once a week.

I'd like to do a true test and no just test the mail script but, test the page.

When I did the email count test, I was able to produce a PHP script which is then added as a schedule in my website control panel.

I'd like to do the same thing with the contact form test.

However, the only way I can think of the test the form, is to write a program which will load the page, populate the fields and click the submit button. And I can't do this in a PHP script.

Any ideas?

by
JM

PS. I have looked for a free service to do this, but I can't find one.

Is it worth seasonalising your site?

I've noticed in the past few days that I've had some orders for a couple of products where I previously had none. One of which has that pack license problem which they haven't got back to me about. I'm convinced that these sales must be people buying presents for others for xmas.

With my KMF program, after the first year in erm, 2005 (I think) I put up some halloween stuff and tried to make a drive towards that event. But I didn't get any / many sales from it.

Since then I've never been bothered about setting anything different up for the seasons / holidays. Obviously this would have to be setup in advance and be dynamic, then hopefully I'd be able to use it through-out the year with zero effort.

I'm talking about slight changes in graphics, with snow or pupkins maybe to text, happy holiday etc. I guess there could be quite a lot of events I could do.

The question here is, is it worth it?

As I say I've not done it in the past as I've not thought my program are good enough, but onee day they will be or may just sell without the download. So is it worth the effort?

Thoughts?

by
JM

Leeching whether we need to worry and what we can do?

Since we discovered that an IP had been leeching from us, Blue discovered that softtester has about lots of IPs doing it.

Blue doesn't think theres anything we can do about it and he's not seen any protection for it.

I'd like to discuss and figure out if its causing us problems, I know its costs resources like bandwidth.

Also, if it is a problem you'd think it would have happened to other people in the past and there would be some sort of protection.

Comments?

Homepage Title Tag: Possible improvements

I've been looking at the title tags on the homepages of both SoftTester and SoftwareLode to see if there's any improvements that can be made to try and get more visitors.

On SoftwareLode, I'm going to shuffle the order of items in the title as the Free Software Downloads phrase isn't attracting any visitors for me. The middle phrase in the title - Free DVD Software - gets me a few visitors though as does the Free Photo Software phrase. The phrase I'm going to try out is "Antivirus Software". This phrase has 550,000 searches a month according to Google's own keyword volume tool. This is much more than either of the other two phrases (DVD/ Photo). I'm also adding an antivirus-software.php page to SoftwareLode to see if that gets visitors.

On SoftTester, two of the phrases in the title might not be doing much to attract traffic - "shareware programs" and "freeware programs". It might be an idea to change these to something else and see if any more visitors arrive. Softtester already has handy links for certain phrases in one of the columns on the homepage. It might be an idea to include these phrases in the homepage title. Here are the search volumes for some of the phrases on the homepage now:

anti virus software: 60, 500

dvd ripper: 90.500

However, these two phrases have higher search volumes:

antivirus software: 550,000

dvd software: 246,000

Note that changing "anti virus" to "antivirus" makes a big difference according to the Google keyword tool.

How about changing the homepage title to:

Free Software Downloads | Antivirus Software | DVD Software

and seeing if any more people hit the homepage?

by ML

PageRank N/A: Why do no inner pages have a rank?

Ever since this blog was assigned a Google pagerank, I've been looking to see if any of the older posts have a rank. As far as I can tell, none of the post pages do. On my software blog, the homepage doesn't have an assigned rank but a smattering of the older posts have a pagerank of 1. I don't  understand this at all - maybe it's just be down to the mysterious way Google operates.

My blog used to have a PageRank of 3. I think this was mainly because I gave it a link from my main site. The link was in place for two or three weeks and I think this was enough to give the PR 3 value. When I removed the link, the PR dropped but for some reason some of the older posts still have a rank.

Any ideas why none of the posts on this blog have a rank? Or are there some that do and I've just missed them?

by ML