I’ve always hated it when you see program budling the google toolbar or other program in the setup program.
However, with my kids prog, its not doing much at the moment, maybe I should consider this type of thing.
Comments?
This month following conversations with Blue I removed the trial links from one of my programs websites. I also added a coupon code for some money off in my january sale.
I’ve had no sales so far.
I haven’t yet analysed my new buy pass through page stats yet, so i don’t know how many people thought about buying.
I have an an email today asking for the trial link, which I gave them.
They asked to try the “download a free trial of you mask making template”.
I know the month isn’t up yet, but, comments, thoughts?
Theres now a blacklisting feature in place at the point where authors / spammers submit their pad files to softtester, behind the authors page.
This stops quite a bit of spam.
But I’ve already got spam and things could be determined as spam at a later date.
So I need a process which will look at the softtester MySQL database and deal with them.
However, there are various problems.
1. The black list is a list of domains, the fields in the database are full urls, so I’d have to do a like % … % query rather than an equals, which will be slow.
2. These fields don’t have indexes.
3. Its going to take a long time to scan the database / fields for each of these domains on a regular basis.
Any solution has to automated and require no involvement from me, when its up and running.
Solutions.
1. Create an offline solution which works on a copy of the database.
Pros.
Quick and won’t affect the web server
Cons.
To be fully automated it would need to grab a copy of the database, import it to a test database then perform the actual process, then action the live database.
2. Do the process manually a couple of times a year.
Pros.
Erm, not sure.
Cons.
Lots of effort, time and lots of transactions on the live database.
Thoughts?
by JM
I’m trying to evaluate the life span of my MS Access Security program as it relies on MS Access versions 2003 and older. Then I can add a new feature or not.
With the introduction of MS Access 2007 everything changed and therefore my program lives as long as MS Access 2003.
So are you still older versions of MS Access? why?
Has version 2007 not been taken up by database professionals?
What advice can you give me?
by JM
In the last few weeks this blog has lost its PageRank. PageRank as an end in itself has little value but it is a measure of how much Google likes a webpage. A page without an assigned rank is very unlikely to appear in the SERPs. Dipsy made a post a little while back saying that it was hard to find older posts that covered topics we were currently discussing.
I wonder whether both these things – loss of PR and difficulty in finding things – can be improved by one simple tweak. The thing we haven’t bothered to do on this blog is do any real linking between posts themselves. We’ve simply relied on tags and categories.
One of the main SEO tips for placing links between pages is to give a link good anchor text and to place the link within a paragraph of text on the same topic as the target of the link. Looking at Google Analytics, it seems that its mainly the newer posts that get the traffic. If we try to do this in the future then we might pull some of the older posts out of purgatory and get some more traffic.
I believe there is a similar posts plugin for WordPress that can do some of this work for us automatically. Has anyone come across this plug-in?
It might be a bit tiresome with nearly 200 posts on the blog but I’ll try and spend some time interlinking the older posts I’ve made – where appropriate – over the next few weeks.
by ML
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
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
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
Tagged SEOFor 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
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