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How to progress further with Ideaspad?

I’m in the process of having a major new featured added, which I believe will help significantly to bring Ideaspad more in-line with similar, more expensive products on the market.

The product does sell at the moment without these modifications.

So I believe it does have a future. I hope to add further functionality.

However I believe the marketing side of things and the website let it down bandly.

Looking at the stats it doesn’t get the page views it should.

We’ve looked at re-branding it under a different name, but haven’t come up with anything which will healp with search engine listings.

Also, the german website is very bad, I believe all the sales I get are from download sites. However, I’ve always thought that if I get the english side of things working well, the german side will follow. So I’m willing to leave the german side for now.

So where do I go from here, with the website.

I’d like to have a new site and a new name, but without the name the site seems pointless.

I’d like to keep the Ideaspad pages and have the new named product aimed purely at business and add industrial strength database functinality.

Ideaspad – An Award winning information manager for home and professional use

by JM

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2008 07 20 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (0) Permalink

How to decide which RentACoder Coder to accept?

I haven’t been lucky enough to have a popular project which has had lots of coders bidding on it for quite a while. But I have had several such projects in my time using RentACoder.

Normally I would almost always say go for a Top Coder as they are more likely to give you good service as they don’t want to loose their Top Coder status.

Top Coders need to have met a good amount of good feedback to gain the status.

I also give favour to coders who can understand me, I always like then to type a reply with a paragraph or so of text, where I can also see that they can respond well.

I think its important to get the coder to explain what you want them to do in their own words.

RAC have a rule which says you can’t get a coder to do work for you in the bidding stage. However I always try to get some sort of demo / mock up from the coder.

At the moment I’ve got a new project for some web design, I’ve got a good few coders bidding. Theres a wide range of skills. I’ve got a Top Coder bidding, but his feedback doesn’t actually mention page design. So this is a little worrying.

As usual I’ve got some coders who have posted me a standard message, I tend to ignore these messages, I think its almost rude. I don’t think it tells you anything.

I have asked if coders have some previous work URLs.

And where they haven’t some URLs of the kind of thing they could do for me.

I’ve also got a couple of coders who only have sites with flash stuff on them, I don’t think this is a good idea for this project.

Its going to be a difficult choice.

I guess at the end of the day theres always an element of risk.

I just thought my experiences may be useful to others.

Have fun making great looking masks with our Software!

by JM

2008 07 17 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (0) Permalink

How to sell / SEO almost identical products in a shop site?

“First thing I can see is that your description meta tags are a bit skinny.”

“Somehow I´m going to have to add more content about my products, but I´m not sure how I could do this without making it sound waffly and pointless.”

Of course I can do the normal SEO stuff quite easily.

But theres product titles..

Thinking about it I guess I can leaved them alone, they will already have good keywords in them.

I guess I’m going to have to use some sort of tool to find different keywords / phrases and then use these on my pages.

But how do I avoid waffle?

For sale, Kids Maths Software and a range of exercise books

by JM

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2008 07 17 Dipsy Search Engine Optimisation Comments (5) Permalink

Tweak, Tweak, Tweak

For those of your reading, thinking, what…

Well it means keep modifying your web pages.

Heres a recent quote.

“That’s why I say – with websites – do bit by bit as you’ll never really finish anyway”

My question is how do you prioritise and ever get round to doing even a small tweak.
Especially if you have lots of pages and in my case, lots of sites.

Ideaspad – An Award winning information manager for home and professional use

by JM

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2008 07 17 Dipsy Search Engine Optimisation Comments (4) Permalink

Draft Software Acceptance Email

Here’s my initial attempt at a new email format for software acceptance/ updating on SoftwareLode. There will only be one or two word differences between the emails – one will say updated, the other added.

Comments are invited.

Dear XXX

Your software, “SliQ Invoicing and Quoting 1.4.0”, has been updated on SoftwareLode.

Your software details can be viewed at:
http://www.softwarelode.com/714/details-sliq-invoicing-and-quoting.html

——————————————————————————————-

We have awarded your software 5 stars. You can get the award logo from:

Awards:       http://www.softwarelode.com/awards.php.

Please use the award logo to link back to http://www.softwarelode.com or to your software details page.

——————————————————————————————-

To find out about Advertising option on SoftwareLode, please visit:

Advertising:  http://www.softwarelode.com/advertise.php

——————————————————————————————-

Please contact us with any questions or comments:

Email       : webmaster@softwarelode.com
Contact Form: http://www.softwarelode.com/contact.php?subj=authors

——————————————————————————————-

Kind regards,

SoftwareLode webmaster

——————————————————————————————-
Please also remember to submit your software to our partner site: http://www.softtester.com
——————————————————————————————-

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2008 07 13 MikeL Tech Talk Comments (4) Permalink

Potential customers that can’t use your trial, what to do?

In the last few months the question of potential customers not being able to access my program trial period has occurred a couple of time.

The first time the customer said they had used the trial last year and wanted to show this years students the program.

Today I’ve had another request, this time from what seems like a genuine customer, who can not access the trial. He says that hes never had my program on his machine and he hasn’t accessed an old database. So in this case it sounds like a problem in my program.

However this is the first report of this problem.

My issue / problem is what to do.
Even if I find . fix the problem, the 30 day data will have to be reset. And this functionality is open to abuse.

I mean I could write a small program to reset the 30 day data, but if this program were to be posted on the Internet my program would be cracked.

So what to do, thoughts?

Ideaspad – An Award winning information manager for home and professional use

by JM

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2008 07 10 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (6) Permalink

Affliates Setup

I’ve been logging into my affiliate accounts and having a look around to see what we have to do to add buy now links to our sites and if we have to do anything in the accounts themselves.

SWReg.org seems a bit odd, but it makes sense from their point of you, you have a basic url and you added an afliate id you make up yourself, when you get your first sale, they create and account for you with that id. The password is the same too.

More info here.

http://www.swreg.org/affiliate_system.htm

Heres some example urls

https://gbp.swreg.org/cgi-bin/sitm35.cgi?s=51509&c=GBP&x=1

Tagged
2008 07 10 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (2) Permalink

How to keep track of your SEO changes and research?

I’ve got a mammoth new job ahead of me, something I wasn’t really concerned about, until I read a book on SEO and discovered that my websites were letting me down and not selling my products well enough.

So I’ve got to change my site design, come up with some good keywords which people will use to find my product, while incorporate these keywords into my content / selling strategy. And I’ve got to keep track on my changes, to see how well I’m doing, also so I don’t end up research the same things, over and over.

So what do I do?

I guess I need to keep some sort of document, with the URL of the page I’m working on. Perhaps the old keywords and a summary of keyword density ? Also a list of all the site linking to me or if the list is long a count of the site.

Then under neath that, my new keywords, density and count.

Have I missed anything?

Ideaspad – An Award winning information manager for home and professional use

by JM

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2008 07 08 Dipsy Search Engine Optimisation Comments (7) Permalink

Careful release for a new version

Well this is kind of a big day for me. For the first time in a few months I’ve sort of released a new version of Kids Mask Factory.

What I mean is I’ve uploaded the program files. I haven’t updated my pad files etc.

I always like to take a careful approach just in case theres any obvious problems I’ve missed. I mean I should get some basic data back if there are any problem.

If all goes well in a few days time, I’ll then update my pad file.

Then after a week or 2 I think I might upload to download.com 🙂

Which is a big step for me, I can’t remember when i did that last. Might be a year, maybe more.

Then is all goes well after say a month or 2, I might go around all those shareware site which still have kids mask print listed 🙂  by doing so I’m kind of saying this is a best as I can do for a long time.

Alternatively, I might post on Indie Gamer and ask for some advice, if i have had a big uptake.

Needless to say I have big hopes that this version of the program has less bugs than ever. And that there are some big performance upgrades this year.

Where it sells well i don’t know, i think that more to do with the functionality of the program rather than whether it runs better. I believe that it might run well on lots of peoples machines anyway.

But thats just a belief, those logging lines taken COULD make a big difference.

So at this point, I’m nervous, then in a few days, i might be confident then in a month or too I could be depressed 🙂

Then the cycle starts again, or not.

Have fun making great looking masks with our Software!

by JM

2008 07 08 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (0) Permalink

First implementation of Shareware Site Improvements

I’ve implemented an Editor’s Picks section listing recommended software downloads on the homepage of SoftwareLode. The list is populated with programs I personally recommend after review. I’ve coloured the background of the Editor’s Pick section to make them stand out a bit.

I’ll probably choose the programs to list based on whether authors ask to be listed and/ or they give SoftwareLode a backlink. I won’t automatically list a program just because someone asked – I’ll review the programs first. I’ll also list programs I come across that I think are neat. I’m reviewing titles as they get submitted by authors so I can decide whether to linger on a review after getting a first impression of a submitted title.

To manage the Editor’s Pick section, I’ve written an extra page in the admin section of the site. This lets me nominate a software title based on its program number and either set or clear its featured status. I can also choose to add my own comments about the program or just use the PAD file description. I’ve allowed the comments to include HTML tags so I can make my own comments on the program stand out a bit.

I’m still thinking of other improvements, e.g. a Recommended List on the home page. The Editor’s Pick section will never contain more than a handful of titles but I may want to add a list – say up to 10 – of other titles I recommend.

On the program listing page itself, I can distinguish programs by giving them a 3, 4 or 5 star rating.

by ML

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2008 07 08 MikeL Search Engine Optimisation Comments (6) Permalink