First, welcome to those of you from my LinkedIn network. I'm glad you're here and hope that you will take a moment to register and follow my blog -- even if it's just out of curiosity.
What should you expect here? Ideas...lots of ideas.... I want to introduce you to all sorts of marketing, promotion, social media, search-engine optimization, personalized URLs, and more that can help you promote your business.
There came a time in my business when I had to learn how to promote my company better, or risk the loss of it all. That time may be now for you; or maybe you just want to have someone from your industry explain to you the tools of the electronic age.
Let me start with a basic. It's not necessarily lesson one, but it's definitely a great foundation. We'll assume that you already have a web site. I think that's a fair assumption since many of you are members of my LinkedIn network and if not, you are, after all, in the business of software for publishing...
Today you can buy anything on the web. Literally. There was a town in Arizona posted for sale on the web. I don't really know whether or not it was sold because it was listed on the web, but I certainly learned about it because it was on the web. I think most of us will agree that Obama was elected largely due to his grassroots, social media, and general web marketing. Four years ago, I couldn't have picked him out of a crowd, and probably neither could have you. So if you can sell a town and you can elect a president, selling your extensible technology ought to be a walk in the park; right?
Theoretically, every customer with any type of problem in which you specialize in solving is a few keystrokes away from finding you. That's mostly true. Think about your product for a moment. ... What are your key phrases? Your talking points? Your elevator pitch? Ok, now imagine that I am your candidate customer but there's a problem. I don't know your key phrases. I haven't heard your talking points. I've never shared an elevator with you. See the disconnect? I have a problem. I can describe it. You have a solution. You can describe it. I speak in problem language. You speak in solution language. I haven't yet learned your language, but you do speak mine. Sort of.
This is where search engines can help, but they don't work alone. You have to coax them.
Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, DogPile, and others all have what are called spiders or robots. These are applications that run around the web and index the content of pages. While they're at it, they evaluate the page content's relevancy. Search engines are successful only when they return relevant pages at a find request. If I type in variable-data publishing, and the search engine returns pages about dentists, I will not be a happy searcher and I will try a different search engine. The better the results -- the more relevant the pages -- the more I will come to rely on their product. Since they charge fees for premium ads, their revenue is dependent upon me using their service and seeing those ads.
There are many things to consider when you are trying to create content that search engines will find relevant, and it is not a documented, exact science. What's more, they all index in their own proprietary manner. Just about the time you make it to page one of Google's results for variable-data publishing, someone -- your competitor probably -- comes along and bumps you out of the top spot or maybe completely off page one. What do they know that you don't know? Maybe nothing. It might have been luck of the draw that day, but probably not. They are probably, likely even, more relevant -- or at least appear to be.
While getting up close and personal with these spiders is probably not how you want to spend your day, you can certainly have casual conversations with them. Job one, of course, is to launch a web site or a blog, and job two is to make sure your content is relevant, speaks to the customer, uses phrases they understand (and not just your proprietary phrases for addressing their issue). You can use meta tags and site maps to help the spiders index the right pages and to identify key phrases, but without content to back up the claims of your meta tags, you are not going to make it to page one of those results.
Stop now and check out your home page. What did you find? Did you solve my problem on your home page?
Hold on. Let me ask you again. Did you solve my problem on your home page?
I just visited ten of your web sites. Out of those ten, I found a clear message on one home page. That means that nine out of ten of you have beautiful home pages with links to your products, your store, your partners, your resellers, your locations, alternate languages, engaging Flash, and one of you actually got me to stop and read because you solved my problem.
You can fix that.
In the span of one or two sentences, describe my problem to me in my problem language and solve my problem in your solution language. When you do that, you are creating relevancy between those types of problems and your solution. Now a search spider is going to get it. (I know you are dying to know what one site solved my problem, so here you go http://www.stibosystems.com.)
As a sidebar: resist the urge to solve my problem in a graphic. Solve it in text, make it searchable, and don't be afraid to solve it more than once. I'm fine with you solving my problem three or four times on your home page. It's okay, sometimes I don't get it right away. Maybe you want to approach it from different angles. Then, not only are you solving my problem, but I also get that you have lots of ways to solve it. Now I really like your home page.
So having said all this, is my advice specific to the business of selling extensible technology? Absolutely not. Most of the lessons I've learned and the messages I share have been learned by thousands, if not millions, of others and extolled on millions of listeners. I'm simply telling them again because I've been here with you for the last 20 years and hope that my perspective -- a perspective you share as part of the same industry -- will be helpful to you in finding your way in this electronic age.
13 March 2009
12 March 2009
Are extensions still a million-dollar industry?
In 1995, I started ThePowerXChange. This was after four years as a corporate trainer where I often also functioned as a reseller of QuarkXPress XTensions to my training customers. In the last 17 or so years, I've made millions of dollars selling extensions (collectively XTensions, Plug-ins, Add-ons, Add-ins, and so on), but it begs the question: Are there still millions to be made? Of course there are, but the way you sell, promote, and even deliver them is different. That is the catalyst for this blog.
We have different challenges today than the early days and many of those challenges come in the form of messaging vehicles. At ThePowerXChange, I feel as though we've tried everything, and believe me, we've had lots of failures, but we obviously had lots of successes, too. I would like to think that despite the number of failures, I at least came away a bit smarter.
In the pages of this blog I will share with you some of our tried-and-true messaging vehicles, but more importantly I will share with you the results of our new forays into the world of social-media optimization (SMO) and search-engine optimization (SEO), and how -- or whether -- you can use it to sell your software technology. These are methods that are common to many industries, but I will tell you about them as they apply to us; those of us in the business of software for publishing.
Before 9/11, at ThePowerXChange, we were just motoring along and enjoying reasonable success and growth. Our big campaigns before this pivotal period were what we called PUNs (product-upgrade notices). It was a form of variable-data printing -- when very few companies even knew what that was. We used Xdata and QuarkXPress to customize postcards to our customers telling them when a product they had purchased had been revisioned. They were hugely successful. Depending upon the product, we would see 80% of the customers purchase the upgrade. Our customers loved that the postcard contained all of their purchase history, the product name, the version -- all the things that are taken for granted today with any variable-data job.
After 9/11, it was a whole, new world. Had anyone told me that my company would be affected by a bombing on the eastern seaboard, I would have calmly explained to them how little they know about my business. As it turns out, I would have been wrong -- completely wrong.
For the eight months after 9/11, our phone simply did not ring. We had a shopping cart site, and the cart remained empty. Out of sheer boredom, we started contacting our customers and asked them how we could help and we ended up developing a nice little niche business that while it generated no income, created more good will than I could have bought with a truckload of money.
We had a fair number of customers in the region of the twin towers in NYC and many of them had been booted from their offices due to the quarantine. These companies were also without their software and computers so we researched, wrote letters, and re-delivered their entire library; including their major apps from Quark, Adobe, Meta, and Macromedia. The great thing is, once everyone got back to work, they remembered us and many are still our customers today.
At the same time we started researching shopping-cart software and how to drive traffic. My support manager took over the shopping cart research and together we settled on Searchfit. The benefit to this proprietary solution was that they created static web pages for each product. This increased the number of relevant pages at our site and moved us up the search-engine rankings quickly. I took on the electronic marketing and started email campaigns, click-thru advertising, co-op eMarketing, link exchanges, and more. I read everything in could get my hands on about how to take advantage of the very inexpensive or free marketing available through the web.
Nearly eight years later we still spend nearly all of our marketing budget on search-engine placement and figuring out how to best employ these new and some not-so-new tools to promote the extensible-technology market. We have launched all new SMO campaigns that include LinkedIn, Plaxo, Yahoo, Google, Revver, YouTube, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, GoogleBase, Google Analytics, Google Search, Google AdSense, Amazon, Flickr, BlipTV, MeFeedia, RSS, link exchange, click-thru ads, banner ads, affiliates program, co-op eMarketing and announcements with our partners, and news and press releases.
So here, on the pages of my blog, I will tell you about what we've done, what we're doing, and where we're headed. I'll try to give you ideas about projects you can implement and maybe we'll find ways to work together to benefit you and your market. At the very least, you'll come away with a sense that we share your pain. If you're like me, it will make you feel better to know that you are not alone.
We have different challenges today than the early days and many of those challenges come in the form of messaging vehicles. At ThePowerXChange, I feel as though we've tried everything, and believe me, we've had lots of failures, but we obviously had lots of successes, too. I would like to think that despite the number of failures, I at least came away a bit smarter.
In the pages of this blog I will share with you some of our tried-and-true messaging vehicles, but more importantly I will share with you the results of our new forays into the world of social-media optimization (SMO) and search-engine optimization (SEO), and how -- or whether -- you can use it to sell your software technology. These are methods that are common to many industries, but I will tell you about them as they apply to us; those of us in the business of software for publishing.
Before 9/11, at ThePowerXChange, we were just motoring along and enjoying reasonable success and growth. Our big campaigns before this pivotal period were what we called PUNs (product-upgrade notices). It was a form of variable-data printing -- when very few companies even knew what that was. We used Xdata and QuarkXPress to customize postcards to our customers telling them when a product they had purchased had been revisioned. They were hugely successful. Depending upon the product, we would see 80% of the customers purchase the upgrade. Our customers loved that the postcard contained all of their purchase history, the product name, the version -- all the things that are taken for granted today with any variable-data job.
After 9/11, it was a whole, new world. Had anyone told me that my company would be affected by a bombing on the eastern seaboard, I would have calmly explained to them how little they know about my business. As it turns out, I would have been wrong -- completely wrong.
For the eight months after 9/11, our phone simply did not ring. We had a shopping cart site, and the cart remained empty. Out of sheer boredom, we started contacting our customers and asked them how we could help and we ended up developing a nice little niche business that while it generated no income, created more good will than I could have bought with a truckload of money.
We had a fair number of customers in the region of the twin towers in NYC and many of them had been booted from their offices due to the quarantine. These companies were also without their software and computers so we researched, wrote letters, and re-delivered their entire library; including their major apps from Quark, Adobe, Meta, and Macromedia. The great thing is, once everyone got back to work, they remembered us and many are still our customers today.
At the same time we started researching shopping-cart software and how to drive traffic. My support manager took over the shopping cart research and together we settled on Searchfit. The benefit to this proprietary solution was that they created static web pages for each product. This increased the number of relevant pages at our site and moved us up the search-engine rankings quickly. I took on the electronic marketing and started email campaigns, click-thru advertising, co-op eMarketing, link exchanges, and more. I read everything in could get my hands on about how to take advantage of the very inexpensive or free marketing available through the web.
Nearly eight years later we still spend nearly all of our marketing budget on search-engine placement and figuring out how to best employ these new and some not-so-new tools to promote the extensible-technology market. We have launched all new SMO campaigns that include LinkedIn, Plaxo, Yahoo, Google, Revver, YouTube, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, GoogleBase, Google Analytics, Google Search, Google AdSense, Amazon, Flickr, BlipTV, MeFeedia, RSS, link exchange, click-thru ads, banner ads, affiliates program, co-op eMarketing and announcements with our partners, and news and press releases.
So here, on the pages of my blog, I will tell you about what we've done, what we're doing, and where we're headed. I'll try to give you ideas about projects you can implement and maybe we'll find ways to work together to benefit you and your market. At the very least, you'll come away with a sense that we share your pain. If you're like me, it will make you feel better to know that you are not alone.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
