The posts you’ve seen here in most cases, bar one and not including this one, were written prior to getting sliced up and grated, in short I planned ahead – but not nearly enough it seems.

Frankly I’ve been going a little stir crazy.  I’m still alive, but my right hand is making it impossible to do the things I would prefer to be working on.  A week ago the plaster came off, but my fingers are only just starting to work again properly.

Not being the kind of person who can sit and watch day time TV for longer than 30 seconds I’ve instead been attending to business building of things I never get time to do, but can actually be done one handed.

With many local schools closing these last few weeks in the Northern part of Melbourne due to an outbreak of the Swinefluenza Hamdemic, you find you’ve got to do something or you’ll go nuts sitting their making extremely lame jokes about barnyard illnesses.  I think my worst joke was about a certain Australian politician turning into “Swinestein” -  the political porker.  I’m not fond of most “Australian Greens”.  Told you the jokes were lamer than usual. 

That’s what you’re reduced to when you go stir crazy wanting to do your work.  Worse jokes than your usual bad ones – right at a time when everybody seems to have lost the last vestiges of their sense of humour.

So, apart from making my kids laugh (youngest daughter fractured her foot on Thursday, more pain doubled by emergency admission taking five hours due to the swine flu admissions – many of whom are infants – at the hospital) by doing my Duke Nukem voice impersonations every time anybody said anything (adult or kid) I figured I’d better do something constructive lest somebody hit me for saying, for the hundredth time “Damn!  Your ugly!”.

So, some news here soon of some marketing support for MixAction that may be of some interest to ISV’s for use in their podcasts, video presentations and training tools.  CDROO, our audio website, is coming back online this coming week.  Last year I took it off line to allegedly prepare it for this task – and never got anything else done.  A silly mistake as it lost all of it’s traffic in the process, which while irrelevant to the interests of the business now, was still traffic.

Not to worry.  “Coupla, days.”

Seems one can work on websites with one hand providing you don’t type to much text, but instead work with images, and in the case of preparing CDROO for relaunch, mixing audio and signing off on license agreements.

So, hoping next post here will be an announcement that it’s up and open for business.  With a couple of packages for readers of this blog.

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches. – George Bernard Shaw

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I try to follow these scum merchants and their proclivity for the advancement of turning search engines into sewer pipes, and as I’m switching currently across to VisualStudio and the .Net platform I have cause to do more searching than usual.

What I’ve noticed is a massive increase in download sites using the product name of an ISV or mISV’s software as a sub domain of their website.  What this effectively means is that they are attempting to out rank the author – and each other naturally – on the product.

OK.  Sure many have been using web pages with the product name for some time, which certainly can play a role in rank.  But a sub domain is taken as far more authorative by the engines – even Google.  Don’t give them the “benefit of the doubt” here, this is extremely cynical.

Given that a sub domain has to be setup – albeit scripts can do it – and takes more work (and expense in many cases) than a simple generated page /productname.html compared to product.name.spammydownloadsite.com

Some developers with a firm grip on SEO are not going to be affected by this, those using content, blogs etc will cream these Google Adsense farmers without any problems.  But those, most, mISV’s who don’t write content, don’t get the basics of SEO will be affected.  Especially if they host their product on a company domain name mycompany.com as opposed to a product domain name myproduct.com

To my mind this is tantamount to stealing IP.  Maybe your IP.  Though you’d be hard pressed to make it stick in a court and the downloads sites know it.

Check and keep an eye on the the search engines lest a download site sneaks up on you.  Better yet – ditch PAD, ditch the download sites and get cracking on writing content to support your product.

Scott Kane

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Well.  Actually no.  Kind of, but not exactly.  I am but I’m not.  I could be but I’m not really… 

At least in the sense that I have here previously.  Instead what this article attempts to address is a link between “download sites” and “domain knowledge” and how they have utterly nothing to do with each other and why you should care.

Now that I’ve totally confused you – let me follow it up with:

It’s not hard to influence search engine rankings for your business/product with a sprinkling of common sense and some good old fashioned hard work and never use a PAD file or a download site again.

Better than that – that influence is done using your own information, your own controls and your own time and it does not involve any stupid (or clever for that matter) – pick your colour hat -  “SEO’ techniques at all.

It’s simply common sense and most of the search engines (including Google) welcome it.  It’s pretty powerful and people without any experience can apply it providing they follow some basic common sense – and -  are consistent and diligent and use a plan….

Oh.  A Couple of more things:

You’ll need to either have solid domain knowledge about your product or at least know (or at least try to find and learn about) how to access information that will enhance that knowledge.

You’ll need to stop saying you ‘can’t write” and understand and accept that practice will improve what you do over time – as in all things – and hence how and what you write.

There is no “can’t” if you are bootstrapping.  Instead you compromise, learn and adapt.

You need to consider that people reading your content are not going to be critics considering it for the next Pulitzer prize or expect you to provide a thesis.

Blogs, for example, are best served raw.  Warts and all – and people actually seem to prefer it, even if they disagree with your contention – because it’s coming from the heart. Your heart.

The psychology for this, as far as I can tell, lies somewhere with the popularity of TV soap operas and reality shows.  If they can relate to you then you have a leg up on the competition and for them to relate you’re better off sounding like an average person writing than, say, a professional journalist.

If you can write like a journo then more power to you – but it’s not essential.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that I pretty much equate download sites on the level of somewhere between slugs crawling around in the dirt – or gentiles feasting on exposed flesh.

I don’t think they do us any favors.

I don’t think we need them.

I’d love to see them shrivel up and kick the bucket.

There are exceptions like the CNet sites, Tucows and a handful of others – but the rest are total Google spam.

Yet ISV’s and more particularly mISV’s cling to them in desperation and honestly believe they’ll help them in their quest for, well, whatever your personal quest is for your product and business…

Most mISV’s and a good many ISV’s are very much like the kittenpreneur above.  They think this is the key to the kingdom.  Total Google domination that will out click their competitors.  They tend to forget their competitors are probably using PAD files with similar descriptions listed on the same download sites.  From page 1 to page infinity of just about every search engine.

I firmly believe there is a better way.  But as a statement that’s not going to cut it, right?

OK.  An act of faith to a limited extent is needed here.

I’m going to use this blog as a limited example.  It’s early days for this blog.  I’m not Bob Walsh or Seth or Joel.  I don’t get anywhere near their level of traffic – though it’s growing.  So I’m not going to actually state what keywords I’ve used to work my way up onto page one (and higher) for certain ISV and mISV related terms that older more established blogs dominate.

But I will explain the reason – the real reason – for why I started the blog and what it proved to me.  Something I will be taking away to use on my business product website’s.  Having said that – the blog has grown beyond the experiment and it has many more purposes now, including the fact I like to write, people seem to get some value out if it, even if it’s just disagreement, and it’s a hell of a lot of fun! 

I started this blog – and admit I came late to this game – as an experiment only a few months ago in March 2008, to see if content really could influence the search engine results we see.  The blog uses no Adwords, it doesn’t do anything else except consistently discuss issues related to my own mISV business in the making and general ISV issues or subjects of interest.

It uses various tools to enhance those keywords, the very ones we’ve been using for years like meta tags etc.  Because it’s possible to automate this in tools such as WordPress the task is made a lot easier to be sure.

But…  It’s the content that is critical.  The content is relevant to the keywords and it’s paying off in terms of results when it comes to the subject of starting an ISV or mISV.

If you look at the articles I post here they pretty much all have something in common.  The most obvious might not actually be obvious to all.  The subject line for each post.

In most instances they have been chosen for the purpose of testing their impact on search engine results.  You might be surprised to learn that I get around 50 – 100 hits in the logs for “cracks, hacks, keygen’s and torrents” each month due to one article alone.  That I get currently twenty hits a day for “secret herbs and spices” even though this blog has nothing to do with chicken… 

This would be utterly stupid for a product site where you want relevant eyes on relevant content.  But in the nature of an experiment anything goes – OK?  

OK – the point is that the subject plays a critical part and it’s so easy to do.  That the subject is also a meta tag in WordPress by default certainly assists in this.

But  to really make a difference you have to have posts that relate to the subject, my “secret herbs and spices” hits will ultimately wither and die, I have no interest in maintaining those keywords.  I just wanted to see if I could. 

The other, for this blog, more important keywords however are used in blog posts time and time again.  In the subject, in the articles, in the meta tags, in the blog tags, in the categories and so on.  They are more durable, though do require maintenance – frequent posts with content.

I see, in various forums, at times folks asking how often Google spiders a site.  They don’t believe me when I tell them that Google comes into this blog several times a day (other blogger’s will understand this and why it is so), and articles go up within hours and often right to the top of Google (and Yahoo and Microsoft’s various search engine flavors like Live).

The trick is the XML sitemap and  the fact that you can set Google (via a free account from Google) to come at a certain frequency.  That and a WordPress plugin that notifies Google of a new post when it’s posted… 

But without frequent posts Google has nothing new to get (same goes for the other engines).  So clearly if you want to play this game, and I believe firmly you should, you’re going to need information that updates frequently.

There are several ways you could handle this.

1. A blog.
2. A website that incorporates a blog type engine.
3. A CMS like Joomla or similar.
4. Hand written HTML pages (a major PITA – I used to do it this way in the 90′s and trust me, you don’t want to have to do that when the other tools do it so much better).

You don’t have to have a blog, at least not in the sense we think of them.  You can use blog software simply as an article manager.  The idea is to get people to visit.  Information has more “stickiness” than a product page.  The idea is to become a resource.

Alas Usenet is Dead…

Many years back now the accepted wisdom was to join Usenet groups and offer information to people and become a helpful regular using your signature in each post as a sales tool.  Alas Usenet is Dead.

What’s needed, and has been lacking, is a clear alternative.  People are not subscribing to Usenet.  Heck, most these days don’t know what it is, let alone how to use an NNTP client.

Articles are that alternative.

• People use Google as if it is the Internet.  We need to grasp that average people are typing URL’s into Google instead of the address bar and clicking the Google result to go to a specific site.
• People use Google as an encyclopedia.  Why not be the source of information they are looking for?
• People are hungry for information.  The mISV and ISV can fulfill that hunger and in the process expose these people to their product.  Tactfully of course.  One has to resist the urge to blast them with marketing rhetoric in articles unless the product clearly addresses their quest.  Tact…

There are rules here…

Yep, there are rules.  The objective is not to try or succeed in spamming a search engine.  The objective is to become a valid, readable, content rich place that adds value to the search engines themselves, potential customers and as a neat side effect, your business.  The rules are:

If you write crap you’ll be crapped on.

You have to write information with the intent of contributing something of value.  Your opinion is valid, your perspective is valid, your knowledge is valid.  However a half hearted attempt to scam the search engine with unfulfilled keyword stuffing and rubbish will hurt you, not help you.

This is the virtual world and not the physical world.

The same rules do not apply. You can build up your content over time, and get pretty quick results as you go.

Google, for example, can be inexplicable at times.

This is not a get rich quick scheme.  This is about hard work, planning, rolling up your sleeves, analysis and it must be said – sheer determination.

It’s true the Google-dance, the sandboxes and other weird stuff impact on us all.  But content – valid content – can greatly assist.  None of my sites have been sandboxed, for example, ever and I have numerous domain names.  All of them have been indexed and visible within 3 weeks of registration and putting something up.

The old truisms are no longer true…

At least as far as marketing ISV wise goes.  What I’m talking about here is the old “truisms” that were dead set true yesterday are no longer true.  Download sites were essential to our businesses.  Usenet and forum posting was the only way to get the message out.  But the new mitigating factors such as the emergence of Google, blogs, PHP driven content technology (like WordPress, Joomla and similar tools to name but a few) are more effective, within reach of any ISV and have an incredibly low cost.

I’m no soothsayer and I’m not trying to say a sooth.  Waking up and smelling the coffee brewing is part of evolving our business, products and minds however.  There is no doubt we need to wake up and start inhaling those vapors.  Way past time.

I do know, understand and appreciate that many reading will not feel comfortable with what I’m suggesting here.  It does require, for many, the pain of overcoming comfort zones.  But a decision has to be made – do you control your destiny or are you happy to let it meander along with the likes of download sites and your competition controlling it for you?

Yes, that’s a rhetorical question.  But it needs to be asked because time and time again the same objections come up with ISV’s.

“I can’t write.”

You couldn’t program once either – how did that change?

“It’s OK for you.”

No it isn’t.  That’s presumptuous of you.  We all have nagging doubts about ourselves and we all have the capacity to address them.  You are no different to me or anybody else in this regard.

“You’ve had a lot of practice.”

So have you – you’ve just got to change your perspective on how you consider what you’ve written.

“There’s nothing to be said about my product.”

Respectfully – look at the logic of that statement.  Either you don’t know your subject matter (domain knowledge which you can fix) or you wouldn’t say that – or you’re backing the wrong horse and need a different product that you do know something about.

The bouncing cueball…

Steve Ballmer bounced around the stage and yelled “Developers, developers, developers…” and forever made an impression on programmers.  I still haven’t worked out why this is so.  I simply can’t fathom any sincerity out of Steve’s repetitive bouncing athletics in this case.  However – I do believe there is a more important bouncing chant for ISV’s  and it’s this:

“Content, content, content, content, content…”

If you take anything at all away from this article – or even this blog – I’m hoping it will be that. Content.

Thanks for reading!!

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. – Mark Twain

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If you’re a regular reader you’ll know I have an extremely low opinion of software download sites.  I blogged about them recently.

Today a developer, Julian Moss , whom I mentioned had problems with McAfee’s SiteAdvisor posted an interesting result, which he admits was an accident, but none the less extremely relevant to ISV’s.

Julian  explains that he created a PAD file as usual for submission to download sites for a recently released product.  He did the usual submissions,  accidentally deleted the content on his own site and used the PAD file description to replace that content.  It was then he noticed:

A while later, while I was purging some junk listings from the download site database, I must have accidentally removed the listing for Morse Machine. Because I was busy, I quickly reinstated it by recreating the page using the description from the PAD file. I thought no more about it until the other day when I happened to do a Google search for Morse Machine and found that my own listing of it appeared nowhere in the search results, even though the page has a good page rank. The top listing for my program was the one from Sofotex, at position 3, followed at position 5 by the one from Top Shareware. Both listings had the same description, taken from the PAD file, that I had used on my own page.

Hmm.  Sounding a bit like the conclusion I came to in the article I wrote, hey?  Not that the conclusion was rocket science, but it’s certainly noteworthy that Julian concludes:

The question this accidental experiment raises in my mind is, to what extent is it worth automatically submitting identical software listings to hundreds of download sites, if Google is going to filter most of them out because they contain the same text?

Right on.  Exactly.  So where is the SEO advantage here to the ISV?  I’d love it if somebody could explain that one.

But, to be fair it’s OK for people like me to bitch and moan and rattle.  But what’s an ISV to do?  Without the download site it’s tough to get top score in Google, right?

Not necessarily.  But that’s a post for another day.  I’m aiming for Sunday on that one as it deserves some attention to detail.

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative. – Kurt Vonnegut

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A lot of folks are going to get incredibly annoyed at this entry (you know who you are).

OK.  I’m a moderator of three Usenet big 8 newsgroups (comp hierarchy) and they relate specifically to so called “shareware”.  I’ve been the moderator there since there inception a decade ago when Usenet was still a big communications channel and nobody had really thought much about online forums.  Blogs was a noun used when referring to an unknown person (Joe Blogs) and of course it was before the so called .com bust.  Pretty much everything that happened in the arena of small companies selling software that you could download and try was defined as “shareware” back then.  ISV and mISV etc had not been defined. There were a few lame attempts at terms like “Trialware” here and there that never had a hope of going anywhere as a term.   Consumers defined a company, as did magazine reviewers and pundits, as a “shareware company” and around about this time the folks running these companies tried, in vain, to get people to understand that “shareware” was a marketing method and not a type of software – or company.  I say in vain because the majority, including the IT industry by and large don’t get it and in cases I’ve met personally refuse to get it.

So what’s the big deal anyway?  Does it actually matter what you call yourself?  Is “shareware” a negative connotation?   To this I really have to say, yes and yes.  But not for the reasons quoted by most folks.

To the first the obvious answer is you are a software company.  Simple.   Your customers won’t know what an ISV or mISV is – maybe this will change in time, but it’s not important.  They will know what a “shareware” company is (even though their definition is in error) however and I really do believe you *must* avoid this for 97% of people.

The second is about application look and feel.

Go to any download site and most software sites run by people selling downloadable trials of their software and it pretty much *looks like so called shareware*.  Seriously.  That’s the first impression of the screenshots.  That’s the first impression after downloading the program. You can justify the validity of definitions till the cows come home, but this is what people think after downloading.

First impressions count and so do ongoing impressions. Is this bad?  I argue yes.  Look and feel is more important than us geeks often realize.  Products like Visual Studio from Microsoft and Borland’s Delphi and so on allow us to create a look and feel for our applications that fits with the Windows paradigm for user interfaces.  On the Mac tools like Interface Builder from Apple perform the same function.

On the Mac people using this tool seem to get what they are supposed to do with it.  But too many, way too many, Windows software developers (small and large) totally and completely and utterly stuff it up!

The Office 2003 look, for example, is not hard to achieve.  It’s a consistent UI and lots of people use it in their app’s for Windows.  But they still make the blasted things look like a drunken wombat careened through the interface with roller-skates wielding a machete!

No balance, no thought, no idea!

I’ve blogged about the importance of good icons and so on in another post here recently.  But I’ve actually seen examples of folks who bought stock icons that matched and were perfectly useable and still managed to screw them up!   Mixing sets can work – but it takes care and it takes trial and error.

I’ve also seen them somehow manage to shift the colors of the icons into ghastly 16 bit aka Windows 16 bit/Windows 95 style.  Get a grip!  If you can’t stand the heat hire a designer!

I have a new image format mantra for icons and glyphs.  If it’s not PNG with alpha channels it’s out!

How many people spend even 25% of their time developing a slick UI for the software compared to the time spent writing code?  It should probably take most weeks of tweaking judging by the array of ghastly interfaces available to terrify the unwary downloader.

In a reasonably sized application if it took you a day (or worse you did it on the fly and rushed off to get to the code) you probably haven’t got it right – nowhere near right.  Henry Ford famously offered his Model T in black and black only.  But he *did* paint it at least.  The Model T looked finished, quirky or obsolete by today’s standards sure, but it looked balanced and finished.  Most software companies don’t do this.  The UI is totally overlooked.  In a couple of words “they suck.”

Is your application a Porsche or an old rusty bicycle?

Study interface design. This should be an ongoing study that never ends.  Look at the top end of town.  See what they are doing in the big app’s or the high volume sales app’s.  See what works (some of it does not).

Only use skins if skins add value to the program (just skinning for the hell of it often looks exactly like that).  Remember if you choose to skin allow folks to disable skins because not everybody likes your color preferences.  By their standards you might qualify as color blind!

Note that some users hate skins period.

Don’t ignore looking at interfaces on other platforms like the Mac.  The Mac really has it together in this regard and those of us who generally code for Windows can pick up some subtle lessons.

One important lesson from the Mac is task related design.  What are your users tasks and how does your program fulfill them.  Crowding up your interface in every screen with every task is not a solution it’s a disaster and it’s more often than not butt ugly.  Consider breaking tasks into multiple windows or hidden panes.

Great thing about this is that it can reduce new user support issues as well while not impeding advanced users.

People do like “cool”.  The wow factor in this industry can not be overlooked.  Ignore it at the cost of sales.  How your product looks may well be the deciding factor between your product and somebody else’s.

Cheap knock-off programs (like those you compete against) won’t stack up to a quality professional interface.

Most people like to own things that look the best and make them feel happy.  Crush the losers who copy you with a class act interface.

Make a statement with your interface about who you and your company really are!

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