After enough years in the industry you start to find you develop a sixth sense.  It’s not the psychic (or psychotic) power to bend Google to your will or anything New Age’y and vegan, in fact it would be more accurately described as a “Bull Shit Detector”.  The louder it is shouted, the more rigorously, or dare I say, vehemently, it is defended the more likely it is to be extremely poor grade chicken poo that even a chicken would rightfully disown.  Thus the higher the needle flicks and rocks until it’s way beyond “0bs” – the measurement indicating the highest level of signal to noise ratio – before slamming hard up into clipping – or crapping – to dispense with a poor audio metaphor.  But it’s not always because there isn’t a kernel of truth in the precept.  Merely that it is all to frequently:

a) Misunderstood or applied without consideration.

b) It’s over thought or over extrapolated.

c) It was true but no longer applies.

d) Is true but in the context of bad data analysis.

e) All of the above.

I’ve Been Guilty Of Accepting ISV Gospel Too!

We’re humans, at least most of us.  We want to “see the light”, be “enlightened” and “drink deeply from the fountain of eternal business success.”

Its understandable, forgivable and totally insane if we stop to think about it – but who of us does that?  Like most small business types I read a lot of business books, have done since the eighties.  It would be fair to say, in the context of a Micro ISV business, most tip the scale of our Bullshit detector above.

I’ve been a member of most of the trade groups and organizations, lapped up the drops of “wisdom” they tend to vomit out – with alacrity – and have been tried and found guilty of worshipping at the alter of “undeniable facts” and taking communion from the high priests of “indiscriminate immutable bollocks.”

In Australia we have an expression whereby we call somebody a “Galah!”  A Galah is a type of pink parrot, unlike most sensible and “normal” birds the Galah flies South for Winter.

As Micro ISV’s we are inclined to be Galahs.  Now that I’ve offended you it’s important to note that this applies equally to me as well.  I am not immune, superior or “anointed” with some magic oil. I’m just as able to be, and demonstrably have been, a Galah!

Which – Finally Brings Me To The Subject Of This Article

In 1999 I released a software package, though, as I’ve pointed out here before, we didn’t call ourselves Micro ISV’s.  Name us what you will, shareware author, Indie, or just small business person, I figured I was going to hit the jackpot.

Sure I did some “sacrilegious” things, like use mail order and mail outs to sell – which actually led to the product being stocked in certain retail stores.  But by and large I did what every one of us does – and most still do today.  I uploaded to every download site, haunted Usenet newsgroups and email lists, was number one in all the search engines, even in the then upstart Google, for the primary keywords, spied upon the competition, read the web pages, books and forums and sat back on my ass – basically flew south with a gusto.

Yes!  Instant wealth, instant success, instant bullshit.

That there was never, ever going to be a large enough market for the product was not considered and when it was angrily rejected.

When others – an incredible few, whom were laughed at as being a bit weird in this sector, – wrote articles I wrote one. Instant results, nope, OK, sod off with that idea then!

When others embraced RSS I ignored it along with the rest.

When others, few others, started single product domains I chortled with the rest.

When others started using tools like blogs, engines like WordPress for their sites I almost wet my pants in rollicking disparagement.

Yep – a real bastard like the others.

Now – here’s the kicker.  While it is true personal illness caused me to throw in the towel it is also true that “Get Rich Quick” did too.  I quickly became disparaged because it was simply not happening.  There was no market of any sustainable size for a product of it’s type.  While I was the first I was not the last.  Competitors competed on price – not features or quality – and at the end of the day in a micro market of the nature of this one – hobbyists – the market was splintered irrevocably.  In short I – and my competitors – where Galahs.  My price was $29.99.  The rest were downward from there – right down to $4.99 and “free”.

To be sustainable in that market the product price would have had to have been $79.99 and even at that price point and “steady sales” (a relative metric) we’d still be mediocre.

We Must Invest Time And Massive Effort – Then We *Might* Succeed

If we don’t accept the reality of the size of our market, the ability or willingness of our market to pay us and rely on dopey software submission tools to submit to spammy, zero trust rank and virtually zero SEO Page Rank  download sites then we are kidding ourselves.  This is not automation, this is calcification.  We are rotting our own potential by adhering to “easy, fast, simple instant” in a desire to become an “easy, fast, simple and instant” success.

If we look back on the path of the people who dared be different, who spent mega hours writing articles, concentrating on building useful resources for their market communities and then look at the rest who relied on “lame “get rich quick schemes” something floats to the surface, and it has a vile smell.  Those who did what everyone does are either not with us today (most), are still stuck with what they had ten years or more ago compared with those who did what we dismissed them for doing – marketing – of the roll up the sleeves and wear out the keyboard, sweat of the brow, seat of the pants and A/B testing kind – and they have succeeded beyond my, your and their own wildest expectations.

I’m content to let competitors submit to download sites, reject blogs, articles, social media sites.   I’m content because I’ve had the luxury of time to see the epic fails and the epic gains and the latter was not acheived through the rigid adherence to yesterdays truisms, the society for Software Promotion Atrophy or the Dicipline Of The Too Hard Basket.

Scott Kane

Quote Of The Day

“Unless you’re willing to have a go, fail miserably, and have another go, success won’t happen.” Phillip Adams – Australian Journalist

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“Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain
Where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies,
Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers,
That grow so incredibly high.
Newspaper taxis appear on the shore,
Waiting to take you away.
Climb in the back with your head in the clouds,
And you’re gone.”

Copyright Lennon and McCartney.

While it’s a pretty song, the lyrics are, to say the least nonsensical.  I find many Micro ISV comments on search engine optimization in the same vein.  Big on laying it down with a big stick, big on supporting the wisdom of the SEO ancients, but low on actual, personal enquiry, evidence, testing and data.

Now of course, they’ll ask you for data to support any claims you make, but if you ask for the same they’ll either ignore the question or, from the safety of an anonymous user account, decry you for heresy.

BOLLOCKS!

OK, the reason for this conniption here relates to that hoary old subject of SEO and back links.  The blind faith so many, and in this case Micro ISV’s, have in relation to the belief- “you’ll fail to get ranking in Google if you don’t have high PR” – an assumption that’s based on….  What exactly?

Ah – “General Knowledge!!!!!”

It was once general knowledge that the world was flat.  A cleric in a middle Eastern Country can be found on YouTube still espousing this clap-trap, a few young Earth proponents of the extreme variety here in Australia and America’s bible belt – but most of us accept it as a fact in 2009 that the world is not flat, mostly because it is demonstrably a sphere.

You can certainly A/B test this for yourself (PR not the world is flat, that’s somewhat more involved   ), and I encourage you to do it, but my contention based on my own tests, that can be verified by where my sites rank – even in the more highly competitive keyword pages, is this:

The notion of page rank (PR)  doesn’t mean a bloody thing in concrete terms. It’s merely and indicator of the popularity of the site as a place people link to and that Google has gotten around to measuring.    PR is a metric that is frequently months behind reality, is measured using metrics not even Google seem entirely sure about and it only measures open links.  It doesn’t measure, for example, RSS.  Hell, even most website server logs fail to measure RSS feed reads properly.  It does not measure your rank in the engine.  Not at all.  It doesn’t even quantify in any real, measurable way.  One of my websites out ranks on a major keyword for it’s sector out in front of huge companies with PR of 6 and 7, it’s only a 2.  They’ve been there for years, that website has been there less than twelve months.

There was indeed a time when PR was valuable.  Say around the turn of this century.  But nowhere near as important as it was made out to be.

It’s Content

Yes, it’s time to pull out that old stick again.  It’s content that makes a real difference to your physcal page rank, content and relevance, not the PR value.  So simple to prove even the lamest, thumb stuck in mouth Micro ISV can do it.  Relevant content based on your domain knowledge that was responsible for creating your application in the first place.  No domain knowledge, insist on adhering to trashy, spammy download sites to do your job badly for you?  Please refer to this article by Clicking Here

Because that’s what this whole “rely on the download sites and content is crap” ethos is in essence.  Spaghetti SEO.  By doing it your PR rank goes up – no question.  But it does nothing for your site rank – your physical location rank in Google’s results.

Congratulations – you’ve just successfully spammed page one of Google with a whole bunch of links who will, even if you are number one, cheerfully direct people to somewhere else, irrelevant to you.  Now, please go and place a  hard hat on, because your next step is to hit yourself over the head with a brick.  Because it hurts like hell, but it feels oh so cool when you stop!

I’d Rather My Competitor Was Ranking Next To Me

Because it offers comparison.  You should be confident your product delivers superior value to your customers to the point most customers are going to choose you.  If you are not confident of this then I – and you should – question why in heck your selling and actively developing it.

People are shopping comparatively.  Like it or lump it.  They are increasingly looking for reasons to buy – and not reasons you give in your website copy.  They want reviews, from people like them.  They don’t trust manufacturer blurb, we have been so over exposed to marketing hype we know we can’t believe even half of it.

Nope.  People want to read the experiences of others.  The good, the bad, the ugly.  Jamming thousands of BS download websites with your PAD spew onto page one doesn’t prove that you’re the best, it proves you’re a disinterested prick who couldn’t give a flying frack about the quality of your product website or your customers experience.

Epic Jerk!

It also proves you don’t have a clue where you’re heading and have a proclivity towards being a “sheeple” because your following along with the advice of some person who’s not done the hard yards of testing.  “Baaaa!”

Now, I’m not telling you to take my word for it.  That’d be like a hammer calling a mallet a blunt instrument.  Test it.  Write content, do the work, measure, test, repeat.  Try it.  Not only will you quickly find you get results, which are far more valuable than anything I might jump up and down about, but you’ll control the results to a far greater extent.  Grasp that download sites offer zero return for effort – no matter how little effort you consider them to be.  That download site submission software sells merely because thousands of people, perhaps like you, who are Micro ISV’s believe without testing, anything they are told.  Handing over hard earned dollars year in and year out – for nothing!

If you write the content, it needn’t ever be mega essays, encourage bloggers to talk about your product – bloggers who are the type of people to be your customer, get reputable sites like CNet’s Download.com because the reviews really do mean something – to review you and prove it for yourself.

Note – blogs etc reviewing your product or site won’t increase your PR rating either.  Get over it.  But they will appear in search results, they will send traffic from those locations.  They will make you money – depending on the blog – the financial return from download sites for most Micro ISV”s on the other hand is zero.  If fact it’s less than zero because those sites don’t want people to download your product – they want people to click their Google Spew AdSense.

Then again – you could continue being a “sheeple”, follow the crowd and let those who do the hard yards beat you effortlessly.  Frankly in many instances that would suit many of us just fine. 

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. Teach a man to create an artificial shortage of fish and he will eat steak. – Jay Leno

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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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