Blitz Presentation (PDF)
This is the PDF of my Blitz presentation.
Mac Indie Marketing Archive September 2009
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
StomperNet is offering their "Stomping the Search Engines" SEO course available for free, at least for a while, as part of their launch. If this is no longer available for free, you can get it for $1 here. Highly recommended — we've learned a lot about SEO from this course. (Note: The presentation style of this company is very "slick" which we're not big fans of. Still, it's really useful information.)
Integration Marketing
Integration points include:
- “Thanks for ordering” page
- Signup Confirmation Page
- Downloading page
- Signup confirmation email
- Newsletter emails
- Your Application itself?
You can get the eBook by the guy who coined the term, here.
Your Circle of Friends
Build an Email List. You could roll your own (We have a PHP script that loops through our database of customers and friends, and we use our SliceHost account with its fixed IP address to avoid a lot of spam-blocking issues you get if you send from a shared account's IP address.
There are a bunch of bulk email sending services. Their costs can start to add up when your list gets big, though! Using an external service means that they handle all the subscription management and they usually can do split testing and analysis. These are some ideas, not recommendations…
Hurdle 3: Converting to a customer
Provide actions for interest levels: Ready to buy, evaluating, or window-shopping. (The book Always Be Testing, listed in the Sidebar, has some good explanations of this.)
Improve your conversion rate: The slide showed this example. You can use Google Website Optimizer (free) or the Taguchi Split Test (included as part of StomperNet membership)
Hurdle 2: Clicking through to your site
URL itself, meta description (156 characters max), and title tag (65 characters max) make up your "free google ad." Here is a nice article on the two important tags and another article on Meta tags in general.
Hurdle 1: Finding your listing on Google
It's a very good idea to register your website with Google Webmaster Tools. With it you can find out about crawling errors, get notified if your site gets cracked, see how people are finding your site, get a big list of your inbound links, etc. It's probably a good idea to register with Yahoo! Site Explorer as well.
Make sure you have Googleable content on your page. Try this "html2txt" tool from w3c.
Use the Google Keyword Tool to brainstorm keywords that you should include on your website (and/or links to your site).
If you want to write some good off-site content linking back to your own website, try general sites like EzineArticles, HubPages, Squidoo. Of course you may want to do some guest-posting on other Mac-specific websites and blogs.
Press Releases: We've had good luck with PRMac. There are a lot of other general-media press release services as well.
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