… take one down, pass it around, 65,000 spams on the wall…
Akismet, the anti-comment-spam WordPress plugin, has just caught spam number 65,000. That compares to 701 legitimate comments on 250ish posts. Thank goodness for Bayes filters or I would never get any work done.
Increase Your Software Sales proved to be fairly popular. I hope that it covered the basics of “Phase Two” of the uISV development process well enough to give struggling beginners some ideas. In particular, take note of what I said about SEO and blogging. In that article I predicted I would be on the front page of Google for the string “increase software sales” within a week. It actually took about 48 hours and I’m number two. That is a fairly competitive (30 million results) search which has obvious economic possibilities for at least some people (payment processors, etc). Your niche also has competitive search words which a decently popular blog article could crack fairly quickly. (Why so high so fast on Google? WordPress makes the URL and title tag reflect the keywords, which were repeated in the body text. I also got linked by two high pagerank WordPress pages which automatically collect the highest traffic blogs and posts of the day. Luckily WordPress has recently changed their site design so that those posts are now static. The traffic which got me onto those was about fifty-fifty from a link I placed on joel.reddit.com and from other sources.) I anticipate the post will probably fall to somewhere lower on the front page as it ages.
Capsule summary: Sales have been nicely juiced by my crusade against usability bugs these last two weeks. In particular, higher CD sales will likely lead to higher absolute sales numbers and slightly lower profits since I subsidize every one by about fifty cents relative to downloads.
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) ran four small software businesses. He writes about software, marketing, sales, and general business topics. Opinions here are his own.