Starting with App Marketing

 My little company just launched its first app. So now, I need to spearhead our app marketing.  I started this morning by making a list of questions that I don't understand. Here's some of them:

1. Do review sites just review each app or do publishers need to contact all the different review sites?
2. What’s the link to review an app?
3. What’s the link to rate an app?
4. I think of our ipad/iphone app as being in the apple store. Yet it is also on Itunes (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spellingcity/id538407602?ls=1&mt=8).  How does the app store and itunes relate?

Answers:

Do review sites just review each app or do publishers need to contact all the different review sites?

While some review sites show some initiative (usually for highly anticipated apps), the vast bulk of us publishers need to contact each review site and ask for a review.  They'll put us in a line. If the app costs money, they'll want a coupon code for a free copy.  

What’s the link to review an app? What’s the link to rate an app?

Rating and Review is done within the iTunes store on your computer or App store on the device. The above is the link you would use, where they then can either rate directly within iTunes/App store, or sign in to write a review. 

I think of our ipad/iphone app as being in the apple store. Yet it is also on Itunes (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spellingcity/id538407602?ls=1&mt=8).  How does the app store and itunes relate?

This all ties together. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spellingcity/id538407602?ls=1&mt=8 is our link that automatically launches iTunes if on the computer or the App store if on iOS device. It also brings up the browser page so you can read about it, useful if iTunes is not installed. 

  

Apple verifies that you have downloaded/own the app before you can write a review so sign in is required. 

iTunes is a central place for all content offered by Apple. You can reach the App Store there, movies, books, etc.. Whereas on iOS you use specific apps for features. 

Read more about our little app here with a page about our vocabulary spelling app.

  

Shared bookmarketing - The visual way

Heh, I'm trying to fiugre out how symbaloo works. It's a visual social bookmarking site!


del.icio.us

info on education, special needs, vendors, resources

Here's some great info on education, special needs, and homeschooling. Actually, it's not that. This is the table of contents from a website and my question is the following. How does Google feel about wholesale lifting the TOC from a website about anything, say education, and listing it on another site.  Obviously, it's not as slick as having a few hundred words of original text with a few content-appropriate links built into the text. But then, this is a lot like having a side bar link in a blog which is a natural and legitimate call out to another site.  How does Big G_  thing about this.

• ADD and ADHD
• Audio Books for Kids
• Autism and Aspergers
• Blog
• California Homeschool Info
• College Education
• Developing a Solid Math Foundation
• Dyslexia
• Early Education
• Family-Friendly Electronic Media Guide
• Gifted Children
• Good Books
• High Stakes Standardized Tests
• History of Teaching Reading
  • Learning to Read
  • What Works for Teaching Reading
• Home School Writing
• Homeschool
  • History of Homeschooling
  • Homeschool Facts
• Homeschool Online
• Homeschool Testing
• Homeschooling Special Needs Kids
• Hooked On Phonics
• Learn to Write Well
• Master Degree in Education
• Math Skills
• Media Literacy and Search Engines
• Music Education
• Preparing for the TOEFL
• Preschool Activities
• Spelling
• Texas Homeschool Info
• Writing Skills

New Social Media for homeschooling

In addition to the obvious, I've been looking at some social media lately.  Here's a few items that I think are interesting.

Mashups of blogs, forums, into one community. Check out the homeschool TV example blog post.
Weird graphical social media called Symbaloo about educational websites.
Tremendous opportunities to create homeschool blogs with wordpress on random domains.
There are plenty of forums about homeschooling some are distinctly Christian homeschool program (or Christian homeschool views), others are more about eclectic non-religious homeschooling.

Many Christian homeschoolers use Time4Learning because it provides an engaging effective education with interactive fun. Many Christian families have questions related to the worldview and philosophy of Time4Learning and how it fits into the education they are providing their children.

Here's  an embedded Symbaloo Webmix on Education

Time4Learning has created an online forum for their high school students which has a Facebook-like feel to it. It's called Time4Friends and is heavily moderated by homeschool parents.

Hows Google Plus and Search Working out?

I've noticed on a bunch of ads recently that there is a google plus hanging off it. When that happens within the context of a search engine, I guess it's a good thing or at least, nothing that I care about. But, when that happens in a content ad that is on my site, I think it is very confusing and something that I do NOT like.

Check this out, isn't this confusing?

The Google plus sort of floats so that sometimes its hard to tell whether it's about the advertisement or the website. Also, it looks sometimes like you are supposed to click on the G+, not the advertisement.

On another note, when did ads require you to fill in all this info before you could click on them? As a website owner, doesn't it make sense just to ban these?

Translating Classic Sales Process Thinking into Online Sales

I was trained in classic organizational sales. I have managed international direct sales forces whose bread and butter was modelling and executing on a sales process. I just ran across a beautiful online presentation describing the sales process. This reminded me of where I come from: consultative organizational high value sales

However, I don't operate in that world anymore. I operate in the world of online sales of educational services generally priced so low that there is no profit in a process if it involves any human contact. So I build sales funnels for my sites that somehow tries to translate the process of selling into a few webpages and follower up newsletters.  We still operate with the concept that prospects need to be moved several steps from idea to buying and that an attempt to close too quickly will not work out well.

However, I also have spent time learning about the direct marketing and mail world which preaches compressing the hook and the close into such a tight two-step that I have trouble discerning a real sales process.  Later, I'll show how our sale funnel, models the process of building rapport, learning about the customer, and then moving them to buy-in to our solution, as steps to having them buy.

gplus

del.icio.us

Friends don't let friends build bad websites

I'm going to plug a service just because I think it deserves a plug. I've used it, it's great.  And they sent me this marketing this morning that just cracked me up:

Friends don't let friends build bad websites - UserTesting.com

Display of Google Paid Results

Is it just my imagination or is the advertisement pink box around the advertisements on the top of Google getting increasingly faint so that now, it's almost impossible to discern?  Additionally, didn't they use to limit it to two results?

del.icio.us

Compete.com - A little more disclosure please?

Compete's Table Explaining Data Differences
Where's the point about school and business-based computers?

Compete.com says "Compete's data comes from a statistically representative cross-section of 2 million consumers across the United States."  They elaborate on how their data differs from log data but in all of this, I think they side step a really big point.  In the case of my site (SpellingCity.com), the reason that they differ from my logs is that most of my traffic comes everyday not from home computers but from computers inside K12 institution. ie  Schools.  In short, there are three big sectors of our economy:

• business and government
• education
• consumers at home

In the old days,  all the computers were in business, government, and educational institutions.  Today, however, consumers also have computers at home.  But many of these same people leave their homes during the day and go to jobs where usually, they have another computer. These same people do a lot of their shopping and see a lot of ads while they are at work.  Schools in particular, have a very large number of computers which get used in many cases over 50% of the time since they are often on carts going from class to class or in a media center with classes filing in and out. 

I know that in my case, the reason that Compete's numbers are misleading, the reason that they report less than half of hte full traffic for SpellingCity is that they don't measure the traffic from schools. Should they? I do not know.  Should they admit and highlight the fact they are no reporting this data? Absolutely.  This table is misleading and misses the biggest reason that at least in my case, local logs don't match what they report. 

Googles kills off its losers

A fall sweep (copied from the googleblog.blogspot.com)

10/14/2011 10:03:00 AM

We aspire to build great products that really change people’s lives, products they use two or three times a day. To succeed you need real focus and thought—thought about what you work on and, just as important, what you don’t work on. It’s why we recently decided to shut down some products, and turn others into features of existing products.

Here’s the latest update on what’s happening:

• Code Search, which was designed to help people search for open source code all over the web, will be shut down along with the Code Search API on January 15, 2012.
• In a few weeks we’ll shut down Google Buzz and the Buzz API, and focus instead on Google+. While people obviously won't be able to create new posts after that, they will be able to view their existing content on their Google Profile, and download it usingGoogle Takeout.
• Jaiku, a product we acquired in 2007 that let users send updates to friends, will shut down on January 15, 2012. We’ll be working to enable users to export their data from Jaiku.
• Several years ago, we gave people the ability to interact socially on iGoogle. With our new focus on Google+, we will remove iGoogle's social features on January 15, 2012. iGoogle itself, and non-social iGoogle applications, will stay as they are.
• The University Research Program for Google Search, which provides API access to our search results for a small number of approved academic researchers, will close on January 15, 2012.

In addition, later today the Google Labs site will shut down, and as previously announced, Boutiques.com and the former Like.com websites will be replaced by Google Product Search.

Changing the world takes focus on the future, and honesty about the past. We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+. Our users expect great things from us; today’s announcements let us focus even more on giving them something truly awesome.

SEO Periodic Table of the Elements

I thought this was silly. Actually hysterical. Its the SearchEngine Land's Periodic Table of the SEO Elements. Speaking of ridiculous inside jokes....
http://searchengineland.com/seotable/download-periodic-table-of-seo

Google Analytics Premium

This past week, Google introduced Google Analytics Premium.  Quoting the little-known industry pundit Brian May,

 ..."the new premium option is targeted at enterprise clients and the messaging is that there will not be any change to the regular Google Analytics as it stands today and that the Premium version offers advanced features and phone call technical support....This is strictly aimed at companies like Webtrends, Coremetrics, and Omniture to offer the kind of support and guarantees that are necessary for some large enterprises to adopt Google analytics....This could be a way to force existing large volume users to adopt the premium version. When the problem occurred a few months ago, it was because of a switch to “Fast Access Mode” which meant that Google Analytics was taking a sampling of your real data to build reports rather than usual all of the actuals. If they roll this out as default on the non-paid version, there may be a need to switch to the paid version to get consistent reporting.

The cost of Google Analytics Premium is in the $150,000 range which makes it very competitive with the other web analytics software providers.

Here's Google's Announcement. 

Paypal Reserves of 20% on a Paypal Merchant Account

Does anyone have experience with Paypal reserves and getting them removed from your paypal account?  I just realized that on one of my paypal merchant accounts (I have two), they are withholding 20% of my money for 90 days!!!!!

Let me start by saying that I'm generally thrilled with Paypal as my merchant account vendor. With a total expense rate of 2.7% and a high level of reliability, they are better than the other vendors that I use to process credit cards.  I give them high marks for low cost, high reliability, great technology, and great service.

I've previously had one big frustration with them in that their reporting sucks.  I have several product lines being sold (I'm in the hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenues in a year with the average payment way under $100) and Paypal isn't really able to help us track by product line.  Even when we have the payments come in under different emails, they can't sort them out. It turns out the solution is to open a child account. The process was cumbersome, basically, open a new account, get it approved, get it linked to the old one, drop out all the fees, and the child account can ONLY withdraw money up to the parent account. And it's an automatic process which happens nightly.  Which would be fine except we have some refunds (we do a money-back offer) and about 4% of our customers take the refund.  Paypal does an automatic withdrawal every night but on the days that there are refunds, they try to withdraw too much and it produces all sorts of emergency warnings and failure notes.

Second big problem I just released. My account has reserves. In fact, they hold onto 20% of my funds for 90 days on a rolling basis. 


Paypal's rules say this but they don't seem to apply to my case:

[I]Reserves are funds that belong to you but have been set aside. We hold money in reserve just in case you receive payment reversals or chargebacks and your PayPal balance isn't enough to cover them. Reserves are typically applied to merchants who handle:
·         large sums of money,
·         high dollar items, or
·         items in high-risk categories[/I]

Quantcast Marketing Statistics

One of my sites is enjoying a particularly strong back-to-school rush. Take a look at these statistics published by Quantcast (which you can view realtime on their site).   Notice that:
1. VocabularySpellingCity.com (url is spellingcity.com) is getting over two million people visiting monthly.  If you change the pulldown on the top left (you'd have to be on the Quantcast site to do that), you'll see that Spellingcity site is growing past 5 million visits/monthly and has already passed 60M page views monthly.  This is big.
2. Quantcast ranks VSC  number 692  in the US by number of people visiting. Number one is Google,  two is YouTube, three is Facebook, four is Yahoo, five is Ebay, six is MSN, seven is match....and #692 is SpellingCity.com.  Does that make us the top K12 educational site?  Sadly, Quantcast doesn't rate by industry otherwise, I could give you an answer.

Quantcast SpellingCity.com demographics, 9/28/2011

3. Quantcast also has some data about the demographics of users of the site.  (See the second image).  Here's my first problem with this data, it misses the point. SpellingCity is mostly used in schools on school computers.  This vital piece of info does not show up anywhere in their analysis. I would think that the basic info on a site would distinguish between sites used in offices, homes, schools, and mobile devices but none of that is evident.  A second problem with the data is that it's wrong. Mostly,SpellingCity is used by elementary school students but Quantcast says that it is used mostly by kids over age 12.

Lastly, here's some very popular games and resources on VSC:

• handwriting worksheets 
•  Vocabulary, Alphabetical Order,
  Word Meaning, Unscramble, Parts of Speech, Hangman
• Analogies  Dolch - Sight Words  Segmenting syllables
  Compound Words