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News and Views - August 2016

Driving Traffic to Your Website: 13 hints for getting real people to visit.

We'd appreciate your feedback and comments.

Rude comments, however, will be summarily deleted.
BO

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09.01.16 Driving traffic to your website: Final Warning!

My other website gets roughly 1000 file transfers a day, and there's no reason you can't achieve similar results. That's the good news. Now for the bad news:
  • I write new, original content for the website at least 5 days per week, 52 weeks per year, and I've been doing it for 10 years. This amounts to roughly 700 typed, single-spaced paper pages of original content.

  • I volunteer my time to write and post the content, and a friend volunteers his time to prepare each page for posting. This amounts to roughly 5 to 10 hours per page, although some pages have taken more time than that. Nobody has paid us for somewhere between two and four man-years of work!

  • I post all new content daily to a Facebook page with the same name; the Facebook page has slightly more than 700 likes after about 5 years.

  • The Facebook page and website are linked to each other.

  • I've spent time trying to develop backlinks, and after 10 years, the website has a few high-quality backlinks and a dozen or so lesser-quality backlinks.
Now, I accept no advertising on that site, but even if I did, it would probably only amount to a few bucks a day. So what's my point? It is this:
    Driving traffic to your website is hard work.
If you aren't prepared to invest the time and effort, you may as well find something else to do.


08.30.16 Meta Tags: Write good descriptions and first paragraphs.

When you're searching for something on the web, the search result contains a little bit of text below the headline and URL. This is called the "snippet." You want to make your snippet as interesting and informative as possible in order to get as many actual people as possible to click through to your site. I searched for "pc games free" and used the the Word Count tool in MS Word to determine the number of characters, including spaces, in the snippets. Just as Google says, the maximum is about 155 to 160. (I trust no one.) Our interesting description needs to be about that length.

I also checked again (see 8.23.16) to see whether Google is getting the snippet from the description or the first paragraph. Yes, and once from the second paragraph. I noticed that several times the description and the first paragraph (or at least the first sentence) were identical, and Google used those words. I still haven't figured out what their algorithm is for choosing between the two if they differ. I have also noticed on my other website that when I write something short and pertinent above my page headline, Google tends to use that.

So my final advice on the description meta tag is this:
  • Get straight to the point in the first paragraph on the page.
  • Make your description and your first paragraph match.
  • Limit the description and the first sentence of your first paragraph to about 155 characters.
  • Hope for the best.
And a final quick observation on titles: Don't waste your first four characters on "The." Just get to the point!


08.24.16 Meta Tags: Write Good Titles

As near as I can tell, keywords won't help you much and might hurt you in Google and Yahoo, although we need to remember that they aren't the only search engines. Some search engines apparently do use keywords, so we shouldn't abandon them altogether. Your description may or may not get used, depending, as near as I can tell, on the phase of the moon. Titles are our best friend, because they are used word for word as both the headline in search results and on the browser tab when the page is open.

Let's think today about how to write a good title. First, keep it to about 55 to 65 characters, and then search for your site (using your site name in quotes, if necessary) to see whether all the words are coming up. Also open your page and see how much of the title is shown on the browser tab. The title should give real people something that's informative and interesting.
  • Wrong: Homepage
  • Right: Storm Dragon: Get the game or read the blog.
"Homepage" doesn't do anything to distinguish you from the other billion websites out there, and it doesn't take advantage of the other 55 characters of "free" advertising that the search engines give you when they bring your page up in a search result. Bearing in mind that you have limited control over the snippet, ask yourself, "Would I click on this extremely boring search result?"

I actually wrote the "right" title just as an example, but it's better than my old one, "Storm Dragon Software: Home." It tells what's on this page, it's a little longer, and it replaces "Software" with "get the game" on the tab. So I'm going to use it for a while. You aren't married to your title or description; change them whenever you get a better idea. Note that the tab changes immediately, but you'll have to wait until your site is crawled for the search-result headline to appear.

Writing a good description is probably trickier, so I'm going to postpone that until tomorrow.


08.23.16 Meta Tag: Description

I Googled "game companies" and compared each headline of the search results with the words on the tab and the words in the title tag.  Guess what: they match!  Here is something that we webmasters apparently can actually control!  I am so excited!

The reason I'm so excited about the title tag is that I also compared the text description below the headline in the search results (the "snippet") with the "description" meta tag and with the page text. The results are out of control.

Wikipedia's snippet is clear but boring. There is no description meta tag, and the snippet is taken verbatim from the first paragraph on the page, which consists of one sentence and three links. For a random page of my other website (not about games), there is a description meta tag, but Google ignored it in favor of the links at the top. Does Google necessarily prefer links? No:
  • New Zoo: Google ignores the description meta tag in favor of the first sentence of the first paragraph.
  • Pocket Gamer: Google appears to use part of the title tag and part of the first paragraph.
  • Insider Monkey: Google ignores the link at the top of the page, which is nearly identical to the title, and uses the first sentence of the first paragraph.
  • Business Insider: Google ignores the headline, the title, and and link, and goes for the first sentence in the first paragraph.
Clearly we're on a roll: Google ignores the description meta tag that we prepared so lovingly and uses the first sentence of the first paragraph. Unfortunately,
  • IGN has a fairly good snippet that comes verbatim from the third paragraph of the page.
Their description meta tag is even better, I think, than the Google snippet; however, from the bits I read, the first sentence of the first paragraph would have made the most intriguing snippet of all!  I looked at the page source, and I see nothing special about the html that led Google to ignore the description meta tag and the first paragraph in favor of the third paragraph.

So I am officially confused. Google says that they use the description meta tag 'in many cases', but I told you above what I discovered. Bottom line:
  • Write a great title.
  • Make sure that both the description meta tag and the first sentence of your first paragraph are brief, exciting descriptions of the page contents, and
  • Hope for the best.

08.22.16 Meta Tag: Title

Okay, a title isn't a meta tag, but it's an important part of the top end of your page so I'm going to discuss it here anyway. The html looks like this:
    <title>Your Title Here</title>
Both search engines and people pay attention to the title, so webmasters should, too. In most (apparently not all) web browsers, the title will appear on the tab at the top of the browser screen. You want your visitors to be able to pick out your site right away, even if they have sixteen pages open. The title of this page is "Storm Dragon Software," so a visitor who has opened websites for several game companies can easily see which one is ours.

Each one of your pages should have a unique title. I think the current recommendation is about 55 to 65 characters in length, although people are probably not going to see the whole thing unless they hover over the title with the cursor. As you open more and more webpages, the title tab typically gets shorter and shorter. It's a good idea to put your brand in every title, but consider putting it at the end: "Downloads - Storm Dragon Software" instead of "Storm Dragon Software - Downloads." That way, instead of seeing Storm/Storm/Storm/Storm/Storm, the Visitor will see Storm/Product/Download/Polici/Contact, and so on, making it easier to navigate your site. So bottom line:
  • Pay attention to your titles, because both people and search engines look at them.
  • Put the most important word first to encourage your human visitors to look at the page and to make navigation easy.
  • Put your brand on every page to remind the search engines who you are.
Now all I have to do is review about 500 titles on 4 websites and make sure that they are working hard for me.

08.19.16 Commented HTML

Probably you know all about HTML comments already, but babies are born every minute, so I'm going to discuss them very briefly. Commented material is written like this:
    <!--Your Comment Here-->
"Your Comment Here" does not appear on the screen; your page visitors do not see it. Subject to change without notice, Google ignores comments completely. There are at least a dozen search engines, so who knows what they all do with comments, but Google has 70% of the market. Can we just assume that whatever you put inside is a private note to yourself? No. Anybody can look at it. Using Mozilla Firefox, select Tools/Web Developer/Page Source to see the source code for this page. Using Internet Explorer, select View/Source. Search for
    <!--
to see all the "secret hidden information." So the moral of the story is:
  • Don't put anything into a comment that you want search engines to pay attention to.
  • Don't put anything into a comment that you want people to pay attention to.
  • Don't put anything into a comment that you want to keep a secret.
And the bonus fun fact is:
  • You can look at source code to see how another web developer did such a cool thing on his page, and then you can do it on yours!

08.18.16 A Realistic View of SEO Offers

Yesterday I said, "Anybody who sends you an email guaranteeing to put your website on page one of the Google rankings using keywords is at best deluded and at worst lying." Today I am willing to broaden that: Anybody who guarantees to put your website on page one using any tool or combination of tools should be regarded with deep suspicion.

Let's do the math. Wikipedia has an alphabetical list of active game developers, and I counted 100 before I got to "F." (Your count may differ.) Storm Dragon Software isn't on the list, and I suspect lots of others also aren't. If you search for "computer game" on Google, 10 results are on the first page, and only five of those sell computer games.

If, for $100, someone could absolutely guarantee to put a game company on page one for "computer game," how many developers would pay that? A hundred, maybe? We would. [SEO Optimizers: Don't call us; we'll call you!] So you've got 100 paying customers, and best case, you get 5 of them on the first page.

Now, if you search for "storm dragon software," we're right there on page one. Unfortunately, the person searching for games already has to know about us and know that we are a game company. "Computer games NM" - nope. "Game companies NM" - nope. "Game company Albuquerque": NO!

So yeah, I could easily get you on the first page under your own name, but what good does that do you? There's a word for this: "scam." If you desire to throw your money away, send the hundred bucks to me. I'll use it to buy chocolate, but at least I'm honest about it!



08.17.16 Meta tags: Keyword

Today I'd like to tell you the truth about keyword meta tags. Unfortunately, I don't know the truth, and apparently neither does anybody else outside of a few reclusive and secretive wizards working for Google, Bing, Yahoo, and their ilk. Even the wizard only knows the truth for his own search engine, because keyword usage apparently varies among engines. It used to be (maybe) that the keyword meta tag was the principal tool that search engines used in determining page rankings, but now what you see on the web about its importance varies.

As near as I can tell, the keyword meta tag is probably definitely not used by Google and definitely probably not used by Yahoo, except for spammy keywords, which may get your site penalized.

After a fair amount of reading, I came to one certain conclusion and a few tentative ones. I could be mistaken even when I'm certain, because it's clear from the range of opinions that a lot of people are mistaken. Before you change your keyword habits, you should do some reading of your own.
  • The certain conclusion is this: Anybody who sends you an email guaranteeing to put your website on page one of the Google rankings using keywords is at best deluded and at worst lying.

  • Tentatively, I conclude that
    • obsessing about keywords is no longer a good use of your time,
    • a few keywords that are tightly tied to your page content won't hurt you,
    • possibly a lot of keywords that are only loosely tied to your content will hurt you, and
    • probably a lot of spammy keywords will hurt you.


08.16.16 Meta tags

When you visit a website, you see a (more or less) pleasing arrangement of text and graphics on the screen. When a crawler visits that same website, it "sees" that information, but it also sees a ton of instructions meant primarily for computers, servers, browsers, and crawlers, and not for the human visitors. Most of these instructions are written in html (hypertext markup language) or php (hypertext preprocessor). The html and php written by the webmaster are handed to the server, which translates the whole package into html and passes it along to the browser so that the browser knows how to display the text and graphics on the visitor's screen.

The html itself does not appear on the screen (unless the webmaster makes a mistake). A fair amount of the html isn't even trying to put something on the screen. Instead, it's talking to the crawlers, using html in functions called "metatags." What you want your metatags to say to the crawlers is, "Hey! Over here! Look at me! Ignore all those other billion websites and bring the eyeballs here!" For the next few days, I'm going to talk about metatags and how to make them work for you.


08.12.16 Make it easy to link to your site.

One last word about links: make it easy for people to link to your website, or to a particular page if you are so inclined. Here's a tiny bit of code that you can cut and paste into your own website to make a link to this page (please do!):
    <a href="http://www.stormdragonsoftware.com">Buy 'A Picture Perfect Murder' at Storm Dragon Software.</a>
If you cut and paste that into your website html, you get this link:
 which you can click on to see that it takes you right back to this page.

Putting in text that you can copy and modify to put code for a link to your site into your site puts me into a bit of a loop, so instead, I'm giving you a picture of what you need to type into your own code. Substitute your own URL and message for mine. I tested this one from scratch and it worked for me, but I've told you everything I know. If it doesn't work for you, sorry, can't help you there.

How to create a copy-and-paste html link.


08.11.16 Check for broken links.

If a crawler comes to a broken link on your website, it stops. I suspect that it also gets out its little book and makes a black mark next to your domain name, although I don't know that for a fact. Best case: it indexes only part of your site, and all the lovely information you've put on the other pages is never found. Even worse, the real people visiting your site can't find the information either, and they are annoyed by the "404" messages that they keep getting.

You definitely need to fix this problem, in one of two ways. You can, of course, check every link by hand. That's not too bad on a small site like this one, but one of my websites has 416 pages. What I did was to Google "link checker online," found a checker that doesn't look too invasive, and had it check my sites.

This site that you are looking at apparently has no broken links; however, my big site has 20 broken links. It looks to me as if the broken links fall into two main groups. About half of them lead to external pages that I have no control over, so what I'll do about those links is just delete them. If I'm feeling really ambitious, I may try track down the information and put in a new link. People, and even organizations, move their data to new domain names and don't necessarily notify you about that. The other half of the broken links are ones where I apparently mistyped or miscopied or misthought when I was putting in a link to another page in my own website. Well, that's embarrassing! On the other hand, those are easy to fix.

I try to test every link when I put it in. Either I missed some, or I moved some of the data to another page without notifying myself about it. Today I'm going to fix all of the broken links, and I'm going to try to check my links more frequently in the future. Maybe I can get the crawlers to erase the black marks against my domain name.


08.10.16 Check before you invest.

Yesterday I said I was going to update my manta.com information. Also yesterday, I got a call at 8:05 a.m. (from a live person, at least) offering to sell me a "cash-flow accelerating" tool, and I deleted about 30 spam emails without opening. When I looked at my current Manta listing, I discovered a couple of interesting things. First, the one link to my website is rel="nofollow," which as discussed below means that it doesn't affect the page rank of my site. On the other hand, my phone number and email address are in plain site. I'm not aware that manta.com has ever generated any sales for us, but it would be easy for spammers and phone marketers to use this page to get in touch with me. The site offers free listings, and it probably would be great if I had brick and mortar, but maybe when we're trying to generate business through website traffic, we need to be a bit discerning about what free offers we're going to invest our time in.


08.09.16 More on Generating Backlinks.

Yesterday I found a free online directory of city businesses and put in a little information and a link from there to ducksnm.com (parent of Storm Dragon Software). I found a free online directory of state businesses and did the same. I don't expect immediate results; neither site has a lot of listings, which I would expect if they were producing a lot of traffic. But they are now linked to my site, and neither one is "nofollow." My ISP has a listing; I used to be on it and now I'm not, so today I'll get back on there. I've got an old, outdated listing on manta.com, and I'll try to get that one up to date today. Now, consider this: you think this is a boring post, right?  Trust me:  doing the work is boring, too. However, I figure the chances that the webmaster of some really high-quality, high-traffic site is going to stumble across this one and link to it on his, her, or its own are roughly one in a billion, considering the number of websites there are. I can improve those odds by putting in some boring work. The only reason to learn about this stuff and do it is to drive traffic to our websites -- but that's a pretty good reason, don't you think?


08.08.16 Backlink Checkers.

When I was checking backlinks on Friday, one of the links to my other website came up with a rel="nofollow" attribute (which I think is a relatively new addition to the link). This means that the webmaster on the site with the link is telling Google not to follow that link when it's crawling the web, and consequently the link does not affect my page rank. According to Google's information on this attribute, webmasters should use this tag for untrusted content, paid links, and crawl prioritization. None of these apply. The source site is closely related to my website; the link is unpaid and put in by mutual agreement; and the source website actually wants its users to come to my site. Since this would probably be my highest quality backlink - if it were not "nofollow"! - I immediately wrote to the webmaster asking him to remove the tag. I haven't heard back yet, but be assured that I plan to follow up (hahaha). And by the way, not all of the backlink checkers gave me this information, so be use more than one of them.

The point is, it's good to have backlinks, but you need to make sure they are working for you as well as possible. I know for a fact that people have seen this link and come to my website, not knowing anything else about it, and that's good; however, having it improve my page rank would be even better.


08.05.16 Backlink Checkers.

If you want to see how you're doing on generating backlinks to your site, Google "free backlink checkers." No, seriously, check out the most recent winning lottery combination and use that, because as near as I can tell, it would be about as accurate. Yesterday I checked for backlinks to my other website (which gets about 1000 downloads a day, remember) and the number ranged from 3 to 53. And I didn't even try all the checkers! Probably what I would do if I were serious is to make a table for myself that compiles the results from all the free backlink checkers. Then I'd actually follow all the links to see whether they were organic links, directories, or whatever. Then I'd break for hot chocolate.

MadDavid's Programming Tips - Always dress professionally.


08.04.16 Generating links to your page, 2.
Of course our goal is to get lots of backlinks from related pages that get a lot of pageviews. For example, if I could get a backlink from Steam, I'd be done marketing by now. According to their website, there are currently more than 10 million gamers online at Steam right this minute. If 1/10 of 1% of those folks clicked through, and 1/10 of 1% of the click-throughs resulted in a sale, I'd be selling 10 games a day, for a gross of $99.50 daily. Well, maybe I wouldn't be done, but I'd be a lot better off. Steam would be a very high-quality link for a game site, but I'm not going to hold my breath until they decide to link to me.

However, a second thing that many people seem to agree on is that poor links - from unrelated pages that don't get many pageviews - are better than no links. If you have a friend or business acquaintance with a website, ask for a link to your page. You may have to trade links, which is of less value, but it's still better than no link. If you can find a free directory - maybe your ISP, city, or state has one - get your site into it. If you are running two completely unrelated websites, put in a one-way link from the high-traffic site to the low-traffic site. Find an appropriate forum that allows you to append your URL and make interesting and pertinent comments - don't try to sell your product! If you have a Facebook page, put in a little "Like Us on Facebook" link.

You have to kind of work hard for each of these links, and they probably won't be super-high-quality links, but each one is another route to your site. Eventually you will start getting "organic" links, which are links from related pages where the webmaster happened to see your site and thought it was useful enough to link to. Next up: backlink checkers.


08.03.16 Generating links to your page.
Apparently Google can find one of your webpages even if you don't put in a link to it, unless you take measures such as password protection. Even so, a page without links into it, called backlinks, is a page that virtually nobody is going to come to. For good or evil, Google is brilliant about listing web pages in order of usefulness when you enter a search term. Although Google's ranking algorithms are a closely held secret and change frequently, just about everybody agrees on one thing: lots of backlinks from different pages that get a lot of pageviews and are related to your topic are good for generating lots of traffic to your site.

So how do you get these links? Unfortunately, the rich get richer and the poor get neglected. If you are near of the top of Google's listing, more new people will find you, and more new webmasters are likely to link to you without your doing anything about it. Then even more new people are likely to find you. If you put exactly the same useful information on your own little #70,000 page (don't plagiarize!), no one will find you anyway and no one will link to you. Right now, this page is getting about 130 pageviews a day. Tomorrow I'll talk about some of the actions I've taken to generate backlinks to my other web page, which gets roughly 1000 page views a day.


08.02.16 Remember what you learned in kindergarten.

One of the first words children learn is "Mine!" One of the first words mothers try to teach is "share." I post original material 5 days a week on my other Facebook page. It has 666 likes this morning, and the number typically goes up by half a dozen or so per week. The reach, on the other hand, is typically about 10 people per post; although it varies from 2 to 20 or so. The reach is the number of people who have seen a particular post. Occasionally a reader will like one or several posts, and I can't really see that "likes" affect the reach. For the July 21 post, the reach was 100! Why? Because one reader "shared." So if you are using a Facebook page for marketing, it is essential to train your readers to share every post. If you figure out how to get people to share, please let me - and mothers everywhere - know how you did it.


07.29.16 What can you give away for FREE?

Many of you are too young to remember door-to-door salesmen like the Fuller Brush Man. Now we have a Schwan's truck and various high school kids working for scholarships, etc., but one huge difference I've noticed is that the new breed doesn't give you a free sample. The Fuller Brush people always gave you a little gift, whether you were a new or old customer. Consequently, when they showed up at the door, you let them in and usually ended up buying something. The new breed, with no free samples, generally gets a quick brush off.

How is this related to Internet marketing? If you want people to come to your website and buy something, you need to give them something for free. Many game sites, including this one right here, give you a free one-hour sample download. Many informational software sites, like Ancestry, give you a free two-week subscription. Others post free recipes or whatever. Figure out what you can give away that won't cost you much or anything, and use it to attract people to your website. Be sure to use the word "free"!


07.28.16 FREE!

After cats, it's possible that the #1 Internet search term is "free." This is one reason we give away a FREE Ogg file decoder for other game developers to use.

The Ogg file format and its codecs are rapidly becoming a standard for playing sound and video in games. It is powerful, efficient, and most importantly, license free. Unfortunately, anyone who has worked with the libogg and libvorbis knows that they can be daunting. Madison created a solution for that, and our company, Ducks in a Row, Inc., gives it away! FREE! Why? Primarily to drive traffic to our website, but also to support ogg as a video standard. Our tool, WinDOgg.dll, simplifies reading an ogg file. It currently supports Theora (video) and Vorbis (audio), the two most common codecs used by ogg files. In addition, WinDOgg.dll is designed to be safe for naive multi-threading: Any thread can enter the .dll and request any frame from any file without a problem.


07.27.16 Adorable Kitten Commits Heinous Crime! News at 6!

You don't have to look at Wikipedia to know that cats are all over the internet. All you really need is a pulse and a connection. Cats and kittens are everywhere: smart cats, dumb cats, old and young cats, beautiful and ugly cats. People love cats on the internet.

The other thing that people love is news - mostly bad news, I'm sorry to say - and they love to get it frequently. Heinous crimes get 24/7 coverage around the world until the next heinous crime.

I conclude that a daily blog about an adorable kitten who commits heinous crimes would immediately hit the #1 slot for pageviews, downloads, and unique people seeing your website, however those might be related. (If you use my idea, you must put in a link to this website!)

But some webmasters are allergic to cats. What to do, what to do? The principle is still the same: add frequent new material about something people are interested in, preferably something you know about or are willing to do some research on. Please humor me and don't repost stuff as fact just because you've read it on a couple of other websites - how do you think they got it? A couple days ago I challenged something a friend said, and she asked, "Then why have we always heard that?!" The implication, of course, is that something you've always heard is true. I did some research in the original sources, and it simply cannot be found there. Not only does a little research give you something to say, it often gives you something different to say, along with a way to back it up.

Plus, of course, writing on a topic you know about is easier and faster, and probably a lot more interesting to you. Trust me on this: for long stretches, you will have the feeling that you are talking to yourself. Best you are interested in what you say. The only benefit I've found to posting my blog on Facebook is that it gives readers a really easy way to provide a bit of feedback. I never have a clue why one person likes this post and another one likes that post, but at least I get a warm fuzzy feeling for roughly a second.


07.26.16 How do we increase pageviews?

So let's say you put up a website, you've had 0 pageviews, and you are Number 1 Billion in the pageview rankings. How do you move up? One thing that you can do is just sit tight: unless you take precautions against being found, eventually the web crawlers, like Spider, will find you and you'll start getting a few hits a day. The crawlers report you to the search engines, like Google, and you'll start coming up in search results. However, you'll probably appear on page 3726 of the Google listings, so relying on web crawlers and search engines alone to promote your site isn't going to work.

Google's ranking algorithms are a secret, and they change all the time, but here are some actions that just about everybody agrees will help direct people to your site:
  • You need to put new material on your website regularly. Yesterday on Quantcast, a site that caught my eye was lagrandeobserver.com. I recognize this site! The La Grande Observer is a small newspaper in a small town, not really in the back of beyond, but certainly in the back. Nevertheless, the website ranks 24,306 in the USA (out of roughly half a billion). Why is it so high? At a guess, because fairly extensive new material is added daily.

  • Links into your website are crucial. Find other websites to trade with by searching your keywords, going down several pages in the results, and writing to the webmasters of other sites. Your ISP or some state or local organization may be set up to provide you with a link as well.
Tomorrow we'll talk about kittens.



07.25.16 Bears and Pageviews.
Some friends and I were planning a trip to Alaska, and naturally one of the topics of planning was bear safety. My friends assured me that they had no intention of trying to outrun a bear. All they planned to do was outrun me.

Their strategy is actually closely related to today's topic: pageviews for your website. According to Internet Live Stats, there are more than 1,057,811,700 websites online right now. (I can't find a reliable estimate of how many of these are in the United States, but in the neighborhood of half.) A number of other websites debate such questions as "How many pageviews per day are enough?" and "How many pageviews per day does it take to qualify as a big website?" Starting at the top, Google gets 220,943,456 people per month, according to Quantcast.* That works out to roughly 7,400,000 people per day. Ignoring the question of how a "pageview" is related to a "person," that means that to become #1 out of more than 1 billion, your website must somehow (probably by magic) start getting 8 million pageviews per day. Maybe we should think about a more realistic short-term goal for our website than becoming #1 in the world.

I mentioned the other day that my other website gets about 1000 downloads a day. Ignoring the question how "downloads" are related to either "pageviews" or "people," this suggests that it gets roughly 30,000 pageviews per month, probably not all unique. Going back to Quantcast and doing a lot of paging down, I discover that 30,000 unique people per month should rank a site somewhere around #24,000 in the US. Two hundred unique people should rank around #50,000, and I'm pretty sure I get more uniques than that. So my website ranks somewhere between 24,000 and 50,000 in the USA.** Maybe that doesn't sound too impressive, but remember the bear: I'm running faster than more than a half a billion websites! So the moral is, you don't have to beat Google to be doing okay for yourself.

* Really, Quantcast? You are giving us an estimate to 9 significant figures??
** Actually, they don't list my site at all, which raises some questions about their rankings. But the principle still holds true. 		Bear safety.
Bear Safety.


07.22.16 Commenting Online.
You need a pretty thick skin for any kind of online marketing, because normally there's a way for people to give immediate feedback on whatever you post or sell. For example, you could easily respond to this post using the widget above. For better or worse, unhappy people are apparently more likely to respond than happy people, if they don't know you personally. (The opposite is true if they know you, in my experience - I almost never get negative feedback from friends and family in the two or three places I post regularly for that group.)

Negative feedback can be helpful and show you how to make immediate improvements in your product. A couple of days ago I sent an email to my ISP pointing out a difficulty I was having with their new homepage design. Not only did they fix it right away, but they even sent me an email saying it was fixed! My comment was (1) specific, (2) detailed, (3) polite, and (4) asking for something that wouldn't irritate another customer. Too often, online comments are (1) generalized, (2) vague, (3) rude, and (4) asking for something that would cost a million dollars and be hated by just about everyone else. So do make online comments - business people want to know what you think, and bloggers want to know that someone is reading! Positive comments can be short and sweet ("Yeah"), but negative comments should say exactly what the problem is.


07.21.16 Steam Greenlight.
Speaking of marketing, if you had a product, wouldn't you rather get 50% of your sales price at WalMart than 100% at your own personal roadside stand? Clearly WalMart is a better option - they are open somewhere 24/7, and people have heard of them and go there all the time. The same is true in software marketing. Yesterday we put our game into the Steam Greenlight process, for two reasons. First, of course, we'd love to be on Steam. Steam is huge, and most gamers have heard of them. We are (currently) small, and almost no one has heard of us. Second, running a greenlight campaign is a marketing tool all by itself. Since yesterday at 12:30 p.m., 446 people have seen something about our game who probably would not have without this campaign. If you have a Steam account, please wander on over and give "A Picture Perfect Murder" a Yes vote.


07.20.16 Social Media.
Whenever you read anything about marketing these days, it consists of just six words: social media, social media, social media. How does that work, anyway? I have a public Facebook page that I have added original content to, five days a week without fail, for a few years. As of this morning, it has 647 "likes," and it gets several new likes a week. A typical daily "reach," on the other hand, is only about 10, because Facebook doesn't automatically send your stuff to everyone who likes your page. One day I had more new "likes" than I had "reach"! How can that even happen? So Point 1 is, the people who tell you to use social media don't tell you how to make it work. I mean, for the same time investment, I could walk down the block and hand out flyers to more than 10 people.

The Facebook page arose out of a website that's been going for about five years. This site also consists entirely of original content (except for the artwork illustrations). I don't add stuff to it every day, but rather every few months I add several pages from the daily tips that I send out by email. The website usage runs to about 1,000 downloads a day, which isn't phenomenal by any means, but which is 100 times better than the Facebook page. So Point 2 is, don't neglect your website.


07.19.16 Affiliate Programs.
A long time ago when I worked in a consulting firm, both I and the boss were out one day. An Amway distributor dropped by and talked to the other two young employees, apparently trying to recruit them as lower-level distributors. As I got the story, he was explaining that they would make money by recruiting even lower-level distributors, and they kept asking, "But who sells the soap?!" Finally he said, "Nobody sells the soap!" and left in a huff.

In an on-line affiliate program, one party, such as Storm Dragon Software, manufactures a product, and another party, called the affiliate, markets and sells it. The money goes to the manufacturer, who pays the affiliate a percentage of the total.

Do you have a website? Would you like to be our affiliate? We've already got "soap" - a game - and we're looking for people to sell it. Contact us.


07.18.16 One little thing you can do to promote your website is to provide an RSS feed like the one above. Say that someone is interested in your site, but they don't necessarily want to visit every day just to see if there's anything new on it. They can subscribe to your RSS feed, and it will let them know that you've posted something new. Of course, you do have to go to the extra trouble of updating the material in the feed as well as the material in your blog. It's extra work for you, but it makes your site friendlier.