In March 2010, motivated by the Facebook session of Perry Marshall’s Maui seminar, I created a Facebook fan page for Collectorz.com.
I had no idea what to expect. But it appears that a large part of our audience (home users) are on Facebook.
Now, 10 months later, the Collectorz.com page on Facebook has almost 12,000 fans and it has proven to be a great new way to communicate with our customers.
Here’s a quick post on the why and how of Facebook fan pages for software. Continue reading
We have been at the top of the Google search results for most relevant keywords for a long time. For some keywords, like “dvd database”, we were even listed at the #1 position. Until this week…. Continue reading
Really, who buys software on CD nowadays?
Well, you’d be surprised… For consumer products, this is still important. Many users still like to receive something “physical” in the mail.
And this happens to be even more true for my collector-type audience. You know, the type of people that still buy real books, DVDs and CDs (remember those?).
So we decided to try and see if we could enhance that “package in the mail” moment, by designing a nicer shipping package for our Collectorz.com software.
(Of course, we were also hoping to sell some more 🙂 )
Continue reading
If you are developing and selling iPhone apps, you may have been wondering: Should I create Android versions?
Is there actually a market for Android apps?
Well, yes there is, but it may be smaller than you think.
In any case, if you are trying to estimate the potential market for an Android edition of your iOS app, do not just look at the Android market share in terms of devices sold.
And don’t even think about judging the market by the number of user requests. 2 words: vocal minority.
The average Android owner is an animal that is completely different from the typical iPhone owner, and not nearly as app-hungry.
Let’s look at some recent market share news and then at my numbers for the Collectorz.com apps for iPhone, iPad and Android.
Continue reading
As promised, here’s the video and slides of my “Art of Testing” presentation at the ESWC in Vienna. You may want to grab a coffee first, as it’s over an hour long 🙂
The player will show in this paragraph
This week, Yahoo Search Marketing has finally merged into Microsoft AdCenter.
I was quite happy when this was announced. I have been using both for a couple of years now, using a few simple campaigns on both. The extra traffic that both can bring is nice, but is still very low compared to the amount of traffic (and sales) that Google Adwords is generating.
Which meant hat I could never afford to spend much time on optimizing my Yahoo or MS ads. I am hoping that this merged system, with combined traffic from Bing and Yahoo Search, will bring enough traffic to justify more tweaking and testing. More results with less work, can’t say no to that. Continue reading
Through the years I have been experimenting with many different landing page designs and layouts. And there is one factor that’s consistently proving to improve conversion rates.
Or, to be more precise, consistently causes a decrease in conversions every time I stop doing it:
Having my main call-to-actions (Try and Buy) on the top right of the landing page
Over the years, since 1996, we have been using quite a few different payment processors. I started out on Compuserve, quickly followed by: SWREG, Digibuy, RegNow, Plimus, eSellerate, PayPal and RBS WorldPay. PayPal has been a constant for many years, as we have always offered it as an extra payment method, through our own PayPal account.
In May 2006, we started using RBS WorldPay (called “Bibit” at the time) for our online sales. That’s more than 4 years using the same payment processor, a record for us 🙂 So… it’s about time we changed again. Continue reading
In about 3 weeks, on Saturday November 6, I will be speaking at the
10th European Software Conference in Vienna.
The session is called “The Art of Testing” and will be about A/B split testing. The focus will be on testing website designs, and I will discuss:
The conference in Vienna will be the 10th European Software Conference, but, as it happens, Collectorz.com is also celebrating its 10 year anniversary this November.
So we have decided to sponsor the “Pre-event meeting” on Friday night and all conference attendees are invited.
Drinks and finger food are on me 🙂
See you there!
We’re on a roll here. Another new platform : the iPad.
Our first iPad app is now available in Apple’s App Store (after being in their review queue for about a week). Like our CLZ Movies edition for iPhone and Android, it’s a viewer app for movie collections created with Movie Collector for Windows or Mac OS X. Users can export their existing database to the iPad app and then browse their list in several cool looking views, including an “home-built” cover flow view.
