Tracking Sales vs. Creating Sales

by Brian Casel  ·  5.10.2010  ·  Business

As a first-timer when it comes to running a product-based business (ThemeJam), I’m doing my fair share of experimenting and learning on the job.  A lot of that is in the marketing/advertising/tracking department.

I’ve got all the basics down, like running Google Analytics, setting up “Goals”, advertising with Adwords and tracking conversions.  E-Junkie (the shopping cart/downloads service that I use) offers a few more guidelines for properly tracking conversions, which I’ve implemented.  All of this tracking, analyzing, tweaking, and optimizing really takes a lot of time and focused energy to get the most the out of it.

But the truth of the matter is that I’m not all that interested in it.  I don’t particularly enjoy combing over the numbers, referring sites, keyword performance metrics, and whatnot.  It’s one of those things that once you open it up, you get sucked into and before you know it you’ve spent your entire morning on it when you could have been getting much more productive work done.

I personally believe the best tactic for increasing sales is to focus that analyzing, tweaking, optimizing, perfecting on your products and not your stats.  There are always ways to improve your product.  Maybe it’s adding a new feature or removing an unnecessary one.  Maybe it’s improving your documentation or fixing bugs.  Perhaps it’s time to design a new release for your product line.  These are ways of being truly productive, and they’re all things I really enjoy doing.  I don’t care (and often don’t even notice) the amount of time I spend on these tasks.

Now that I’m 3 months in on ThemeJam, I can look back and assess a very clear picture:  The first 1-2 months had relatively low sales, and I believe it’s because I spent too much time stressing over keyword tracking and traffic analysis.  In April I took a “set it and forget it” approach and saw a significant increase in revenue.  I also worked the hardest in April, churning out new themes, improving the others, and offering support.

I must note that I don’t completely ignore the stats or ways to improve my site’s performance.  I do check in on my analytics roughly once per week for about 30 minutes.  This amount of time commitment allows me to keep my finger on the pulse, notice any red flags, and make minor improvements over time.  It also gives me the freedom to focus my efforts on the stuff I really want to be doing:  Designing, coding, and serving customers.

It’s all about striking a balance that works for you and allows you to do your job with as much enjoyment as possible.  That’s the real recipe for a successful business.

How do you strike the balance between production work and promotion/analysis?

Personal Blogging And Personal Branding Are One And The Same

by Brian Casel  ·  5.3.2010  ·  Business

Freelancers, especially web workers, are constantly reminded about the importance of developing your personal brand.  I believe personal blogging plays an integral, and sometime undervalued role in establishing your personal brand.

First, let me explain exactly what I mean by “Personal blogging”.  I’m talking about your personal (yet public) site where you share your ideas, experiences, lessons learned, opinions, etc.  Most likely this site is branded with your own name (as I do here on briancasel.com) or perhaps you’ve created a brand name to represent you.  It serves as your behind the scenes version of what you do.

Think of your portfolio, your business storefront, your guest articles, interviews, lectures, books and other exposure as your “center stage” content.  The stuff you put out in front of the world.  Think of your personal blog as your “back stage” content, available to those who actively seek more from you.  I blogged about digging into the personal blogs of others.  Today’s post is about is the importance of keeping a personal blog for yourself.

140 Characters is Not Enough

Many folks rely solely on Twitter as their only channel for personal output.  Some, including myself, even keep two twitter accounts.  One to represent their business and another as their personal account.  While Twitter is great for sharing bits and links throughout the day and making connections, I think it’s best used in conjunction with a full-length blog.

Take the 10% of your tweets that you feel most passionately about and expand those ideas into full blog posts.  Flesh out those ideas – even if you don’t have a large audience.  The few who do read your blog are probably the most valuable followers you can ask for, ones who are truly interested in what you have to say and likely willing to share and spread your ideas.

A Solid Foundation For Your Personal Brand

Your personal blog should be your most authentic representation of who you are.  After visitors have passed through your storefront (your business website), seen your tweets, or read your guest posts, they arrive at your personal blog seeking a more complete picture of who you and your company are.  If you’ve been blogging regularly for the past few months or years with authentic, insightful, and relevant content, then you can bet that person will come away with a positive view of you, your company, and your future endeavors.

Again, those who do find your personal blog are likely the most engaged members of your audience.  You want to give them what they want, and that’s more information to consume, draw opinions from, share and re-blog.

Where? When? How?

Where should you publish and promote your personal blog?  It’s really up to you.  The approach I’ve chosen is to fully separate my business sites (casjam.com, themejam.com) from my personal blog (briancasel.com).  I gear my content here towards other freelancers and web workers, sharing un-edited ideas, and providing a behind-the-scenes look at how I do business.  I’ve taken a similar (but on a much smaller scale) approach as Gary Vaynerchuck (business: winelibrary.tv / personal: garyvaynerchuk.com) and Adii Pienaar (business: woothemes.com / personal: adiirockstar.com).

Others take the fully integrated approach, where their personal blog doubles as their business or portfolio site.  This can work, especially if you’re business is primarily in serving other freelancers in your industry.

How often to blog?  The SEO experts will preach that you must set a consistent schedule, at least once or twice weekly.  While I do think it’s important not to leave your blog idle for too long, I think your schedule should largely depend on when you feel passionate enough about a particular topic to whip up a solid post with substance.  A quick way to get me to unsubscribe or un-follow you is to post fluff.

How to do it?  Tumblr is probably the easiest way to get started with your own blog.  Of course WordPress would be the next easiest way to go.  Both of these platforms give you loads of awesome themes to choose from and endless ways to customize it to your liking.

Over to you

What is your approach to personal blogging and how does that differ from your other avenues of exposure?  Do share…

New Publication Page

by Brian Casel  ·  4.29.2010  ·  Bits

Just a quick post today to let you know about a new section I’ve added to this site:  Publication

It contains a list of links to articles I wrote and published on other sites as well as articles which might include my quotes.  I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, and decided I better get this up now before I completely lose track of these links.

I was planning on adding this new Publication section as part of a redesign of this blog, but looking at my upcoming calendar of client work and ThemeJam releases, I can tell that a redesign will have to wait a little while longer.  I do plan to make several changes around here though, as soon as time allows.

So please have a read of the articles I’ve published elsewhere.  They represent another side of my writing, which is a bit more structured, informative, and polished for a larger audience.  The posts I write here tend to reflect more of my personal views and opinions.  Either way, I’d love to get any type of feedback and/or constructive criticism as I’m working to take writing more seriously moving forward.

App Review: Bidsketch, Web-Based Project Proposals

by Brian Casel  ·  4.26.2010  ·  Business, Opinion

So I just began trying out the web-app, Bidsketch, which provides tools for creating nice looking project proposals.  This may be a bit of a pre-mature review, since I’ve been using it for less than a week.  However, I do have some thoughts I’d like to share both on the app itself and the Bidsketch pricing model.

I won’t go into detail on each and every feature of Bidsketch.  For that, you should check out their nicely laid out feature tour.  In a nutshell, Bidsketch offers a system of templates which you can piece together to produce a web-based project proposal.  As a final step in the creation process, you can skin your proposal with a variety of design templates, or you can even design your own using CSS (a feature I have yet to dig into, but very intrigued…).

In this app review I’ll tackle various areas and provide a grade (A to F).  And away we go…

The Problem

Every great web application must solve a common problem.  For me, the problem I’d like to solve is two-fold:

  • I want to spend less time creating project proposals (without sacrificing quality and thoughtfulness).
  • I want to improve the presentation of my proposals and offer a web-based version along with a downloadable PDF version (until now, I’ve only been providing a PDF version).

Ability to solve my problem:  B

Have I saved time by creating proposals via Bidsketch rather than my old method?  So far, I don’t think so.  Even though I have defined my default copy for each area of the proposal (goals, solutions, fee schedule, etc.), I still end up re-writing a lot of custom copy for each individual project.

Has the presentation improved?  I’d say yes, with the potential improve even more once I fiddle with customizing templates.  Having a web version with the option to download a PDF is great.  Very professional and user-friendly, and reminds me a lot of the way Freshbooks works for invoices.  The PDF looks pretty good (basically mimics what you see on the web version).  However, my minor complaint would be that I’d like to better separate areas into different pages in the PDF.  There were some sections which were split between two pages, making for an awkward read-through.

Usability

Usability is extremely important in today’s market of web applications.  This is especially true when you’re app is targeted at web designers, who deal with usability issues every day!

Usability score:  C-

Not downright awful, but I do see several usability issues with Bidsketch.

The first is pasting content into the text areas.  For some reason, as soon as you hit command + V, a lightbox window opens where you can paste your content.  Bidsketch then strips all formatting and inserts the pasted content where the curser is.  While this may solve some weird formatting issues when pasting from a MS Word doc, it can be very frustrating.  There are many times when I wanted to paste an entire unordered list (I’m addicted to bullet lists!) and the app not only strips out the bullets, but they’re replaced by *.  I then have to manually delete each *, and create the bullet list all over again.  Not fun.

The next issue is navigating around the various areas of the proposal creation process.  The process is broken into 4 screens, each with a set of text areas.  The only way to move between them is with a forward and back button.  My first problem with this is that the forward and back buttons are at the very bottom of the screen, not at the top (or better yet, both).  The other problem is that I can’t jump from screen 1 to screen 4, or 4 back to 2, etc.  You’ve got to navigate sequentially, which is a pain, especially when you need to scroll to the bottom of each screen every time.

The last issue is more of a bug than a design issue, but it’s something that needs immediate fixing.  When the proposal is ready to go, Bidsketch provides a way to email it to your client.  This works nicely when sending to one email address.  However, when you add multiple email addresses (which it indicates you can do with a comma), pressing send produces an error alert, “Email field is incorrect”.  I can only assume that the email was not sent due to some kind of error.  So I double checked the emails and tried sending again.  Same error.  So I delete the second email and send it separately to each recipient.  On each I get the “Successfully sent” message.  However, I later found out that every time I received that error, the email did send! So I ended up sending the proposal to my client 4 times!  Not cool.

Oh yeah, one more frustrating problem:  Uploading my company logo is either very buggy or poorly developed.  The system either stretches my logo way too big, or shrinks it way too small, depending on the dimensions of my uploaded image.  Either tell me what dimensions it needs to be, or make it flexible enough to display the image with accurate dimensions.

Why didn’t I give it an F for usability?  Here are a few things I like:

  • Ability to save section templates for use later.
  • Ability to add new sections and items on the fly.
  • Ability to drag and drop to re-order sections.
  • Inserting template tags, like {client_name} is nice (but I’d like to see many more available template tags).
  • Nice, clean interface when viewed by the client.
  • Custom template design features.

Value

This is the make or break aspect of any commercial application.  Does it provide enough value to justify the price?  Bidsketch offers two monthly plans:  $14/month and $24/month, the only difference being the $24/month plan offers 75MB of storage for images and flash compared to the 35MB available in the $14/month plan.  Both plans offer the first month for free.

Value score:  C

First, let me evaluate the pricing model.  To be honest, I’m a bit confused.  I personally don’t see the value of upgrading to the $24/month plan.  Is having an an extra 40 MB for presenting images and flash within proposals that important?  I don’t think so.  I certainly don’t think that extra 40MB of storage is worth an extra $10/month.  My proposals are primarily text.  To use 75MB of storage, you must be putting a lot of images in your proposals (which I don’t understand.  Are you doing design work before you even win the project?)  Or you’re putting some type of flash elements in your proposals (again, I don’t see where this comes into play, but maybe others do).  Or you’re producing a massive amount of proposals every month, which for me is not the case.  I aim for quality projects with healthy fees, rather than quantity.  Personally, I’d stick with the $14/month plan.

Now, is $14/month worth it for this app?  I think it’s a bit high.  There are too many issues which need to be improved or resolved.  It feels much more like a pre-release beta version than a release version with a significant price tag.  Sure, one successful project could more than cover the cost of Bidsketch, but $14/month still has an effect on your bottom line, which needs to be justified.

While Bidsketch somewhat solves a problem, I don’t consider this to be a crucial tool for my freelance business.  Freshbooks is the centerpiece of my invoicing and bookkeeping system, which makes it crucial to my business.  Dropbox is a flawless app and provides the piece of mind that I’ll never lose my files.  Worth every penny.  I can’t say the same for Bidsketch.  It’s nice to have, but I could certainly continue on without it.

I see two ways to improve the pricing model of Bidsketch:

  1. Separate pricing options by how many proposals you can send per month, not storage space.  Something like 3 proposals per month, 10 (my ideal plan), 25, and maybe a 50.  Perhaps offer a 1/month plan for free, although I like the 1 month free system which is currently in place.
  2. Offer a lower priced option.  Keeping with my first suggestion, the 3 and 10 proposal/month plans should cost something like $5 and $8/month.  Given the value this app brings, I think this makes sense.

A lot of potential

I was drawn to this app because it’s something I’ve had in mind for quite a while.  In fact, I’ve been kicking around various ideas to try producing an app like this myself.  Perhaps a proposal creation app built on WordPress, either in the form of a theme or a plugin.  I haven’t pursued it due to lack of time.  But if you’re a developer and interested in collaborating on the idea, shoot me an email!

For now, I’ll continue to use Bidsketch, at least for the remainder of my free month.  I’m undecided on whether or not I’ll continue with the paid subscription.  If nothing else, it does provide me the opportunity to give my proposal writing a refreshed approach, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while.

Launching a Commercial WordPress Theme

by Brian Casel  ·  4.21.2010  ·  Business, Education

This is the third and final part of my mini-series detailing my WordPress theme development process, which includes:

  1. WordPress Theme Design Process
  2. WordPress Theme Development Process
  3. Releasing the WordPress theme on ThemeJam.com (read on…)

So the theme has been fully tested (and tested, and tested again) and is now deemed ready for release into the wild.  Here is my process for prepping, releasing, and promoting a commercial WordPress theme on ThemeJam.

Prepare the Theme Demo

The functional demo should already be up and running at this point, because I created it during development.  Of course, there weren’t any links pointing to it yet, so it hasn’t actually been set “live” yet.

But I haven’t set up the iframed demo for this theme yet.  What I’m referring to is setting up the theme switcher navigation bar across the top of all the demos on ThemeJam.  This allows easy switching between themes, switching between stylesheets for each theme, and links to purchase.

Setting up the iframe is pretty simple.  It’s just a matter of duplicating a folder, changing some values and path names, and we’re all set.  Though we’re still not live at this point…

Write Theme Documentation

This is a super-important step.  As I mentioned in my reflections on ThemeJam two months in, I believe that thorough documentation is the best method of pre-emptive customer support (if you will).  I try and go above and beyond and provide as much detail as possible in my instructions and explanations.

Currently, the theme documentation is created as a PDF document.  I plan to overhaul and create a web-based version of theme docs, hopefully in the coming months.

I should also mention that I include quite detailed instructions and notes throughout the theme options panel built into the theme.  Every option has it’s own sentence or two describing what it does.

Prepare the Download Package, Upload to E-Junkie

As you may know, all ThemeJam themes come packaged with the layered Photoshop design files (PSDs).  We don’t have separate “developer” packages as most theme companies do.  Every package would be considered the “developer” package.  Before zipping the theme, I go through all the PSDs and tidy up the layers and groups.

Once the zip package is all set, I create the product in E-Junkie, which is the service I use for issuing downloads and handling the checkout process.  I set it up so that affiliates can easily link directly to the product and earn money promoting ThemeJam products.

Push live on ThemeJam.com

This step involves several things:

  • Cutting screenshots and thumbnail images for the home page, gallery page, and detail page.
  • Writing copy to describe the theme on the detail page.
  • Input the various pieces of info (copy, price, demo link, purchase link, callouts, etc.) in WordPress (I set this up using quite a few custom write panels).
  • Add the theme image and link on the ThemeJam home page carousel.

Notes on Promotion

Here are a few things I do to build awareness of the new theme, both before and after pushing it live:

  • Release teaser images showing screenshots of an upcoming design.  I do this while I’m in the design phase to build awareness of what’s coming up next, and ask for feedback.  If I were a dribbble member, I’d do this much more often.  Anyone have an invite for me? :)
  • Blog about it. I always post about it on the themejam blog, and I plan to blog in a lot more detail here on briancasel.com for upcoming themes.
  • Videos. I’ve been using screenr to create quick screencast videos showing how the back-end functionality works.

And that concludes my series on how I go about creating and releasing a commercial WordPress theme.  Please share any feedback and/or questions in the comments below and if you haven’t already, check out the current selection of WordPress themes at ThemeJam.com.

Page 4 of 18« First...2345610...Last »