TechyMarketer.com

Back after few weeks of vacation from the blog. It was necessary, I was overheating due to an insane amount of work. Now, it feels better…

2009 is in few days now and guess what?

Everybody seems to think it’s gonna be an annus horribilis.

No joke, you just have to listen for more than 5 minutes the radio or the TV, all they talk about is employment rate, house price droping etc. Sounds like the end of the world, right?

If it may well be, that won’t change anything if we worry to much. The only thing we can do at that point is to manage to increase our income during that period.

Yes, you read it well, INCREASE our income.

How are we gonna do it?

Simple, we just need to increase the number of people who know about our service.

Count the number of people you advertise to, on a monthly basis. Count your visitors on your website, count the number of messages you send to prospects, the number of people you meet in person and to whom you hand a business card etc. Count them all, and put those numbers in a spreadsheet.

Each row is dedicated to an advertisement method:

Resume Submit
Monster
Emailing campaign
Etc

Pretty simple so far, huh?

Now you’re done with your different methods of advertisement, add a new column representing the number of leads you gained for each of them. You may not know for some of those leads but in the future, always remember to ask them for where they heard about you, it’s easy and will give you great info on how effective is each method.

Ok, now your lead tracking system is in place, you’re gonna add a column for each new month to come. Cover the whole year 2009, January, February etc. The idea here is to increase your advertisement every month.

Let’s say last month you had 100 visitors on your website, this month you should manage to have at least 150 visitors. Now, how you manage to get more visitors is a different story, but at least you have a clear objective of what you want.

Repeat the same process for all your advertising activities, whether they are cold call, resume submit or anything else.

After doing that for few months, discard the method that doesn’t give any prospects and increase your action on the effective ones.

Then guess what?

The number of leads you’re gonna get is gonna start increase in no time.

Happy 2009!

Today, I’m gonna talk about one of the most effective way to drive prospects to your website. It’s not free, but with a little bit of magic, you can easily keep the CAC (Client Acquisition Cost) very low.

If Google is your friend for search, it could well become your best friend for your advertisement. It’s pretty cheap and can start to drive traffic to your site in a matter of minutes. But of course, you need to know what you do with PPC (pay per click) or you could waste a lot of money.

Start with that link if you’ve never used Adwords: http://adwords.google.com/support/

You read it all? Ok let’s go forward.

There are 3 main elements in a PPC campaign with Adwords:

1. Location

That’s where you want the advertisement to be displayed. If you select US, only people having an IP located in the US will see the advertisement. You can target by City, zip code or even a custom zone you set on a map if you want to.

2. Keywords

Keywords trigger the display of your advertisement, but you need to bid high enough to outbid the competiton of course. It’s not only about price though, there’s a quality criteria called the relevancy. Let’s say that more an ads gets clicks, more it is considered relevant by Adwords, which has a positive effect on the bid price. See below.

3. The advertisement

That’s the text you want to show to your prospects, they are displayed on the right side and on the top of the result page, they are shown as “Sponsored Links”.

For any given set of keywords there are between 8 and 11 ads displayed on each page: 8 on the right bar and between 0 to 3 displayed on the top of the page. If your bid is too low, your ads won’t be displayed on the first page, but on the following ones. Being on the first page, but not necesserely on the first position though, is what everybody wants, so don’t be surprised that you will have to fight for it.

Here’s how it works:

Everything starts when a person searches for keywords. Your ads will show up if that person comes from one of the location you selected. The ads position, on the other hand, depends on 3 factors:

- The competition, how many advertisers are bidding on those keyword.
- Your Max cost-per-click (CPC) which is the maximum price you’re ready to pay for a click on the ad triggered by that keyword.
- The CTR (Click-Through-Rate) of your ad, given in percent, it is the number of times your ads has been clicked over the number of impressions. Example: 5 clicks for 100 impressions => CTR = 5%.

All this gives the golden rule of Adwords:

A higher CTR gives cheaper clicks, while a lower CTR gives higher click price.

The main consequence of that rule is that you must find the good combination between your keywords and your ads if you want to get cheap clicks and make the best of the campaign.

If it seems challenging at first, we’ll see in the following posts that we can, with a bit of method, to create a pretty good campaign without headache and pretty fast.

In the part 2, we will create the campaign and continue to explore the Adwords mechanic.

Just a quick post to prepare my next ones.

The conversion rate, CR,  is the percentage of prospects your site converts into customers. Let’s say you get 100 visitors on your webpage and one of them signs a contract, or any other action, the conversion rate is 1%.

Going a little further, if it costs you 50 bucks to get those 100 prospects (PPC for example), the Client Acquisition Cost (CAC) to find 1 customer is $50 for a conversion rate of 1%. CAC would be $25 for a 2% conversion rate.

The price is a very important factor when you consider selling your service as freelance developer or employee. It’s important not only for your income but also on the perception your clients or employers have about you.

People in our industry used to decide of a price based on 3 main factors:

- Their experience.
- The market price. 
- Their negociation skills.

While it may give some result in a flourishing economy with moderate competition, it doesn’t work at all during hard time or in a highly competitve market. Still wonder why it’s getting more and more difficult to make big money for most of us?

In a capitalist system, prices are free, or more precisely, they are based on demand, not on competition. Which means if you build a strong demand for your service, you can charge an extremely high hourly rate. It’s not about competition anymore, on which you have no control whatsoever, it’s about you, and the demand you’re able to create.

If we’ll go into the details on how to become increasingly demanded in future posts, always keep in mind that you’re the one in control of your price, and that nobody else can make it for you.

It’s hard to be an happy developer these days.

The economy is all wacky and competition from third world countries tends to lower prices to a level where paying bills become difficult.  In such a difficult environment, people who have a job tend to keep it even if they don’t feel happy while people looking for a job are ready to lower their expectations to have it.

“Good old time, RIP” is the new motto of the Silicon’s Valley VCs… How crazy is that?

If all that sound scary, I’m gonna show you how turn things to your advantage, and not only you will be able to survive that crisis but you will be ready to prosper when things will get better.

But first let’s check few facts:

- There are more and more software projects available out there. The number insanely increased those last 10 years. More and more companies have acknowledged that software allow them to capture opportunities while lowering production costs. That’s the good news.

- The bad news is that as developers, we have to compete with people living in country where the cost of living is so low that they’re able to do the same job for a fraction of our prices.

You think it’s bad?

Actually it’s not bad, not bad at all, for different reasons:

- First, those poor countries will get better economically which is good, for the people of those countries and for us in the long term.

- Second, more projects and more developers means the industry is growing which is a good sign too. It’s now common for a very small company to have a couple of developers working for them on their websites or on a custom software.

- And finally, it’s good because it gives us an opportunity to get better at what we do, at how we do things and how we market and sell ourselves to our customers and employers.

That’s precisely why I created this blog: How we market and sell ourselves to the world.

With a lot of competition from both inside and outside, being able to sell ourselves is the guarantee to not only survive that crisis but to prosper when thing will get better.

So, my developer friends, get prepared to learn the magic of marketing.