The Agile Micro ISV Blog

Potential customers arrive at your page with a mug full of suspicion. It’s your job as a copy writer to remove that fear. I’m trying something a little different with PDF Scan Pro.

I thought about what might prevent someone from making that initial purchase and becoming a customer. I think some of it is going to be because they’re not sure if your app is the one for them. Is it right? Is there another app out there that is better/faster/cheaper. A traditional approach might operate a little like this:

“Don’t bother checking out the opposition, we’re the best.”

I think people are so used to this approach that they’re immune from it. I’m not going to spend my time developing an application I didn’t believe in – so I know my applications’ USPs, I know there strengths and their weaknesses, I know where they sit in the market. So why not spend a little time telling your customer about your competition, so they can see where your product fits in?

I’ve not tried this before, but I’ve added a section to PDF Scan Pro’s Trial/Moneyback page listing the competition. I’m hoping that this approach might show a little confidence, and might alleviate fears that ‘the perfect product’ might just be a Google search away.

Anyone else tried this or anything similar?

I’m learning.

Like a lot of micro ISV‘ers, copywriting is not my strong point, but, I stumbled across an interesting way to boost traffic to the Home Document Manager blog. When I issue an update, which can be as frequently as once a week, I found I was making a series of posts with repetetive, uninspired titles – “Update Released,” “Minor Update Released” etc. Then, for one of my updates, I wrote a small piece explaining some of the issues with TWAIN. The post was entitled “Ne’er the TWAIN shall meet,” an obvious reference to Kipling’s “The Ballad of East and West.”

Suddenly, instead of a dull and uninteresting nuggat about an update, this small, boring post, became the most popular post on the blog. The main traffic sources were people searching for the quote, so it wasn’t highly targetted traffic, but since these kinds of posts would seldom attract traffic anyway, untargetted traffic has to trump no traffic. It can’t hurt my Google standings either, since the post makes a reference to Kipling, as well as the TWAIN specification. The double entendre is an interesting way to get a free traffic boost. Take this post for example, I wonder if it will start ranking for the “Tales of The Unexpected” TV series??

The second unexpected traffic source came from a review I wrote about my new shredder. This too became the hottest post on the blog, and is still pulling in 3 times more traffic than any other post or page. This is different because it is, of course, pretty highly targetted traffic. I’ve gone on to publish a review of one of the Scansnap scanners to see if I can replicate the earlier success. I guess this goes back to one of the first principles of micro ISV blogging – blog about things your customers are interested in.

I’ve signed a joint marketing agreement with Microsoft to promote Convert2XPS. As such, Convert2XPS now appears on Microsoft’s XPS Showcase site.

XPS document conversion is a pretty niche
area, so I’m not expecting an avalanche of customers to crash my server
with traffic, but every little helps, and a link back from Microsoft
certainly can’t hurt.

I’ll be sure to keep an eye on my analytics to see if anything of interest changes.