I just published my first ScreenCast (if you don’t see it, it’s because I’m split testing against the old version of that webpage, and you got the old one–sorry!) I checked out some Mac software first, but ditched it almost imediately–useless. I tried Wink next, but found it wholly unsuitable both for recording audio and [...]

4/26/2007 Update: The price is now locked at $14.95. This for a DVD recording of a seminar on making your mailing lists more profitable. The original cost of admission was $997!
If I were you, I wouldn’t even take the time to finish reading the rest of this post! Seriously, if you want to get [...]

I recently signed up for a test drive of BidFuel.com (which I cancelled during the free period–it didn’t look useful enough). Since then, I’ve started receiving spam at the email address I gave them–an email address I created uniquely for them. No one else has ever seen that email address. I recommend not signing up [...]

One of my brothers and I are opening a new website, Free Home Shop, to the public tomorrow. A few weeks ago, while looking for good places on my other sites to link to it from, I asked another brother if we could link from his title insurance website. His response surprised me–title insuance companies [...]

I’ve noticed over the last few days that one of my sites has been getting hundreds of hits a day from people searching for “katharine mcphee yellow dress”. I don’t have a site about American Idol, and I’ve never even typed the words “katharine mcphee” (and the first time I’d even copied and pasted the [...]

I’ve just set up a 7 day email mini-course, 7 ways to turn RSS into R$$. When you register, you also get a free download of CaRP Free, an RSS to HTML converter for your website, and if you stay on the mailing list, updated versions will be sent to you as they’re released.
This is [...]

You’ve heard of the 5 W’s–who, what, when where and why–possibly in relation to writing or analyzing news stories or press releases. The 5 W’s are also applicable to choosing keywords and sites for AdWords keyword or site-targeted advertising. For example, considering how these five dimensions relate to potential customers for CaRP (my RSS to [...]

Well, the “sales letter” style homepage I tried out for CaRP last month was no Willy Loman, but a statistical analysis of its conversion ratio (page views to downloads of the free version) showed that it didn’t perform as well as the page that I’m using right now, and while I don’t have stats to [...]

A while back, I overhauled my shopping cart system so that it guided the user through the process better. I’ll admit that I didn’t bother tracking the difference that it made, but my general impression was that the change was for the better. Today, I realized that I could streamline the checkout process further, and [...]

When I first started seeing those “sales letter” webpages, I didn’t find them very appealing. They’re long, often repetetive, don’t contain many (if any) links to more information about the product. But apparently, they’re very effective. Well, I’ve finally taken the plunge and ditched (at least temporarily!) as design I really liked on one of [...]