Google Reader To Shut Down: My Thoughts

So yes, I woke up to the news that Google Reader is To Shut Down.

Usually I am rather flippant when Google services shut down (remember Google Wave?), and I am usually that dickish mate who responds to my less intelligent mates who whinge about Facebook changing it’s layout with “If you don’t like it, ask for a refund.”.

But gah I am annoyed with this move.

Where's the "I AM NOT OKAY WITH THIS" button?
Where’s the “I AM NOT OKAY WITH THIS” button?

You see I use RSS in 3 ways. Despite the usual way of keeping up with news, I also use it to provide basic content to my Twitter feed quickly and easily, using a combination of Buffer (which is amazing, use it), and IFTTT (which is amazing, use it). It helps keep me relevant and useful even when rushed off my feet.

The second is that, at least with this here blog, RSS is the fourth biggest source of traffic, and has the biggest engagement. I assume many of these people come from Google Reader, so to lose that source is really frustrating.

I have signed the petition on change.org with the unbelievably vain hope the behemoth that is Google listens, but I doubt they will. I am looking at alternatives as we speak (suggestions welcome! Especially those that have recipes already in IFTTT), but I guess this is a timely reminder that you should always always build your services and legacy on your own domain and hosting, and obtain email addresses when marketing. Whilst not 100% secure, it is more secure than building on services that are open to the whims of large organisations.

What are your thoughts on Google Reader Closing?

P.S. Even with this move, RSS isn’t dead. I think WordPress would have to stop offering RSS feeds, and this doesn’t look likely, at least for WordPress 3.6. Feedburner users should be worried, though.

My First Tweets….

In case you don’t spend as much time on Twitter as I do, Twitter have started offering archives of your Tweets to download and read through at your leisure. Basically, to save space, you cannot search through all your tweets (heavy users get about 2 weeks worth), but the links are obviously still there and live, so you can see them, just not find them once they are lost in the Internet.

Anyway, if you go to your settings page and click “Your Twitter Archive”, you can request it.

And. It’s. Brilliant.

A little history for you, I joined Twitter ages ago in July 2007, at the ripe old age of 23, and this was my first ever tweet:-

Don’t worry, 4 tweets in, I was already yelling at Han for some reason.

So this got me thinking! What was the first tweets I sent to various people that have become close friends now about? Well, thanks to a rather handy search feature, it’s easy to find out! First off, my 3 Door Digital colleagues Alex:-

and Anna:-

Fascinating, I’m sure you’ll agree. It doesn’t get much better, here was my first message to Shane, discussing Movember:-

Carly‘s – which was discussing the latest troll that existed in the SEO-sphere (who was being SEOCockstars?):-

And Richard‘s:-

However, occasionally, very occasionally, the odd first message turns out to be brilliant. Take for example my first message to Matt. For a few years, I’ve been routinely mocked due to my lack of film knowledge. Many may argue that is completely justified, but – a year before we began working together at Manual Link Building – I can’t say I didn’t warn him.

But the best, and the most relevant to my career was my first message to Pete. It was when I was the SEO for Livetech, and I was whinging about the Google SERP’s for one of our clients, who wanted to rank for a particular localised phrase. Despite having reported the phrase to be #1, we still weren’t getting traffic, and then I realised, the localised listing for this phrase was for the place in the United States with the same name. I whinged on twitter, and Pete replied:-

Anyway, I remember the SERP now, it was “plumbers in Flint”.

It is still fucked.

The more things change in SEO, the more they stay the same.

Still, it got me thinking of how big a deal Twitter is. When twitter started I was living in Colwyn Bay, doing an okay job, but not really meeting many like minded geeks. I’m now living in Manchester, forming friendships with all the people who are listed above, and am enjoying life. It’s a long way since the days we were warned to not meet people off the Internet in case we were axe murderers or something, and Twitter is largely to thank for it.

Maybe it’s true what they say: Facebook is for people you went to school with, Twitter is for people you wish you went to school with.

Anyway, what were your first tweets? Anything interesting to anybody? I’d be keen to see them in the comments!

Selling Out at The End of The World….

….or how I made a three figure sum, just before Christmas, in 48 hours.

Last August I released WP Email Capture. I know it sounds daft, but in terms of “amazing things I’ve ever achieved” it’s up there. Through it, I’ve made a few friends, landed more opportunities, and made a bit of cash. I would recommend to anybody who is going it alone to have something you can sell, that’s relatively cheap to develop. That way you have at least some cash flow.

One of the biggest bonuses (as I mentioned in my post on the Blogging Dojo on the best post I read in 2011) is that there is leverage there. Obtaining coverage on blogs is really easy when you have something to offer bloggers. Also, I’ve noticed that even if I don’t get a direct link, coverage can lead to sales, many of them are non affiliate sales.

Furthermore, rather than launch a campaign, I can easily send out an email, blog post, or a couple of tweets to try things to try and drive a bit of traffic and hopefully, some sales.

This story is one of those spur of the moment campaigns, which saw an hour’s “work” turn into over £150. Not a life changing sum of money, but it helped pay for Christmas.

My Story

I was sat in The Old Grapes in Manchester, talking with a friend. It was the 18th December 2012, three days before the impending apocalypse. Yes, remember that? The alleged end of the world on December 21st.

I suggested an idea to a few friends, and with only three or so sites actually leading with something (Hostgator, Paddy Power offering 5000/1 on the End of The World & Wish’s “Money Back if it is Doomsday” Guarantee), I thought I’d run with something.

I would offer a whopping 60% discount on WP Email Capture, a discount that would make Groupon’s discounts seem rather stingy in comparison. I would sell off my plugin to obtain as much Old World Order cash as possible before the impending fall of civilization. What has everybody got to lose?

In short, this wasn’t a fire sale; this was a sulphuric gas & eternal hellfire sale.

I created a discount code in E-Junkie and scribbled together an email, which you can read here (please note – the discount code no longer works!), and sent it off to my hundred or so subscribers.

When I woke the next morning, this was the response:-

eotw-sales
Whoop whoop!

Considering a sale day is a good day, and I’ve had four “two sales days” since launch, getting four sales in a short space of time delighted me. It was good enough for me to run with it on the blog.

When I ran with it on the blog, I got a few more sales, and directed prospects to the sale in the hope they converted. I also refunded people who bought the plugin full price during that time, which was lucky, as one chap posted it on a forum which lead to a few more sales.

In short, I broke my December target. Also I made it a very successful month, a month that I wasn’t expecting to get many sales due to Christmas getting in the way.

My Three Tips

Of course, my number one tip is to fake an apocalypse to lead to an influx in sales 3000 years later, but three tips I have are the following.

Have a List

It still frustrates me when websites don’t build email lists. Of course, unless you’re Amazon or Play you can’t really sell to them all the time, but by and large a little bit of noise when you’re consistently sending out signal is perfectly fine.

The other thing that lists are good for are experimentation. If I had judged public conscience wrong, and people had genuinely believed an apocalypse was occurring, then I’d have only offended 100 or so people (of which I wouldn’t care too much, as, you know, I’d probably be suffering eternal damnation). If I had gone public with the offer straight away, then I’d have looked foolish if it didn’t sell. I could gauge reaction first of all, and act accordingly. Furthermore you can use this as saying the newsletter has exclusive content.

Here’s the thing, my list isn’t particularly “warm”. I’ve only emailed them a couple of times, but it has usually got a few sales.

Look at your email list as leads. They aren’t buyers but they are interested in what you put out.

Price High and Discount

I believe that most people price themselves too low, or don’t believe in their skills.

I price WP Email Capture fairly high, it’s $49. I believe it is worth that, largely due the support I offer is remarkably detailed, going above and beyond to make people happy. If customers aren’t happy then a refund is offered. I don’t get a huge amount of refunds, but I do get them. Furthermore, as Tim Ferriss said in the Four Hour Work Week (read it, it’s superb), if you price high, you weed out a lot of the tire kickers. The “worst” customer I’ve ever had has sent in total four emails. Four. Knowing how many emails people send with the possibility of getting a fraction of that, I’m doing well.

And that was just one customer, most I don’t hear from at all.

If sales were non-existent, then yes I would’ve dropped the price, but they aren’t, sales are still coming in for the plugin.

Furthermore, the beauty of it being priced so high is I’ve plenty of room for manoeuvre for discounting. In this campaign, knocking off 60% still pockets me $19, which is more than most plugin sales on CodeCanyon, for example. I still make a profit (effectively costs are now zero), and the “work” I largely do is simply creating logins for customers.

Also, with this manoeuvrability on price, I also got a few people who missed the discount. A quick email with a smaller discount of 30% also got a few sales.

People Believe In You, Not Your Stuff

One of the nicest things I got was a few messages in response. I’m not a great copywriter (seriously, if you need one, hit up Super Carly Wood for copywriting), but even people who didn’t buy quite liked my sales patter. It was written to try and put off packing for the Christmas holidays. I probably could buy a book, go on a course, or read Copyblogger for a week, but I didn’t have time. I published, and I was damned.

Luckily, most people loved it. I think there was an element of (urgh I hate saying this) “Brand Building”. If you have a decent reputation, it can help you with things such as this. I refuse to believe that people were desperate for WP Email Capture Premium when they bought, I believe the people who bought were WP Email Capture users, who liked me, and took advantage of an offer.

So that’s how I had my most successful day with WP Email Capture. It was a combination of alcohol fuelled inspiration, an hour’s graft, and being the right place at the right time. I urge you to make something (be a book, theme, WordPress plugin, anything besides bacon flavoured jam, as that market is cornered), and try selling it yourself (or if you’re lazy, sign up to the WP Email Capture affiliate programme and try selling my stuff). You could get a bit of cash doing so.

If you don’t though, don’t worry. It’s not the end of the world.

State Of Search: Recommended WordPress Backup Plugins For 2013

Not sure if I’ll do this which much regularity, but I keep forgetting when and where I’m featured on other websites. I’m looking to compile a list, but at the moment it’s quite barren, so before I build up said list, I’m going to start linking to posts featuring me as a talking head, or commenting on something.

Meh, it’s content!

I’m not featured in many places, so I think this’ll be fairly easy to keep updated.

Anyway, the first one is being featured on State of Search (a blog I regularly read, and one of a small handful of SEO blogs I actually bother with) talking about my recommendations for the 6 Top WordPress Backup Plugins of 2013.

I was featured along with Michael Wester, Bastian Grimm, Dan McGuire, Carla Marshall and Dean Cruddace, and for the record, I recommended WP-DB Backup for a Free Plugin (which I must admit is more out of habit, I really should check out BackWPup recommended by a couple of people), and Vaultpress if you can afford it.

Thanks to Jackie Hole for featuring me!

How To Sort Spotify Playlists into Alphabetical Order

So this week I took the plunge and purchased Spotify Premium. In truth the ads were getting annoying and some of my favourite songs were disappearing due to the over five plays, and do you know what, I like it, I like it a lot.

I like the syncing feature with my phone and the offline mode (which is great when listening to music on your phone as you don’t get charged a metric shit load of data) so I set about creating a playlist featuring songs I listen to regularly, which raided all my previously made playlists (including my Epic 90’s Playlist) and the Manual Link Building playlist that we usually listen to in work.

Unfortunately, on test run one, it was tricky to find songs, as instead of being listed A – Z (like it should be), it listed it in the order I copied & pasted it (I’m not a firm believer in orders of playlist, sorry, I don’t care about music that much).

Anyway, there is a workaround, which I’d thought I’d share (until Spotify implement this feature).

1. Create Your New Playlist – Something Like [Original Playlist Name – A – Z]

In this example, I’ll use my equally epic Welsh Music Playlist. If you don’t know how to do this, then really you’re struggling.

2. Organise Your Original Playlist Into Alphabetical Order

I do this by track (as on Spotify Mobile I find it easier to find stuff). To do this click on the track heading.

3. Copy Your Tracks into the New Playlist

Boom!

As I said, it may be obvious to some people, but it took me ages to figure out. Google wasn’t much help, but now it will (hopefully) be. 🙂