Got hit by a Penguin and lost 80% of my Google search traffic (now what?)

Posted on May 28, 2012 by

I don’t usually worry too much about SEO, I prefer to believe that good content will attract visitors (I know, I´m sometimes a bit naïve!). So, I was not even aware that on April 24rd Google was launching the Penguin update but its effect has been devastating: I’ve lost 78% of my organic search traffic since then. See the graphic below comparing the months of March and May.

Since I was not aware of Penguin I just thought it was a temporary thing until today that realizing that the stats were not recovering I started to look into it and discovered that Penguin was the most likely cause. Nevertheless, the real question is why? and what now? (and since I´m totally lost, any help from you will be really appreciated).

Let me start by saying that I plead innocent. The affected site is mainly used as a dissemination channel for my research results and opinions about software development, it’s not at all a site created with the goal of making money so I have never (consciously) followed any of the spammy practices (like buying links) that Penguin is supposed to target. And my google webmaster tools account has not messages for me either than can enlighten me.

Nevertheless, I did see something very strange when looking at the “links to your site” section. There is one site that it’s linking to 4 of my pages more than 200.000 times! Can google think that I’m stupid enough to have bought all those links? Is this the reason for being hit?. I have already contacted people from that site (also researchers, so clearly they didn’t do it on purpose either) to see if they can prevent this but the question is whether this will restore my site ranking in google searches (and if so, when?).

To be honest, it’s scary that so much of your site success depends so much on a single company and on the tweaks this company does to its ranking algorithms (I hope they are at least strong supporters of test-driven development).

If you liked this post please consider following my thoughts on twitter and visit my other projects: the modeling languages portal, go wordpress migration services and my research rants.

Posted in advertisement, marketing, social | 2 Comments

Get paid not played by clients

Posted on May 8, 2012 by

Most (all?) of us selling services have clients that went missing after doing the work. This has happened to me (when I started, I’m not so naive anymore, and luckily it was only an invoice of 200 USD) but I was not aware the problem was so common. I just discovered that the site the World’s longest invoice claims that 15M USD (and growing) have been stiffed by clients.

There are different strategies to avoid this situation in the first place (once it happens and unless it’s really a considerable amount of money, it’s simply not worth pursuing them ). Sure, the obvious one is asking the client to pay the full amount in advance but this can scare off the client (who is also thinking you may run away with the money before doing the job if s/he pays you upfront). Having a nice looking site with testimonials will help to inspire some trust in you but this may not be enough for reluctant clients.

What has worked for me is offering a free test migration . The client gets a partial but complete site migration (i.e. the migration only contains part of the posts,pages,… of the original site but those that are included are fully migrated) which allows him to test and validate the quality of the work before paying but that, alone, is completely useless. Then, if he is happy, he pays the full amount (now he already trusts me) and we go ahead. If not, we just stop there (and yes, the work done so far goes to the trash but at least this way I’m sure that once the client pays he will be happy with the result; this is a different discussion topic but I prefer this than arguing and/or refunding clients that didn’t read the the conditions of the service and had unrealistic expectations about it).

Obviously, I’m not suggesting this is the best strategy nor that it can be applied to the product/service you’re offering but I’d love to know how you deal with this problem!

If you liked this post please consider following my thoughts on twitter and visit my other projects: the modeling languages portal, go wordpress migration services and my research rants.

Posted in customers, legal | Leave a comment

Battery of tests your next business idea should pass

Posted on April 26, 2012 by

Nice discussion on answers.onstartups.com about how to analyze your new business idea before getting too excited (and investing your time and money) on it.

To complement this reading you can also take a look at my series of posts trying to understand/explain why I failed with my previous software business.

If you liked this post please consider following my thoughts on twitter and visit my other projects: the modeling languages portal, go wordpress migration services and my research rants.

Posted in business model, customers, learning | Leave a comment

Wanna improve your productivity? Have a baby!

Posted on April 4, 2012 by

You may think I’m nuts but as counter-intuitive as it may seem, I’ve improved my productivity since having my first baby six months ago.

Sure, the first three months were horrible (in terms of sleep deprivation) and some days I even thought about closing down my “migration to wordpress” business but once the baby starts sleeping more regularly (yes, this happens eventually) I found myself being much more productive than before for two reasons:

  • A child gives you the focus and motivation you need. No matter how motivated you were before, a child will boost your motivation. Now you are not doing it only for you anymore, now you want to succeed to give the best possible life to your child.
  • There is no time to lose. With a baby you can never be sure how long you´ll have to work (babies can get ill, have a bad night,…). This “threat” makes you squeeze every available minute and produce much more in less time. You stop wasting your time with stupid distractions. Every moment counts!

Don’t you believe me? Well, have a baby and prove me wrong :-)

If you liked this post please consider following my thoughts on twitter and visit my other projects: the modeling languages portal, go wordpress migration services and my research rants.

Posted in philosophy, product development | 8 Comments

Why did I fail with my previous software business – Advise(III): Test your market exists

Posted on March 5, 2012 by

This is the third in a series of posts trying to explain what I think went wrong with my attempt of selling online code-generation services, that I end up shutting down due to the lack of clients. In previous posts, I recommended to Choose a cool technology to sell but do not try to sell to developers.

My third advice is to make sure you test your target market really exists. And let me emphasize the word “test”. Obviously, I believed it existed. And I even commented it with “family and friends” and they all confirmed my idea was great!. But I didn’t go beyond that. I thought my gut feeling and those encouraging comments of some close colleagues was enough to justify my “huge” time investment in the complete creation and deployment of the services. No test, no prototyping, nor pretotyping either.

My services were directed to individual developers interested in accelerating their development process by using models to bootstrap the web applications they were contracted to do. As it is now obvious, such group of developers do not really exist. From all my conversations with MDE vendors, I’ve now realized that most successful MDE companies are targeting business people instead of pure developers and big companies instead of freelance developers or small companies.

And when the market does not exist it’s not a matter of adding more features, lowering the price or spending more on marketing (good marketing helps but doesn’t do miracles). The sooner you realize your market does not exist the better. Just get over it and move to your next idea.

If you liked this post please consider following my thoughts on twitter and visit my other projects: the modeling languages portal, go wordpress migration services and my research rants.

Posted in business model, customers | 1 Comment

BM: Blog Micro Transactions

Posted on February 23, 2012 by

After reviewing the original business model of the Entrecot restaurant I’d like to write today about a second original business model: blog micro transactions.

The idea is to write a blog post interesting enough so that people want to know more about the post topic. Then, as part of the post, you offer the reader to buy this “more” (a pdf with extended information, a more complete example, some technical details not explained in the post, etc) for a small price.

The best example of this is WildBunny that sells the source code that accompanies his technical articles (on how to make games). He explains his not-so-bad results with this strategy in this post. Definitely worth reading!

Most likely you won’t become rich with blog micro transactions but it’s a possible strategy to complement to your main revenue stream.

If you liked this post please consider following my thoughts on twitter and visit my other projects: the modeling languages portal, go wordpress migration services and my research rants.

Posted in business model | Leave a comment

Worst thing can happen to you is to have “some” success

Posted on February 14, 2012 by

When you have no clients (and you’ve been pushing the product long enough) is easy to realize that you better drop the product and go back to the drawing board.

When you have many many clients, it’s a no brainer to go on (and become filthy rich :-) )

The problem is when you have some clients (e.g. imagine that you make, let’s say, 1500 USD per month with your product). Not enough to make a living (at least in many countries/cities, specially if you have to support your family) with the product but enough to be willing to stick to it.

Sure, you could try to take yourself out of the equation and automate as much as possible the product and all the tasks surrounding it (support, publicity,…) but still it will still occupy some of your time (or it will slowly die so you’ll lose the 1500 anyway).

You could also stick for a while and see if you can bring up considerably the revenue but how long should you try? When it’s better to just stop and try a different idea that could work better (or not, and then you’d lose the 1500 again!).

An alternative option would be to try to sell the product before moving on the next idea (not sure how much you can get for a product that makes 1500 USD per month, probably no more than 20-30.000 USD)

Tough decisions…

Posted in business model, customers, philosophy | 5 Comments