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It was a productive hour today, and then some. I met with my teacher for the college class I'm taking, Entrepreneurship II. She is awesome! www.michelleneujahr.com is her website and I tried to go there but it was down. I blame TW, and if you are familiar with ISPs you know who I'm talking about.

We talked for an hour a she gave me many ideas and suggestions for social marketing. Marketing is what this blog is about, my attempts at trying to market our products. So far, while I've tried a few things and nothing seems to be the big hit, it has generated further traffic. Google AdWords is one example of something that has generated traffic, albeit no sales. I'll have further analysis on that one on Monday.

Social marketing (e.g. Facebook, LinkenIn, blogs, etc) is the newest trend where everyone seems to be congregating. I haven't touched Twitter yet, but it seems like another path I'll need to pursue. But what I've tried so far, while it seems to make some progress, I need to figure out how to use it to generate income. I don't like the "in your face" approach to sales, because that just pisses me off, and I don't want to piss other people off. My idea of sales is this; here it is, if you want it, buy it.

My meetings with Michelle are for the college's Business Incubator program, to build or grow your business. I know my weakness is in marketing, so our concentration will be in that area, and whatever other areas she deems need work. It will be work, but it is our business and we want/need it to be successful. Jamie and I have way too many ideas that need an outlet. We figure we will be doing this anyway, whether or not we make millions, although millions would be nice. We just want to generate enough income that we can perpetuate ourselves and continue spending our time/efforts on creating games and utilities that we want. We know there are markets for everything we do, we just need to get the word out. Build traffic. That is the key.

What is my mission for the week? While I have many things to do the most important one is to figure out the demographics and psychographics for every product we have. As homework I had to figure out that information for our casual games, it was interesting. We need to target just that group and if we hit other groups, which invariably happens, all the better. So I need to know what groups need to be targeted for each product. It should be some interesting research. I know I need to generate enough income that I can do this full-time because it already appears to be more than a full-time job.

Well, I found two books on my shelf that really serve no purpose anymore. I went through both and found subject areas of interests and gleaned a few items from them, then placed them on my "to disappear" pile. One was about starting a business in Florida, we're now in Maine so that one is useless. The other was about forming a business in any state, but we're already formed. Another book was on legal forms, so I kept that one. The last one was about starting your own business. I found a chapter in it, about 100 pages, about advertising and marketing. Hmm, I even had a bookmark on the damn page. Talk about filing and forgetting, oops. Hopefully I'll have the time to read that book today.

Two pots of coffee and the day still feels weird. It's like I feel I had a very busy morning and accomplished stuff, but I don't know what I did. There's nothing to really show that anything was done either. I guess the best thing I can do is go to work early and do a bunch of crap that I won't get paid for. How's that for fun? Oh, the futility!

Ouch, December. What happened to this year?

Yesterday was an active day for Google AdWords, with 11 clicks. Still no sales though, ugh. Maybe it's just the upcoming Christmas insanity but everything seems a bit "off". Are the planets misaligned? Work has been screwy too, with a haphazard schedule and lots of bad weather. I'm not sure what is going on but I have a feeling it doesn't bode well.

Onward with my search. I went through maybe three dozen websites today, looking for updates and useful information. I found absolutely nothing I could use, and nothing that could give me direction either. It was very frustrating. Looking at my computer is becoming annoying as well. I think my mission for tomorrow is to look through the business-related books I have on my shelf to see if any of them have any insight. I've wanted to clean house anyways, so if they suck, guess what? ... Good riddance!

That makes me think of the movie, "History of the World: Part I". "I love my people. Pull!" BANG. If it wasn't illegal, and I had a shotgun, I could toss the books out the window and blast them to oblivion. Boy that sounds like fun.

Ack, what happened to the weekend? I've been trying to get things working right with creating a presentation for my college class and having no luck. OpenOffice has been giving me a lot of grief on this front. I remember this being a lot easier and maybe the new version has taken a few steps backwards. I am running out of time.

Google AdWords is over 60,000 impressions now with 102 clicks, but no sales. As our budget amount is slowly running out, the return on investment (ROI) is still zero. That doesn't bode well for this adventure. Of interest is only the angle of one of our ads, "MahJongg With A Twist". Just that line seems to be doing well, or getting the most click through. I'm going to keep that in mind for some searching once our ad campaign is over.

I've been reading a lot of posts online and found several documents which I am also reading through. Most I find to be rehashes of what I've already read, and no real new ideas to try. I'll continue on this track a little more and then I'll have to dream up my own ideas. There appears to be no real answer to the problems we are finding. It is the same old story, you have to be popular to get popular.

Fedex, previously Kinkos, has an annoying website. It doesn't work in Firefox so I needed to start up a Windows Virtual Machine in order to send my brochure in. Luckily it seems to be working fine and I should know in a few moments whether it takes it or not. Hmm, it took, and should be ready in 4.5 hours. Wow, is that true? I guess I'll find out soon enough.

I hadn't checked Google AdWords in several days, I have been just letting it ride to see what happens. So far we've had 57,000+ impressions and 89 clicks, no sales though. Jamie has noticed about a 4,000% increase in spam though. I think advertising works for those people already popular, but you can't really use it to get popular. I'll leave it active a few more days to see what happens. I was hoping it would generate traffic and sales prior to Christmas.

So, with press releases complete and advertising going down the tubes in a hurry, I'm needing to shift to learning mode again. I need to figure out what else to try in this marketing effort. It may just be a matter of having something go viral, but there must be outlets out there for sleeper hits. Time to hit the books and websites in my quest for knowledge.

Ended up driving yesterday, too much fog to mess with and I didn't like the potential of ending up somewhere I didn't want to be. The saying goes, "If you have time to spare, go by air." The drive back sucked more than the drive there, too many damn idiots with their high beams on. Had one moron try to merge with us. I sure wish people knew how to drive.

With the brochure designed we discussed my presentation and what screenshots I would need, etc. It was a long drive so we had plenty of time to sort things out. I feel really good about the order of information I'll pass along. Now I just need to script what I'll say and begin practicing it so the flow is right. Only two classes left and then the final night for the presentations. It's almost Christmas too. Maybe I should begin shopping, oops.

Today's mission is to submit the brochure for printing and catch up on some marketing reading. I keep getting emails and stuff on the RSS feed from CopyBlogger. There is always so much to do.

It was a good three hours of work today, at least. I kind of lost track at some point. I was able to finish the design of the brochure and tweaked several things until both Jamie and I were happy with it. Since tomorrow is Thanksgiving there was no sense in submitting it to Kinkos for processing, so I'll do that on Friday. Plus it gives a day or so for the work to settle and I'll review it once more for typos and such in case I missed anything.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. We won't be around tomorrow so don't expect to find anything posted here. We're flying, hopefully, down to Western Mass for the day. I much prefer a 2.5 hour round trip flight as opposed to at least a 7 hour round trip drive. Since it is a holiday it would most likely be more, especially around Boston and Worcester.

I found a template for brochures on the OpenOffice website, and it is working out just fine. I can then print it out as a PDF and upload that. After titling every leaf, or page or whatever you want to call it, I began gathering the screenshots. To keep the size down I resized them all to an appropriate dimension. Right now I will piece together a rough idea and then for our Friday meeting we will finalize the design. Then I can upload it and get that piece of this puzzle done.

For the rest of my presentation I have decided on a format and a series of events. I guess "events" is the best word. Or maybe "segments" would work better. If I time it for about twelve minutes I'll probably talk fast and be done in 10. I have to fill between 10 and 15 minutes. That should be no problem. I also will intermix slides with video. It will be a good taste of the company and of what we can do.

I can't believe I only have three weeks left to my class, and the presentation is for the final one. It doesn't really give me much time. I may need to take some extra time off from work to get it done properly. That shouldn't be too difficult since a couple of my students are at the point of taking a checkride with the FAA. Good luck to them!

The planning began for the brochure I want to do for my college class. I dreamed up the idea and began organizing how I want the document to look in my mind. I then looked around online for potential places to print them and found Kinko's does it online. Just upload your file and it is $1.43 per tri-fold color brochure. Not bad! You can also either have it sent to you or pick it up at your choice of local locations. I will definitely try that. They also allow you to upload from multiple file formats and can keep them on their server if you want to reprint. I'll have to see what other things they have available for businesses.

Tomorrow I'll sketch out the design for the brochure and then begin gathering screenshots. Then I will need to figure out what text I'll have where and begin formatting it. This ought to be interesting since it will showcase everything we do here at Lost Luggage Studios. I like the idea of a rough drawing showing what goes where, instead of just slapping it together haphazardly and making adjustments. In the giant scheme of things this will prepare us for when we do movies (e.g. storyboard). More on the brochures tomorrow.

Yesterday I felt a tad bit "off". Not sure what was going on but after my weird day at work I did not feel like turning my computer on. I guess those days will happen, hence my lack of posting in this blog.

Google AdWords is up to 35,000 impressions with 42 clicks, still no sales. Looking around at other advertising and marketing prospects leaves me feeling a bit annoyed. It's hard to justify the usability of an option when you have nothing to gauge it against. I tried to find other benchmarks from companies in our field but they never release those details. It all comes back to the fact that you must be popular to get popular, the typical double-edged sword. All we can seem to do is keep plugging away at what we do until we stumble upon the sleeper hit. Like I said before, it's all a matter of time.

I think I'll merge my marketing efforts with my final presentation homework for my Entrepreneurship II class I'm taking at the local community college. I've dreamed up a brochure to use as a handout and I'll continue with planning that process. It should be interesting. Once I'm done I'll be sure to make it available for download on our website, for those that are interested. Hopefully I can get an "A" from it!

Not much new on the advertising front. Yesterday was a slow day for Google AdWords. Only about 2,000 impressions with 4 clicks. I'll continue to check it daily for a while but will let it run its course and build some statistics.

Meanwhile, Jamie and I are going to have a big meeting today to determine our hit list of things to do before the end of the year. This will give me focus on my next marketing project. We have a bunch of updates we'd like to do and each one could warrant another round of press releases. The nicest thing about doing that is company exposure. Our name will keep getting out there and growing over time. Time, there's never enough of it. Speaking of which, why did I wake up at 6am when I could have slept as late as I wanted to today? I think I'm broken.

I spent several minutes today looking around at the past couple of weeks worth of my marketing effort. Surprisingly, Bytten still has my press release of the Anirah update on their front page. That's awesome! All of the other PR sites still show our press release but it is quickly being buried by the new stuff, which is understandable. How long does it take before news is acted upon? My guess would be that if it were going to be acted upon, it would happen as close to the release as possible. If a publisher, either print or web, was looking for what we were reporting news about, then they wouldn't wait for somebody else to grab it and deliver.

That said, this entire PR effort has been a test to see what it would be like and what it could possibly do for us. Like everything else we do it is a matter of time. The more we can get our name out there the better off we will be. I will continue to dream up potential news items, using whatever angle I can for a new product or an upgrade. But my most important mission will be the pursuit of promoting my blog, this blog. Any suggestions?

More tweaking of the Google AdWords began my day today. We are up to almost 30,000 impressions with 25 clicks. I turned off one of our ads, which contains the word "game" in it. That was becoming our most costly ad to display and pay for the click. I'm guessing there are certain keywords which are costly. I've concentrated our keywords to "MahJongg" and "puzzle" since those ads are much cheaper.

Here's my final review of the three press release sites I'm still awaiting some kind of action from. Click Press, nothing. Since I am almost positive they had shown it at one point I have to discount this website. For S&Gs I may use them again, then I'll screenshot the release and when it disappears I will know for sure. That could be fun. "Lost Luggage Studios Releases Gigantic Chicken Chaser v1.0". Uh oh, did I just create a new gaming potential?

Download3k? Seeing that the entire press release section of their website was unknown to me until an email about updating Anirah on their site, there wasn't much of a possibility that they would actually list our release. So, they have met my expectations.

Lastly, PR Free. They are, laughingly, not free. If you are a charity then it is free. But for others they have a recommended $30 minimum fee to put your press release out. Well, until we actually see any returns whatsoever from a single press release, paying for them is out of the question.

It has been over two weeks now since we began the press release cycle. Of the seven releases that were published we've seen no sales and only one actual contact. That contact turned into a brief game review on the website in question.

Do we have an increase in traffic from any of it? Hard to tell. Do we have any increase in traffic from our advertising campaign? Minuscule at best. I'm thinking both efforts take time to build up momentum.

More advertising analysis, since that is the major news at the moment. This morning I checked Google AdWords again and we had 3,000 impressions yesterday and 8 more clicks. Still nothing new for sales though, but after yesterday's math session we will need a lot more clicks before we see any income. That is kind of disheartening.

I also had a brief meeting with another local advertising opportunity. The potential for reaching local people is there, to the tune of 25,000 to 30,000 people per week. Is it worth $60 per week though? Not sure about that. To do this nationally would cost a lot, and I do mean a lot. We are currently budgeted on Google for a $5 per day limit. We could always increase our budget to $10 per day and maybe cover as much, but on a global level. I guess the big question will be in converting those clicks to revenue.

Back to Google AdWords. Yesterday I tweaked one of the keywords we used and changed one of our advertisements. It will be very interesting to see what transpires over the next few weeks. Hopefully we can discover what works and what doesn't. I found out how to limit our cost-per-click (CPC) on the keywords, but found no way to control the CPC on the ads themselves. Our first day, the budget was exhausted after 5 clicks. Our second day took 8 clicks to eat through the $5.

I began looking through whatever pages I could find and discovered a neat page listing demographics. There's not much data there right now, and it only populates with information from sites that report. Of interest is that about 70% of almost 200 impressions where female. I did also found some ways to tweak the amount, or maximum, for a cost-per-click for both the ads and keywords. I'm not sure what will happen with those but we shall see. My initial value turned off all our keywords because Google's estimate was a lot higher than what I entered. I'm hoping that by the end of the first week I will know what keywords are working and which of our ads has the best click through rate (CTR). Ugh, this is a field I never expected to need to learn about.

Advertising is a scary subject. My best definition is; throwing away a lot of money in the hopes that you sell something. Since people are bombarded with ads everywhere that they go, how can a single ad be successful? I block ads on the Internet with Firefox's AdBlock, and ignore the ones that do show up. If I want to buy something, I go and buy it. I don't need some advertisement telling me to buy this super-duper beer guzzling mug. Hmm, maybe I do. Okay, bad example.

Today is the day after our ad campaign with Google AdWords began. Looking at the stats was a little bit confusing at first. I had to dig through several pages and read a bunch of info boxes in order to determine what transpired yesterday. Here's the breakdown of our first attempt at advertising.

We received a little over 2,500 impressions. An impression is simply your text ad being displayed, somewhere. Of those impressions over 1,700 of them were from the Google network. What this means is that companies, other websites, have set themselves up to grab pertinent ads and display them on their website. What does this mean for us? Targeted advertising, in essence. Sites that relate to what we're advertising get relevant ads to use. For a more in depth description you'll have to dig into Google's information.

Alright, out of those 2,500 or so impressions we received 5 clicks. A click means that someone actually clicked on the ad and was sent to our website. Sadly enough I don't think we can track what happened from there. We do track how many people download and purchase our software, but how can we know if that particular download or purchase was from that ad click?

Now on to the math part. Of 2,500 impressions we get 5 clicks, or 0.2%. Of the 5 clicks we probably end up with maybe 10% of those people downloading the software, and the 10% is just a guesstimate (or a WAG for those so inclined) since downloading is free. We know that a normal conversion from that point is to the tune of 1%. That gets us to really small numbers, so let's boost the figures a bit. If we were to receive 100,000 impressions, at 0.2% we could expect 200 clicks. Of the 200 clicks at 10%, we could expect 20 downloads, which equates to 0.2 actual purchases. Bah, we'd need more than 100,000 impressions then. To get 1 sale we'd need to have 500,000 impressions and 1,000 clicks, then 100 downloads. That's a lot of exposure.

Knowing the above, we made some changes to our advertising campaign which we will analyze tomorrow. How will our results from yesterday differ? We shall see.

I spent well more than an hour today, but I really don't know how much more.

I started with taking a deeper look into LiveJournal and I found some settings to tweak. I should be able to get a list of people that have at least looked at this blog. Since it is a public blog, I hope it at least shows unique IP addresses or something better than "Anonymous viewed your blog 623 times". Okay, does that mean a single user viewed my blog 623 times or that 623 people viewed me? Or was it some derivative of that? See, too complicated. So far I don't think anyone is reading this adventure. If you are, wave.

With Technorati, there wasn't much I could do there. Sometimes it seems like editing profile information on their site does absolutely nothing. I've tried to change my blog information to include categories, but they never show up. When you go to edit the info it also doesn't show what the current info is. I think it is broken.

I was able to do some research on Technorati to find out more about their Technorati Authority value. I have a value of 1, yay! Unfortunately, 1 is at the bottom of the food chain. I tried searching through the available blogs being listed and shown on their site and I can't find mine. As near as I can figure, if your value is below a certain point then you just don't exist. The moral of the story, and the crux of my search, indicates that I need to promote my blog and get it popular before I can be popular. Hmm, that sounds like a lot of things in life.

I reviewed everything I could about our ad campaign with Google AdWords that will begin tomorrow. I also added a third text ad, so it has a few to cycle through and we can see what works best. It will be an interesting week on that front. I'll watch it closely for several days in a row and then check it every other day or so. I'm really curious as to how this will work, how much it will cost, and how many sales it will generate. Too many unknowns right now.

I also received a response about another potential advertising venue. But that will cost $25 per week and reaches 9,000 or so readers in only the local area. Not sure how effective that will be. Honestly I don't think 9,000 people being exposed to our advertising will be sufficient. I sent an email to their corporate office asking about national advertising. Odds are that that will cost in the $1,000+ range, well out of what we can currently afford. I will not throw money into any kind of campaign unless it has a proven track record, proven by me in a previous undertaking. It may be worth trying once we have generated enough revenue to have disposable cash. I think that's what advertising is about. I've read so often that companies exhaust all their financing in a big advertising push that does nothing. That's not a very good plan at all.

Copyblogger had so much information I kept following links to the tune of another hour of reading. It gave me a few ideas but nothing really new to try. I already seem to be doing the majority of what they suggest. The biggest thing of interest is that I find myself on the right track. The most I have been able to get out of this website is a deeper understanding for the reasons why I have done what I've done, as far as online marketing and blogs. What I figured as being common sense, at least to me, may not be as common as I had suspected. Maybe it is something easy to dismiss or forget, I'm not sure.

One of the biggest drawbacks, or annoyances, that I have with this blogging site is that I can't find out how many people are subscribed to my RSS feed. Something as simple as that should be easy to figure out and report. Maybe it is part of the premium (i.e. paid) services. I'll have to dig deeper here because knowing this information is something I deem as essential knowledge.

Today I spent almost one and a half hours researching and learning more about blogging. My next mission will be to dig deeper into FAQs concerning LiveJournal and Technorati to see what else I can do with them to increase my exposure.

I actually, and finally, received an email from a potential advertising company. I had given up on them, it had been so long. My first attempt at emailing them was in September. On their website they said to contact a certain person for inquiries, and they gave the email address, so I did. Then at the beginning of November I went to the website and found a different way to send an inquiry, so I tried that. Oh, it gets better, really. The email contained several apologies and his real email address, that's it. Where was the advertising info? Bah, email attempt number three.

The last three press release sites on my submitted but waiting for action list still have not published our release. I'll check one more time, next Tuesday, then I'll move them to the worthless pile. By that time it will have been two weeks since I submitted them. If they haven't published them by then, they probably won't. Then I have to come up with some kind of way to rate each site, as to their usefulness. I haven't figured that one out yet. Most sites have a pay option, to get more coverage and exposure on your press release. But, why pay for something you are not sure the site can provide for you? If their free service does absolutely nothing, it stands to reason that their paid services will perform ten times better. Ten times zero equals? Bah!

I went back to a previous website to refresh my last used time in Weblinks, the Firefox plug-in Jamie wrote. The name of the site? Copyblogger.com. Great website. Every time I go there I keep finding more and more things to read. So I set myself up for their newsletter as well as an RSS feed. This opened up even more information to read. I'm not sure how much time I spent today looking through all of this, and there is still a lot more to read. I think I know what I'll be doing tomorrow.

I've been looking at further advertising options and it seems like the common practice is link sharing. Some sites will put your ad up for free as long as you put a link to them on your website. From what I understand of link sharing it legitimizes websites by giving them more exposure, thus pushing them up the hierarchy on search engines. I will look into this a bit more before I venture there.

For press releases, Click Press, PR Free, and Download3k are still not showing anything. I'll continue checking but if they haven't done anything by now I seriously doubt they will.

As far as all the other sites, still nothing different in traffic and/or sales. Our advertising campaign with Google AdWords is set to start on Nov 16^th, so we'll see how that goes as well. For some odd reason I keep having a line from Galaxina popping around in my head, "Any old port in a storm, any old storm". It was in relation to a whorehouse. I wonder how that applies to our situation. Hmmm, dancing girls?

I checked some of the PR sites to see if they showed stats, and not many do, or you have to pay for that feature. The ones I did find didn't show much in the way of views, so popularity of the release isn't there. We need more exposure, that's my take on it.