Browsing Category: Business

There are a few fundamental truths when selling things online. The first is that you need visitors to your website. The second is that you need those visitors to buy something. Anything else they do, such as blog or tweet about you, is just a bonus.

A lot of times people concentrate on getting traffic, instead of on obtaining quality traffic.

This article contains most of the traffic generation techniques I’ve used in the last few years, along with some statistics on how well they perform. Naturally, your results may differ from these, but they’re a good starting point for evaluating different methods.

All statistics are taken from an 18 month period (September 2007 – February 2009) to give as large a sample size as possible. There are nearly 1,000 different referrers for this period, so these statistics are certainly not 100% accurate. They do give a good picture of what works, which is the important thing.

Anyway, enough with the disclaimers. Each table contains four columns:

Pages Per Visit

This is the average number of pages a visitor looks at. A higher number means they look around your site more, so keep an eye on this number.

Adding relevant links to the bottom of pages, or sprinkling them throughout your content can help. Be careful not to add too many links though, so you don’t distract visitors from downloading or buying your product.

Time on Site

The average amount of time a visitor spends on your site. Again, higher numbers are better, as it generally means they’re reading and not just skimming.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave your site after a single page. For example, a visitor who enters your homepage and then types another link in the address bar without following your links has “bounced”. The lower this number, the better.

Download Rate

This is from a goal I set up in Google Analytics to track downloads. A lot of my sales come from people who buy from within the demo, so the higher this number the better. If a source of traffic doesn’t produce any downloads, it’s a sign that I’m advertising to the wrong people.

As you’ll see, there’s a big difference between the best traffic sources and the worst. The most traffic to sodaware.net comes from search engines, but search engine optimisation is a big topic that I wanted to avoid, so this article concentrates on sources that are easier to control.

Paid Advertising

Google AdWords

This is one of the easiest ways to buy traffic. All you have to do is write a short textual advert about your product or website, and then target keywords that people search for. It’s quick to set up, and you know visitors are looking for what you’re offering because they searched for it.

On the flipside, there’s a lot of depth to AdWords, and it takes a long time to get really great results. Throwing down a few dollars is only the start, and you’ll lot of your time will be spent on optimising your campaigns and weeding out underperformers.

Project Wonderful

Project Wonderful is even easier to use than Google AdWords. Create a graphical button or banner, select the criteria for sites you want to advertise on and you’re away.

Project Wonderful has the advantage that ads are extremely cheap, as you pay per day, not per click or impression. It’s a good way of getting lots of hits, and the campaign option makes things even easier. However, it’s quite easy to spend a lot of money and end up with little to show if you’re not careful.

Manual bids that are tailored to each site you’re bidding on seem to work the best. They takes more work, but the responses are generally higher.

Below are stats for the top three bids I ran.

Text Link Ads

According to Text Link Ads, the real power of this method comes from the increase in search engine ranking for your site. They recommend you leave your ad running for several months to evaluate it, as search engines take a while to update.

Over a five month period, I saw no change in my ranking. Having said that, I was trying to rank on very competitive terms, so it may be better for niche phrases instead.

These are statistics from the sites that ads were placed on. As you can see, the links themselves didn’t bring particularly good traffic compared to other methods.

Free Advertising

StumbleUpon

Although you can pay for Stumbles, I’m putting it in the free category as you can get good results without paying. Stumblers generally fall into two categories: People who will stay and read, and people who will leave within a few seconds. This dramatically skews the visit time down and bounce rate.

StumbleUpon brings in a big spike of traffic at the beginning, and quickly tales off after a few days. It continues to bring in visitors over time, and sometimes you’ll get secondary spikes. There’s also the chance that visitors will stumble your other content, leading to more spikes.

For the main page, the were quite poor, but for articles and resources it works much better. Your best option is to add tips, hints or guides to your site and have them stumbled.

Articles about unique qualities of your product will perform better, as long as you go easy on the sales talk and concentrate on writing something of value.

Article Marketing

This is a simple technique, but it can have good results. The process involves writing articles that target certain keywords. Each article will contain a link to your site in the article footer. This article is then submitted to article directories, which generally rank high in the search engines. For example, if you’re selling a solitaire game you could write about tips for playing the game and include a link at the bottom of the article.

It may sound a little bit spammy, but it isn’t if you provide value to your readers.

So far this has been one of the best methods of traffic generation I’ve used. It takes effort to research and write your article, but the traffic quality is extremely high. An article I wrote over a year ago still sends a good amount of traffic which converts extremely well into downloads and sales.

Article marketing is a topic I’ll be writing more about in the future.

Blog Commenting

Find a blog that relates to your topic, and make a relevant comment that contains a link to your website. As long as your comment is useful and the blog gets a reasonable amount of traffic, you’ll get visits. Depending on your contribution, you may also develop a relationship with the blogger which can bring more traffic.

The first result in the table below is the result of a single trackback I made three years ago. It’s brought several hundred visits (and still brings in a dozen or so a week), but the traffic doesn’t convert. This technique works much better for getting blog readers rather than customers.

Forum Posting

This is similar to blog commenting, but the link to your site goes in your forum signature. Again, the benefit here comes from generating an online presence, rather than raw traffic power.

These are the top three forum referrals to sodaware.net.

"How To" blog articles

Think of a problem you face daily, and write a blog article about solving it. Its simple, quick, and if you get the title (and problem) right you can get a lot of exposure and links.

I get a lot of traffic to one "how to" in particular, but the vast majority of visitors don’t stay for anything else. This makes sense, seeing as they’re searching for a solution to a problem and not for games.

The best advice I can give is to treat this method like writing a recipe with one of your products as the ingredient. This way you’re providing something valuable, and also encouraging downloads and sales.

Link directories

I tried an automated submission programme a while ago, but I’m yet to see a single visitor from any directory.

dmoz.org is worth submitting to, but as it’s human edited it can take a while to get added.

Blog Carnivals

I’ve entered blog carnivals as well as hosted them, and the results have been a little mixed. Hosting brings in a decent amount of short term traffic, but I suspect it’s mainly people who submitted articles that visit.

It’s a good way of getting a few more readers for your blog, and be good for spreading your site around.

Game Buttons

I tried these out in my $19.95 experiment and absolutely hated them. I think they cheapened the look of the site, and most of the banners contained images I didn’t really want to see. The other problem is you have to make a lot of impressions to generate any decent amount of traffic.

Free Developer Resources

The "For Developers" section is where I put articles, source code and tools for other developers to use. It didn’t bring in much traffic to begin with, but posting about some of the resources on forums helped.

WikiPedia

This is a five minute method that works well, but if done incorrectly you’ll end up looking like a spammer, so use it wisely.

Find an article on WikiPedia that relates to something on your site, and add a link to it in the "External Links" section of the page. Remember that WikiPedia monitors links that are added, so if you don’t add value to the topic you’ll find your link nuked (and you could also be banned). For example, my interview with Hanako Games is on the Hanako Games WikiPedia page.

As with text link ads, the real benefit here is getting links and increasing your search engine ranking.

Traffic Exchanges

This one is a little hit and miss, although it’s not as bad as some of the other methods. You add your link to a directory, and its position is dependent on how many other sites you visit. For example, visiting 30 sites may put you on the first page, which will get you more visitors.

The downside is that most people are only visiting your page to increase their own rank, but the traffic isn’t as bad as I expected.

Conclusion

This is just a small sample of the various method of traffic generation techniques out there. If you’re trying to increase your site’s traffic, just remember to measure what your visitors are doing, not just how many you’re getting. Sure, it’s nice to see big numbers in your hit counter, but that means nothing if they don’t stay and buy from you.

In part 1 I gave an overview of the experiment and what methods were used. Today I’ll be explaining what happened. Just as refresher, here’s the idea behind this challenge:

“If I had $19.95 to spend on advertising and I had to do everything myself, what would give me the greatest return on investment?”

Results are split into two categories, “paid” and “free”. Where applicable the number of ad impressions and clicks are shown. There are also some exciting charts and analysis at the end too.

Paid Advertising

First up we have the paid advertising, the main focus of this experiment. The total number of hits generated was quite impressive for the amount spent. Sales and newsletter sign-ups were the best I’ve seen whilst the adverts were running, so something must have worked.

Google AdWords

I wasn’t really sure what to expect with AdWords, but I was pleasantly be surprised by the results. The cost per click was a little more than I would have liked, but the clickthrough rate was quite high for a first time ad on some pretty competitive keywords.

First time advertisers must pay a fee to set-up their account, so in effect only $9.95 of the advertising budget actually went on displaying ads.

Project Wonderful

Project Wonderful use an auction based advertisement model, where the highest bidder has their ads displayed on their chosen slot.

To start with I placed a few manual bids to get a feel for how the site worked. Once I was more comfortable with it, I placed a campaign to last for the rest of the challenge. The campaign feature in Project Wonderful is a massive time saver and is quite comprehensive. Simply enter the criteria for sites you’d like to advertise on, and the system will go out and bid on appropriate slots.

One thing you’ll notice is that you often go under your bid limit. The total amount spent on Project Wonderful was $18.59, so there was a little change left to run a few more slots. Another important thing to note is that the most expensive ads are not always the best. A $3 bid on a rather busy site (icanhascheezburger.com/) only brought in around 30 visits, whereas $0.57 on rpghost.com brought in over 100.

Text Link Ads

I use Text Link Ads (affil) to generate revenue, so it seemed only right to try them out from an advertisers point of view. The ad cost $17, and with only 20 visits the cost per click wasn’t very good. To make matters worse, 80% of visitors left without clicking anything else on the site. Oh dear.

Of course, Text Link Ads is (or rather was) more about boosting search engine rankings by getting links for your keywords. Google has recently punished people who place text link adverts on their sites (including myself), so I’m not sure how this model of advertising will continue. In this case it wasn’t really worth the money, as any improvements in the site’s ranking have been wiped out by the latest Page Rank update. Oh well.

StumbleUpon

Everybody knows the WWW is a huge time waster. StumbleUpon is time wasting on steroids. By entering your interests, StumbleUpon will let you “stumble” onto sites that fit into your likes and dislikes. I use it myself and have found hundreds of new sites I never would have seen otherwise. It’s really worth installing, especially if you have Firefox.

The idea behind StumbleAds is that you pay for “stumbles” from people interested in your site’s theme. Each stumble costs $0.05, and you can set how many will be used each day, which is useful for spreading the server load.

My first try at creating a campaign was rejected for not having enough visitors to send. I found this unusual as I’d submitted it in the “Video Games” section which apparently has around 154,000 subscribers. Changing the site to “Shareware” got it accepted, and I was away. $19.95 would effectively buy 399 visitors, but only 281 showed up in the log. I assume that means a percentage of visitors blog Analytics or JavaScript.

Free Advertising

The free advertising was much harder to measure, as it came from a lot of smaller sources which don’t usually have their own reporting features. The range of traffic was quite varied, with a few surprises as well as a few disappointments.

LinkReferral.com

LinkReferral.com is quite a simple idea. Your site is placed in a directory, and its position within this directory is dependant on how active within the community you are. By visiting other member sites you gain places, which improves your exposure. Writing (good) reviews and helping in the forums also improves your rank. Other members can also review your site so you get feedback.

Naturally it doesn’t work quite like that. Plenty of reviews consist of “Great site link me kthxbye”, and there are a fair few sites which are…below average. Having said that, for the amount of work it’s a good way of getting feedback and a few hits. Some of the reviews are quite useful, and I’ve had a few website errors pointed out by members.

Traffic wise, the bounce rate (number of people leaving without interacting) is about the same as StumbleUpon’s, which isn’t as bad as I was expecting.

Link Bait

Link baiting is the process of crafting articles and content with the deliberate intention to attract a big response. For an idea of what these articles are like, check out the front pages of digg or reddit.

The article that worked for me was “Game Design Lessons: Halo“, and a quick email to the editors at the excellent halo.bungie.org quickly got me over 800 visits. There were also a few referrers from other Halo fan sites as the link spread. Sadly Bungie didn’t visit my house with cake and an Xbox 360, or even and Xbox 360 cake. Maybe next time.

The only other attempt at link bait was the Pirate Week series of posts, which didn’t exactly set the Internet on fire. The Carnival of Video Game Bloggers also brought in a few visitors, but nothing compared to the Halo post.

Flashing Banners

You might have seen the square adverts if you’ve visited Flash arcade websites. Most of them animate far too quickly and include gratuitous flashes of cleavage to grab the viewer’s attention.

I’ll be honest. I ran the ads on this blog for a week and then had to remove them because I felt they were just too horrible. They were generating no traffic and made the place look untidy. I didn’t actually realise that one of the services (moregamers.com) gave out 50,000 free credits after a week of posting, which is where all 190 visits came from. Never again.

Forum Posts

I didn’t exactly go overboard with this technique, but I was still surprised at how poorly it did. I went for a more indirect approach with links in signatures and profiles instead of in actual posts, so perhaps that explains the poor response rate. It’s worth a try, but links need to be promoted a little more.

Blog Comments

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The Big Conclusion

Out of all the advertisements, creating link bait brought in the most visitors. However, most of them only stayed for the article and then left so sales weren’t really affected. Project Wonderful brought in lots of traffic from a wide variety of sites, and AdWords had a decent clickthrough rate and brought good visitors.

I promised charts, didn’t I?

Exciting, isn’t it?

And finally, two heat maps from before and after the ad campaign (click for bigger images).

Before 1779 visits / 557 clicks

After 3021 visits / 1222 clicks

The links to Cute Knight and Aveyond attracted a lot of clicks, especially from visitors referred by More Gamers. It must be the pretty pictures (and the fact that they rock).

So where does this leave things? As someone who’d never advertised online, it was easy to get started and quite nice to watch traffic appear with no more effort once the payment had been made.

One thing that’s worth pointing out is that it’s quite easy to blow a lot of money on advertising and see virtually no return. Different advertisers bring in different visitors, and spending money (or even time) on the wrong audience will quickly drain your resources.

From that perspective, Google AdWords brings in some of the most targeted visitors as they’re already looking for what you’re selling. Project Wonderful brings in a lot of traffic at a very low price, so it’s a great place to get started.

StumbleUpon didn’t perform nearly as well as I would have liked, but the content really wasn’t targeted well for StumbleUpon audience. Individual, focused articles tend to do much better than site front pages. In the past I’ve seen articles bring in thousands of visitors within a few hours, so it’s worth using to get some good exposure.

Text Link Ads were the biggest disappointment for me. The recent Google update hasn’t helped matters, but I did see a slight improvement in my search engine rankings shortly after the ad went live. A few well placed ads might still work for other search engines, but it takes a while for the visitors to show up.

The free advertisers weren’t as bad as expected. LinkReferral.com brings in a trickle of traffic, although the site users are looking for free advertising so may not be the biggest spenders. Some reviews are helpful though, and you may be able to build contacts if offering services and products to webmasters.

I still hate those flashing banners, even though they brought in nearly 200 hits. I really don’t see how they’re worth it for most sites as you have to generate around 100 impressions to get a single click. If you’re getting enough impressions to get a worthwhile amount of visitors from them, you really don’t need the help ;)

Forum posts and blog comments didn’t really do much for the traffic, but they’re easy to make and they may just catch someone’s eye. A few recommendations between friends can do more for your business than any amount of paid advertising.

More business articles: Sodaware.net – Article index

Traffic.

Traffic is the lifeblood of websites. Without people seeing your website, it’s just another piece of litter at the side of the Internet super-highway.

Digressing slightly, I really hate the term “Internet super-highway”. It has a real dot com boom feel to it. It’s the sort of term the media used when the online world was new and exciting and and everything that wasn’t electronic was going to become extinct.

Moving swiftly on…

There are plenty of ways to get more traffic. Whole websites and online communities are devoted to it. When starting out, it’s easy to just look at what free options are available. After all, why pay for traffic when you can get it for free?

The thing is, you may never find something better if you don’t experiment with the available options.

I decided to try it out.

This is part one of a two part series that covers an experiment I ran during September.

The Setup

The idea behind the challenge was as follows:

“If I had $19.95 to spend on advertising and I had to do everything myself, what would give me the greatest return on investment?”

Why $19.95? It seems to be the common price for a single Indie game, so it would make it easier to see what percentage of a sale went on advertising. It also meant I wouldn’t break the bank if things went wrong.

The “everything else” clause served two purposes. The first was to stop myself from spending money on advert designers. The second, and perhaps most important, was to act as an excuse in case the ads didn’t perform particularly well.

Finally I picked several forms of “free” advertising to try to see how they compared. I couldn’t use the $19.95 benchmark for these, but I needed some form of limit so I used “time”. My limit was thirty minutes a day on each method. That’s not a particularly long time, but I didn’t really want to devote a full eight hour day to commenting on blogs and forums.

Here’s the list of paid and unpaid advertisers I settled on:

Paid Advertisers:

• Google AdWords — AdWords appear on nearly all Google search results pages, and AdSense is shown on a huge amount of other websites.
• Text Link Ads — TLA sell text links on other sites that are designed to increase your search engine rankings as well as generate clicks.
• Project Wonderful — Project Wonderful sell banner ads in a variety of shapes and sizes. Advertisers bid on different slots, and the highest bidding adverts are displayed.
• StumbleUpon — Users install a browser toolbar, and are given random sites that will appeal to them when they click the “Stumble” button.

Free Advertising:

• LinkReferral.com — Place your link within a directory, and increase your rankings by participating in the community.
• Forum posts  — Make a post on a forum advertising your site and get traffic (and flames). I didn’t want to spam people, so I kept this to links in my profile and signature.
• Blog comments — Find interesting blog posts that are related to your website and leave a comment.
• Free banners — Square images that flash and generally annoy. Gain exposure by generating ad impressions and clicks.
• Link bait — Articles deliberately crafted to attract attention.

So there we have the basics of the experiment. $79.80 to spend on four advertisers, and just under three hours a day to spend promoting the site.

Measuring the Results

It wouldn’t be much of an experiment without measuring the results. At the very least I needed to measure where visitors were coming from, but it would also be handy to know what they were doing once they arrived.

Most web-hosting comes with weblog analysis built in, usually Webalizer or AWStats. Several third-parties offer a more visual approach to visitor tracking, such as Crazy Egg and Google Analytics.

I decided to use Analytics to monitor where people were coming from, and Crazy Egg to see what they were doing once they arrived at the index page. Webalizer kept a watchful eye on the blog, but as the blog wasn’t my main focus I left it out of my main tracking.

What happened?

The full results of the experiment are revealed in part two, including how many hits each source generated and how much they cost per click. There’s also a rundown of how the free advertising performed.

There will also be charts like the one below. If that doesn’t get you excited, I don’t know what will…

To give an idea of how things looked before, the following heat map was generated from 56 days worth of data before the test. That’s 1784 front page visits and 560 clicks, if you’re interested in precise figures.

Click the preview below for the full image.

In total, the experiment generated an additional 2261 visitors in 30 days. Where did they come from, and what did they do once they arrived? All is revealed in part two…

We’d all like more traffic, wouldn’t we? Well here’s something quick and easy you can do that will not only bring in traffic in the short-term, but also increase your Google page rank so you’ll get more search traffic in the long-term.

All you have to do is write a review of the site. You can write anything you want, good or bad. The only requirements are that you link to this post, and you must also link to the main page (www.sodaware.net) using any of the following terms:

• Free game downloads
• Free computer games
• Download computer games
• Download free games
• Downloadable games

Here’s a quick example of what we’re looking for:

Sodaware is a great website that features many free game downloads. You can get links and traffic by writing a review of the site.

As long as it includes the two links and the anchor text, the format is entirely up to you.

What you’ll get

Depending on the volume received, reviews will be published every two weeks. You’ll get a link in the update post, and also a link on this page. You’re free to choose the anchor text you’d like, as long as it’s not on the list of terms already mentioned. So that’s two links from this blog (currently a PageRank of 4) as well as the chance to increase your search engine rankings by choosing your own anchor text.

How to enter

Write your review as a single post, then send us an email with the following details:

• Subject: Sodaware.net Review
• Your name as you’d like it to appear
• The URL of the review
• Your homepage URL (should be the same domain as the review)
• The anchor text you’d like to use

That’s all there is to it! As long as your site is legal and not pornographic in nature, your review should be posted within two weeks.

Completing a software project takes time and a whole heap of patience (amongst other things). There are plenty of ways to stop a project from reaching the finishing line, which can cause big problems for an indie developer. Not all of the problems outlined here will affect indies, but you’re bound to find something you can use to help your project die a horrible, drawn-out death.

Different Kinds of Failure

There are plenty of ways that a project can be considered a failure. Some are more subtle than others, and may depend on the kind of software being developed and the individuals involved. Common types of project failure are:

• Over budget – The project is finished, possibly before the deadline, but cost much more than expected. This may not be such a big problem for large companies, but for a small business with a tight budget, it can be disastrous.
• Late delivery – The project is finished, but this time it is later than initially promised. Again, this may not be a fatal problem for a big company. For some people though, it can be so bad that a day late is a day without food on the table.
• Lack of promised or essential features – If you promise your software will do something and it doesn’t, then that’s a pretty big problem. This type of failure may be a symptom of trying to avoid either (or both) of the problems above.
• It’s not what the client wanted – Similar to the above, although it’s more likely to be caused by bad specifications than by poor scheduling.
• It doesn’t sell – This is another type of failure that can kill an indie developer. Failure to sell can be the result of poor market research, a lack of marketing or a plain sucky product.
• It’s cancelled – This one is pretty obvious. A cancelled project can be a sign of any number of symptoms, from bad management to a lack of resources.

Now we know the types of failure, let’s see what we need to do to achieve them!

Before Work Starts

There are plenty of things you can do before the project starts to make sure that it never succeeds.

• Ignore client requests – If you’re working directly for a client, make sure you ignore what they ask for. After all, you’re the one who knows how to create software, right? You can score bonus points here by mocking them, pretending to listen whilst doodling, or blinding them with jargon.
• Create fuzzy requirements – If you must create a list of the user’s requirements, make sure they’re as generic as possible. Don’t bother detailing what features the finished product will need, because you might want to change it later. Also make sure to include as little detail as possible, and leave the requirements open to speculation. If someone has to ask for clarification on what a feature does more than once, you know you’ve done your job.
• Don’t put effort into design – Design is for hippies, so make sure you only vaguely describe a few bits of the software. Make sure to leave out details on the most important features, and definitely don’t describe how people will use the software. Include a few designs scribbled on a beer mat, so you look like you’re completely devoted to the project.
• Implement the least important features first – When the client sees you’ve gone to the effort of implementing some of the least important features, they’ll think you’ve gone the extra mile. Make sure you escape before they realise what you gave them is just a husk of a product. Bonus points for using a smoke bomb in your escape.
• Schedule your time poorly – We all know you’re such a cool programmer that you can write a 3D engine in a few days, and that the AI routines are a three hour job for you. Make sure the schedule reflects how awesome you are.
• Swap people around – If you have more than one developer, make sure they all work on something they’re least proficient at. After all, this will help them get better, so you’re actually doing a good thing!
• Don’t specify the level of quality you’re aiming for – Your product will totally rock, so don’t bother setting any quality goals.

During Implementation

• Don’t use source control – There’s no point in wasting a few hours setting up a source control system, because nothing bad will ever happen to your code.
• Don’t organize yourself – Once work has begun, don’t bother interrupting the flow by reviewing your project’s progress. Remember – Everything will be all right.
• Ignore ready made components – There’s a plethora of well written, fully tested components that can be integrated into your software. Using them will shave precious time off your schedule, and allow you to actually get the damn project out of the door. They’re your worst enemy, and you should treat them as such.
• Make everything more complicated – If there’s a choice between writing a small module that implements all the functionality you need, and writing a huge set of modules that uses all the latest design patterns you’ve been reading, you know which one you should choose. Bonus points are awarded for refactoring your code so that each method is only three lines long.
• Don’t track bugs – Keeping track of bugs makes it much easier to eliminate them, and that would mean you’d have to waste time fixing things instead of creating cool new code.

After Implementation

Don’t panic if your project has actually been completed on time and under budget. There are still plenty of ways you can make sure it never reaches its full potential.

• Don’t promote it – Your product is so good, it’ll sell itself! Don’t ignore the fact that marketing is one of the largest factors in a project’s success. Just make sure you do as little as possible. Try including a link in one of your forum signatures, and that should be enough.
• Don’t support it – Don’t respond to customer emails, and ignore any requests for help. Feel free to add a wiki to your website, and tell people that if they don’t know how to do something, they should add it themselves. Remember to be as rude as possible.
• Don’t improve it – Once your product is done, it’s done. Don’t waste time refining it, because we all know that good software is written in one go.
• Ignore feedback – If someone suggests an improvement, no matter how small, you should ignore it.

Remember

The real challenge with helping a project to fail is making it look like you tried your best to prevent it. Be as creative as possible when thinking of ways to help your project to its demise, and you’ll soon be celebrating a complete disaster.

As an Indie developer, you must wear a lot of “hats” in order to run your business properly. Perhaps the least favourite hat for developers is the “planning and scheduling” hat.

A lot of indie developers come from a programming background, including myself, so we should all know the benefits of planning; shorter development times, improved software quality and less hair pulling. However, there’s still a lot of friction and procrastination when it comes to planning.

A true story

We’ve all read the examples about how valuable planning is, but I’ll include my own to prove it. Let’s take two developers: Bob and George. They both come from a programming background, and they’re both working on a similar style of game. Bob knows the value of planning, and he writes a detailed plan of exactly how is game is going to turn out. George decides to “wing it”, and just scrawls a few screens and flowcharts. He’d much rather program, and whilst Bob is still “wasting his time” planning, George has a good head start. Stupid Bob!

Twelve months later, and Bob has finished his game well before his deadline. In fact, and it’s a top seller all over the world. He’s rather pleased that he “wasted” that time planning.

And what happened to George?

His game never got completed, because he overlooked several problems that Bob found in the planning stage, and it was too hard for him to fix. He doesn’t have a proper job now, but for $5 he’ll love you long time.

Ok, so I made that entire story up, but it illustrates an important point – planning is good.

So why do we hate it when it’s so valuable?

It’s not programming…

It sounds obvious, but planning is not programming, so there’s already some resistance. There’s often a one dimensional view of what’s involved with completing a game – it won’t get completed unless it’s programmed, so any activity that isn’t programming is seen as a waste of time.

Fear of making a mistake…

There’s often a feel that the plan needs to be absolutely perfect. Here’s the good news – it doesn’t. Plans can often change during the course of development, and this is perfectly normal (within reason – too many changes are a symptom of “feature creep”). It’s more important that the plan is kept updated, rather than remaining stagnant and outdated because nobody dares to change it.

It’s scary…

Writing a big plan is scary on two fronts.

First, we’ve often seen the huge, monolithic design documents that large software companies churn out. You know the ones I’m talking about – they’re the kind that weigh more than the entire development team. Indie design documents can be much more lightweight, as they don’t need to cover all the corporate red tape.

The second scary thing is confronting exactly what is going to be involved in creating the product. It forces you to look at the big picture, and accept the fact that creating a 3D engine in a weekend is just a pipe dream. It’s never easy to admit that you can’t do something, but planning and scheduling a project helps you to develop more realistic expectations and will save you a lot of pain in the long run.

It’s boring…

What’s more exciting? Writing a new whizz-bang particle system, and watching colourful sparks fly across the screen, or writing about it? Exactly.

It’s hard work…

Perhaps the biggest problem is that planning can be hard work. Thrashing out all the details of a project is difficult, and it makes you realise just how complex software construction is.
Thankfully, it gets easier with practice, but it’s still a pain to get a good plan completed.

So why bother?

One hour of planning can save anything up to ten hours of implementation work. I think that’s reason enough.

In Monday’s entry, I explained some simple techniques to turn a drain on resources into a free* method of advertising.

In today’s entry, I’ll be going into more depth about how to use a little PHP to dynamically generate your adverts. Why would you want to do this? For starters, you can modify the image to include a discount code, which will help track where the orders came from. Who knows, you could even strike up a deal with the site owner to display ads on their site should it bring you a lot of customers.

Please note that most of the code will just be fragments, and I’m not tying it down to one implementation. It’s quite likely that I’ll modify this method over time and post updates in the future. There’s also the small question of “is it worth it”. Again, I’ll keep you updated.

First things first

First, we’ll create a database table to store several things:

• The full referring URL – The unique identifier.
• The number of hits to this file.
• The discount code, either for this URL or for the domain.

Nothing particularly complex there, although you may wish to tweak it to allow for different advert styles.

Basic PHP

Our file, which I’ll call “image-script.php” needs to carry out several functions:

• Check to see if we’ve had a referrer from this site before.
  • If we have, log the hit and get the discount code
  • If we haven’t, create an entry and generate a discount code.
• Create and output an image

Lets look at some sample code

[php]
// Get the referrer and look for this site in the database
// Please note: HTTP_REFERER is not a typo
$referrer_url = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$siteData = find_site($referrer_url);

if ($siteData) {
// Seen the site before, so grab discount code
add_site_hit($referrer_url);
$discountCode = $siteData['discount_code'];
} else {
// A new site, so create a discount code and add it to the db
$discountCode = create_discount_code($refferer_url);
add_new_site($referrer_url, $discountCode);
}

// Image Creation code
[/php]

create_discount_code would need to be tailored to each particular solution, and I’ve deliberately left out the database code to save space.

Image Creation Code

The final bit of code is creating our image, complete with embedded discount code. You’ll need the GD engine installed to use these functions. More information about that is available in the image section of the PHP manual.

The code itself is relatively simple. We open an advert image, and then add the discount code to it before outputting it to the browser.

[php]// Image Creation code

// Setup where we want the code to appear
$codeX = 5;
$codeY = 5;

// Load advert image.
$advertImage = imagecreatefrompng(‘background-image.png’);

// Draw discount code
$textColour = imagecolorallocate($advertImage, 255, 255, 255);
imagestring($advertImage, 3, $codeX, $codeY, $discountCode, $textColour );

// Output our image and cleanup
header(‘content-type: image/png’);
imagepng($advertImage);
imagedestroy($advertImage);[/php]

In case you’re wondering if creating an image works, here’s one I made earlier (using slightly modified code for the shadow and position).

One of the advantages of using dynamically generated images is that you can modify the code to perform a split test if you wish to check ad wordings or appearances. That falls outside the scope of this article, but I may write about it in future.

All done

So there we have it – how to change an unpleasant situation into something that can benefit your business.

The code is still a little rough around the edges, so I’ll be cleaning it up to make it ready for release. My goal is to create something that is simple to install and use, which will take some work.

In case anybody’s wondering, I’m using “iG::Syntax Hiliter” to produce the highlighted code snippets.

—

* Not including bandwidth costs, but seeing as your bandwidth was already being stolen at least now you’re getting some value out of it.

If you own a website, then it’s likely you’ve had images “hotlinked” or “leeched”. Not only is this annoying and rude, but it also costs bandwidth. The usual response is to replace the linked image with something suitably amusing or offensive, but in today’s post I’m going to look at the alternatives.

A recent post in the private ASP newsgroups by Bret Reece of Five O’clock Software interested me. After some tweaking, the hotlinked image became “free” advertising. I thought about this and realised that with a bit of coding wizadry, a more flexible method could be developed.

There are several methods of preventing hotlinking, ranging in difficulty.

The Easy method

Replace the linked image file with your “special” image. We’ll assume that it’s a pleasant advert for your software or company, rather than something that will blind them. Simple and easy, although you will need to replace references to the image on your own site, which can be time consuming.

The Advanced Method

If you’re using an Apache web server and have access to mod_rewrite, you can automatically redirect offsite referrers to your special image. The code below, placed in a “.htaccess” file will do the trick. If you’re not sure how to do this, I recommend this tutorial at freewebmasterhelp.com.

The following code will redirect all external referrers that link to png, gif of jpg files to “www.your-domain.com/image.gif”. You can add more “safe” urls to the list if required.

The Extra Special Method

If you want to get really technical, you can combine PHP with your .htaccess file to dynamically generate images for each site. Instead of redirecting to “image.gif”, you would redirect to “your-image-script.php”. This script would then dynamically generate an image using PHP’s imaging functions.

In Thursday’s entry, I’ll cover the PHP side of this method in depth. This will include using a MySQL database to track referrers, as well as using discount coupon codes to track where the orders come from.

A good post over at Joe Indie about why indies should start with a small project before moving on to bigger things. He states the main benefits of this approach as:

1. Experience with the entire software development process.
2. Experience shipping software to end users.
3. Experience setting up shop on the Web.
4. Experience as a business entity with a product to sell.

All of these are excellent points, and after some thought I’ve expanded on them:

Experience with the entire software development process.

As a developer at heart, I’d put this at the top of my list. A small project gives you a chance to try out tools that you may later rely on, such as code versioning systems and build tools. It also gives you a chance to experiment with development methodologies, design processes and all the other wonderful things that come with developing software. As an indie, you have the particular joy of being able to do things your own way, so it’s a good idea to find what works best for you.

It’s important to push yourself to learn at this point. The object of the exercise is to produce to small, fully functional product, which brings me nicely onto the next part.

Experience shipping software to end users.

How are your support skills? Do you have a system for tracking user problems? How will you keep track of what bugs you’ve fixed (and when)? How will you deliver these fixes to end users? More importantly, how easy is it for an end user to apply a patch?

You can guarantee that as soon as your software is released, it will start misbehaving. If you’ve ever demonstrated one of your products to someone else, you’ll know the phrase “Hmm, it’s not supposed to do that”.

Experience setting up shop on the Web.

Which payment processor will you use? Plimus? BMT Micro? ShareIT? Do you want to offer affiliate opportunities?

Next comes writing the product page that will sell your product, which is perhaps one of the toughest things to do. My advice: Get as many of your friends to read it as possible. Experiment with layouts, phrases and colours. Remember that you have the flexibility of a website, and that you can change it whenever you wish. Take advantage of it!

Marketing is another important factor, and this is a good chance to experiment with different kinds of marketing. Will you handle it all yourself, or use a third party such as Shareware Promotions?

Experience as a business entity with a product to sell.

Tax, insurance and other legal issues abound here. If you don’t know much about the legal side of business, now would be a good time to learn!

And more…

There’s far too much to cover in a single article, but the important thing is to make sure you learn something from your experiences. Experiment, and make sure you find what works for you.

Read: Why New Indies Should Start with a Small Project; or “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”