So let me tell you about my awesome idea!  It came to me to while visiting my favorite nephew who is about 2 years old.

Most Awesome Nephew Ever!

As I’m sitting there with my sister one evening, we were talking about how much he was speaking now and how funny some of the things he says are.  I then just thought it’d be pretty cool if you had a creative way to capture that and remember that.

Now, let’s backup a few weeks where I was doing some job hunting and I was trying out an interesting idea I had read about.  The premise was to read over a company’s job description and pull that big long description they give and plug it into a world cloud generator such as wordle, and then see what the relevant words are and sprinkle them throughout your resume.  The idea is that your resume should speak their language.  I can’t tell you if it works but it is a very cool idea.

Now back to my nephew.  It hit me that if we could somehow record his words or somehow get them into a word cloud, you could actually get a pretty cool piece of art that would be representative of your child’s words for that time period in their life.  My sister already being artsy and in love with everything about her children loved the idea and I felt pretty damn creative for thinking about it.  We talked the rest of the night about how so many parents would love that and they could be customized in so many ways.  Surely people will buy this if they only knew they could.   Obviously it requires the parents to do some work recording their child’s words and typing them into a form or something, but for this they’d obviously be willing to do it.

So the visit is over and I’m back home doing my thing and suddenly a month goes by and I’m still saying how good an idea that it is and I’ve done nothing.  This is clearly not who I want to be.  So I said that’s it, I’m testing it!  I had obviously read and seen some simple ideas for testing in the 4 Hour Work Week but also the guys over at App Sumo or Neville at nevblog.com had really reinforced the importance of testing ideas and doing it very simply through one of their courses (not an affiliate link) I purchased.  So this is what I did.  I fired up my old copy of iWeb and created a simple sales page literally within 25 minutes.  I wrote some basic copy, added some sample photos, and even dropped some paypal buttons in and made up a price.  After some tweaking, I had a very basic webpage where someone could actually place an order and send me money through paypal.

Next step was to get some eyeballs on it.  For this I opted for Facebook ads.  I thought about google ads but I really didn’t even know what keywords I would use.  Baby art?  Kids art pieces?  In researching them, I didn’t find much with any significant volume. (should have been my first clue, but I thought I was Steve Jobs and people didn’t know what they wanted until I told them.  I’m still not Steve Jobs btw)  But Facebook ads gave me great categories to target such as babies, art, decorating, etc.  So, I log into Facebook create a couple quick ads and give it a budget of $25/day for four days.  I felt this was enough to get me a significant number of views and probably even a few orders, even though the web page looked pretty bad.  About a step above craigslist.  (people buy millions of dollars of stuff through craigslist though)  Now it was just time to wait for the orders.

Four days later my $100 is spent and I had 65 people check it out.  Log in to paypal, ZERO dollars.  Check my special email account set just for this and there was one lonely email where someone had tried to send some kid words over but it was clear they didn’t know what they were doing and they didn’t go through paypal.   So what did all this do for me?  Well nothing in terms of making money, but in enabled me to move on to my next great idea, which I’m currently searching for.  But for about an hour of my time and $100 I realized that as a business, it probably just wouldn’t work.  Yes if I had poured thousands of dollars into my website and had great samples, sure I probably would have sold some.  If my test had yielded even one interested customer I would have been willing to invest some more into the idea, but it’s clear people weren’t in love with the idea like I was.

I can not tell you how this simple testing is very exciting though.  It is liberating in fact.  I can not wait to run my next test now.  I’m eager to come up with my next great idea.   I know eventually one will work but if I don’t test them how would I ever know?  So for my piece of mind, failing is a good thing.

So the main reason for my departure was that I actually lost my real 9-5 job at the end of January.  It wasn’t entirely unexpected as it was a corporate merger blah blah blah.  Some of you might have seen me mention it over at nichepursuits.com.  So the immediate worry set in, and of course the million things you now have to do everyday to find a new job.  (I’m still looking btw)  That was a major distraction for a while and still is in many ways but I’m getting back into a routine so I hope to be around more although I may not necessarily be trying as many new things until I get that solid income stream back.  The good thing is that I have lots more time to sit around in my basement un-showered on my computer. (hence the smell funny)

But now, let’s play catch up real quickly.  I’ll give you the highlights, or low lights in some cases, of what’s been happening.

1. iPhone App /  Things were going quite ok through January and kind of in February and March.  It was getting downloads almost every day but not many.  On a good day it was 10 and I was quite content with that knowing that my SEO and keywords listed for the iTunes store needs to be redone.  This was not done well from the beginning and I left it up to the developer at the time assuming they knew what they were doing.  Never assume!  Regardless though for the last 2 weeks it has fallen of the face of the earth.  Literally a handful of downloads in that time.  I have no explanation for this other than seasonality of cooking roasts or things like that.  I am hoping that if I can redo the SEO for the app soon, (I have a hard time finding my own app in the store without typing in the exact name, which is not good.)  and with spring coming on that I can bump up the downloads.  My wife and I usually buy far more whole chickens from our farmers markets and end up doing quite a bit of roasting well into the fall.  So hopefully other people do as well.

2. Niche Websites /  This has been the one area I did work on but slowly I will say.  I actually have that one website that has done $30-$50 per month and looks pretty solid.  I have two more that cranked the front page in the past two weeks and have been making a few dollars and I have 3 more that are hanging on page 2, getting very few clicks, but should hopefully move up in the next month or so.  I was becoming very encouraged by all of that and I had literally just had a conversation with my wife about how I think I was finally going to ramp up production of niche websites.   That is of course until Spencer dropped his bomb earlier this week of getting his Adsense account banned.  So honestly that has kind of put me on hold.  I know there are other monetization methods but honestly I’m worried that one of his next posts might be that a majority of his sites were deindexed.  I really hope not but it seems that Google is doing whatever they want and making the web what they want it to be.  So before I push hard there I think I’ll just tip toe around a bit longer to see how it all plays out.

3. Finally because of the unknowns with niche websites I actually did start on an authority site.  I am excited about it and I know it will be a lot of work if it is ever to get anywhere.  I did not do any market research on the topic. I picked it only because it’s an area that I’ve enjoyed since i was a kid.  I know that I will enjoy what I am learning and writing about, and I do think I can build something that can add real value to that community. So I’m hoping with lots of hard work over the next year I can begin to do that and then maybe somewhere down the road I’ll find a way to make a few dollars on it.

4. And I’ve got one more thing I tried just once to learn about it, but I’ll keep that for another posting.  It is very interesting.

So in the last few days, I finally had my first niche website crack the top 10 for its keyword and it is in fact sitting at the #5 spot right now.  This was after about two months of backlinking and it has about 10 original articles right now.  I had almost written it off honestly but then, there it is 3 days in a row getting Adsense clicks.   But I’m not talking about that right now either.

Here is where I am. After spending about $500 on niche websites I have one that has made about $5 the last 3 days.  I have an iPhone app that I spent over $3300 on and I’ve made around $700.  I’m starting the year off in the hole about $3100.

To be honest right now, I couldn’t be more excited.  Wether it’s false or not I feel I am making something happen.  All of those times I sat watching late night TV over 15 years ago back in college,  watching Don whatever his name was, talk to Cindy Margolis about tiny classified ads, and even buying it mind you.  (I blame Cindy)  I wasn’t interested in running a tiny classified ad empire.  I just wanted the dream of being financially independent and working for myself.  So what did I do?  Nothing.  For the last 15+ years I’ve gone to work everyday for someone else and done nothing.

Which brings me to tonight at 11:19pm.  I am $3100 in the hole and excited about it.  I have learned so much after finally getting over my fears and just doing these very small things.  I’m ready.  I can start to see my path in front of me.  I can’t see very far down it yet, but I’m on it and I’ll figure the directions out as I go.  It’s a frightening but thrilling experience so far.  I no longer wonder if I can do it, I now just want to see how far I can go.

If you’re reading this and have your own dreams outside of your day job, I strongly encourage you to just begin.  Don’t wait for everything to fall into place, just start,  even if it’s small like me.   You’ll be glad you did.  But now I do have to go to bed so my day job can continue to fund my dream job.

Obviously as we discussed in the last post, app sales were slower than I would have liked but I am sure my lack of promotion didn’t help.  Take a look at my screenshot below for the week ending 12/29.

Wow!!!  Now that’s just one more reminder why if you aren’t growing then you are dying.  Be persistent!  I am going to make sure that my activity level is rigorously scheduled for promoting my app.  I unfortunately don’t have an app where people were excited to open their new iPhone or iTouch on Christmas day and eagerly search for a fun cooking app.  What I do have is an app that is a simple tool, that for people who have experienced what I have, will understand the benefit of it.  I just have to do my best so they see it.

1. It is all about the promotion!

2. You must be in for the long term.

3.  You can not please everyone.

So let’s take those one point at a time.  As I look back over the launch of my app before Thanksgiving, it was downloaded about 600 times in 2 days.  This also coincided with being Gizmodo App of the Day. So my question was how much did Gizmodo influence that versus it just being a big holiday for cooking.  Well I can definitively answer that.  Gizmodo was HUGE!  Looking at two days over Christmas, which is also a very big holiday for cooking roasts, turkeys, etc, in the same 2 day time frame, Is It Ready Yet was downloaded 25 times.  Very disappointing but I pretty much knew Gizmodo was huge.   I just didn’t know how big.  Thank you again Gizmodo.

After looking at downloads over Christmas, and keep in mind there has been almost no promotion over the last 3 weeks, it is apparent that I’m in this for the long term to recover my total investment.  And to really do that, It is apparent to me that I am going to have to come up with a long term marketing plan.  I’m not sure what that will be yet.  Obviously social media will be a large component but I haven’t really thought it through yet.

My final point, is that you just can not please everyone.  We all have heard this growing up and guess what?  It is still true.  When I read a couple of the negative reviews on my app I want to reach through the computer screen and say, “Hey dummy! Did you read the description of this app?  It doesn’t teach you how to cook!  And it’s not for grilling or ground meat products!”   It is frustrating in that I thought the app description says very clearly what it does but yet people bought it and were shocked when it didn’t do what they thought.  If something good came of that, it definitely taught me to be as precise as possible in my description.  None the less I just realize that it is also a price of doing business with the public.

So I’m sure you want to know how many have sold.  Well to date there has been 1056 paid downloads. Depending upon how you look at it, it’s pretty good or very disappointing.   On one hand in a little over a month I have recovered about 22% of my cost.  Not bad at all if I continued at that rate.  However, I now know that unless I get Gizmodo or some other big outlet to promote it again, I will not continue at that rate.  And honestly I’m okay with it.  To date there has not been even one day with zero downloads, when that happens I will start to worry.  Otherwise I will take what I’ve learned from this and get ready for my next idea.

As I mentioned in earlier posts I said I was very excited about the opportunity to develop these niche websites.  I had been following Spencer over at nichepursuits.com (I still do) and I wanted to start doing this myself.  I jumped right in doing keyword research and I thought, “wow, I’m really good at this”  I was finding 3-4 great keywords and exact name domains in just an hour or so, which should have been my first clue I wasn’t doing it right.

At that time I bought all my sites on godaddy so I was eager to find new ones and buy as a bundle to save some money. As I mentioned I bought 20 domains and thought I was well on my way to quitting my 9-5 job.  I also bought all of those domains within 3 days.   Finally at that point I thought maybe I should try to make some money first before I continue buying domains.

I then moved forward with a couple of them I thought most promising.  Bought content through textbroker.com, spun some PLR content with the best spinner, and then did some back linking with Unique Article Wizard.  I had this down!  My new domains got ranked very quickly even to the first page of google within a couple of weeks.  Now the worst thing that happened was I actually got a couple of clicks and got some adsense payments, which then fueled me to go even more.  Now to cut a long story short, I’ve spent a total of $407.14 and made $.66 realizing that maybe two of the twenty domains I purchased has a real shot of being viable.

So What Did I Do So Wrong

Well it was a pretty simple mistake.  First I may have really limited myself to sites that were too niche.  I bought many domains that had around 1600 searches per month.   Now that in and of itself is not terrible, but I made a critical error.  Those were BROAD searches and not EXACT searches.  Once I realized this over the past week or so I’ve gone back and properly qualified these keywords.  The reality is those that received 1600 broad searches may have only showed up with 200-300 exact searches and with CPC’s of $.33 it just doesn’t make sense to continue these.

Nonetheless, I am still excited about niche websites and I am moving forward.  I realize now that it actually does take a bit longer to find great keywords even using  fantastic tool like LongTail Pro.  So to avoid this stupid mistake in the future, I see that LongTail Pro now has the ability to save your filters (not sure if it originally had that).  I’m sure you can guess what the first thing I changed by default was.

Broad searches are still very useful but only to generate ideas.  I was not then looking any closer at the ideas I was generating.  I was immediately buying.  Many of you probably haven’t made this same mistake as I have and I wish I hadn’t, but oh well.  Now aside from my wife I have one more “broad” that costs me money.   I’m still confident and I know that now that I have learned this, I ultimately am that much closer to being successful.

So I was fortunate enough that my app made the top 10 within the lifestyle category in several countries.  Those were the United States, Ireland, Belgium, and the Netherlands.   Now, the unfortunate thing is my app being a somewhat seasonal app did not maintain these rankings for any length of time, basically just on Thanksgiving in the US.  In almost every case it had fallen significantly several days later.  I’m still getting a solid amount of downloads that I’m happy with but nothing like the top 10 days.

So here were the peak rankings by day and what the sales were.

Rankings in Lifestyle category

• Ireland climbed all the way up to #6 and that resulted in a whopping 5 downloads that day.
• Belgium peaked at #8 for 6 downloads.
• Netherlands oddly peaked on saturday at #7 for 14 downloads but the day prior did 24 downloads despite peaking at #8
• United States like the Netherlands peaked at #10 on thursday for 217 downloads while the day prior was actually bigger at 302.

So those were my top 10 hits.  Obviously if I could maintain top 10 everyday in the United States i’d be pretty happy with that.  I knew going in that it wasn’t feasible and I only hope to put myself in a position again for multiple top 10 rankings over Christmas which should be very fruitful for me.

Just for reference currently in the United States I’m staying just inside the top 100 and yesterday I did 54 downloads.  If I could walk away from this app and never look at again for the next couple of years I’d be very happy with that.  I’m very hopeful that I can sustain that level until Christmas rolls in as I don’t plan to spend any more money on marketing.  I do have some things I’ve already invested in that aren’t out yet and should hit in another week or two so that gives me some confidence.

What can I learn from these rankings?  Well I don’t think much at this point, except how small some of the markets really are in other countries. Otherwise, the sample size is just to small to spot any trends.  You throw a holiday on top of this and it confounds the data even more.  I will say I’m thankful that Apple doesn’t provide hourly sales data as I would have been pinned to the computer the last few days.  Unfortunately, you can get hourly ranking data through third parties and that did keep my attention.  So far it’s been a roller coast and I’m looking forward to the next climb.

First thing I did was immediately send an email to my virtual assistant alerting her to the fact that it had been approved.

Second, I updated the website to reflect the link to the iTunes store.

Third, update Facebook and twitter to announce the release.

Whew, I thought I was done.  But oh was I wrong.  As my assistant began sending out press releases I began seeing emails come in from various blogs communicating their excitement or asking me to advertise.  But then I saw one email from someone at Gizmodo.  I was pumped to say the least.  He was asking for a promo codo to review the app.  I thought great but tried to stay calm thinking, oh well Gizmodo probably reviews 100′s of apps every day.  But then after I provided him with the code and tried to kiss as much butt as possible, he started emailing me back with questions.  After several back and forth emails with one email that I knew to be negative, I thought, “well so much for Gizmodo”.   So off to dinner I went.

Returning from dinner I check Facebook, see a few new likes, all good.   Then I decide I need to set up a google alert on my app just to see if we are really getting the word out.  Well upon setting that up, I see it.  A review from Gizmodo.  I click on it and immediately see I have been picked as app of the day.   Now at this point I’m home by myself so you can imagine the screaming like a little girl that took place.  Right now I still can’t believe it.  I realize this isn’t a golden ticket and that not everyone who reads about it will buy the app, but what a first day.  As I look at it now the article was published 4 hours and 7 minutes ago and 6221 people have read about my app.  This is a dream for the first day of being released.

No doubt it will be a long night for me.  I can not wait to pull up my sales data in the morning.  Now, I’m not expecting 6000 downloads from this, but I’d lie if I didn’t really expect a few hundred.  I guess tomorrow morning I’ll know for sure.

Oh and check out the review for yourself here.

On the positive side the assistant I hired through elance.com is doing a fantastic job. The Facebook page  for Is It Ready Yet App seems to be growing nicely as does the Twitter feed.   I’m also seeing lots of emails and interest to and from various blogs. I only hope I didn’t hire her too early.

Now a quick word about my niche sites. Still not making any money and my sites tend to be stabilizing in rank. I’ve done quite a bit of article marketing this past week through Unique Article Wizard so at this point I’m just waiting for back links to start showing up. With 2 of my sites I’m hopeful that if even very small number of back links show up that should push them to the first page of google results.

I’m also very excited after reading Spencer Haws, Ultimate Link Building Guide, as it is actually a simpler and more streamlined process than I’ve been doing.  I thought that process would carry more risk but apparently not for micro niche sites.  So maybe my first strategy might take a a bit more time for links to start showing and I’ve already done some back linking last night using Spencer’s strategy so I’ll see how that goes also.

So what am I doing while waiting for all this?  Unfortunately I still have a real job and one I need to get off to right now.