Hanging out at the intersection of Internet Marketing, Social Media and Communications. It’s a great place to be – watching things unfold as marketing types tell you that “this is the thing you need,” and social media types push certain people as gurus, and communications folks try to make sense of it all for their company.
And smack-dab in the middle of one such “thing” of late. A piece of software. $39. Perhaps life-changing. No risk trial.
Oh, and it’s a crappy product.
What is the product really worth?
Here’s where the mistake often gets made. Let’s assume that this particular product really can drive tens of thousands of dollars of revenue to your personal or company bottom line.
Then, dare I ask, why IS IT $39?
Chris Brogan had a tremendous post on price and value. Take a look here and figure out if the stuff you’re looking at, or considering, is worth the money.
How to do product value math
Software can be an easy question: what does it cost to buy, what does it cost to implement, and what value does it potentially bring? Even online tools that are free or freemium have a cost associated with them – but spending the $20 for an annual subscription to a service that allows you to do in 5 minutes what you would have to ask someone else to do for hours of time = probably worth it.
But information products are really interesting: did my investment of $39 in this “software” that is REALLY an information product disguised as software make sense?
No. Here’s why:
How do you value your time?
Rough math alert: a six-figure marketer who works a 40 hour week values his time at $50 an hour.
Same marketer that spends $39 on a product that he has to (1) learn and (2) implement and (3) monitor for roughly 10 hours a week…now we’re one week into what has turned into a $539 experiment.
But what if it’s something you HAVE to know? Or something you “think” you need to know. (Like, for instance, SEO for the Corporate Communications person: here’s a link to an Area 224 webinar we’re doing on 2.24.)
Maybe we’re talking ourselves out of some business here, but this comes back to your investment in your own time, or your company’s investment in you.
If you’re a $100K a year Corporate Communications person, it might actually be a sensible investment to spend the additional $40 or so bucks, on top of your hourly rate of $50, to get to a decision point:
Is this something that will make my life easier, my job better, or my company more findable if I invest more time on it?
OR…
Is this going to always be way too complicated – so maybe I should hire a professional?
As for Crappy Product Avoidance…
Make sure there’s an airtight, easy-peasy guarantee. Protects everybody. We had a tough time finding the Crappy Product’s refund policy, or who to contact, or how to uninstall the software in exchange for a refund.
Gathering Intelligence – Intel – On Your Site, Your Competitors and Your Clients? Easy with this 1-2 punch – we just shared it with attendees on our “Underground Strategies” webinar…
1. Compete.com. You can, admittedly, drown in analytics. Google Analytics can tell you a ton about your own site – and, with all the monitoring tools out there, it’s possible to over-analyzed.
Compete.com provides a quick traffic snapshot – over there is ours from the month of October – and you can compare a couple sites at the same time.
Plus, you can do this with a free account – if you want to dig deeper, you can pay for the “Pro” service.
Even though the numbers are from US traffic, you can still get a sense of whether someone is actually making any noise.
FOR INSTANCE: we saw a site promoted on Twitter that claimed they were getting 1000 visitors a day. Quick search on Compete, took us about 1 minute, and we learned that these folks weren’t getting enough visitors to even register.
2. Grader.com. Another fave – specifically the Website Grader. Hubspot provides this tool and it’s powerful. Also, it’s free.
We have been critical of some of the components of Grader’s score, but now is not the time for that. This is, without a doubt, one of the most powerful tools you’ll find for finding out whether or not you are doing things right on the web. And for finding out whether your competitors are doing things right on the web.
FOR INSTANCE: We have an old domain and were trying to gauge what it would take to give it the spice it needs to make a dent. (It’s in, get this, a niche market.) So we ran the domain through the Grader and learned that we might not have that much work to do. Since it scored in the 80s, well, we’re ahead of the game.
By the way, if you missed the webinar, you can still get all the materials – $49 for the slides, audio, and the Underground Strategies report.
For the most part, we find the tools from Grader.com indispensable. BUT…
If you’ve read the New York Times piece on Decor My Eyes – here’s a link to this frightening SEO tale – you know that there’s an eyewear provider who was able to leverage bad publicity into good search juice.
And, if you’ve been following the developments, you’ll know that Google has made some changes to account for how negative reviews help or hinder SEO results. You can read about those in this article, entitled “What Google’s Search Change Means for Your Website.”
So, why are we picking on Grader.com?
This is why. A 98. Out of 100.
This means that the site still ranks in the top 3 percent of all the sites that Grader has graded based on “Marketing Effectiveness.”
This, despite an MOZ “Page Rank” score of 2, out of 10.
This, despite a “Blog Not Found” listing on the Grader report.
This, despite a “No Twitter Grade” for the site.
One of two things is true: (1) “Marketing Effectiveness” does truly equal “number of indexed pages” (which, in this case, is in excess of 423,000) or “number of inbound links” (more than 14,000; a good chunk probably from the bad reviews), or (2) Grader has yet to update its scoring – since Google just made the change this week.
