Gauging Interest

Step 1 in the process of gauging interest has started today.  I’ve taken two applications that have been side projects for me and put up initial two page landing pages to promote them.  Here’s what I’ve done so far:

SnipBit (www.snipbit.net)

• The product is a replacement for the search built into your website.  It pulls results from Google Site Search, your Twitter feed, your YouTube videos and combines them into one single search page for your site regardless of where you’re putting your data today.
• I’m starting by using a temporary name (SnipBit) because I already had this domain laying around.  This will get rebranded quickly before moving any further.
• I created a quick two page landing page.  A homepage with a screenshot of the application and a quick set of bullets on what it does, and a sign up page that takes requests for a beta launch.  This keeps me from having to program the functionality to take automatic sign ups through the site.
• I installed LiveZilla, a free live chat service, on the server.  There’s now an icon in the upper right corner of the site for answering any immediate questions.  It also has the advantage of giving me real time results on traffic to the site.
• I’ve signed up for Google Analytics and Google Adwords for the site, using the $100 credit they’ve been sending around, and Kristen and I have created a series of text and image ads.

Silver Lining Backup (www.silverliningbackup.com)

• The product is a backup service for shared/cloud environments.  The idea came from working at hodgsonConsulting where our client’s sites would get hacked from time to time (never our fault of course), and the client would be forced to pay us to resolve the issues.  Many times the backups weren’t being done properly if at all.  So Silver Lining Backup would resolve that by making sure your website is being backed up in a way that’s transparent to the user, regardless of which hosting service they use.
• Using the same template as SnipBit I created a new website here, filling in the appropriate product features and a screenshot of the application.
• I created a new campaign in Google Adwords with a new set of keywords and ads.

The results so far (24 hours in):

• 7,416 Impressions on the ads run
• 0.09% CTR (that’s 7 clicks total, folks)
• No sign ups

We’ll keep this going and start moving onto new strategies…