Back in February of this year, I launched a keyword tool that I’d developed to help save me time setting up Google AdWords campaigns. Rather than some of the grand launches you can see from a mile off, Keyword Permutator (KP) trickled onto the Internet with little promotional effort on my part.
The result is a disappointing, but not totally unexpected, handful of sales that haven’t taken the project into profit yet.
Although I’d invested an amount of money in the platform for KP, it’s something that I can reuse for future products as well as tools for my own use.
Rather than simply let KP stagnate in its current state, I’m reviewing the situation and considering my options for turning a profit.
Some of the reasons why I think KP’s not done as well as I’d hoped:
- There’s no must-have factor for what is essentially a simple tool that simply saves time. The product isn’t as glitzy or sophisticated as some others or at least it’s not been hyped as something that could make you into a millionaire overnight.
- The demo video sucks! It was a DIY job and I just couldn’t bring myself to narrate in an overly excited tone of voice. It was also longer than it needed to be.
- There’s little awareness about the problem it solves. I’m confident that many people will find KP just as useful and time-saving as I have, but how many of those people will be aware of a solution to their problem?
- The price point. I thought long and hard about this one. One of the things I was counting on was the support of affiliates so I didn’t want to set the price too low in case it made it less appealing to them. On the other hand, I didn’t want to put potential customers off by pricing too high.
I’m sure that the cause of some of the above was down to a lack of dedicated time spent on the project. With multiple projects going on and a wedding to prepare for some corners were cut in order to get the finished product onto the shelves.
Some actions I’m considering, going forwards:
- Raise awareness by distributing articles and improving KP’s website ranking for relevant search terms.
- Remake the demo video; make it shorter and snappier!
- Reduce the price, but increase the affiliate share.
- Make the ad-powered version free to distribute and continue to sell a version without ads.
- Add additional functionality and make KP a better product.
If you’ve seen KP being used then you will have noticed the built-in ad space. A ‘feature’ of KP was the built-in ad system. The way this works allows me to change the ads that are pulled into the application at run time. This feature obviously has the potential to generate some additional income from referrals or sales of other products.
One of the things I considered when I was designing the application was at some point releasing some form of resale rights perhaps with the ability for the reseller to control the built-in ad space for themselves. To someone with a large mailing list, selling KP off cheaply or even giving it away for free could put their ads in front of many eyes.
The pondering continues…
Technorati Tags: Keyword Permutator, Keyword Tool, Affiliate Marketing
Leave a reply