Jim, where do we go from here! (Redux)

[ESHIREY]

I think once he is added under the settings for the name for the eel "Harvey" should be part of the name.

[Jim Sachs]

No name, no settings - remember, he's just part of the background. (But I do plan to refer to him as Harvey when telling people about him)

[ESHIREY]

hahahahahahaha cool.

[Nicki]

The truth is out now, Michael's a big Sabrina the Teenage Witch fan .

[Wizwad]

Wait, didn't we know that already? I'm sure it was in his list:
Stargate SG1
Stargate Atlantis
Sabrina the Teenage Witch

[Jav400]

hmmm, I feel tomato's hitting me from somewhere or the other....................


Jimmy Stewart people Jimmy Stewart

[spetro]

lets forget about the eel and concentrate on the puffer project.
v
v
v
v
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(only kidding)

[Jim Sachs]

Another slowdown - we have a guest staying in our spare bedroom/computer room, so I don't have access to my computer at night.

[ESHIREY]

no no no, put them in the garage. hahahahahahaha just kidding.

[Ralph]

I hope your guest appreciate the disappointment they are causing.

[Ivanhoe]

Hi Jim
I am not into marketing or anything remotely like it,but there is an advert for MA3 in the Computer Active mag in the UK selling it for 50% below RRP, also there is sticker on the box saying over I million copies sold,now I do not know how much you get each copy sold and I do not want to know but if it is less than £3 or 5 US Dollars for such a superb piece of software then you are getting ripped off by Prolific.
Computeractive sold an average of 159210 copies 26 times a year in 2009.
Sorry if I rambled on a bit Jim but I'm trying to figure out how to get you more money so you can carry on developing.

Regards
Bill

[Jav400]

Oh no MR. Bill.....................

Tell them your new house needs work and while they are out there then you can get Harvey swimming along just fine.

You even get two things done at once that way as well. Bonus!!

[Jim Sachs]

Ralph - They haven't a clue.

Michael - I suspect that this guy would not be much good at roofing. Anyway, I need the computer at night when he's sleeping.

Ivanhoe - I'll have to look into that ad. Probably a European sub-distributor. The only way I make any significant money is when customers buy Key Codes on the SereneScreen.com website. All the other deals are split so many ways that I only get a few cents per copy. Prolific makes very little also, and they have to pay people to handle customer support, keep the high-bandwidth website up, handle credit-cards, etc.

Yes, there have been over 1 million sold. Way more, actually. Our previous hard-copy publisher, Encore, stopped counting at 1 million around 2005. Microsoft also sold something like 8 million copies of MA in their Plus Packs (from which I got not one cent). I always felt that Encore was taking a disproportionate share, but now that I look back on the relationship, I find that it was mutually beneficial. They got the hard-copy into stores, which acted as advertising, which drove my website sales. Now we have no advertising, the new distributor buys blocks of Key Codes at a huge discount, sells many of them on their website in direct competition with me, and is unable to get the hard-copy into major store chains.

I've always wanted to do some actual advertising, but have always been fearful. Ads which have any likelyhood of success are extremely expensive, and an unsuccessful try would mean the end of me. If anyone here has any experience with Google, Amazon, or Facebook ads, please let me know.

[Digital Lungfish]

Originally posted by Jim Sachs:

No name, no settings - remember, he's just part of the background. (But I do plan to refer to him as Harvey when telling people about him)  

Jim, I'm excited to hear that you'll soon have the long sought after eel in MA for us to test.

However, I'm curious to know about his placement in the tank. You said "he's just part of the background", but will this only be for testing purposes or also for the release build? I guess I'm asking if in the final version he'll have the freedom to roam away from the background from time to time and then return or if he'll be a permanent fixture? If I had to guess I'd imagine you would take the path of least resistance and go the permanent fixture route, but wanted to ask just to be sure.

[ESHIREY]

From what he has been telling us it's just going to be in the cave.

[Jim Sachs]

The plan is for the eel to be part of the background, like the clams and featherduster. It will live in the cave, generally near the back, but will poke its head out if a fish swims by.

If I have a On/Off switch or any other User Interface additions, then it's a whole different ballgame. That would entail alerting the Cast of Thousands to come up with suitable translations for "eel" in French, German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc., among many other things. There's nothing I hate more than seeing the dreaded "Development Cost" item on my royalty statements.

It's at least an order of magnitude easier to just have two downloads available. I assume that most users would choose the one with the eel.

[Digital Lungfish]

Pretty much as I suspected, Jim. But, it didn't hurt to ask just in case.

[Racer57]

My picture of an eel on one of my introductory dives as previosly indicated. Pls excuse the blueness of the picture. I am not even gonna tell you in what year I took it and the ravages of age on the picture, but at least you get the idea.

[wetmonkey]

Hi Jim,

Very familiar with Facebook ads, Google Adwords and am setting up an amazon merchant account as we speak.

PPC is a quick way to inject online traffic.
A Facebook Business Page will also give you a current way to gain exposure and allow you to communicate in a new vertical and gain new audience.

The keyword Aquarium Screensaver is pulling 14,800 US searches and 60,500 global a month with a PPC rate of $ .43. There are other beneficial keywords you can use. This is a quick birdeye pull of what I saw as the highest traffic phrase.

Once you get some time under your google adwords campaign you can shift from PPC to CPA (Cost Per Action) and pay for only the people who make a purchase. The CPA rate will be higher.

Facebook campaigns would cost you roughly $ .50 per like to gain a new person to your page. The more your drill down into demographics, the higher the PPL will cost you. You can directly engage with fans and drive them to your website to purchase. There are also a few Facebook E commerce solutions like http://www.payvment.com. I am not certain if they handle digital distribution to help you sell serials. I am sure their would be a solution out there that you may want to look at adding.

I would recommend making a Facebook page as soon as possible. It is a great free way to engage fans and customers. Make sure you create first a personal account, then you can create a business page. Do not make a personal account your product name or website name. You will be limited to 5000 "friends" vs. unlimited people who can like a page and sooner or later Facebook will disable a company running as a person (against TOS) I know several occasions where people loose all of their connections. People have Friends/ personal accounts, business have Pages and people who Like them. Rest assured if you do not want to have a personal page assessable to people, you can block it off. You will be tied to the Business Page and it is anonymous to who admins the Page.

I will look into amazon and how to setup digital downloads and serials.

If you need some help getting going, feel free to let email me. I can help and have a well of colleagues to help answer questions also.

Jasen

[Jim Sachs]

Thanks for the info. We've already had the e-commerce stuff set up for 10 years, so it's really just a matter of getting people to go to SereneScreen.com and buy the program. I certainly wouldn't mind paying $.50 for each actual sale, in fact we've long had a system in place to pay 4X that to anyone wishing to register as a "dealer".

PPC is very scary for me. Just one day of high-volume/non-purchase traffic would bankrupt me. The website already gets something like 12,000 hits a day, but only about half of 1% actually buy.