Since we ran our tiny little ad on Google AdWords, we have suddenly found ourselves absolutely overwhelmed with work to do related to our iKollect.com site. I believe in answering every email that we receive, and it’s really a lot of work responding to all these customers.

First off, the feedback for improvements to the iKollect.com site itself is constantly coming in. At first, I wrote back a lengthy email to each one of these nice people telling them how much I appreciated their input. But now my replies are short and sweet. And very non-personal. I don’t like that my responses have become so impersonal, but that’s all I have time for now.  So although I am still responding to every email I get, I’m not happy about how I’ve been doing it.  If you have written me a lengthy email and received one of these short replies…sorry about that!

Many of those feedback emails contain great suggestions that I believe would be very valuable to our customers when implemented. And I believe that when I get feedback about a particular feature being desired more than three times, I had better work on that feature, no matter how much time and effort it requires.  Of course the effort involved in implementing these some of those suggestions is quite daunting. So in addition to answering lots of emails, there’s a lot of programming work that needs to be done also.

Then after I’ve spent countless hours working on one of these features, I need to test thoroughly to make sure it will not have a negative impact on my current customers.  I absolutely HATE testing.  But it absolutely MUST be done.  Yippee.

And there are other little support details I need to take care of to keep customers happy.  I guess my problem boils down to having too many customers. If there was no need for a web site for people to store information about their coin collections, then I would be sad, right? So every time I am feeling overwhelmed, I remind myself that I’d rather have the problem of too many customers being interested in our site, than the opposite.

A friend of mine (a programmer, but not an entrepreneur) said that I should consider locking my site down and not allowing new customers (except maybe by invitation only from other customers).  By keeping the number of customers down to a minimum, I would be limiting the problems that could arise.  And since it’s usually the newer customers who send me feedback, by not taking on new customers, I would reduce my feedback and lessen the impact of that problem also.  Hmmm…maybe he thinks that I am doing this merely as a hobby?
So I’ve got lots of problem in my life, and this is my latest problem.  Too many customers.  But it’s a problem that I can totally accept.

After opening up a checking account with Wachovia and transferring $100 to it, I was ready to create the Google AdWords account.  (I get very excited by these little things!)

The first question in the whole AdWords process is what email address I want to use.  This may seem like a trivial question to some, but to me it was a dooozy.  Do I create a new GMail account (I already have one for my personal use)?  Do I create an email address in the iKollect.com domain and use that?  Do I use one of those “I don’t want junk mail so I am using this email address which gets lots of spam” email address?  Do I use my existing GMail address?  Do I use another email address?  Ugh.

In the end, I decided to create another GMail account and use that one.  My decision was based totally on the old eenie-meenie-miney-moe method (I’m sure I spelled that incorrectly).  I was spending so much time on deciding which email address to use that I wasn’t accomplishing the task I actually wanted to accomplish.  So I may be angry with myself for having yet another email address to keep track of, but oh well.

After creating the new GMail account, the first thing I did was to go into the GMail account setting and set it up to forward everything to my other primary email address.  Then I went to work on setting up my new AdWords campaign!

I had already decided that I wanted my advertisement to look something like this:
 
  [ Free Coin Inventory Software ]
  [ Free Web-based coin Collecting Software ]
  [ http://www.ikollect.com ]

I had also already set up a smart PHP landing page on my website to handle the traffic that came from the Google advertisement.  That looked something like this:

  http://www.ikollect.com/ landhere.php?camefrom=Google&subject=Coins

So creating the ad in AdWords was pretty straight forward.  I won’t go into too many details on how it all worked because there are several things you have to memorize regarding rules on what about AdWords you can tell other and what you cannot share.  If you don’t follow all the rules, they can suspend your account, and we certainly didn’t want that!

I already had my checking account Wachovia set up, so that part was easy.  The only bummer was that when I linked the account up, I realized that I had to wait several days for the account to be verified.  That was a total bummer because other online banking sites I’ve been to lately have allowed me to verify instantly.  I’m not sure if this is a limitation of Wachovia’s site or Google’s or maybe some crazy law that keeps people from stealing my massive quantities of money (did I mention that it’s up to $150?).  But nevertheless I had to wait. 

So wait is what I’m doing now.  But not patiently…I’ve checked several dozen times in the past couple of hours hoping that I could proceed, but no such luck.  After the verification is complete, I believe I’ll be able to activate my ads!

As you may know, this whole AdWords campaign is being done on a very limited budget.  To someone else starting this little business, $100 might be considered chump change.  But to Kate and I, this is a lot of money…and it is our entire marketing budget!  So I had an idea a few weeks back.  Why not turn a few dollars into a few more before starting up the ads?

Noooo, I’m not talking about going to Vegas.  Although I’m sure that would be fun!  I’m talking about taking $100 and turning it into $150 by doing something I already need to do.

As I looked down my list of to-do’s, I could see that I needed to open up a checking account.  Of course we could simply use our personal checking account, but I think that it’s best to keep the business and personal finances separate, so I’m not going to do that.  And I know I’ve read some blog entries out there in the past about bank account giving away free money for opening an account, so I went hunting.

Jonathan at MyMoneyBlog has lots of great posts about finding free money, so I went there and read some great articles that totally sidetracked me.  After hours of reading lots of great posts on his site (I don’t know Jonathan personally, but he seems like a good guy from reading his blog!), I decided to get back to the task at hand, and to open a Wachovia checking account. 

Opening the account was extremely easy.  I filled out some basic info, linked another account and transferred over $100.  As promised, in a very short time, there was a $50 bonus deposited to my account.  Voila!  Free money!  And I needed a checking account anyway, right?

We never intend to write physical checks with the account, so I did not order checks.  So the account is really, truly, free.  I think they charge $16.00 for checks if I actually wanted them, but I don’t so who cares! 

So I now have a $150 budget for advertising instead of $100.  Life is good.

Update: as Mike-S noted, I could have opened up a Citibank savings account, earned almost 5% interest, and still received a bonus.  The only down side to this would be the limit to the number of times I can move money in and out of the account.  It too has a $50.00 sign-up bonus.  Doh!

At this point in our plan, the user has seen our ad on Google and clicked on it.  He or she is the directed to our landing page, which is merely a regular web page that has been specially designed to make the user want to sign up for our service and not run away.

Once again, I didn’t know what I was doing, so more research was needed on this.  I learned that the landing page should be clutter-free, the headline of the landing page should match the AdWords advertisement heading that made them want to come here.  If there are images, they should be on the left side of the page.  It should be quick to read and decipher, using bullets and lists to summarize the benefits of the iKollect system.  It should talk about the benefits, not the features of iKollect.com, and it has to be able to convince the user to click on the “GO!” (or whatever it’s going to be called) button within 8 seconds.

I really thought coming up with the keywords was going to be the hard part.  Boy was I wrong.  Writing a page like this is tough!  And the 8 second thing?  What’s up with that?  8 seconds is really not very long at all.  How can someone read a whole page and click on the action button in less than 8 seconds?  I didn’t believe it so I went out to do some research of my own.

I looked at a lot of ads that I never would have paid attention to.  My hunch was correct that not many sites that I found followed the 8 second rule.  In fact, some of those hard sell sites take minutes to read.  But they are really trying to push something  hard.  Like the latest, must-have, “YOU CAN MAKE LOTS OF MONEY ON THE WEB!!!!” sites.  But those sites have very little in common with our site.  Those sites are usually going to ask for a credit card as the next step.  That’s not us!

But I was surprised to find that the really good landing pages did indeed follow the 8 second rule!  I could glance over the page in seconds and decide that I wanted to proceed or bail.  Well that was convincing enough for me.  So I went to work on the landing page. 

The landing page is simple in design as well as wording.  I followed all the rules the best I could, and put some ability to simply track how the user got there.  If he or she came from Google, I would track that in the database.  If it was in search for coins, we would keep track of that also, because we hope to have enough success in generating coin-collectors traffic that we can use it for another collection type (perhaps model train collectors).

I tweaked the registration page to be really simple, and require just an email address and password to get started.  We really don’t want to chase anyone away by asking for too much information.  We figure that since the potential customer may be leery about the owners of the iKollect company knowing every expensive coin in his collection and where he lives, we would avoid asking for too much during the initial sign up process.

I also changed the system a little to make it a little smarter about why the customer came in the first place.  For example, one of the changes I made was to automatically add the coin collection type to the user’s “My iKollect” page, and put them right into the data entry mode.  we don’t want the user to get all the way into our system and then think “awww-jeeez, this is some giant overly complicated inventory system, I just wanted a coin inventory software package.”

Next up is to get the money into place and actually start up the ad campaign.  Wow, I am rather excited!

Google AdWords is simple.  The user is in Google searching for some specific keywords, or they are on a site that uses the specific keywords in the text of the page (and is using Google AdSense to generate revenue), and  the advertisement shows up to hopefully get the user to come to your site.  The advertisement is clickable, and it will take the user to whatever page we specify in our advertising campaign.

we are hoping for folks to follow a certain path:

1) The user searches for certain keywords on Google (or those words are in the text as mentioned above)
2) Our advertisement is there trying to gain the user’s attention
3) The user clicks on our advertisement (and we pay Google!)
4) The user is directed to a landing page that is specifically designed for the keywords that were shown in the ad (that convinced the user to come to our site)
5) The user reads the text on that page, determines that he or she should check us out, and clicks the “Go” or “Register” or whatever button.
6) The user is brought to the “Register” page that asks him or her for the minimally needed information to register with the site and start using it.
7) The user registers and is directed to another page where he or she can start using our service immediately

Well, that’s our plan anyway.  Hopefully the user won’t bail out in the middle there somewhere.  But we’ll be keeping track of what users do so we can tweak things along the way.  Anyway…

Steps 1 and 2: Get the user’s attention with the ad

So of course we need an ad in the first place.  The Google AdWords ad that we are going to create falls into a shape that looks something like this:

  [ Line 1 Underlined Somewhat Capitalized Title]
  [ Line 2 (and sometimes wrapped
    into Line 3 if it’s a narrow ad)]
  [ URL of advertising website ]

Google has all kinds of rules around what you can and cannot do.  But as long as you aren’t trying to pull any fancy stunts, you’ll find that they are all common sense rules.

We needed to do some research to determine what the keywords we wanted to purchase were going be.  Since other competitors also desire the keywords, there’s some research and guesswork required. 

The market we are focusing on first is the coin collectors.  There are lots of these types of collectors out there and because their collections can often be quite extensive and valuable, they like to be organized.  They are split in how they are organized.  From what we can tell, about 40% of them purchase specialized inventory software for this purpose, whereas the rest of these folks either use a simple spreadsheet, a personal database (like MS Access), or a low-tech solution like a notebook. 

And why would they want our web-based software over the one they can pay for?  Because like so many other applications out there, it’s web based and free.  I’m not saying I completely agree with the whole “web-based is better than fat-client” argument, but I am instead going with the trend on this one.  Personally, I would rather write a fat client application and sell it on line, but that’s not what our research suggested we should do…

So now we need to do some research to figure out what to put into the ad.  But I’m tired and it’s late, so I’m turning in for the evening.