By Peter Bell

The Paradox of Software Product Lines

Posted At : April 2, 2008 1:00 PM | Posted By : Peter Bell
Related Categories: Application Generation, Marketing, Software Product Line
One of the interesting challenges when you have a software product line is determining how best to market the solutions you provide. A SPL is neither a product nor is it completely custom code, and while it can be hugely beneficial to both the developing company and their clients, the marketing of such solutions is a bit of a tightrope.

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Do Personas Matter?

Posted At : October 16, 2007 5:25 AM | Posted By : Peter Bell
Related Categories: Marketing
On a recent posting, Tim Buntel suggested the need for personas in website planning. At first I was skeptical, but now I'm wondering if they maybe are an essential part of the process - even for smaller projects . . .

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Pay Per Action Beta

Posted At : March 20, 2007 4:23 PM | Posted By : Peter Bell
Related Categories: Marketing
This one is gonna be very interesting. When they get the kinks rolled out, marketing is finally going to be able to say "a lead with an email address is worth $3" and pay exactly that.

It'll be interesting to see how pricing ends up working and I'm sure there will still be a big incentive for improving conversion ratios (lower cost per action and/or higher position in adsense results) but this is the start of something that Google has been moving towards for a long time that's going to have huge repercussions if it succeeds and can drive a sufficient quantity of actions to displace less "certain" media buys.

One to watch. Thoughts?

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Guy Kawasaki on "Hindering Market Adoption"

Posted At : January 29, 2007 8:37 AM | Posted By : Peter Bell
Related Categories: Marketing
Just a nice posting reminding us of some of the stuff we really should be building into our sites and business models.

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The Cost of Selling a Website

Posted At : December 10, 2006 1:39 PM | Posted By : Peter Bell
Related Categories: Marketing
And now for something completely different! At SystemsForge we were working up a list of the criteria for our ideal resellers for our application generation services. There are a number of good characteristic, but in general it is people who sell web sites/web applications that retail for under $50,000 including design, programming, project management and data entry but excluding any custom content creation (copy writing, shooting videos, photo shoots, etc.) or SEO. Our sweet spot is typically projects that retail for $5,000 - $50,000, but we were discussing how small a project someone might use us on (around $3,000 retail including design, it appears). As part of that discussion, we worked up an interesting set of numbers for what it actually costs to sell a website. Interesting reading for anyone. Essential for anyone involved in a website development company that hasn’t gone through the exercise for whatever reason.

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