By Peter Bell

Take Me To Your Leader - by Rob Gonda

From the man who brought you AjaxCFC . . . Rob doesn't do quite as much CF development as he used to these days, but he has started up a great new blog on consumer behaviors, digital marketing, technology, and social media. It is called Take Me To Your Leader and looks like it will be well worth subscribing to for anyone involved with digital media.

The Paradox of Software Product Lines

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?

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

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?

Guy Kawasaki on "Hindering Market Adoption"

Just a nice posting reminding us of some of the stuff we really should be building into our sites and business models.

The Cost of Selling a Website

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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BlogCFC was created by Raymond Camden. This blog is running version 5.005.