In previous posts, we’ve talked about a variety of ways to promote your product in small ways that all add up to cost-efficient methods to increase your reach; you should really be doing these things from the start (just like that monetization bit we keep harping on) or else you’ll end up sad and lonely and the cool kids won’t hang out with you.
Oh, sorry, flashback to my little brother’s high school complaining… it’s not like he reads this blog.
So far we’ve talked about Author Rankings, Creating an Effective Pitch, Color, Screenshots and way back when, we talked about your product pages – the same pages I’m going to harp on again.
Google’s latest gambit in the search game is the Knowledge Graph, and the goal is contextual search made into efficient reality (and probably somehow tied in with Google Goggles or who knows what) even though they haven’t announced it yet, trust me, they will. What does this mean to product pages everywhere? And why is it even a topic, AGAIN?
You cannot have enough entryways into your monetization plan. Ever. Just like a porn site, there will never be enough landing pages, at least not if you want to survive. (Yep, I can hear you… muttering about how you’re not a porn site and wouldn’t even look at one, even by mistake!)
How many times do you look for an app, a WordPress plug-in, a restaurant (not that I don’t trust UrbanSpoon), or the listings for your favorite jazz club via a search? There’s so much noise everywhere that it’s nearly impossible to find what you’re looking for unless you are willing to dig for it. When I need any of the above, I don’t search the appstore listings or the WordPress results or even UrbanSpoon (unless I’m in a big hurry) to find them. I do a search, even on my phone, and I look at the web page results. Then I go and look in the WordPress or the appstore or the app results to see how they compare.
And when I come to your product/web page, if it sucks, I’m not going to be inclined to choose your product over someone else that took the time to make an attractive page that is easy to navigate. If I’m searching in WordPress, for instance, and I haven’t already found the target plug-in via search, then I’ll go to the plug-in site and check it out. Seeing something that makes sense in larger format is always a plus and drives sales like running buffalo off a cliff.
So much of the appstore results are nearly incomprehensible that I rarely download apps any more without doing a quick web view to see what the product pages look like. This is human behaviour 101 – how will your customers find you and what impression will they get when they see you, that sort of old school marketing that still drives companies to media buy across platforms and devices and verticals.
I should probably mention that Hazel and I watched a fabulous ad monitoring demo today from WhatRunsWhere.com which only reinforces every word above. If you delve into the stats, you will see that no matter how prevalent apps seem to be, they still don’t hold a candle to the sheer volume of online presence and smart companies with big – no! GIANT – budgets are still spending the vast majority of their media buys in the online neighborhood.