Noted Link Whore to Pay for Traffic

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

March 7, 2005

TRURO, NOVA SCOTIA: Software Consultant Michael D. Crawford, author of GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks, kicked off a marketing campaign today aimed at transitioning his company from a custom software development firm to an advertising-supported technical website publisher.

"I want to crush Joel Spolsky like a bug," remarked Crawford, referring to the author of the popular competing technical tip website Joel on Software as well as a dead-tree book of the same name. "He got where he is today by publishing - frequently publishing - well-written technical articles presented in a professional manner on a tastefully designed website," Crawford admitted. "While I have written just as prolifically, my articles and essays are on a much more diverse range of topics and scattered all over the web. They are both hard to find and often have poor presentation. I am already working to change that."

Crawford, an avid writer whose essays have been featured on the front page of the community website Kuro5hin, says he believes in doing well by doing good: "My entire advertising budget for the month of March will be spent on text ads at Kuro5hin. I want to give back to the community that has given me so much." Crawford added that much more would ultimately be spent at Kuro5hin if his marketing campaign proved effective.

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Crawford showed off his recent website makeover, created by his wife Bonita. "She was a freelance web designer before she returned to school to study fine art." Again referring to Spolsky, Crawford said "Some of his ideas might not make a whole lot of sense, but I have to say he's got a really cool website."

The campaign's first test advertisements were placed at Kuro5hin late in the afternoon of March 7, a few days after Crawford outlined his plans in his weblog, saying "I'm going to make rusty a very rich man." Crawford was referring to Rusty Foster, owner of the Kuro5hin website and chairman of the Collaborative Media Foundation. Foster could not be reached for comment by press time, but a spokeswoman read a prepared statement on his behalf, saying simply "There is no K5 Cabal."

Crawford's strategy is to ramp up his marketing campaign slowly. In his weblog he said, "Each day I will update one article with Bonita's new design, insert the relevant affiliate ads, and then, after posting it, pay to advertise it here at K5."

As each article is republished, Crawford will feature it in his Kuro5hin weblog. "Yesterday's diary on refactoring C++ code stimulated enthusiastic debate among the software engineers who read Kuro5hin," said Crawford, "but today's entry on website promotion proved much more controversial."

"Even though I said it wasn't link whoring that got me where I am today," continued Crawford, "simply presenting one of my articles each day in my diary ultimately met with an angry response: accusations that featuring my articles in my own diary was link whoring, and that I wasn't contributing content to the community, but using it to direct traffic to my own website."

Link whoring, and a related practice known as "Google Bombing", are methods of website promotion used to increase traffic by improving a site's search engine ranking. Some search engines, notably the popular Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), consider the number of links pointing to a page, and the text of each link title, when calculating a page's position in the results presented for a search query. "There is some benefit to link whoring," admitted Crawford, noting that his site is Google's #1 hit for the query programming tricks. "I get a lot of traffic from the search engines that way, but it pisses a lot of people off.

"It has never been my intention to succeed by alienating others," said Crawford, "It's what I have had to do to survive, but that's no longer the case now that I have a way to make money directly from my writing." Crawford responded to the criticism leveled at him by pointing out that he is a valuable member of and contributor to the Kuro5hin community:

Living with Schizoaffective Disorder is, I'm pretty sure, the longest article ever published at k5. It had to be submitted in three installments because it exceeded the 64 kb anti-crapflood limit that Scoop sets for article submissions. All three installments were voted quickly and enthusiastically to front page.

(Scoop is the Open Source content management system used to operate several collaborative publishing websites in addition to Kuro5hin.)

Crawford added that he also wrote what he believes is the second longest article in Kuro5hin's history, Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads, pointing out that it was approved by Kuro5hin's moderator by a vote of 110 to 15, with 85 votes for front page.

Even though Crawford aims to earn money by writing for his own site, he still plans to write for Kuro5hin. "I wouldn't be half the writer I am today if it weren't for the feedback I get from Kuro5hin's moderators," pointed out Crawford, "and the trolls at K5 don't bother me at all. Even Shakespeare had his groundlings."

Canadian independent filmmaker Matthew Frederick Davis Hemming came to Crawford's defense. Known to the Kuro5hin community as CheeseBurgerBrown, the creator of the popular animated short Space Attack! said:

Is it reasonable to expect Kuro5hin pages to contain peripheral commercial content?

I would argue that it is. There are several tacks such an argument could take, but I think the clearest is this: name whom you consider to be the top 10 contributors to FP articles on this site, and then go look at their userinfo. How many of them are using strategies like Mike's to tap into the traffic? Look at their websites, and the links in their signatures. I think you'll be surprised.

... If "marquee" contributors like kpaul, MichaelCrawford, localroger and myself (for example) all see our diaries as reasonable gateways to our personal wares, who's to say we're misusing the medium?

Crawford added that " It is naive to expect the Web to be free of advertising."

Returning to discussion of his marketing strategy, Crawford emphasized that the six ads placed on the first day of his campaign were only published for testing purposes. "If you're going to advertise in such a way as to make a difference to your business, you have to be prepared to spend some money. There is no way to know how to reach your audience without actually paying for some test marketing. You have to be very careful and scientific about your ad campaign. If you're not, you won't get the results you hope for, and you might go broke."

Crawford credits Silicon Valley video game pioneer Dave Johnson for teaching him most of what he knows about test-driven scientific marketing. "Working Software was unable to penetrate the retail channel. If it weren't for direct mail, the company would have failed long before I was ever hired there."

Johnson, now a political activist and author of the Liberal weblog Seeing the Forest, wrote the chapter on direct mail in The High-Tech Marketing Companion, edited by Dee Kiamy. "Most of the material in that book is now out-of-date as it was published before the commercialization of the Web," explained Crawford, "But Dave's explanation of direct mail is still valid today, and many of its principles can be applied directly to online marketing."

Crawford explained that failure to test one's marketing message is a recipe for economic suicide: "Back when Apple was struggling to stay in business, with round after round of layoffs, one reason they did such a poor job of selling their products is that they failed to test. Dave told me that they would roll out direct mail campaigns with millions of pieces, at a cost of millions of dollars in postage, printing and mailing list rental, without a single test of their offer, their message, or mailing list response."

Crawford adds that a critical problem faced by any direct mail marketer is to simply convince the customer to open their offer's envelope at all. "Ideally, you would test with several different messages printed on the outside of the envelope. You have much the same problem in optimizing the wording of your ads, just to entice the reader to click the link."

While many, if not most businesses keep their marketing strategies a carefully guarded secret, Crawford has never been one to keep his methods private. "There is plenty of room for both me and my competitors. If you conduct your business as if there was a scarcity of wealth, you will always be poor. You will create the results you expect."

Crawford promises to share the results of his market research in an upcoming article at Kuro5hin. "I'm working out ways to measure my results in an automated way, without having to spend a lot of time analyzing my web server log files. I used to spend a couple hours at my logs every day, but I couldn't keep up with the work required, so I gave up."

An example of his technique are the parameters encoded in the URLs of the pages his ads link to. "My website consists entirely of hand-coded static HTML pages. While maintaining it is labor-intensive, it is very cheap to serve. I don't use any kind of web application software or database. The URL parameters are ignored by my hosting service's server software, but enable me to quickly decode my log files by searching for text strings. The parameter 's=1' encodes the site I'm advertising on; site 1 is Kuro5hin. 'd=2' indicates the design of the ad; design number 2 is the Kuro5hin Story Text Ad, the tall ads that appear in article bodies. 't=6' indicates that this is the sixth message text I have tried so far. Over time, I will try placing ads at different sites, with different designs, and with different messages, until I find a combination that is self-sustaining, paying for itself in affiliate book sales at Amazon.com and Powell's City of Books.

Crawford expects to place just one ad a day at Kuro5hin for the rest of March, but upon receiving his next Google Adsense check in early April, he expects to reinvest all of his website revenue back into growing his readership. "Google's Adsense user agreement forbids me from revealing how much I earn from their advertising that I publish, but I fully expect to spend thousands of dollars on my own advertising in April. Having a tested, self-sustaining advertising campaign is a license to print money. It was not unusual for Working Software to pay the Post Office for a quarter million dollars worth of postage with a single check, yet we made all that money back and more through direct mail sales of QuickLetter, Spellswell, Last Resort, Toner Tuner and Working Watermarker."

"Advertising alone cannot sustain a business forever," cautions Crawford, "Working Software ultimately failed because we did not invest enough in the development of new products. Eventually demand for our old products waned, and no amount of advertising would save us. Working Software is long gone now."

"Those were the best years of my career," Crawford fondly remembered, "but I learned some hard lessons there. We made some mistakes I will be careful not to repeat. As soon as I have all my existing articles published in Bonita's new design, I'm going to get back to work writing new programming tips. Writing technical articles that my readers find so valuable that they keep coming back for more is what's going to keep me in business. No amount of advertising will make me a success. Working hard to write well will."

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GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting provides software development services for clients worldwide, emphasizing well-thought-out architecture, robust implementation, and delivery of products that are reliable and easy to use.

Please direct press and advertising inquiries to Michael D. Crawford, email crawford@goingware.com, telephone +1 (831) 401-3790.

Call GoingWare: +1 (831) 401-3790, info@goingware.com