The first video is a five-minute pitch about Feedback Army. You’ll learn what the service is (hopefully you know if you’re here), how customers use it, and what they think of it.

The second video features ten minutes of questions and answers. My favorite part is the surprise appearance of a Feedback Army reviewer / Mechanical Turk user. This definitely added spice to the event

Here are the questions fielded:

1. Why does Feedback Army use a third-party service to recruit reviewers? (0:00)
2. What is the target market for Feedback Army? (1:00)
3. One nice thing about Feedback Army as a business (2:25)
4. How does Feedback Army ensure quality of reviews? (3:00)
5. Does Feedback Army let you pick reviewers by demographics? (4:30)
6. How does Feedback Army recruit the reviewers? (5:45)
7. I’m an anonymous mturker and I want to say… (6:50)
8. Is Feedback Army for sale? (9:40)

If you want to see what Feedback Army is about live, you’ll want to peep this Q&A.

I’d like you to head over to the $300 Million Button. It’s one of my favorite usability testing success stories. A large e-commerce site used usability testing to learn how users really felt about some of these requirements. This hard data led to changes that made the site better for users and revenue better for the business (doesn’t everyone win in this case?).

You can also use Feedback Army to get feedback of this type. If there is a controversial feature getting built, ask several people to try it and see how they respond. In this case, I’d write:

We’re testing the checkout process of our e-commerce site. We don’t expect you to pay but would like to know how you feel about it. Select an item from our store and get as far as you can during checkout. Then answer the following questions:

1. On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to complete the checkout process? Why?
2. What slowed you down?
3. What could make it faster for you?
4. What part of the process did you like?
5. What part of the process annoyed you?

With these questions, you can find out how users feel about that particular process and take an appropriate action.

Photo by: Alex //Berlin _ as+photography

This past weekend I had a phone call from an employee of a company that connects travelers with those who have couches and want to earn extra income. This employee, we’ll call him Jordan, mentioned that someone had made a request on my Syracuse, NY apartment (one I haven’t lived in for over a year) and asked if I was going to respond to it.

The phone call caught me by surprise because two days ago, I visited Jordan’s website to disable my listing permanently. When I got there, I found myself a little lost. I couldn’t find a help feature from the account management screen. I then went to the homepage and saw an FAQ link at the bottom. Finding this I tried a few search queries until I learned that I needed to visit my calendar and select an option to disable my listing.

Boy did I feel dumb, the calendar is the first place I should have looked!

This story highlights what I want to write about today. When you develop a service, you should take into account what happens when a user stops using your service. For some services this is easy, nothing happens. The user’s content and account stays.

For other services, this detail is critical. In the case of Jordan’s service, when a user likes me stops using the service, it hurts. I’m the scourge of his service. He looks good when travelers get quick and courteous responses from those with couches. I no longer have a claim to the property with the couch I was renting. For Jordan, he may want to consider an active strategy to force people like me to exit without polluting his community. Maybe an email ping after a year of no account activity from someone with an active listing.

Sometimes having an exit strategy is not necessary but it builds good will. I particularly like what WordPress.com does. WordPress.com lets you export your data into an XML file that you can then import to another service. Knowing that I can sign up for an account, invest into making a blog on WordPress.com, and later get that data back is nice.

Now, ask yourself: “when a user stops using my service, what is their exit strategy?” If you can, help them out. If a user’s lack of exiting negatively affects your community, make sure you’re doing something to protect your business.

Photo by: PinkMoose

Recently I was asked via email for my methods marketing my online business. I’ve tried a lot of things to promote Feedback Army. Here is a quick list of the methods I’ve tried and how well they worked for me.

Cold Emails

I’ve had a lot of success with cold emailing. To find prospects, I visit buysellads.com and search for tags related to usability testing and startups to look for blogs that might take interest in Feedback Army. I then visit the blog, view the about page, and see what the blogger has written about usability testing. Once I have this information, I contact the blog owner modifying the first sentence or two of a template email to say something about their site. I also include a coupon for the blog owner to try Feedback Army. I usually see a response from 3/10 emails, which isn’t too bad.

When cold emailing, ask for an opinion or feedback. Do not ask for a review. If the blogger wants to, they’ll review your site. If they give you feedback that makes your business better, that’s helpful too.

I usually target small sites, but even popular bloggers have helped me out in unexpected ways. I once contacted Andrew Lock, the producer of the excellent Help My Business Sucks show. He never wrote about Feedback Army but he did mention it at a conference and this led to new customers.

If you plan to use this tactic, I recommend you read Startup Marketing Advice from Balsamiq Studio. Peldi’s advice help put me on the right path here.

Start a Blog

Now that people are aware of Feedback Army, I’m trying to market it through my blog (hey, you’re here). You’ll notice that I post about once a week. My goal is to be consistent and open in my blogging. I find posts where I’m most vulnerable (read: open and honest) generate the most attention. I seed relevant posts on Hacker News. It’s hit or miss but when it hits, it’s worth it. A hit blog posts also leads to a sales spike for the current day and the day after. Sometimes it also leads to other blogs writing about Feedback Army.

Advertising and Analytics

I’ve tried ads on buysellads.com. It took little effort on my part and it made me feel like I was doing something to market my business. However the party ended once I installed google analytics and started tracking “goals”. I noticed my ads weren’t converting to sales. After A|B testing variations of my ads, I decided to abandon buysellads.com and Google AdWords.

Before you buy any advertising, I recommend that you install Google analytics and set it up to track whatever you consider a conversion or goal. It’s easy to do and will help you decide if you’re seeing an ROI from your advertising.

When exploring advertising opportunities, make sure you set a time limit, a budget, and a have a means to measure the effectiveness of the ad.

Cold Calling

I’ve also tried cold calling.  To do this I decided on a target (small web development shops). I chose these smaller businesses as I felt I would be able to build rapport with them easily. I used google to put together a list of names and numbers. I also wrote a script to guide me through the beginning of the conversation. Before my first call I practiced this script with my cell phone held up to my ear until I felt confident and automatic saying it.

When cold calling, it’s important to know what your goal is so you can steer the conversation there. My goal was to get an email address so I could send a Feedback Army coupon worth ten responses. The callee wins and I win because I’m able to track how many coupons were redeemed and how many sales came from it.

The people I spoke with were pretty cool and the conversations weren’t awkward like I initially feared. Despite the favorable chit chats, the conversion rate from this experiment was terrible. For a startup with a low-cost product like Feedback Army, I do not recommend cold calling.

Affiliate Marketing

I tried setting up an affiliate sales program for my mechanical turk worker base. The idea was to give each worker a URL that they could refer people to. My software would pay a bonus to the worker when someone they referred bought feedback. I was very excited when I put this program in place. Unfortunately it ran into a few difficulties:

1) The profit margin on Feedback Army was too low to support an effective affiliate marketing program. I had several complaints that I wasn’t offering enough of a reward.
2) I believe recruiting the workers on Mechanical Turk was a mismatch as the workers didn’t entirely understand the program.

If you’re thinking of going this route, I recommend designing your price packages to accommodate this beforehand.

Search Engine Optimization

I’ve tried some white-hat SEO stuff. I still only get 10% of my traffic from search engines and it’s not a big money-maker for me. Someone once said if people aren’t searching for your business by name then it’s more important to focus on the product. Make sure some people are happy with what you’re doing before you focus on SEO. No organic growth is a bad sign.

That said, you should check your basics to make sure you’re not doing anything that will hurt you. If your business can accommodate it, look into finding a way users can share what they bought or build out the content on your page. For example, I’m planning to create a badge to let clients share their Feedback Army results on their sites. I don’t know how well it will do, but as you can see from this post–marketing is about trying a lot of things.

Meetup.com

Make sure you visit meetup.com and look for events in your area. I have tiny cards I printed via moo.com that I hand out to the folks I meet. In the past I haven’t seen a lot of conversions through this approach (although I’m not very aggressive about going to events to solely market feedback army)–but it is a good way to get your idea in front of people and get instant feedback. This is easy to do and if you’re an extrovert (like me), it’s a lot of fun. If you live in an area with a startup community, look for events where you can pitch your business to a crowd. This is also a great way to get exposure.

Customer Service

Feedback Army’s sales continue to grow each month. To keep this up, I focus on the most important marketing tactic of all: delivering a good product and providing good customer service. When my software detects an error or a customer uses my contact form, it goes straight to my cellphone. This way I’m able to address issues quickly. Good customer service has led to these customers coming back. I believe this is responsible for the growth of Feedback Army.

Final Thoughts

The world of marketing is filled with options. As you can see, it’s also a lot of work. Don’t let yourself get lulled into believing there is one magical thing that will build your business for you. An off-shore team offering to “increase your SERPs” for $30 is not going to make your business. Once you get going your efforts will pay off. Remember that you may have to try a few things and don’t expect every campaign to succeed. Ultimately, your business will be made by delivering a good service and acting like a responsible netizen. Don’t forget that.

Value will continue to stay part of the Feedback Army equation. One response is still around what you might pay for a click or a thousand impressions on an advertising network. The difference? Our reviewers give you actionable feedback to improve your web presence.

We look forward to continuing to serve you and make the web a better place.

Photo by: springhill2008

Recently, I was looking for an accountant using Yelp. I came across a review where the reviewer asked simple questions and the accountant kept avoiding straight answers. Worse, the accountant was non-committal and kept exclaiming “I’m an honest accountant” as a reply to every question. This woman’s behavior didn’t give her customers confidence in her as an accountant.

Part of being in business is dealing with the responsibility of dealing with things that can go wrong. It’s important to realize that fear of these bad outcomes exists and to realize you can deal with it when it happens.

I once bought eye glasses from a nice boutique place in Syracuse, NY. The glasses took an extra few weeks to get to me. Why? It turns out the frames I selected were a poor fit for the prescription I had. While making the final pair of glasses, three pairs of lenses were broken. Someone had to eat that cost. It wasn’t me.

Even though these bad situations are a part of business, they’re rare. When they do happen, they have a cost and that cost is usually something that the overall profit margins can absorb.

I used to work as a consultant. One thing I really disliked is I behaved much like the accountant in the first story. I was always thinking about what could go wrong and working with a fear of what would happen if I couldn’t deliver what I had promised. Fortunately the clients knew my work and put up with my quirks.

From that experience I’ve learned. If you’re in business, it’s ok to plant your flag and exclaim “this is what I’m offering”. Own it and be ready and willing to tackle what goes wrong.

I run a website service that gives customers (some big, some small) paid feedback on their site. I have a control freak’s nightmare. I work with a completely anonymous work force. Imagine the level of control I have in this situation. When I started, I had tested the concept and was satisfied it provided value. Yet, I was still pretty scared of it so I priced it way low to compensate. Fast forward over a year later, this service is growing and my anonymous work force has serviced many happy customers. There is a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong.

Once, I had a worker write a very vulgar review filled with swear words. Imagining this situation in the beginning of my service may have been enough to stop me from pursuing it. The customer brought it to my attention and was happy to accept my apology and a few extra responses as compensation. I also added a feature to let me ban misbehaving workers to my system. I learned that bad can happen but when the bad happens, it’s also a chance to shine.

Part of being in business is having the courage to own some task and tell the world you can do it. Don’t worry about what can go wrong–it will. When it happens, you’ll find customers are happy to work with you so long as you’re fair and treat them with respect. When starting, focus on inspiring confidence and realize the rest will work itself out.

Here are the new packages:

With these prices, one review is still around the cost of a click on an online advertisement. Not a bad deal.

Photo by: Orin Zebest

I receive quite a few direct messages from folks asking me to consider advertising with them on BuySellAds.com.These messages are almost always examples of poor marketing. I feel for you. If you want to get better, read this post. If you follow these tips, you’re bound to generate more good will and find some buyers. Trust me.

Add Value

Before you contact someone (like myself), ask yourself: what kind of extra value can you create for this person when they deal with you directly. Shotgunning an email with your URL and saying “buy from me! buy from me!” adds no extra value to your service. Contacting someone and offering them something they can’t get through the direct channel, that may get their attention.

When I market Feedback Army via email, I usually offer a coupon for 10 free responses. This is me offering something without demanding something from the person I contacted. This immediately creates some good will. If the relationship ever had a chance, it’s going to do a lot better now.

Maybe you’re asking: “hey, great you have a service… I just have a website and there is no way for me to give my ad space away”. I buy that. But there are things you can do.

For example, you can say “hey, I have a newsletter with 5,000 subscribers. If you’re interested, I can add your link to it one day and we’ll see what kind of response you get from my audience. If it benefits your business, you should consider advertising on my site to reach more of this audience every day”.

I’ve also seen webmasters offer to tweet a “welcome our new sponsor” message to their Twitter followers. Things like this add value over raw CPM and ad space on your blog.

There is a goal to this value add. When you contact someone, you want them to feel special because they received the message from you. Offering something they wouldn’t get otherwise is a great way to do this.

Avoid Irrelevant Facts

When contacting a potential advertiser, stick to facts that are relevant to the advertiser. It’s great that your site is PR5 but since the ads are nofollow type links, that does not benefit the person you’re trying to get to hand money over to you.

I sometimes advertise on sites outside my niche. For example, I ran an ad on a site that caters to graphic designers with stock vector art, Photoshop paint brushes, and other stuff I’ve never used. I do this because I’m curious to see how a different audience will respond to my advertising. I got an email from someone touting how many brushes and other things they had on their site and trying to lure me to them based on that alone. This led me to ask, did they even look at my site? This gets me to my final tip:

Personalize Your Message

When contacting someone, always take a minute to look at their site. It’s ok to send a template email. You’re in business and need to save some time. But always leave room to customize the first few sentences for whoever you’re emailing. Your goal is to make sure they know you looked at their site and you’re not just blasting a message to a bunch of different people.

That’s it. The goal is to make sure the person you’re writing to feels special. Personalize your message, tailor it to your audience (they’re reading it, not you), and finally add value. If you do, you’ll do great.

Photo by: Robert S. Donovan

Dr. Peter Meyers has a great write-up on selling usability to small businesses on UXbooth.com. I’m glad to see this conversation happening. Usability should be part of every web project. I think designers shy away from testing because they believe usability testing is too expensive.  (During an afternoon of cold calling, I had several developers recount to me that they and their clients couldn’t afford usability testing and they refused to hear me out further).

Dr. Meyers’ write-up focuses on how a usability consultant can hook the small business client. I think many small businesses want to deal with one person, the one who is building their website. If you make websites, you can (and should) add usability testing to your personal toolbox.

Here is what you need to do:

1. Read Don’t Make Me Think by Steven Krug. This book is a quick read and it will introduce you to accessibility, writing clear copy, and what to look for when usability testing.Hint: throw out the subjective stuff like “change the color” and pay attention to where testers get frustrated.
2. Familiarize yourself with a remote testing service like Feedback Army. If you’re a free-lance designer/developer who is on the fence, email me (good thru April 2010), and I will send you a coupon to try Feedback Army on one of your projects for free.
3. Decide where to add usability testing to your process. I think any time you present concepts to your client you should also present what outsiders think. If you create several mockups (or wireframes) of a site, post them to a remote testing service and see what the reviewer(s) think. A printout of these results is a good way to inform your client on what direction they should go and give them confidence that you’re a professional who is looking out for the success of the project.

Photo credit: Bramus!

Running a business is about having tools to make your life easier and please your current and future customers. The most useful tool I’ve created lets me give away 10 Feedback Army responses to anyone I choose.

What? Yes, it’s a simple coupon system. I send anyone I like a unique URL. When they click it, a cookie is set in their browser. This cookie lets them redeem 10 free Feedback Army responses. I also receive an email to let me know when a code is redeemed.

Simple enough. You should have something like this too. I’ve found many uses for this tool, here are a few:

1. Measure the Effectiveness of Marketing Campaigns

One the nice things about a free coupon is it’s trackable. Last year I tried a cold calling campaign for Feedback Army. It was a good opportunity to work on my salesmanship and find out what people thought of my product. My goal for each call was to end by giving the callee a free coupon. That was it. With the coupon system, I was able to measure how many of these calls resulted in people trying the service. Note to self: cold calling sucks.

2. Solicit Feedback from Bloggers

When Feedback Army was new, I used to write to bloggers regularly to get their feedback on the service. Sometimes this would turn into coverage. Having promoted another service, I’ve learned that giving something away in a cold contact is much stronger than “dropping a note” to make someone aware of my product. By sending the coupons out to bloggers, I usually saw a good follow-through where they would try my service and comment on it.Now I find myself on the other side of the table with ambitious upstarts contacting me about their services. Being on the receiving end of cold email marketing, I can verify that my instinct was right. Give something away if you want to get someone’s attention. If your service is freemium, find a way to give away the premium. .

3. Reward Favors

I screw up or sometimes my technology screws up. It happens. Recently, my samples page was wiped to oblivion with none of listed sites showing their feedback. Someone took the time to email me and let me know (in a respectful tone!) that this had happened. After a few email exchanges with this person, I decided to reward them with a coupon. I can’t do this for everyone that contacts me, but when I can I do. Who knows, maybe they or someone they know will become a regular customer?

4. Defuse Scary Customer Service Situations

Part of running a business is providing good customer service. Feedback Army is a good service but there are opportunities for things to go wrong. I rely on customers to click the Return to Merchant link when they checkout from PayPal. If they don’t, I have to 1) spot their PayPal payment and 2) post their job manually. This is a rare thing and that’s why I haven’t updated my system to deal with it. One time I had a call from a customer asking where their feedback was. This was two weeks after they had paid. Doh! When I screw up, I find giving away something free goes much further than a simple “I’m sorry” with a pleasant tone.

Final Thoughts

So there you have it. A simple coupon system has many uses. You can measure your marketing, get people to promote your service, and even use it to offer stellar customer service. The common theme in all these things is the coupon is a chance to make someone feel special.

What uses do you have for making people feel special?