The Contract Programmer

Some days I just feel like I gotta get my blog on. It’s a beautiful day in Boston so I thought I’d go inside and use a computer.

-Satch

Last night I had dinner with some friends that run a business that focuses on amateur pilots. My good friend Andrew writes a blog, and Guy does camera work.  Andrew used to be a newsman at New York 1, but then he went back to law school and now works in publicity.  I think that Andrew has changed more directions in his career than I have, which is a feat I think!  Aside from the blog, they make and sell DVDs about aviation, the latest of which is called Flight School.
So Andrew updates the blog pretty often, well more often than I update mine anyway.  And it’s gotten some attention too, but they wanted to spruce up the site and I recommended Wordpress for the blogging software.  Then we got to talking about advertising and trying to get more traffic and marketing a website.  We all know one guy who spent something like $50.00 a day to advertise a DVD that he made about the Lake Plaid miracle USA hockey team, and it didn’t bring in any incremental revenue.  I had the same issue when I was doing the pay-per-download program through CNET for the Java Contactor.  I was bidding between $0.30 and $0.45 per download, and was maxing out my budget after only 4 or 5 days in a monthly cycle.  After maxing out the budget, I’d sit and wait for customers to buy a licensed copy of the software…but no. Then CNET created a wrapper program that forced a registration.  And that’s when I realized that the quality of users downloading the software was total crap.  Most everyone registered bogus names, email addresses, street addresses etc.  Everyone wanted free goods and wanted to remain anonymous too.  Pretty hard to run a business with anonymous non-paying customers:)