Community, Ideas - Tuesday, March 18, 2008 15:55 - 5 Comments

An Excellent Ebook for MicroISVs

Stephane Grenier (FollowSteph.com) has released and excellent ebook entitled “How to Generate Traffic to Your Website” [aff.] for any microISV interested in boosting traffic to their site. The book length - 136 pages - ebook covers both time (SEO, content, blogging, online networks) and money (Google Adwords and writing and getting placed press releases) ways of generating more traffic in detail.

As someone who knows a fair bit about these topics, I found Steph’s down to earth - here’s-what-you-want-to-do-and-why - presentation very complete. His chapters on SEO, AdWords and press releases were some of the best material from a microISV’s point of view I’ve seen to date. Steph pulls from both the experience of his microISV - LandlordMax - and other sources to illustrate and illuminate his points.

The SEO chapter in particular is must reading for any microISV because it focuses on techniques that work today - not 5 years ago - and because it gives you for the time invested a solid set of strategies to start acting on now. MicroISVs seldom have the luxury to dive to the bottom of any of the many subjects we have to deal with.

Yes - there are even better SEO information sources out there, lead by the SEO Book training site by Aaron Wall [aff.], but you have to be prepared and able to dedicate a great deal of time and energy to get your SEO game to this level. Steph’s book will help you get most of the way there - a very good tradeoff for the time and effort you’ll still need to invest.

If you’ve never taken much action on the SEO front, if you’ve never written a Press Release, if you’ve never done an AdWords campaign, Steph’s ebook is an excellent place to start.

While overall the book was excellent, there were however a few chapters I felt got short changed - the blogging chapter is all of 4 pages long, yet blogging is an extremely effective way of generating traffic for small software companies. And certain techniques Steph covers - specifically off-site SEO and domain acquisition - run a high risk not in my opinion worth the effort.

Bottom Line? Get this ebook! [aff.] At $28.95 USD, it’s well worth it.