“Around a year ago we desperately needed a name for the new test management software we had been working on. We aren’t very good with names. In fact, we used a codename for the project until the very last minute, so that we didn’t have to come up with the product name earlier. Still, even with many months to think about a name, it was difficult to find one that we liked.”

Read more in a guest posting I wrote for the Successful Software blog:
How to find a great software product name

“Overall the microsites are a great success for us and are an impressive testament to how important keywords in the domain name really are for Google. We already plan to launch additional microsites for SmartInspect and for our upcoming test management software TestRail.”

Read my full guest posting about microsites on 47 Hats.

We have posted about the requirements and pros and cons of all the available web development stacks over on our No bug left behind blog. So if you are in the process of selecting a web development platform, you might be interested in our experiences:

• Choosing a Development Stack for Installable Web Applications: Part I
• Choosing a Development Stack for Installable Web Applications: Part II

The application is coming along nicely and we hope to post some early information and screenshots about our next product in the coming weeks.

Of course, the websites also help us promote our own logging tool SmartInspect. But if the sites are useful guides to developers interested in this topic, it should be a win for everyone if we are able to make SmartInspect better known at the same time. We know that product related microsites worked well for some fellow MicroISVs such as Ian‘s open source help desk list, so we wanted to give this experiment a try. If you happen to have a programming or MicroISV related blog or website, we would be really grateful if you could support this experiment by linking to one of the sites.

If you are into search engine optimization, the choice of domain names might be interesting to you. We chose DotNetLogging.com and Java-Logging.com to be exact matches of popular logging related search keywords. After analyzing a few of the well-ranking websites for these keywords, we are positive that the domain names and URLs are important ranking factors for them, especially when you consider that some of those sites only have a handful of inbound links. This is also supported by a blog post by Aaron Wall of SEO Book fame:

“Over time the role of the domain name as an SEO tool has changed, but currently I think they carry a lot of weight for the associated exact match search. Depending on how they are leveraged going forward they may or may not continue to be a strong signal of quality to search engines.”

Another reason we’ve started this experiment is to find out if the server location has an impact on search engine rankings. Our main server, the server hosting this blog, gurock.com and DelphiFeeds.com, is a dedicated server located in Germany. Even though our website is only available in English, we believe Google is favoring websites hosted on US servers when users are searching for English keywords. This is also confirmed by the fact that our website is ranking better on Google.de, Google’s localized website for Germany, even though our website isn’t available in German. To test this theory, we opened a cheap shared hosting account with an US provider and are hosting both microsites on US servers.

It will be interesting to find out if our assumptions about domain names and server locations are true and if the sites become a useful resource for developers interested in logging frameworks and tools. We certainly hope so and would love to read your comments about this experiment!

» .NET Logging
» Java Logging

Although most of the presented data is already available via other Google tools such as Google Trends and the Google Keyword Tool, Google Insights presents the data in a very clear and concise manner. It also looks like Google Insights shows trend information for some keywords that aren’t available via Google Trends.

Even if you are not advertising with Google Adwords or other search engines’ PPC programs, this new offering from Google looks like an indispensable tool for selecting the perfect keywords for your SEO efforts.

Time is money
I think many of the initial MircoISVs that shared business, marketing and MicroISV ideas on their blogs realized that blogging about their products and target markets is often more effective than blogging about their businesses. Although there are many benefits of blogging about your business (customer loyality, SEO, exchanging ideas with others), a day has only so many hours. And because we all wear many hats as a MicroISV, we have to think about how we spend our time. Sometimes other things than blogging about your business or participating in business communities feel more appropriate.

Learning by doing
Although I learn new things every day, I have learned the most about starting a MicroISV in the first 2 years or so. All the little details you have to care about in the beginning lead to blog postings, asking questions, giving tips and just exchanging ideas (registering a business, creating a website, building a shop, beta testing your product, researching additional marketing ideas, getting the first customers, providing customer support, price finding and 500 other things). Now that many MicroISVs either managed all the initial tasks or failed with their business, a lot of MicroISVs are now concentrating more on their products and customers.

Fear of competition
I noticed that more and more new and established MicroISVs in the Business of Software forum are posting anonymously because of fear of competition. Transparently blogging about their business and exchanging ideas in context (i.e. with their name and website address) would probably be the last thing they would do and this is another point why the MicroISV scene isn’t as active/visible as it used to be. Although there are really some new competitors who have been inspired by our .NET logging tool (we know of at least 2 products that were developed because the vendors saw that we have success with our product), blogging has been much more useful than harmful for us. And I’m sure there are new help desk software products that were inspired by HelpSpot, but I believe Ian has benefited a lot from his blog as well.

We have been guilty of not blogging about the MicroISV life and business in the last months, but we intent to change this to play our small role in making this community more active again.

This post, however, focuses on a common query from vendors whose products did not advance to the final round: what more could we have done to advance? The answer frequently is: plenty.

In case you don’t know what the Jolt Award is: this award is presented annually by the Software Development magazine and is given to software development tools vendors and book authors. The award looks like a nice way to get some publicity and I will make sure that we participate next year with SmartInspect.

ComponentSource is the first official Gurock Software reseller. Although we had quite a few sales through other resellers in the past, ComponentSource is the first reseller to include us directly in their online catalog and who is now listed on our website in the new Resellers section.

I know all the caveats about resellers that are discussed in the forums (BoS, SoftwareCEO etc). Most people who have tried partnering with a reseller say that they only fill the demand, but do not create it. This might be true, but I believe that a reseller like ComponentSource might have access to customers and can reach corporate clients that we cannot target with our limited marketing budget.

We will see how it works out and I will make sure to post our experience with ComponentSource either when the agreement ends or when we renew it for a second year. Time will tell.

You can read more about the new company behind Delphi and all the different opinions about it on DelphiFeeds.com. The one thing I noticed is that the name of the new company is very similar to SourceGear. Eric won’t be amused I guess.