The Bojo Blog

I thought about my recent post, What is the Value of a Bojo, and how Email Ideas centric that post was.  As much as anything, it was written to help me organize my thoughts about our product.  OK, that is all well and good.  But how can you judge the value of your Bojo.

The tool below will help you determine the value of a click to your website.  We are all in different businesses and leads and viewers cost more or less depending on the amount of competition we have, the cost of the products we sell and so on.   Google provides a neat little tool that will help you determine the cost of a click for keywords if you were to buy Google Adwords.  

https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox

When you go to this page, you must enter only a few bits of information.  The first field is titled Enter Keywords.  Enter a keyword that is good for you.  I tried a couple like “home owners insurance” and “home mortgage”.  Then the only other required field is step 4, the Targeting field.  I entered the United States for the Country and left everything else as a default.  The report shows you CPC – Cost Per Click.  That is the amount of mony you have to pay Google for each click.

The results are quite interesting.  For my sample keywords, my results were:

home mortgage - Average CPC: $19.91 (and the  maximum CPC was $48.93)

home owners insurance - Average CPC: $17.74 (at a maximum CPC of $50.00) 

atlanta real estate - Average CPC: $3.19 (at a maximum CPC of $5.98)

work at home - Average CPC: $2.18 (at a maximum CPC of $4.76)

What does all this mean?  First, it means it must be really expensive to get leads if you are in the insurance or mortgage business!!  I can’t imagine paying $17 to $50! … just for a click.  It takes a number of people clicking before you get one who will fill in a contact form and become a lead and then even fewer who become customers.  It also shows you how to calculate costs for your industry.

Try this excersize for you business or industry and see what clicks would cost you.  If you’d like to share your results, post a comment.
 

        

I did some analysis last week. I wanted to see if I could quantify the value of my Bojo.

So, how do you prove the value of a product like a Bojo?

To start, I went to my statistics page. (www.emailideas.com, click on Login, then View Statistics). I noticed my Email Ideas Bojo was viewed about 50,000 times last year. Yes, I send a lot of emails. However, the real surprise was the click total. For the last 12 months, I had just over 2,000 clicks. That is 2,000 visitors to different pages at emailideas.com as a result of me sending emails to people.

I was kind of impressed with that number, but that really does not tell me the value of the Bojo. So I compared those numbers with our Google Adwords campaign. We buy keywords from Google for “email signature” and other keyword phrases, to drive people to our website. Those keywords cost between 75 cents and $1.25 per click. If you allow me to keep the math simple, I’m going to use a $1 per click average.

Now I have something. My Bojo produced $2,000 of traffic to our website in one year!!

Not bad for a product we give away for free.

John

Is Wikipedia a verb yet? I think it is, or at least really should be. You know, “Hey Cornelius, Facebook me about that raucous party Milton is throwing,” or, “Chauncey, did you Facebook that girl you like?”

Well…folks, come and Wikipedia us. For we are there. On Wikipedia.

Now that that exciting little bit of business is over, here comes the meat and potatoes. Mmm…starch.

Many of our users don’t have a clue what email program they ought to be using. Some use whatever version of Outlook came with their computer; some use whatever webmail corresponds to their Instant Messenger; some use HorridMail for Windows 95 or something–and for them, life is glib. They’re 14 years behind the technology curve and don’t know what to upgrade to.

*Trumpets sound*

Don’t worry, I’ll save you! I may not wear my underpants on the outside, but as you can imagine I work with a lot of different email programs.

So here are the recommendations:

Webmail:

If you’re often on-the-go and need access to your emails from multiple computers, you definitely need a webmail service. But which one? Gmail. Of the lot, Gmail is the easiest, fastest, and offers the best support. Automatically forwarding all your mail into Gmail is a cinch, and it is fully HTML-compliant–which means we very rarely have support issues with Bojos in Gmail. Can’t necessarily say the same for other webmails that change their HTML rules constantly.

Client Email:

If you pretty much read all emails on one computer, and like the security of downloading messages to your hard drive, client email is the one for you. But which one? Thunderbird. Mozilla’s Thunderbird is easy, fast, and FREE, and since it’s open-source, you get a support network of tech geeks the world over. If you’ve switched to the Firefox browser, you already know that Mozilla does it right. Same with email. And again, Bojos work flawlessly in T-bird.

So why have I done this?

Why risk angering the Microsoft and AOL and Yahoo gods? Well, because as long as you don’t have a serious in-the-blood allegiance to your current under-performing email service, why not switch to the best? We want the best for you. It will almost certainly wind up saving you time, energy, and money.

Huzzah!

Hey–I haven’t heard from many of you in a while. I do love your feedback!



Oh, you heard me right.
Check out the new look. You like?
Compliments to Joe at http://thebuckmaker.com/ for the killer design and outstanding support!

But the facelift is only one piece of the puzzle!
We’re integrating the way you interact with the Bojo community.

Instead of blasting out emails every time a new blog post is published, we’ll be automatically updating our RSS subscribers, Facebook fans, and Twitter followers. So if you aren’t a subscriber, fan, or follower yet: get on it, I don’t want you to be left behind!

I think this can all be wrapped up in a delightful limerick.

*ahem*

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