Setting Goals for a Web Marketing Experiment

I've got a good product which I've been constantly improving, a bunch of happy customers, and a website for sales and support. Most of these customers found me through a link from this blog or from a blog post about the online visualization market at FlowingData.

In that very same blog post, Nathan Chase expressed a bit of surprise that I hadn't done any marketing. Now I think it's finally time to do something about it.

So I'll take so benchmark numbers, set some goals, do some research into how to market my product and website, and see how it goes!

I'm going to track my progress here and post useful information I find along the way. Hopefully others can learn from my successes and mistakes!

Google Search Result Positions

So these are my numbers right now. The red bars indicate current rank so the more red you see the worse I'm doing. Blue bars are the positions I would like to reach by the new year.

Search String	Current	Goal
graph visualization	> 100	90
network visualization	63	50
flash visualization	12	5
flash graph visualization	69	5
flash graphviz	> 100	5
flash network visualization	1	1
flash node visualization	3	3
flash tree visualization	> 100	5
flex visualization	> 100	3
flex graph visualization	98	3
flex graphviz	> 100	3
flex network visualization	> 100	3
flex node visualization	> 100	3
flex tree visualization	> 100	3

I'm doing fine for "flash network visualization" and "flash node visualization" but those are unusual names for graph visualizations. I really need to improve my ranking for searches including "graph visualization" or "graph viz."

This has helped me realize that I don't say Flex very much. This isn't too surprising because Constellation Roamer is a Flash product. However, with the release of Framework, the Flash or Flex library, this has got to change.

Should I be trying to get "actionscript" as well?

Traffic

The number of visitors hitting the Asterisq website is pretty pitiful right now. Hits have never broken 50 and about a third of those are returning visitors. Returning visitors are not a surprise—customers come back to the website to use the documentation. However, I could definitely afford to increase traffic.

So my goal here will be to break 100 hits per day for three days in a single week. I've had some experience with search engine optimization but not so much with other means of increasing traffic. This is something I'm going to seriously start looking into and I'll be posting my findings in the coming weeks. If you know some good resources, let me know in the comments below.

Wish me luck!