ProductCritic Is Definitely For The "Time Poor"

Lightspeed Venture Partners has a blog posting up about the different types of Internet users.

In creating ProductCritic, we didn't actually think in terms of this but given that I put myself in the "Time Poor" camp and the whole reason to create the site was to help others like me, it's not a wonder that "search engines" and "comparison shopping engines" are two examples that are directly linked to why we built ProductCritic.

Our goal is not only to minimize the time that you spend researching products before you buy them, our goal is also to minimize the time you spend on ProductCritic! I know that doesn't sound like such a smart thing to wish for the visitors to your site when you're creating a startup. It actually sounds completely counter-intuitive.

As I've stated in previous posts, the usefulness of ProductCritic is tied directly to how much time we can save people when they research products. That includes spending time on the site itself. Our belief is that if ProductCritic saves you time, then you're more likely to return (when researching other products) and also you're more likely to tell your friends about the site. That's exactly what we want.

This basic philosophy of trying to minimize the time people spend on the site has lead directly to some design decisions like:
1) Making sure all the reviews on a product are all on one page
2) Not paginating the list of cameras. When you ask for a list of them (sorted by name or sorted by score), they all appear on one page. That's actually easier for you than just showing 20 on a page and forcing the user to click "next".

You should think about your basic philosophy of your site. Are you targeting "Time Poor" or "Time Rich" visitors?

Startup Lessons From ProductCritic - Save Server Costs

We thought it would be interesting to share some of the technical decisions we made with creating ProductCritic. In this first of a series we talk about the hardware running the site.

ProductCritic runs on its own VPS (Virtual Private Server) supplied by SliceHost. A VPS allows a single machine to emulate multiple machines. What this allows is a service provider like SliceHost to own a high end server and then slice it down into any number of smaller less powerful servers and then rent those out to customers.

It's a really great because you get your own rock solid piece of (virtual) hardware running in a secure data center with fast network connections at a very reasonable cost. Since you own the entire slice you can install anything you want on it. You also don't have to worry about anybody else wrecking the server when they install something because only you have access to it. Since the service provider is running very little software itself not much every changes on the server causing a crash or reboot. The result is great uptime as can be seen here:

  % uptime
16:55:55 up 76 days, 20:47,  0 users,  load average: 0.08, 0.02, 0.01

But one of the greatest reasons to use a VPS is because it allows you to grow your hardware needs as your site grows. Instead of investing thousands into your own dedicated server and that is basically just going to sit idle 99% of the time you rent a slice of the size needed for your site. This is less expensive, more flexible and very cost effective. Zero upfront costs and very low monthly costs. ProductCritic is running on the smallest slice available and as you can see from uptime report has a very low load. I find that a sustained load > 1.0 results in slower response times.

Disclaimer: We have no affiliation with SliceHost other than being a happy customer. If you signup with them and want to send us some love enter 'gerry_shaw@yahoo.com' in the referral email field. We'll get a credit but it won't cost you anything.

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Your Rank In Search Results...How To Compare Against Competitors

Since launching ProductCritic last month, I've learned a lot from other bloggers about various terms and tools that you should use to optimize, improve, and gather information about your site or blog.

What is SERP? It stands for Search Engine Results Pages. SERP tools help you gather information on where your site ranks on the search engines for various search terms. My favorite SERP tool is Shoemoney's Serps Script. It's really free, fast, has nothing extraneous, and works great for comparing where ProductCritic ranks against its competitors. I also use it to compare the rankings for ProducCritic against one of the largest technology review sites on the Internet....CNET.

Not surprisingly, for a site that only launched a month ago, ProductCritic doesn't rank at all for the generic and most popular keyword searches like "digital camera review". What is surprising to me is that some of the "long tail" terms (I'll post a blog entry on short tails, long tails, and hittail next week) rank incredibly well for ProductCritic and we actually beat CNET for those terms!

For example, using Shoemoney's SERP tool, I found that for the search term "vpc-hd1a review" (one of the camcorders on the site), ProductCritic ranked #4 on Google and #8 on MSN while CNET, for the same search term, ranked #9 on Google and #22 on MSN. Disappointingly, for the same search term, ProductCritic doesn't even rank on Yahoo! but CNET is ranked #1 on there. Nevertheless, I'm greatly encouraged that, for some terms, a new site like ProductCritic can rank higher than a site like CNET for the same relevance of content.

Even more encouraging for me is that the same searches for ProductCritic competitors (like wize.com) show up at #41 on Google and don't even rank on MSN (some didn't rank on any search sites). We obviously still have lots of work to do for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but Shoemoney's SERP tool helps us quickly compare ourselves against other sites and gauge our progress as the months go by.

Shoemoney is one of the most successful Google Adsense publishers on the net with hundreds of sites and thousands of domain names. Providing something like his SERPs tool is impressive to me as he provides it for free and it helps many other bloggers and site owners using his success as inspiration to continue to work hard.

7 Steps To Promote ProductCritic

We launched ProductCritic earlier this month. When you launch a site, you should have no illusions about how long it might take for the site to be "successful". It's completely understandable to create a site just to make money but if that's all you are in it for, then you will probably be disappointed.

If you're going to apply so much of your energy and time into a site (and you will, if you want people to visit it), then ensure that you have what it takes to be in it for the long run. If it's a blog, update regularly, be creative, and spend time with it. For ProductCritic, believe it or not, our main reason for creating it was NOT merely to make some $$'s. Before buying a consumer electronic (like a Digital Camera), I do tons of research to make myself comfortable that I'm spending money on something that I'm going to be happy with. I got tired of keeping track of all the different reviews and not really remembering what different reviewers said about the products. I got even more tired with my friends and family asking me, "what should I buy?" That's how ProductCritic was born.

Now, of course, after launching the site, I do want it to become a site that other people also find useful. So, here's a list of all the things I've done so far to promote the site:

1. Submit to Search Engines - Instead of submitting to every engine I can find, I submitted to Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Right now, about 80% of the visits from search engines come from Google. Doing this correctly is the subject of all the SEO blogs and I agree it's one of the most important things you can do well to promote your site.
2. Started ProductCriticBlog (this blog) - you'll notice that there's no ads on this blog. At this point, the blog's purpose is not to earn money, it is to help promote the main site (ProductCritic).
3. MyBlogLog - A cool social networking site for bloggers. It just got purchased by Yahoo.
4. del.icio.us - I went to add the link to ProductCritic here but, to my surprise, it had already been added by other people who had somehow stumbled on it within days of the site launch.
5. StumbleUpon - Speaking of stumbling upon it, I added ProductCritic here so that once in awhile, someone could just run into the site while actually "browsing" the web.
6. DMOZ - The Open Directory Project - it just reopened for submitting URL's but although I've submitted, ProductCritic is still not yet listed in it yet.
7. SpicyPage - This is a pretty new site that allows people to submit their site and people can vote on it and comment on it.

Finally, I can't stress this enough...make your site useful! It's more important than where you place your ads or what size the ads are. Your visitors are spending a bit of their precious time on your site. Make sure that they get a good return for their investment in time. As long as you are genuine and you try your best to produce high quality content, the site promotion will take care of itself as people tell their contacts about your site.

I'm still pretty new to this, leave a comment for promotion techniques that you've found work for you.

Organically Grown Website - Is it Possible?

Before we officially launch ProductCritic, I'm going to see how many people can stumble upon the site without us linking it from anywhere. Besides putting up a tag on TagACloud, I haven't placed a link to ProductCritic anywhere else on the web.

Today though, I noticed two things. First, a spike up in traffic to the site (which I've only told some friends and family about). Looking at the referrals, I noticed that the visits came from a blog called Web 2.0 Magazine. After digging around a bit, I noticed that in a blog entry talking about Web 2.0 sites, a comment had been put up with a link to ProductCritic. That's where all the links came from!

The second interesting thing I noted related to organic growth of the site is that I did a search on del.icio.us and someone had added a bookmark to ProductCritic already! As of this writing, 14 people have saved the url to their bookmarks. I would have thought that most of the 14 people came from the above blog referral but actually the ProductCritic link was entered into del.icio.us before the blog entry comment link. That tells me someone found the site useful enough already to bookmark it.

We're focused on the usefulness of the site. We feel that if the site is useful, people will visit it, bookmark it, and tell others about it. Overall, a great learning experience for us so far.