• Plan and Develop the Software
  • Determine what data will need to be collected and stored.
  • Design the database, then convert the schema to SQL/DDL statements.
  • Decide on the major units of modularity for the software, lay out the application structure.
  • Code the model layer classes which retrieve, represent, modify and store the data,
    along with stubs for the controller that are just intelligent enough to start recording
    ad clicks and conversions. Doing this and verifying the queries and the code were accurate
    took over a month (this is the core of what the software does, so it has to be right).
  • Complete the controller code with a basic skeletal UI.
  • Design a proper interface and write complete user interfaces to the reports.
  • Code the CRUD and authentication stuff — logging in, adding campaigns, editing
    ads, importing and exporting data, etc.
• Plan and Design the Website
  • Find a designer to create a logo so I can set up a splash page for the service
    and finish the UI design.
  • Mock up the website layout and pages needed.
  • Explore galleries and directories of other sites to identify what kind of design
    I think will work for this site.
  • Write up a design brief and find a designer to do the work. I ended up doing this
    with a contest at 99Designs for about $950.
    A week and a half later, get the finished design in Photoshop format.
  • Slice and code the design in HTML and CSS, with days spent hacking it for
    Internet Explorer 6 (still not quite there!).
• Write the Website Copy
  • Spend a lot of time identifying benefits to focus on.
  • Write, write and rewrite feature pages.
  • Create supporting graphics, screenshots, etc.
  • Produce a promotional video for the service, highlighting key benefits and features.
  • Decide on initial plans and pricing, considering competition and target customers.
• Prepare Support and Documentation
  • Spend days recording screencasts of how to use the service to track
    advertising, integrate with various sites, import and export data, etc.
  • Convert screencasts to Flash videos, write up the HTML pages to embed them.
  • Write tutorials, glossary, etc.
  • Sign up with ZenDesk for ticket management,
    help desk/knowledgebase, forums, feedback forms, etc.
  • Set up e-mail hosting with Rackspace Email (formerly MailTrust), since my own
    spam filters suck. Make DNS changes for the e-mail hosting and help desk.
• CYA & Legal Stuff
  • Write a Terms of Service agreement to protect myself as much as possible.
    Very important, businesses are going to be using this service to make material financial decisions.
  • Write a Privacy Policy with the help of the Direct Marketing Association’s generator.
  • Come up with a backup and recovery plan, and write code to create offiste copies of all
    user data each night.
  • Document all the server software needed, configuration changes to make, etc. in order to
    set up the service on a different server in case the first should crash/die/disappear/etc. Guesstimate
    capacity until I need to upgrade.
• Plan the Marketing Campaign
  • Sign up with an e-mail marketing company to manage mailing lists, autoresponders, track e-mail
    opens and bounces, etc. Set up the lists, confirmation and reply mail text.
  • Write a 12 page guide to optimizing AdWords Quality Score to give away for free to
    e-mail newsletter signups.
  • Contact affiliate networks about support for recurring commissions. Figure out what’s
    reasonable to pay to affiliates without destroying any profit margin. Pay an overly high
    setup fee to open the new account.
  • Compile a list of bloggers that reach target customers and are willing to write a
    sponsored review of the service when it’s available.
  • Start a Twitter account specific to the service and start following people that talk about
    advertising and tracking every day.
  • Start an online marketing blog to establish the service as an authority in the field and
    attract search engine traffic to the site, potentially resulting in new customers. Spend a day
    finding and installing MySQL libraries for PHP 5.2, which is not yet officially supported
    by Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so that WordPress will run.
  • Buy SSL certificate not only to secure the signup/payment forms, but to have a “secure site”
    badge to show on those pages to increase conversions.
  • Prewrite e-mails for the autoresponder (drip campaign, automatically sent on schedule).
  • Start writing a press release and comparing wire services.
• Getting Ready to Launch
  • Decide how to handle payments, upgrades, downgrades, overage fees. Look at invoicing
    services for the overage fees beyond the monthly subscriptions.
  • Set up Authorize.net’s Customer Information Manager for PCIDSS-compliant storage of
    payment data for the monthly billing. Write the code to automatically charge customers each
    month. Test test test.
  • Set up PayPal subscription links, IPN script to handle updating the database.
  • Write and test a signup/payment form.

I’m probably 80% through all this work… hope it’s worth it. Using w3roi, I’ve saved myself about
$200 a month by eliminating unprofitable ads, keywords, times of day, countries, etc. But I think I’ve
invested so much time and money into this, it’ll take a long time for that to add up.

The website for w3roi is now well under way, but most of the content will be in the “learning center”, a training and support knowledge base. That’s going to involve lots of writing, screenshots and desktop recording for videos. I’ll have a busy week.

Here’s another video highlighting some of the new reports:

I want w3roi to be ready to import commission data from as many affiliate networks as possible.

What I need is an example of a commission/transaction report exported from whatever network you use, in CSV/tab-delimited/Excel/whatever format they support exporting to. I’ve only promoted products on Commission Junction, Clickbank and Shareasale, so those are the only reports I have access to right now.

If you can get me a report from another network with at least a few rows of sale/lead data, please e-mail it to dan@dangrossman.info.

w3roi will allow users to add new networks and tell it what the columns are to import new types of reports, but I’d like to support as many as possible out of the box.

w3roi is now open for account creation. If you run any type of ecommerce site, and you advertise online but don’t currently track all your ads from a single location, then w3roi is for you.

It will remain free during the testing period (which will likely be a few weeks), and anyone that signs up now will get at least a free month after that, plus anything else I can think of to throw in to thank you for trying it out.

This is most definitely a beta, so you will encounter some missing details, and maybe even some bugs. If you do run across anything that seems wrong, or have a suggestion for improvement, use the Feedback link at the top right of any screen to leave your message.

Thank you for your help, and I hope you can make use of w3roi to improve your advertising’s ROI!

P.S. Internet Explorer 6 is not currently supported, but will be in the future. If you need help setting up your tracking, since there is no documentation yet, you can e-mail me directly at dan@dangrossman.info.

Initially I was going to target w3roi (in terms of what features it has and how I market it) to ecommerce sites — sites that sell something and need to track the conversions from their advertising. It’s working great for conversion tracking on mine right now.

But why would I do that when selling to affiliate marketers is what I know best? How stupid can I be? I know what sites to advertise on, what forums to be active in, and how to write copy for them. I just sold them over $140,000 in WP Review Site licenses.

So I’m going to spend some more time on w3roi to make it perfect for both ecommerce sites and affiliate marketers. That means reorganizing the UI and supporting the features necessary to track affiliate sales:

• Optional two-part tracking of ads to landing pages, then landing pages to affiliate offers
• Automatically creating appropriate tracking links for the specific affiliate network being used
• Import/synchronization of sale/commission data to tie affiliate sales back to ads and landing pages

But I don’t want to be the only eyes on these reports while I add all this, so I’m going to try to open up new account creation over the next few days, and let anyone that wants to use w3roi do so for free.

w3roi doesn’t require you redirect all your ad clicks through the site to track them, so even if there’s a bug or the tracking site were to go down, every single ad click makes it to your destination page. Tracking your advertising with w3roi is risk-free.

More details on availability will be posted on this blog and e-mailed to those that contacted me about the beta earlier.

Pretty soon I’ll need to find beta testers willing to try it out. If anyone’s interested, leave a comment or send me an e-mail.