Affiliates – Part 2
In my last post I debated whether or not affiliates are worth it for merchant’s, or in my particular case an ISVs (Independent Software Vendor). I personally believe that they’re worth it, but it takes time and effort to nurture for affiliates to be worthwhile. In any case, I promised I would write a follow-up with more detailed metrics, so here goes.
And for those of you who haven’t read the last post, I concluded with the following tip: If you do decide to go the affiliate route, you’ll find that almost all of your affiliates will fit into two main categories. Those that have 0-1 sales and those that have many sales. To maximize your results from your affiliates I recommend you increase the commissions of your higher performing affiliates, those that prove themselves. This will make them happy and work even harder to get you more customers.
To give you an idea of just how true that is, here’s our sales graph from ShareASale listing our affiliate sales distribution. You’ll find that 86% of our sales went to our Top 10 affiliates as illustrated in the graph below. That’s a whopping majority of the sales!!!
I apologize if the graph isn’t as clear as it can be, but the key thing to note is that the blue signifies the percentage of sales going to the Top 10 affiliates. It obviously dwarfs the rest.
Which made me think, can we get even more detailed metrics? Of course I could look at the raw data, filter it, and then generate my own chart, but luckily ShareASale offers a Bubble Chart of the top affiliates, which you can find below (I have left out the numbers and names of our affiliates for their privacy).
Looking at the above graph, it’s obvious that there are two super affiliates that bring in the majority of affiliate sales! I haven’t looked at the numbers in details, but I suspect they could count for half of all the affiliate sales. Following them there are two medium scale affiliates, and then everyone else. Therefore if we really want to maximize our results from our Affiliate program, we want to work closely with the top 2-4 affiliates. The others almost become noise. Not quite, you can obviously see that there are a number of affiliates getting some sales, but nothing in comparison to the super affiliates.
Which leads me to a bonus and unrelated last chart. I’m mainly posting it because I found it personally very interesting. But before I post it let me give you some context as to why I find it so interesting.
Before you purchase LandlordMax, you can try it for free for 30 days. And then, even after you purchase LandlordMax, you still have 30 days to get a refund if you’re not completely satisfied (for any reason). What does this all mean? Generally our customers have tried it before they decided to buy it, which is great (and I strongly recommend it). In other words they’re already comfortable with the software and know what they’re getting. They’re happy before they bought it. It also means we also rarely need to give out refunds. No company will ever not give out any refunds, but what I’m saying is that our number of refunds is almost non-existent.
That being said, when someone clicks on a link from our affiliates, they have 60 days within which to buy the software for our affiliates to collect their commissions. This gives them time to try the software for 30 days, as well as giving the purchaser time to ask for a refund (to protect us from fraudulent affiliates). Although rare, it balances out everything.
With that in context, below is the graph showing “Return days by gross sale amount”:
Notice anything? The majority of affiliate purchases happen on the same day that they clicked on the affiliate link! But what’s really astounding is that so far we’ve only had one affiliate refund (we actually had two but the second one was because someone accidentally purchased the software twice within 15 minutes). These are people who are buying LandlordMax the same day and not even trying it (sight unseen). This is very different than our internal sales cycle. I wish I could explain this but I just discovered it today when I was looking into the stats for this post. In either case, it’s very interesting and I plan to investigate it some more.
In any case, you now have an idea of what our affiliate sales metrics are like. Hopefully this will give you a better idea of whether it’s worth it or not for your company/website. Just remember that getting those super affiliates does take time, but when you find them they can make it all worth the effort.
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Are Affiliates Worth it for Merchants?
The real answer is it depends. Having an affiliate network to sell your product does require a decent amount of work, so if you’re going to do it the biggest tip I can offer is that you use a service such as ShareASales.com (which is what we use). Don’t try to roll out your own (we initial did), it’s not worth it. Going with a service will alleviate a lot of the technical effort and costs. You’ll still have many issues to deal with, ranging approving affiliates, dealing with people trying to scam you, etc., but at least your cost of running it will be drastically reduced. If we hadn’t moved to a service we would have dropped our initial affiliate program. Actually we were in the process of dropping it when I found ShareaSale.com. It just costs too much to maintain in-house.
In any case, an affiliate program can be worth it if executed properly. To give you an idea of what’s possible, since 2005 (so in two and a half years) we’ve sold $9,408.00 worth of licenses of LandlordMax through our affiliates. Although this might not seem like a lot, based on the amount of effort it took to manage the affiliates, the commissions($1,808.10), the amortized cost over all customers to build the software, technical support, etc. we believe we made some profit. In terms of percentage of total sales it only accounts for a small percentage, but it does add up to more than nothing. In other words it’s an extra $7,599.90 ($9,408.00 – $1,808.10) we wouldn’t otherwise have.
The biggest negative issue we encountered was an affiliate who generated a bit more than a dozen sales (not included in the above totals) that resulted in fraudulent credit card purchases. Luckily we were able to spot him pretty quickly, it was fairly obvious what was going on. Although I don’t know for sure what his intentions were, I would guess that he was trying to get paid the commission before the credit cards were returned to us as chargebacks. In any case we were able to quickly cancel all their transactions as well as avoid the chargebacks by being proactive.
That and some affiliates do use more “aggressive” means of getting people to your product. You should be on the lookout for these types of affiliates and try to limit them to what you find acceptable for your company. Remember that if they go a little crazy and spam your product all over the place (or at least more than what you find acceptable), your company will be associated with the spam, and not the affiliate! You need to be vigilant about these affiliates.
Because of all this we now manually inspect every affiliate that applies, and we double check all their purchases. However other than this negative experience it’s been pretty positive overall for us. The thing to remember is that managing your affiliate program does take time, so you need to add this into your cost. That’s above the commissions you pay out. So your average profit margin will be much lower than a regular sale, if any at all.
Where you’ll really benefit from affiliates is in the total lifetime of your customers, assuming you have a good product or service. In other words it might not even be a bad thing if they’re loss leaders, as long as these customers buy from you again (for example future upgrades as in our case).
So to answer the original question, are affiliates worth it from the merchant’s perspective? It depends. The honest truth is that you need to try it out and see what numbers you come up with. That and you need to look at the total lifetime revenue of your customer, not just that initial purchase, otherwise you’ll probably lose out. And expect to spend a decent amount of time managing and monitoring your affiliates.
Quick Tip: If you do decide to go the affiliate route, you’ll find that almost all of your affiliates will fit into two main categories. Those that have 0-1 sales and those that have many sales. To maximize your results from your affiliates I recommend you increase the commissions of your higher performing affiliates, those that prove themselves. This will make them happy and work even harder to get you more customers.
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LandlordMax Customer Testimonial
Recently I had a very positive exchange of emails with John Newton, a LandlordMax’er. In one of these exchanges he stated:
“All in all, LandlordMax is my favorite property management software package I have reviewed simply because it is a good mix of functionality, ease of use, and price. You get a great software package for under $150 and the company behind it has great service.”
At which point I asked him for his permission to publish his comment. Rather than just respond yes, he added:
“Hey, you guys are the greatest. I love your customer service. I have now bought the software and am loving every minute of it!”
Thank you John for the glowing feedback. It’s great to hear you’re loving LandlordMax and that’s it really helping you out.
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What am I Up to?
Well it’s been almost a year since I last posted what I’ve been up to, and what a year it’s been! I’ve been just as busy this year as last year, if not busier. A lot has changed since last year. We’ve had to shift a lot of priorities based on time and money, which I’ll discuss shortly. As well I’ll talk our current objectives for the upcoming year.
LandlordMax
Lots has been happening with LandlordMax as you’ll soon see, so much so that I’ve had to allocate separate sections to it. Overall though we’ve really been growing at a good rate as you’ve probably already read from my recent post on our sales metrics. We’ve been working hard at it.
LandlordMax has also started to appear in several major newspapers, rather than just our market specific niche publications such as Multi-Housing News. We recently appeared in the Ottawa Business Journal, the Ottawa Citizen, the Calgary Herald, and so on That’s been great, and it’s definitely helped to get our name out.
In addition to this we’ve really been growing internally here at LandlordMax (beyond what I’ll cover in the individual sections). We’ve now automated a lot more of the shipping process (24% of our orders are shipped). We’ve enhanced our technical support offerings (we now have a discussion forum for example). We’ve also automated a lot more of internal development process. In this regard, our version control system has been enhanced, we’ve moved from CVS to Subversion. We’ve also improved our project management system. Not only that but we now use a higher-end wiki much more extensively than before for all our internal documentation. Basically a lot of behind the scenes enhancements.
LandlordMax Version 3.11f Released
For those of you who have been following this blog, you know we just recently released version 3.11f of LandlordMax. It involved a great deal of effort and it was a success, it went without a hitch. Not only did we resolve some issues, but we also completely overhauled the report printouts! That in itself was a large effort.
LandlordMax Website Re-design
Although a lot of effort has already gone into this project, it’s one that we’ve had to push back a few times. We’ve already designed the website, we’re actually well into the implementation phase, but it takes time. As well we need to be careful with our SEO (Search Engine Optimizations) because we’re ranked very highly on Google. The new design looks amazing and will really improve the site but I’ve had to make the hard decision of pushing it back. I’d post a screenshot but I don’t want to unveil it until it’s complete.
We’ve also started to created animated tutorials but unfortunately this is another effort that’s had to be pushed back. That being said, we are actively working on making one larger animated tutorial for the home page which will showcase LandlordMax. Our goal is to have this available and online sometime between now and next month.
LandlordMax Version 5.x
In my last update I mentioned how we were working hard on getting a version 4.x out, well it’s now version 5.x. Our version numbers are based on year dot month, so 5.x means it was released in our 5th year of business on the x’th month of the year (3.11 being 3rd year of business in November – the 11th month).
This major version upgrade has mainly been delayed because we went down some wrong paths, well maybe a better way to put it is paths that we couldn’t fully support with our resources. For example we attempted to include full QuickBooks integration but this was pushed back. As well we attempted to provide full support for check printing, but again the higher costs (time and money) have forced us to push this feature back to another version. We got pretty far, the issue is to properly and fully integrate these features takes a lot of effort. We could do a quick and dirty job, having them poorly integrated with many outstanding issues, but that’s not the way we operate (for example checks that can only be printed to very specific layouts). Therefore we’ve pushed these features off until we could completely and seamlessly integrate them
That being said, we’ve been working feverishly to get the latest version out. Some quick previews of what you can expect include a whole new workarea in LandlordMax called “Contacts”. This is a place to store additional contacts beyond your tenants, vendors, etc. As well we’re planning on adding the ability to send out emails directly within LandlordMax (where having additional contacts will be a big benefit), such as invoices, receipts, and even generated reports. Sending emails without spell checking wouldn’t be much fun, so you can expect to see this as well. We’re also adding support for “Accounts” in the accounting workarea. Although we won’t offer for bank reconciliation support with this version, we will be getting much closer (you can take that as a hint of another feature we want to eventually offer). There’s a lot more than this, but I hope these teasers give you an idea of some of the great new features you can expect to see in the next major version.
LandlordMax Mac Version
We wanted to offer a Mac release of version 3.11 of LandlordMax but this has been pushed back due to other higher priorities. We’d love to offer a Mac version, but the demand compared to some other items has forced me to make some tough decisions, this being another one of them.
LandlordMax Network Version
We’ve been talking about this for some time and our intentions are still very strong in this respect. Indeed a lot of effort has been going into this. At this stage we’ve definitely decided it will be based on the same programming language as the desktop version of LandlordMax so that we can share a lot of the same code base. We’re still ironing the details of how we’ll finalize the offering, whether it will be a client/server application or a browser based system. Both have their pluses and minuses. In either case, the work we’re doing now is going to be beneficial for whichever path we ultimately decide to take.
If I were to guess today on the outlook for a networked version, I’d wager it’s closer to 2009 than 2008. This is mainly because I’ve had to commit some of these resources to getting the latest version of LandlordMax, version 5.x, out sooner than later. We really strive to release a major new version of LandlordMax every year, at the longest every year and a half. For this release we’re already at the year and a half marker, so I really want to get it out as soon as possible. It’s understandable why it’s longer than usual, but we still need to get it done. I’m aiming for under two years, but that’s still to be determined. Which means another hard decision, diverting effort from this endeavor to the 5.x version. But don’t worry, it’s coming! That’s a certainty. It’s just the when that isn’t.
FollowSteph.com
This blog is growing by leaps and bounds. Since last year the RSS feed count has pretty much gone up four times! The traffic numbers are higher than ever.
I’ve also been trying to post more frequently and regularly, which I’m sure has really helped. I’ve also past my 250th post milestone in February. In addition I’ve done many smaller enhancements with very good results (for example I include relevant pictures with each post whenever possible).
I did look at a blog re-design, but to be honest I’m pretty happy right now with the current look and feel. It’s simplistic. There’s quite a few things I would like to do, but they haven’t been enough of a priority for me to implement them. Maybe this year, we’ll see…
Interview the Pros (Book)
The full title being “Interview the Pros: What does it take to create a Successful Blog?“. Since last year I went ahead and interviewed 40 of the most prominent bloggers and compiled all the interviews in a book that will be traditionally published and available in stores such as Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, etc. You can find the complete list of everyone I interviewed for the book here. As you can see from the list, these are some very influential bloggers. Even though I’ve been blogging for over two years, I still learned a lot from them!
The book just recently came back from the initial editorial review and was very well received (this took about two months). The biggest change from the original version was the epilogue, which I completely rewrote. That’s been re-submitted and the book is going through one final edit. I expect this last edit to be done within 2-10 weeks (at least that’s what they’ve told me). But they did suggest it will probably be on the shorter side as I’ve requested the interviews be left intact for obvious reasons. Once that’s done it’s down to the final details, the book’s cover art and copy, and so on. Based on what I’ve seen, I suspect the book will be available in stores by late summer. I was initially hoping for spring/summer, so late summer is still inline and reasonable.
By the way, the other big concern they had with the book is that it contained too many interviews. In other words there was too much content. They tried to convince me that it should be published as two separate books, but I pushed for one. Therefore expect to get a lot of value from this one book, it was strongly suggested to be two separate books!
Generate Traffic to Your Website (ebook)
In addition to the above book I also wrote a 138 page ebook on how to generate traffic to your website which has been a great success. The ebook goes for $28.95 which is very affordable, and so far it has generated sales in the thousands of dollars. If you’re interested you can read the first 21 pages free here.
This ebook has appeared on many sites such as 47Hats.com, BloggingTips.com, etc. and has been positively received overall by the online community. There are a lot of very positive reviews about it online, two of which I haven’t even yet had the time to mention on this blog, or the sales page for that matter. This will soon change of course.
With all that, the biggest issue with this ebook is that the sales page needs a lot of work. I honestly put it together very quickly, and it’s obvious. Just as I was releasing it, I got my editorial review back for my book Interview the Pros, which took precedence over fully developing the sales page. And then came the final push to get LandlordMax version 3.11f out the door. And so on. Basically I haven’t had the time.
In any case, it could be converting much better. Therefore you can expect to see the sales page for the ebook to be updated very soon, especially since we’re suppose to be showcased on BitsDuJour.com early next month (May). I really want to have it updated before then.
FindYourWeddingDress.com
This project has moved a lot since last year. The website is stable, and we did hire someone to populate the database with wedding dresses. Although it’s not publicly released, I figured it would be a lot easier to get commitment from wedding dress designers if they could see the website in action with a sample database. See what it would be like when it was fully populated.
To do this we hired someone to populate the database, and she did a great job. If you go to the website you’ll see we have over 500 dresses in the database right now. 500 dresses might not seem like a lot, but it is. Without getting into the specifics here, I can say the work is in the details.
However, the next stage of this enterprise is to contact the different wedding dress designers and work out arrangements with them to fully populate the database with complete data. This is where I’m lacking the resources to move ahead. I would prefer to do this myself, or hire a professional to help us contact the different designers. In either case, I just don’t have the time right now. Therefore this has been temporarily put on the back burner with the full expectations that I will return to it by winter.
The good news though is that the traffic to this website is growing exponentially, without any marketing! For some reason we’re being found on the search engines for all kinds of searches. Right now we’re looking at about a thousand unique visitors per month. Overall this is an almost non-existent website, but it’s amazing for a website that doesn’t have any links to it other than my mentioning it once or twice on this blog. No one else is linking to it. These are almost all due to search results. For example this month the search term to generate the most traffic is “castillion train dress”. I can just imagine what will happen once we really get the ball rolling with this project.
WhichJar.com
Last time I left off this website was stable and only needed the database to be populated. Unfortunately this is still the case. I just haven’t been able to allocated any time to it, including time to find someone to help me with this project. Therefore it’s currently been put on hold. The database has about 100 jars, but that’s insignificant, it’s just not enough to be of any real value right now. It needs at least 1,000 – 10,000 jars of the bigger open source project to get any real traction.
More
Yes, there’s still more! Like I said, I’ve been busy. But the rest isn’t as interesting as what I’ve already mentioned. For example we’ve bought a bunch of domains to monetize and/or re-direct to LandlordMax (for example PropertyManagementSoftwares.com), we’ve been enhancing on our affiliate program for LandlordMax, and so on.
Overall it’s been a busy year and next year is looking to be even busier! I can’t wait. And just like I said in last year’s post, this is why I love being an entrepreneur; you never know where next year will lead you.
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More LandlordMax Sales Metrics
Last week I promised I would post a follow-up article to my previous one about our sales metrics at LandlordMax, where I would show our daily sales averages over a month. Well here’s the graph below:
It’s not exactly what you would expect from a property management software application is it? To quote Eric, the founder of RentARoom.ca, who commented on my previous post (thanks Eric):
“Beginning of the month is probably slow, rising to mid month to it’s peak, and the last days of the month fairly low sales as well. The slowest days: First to Third of the month.
I guess property managers are busy trying to get it all done in their old system. They give up by mid month, or catch their breaths and say they have to find an “easier” way by next month and find a new program.
So by that, advertising just before mid month would be best. (depending on first ad seen -first visit to the website- and conversion to a buying decision)”
That was exactly my initial thoughts. And this proves why it’s so important to get real hard data rather than assuming. In this case common sense is wrong, including mine. The best days for our sales are at the beginning of the month, when landlords and property management companies are at their busiest.
Not only that, but when they’re at their quietest time is when we get the least sales. In other words when we expect the most sales is when we’ll get the least!
Why is the real buying pattern almost the opposite of what we’d expect? Although I don’t know for sure and I can only speculate, my guess is they buy LandlordMax when they’re experiencing their biggest pains. That is they buy it when they need it most rather than when they have the most time. The biggest time for sales is when all the rents are due.
Interesting isn’t it? Common sense in this case proves to be wrong. Getting cold hard data made a real difference, it was very educational. It’s also a very big reminder to always double check your intuition with data. I’m sure glad I did!
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The Scariest Day of a Software Release
What’s the scariest day of a software release? Is it the day before the release? The day of the release? It’s neither, the scariest day of a software release is the day after the release.
Why? That’s when all hell can break loose. That’s when your software will move from your small testing world to the big real world, when it will really be tested beyond the small and friendly confines of your company. That’s when you’ll know if there’s a problem and you’ll be called upon to fix it right NOW. Not tomorrow or next week but right now. The day after the release is by far the scariest day of a software release.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to bringing a software release to fruition. It takes a great amount of effort. And there’s definitely a lot of pressure to get it right. But all that’s nothing compared to the nightmare of having to deal with a software release gone bad. It can mean rolling back, losing data, angry customers, customers who’s entire companies go down because of you. It’s not a good position to be in.
It’s also when the customer wants solutions and answers right now! How can this have happened? When will it be fixed? And you need to give them an answer and solution NOW. You’re on the fire cooker and with each second that passes the stress and pressure increases exponentially. No one wants to experience the day after a bad release.
The day after a release is always tense, everyone’s on standby waiting for any signs of trouble. Although I’m not making justice to real soldiers, it almost feels like being in the trenches waiting for the battle to begin. It can be nerve racking.
You’re hoping for a completely quiet day, but you’re prepared for the worse.
And that was us on Monday this week. The good thing is that it was a completely quiet day!!! Not a word. Not a peep. Nothing. The release went absolutely perfect. Not one hitch. The server got hammered by the sheer number of downloads but it held up without a problem. A lot of people upgraded based on the sheer number of downloads, but not one support request was related to the upgrade!
I couldn’t have asked for anything more. So far every single release of LandlordMax has gone really well. It’s been great. Of course I could say we’ve been very lucky, but I have to admit there is a lot of effort that goes into each release to make them successful. And it pays off. It’s worth the time, and I strongly recommend every company put the necessary effort into successfully releasing software rather than just throwing it out there and hoping for the best. It’s worth it.
And please don’t misconstrue this last comment as me saying that you should only release software when it’s fully complete feature wise, that’s not at all what I’m saying. I’m a big fan of evolutionary software, meaning build your software iteratively. Don’t try to build it all at one time, rather build as many features as you can now and add more later in future versions. It’s just that whatever you do build now, make sure it works to perfection.
Once I’ve written the follow-up article I promised on our sales metric here at LandlordMax, I’ll post an article about how to significantly improve the odds of successfully releasing a software. If you’re interested come back soon, or if you want to save yourself some effort, you can also subscribe to my RSS feed so that you don’t have to come back each day until I post the follow-up. As well you can subscribe to my email newsletter which will send each of the blog entries I publish to your email box directly.
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LandlordMax Version 3.11f is Now Available!
We just released the latest version of LandlordMax Property Management Software (version 3.11f) tonight. If you’re a LandlordMax’er I suggest you upgrade to this latest version. The most noticeable change you’ll notice is that we’ve really enhanced all the reports printouts. Although the reports were really good before, we’ve brought them up to another level. On your computer screen you might not notice the difference as much, but when you print the reports out on paper the use of a darker gray instead of black for the lines makes the reports much more readable (click here to view a sample report).
As well this latest version of LandlordMax is a maintenance release, which means we’ve resolved some issues within the software. In particular we resolved two bugs that can affect you. One of these is that the report “Account entries for a Landlord (adjusted % owned)” didn’t work for some individuals in particular situations (the report just didn’t generate). This was of course resolved. The other issue that we dealt with how negative expenses were shown and calculated on two specific expense related reports. After that all the remaining issues are pretty much minor issues, such as having some text truncated, icons revised, etc. You can find a complete detailed list of all changes (release notes) for version 3.11f here.
Actually one of the more noticeable minor changes we made was the default screen size of LandlordMax. Up until this release LandlordMax supported all screen sizes from 800 x 600 up and default to 800 x 600 on startup. As of version 3.11f, the default screen size is 1024 x 768. Although we realize this may be an issue for some people (we still have approximately 3% of the people visiting our website using this resolution), they can still downgrade their LandlordMax screen size to 800 x 600.
However as of the next major release we will only support the screen resolution of 1024 x 768 and higher. That’s a pretty standard, 97% of our web visitors have this screen resolution or higher. We preemptively did this change to determine the reaction, if any, we might encounter from our current users before we fully commit. The reason we’re increasing the minimum supported screen resolution for the next major release is because we’re finding it impossible to properly display all the data we want to expose. Not to mention the fact that 97% of our users have already moved to this higher resolution (try to buy a monitor today that’s lower than 1024 x 768!). We have to do this if we want to continue to grow and offer more and more enhanced functionality. This is especially true if we want to do it in a very user friendly manner (aka. easy to use). In other words this is in anticipation of these imminent upcoming needs.
In any case, I strongly recommend you download this latest release of LandlordMax if you haven’t already done so. The updated reports alone are worth it!
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LandlordMax Sales Metrics
After the last post about our sales revenues I got to thinking, it’s been too long since I really looked at our other sales metrics for LandlordMax. Which days of the week do we sell the most? Which days of the month? Is it still as consistent today as it was the last time I checked?
The answer is yes, the data is still as consistent today as it was then, at least for the days of the week.
We sell twice as many copies of LandlordMax on any given weekday as we do on a weekend. Why? It has to do with our customer base. We’ve found that half our customers are real estate investors and half are property management companies. It’s a little more complex than that, for example we also have at least one major city using LandlordMax, some banks, and so on, but overall the vast majority of our software is sold to two categories of customers.
The question is: why are weekend sales levels roughly half of our weekday sales levels? I still really haven’t answered the question although I left enough clues to give a hint at the answer. It’s because on weekend most property management companies are closed, and therefore there’s no one around to buy LandlordMax. On the weekdays we have both categories of customers buying LandlordMax. On the weekends we only have one category of customers buying LandlordMax, individual real estate investors.
Because of this, if I want to spend money on advertising, it’s to my big advantage to do so on the weekdays. It’s effective on the weekends, but twice as effective on the weekdays. Knowing your sales metrics is very important, well at least if you spend on advertising.
Next post I’m going to expose our average revenues per day over a month. There’s also a visible pattern in this graph, but it’s not as pronounced as the days of week chart you see above. What do you think it is?
I’ll give away one free copy of my Ebook How to Generate Traffic to Your Website to the first three people who correctly guesses either (by posting a comment on this post):
- Our sales trend over a month
- The day we get the most sales
- The day we get the least sales
Additionally, if you want to save yourself some effort, you can also subscribe to my RSS feed so that you don’t have to come back each day until I post the follow-up. As well you can subscribe to my email newsletter which will send each of the blog entries I publish to your email box directly.
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LandlordMax Sales Revenues
It’s been almost a year now since I last posted our sales revenues at LandlordMax (May 2007). Therefore I figured today was as good a time as any to update our progress and growth. You can find our sales revenues chart below:
As you can clearly see, our growth it ongoing. The current real estate crash is not adversely affecting us. Actually on my last post a year ago I predicted this would happen, with greater effect the more the real estate market crashed.
Of course I’d love to take all the credit for growth, that my company is solely responsible for all this growth. And there’s no doubt that the biggest reason for our growth is ourselves, but I really think the real estate crash is helping us. What I believe is happening is that the real estate flippers (those banking on capital appreciation) have basically been squeezed out of the market. And this goes for subprime borrowers too that cause increases in real estate prices (the higher the demand the higher the prices). What’s now left is the core group of investors, those that have larger real estate portfolios for cash flow (monthly income). Investors that need software like LandlordMax to manage their real estate portfolios. Hence increasing the demand for property management software like LandlordMax.
In any case, the last time I posted we had just started to reach new heights, and again this year history is repeating itself. It’s great! In the last 3-4 months we’ve consistently increased our revenues to another level again. It’s been a great ride and I can’t wait to see what the future will bring!
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LandlordMax Version 3.11f Coming Soon!
This is just to let all you LandlordMax‘ers know we’re planning a patch release of version 3.11, version 3.11f, very soon. Although we don’t have an official release day, you can rest assured that it’s coming in a matter of days and not weeks.
The patch will consist of about 5-6 small bug fixes, issues such as “Fixed a bug where the data printouts didn’t default to the address when the building didn’t have a name entered“. In addition to this there will be one bigger fix related to negative amounts on some of the expense only reports. It only affects you if you enter in expense amounts in the negative, for example “-15.00” rather than “15.00” (such as a refunded amount as a separate accounting entry).
Additionally, as a free bonus (this was intended for the next major release but we pushed it up), we’ve revamped all the reports in terms of printing. As of version 3.11f, all the lines in the reports will be gray rather than a black. This makes it a lot easier on the eyes, especially for line items. In other words the printed reports are a lot easier to read.
If you already own LandlordMax Property Management Software, and you’re already on any version of 3.11, then this will update will be absolutely free. And don’t worry about having to come back every day to the website to find out when it’s released, when you start LandlordMax it will check for you to see if a new version is available, and when it is a popup window will let you know.
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