SEO (search engine optimization)

I've been working on our web site for a little over a year now. Through all this time, I have read books, searched online, talked to companies that specialize in SEO and website rankings, played around with google adwords. All to no avail. We still rank low on searches for our product and the problem it solves. This last Friday my wife and I met with someone from SCORE. They are a free organization formed usually of retired business people. They can help everyone from starting a business plan to opening the doors.

We met with a guy who specializes in SEO. He's not retired, but volunteers once a week. We talked for an hour and after he assured me that I know a lot about the internet and web sites we made another appointment for next week. That's because if I know a lot, you really need an expert to help you out. I don't know 1/10th of what I need to know to make our site a success. I'm going to try and go the free route for now and see how much free information I can suck from his brain. I'm stubborn and like a challenge. Probably a bad combination but hey, it's how I'm wired.

Design Patent issued . . .Hip Hip Huraaaaay!

We received our official Design Patent from the USPTO a couple of days ago. We were notified a couple of months ago that it had been approved and it took 2 months to get the official booklet. It's pretty cool to know that your forever a part of history. Design Patents are relatively easy to do and fairly cheap. I think overall with using an Attorney it was around $600.00. It would have been more, but my wife did the patent drawings. There are books that specifically address how to draw patent drawings and she followed them along with some advice from the attorney. We were trying to squeeze more than one design in because our crystals we make that sit on top of the monster basher light base are similar, but the USPTO said we had to pick one design, so that's what we did.

I would recommend that you work with an attorney even doing the simpler Design patent. We would have made it much more complicated than it had to be and might have cost us more because of all the re-submitting we would have had to do in response to issues raised by the USPTO.

The Attorney we used was Antonio Papageorgio from Ostrow Kaufman in New York. He was great and we never felt rushed when talking to him on the phone. He explained everything to us and we felt like we were very lucky to have found him. If your thinking of filing for a Patent, whether Utility or Design, I would recommend you at least talk to him.

TV advertising or Radio. Which is best

We started running a TV commercial for a small area on Friday. We decided to go the TV route instead of Radio for a couple of reasons. One was the cost. I can't believe how expensive it is to advertise on the radio, at least for our area which is pretty small. The other was that our particular product is something that is hard to describe just by words. For some products Radio might be the best bet, for others you need pictures. Besides, I like to watch TV.

Working with the TV station was pretty painless. We discussed some ideas and they made the commercial for us. I even got to be in it...WOO HOO! The station didn't charge us for making the commercial as long as we committed to a certain level of air time. After discussing our limited budget with the sales rep he suggested running the commercial with a lot of spots for 1 week then taking a week off. He said this would give us a longer campaign money wise while giving the illusion that we were on all the time. We turned a 5 week budget into a 10 week campaign. Our average cost per commercial is under $8.00. Of course for some of the better spots it cost more. One of the best things I found out is that they have a thing called rotators. In our area they cost $20 and we might get lucky and be aired during Oprah or other high cost shows. If we asked for that particular spot, we might have to pay $100 or more. Some shows can cost $600-1000. It's a pretty good value.

Now that it's airing, I can go on our website and just by monitoring the hits by the hour, I can see what time of day the commercials are on. Ain't technology great! This is all still part of our proof of concept. Hopefully after the campaign we'll have all the information we need to see if we have a winning invention.

We had talked with a local radio station about 6 months ago and they were wanting us to commit to a year long advertising schedule in order to get the price down to where it was a reasonable cost per commercial. We weren't convinced at that point that radio was the way to go for us. For some it's perfect.

Advertising people say that you should target 7% of your budget for ads. In our case that would be about $1.40 but what the hey.Weigh all of your options and talk to the advertising experts (Sales). After listening to them tell you how they can turn a horse turd into a cupcake make a decision. Who knows maybe both mediums will work for you.

More Trademarks

Since we were looking at the Canadian market for our invention there were some decisions that needed to be made. Our original filings of Trademarks in the U.S. were done on November 1st 2010. You have 6 months to file in other countries and still be able to claim priority. Claiming priority means that if your trademarks are granted in these other countries, you can claim the date of first filing which in our case is the November date. If you wait longer than 6 months you take the chance that someone will claim your trademark or if they started using the trademark before you filed in the other country they would be safe.

We decided to file in Canada and I went to the Canadian Intellectual Property website. They had an entire list of trademark attorneys. I sent emails to about 10 and got prices back ranging from $1250 to $2300 for each trademark. After more research I found a sample filing and decided to follow that format to file myself. The cost of filing yourseld is $250 canadian for each. So we saved at least $4000 because we filed 4 trademarks. The form seems relatively simple to fill out as long as you follow the sample provided. We'll see if I did everything correctly. If not, they will contact us and let us know what questions they have or what needs corrected.

If you decide to file for Trademark protection in other countries it might pay to look at their websites and see if it's something you can do yourself. You might be able to save some serious money.

Oh Boy! Some One Likes It!

It's been a while since the last post so I may have to work at keeping this short. In any invention process you should be doing what's known as "Proof of concept." This is where you manufacture your invention on a limited scale for a limited market and see if someone actually buys your product. Large companies do this all the time. They go to trade shows with a new product prototype and take orders. If they don't get the interest they are looking for or orders are low, they just tell the people who originally ordered that they have decided not to produce it and move on.

We have been working on our proof of concept for the Monster Basher Night Light. First came the idea. Then building a prototype. Next we conducted surveys and found other surveys that were done in the past to determine if there was a market. The next step was to see if it actually worked. The last step in proof of concept is to try and sell it to see if there is a market. This last step will help you determine if your previous steps are fundamentally sound. If all of this says go for it, go for it.

Uh Oh I don't have the money to go for it. I don't know how to go for it. In the immortal words of President Clinton, "I feel your pain." You may be able to go to a bank with all of your proof of concept information and convince them to give you a loan if you have other collateral you can put up and you have good credit, and you can convince them you can make this happen. You could borrow from family. They probably believe in you or your product but that's a difficult decision. At least for me. What if it doesn't work out and you can't pay them back. Even if you give them part of the company for their investment, if it doesn't work out all they have is a worthless share of a company that is out of business. You may have to find an angel investor or Venture capitalist if your idea is worth hundreds of millions.

We took another route. There's a reality TV show called Shark Tank here in the U.S. It's a spin off of a TV show called the Dragons Den in 14 other countries. We traveled to Calgary to audition in front of the shows producers with our little invention. We got a call about a week after. They want us to fly to Toronto and pitch in front of the Dragons. It may work out or it may not. Chances are we will have to give up most of the company for their involvement and money. The up side is that even if we only maintain 25% we will make much more money in the long run than going it alone. These people have very deep pockets and know what it takes to bring a new product to market in a big way.

We won't be able to say anything until after the episode has aired but we'll let you know how it comes out. In the mean time, we will be starting a limited TV commercial campaign in a small area to see how that affects sales. I'll let you know how that is going as well.

This is a difficult process and causes a lot of stress, but I have to say that overall it's fun. Hopefully rewarding as well.

Monster Bashers big adventure

Well we're getting ready to take off on another adventure in the continuing development of our kids night light, the monster basher. We are going to the Western Toy and Hobby show to scout it out and see if we may possibly find a company to work with to license our little invention. This would make the most sense for us because although we want as much money as possible we don't really want to manufacture, promote, ship, etc. Hopefully while we are there we'll find a company that is interested. If not, on to plan B. In the meantime, we may be making a commercial to run for a test market of the product when we get back.

Damn it Jim, I'm an Inventor not a website guy.

Well I met with a guy who specializes in internet marketing. We went over all of the things that I could be doing to drive traffic to our website. He thought that we were doing pretty good as far as traffic goes but there is room for improvement. He started talking and every so often I would actually understand what he was saying, but for the most part, it was blah, blah, blah protocol, blah blah. He was good and explained it all pretty well.

Then he said, "I know that you told me that this is your first website and you did it all your self, so don't take what I'm about to say personally, but your site is pretty chaotic." I assured him that I did not take it personally and his mother wears army boots. The last part I just made up. Any way, I took his suggestions to heart and revamped our home page. He told me that I had so much information that the message was getting lost.

He laid it out like this. The title of the page needs to be key word rich with what your trying to accomplish. A simple statement that piques their interest and causes them to want to know more. You then give them the information that solves their problem and why they need your product. Finally the call to action, BUY NOW.

I followed his advice and I have to admit that the home page looks much cleaner with a clear message. It's been reinforced to me through this inventing process that you can't be an expert in every field. Find people that are experts and listen to what they have to say. You may feel intimidated, but the expert may be intimidated by you. In the case of our marketing guy, he can't fathom how to even start to invent something and get it to market. Just like I can't fathom how anyone learns HTML code.

Printing a book

It's been a while since the last post, but we've been busy. During the Seattle show we went to, we ran into a guy who had a book that goes along with some childrens pajamas. Since we need to get a book printed to go along with our products, I asked him who did the printing and how much it cost to do his book. It was really a very nice quality paper and printing. Since it was a childrens book, it had a thick paper cover. He told me that it cost him 60 cents per copy. I couldn't believe it. He gave me the name of the printer Asia Pacific Offset. I got in contact with a woman named Elizabeth@asiapacificoffset.com based out of San Francisco. I asked her to give me a quote for printing our book with the same high quality paper and color. The quote came back at 55 cents per book including customs and delivery to Medford Oregon which is where we are close to. It's amazing that we can't get it printed locally for even 3 times the price.

Now all we have to do is finish the text and find an illustrator. We are meeting with a graphics art student tomorrow. We'll see how that pans out.

Book Keeping Software and Goober Balls

We have been working on our quickbooks for the 2010 tax season. Because we are currently the manufacturer, there are some complicated issues for keeping track of inventory. I always thought that inventory was what you have on hand ready to sell. Not so when you're the manufacturer. Inventory consist of the raw materials to create your product plus finished product for sale. We found out that our version of quickbooks (Pro) isn't really set up for this type of business and makes things more complicated to keep track of. Apparently if you're going to do manufacturing and whole sale, you should use QuickBooks Premier.

We'll use what we have for now, but probably in 2012, we'll upgrade if we're still doing the actual production. You can save yourself a lot of work if when you buy your materials, if you break it down to how many items that batch of raw materials will make. As an example, you buy 100 pounds of flotsam and jetsam for $100 to make your patented Goober Ball. It takes one pound of flotsam and jetsam to make a Goober Ball. Your materials cost is $1 of raw material for each Goober Ball. Now we all know that Goober Balls sell very well and are highly profitable. You'll make a fortune.

Trust me, you'll need this information when you start your setup for your company.

Google Adwords

I started experimenting with google adwords a couple of weeks ago. I don't know how it will go, but it is really interesting. I set up Google analytics to track the clicks on our site. I bought a book written by Perry Marshall called The Ultimate guide to Google Adwords. In the book he explains how Google evolved and how to operate in their system. He talks about picking related Keywords for an ad test. You then create 2 ads and run them at the same time. After a few clicks, you throw out the worst performing add and replace it with another one. Your goal is to try and get a better click through rate than the ad you kept. You keep doing this until you have the best CTR possible (2% is good,4% is Great). Then you move on to the next set of keywords and do the same thing. Eventually you have a few ads running that are generating clicks to your site. It is a very methodical approach. I really recommend this book if you are thinking about running Google ads. It will save you money.

You Tube Hip Hip Hurray!

Well, Professor Bayliwick finally made it onto You Tube. He's our character who discovered the Exterminite Crystal. My wife operated the camera and the professor did his thing as good as he can do things. Any way, this whole process is about promoting our new product. It's a matter of getting the word out to anywhere and everywhere that is cheap. Just an idea for you to consider when it comes time to start promoting your product.

Copyright done.

We sent off our copyright today to the copyright office today. I filled out the information on the copyright offices website and then mailed the copies of our book. You can download a paper form and fill it out and send it in or do it online with their eCO file, which is an electronic filing system. The advantage of doing it electronically is that it cost $35 versus $65 and we will get our copyright registration in about 4 1/2 months versus 15 months.

After you fill out the form electronically, you have the option of uploading your copyrightable material and sending it electronically or printing out a barcoded label to attach to each copy of your book and mailing it to the Library of Congress. All of the information is on their site. I have a link to their site on the link page of this blog.

The whole process took about 20 minutes. The explanations on what information is required and what needs to be filled out is clear and helpful. I had read a book on copyright called The Copyright Handbook, what every writer needs to know. It covers every type of copyright so you only need to read the section that deals with the kind of copyright your looking to get. Reading that helped understand the form to be filled out.

Back from the trade show.

Well we got back from the Seattle gift show and we really learned a lot. We found out about how our packaging needed to look. We talked with a couple of showrooms about having them Rep us when we get ready to take our product to store shelves. All of the showrooms charge 15% to rep your product.

We also talked with a manufacturer that was at the show for his new product line he had just introduced. He told us that if we want to manufacture and sell whole sale that we should be at a margin of 3 to 1. For every dollar it cost us to make our product, our whole sale price needs to be 3 dollars. The reason for this is that manufacturers often give discounts on their whole sale price if the buyers are purchasing a given quantity. This is usually around a 5% discount. They also offer different terms of repayment depending on buying levels. As an example:

Minimum order $500 net 30days
$1000 order net 60days
$1500 order net 90days and 1/2 FFA

FFA stands for free freight allowance. This means in the above example, if someone bought $1500 worth of product and they paid within 90 days, you would only charge them 1/2 of the shipping cost to ship the product to them.

Usually the invoice shows the entire cost to ship the product, say $100. If they pay within 90 days they only get charged $50. If they are late, they get charged the entire $100.

Usually the more they buy, the longer they have to pay their bill.

Other things that are typically done by manufacturers is the initial order minimum might be $250 and then reorders might only be $100 or even $50 depending on the product retail price.

When we go to the Long beach show in March, we will be looking at more options.

Road Trip.

Well, we're taking off for Seattle tomorrow for a trade show. While we're there, we are going to visit a couple of showrooms to see what we need to do to get our product on the store shelves. We will also be attending the trade show to possibly talk to people in the trade and pick their brains.

When we get back next week, I'll post everything that we learn.

Marketing seminar.

My wife and I went to a marketing seminar yesterday that was put on by a media group. We always seem to pick up something we didn't know or something to try. The guy that put on the presentation said that people like free. What a shock, I mean who doesn't. Anyway I tried an experiment. I went to our website and said that for a limited time, you could get a free A/C adapter with an order. What do you know, we got an order within an hour with someone clicking on the free adapter.

Now this didn't really cost us anything because we already included the adapter with the order. The website explained how the product comes with an A/C adapter. I figured that it was a good thing to have everything included, you know...make it easy for the customer. Apparently what they really want is to feel like they are getting something for free. I am going to run this little experiment for a couple of weeks and then change it up.

I'll keep posting the results. TTFN

To many inventions, not enough time or money.

My wife was using something the other day and she was positioning it on the center island so the light gave her a shadow line to follow. I said, hey, I could mount a laser on that, it would be handy. Then I thought of what we still had to do for the invention we're working on. So for now, another idea on the back burner. I still have another product that I had plans for an injection mold drawn up but that market is more specialized so it will come after this one get's off the ground.

Inventing is both curse and fulfilling all at the same time. It's great!! I have become a serial inventor, which apparently is not uncommon once you go through the process once. You just tend to look at things differently that most people.

So for all of you serial inventors out there, in the words of President Clinton "I feel your pain".

Product Reps.

While we're waiting to meet with another graphics designer, I made a phone call to a store that we were trying to get our product in. They had gone to our website and decided our product wasn't a fit for them. Bummer! The good news is while I was talking to them, I found out that they were Product reps. I was able to get a lot of information from them as far as how Reps work.

First you have to find a showroom that handles products like yours. Then talk to them about handling your product or line. The showroom charges between 10-15% commission typically. The reps work for the show rooms and get paid out of that 10-15%. There are a lot of stores that won't talk with a manufacturer directly, they only deal with reps. So if you want any chance of hitting a wider market, you will have to find a rep.

The other thing that he told me was that if I wholesale to the show room an item for $10.00 then the retail price would typically be $20.00. If I am selling on the internet with a website my price has to be no lower than $20.00 or I will have a difficult time selling to the stores. If you need to bump up your wholesale price to take care of the commission charged by the showrooms, you need to make sure that your price on the web is at least double your wholesale price.

My next venture when we go to the Seattle gift show in Feb. is going to go to a show room and do some investigating. One of the things I want to find out is, if we sign on with a showroom, how much inventory do we need to have available to ship? I mean if they can sell to 500 locations and each location wants 10 units to start with, then I should have 5000 units ready? Don't know but will find out. Stay tuned for the exciting developments!!!

Packaging Design continued

I got an estimate from someone who does package design graphics yesterday. Holy Crap!! I know it takes some time to get the graphics right but 42 hours is what the estimate said. Plus I have to supply some of the graphical elements.

After getting over the initial shock, I thought maybe this isn't out of line so, I'm contacting another graphic design person who does graphics for boxes. It is a specialized talent, because you have to design the graphics in so many different directions because boxes are printed flat and later folded, so you need the graphics to wrap around the corners etc.

Once I get a new quote I'll blog about it. Onward and upward!

More Trade marks or copyright

We have a dilemma that we are currently working through. We have 2 more words we want to trademark. We have 2 trademarks currently filed under 2 categories and need to protect 2 more. The question that I have sent to our trade mark attorney is this: We have a character in a story we wrote that we want to trademark. We haven't drawn the character yet. We will copyright the story and we are wondering if that will give us any protection of the character until we file a trademark with the character drawing.

Trade marks and copyrights can be very confusing. First of all for a trademark, you have to determine if you are filing for goods or services. Then you have to determine what classes you want to register them in. At this time, it cost $275 per trademark class. There are 22 classes. It's not uncommon to have your trademark registered in 2 or 3 classes. There are some very helpful videos at the USPTO that explain this. I haven't really found an answer on the copyright offices website. Maybe there will be an attorney that can weigh in for an answer for future followers. Once I get an answer from our attorney, I will post it.

What's required for success.

You have a great idea. Everyone tells you so. They all say it will be a big hit. All you have to do is get it to someone and they'll go crazy over it and make you rich.

That may happen. It won't happen overnight and it will take a lot of work. You'll get excited, frustrated, start doubting. But through it all, you'll keep trying. If you have done your homework and you know that there is a market for your product you'll keep trying. If you try long enough, you will make it. Don't give up. This is one of the most rewarding things that you will probably ever do it it's successful.