pegasus

Since the creation of VaultWiki in 2008, a huge problem has been spreading awareness of its existence to the niche that is vBulletin forum owners. Over the past 20 months, trying to increase awareness has taken the backseat to VaultWiki's presentation. Refusing to advertise until a bug-free fully-featured release was made, until complete documentation was written, until a site re-design was done, and more excuses. This approach has not proved to be a particularly fruitful marketing strategy, because presentation can always be changed and improved. Unless someone sees the presentation, it's pointless to make in the first place.

2009

To be fair, in early 2009, it seems some good steps were being taken - posting back-links in other forums where people seemed to be interested in the product, direct mailing to forums who were using a similar, dead product (NuWiki), opening a Twitter account and creating profiles for the product on numerous social networking sites and PHP script directories. In mid-2009, the owners of the Cracked Egg Studios site, where VaultWiki was sold at the time, spent a great deal of effort working on Search Engine Optimization and attempting to get to page 1 for the keywords "vbulletin wiki."

But in late 2009, it seems that thousands of dollars were wasted on a traditional advertising campaign for a product that is anything but traditional. VaultWiki is a product that is only useful for a specific group of people - vBulletin forum owners who want to set up a wiki, documentation, or other content depository. While it's good to note that the marketing team seemed to be aware that newspaper or media advertising would yield few results, a majority of funds were spent maintaining a small number of paid links and an exorbitant Google Adwords campaign, which frequently went over budget.

I'm not sure what, if anything, Google Adwords is good for. There were rarely any clicks for particular keywords, and it seems that a majority of visits came from Google Ads that were embedded in sites completely unrelated to VaultWiki. By analyzing Goal Funnels and other metrics, it seemed that almost no Google Ad visitors were actually interested in the product.

2010

In 2010, the "VaultWiki Team" has decided to take a new approach. Encouraged by some of their forum's most active members, they broke away from Cracked Egg Studios in January and made a dedicated VaultWiki.org site to sell and support the product. Since then, multiple pages that actually attempt to sell VaultWiki have been added. More VaultWiki-related forum areas have been created, and all-in-all it seems to be a more comfortable environment than the cramped space it had shared with other projects on its old site. It seems that in 2010, word-of-mouth has started more, perhaps members have just been happier in general regarding the changes.

In February, the authors started looking into alternate payment methods. Previously, only PayPal was accepted, which could have driven away potential customers who did not have PayPal or were wary of using that method. For an online business, it's probably a good idea to accept more than one method, because the web site isn't secondary to a store-front - it is the front.

Another thing is trust - There's definitely a percentage of people who visit a web site that offers an intangible product (or even tangible products) and just aren't sure that they won't be scammed. I haven't seen a study on this per se, so how much of a difference it makes for a niche that is already searching for downloadable goods is questionable. In any case, the people running VaultWiki.org have begun filing the necessary paperwork to apply (and pay the rather large annual fee) for a decent SSL certificate. This would hopefully show anybody on the fence that the owner is a real entity and that transactions are safe and insured.

Lite Addons

But none of this really matters unless the VaultWiki Team can let the right people know that they exist. A huge problem is that there are no real high-volume vBulletin addon directories that allow commercial listings. The most popular vBulletin addon site, vBulletin.org, only accepts free postings and has a reputation of many postings being poorly supported, poorly coded, and not well thought out.

A common practice on vBulletin.org is for commercial mods to release "dumbed-down" versions called "Lite" versions to satisfy the free requirement, and posting a link back to the full modification. The problem with these kinds of listings is that Lite versions are typically unsupported, have bugs where features were removed, and don't have any selling points. All this means that posting a Lite version could do more harm than good when dealing with a young product.

In mid 2008, VaultWiki Lite was released on vBulletin.org. It was a stripped down clone of an early beta and was quickly abandoned. It had many bugs and the setup process made it virtually unusable. Those who tried using it were probably quite displeased and did not convert to the full version.

However, now, in 2010, the Team is considering a new Lite release. Rather than simply posting it and abandoning it, VaultWiki Lite would be an official product available for download and support on both vBulletin.org and VaultWiki.org. It wouldn't have many features compared to even the Standard Package, but it would certainly meet other quality standards.

With the recent release of vBulletin 4, there's an influx of vBulletin owners (new and old) downloading updated addons for the new release. Since vBulletin 4 itself is still pretty young, there should be plenty of time to take advantage of the situation and release what could be a very worthwhile VaultWiki Lite. With a higher volume of addon users and a better product, the conversion rate seems promising - at least compared to doing nothing, or throwing another several thousand dollars at Google.

You can check out VaultWiki itself at: http://www.vaultwiki.org/