Venkat Koduru’s Blog

This is a copy of the blog post I wrote for CrazyTextEffects.com. I though I’d share it here, since A) I wrote it and B) as of now, no one knows of the crazy text effects blog. Oh, and a little background: CrazyTextEffects is the brand that I’m running UpsideDownText.com and BubbleBallText.com under.

I’d like to dispel a common misconception – that operating a site like UpsideDownText.com is easy. To be fair, it’s not hard. The programming is so basic that a one week long crash course in Javascript, PHP, and basic HTML would be enough to teach someone to build it, but that’s exactly the problem.

The fact that it’s so easy to build poses the first real obstacle – competition. They’re more than a dozen upside down text websites that do exactly what our website does – take text and flip it upside down. The product is practically identical from site to site, and since it’s limited by the constraints of Unicode there’s little anyone can do to improve the product, apart from adding side features. So in order to compete, one must focus on advertising – in fact one must focus about 95% of their efforts on aggressive, cheap and effective marketing. I mention cheap because websites like this cannot have even a $0.50/user marketing budget; there’s simply not that much revenue to be made per person. A person visits the site, flips his text upside down, and leaves. That’s it!! That’s the whole transaction. The only potential for revenue then is if a mass of users (say a few thousand a day) visit the site, and even then it’s difficult given the short duration of a time a typical user would spend on the website.

For this reason, we spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to promote UpsideDownText.com using every strategy imaginable – we’ve researched keywords and carefully crafted every piece of text on the site for optimal SEO results, we’ve launched this blog (horray!), we maintain a Twitter account and actively tweet and respond to messages… we even built a Facebook app that does exactly what our website does, just to attract the Facebook crowd. We encourage blog owners writing about Upside Down Text (or Flip Text as it’s often called) to mention our website, and we actively listen to what people are saying about our website and promptly respond if necessary. We actively search on Yahoo Answers, and Twitter for people asking how to flip their text upside down, and then reply with an explanation + link. We’ve even taken up Google Ads, and Facebook Ads (through a third-party), and we carefully monitor the peaks and troughs in our daily traffic through Google Analytics to see which of our strategies are most effective. To be honest, these are tasks that every successful webmaster must do, but it becomes all the more important for a site like UpsideDownText.com where the main distinguishing factor between us and our competition is marketing.

The interesting thing that this teaches you is that there’s more to a website then building the product (building the upside down text converter in our case)… people need to know about it, and as obvious as that sounds, I’ve seen numerous instances where companies and people have created brilliant full-featured websites, only to find that at the end they have neither the resources nor necessary time to devote to the equally important task of marketing.