Sunday, November 23, 2008

Getting Started with Spyble - Configurator

Just signing up for Spyble and wondering what to do? It is very important you configure your account correctly when starting, to make sure you are properly monitoring your competitors and tracking your progress to the TOP!!!

Now I will go through a test account for the automotive industry, with BMW as the Spyble client. See below.

1: Starting the Configurator


Upon your first login into the Spyble system, you will see a welcome screen, click start to begin.



2: Inputting Known Competitors


Next I identify online competition that I am aware of. While you can leave this blank, do you best to put as many as possible, we will help you get more in a bit, so don't worry!




3: Inputting Target Keywords


Next, to better configure your account, enter keywords you are targetting and using in your online marketing strategy. These should be keywords that you want your potential customers to find you with.




4: Spyble Identifies Unknown Competitors


The Spyble system, using your prior inputs of URLs and keywords, will list potential unknown competitors. You can click on the links to see their websites, decide if you would like to monitor those sites, and check off the appropriate sites.


5: Confirm All Competitors


Taking the competitors you identified combined with new competitors Spyble recommended, this screen lists those for you to confirm before moving on.


6: Map Out Competitor Sites


Taking these competitors selected, Spyble will map out the subpages of these sites real-time for you. Select those pages you would like us to monitor and over time we'll keep you posted whenever they change the files.



7: Confirm Pages to Monitor


After selecting the pages, we just make sure you didn't miss any, confirm here.



8: You're Done!


And there you go, your new Spyble account is ready, within 2-3 days you should have a newly populated account displaying you versus your competition - links, keywords, changes, and some new Spyble Advisor's advice!

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

SPYBLE IS LIVE


Dear All,
First of all I apologize for not sending out a progress email last weeks

We have been really busy focusing on one thing GET SPYBLE LIVE ASAP!!!!!!!!

And we have done it SPYBLE is Live!.

We all had to work very hard to get it done as we decided to add some additional functionalities to the system. Such as graphs that give a more graphical display of your popularity and referrers. This is why we are one week delayed with our go live.

After spending day and night in the office and asking Tommy and Alla to work in the weekends and evenings we are there.

In Dutch we say “De laatste lootjes wegen het zwaarst” Meaning the last tasks before something is finished are hardest and we certainly found that out. Especially Mike working on an old Laptop, trying to understand Microsoft Office 2007 and at the same time explaining in his very basic Chinese to Alla what he wants to put on his landing pages.

Picture of Mike finishing off his final tasks,


To get some extra motivation we worked out all of the tasks we had to complete before go live on the whiteboard and use different colors to track. Every time we checked off a task we realized we were getting closer to system go live and getting more and more anxious to finally start selling SPYBLE.

Here is a picture of our whiteboard with the final go live tasks,


Communicating with Marco through Skype about where we are and what we are doing was sometime not that easy. With Marco being at his day job in The Netherlands and the time difference. However we managed to work out all issues and get everything done.

Marco spend all his free hours into getting the backend of the system ready. Especially with our decision to be less dependent on search engines and changing the way we get our data from the Internet gave Marco a lot more work.

Typical Marco, Bas Chat


Tommy and Alla working on last minute interface changes, forgot password function and the SPYBLE tour pages.


We hope you will all use SPYBLE and send us feedback about the functionalities data and user interface. For all the SPYBLE stakeholders I hope you will use our system and give us feedback on functionality, data and user interfaces. If you don’t have an account yet please let me (Bas) know and I will create one for you.

As I wrote in one of my previous mails we are using Google Adwords to do a survey in the US to better find out what people’s SEO tool needs are. Mike has Switched the Adwords campaign from the survey to SPYBLE.com meaning that people clicking on our Advertisement will be directed to a landing page instead of the survey. A landing page is a page on the SPYBLE site where people can quickly find out about what SPYBLE is, what it can do for you , how to use it and what it costs.

Pics of our landing page,




We are using this week to do some more debugging, triple check our interfaces and our system data.

Our next step will be to start developing SPYBLE 2.0 our next version of SPYBLE. This includes a lot of new functions and a complete new Database system with our own spiders crawling the web.

After this we will be sending out and email again every Friday. Sorry for not keeping you guys up to date in the last two weeks....

Regards

The SPYBLE Team!