Making Millions in Alabama: SlimWare Utilities CEO Chris Cope (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: After you obtained information to determine which products were doing well on the Internet and which ones were failing, how did you use that data?

Chris Cope: I used it in several different ways, primarily as an affiliate, and I did pretty well for myself.

Sramana Mitra: Did you simply identify the top products on the internet and target the affiliate programs associated with those products?

Chris Cope: Yes. I would become an affiliate of those types of products. You would think that by doing so I would be stepping on someone else’s margin, but that is not really true. I had a tool set in front of me that I could look out across the Internet very broadly. I was not required to look at where just one person was at but I could expand on it.

Sramana Mitra: You were leveraging search engines and identifying where affiliates were building businesses. You took that data and search key terms as inputs and made decisions regarding which products you wanted to sell as an affiliate. That is a great, clean strategy.

Chris Cope: I would then dig deeper. The term ‘buy books’ was a good term, and if you clicked on ‘buy books’ in the tool it would give you a deeper set of long-tail search terms. The deeper you dig, the less the competition among those keywords. That also meant there was less competition, so the less I had to spend while at the same time getting a more precise advertising campaign. That all led to getting a much better conversion ratio.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you became a master of search engine optimization before search engine optimization existed.

Chris Cope: Pay-per-click was as good as search engine optimization.

Sramana Mitra: And you used that to maximize affiliate revenues?

Chris Cope: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: That’s brilliant.

Chris Cope: I have always had that knowledge and ability to map that information. I have been doing it for a decade. That has allowed me to focus on complex problems like what we do with SlimWare Utilities.

Sramana Mitra: How did you go from publishing tools like Click Ad Equalizer to where you are today with SlimWare Utilities?

Chris Cope: Eventually I sold the application to online businesses. We also had a subscription service which would track things over time. Now a lot of that information is free from Google search tools. We knew that Google would get more features and Yahoo would continue to lose search share, so we had to find something more sustainable.

When I worked at Circuit City, Best Buy did not have the Geek Squad. When customer came in with problems, I would sell my services constantly. I did things like setting up networks and troubleshooting PC performance. I also knew that the amount of searches conducted for computer-related problems was always very, very high. I always knew that building utility apps would be a cool business to be in.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Making Millions in Alabama: SlimWare Utilities CEO Chris Cope
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