Category: Uncategorized

Stripe, .NET and ASP.NET – The Book

If your website is accepting credit cards and processing payments online then you’ve probably heard about Stripe. Is the simplest and easiest processing gateway to implement from a programmatic standpoint. For the past four years I’ve been using Stripe to process all the payments and subscriptions on my products.

But not only I’m using Stripe to process payments, I’m also using it to provide services to other companies using Stripe by building Tender, an add-on for Stripe that adds emailing of PDF invoices, dunning for failed credit cards payments and subscription metrics. All my products and specially Tender are built using ASP.NET MVC and, because of Tender’s nature, we’ve built a product that’s capable of handling thousands of Stripe transactions per minute, background processing and data manipulation. It’s a very high end product that support mission critical scenarios.

Because of this past experience, I’ve decided to share what I’ve learned from this past four years, and specially with Tender, and and write a book about how to integrate Stripe with ASP.NET which I’m calling: Mastering Stripe Payments with ASP.NET. The book will guide you through on how to build an ASP.NET web application with production ready code that can handle billing for thousands of users in a short time and it doesn’t crash. If processing payments is a big part of your business, then this book is surely for you.

Desktop application marketing – search engine marketing

Search engine optimization is what you do in order to improve and promote your website in order to increase the number of visitors it gets from search engines. You'll really optimize here to get traffic from Google as they handle most of the search queries.

They key thing with search engine traffic is that you’ll get a virtually free incoming stream of prospects to your site that are highly targeted and have an inclination to buy your product as they’re actually searching for something related on the internet. 

Ranking high on Google is a pretty difficult process that involve multiple factors but nobody really knows for certain what those factors are. Google has an internal algorithm to rank pages that to this day nobody knows how it works (and it gets updated fairly frequently to prevent spam).

Even though we really don’t know how the ranking system works, we can do some things that can help:

  • Register your domain: try to register domain as soon as possible and get it indexed on Google as recently created domains rank lower on searches. They basically go into a sandbox until Google knows for sure that your site is legitimate. There’s really no timeline of when the domain will get out of the sandbox but the sooner is in there the faster it’ll be out. You can register the domain and setup the website even if you haven’t started development. Just setup a landing page announcing the new product and collect email addresses for anyone that wishes to be notified when it launches.
  • Do fairly common SEO practices for on page optimization like:
    • Having a title on every page to indicate what is the page about. Every CMS out there should allow to put a title on the page. Make use of it and try to be as descriptive as possible about what the content of the page is about.
    • Have a description using the meta description tag. Also all majors CMS will allow you to do this. For WordPress you can use the Yoast SEO plug-in for editing this kind of fields.
    • Have image descriptions on the alt attribute for image tags. This is also straightforward but sometimes we just forget to add this type of information.
    • Clear urls indicating what the content is about. Avoid having parameters for dynamic rendering or querystrings. Google favors urls that are clean and that mean something to the user when they actually read it.
  • Link building is the next step but avoid at all costs any black hat techniques as this will get you penalized on Google. One way is to build links by providing good and valuable content to users. An example of this can be to create guides, books, infographics or any other form of distributable content that can be shared and linked by others. You can also use this content and do guest articles on other websites about this as they are also looking for people that can help in the creation of content.
  • Create content that is valuable to your market and relevant. This can be as simple as creating a blog and start posting articles related to the problem you’re trying to solve. It’ll help your users but at the same time it’ll help them to find you.

It’s very hard to rank and to be able for Google to notice your site but once you get it to work it can drive a lot of free traffic to your product.