Payscroller - The Blog

Hi Everyone,

We pushed our new software release version 0.3.2 out the door this morning at approxmately 2am EST. This release has quite a bit of goodness in it.

The most significant change is the ability to add other PayScroll members to your contacts list. To add the member to your contacts list, all you need to do is to go the member’s profile page and you will see an add to contact button. Click on that and magic happens.

The other significant change would be your profile page. If you login to your profile page, you should see that all your profile information is now nicely organized in tabs. We have also improvised the way that you add or rate your skills. By clicking on a skill that’s not in your skill profile, that skill is added to your profile. Once the skill is on your profile, to increase your skill rating, just continue to click on that skill in the main skills tab and you will notice that the skill rating will go from 1 badge to 2 and so on and back to 1 if you click again when its 3.

In addition to these changes, we’ve also fix some bugs that were reported by YOU, our users.

So thank you for reporting those bugs and keep those feedback coming.

We have been working hard in getting PayScroll launched and of course, along the way, we tried to make things better. I know there are still some kinks here and there, and we have much improvements to make over the next few months. As a site that has just opened up to the public early october, we are seeing good results from our hard work. Today, a glance at our stats shows good healthy traffic and growth since October 1st. But what made me jumped out of my chair is how easy people can find salary information just by searching for it. A lot of emphasis is put into making data open and free. So if you are out on Yahoo Search looking for say “average pay for computer programmer san francisco“, and guess what’s came up as the first result? PayScroll Salary Center.

We are happy that people can easily get access to this important piece of information, FREE. That’s right, no other requirements is needed. With PayScroll, our goal is to help YOU by providing YOU with valuable career tools. Being a young startup, we strive to improve our technology - be it Salary Search, Job Search , Career QnA and your PayScroll profile, as we grow we want to make everything better and so can you!

So if you think PayScroll has given you some insights to the biggest secret that the HR industry has been trying to hide for, why don’t you tell you friends and family about this valuable resource that you found online.

Andrew over at Jobacle.com has been running the Working Podcast for quite some time. He recently contacted us and we were honored to be interviewed by him for one of the episodes for the podcast. After listening to a few other past episodes, we were all game for it. So what is Jobacle, here’s the spill from the man himself,

Jobacle.com is your cure for carbon copy career advice! Get useful 411, expert interviews and a forum to speak your mind on everything work related.

The Working Podcast is a podcast on what’s going on in the career space and is injected with awesome tips on how to power charge your career. In this episode, Andrew had an interview with Geraldine (our cofounder) and gave some good feedback on what he likes and finds interesting about PayScroll. In the interview. Geraldine talks about PayScroll’s vision and how we can and want to help people find that dream job! So why don’t you check out the interview and make sure you subscribe to The Working Podcast rss feed.

Being a startup that is bootstrapping with our own funds, our advertising budget is probably penny change compared to the well-funded web 2.0 startups that got billions of pennies so that they could buy $700 chairs for the entire office. So I thought it would be somewhat beneficial to other startups that are working towards that “common goal” to share some tips that we picked up on how to run an advertising campaign your startups ( website ) on a small budget.

For the public beta launch of PayScroll, we had to work with a budget of $125 and here’s how that $125 advertising budget can go a long way.

1. CPC Advertising
I believe the first thing that most people think of when CPC advertising comes to mind is - Google Adwords. I’m sure most web 2.0 startups are well aware of Adwords. Beside Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing is also another great text CPC advertising channel as well.

Google Adwords might seem all too familiar for you but is it friendly towards our $125 budget. Well, our answer is NO. And here’s why - 1) Adwords campaign has CPM cost - meaning every impression of your CPC ads has a small cost to it. Although small, but if your campaign is doing 10000 impressions a day, that adds up. 2) We also noticed that Google Adword’s CPC bids are expensive. Yes, there is a reason why Google’s stock is $600/share.

Our tips: Yahoo Search Marketing to the rescue! Yes, Yahoo Search Marketing is a similar offering to Adwords and yes, it is cheaper than Adwords (YMMV since it depends on what keywords your campaigns are bidding on). At least our campaign did not have any CPM cost. As a small bonus - if you click on the this link (disclaimer - we are NOT getting any affiliate commissions), you should see a $50 promotional credit banner if you signed up for Yahoo Search Marketing from there. The catch is you need to deposit a minimum of $30 to get started. So there you have it 30 bucks for 80 that you can burn to get some visitors.

Our Budget: $125 - $30 = $95 left

2 . Text Links Advertising
Another great way to spend your advertising dollars is to purchase Text Links, and of course there are no other easier way than to go through Text-Link-Ads.

Our Tips: Text-Link-Ads is offering a $100 sign up bonus, what a deal for a shoestring budget! The catch is you need to spend at least $125 for your first order with the promotional credit. So there you have it, just $25 for testing the water to see which sites in their network could possibly bring you some traffic and perhaps gain a little pagerank love.

Our Budget: $125 - $30 - $25 = $70 left

3. Paid Reviews
What are paid reviews? Paid reviews are as straight forward as what it is called - you pay someone - in most cases - a blogger, to write a blog post about your site. There are a couple of well-known providers - ReviewMe and PayPerPost.

Our Tips: We have not buy any paid reviews yet, but here’s what I’ve observed from my hours of research. ReviewMe’s “publishers” appears have a higher review fee than PayPerPost’s publishers. At least that’s been the case for several publishers that we are interested in engaging. Reviewme shares 50% of posting fee with the blogger while PayPerPost charges 35% of the posting fee. So getting a paid review would cost you more from Reviewme than getting one from PayPerPost. If you are serious in purchasing a paid review, try out PayPerPost Direct. PayPerPost Direct is basically a directory of all the bloggers that have signed up with PayPerPost. Once you found the right blogger, you can make an offer. You can see what minimum offer each blogger is asking for. The bonus with using PayPerPost Direct is you only pay 10% compared to 35% fee for posting an opportunity in their marketplace. So our budget is around $20 and we’re now in the process of selecting a reviewer. We hope to share our experiences later in another post.

Our Budget: $125 - $30 - $25 - $20 = $50 left

4. Press Releases
Press release can be a cheap and powerful marketing tool. Never underestimate what amount of exposure and possible traffic it can bring. But how can we manage a successful press release without burning up too much of our budget?

Our Tips: Find a freelance press release writer to write your press release if you are unfamiliar or have no prior experience with writing one. After you get your press release finalized, submit your press release to the free PR distribution sites. Here’s a few that we have found and will be using: SbWire, MyPRGenie, PRLeap and PR.com. If you have $50 to spare - try the CenterNetworks Press Release. CenterNetworks is a major web 2.0 blog that covers web startup and a PR release link at $50 is a great deal ( PageRank and traffic ).

Our Budget: $125 - $30 - $25 - $20 - $50 = $0 left

5. Last but not least - Google Radio Ads
Ok, we did not have the money to do this , but we just can’t resist posting this awesome tip on our guide. So if you happen to have $1000 left after steps 1, 2, 3 and 4. This would not go wrong if you want to drive target local visitors.

Our Tips: Buy $1000 worth of radio ads from Google and get $2000 back in credits. You can go wrong with this deal. Too bad our shoestring budget wasn’t big enough to last till this final step.

So there you have it. An insider’s guide to running a YMMV but hopefully successful online advertising campaign for your site launch with $125. Let me know if this worked well for you!

Being a small startup, we are bootstrapping with our own funds right now, I basically wear the hat of a web designer as well as being the lead developer for PayScroll. I enjoyed having the absolute control of making every single pixel on the site and along the way, I became familiar with the best open-source graphic tool in the universe - GIMP. Of course, if you have the money, PhotoShop is usually the way to go. However, being an open-source fanatic, I gotta use GIMP.

Now, on to the tutorial. The tutorial is about making a “beta” banner that you see on many web 2.0 sites. And I am going to show you how using GIMP.

STEP 1
Make a new square image using say 125px x 125px. After that add a new layer, make the height the thickness of the banner and the width much longer than your image width, say 200px. Ok.. not too complicated right?

STEP 2
Next, you will need to rotate the new layer. And to do that you need to make sure the new layer is selected, then use the toolbar Layers -> Transform -> Arbitary Rotation. In the Rotate pop-up option, type -45 into the Angle field and click on Rotate.

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We officially took the invitation key field away last weekend and so PayScroll is now open to the public. But bare in mind, we are still working hard trying to make things better. If you experience a problem, please contact us or submit a bug. Thanks much! In addition, we also released quite a few updates and added a few features.

First of, lets talk about the changes.

1) The PayScroll design and look will be moving towards a cleaner look and design as opposed to what the main page is - Web 2.0ish. I know we got over our heads with trying to be too web 2.0 and in the end, we had an excellent design but we also realize that we ultimately want people to feel comfortable and hanging around at PayScroll.com. So you can see the first sign of changes over at PayScroll Career QnA.

2) We added a few features to our Career QnA section. You now can earn points while taking part in the QnA by submitting questions, answering questions, rating questions, etc. Why do you need points? Of course you do, it makes you a Career Guru (hint: more to come in the next release). You can now add questions to your watchlist, get an email notification when your question receives an answer and vice versa, your answer was chosen as the best answer - kudos to you.

And now let’s talk about what’s new!

1) We launched PayScroll Salary Center as well with this public beta launch. So what is PayScroll Salary Center? PayScroll Salary Center captures the annual salary statistical data released by the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. We add some math to it, analyze it a little and present it in a graphical representation so it’s nice to look at.. haha.. no really, we want to present the data in the most intuitive way as possible.

2) That’s it. But no worries, we back on our next iteration and ramping up on development because there are more good things coming.

If you are looking for a press release for our launch. Email me at alfred.toh@payscroll.com, we are in the process of getting that done, and we will send you a copy when it’s ready.

Hey everyone. sorry if you were expecting more from us on the PayScroll blog. We are in the final stages of pushing out our next software release for PayScroll. Sit tight, you’ll see more new features, salary information reports soon!

Yes, you read it right. The team (consisting of Geraldine and Alfred ) will be flying out to the West Coast this week to get some partying at the TechCrunch Party at August Capital. We will be hanging around the Bay Area for the week and so if you are a web entreprenuer, or just hoping to meet the awesome people who started PayScroll, drop me an email at alfred.toh@payscroll.com!

We revealed PayScroll to the public for the first time on 7/7/7 ( really nice numbers huh for a launch date) and everything is coming together nicely. Since we have a lot of ideas and features that we want to put in place, I thought we go easy first and started sending the invites for registering an account in small batches.

Right now there is no other way to get on that list since the sign up page is not there anymore but if you are really interested in requesting an invite, please email us at support@payscroll.com.

Now on to the feedback we got and what we fixed so far:

1) Brower Compatibility Issues
You might not have notice but since 7/7/7 we’ve put in quite a bit of cosmetic changes (HTML and CSS) mainly to fix IE issues. We’ve got feedback that the layout is broken in IE. Oh well, there you go again, browser compatibility issues. It just never seem to stop huanting you. Well, we went ahead and tried to fix the layout issue and I believe all layout issues should be fixed for IE6 and prior versions. There is still a little rendering issue with IE7 but its not gonna hinder the site usage, so we have lower our priorities on that.

2) Account activations
This might not be a known issue for some, but you are supposed to receive an email with a url to activate your account. Turns out, you could still use the site without activating your account. So the story is your first user sessions is not expired by us so it should work until we decided to expire those sessions. So when that happens, when you try to login, you will get the “activate your account” message. So the safest bet is to go ahead and activate your account now.

3) Minor changes to our Salary Search algorithm
We are young, we are ambitious. So we really like to give you the best and accurate salary results that you have searched for. So we change the search algorithm for the time being to get salary results based on the location’s state that you have entered IF there was not enough good results based on the city,state criteria.

“How about company type searches”, you might ask… Well, something is in the works right now, so if you are getting “No results found”, DO NOT FEEL DESPAIR, we are working getting some alternative results if there was not insufficient results for your Job Title. So check back in a couple of days.

If you haven’t noticed that the PayScroll Sign up page is gone… well, it’s our fault. We were planning to start the engine before May this year but as we were trying to enhance the features on the website, things “creeped” in.

But hey, guess what? We have officially opened up parts of PayScroll.com to the public on July 7th 2007 (070707). We will be sending out invites in groups, so if you have signed up for our Alpha Launch, please look out for our invitation email. I noticed that a few common webmail providers are sending our emails straight to the spam box. Here’s how to overcome that: Add our email registration@payscroll.com. to your contacts/address book. This way when the email arrives at your mailbox, it will not be classified as junk mail. If you decide not to add us yet, then you just have to check your junk mailbox periodically to watch out for our invites!

I recommend you take the Site Tour, go to our main page and just click on the Take the PayScroll Site Tour now! link. Then if you still have questions, then check out our FAQ section. So you might ask “I have not received an invite with an invitation key… bummer… so what can I do now at PayScroll?”

Simple! Without an account, you can actually still utilize a lot of of PayScroll features … isn’t that cool? Well, here’s what you can do now without an account.

1. You can browse the questions and answers now at the PayScroll QnA.
2. You can Search for Jobs! Yes, our Job Search is powered by Indeed. It is very powerful. Why don’t you try it out.
3. You can browse other members‘ profiles and what questions other members asked or answered?

If you have already received an invitation from us or from someone you know who is a member, you can access these other site features.

1. Search for salary information of job positions by location or company.
2. Create a profile, create a personal profile, and update your professional profile and skills.
3. Post a question or answer a question at the PayScroll QnA.
4. Rate an answer if you find it is good or useful.
5. Invite your friends or co-workers to join PayScroll by sending them an invitation.

We appreciate your feedback, so email us at Support@PayScroll.com if you have anything to say.