SoftTester Blog

This posting was originally from our forum.

motherswan

How do you figure out what to charge for your products?

I have experimented with pricing but have not reached any level of confidence that my prices make sense. There is such a wide range of competing products on the market with varying prices, including free, and functions, I don’t know how consumers make a decision. Right now I have one program at regular price of 60 and the other at a new release introductory price of 9.95 (regular price has been 50). The only thing I haven’t tried is charging what I think is an unreasonably high price, which has actually been suggested casually. I haven’t found anything that affects downloads or sales.
Another recent change was replacing a limited-time, limited-function trial version with a free limited-function version.

Forum Admin

I was quite disappointed when I didn’t initially get lots of downloads (still am) but I consoled myself saying, well this was only a test product.

I decided that the reason it wasn’t doing well was because there was a million similar products which were much better, more features and cheaper.

However, listening to your story makes me think otherwise.

Although I haven’t got the answer / success story, I do have some suggestions, where I’d like some feedback.

I’ve been most successful with my MDBSecure and HTMLSquueze products. I’ve had around 30 downloads for each. I believe this was solely due to the ProgrammersHeaven site, which sends out a new products email. I think I had 10 downloads from them a day or so after. However, they remain my best site so far.

From this, it seems that advertising is the answer.
Finding your correct market place and pushing your goods there.

Sadly, I think it’s also got a lot do with the amount of competition, in hindsight I believe I should researched the market a bit more first before writing Ideaspad, if I’d known there were millions of similar products I may have written something different.

axsaxs

I have a feeling the the price is not the main problem.

The main problem seems to be that people usually DOES NOT PAY for software.

In Italy, for instance, only big companies actually buy software - they may face serious legal problems if they don’t do so.

The open source movement can be another reason (why pay for something I can have for free).

The casual user cannot reach our products because he is not able to search the Internet for what he needs (often he is not sure of what he needs, too).

The advanced user knows that with some more effort he will get for free whatever he wants (either from piracy or from the open source).

I’d like to see what would happen in charging, let’s say, 0,10 Euro per product. I think that nothing significant would change.

mindwarpltd

Sorry to be the person replying straight away again

Well, I’ve tried different pricing variations in the past.
And not 100% sure I agree.

I used to have my Ideaspad program priced at around $29 and wasn’t successful. Then I improved my program and thought that the cost / quality factor was a problem. So I increased my price to $50 and wasn’t that successful either.

Yesterday I improved my webpage, just the English page but I modified the price on both German and English pages to $25.

I’d discovered that competitor programs were around $30.

This morning I had a German sale.
I know you can’t read anything into one sale, however it’s highly probable that as that was the only thing that changed on the German page (and looking at the hit log, the customer didn’t visit the English page) that this was the cause.

There again, seeing the program at half the price of a couple of days ago may have been the cause.

I guess I’ll have to wait a while longer to know for definite.

I agree, that users don’t know what they want (and pros can find it for free) .

Also, that around $20 to $25 is about the maximum price people will pay for shareware.

Today, someone who submitted to this site, had a site selling REALLY cheap shareware. This got me thinking.
I visited the site, then went back later to see if there was anything good.

I think CHEAP prices may be the key with certain software.

crybaby

I make about 1500USD$ a month, my price ranges from 60 to 200$ and the key to any reasonable sales is to make non-trivial applications. Don’t just throw together some little utility and sell it, if you do you won’t make any headway. In other words make an application people are willing to pay 50$ and above for to get

by JM

When your child first starts crawling around you’ll find your life get a lot busier and you’ll have to rescue your child when she climbs on new objects for the first time.

Make sure there are no loose cables anywhere, secure them to a while or object. Buy mains sockets protectors to stop your child putting his fingers in the outlet.

Try not to put sofas and chairs next to other climbable objects like book cases or window sills.

Make sure all your mains plugs for your TV and entertainment systems are out of reach, you may have to build something to make them safe.

Leave lots of pillow around, this often provides a far more tempting target than a couch.

Have fun making great looking masks with our Software!

Since I bought my SEO book the information seems already out of date, even for the online tools its suggested.

I’ve been looking for a good keyword selection tool.

I’ve found these, oddly the urls have changed from my book.

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Anyway, my original choice of ms excel security seems a bad idea although the data says its from January 2007.

by JM

All things considered I feel my effort / time to develop a product site with a keyword phrase, has to be well spent. So I really need to find out if my choice of keywords is correct before I jump in feet first.

My keywords are MS Excel Security.

In my SEO book it says www.wordtracker.com and www.nichebot.com are great free tools, but looking at the sites now, both require payment. The first site, requires you to enter your card details for the 7 day trial, which you can cancel at any time within those 7 days.

Expensive too.

So that was going to be my first step.

Where do I go now with this?

by JM

The answer is - as much as you need to get a good spread of keywords and phrases. It is unlikely you will get good coverage of alternatives in 2 or 300 words. Since there is no penalty for having more text on a page - unless the page gets to be 45Kb in size or more - take the opportunity to write more text and include so-called long-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords are less competitive since they are searched for less but if you have 2 competitive keywords compared to 10 long-tails, you might end up getting just as many long-tails hits in searches. You certainly won’t lose anything.

One way to start working out a good set of keywords is to look at sites in a similar market. A good set of keyword analysis tools can be found on www.googlerankings.com. The tools on this site can be used to see what 1, 2 and 3 word phrases appear on a web page. Try to make sure the text on your site includes the same phrases where appropriate.

Tips for thinking up new keywords are:

1. Always include alternative ways of saying the same thing, e.g. an animal mask/ face mask and kids/ children.

2. Try to include the words in different orders, e.g. a man’s hat/ a hat for a man, Kids arts & crafts software/ Arts and crafts software for children.

3. Another way of packing in possible keywords is to include a column on left or right with a list, e.g. dog mask, cat mask, horse mask, party mask, make your own mask …

Never lose an opportunity to include an alternative way of saying something. Two ideal places to do this are:

1. alt text on images

2. title text on a hyperlink.

HTML tags are also an important way of highlighting keywords to Googlebot. The top tags are <title>, <h1> and <h2>.

The page title <title> is an excellent place to include up to 3 keyword/ phrases. Separate the keywords by - or |. The page title is often considered the most important SEO element. Make sure your most important keywords are at the start of the title.

The <h1> tag is the most important header tag (and should be near the top of the page) but <h2> is important too. Structure the page so that you can use a h2 title. If you can’t restructure a page in order to place a h2 tag, make a paragraph of your most important text into a h2 tag and use CSS to style it like a <p> tag.

Make some of your keywords bold or strong to emphasise them - Googlebot picks up this as well as a human reader.

Also, always make sure your important keywords are near the top of the page. Ideally, your first paragraph of text after your h1 tag should be nicely worded with your main keywords.

I’ll include more tips on keywords and linking strategies in a later post.

by ML

On any web page, there are two types of outbound links:-

a. Links to other pages on the same site.
b. Links to pages on other sites.

Very roughly speaking, the PR for a page is divided up between all outbound links on the page - whether the link is of type a or b.

If a page had a PR of 5 and had 10 outbound links then, roughly speaking, each link would pass on a PR of (5 * 0.85) / 10 to their linked targets. The factor of 0.85 is known as the dampening factor and avoids any page passing on its entire PR.

This is why it is necessary to have a good linking strategy within a website and maximise the PR the site’s own pages pass back and forth between each other. You can’t raise the PR of pages on a site above the maximum PR assigned to your best page by Google, but you can maximise the spread of PR through the pages in your site. With a good linking strategy within a site, the effect on PR of the odd outbound link is kept to a minimum.

Of course, the real situation is more complicated than this simple equation shows. Link text and other factors like the position of the link on the page also count. It’s thought that links higher on the page probably pass a little bit more PR. It’s also thought that links on a page with the word “Links” in the title count for less. Having text close by on a page with the words “Sponsors”, “Links” or “Adverts” might also diminish the PR (or link juice) passed on.

If you add a rel=”nofollow” tag to a link, the link no longer passes any PR. Google advises people who sell advertising with links to do just this in order to avoid a penalty.

Some webmasters nofollow all outbound links as a matter of course. This is considered a little rude in some quarters - if you think a link is worth having, give the linked page the benefit of some PR.

I guess the main question now is why have any outbound links at all? One reason will be that you believe the links add value to your page - by giving people access to more information. Google buys into this mentality. If you link from your pages to relevant, authority pages, Google is thought to consider that your pages are themselves a more valuable information resource. Google then gives you a bit of extra help in SERPs. For example, if you were a billing software seller, you might link to the UK goverment’s advisory pages on invoice payment terms.

by ML

I’ve often thought that for my small sites and Content Management System (CMS) is a bit over the top.

However, since I first noticed that I had lots of pages errors and lots of dead links, I thought it would be a good idea to have some way of easily managing external links on my sites.

A few days ago all my links and support text were hard coded in my ASP / PHP pages. I guess I could have just altered each page. However I thought in the long term it would be a good idea if this data was held in a database.

I therefore setup on PHP admin pages and have put most of links / supporting text in a mysql database. I not have a standard script which adds this content the each page, via a SiteTag and PageSection tag / variable.

I’ve got about 250 records

Throughout this task, I keep having doubts as to whether all this work will make it easier and whether all this time spent is worthwhile.

I’m now not every sure that outbounds links is that important any more.

Thoughts?

by JM

When I first created landing pages on my sites, I had heard that googlebot may not like them.

My approach (which I think I must had read somewhere) is to have a page which concentrates on 2 or 3 three keyword. The content is lightly stuffed with keywords but it also human readable. I have a link back to my main product page and some related links. Those links were from google for the keywords I was using on that page.

I do think they are a good idea, if you ignore the words landing page, as you do get listings on google for keywords you might not have already used on your main pages.

However, I’m not sure what googlebot thinks about them.
I’m now thinking of adding rel=nofollow to my external links as they might be stealing my PR. Also I was thinking of adding links for words, phrases in my content to other pages.

At the time I did make sure that the keyword density was good, but I haven’t used much text, I now understand that I may need to have 250 to 300 words.

Heres a typical page, I’ve used Tiny URL to provide the link :-
http://tinyurl.com/4lqarg

Thoughts?

by JM

Many people have heard of Google Pagerank - the number that Google assigns to each page on the web. In one sense the rank assigned to a page controls how high up the page appears in search results. The reality is more complicated and Google takes into account a number of factors when positioning pages in search results. In fact, Google themselves say that content is now more important than Pagerank.

Take two pages, page A and page B, each with a Pagerank of 3. When a user searches for a specific phrase, let’s say “dog biscuits”, why will one page appear in the results above the other if they both have the same rank?

One answer is that if page A contains the text “dog biscuits” and the other page doesn’t contain the phrase, page A will appear higher in SERPs. Page B might not appear at all.

What if page A is trying to sell pet food and mentions “dog biscuits” twice and page B is a story about how much someone’s dog that loves biscuits and also mentions “dog biscuits” twice? Which page will be higher then? Maybe both pages will be trying to sell pet food and both pages will mention “dog biscuits”. Who wins out in this case? The winner will be the page with the better on-site and off-site optimisation.

Off-site optimisation largely comes down to getting relevant links to a web page.

Google takes into account the text associated with links to a web page. For example, the HTML for a link will look like  <a href=”…”>some text</a>. If page A has more links to it where “some text” is “dog biscuits”, Google will take that to mean the page is all about dog biscuits and place the page higher in SERPs. Page A is likely to come higher in the results in this case, even if page B contains the “dog biscuits” phrase but has fewer relevant links.

Often this voting by external links will override the Pagerank of either page - the one with the outbound or inbound link. A number of links from pages with low Pagerank but the right link text will count for more than just a few links from pages with average rank with irrelevant link text.

There are a number of on-site optimisation (or on-page optimisation) factors affecting positioning in SERPs. These include the domain name and web page URLs. The most important on-page factor is probably the page title, e.g. does the page title mention “dog biscuits”? Is “dog biscuits” near the start of the title? However, you should never ignore the need for backlinks with relevant link text to reinforce the topical content, i.e. keywords, of a page.

by ML

Absolutely, I do agree that not just relying on the domain name is the right strategy. However, I do think googlebot will give something for it.

I do agree it is a bit risky.

However the risk is only in the cost, My ISP (One Smart Host) tells me I can have several domains in the same hosting account. So I will only pay for the domain name really.

I do need a new website, a nice short domain name, which will be easy for customers to remember. My current domain name is really long www.mindwarp-consultancy-software.com.

It is true that there is risk in concentrating on one keyword phrase does sound risking, in the amount of effort involved. However, this is a test to see if the keyword heavy domain name strategry actually works.

I’ve always thought that some keyword stuffing, with human readable content is the right strategy too. I have created landing pages in the past and the PR varies on them. I’m not sure what else could be creating the PR?

by JM