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First Thoughts on Shareware Site Improvements

On SoftwareLode at the moment, the home page has a Featured program at the top. The script for this is a bit wonky though. It selects a program at random but the random number range is very small (1 to 10) and doesn’t cover the full range of programs on the site.

In any case, I was considering changing the Featured feature to be a series of 2 or 3 panels that give:

A pick of the day

I would pick a set of good programs on the site and display these randomly for one day at a time. The programs might be those where the authors supplied backlinks for example.

A personal recommendation

This would be a program that I personally recommend after review. The wording for the description would be my own – not the author’s. These programs might be those with which I have affiliation.

I’m still thinking these things through. One thing I might do is drop Google Ads from the right column on the homepage and use that for a list of table cells containing further recommended software.

by ML

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{ 3 } Comments

  1. Dipsy | July 7, 2008 at 3:55 pm | Permalink

    When I first read this, I didn’t have time to reply, but I thought at the time, I doubt he’ll keep up with pick of the day and the general maintenance of it.

    The I thought about revenue.

    On other sites they promote everything because of the revenue value.

    Therefore having ‘pick of the day’ could be the next program we have for 50%+ revenue from an affiliate. Then you don’t have to pick software.

    I’ll have to have a look at RegNow or whatever its called these days and see what the setup is. I think a lot of affiliates are auto accept. I guess a good place for me to start is to look at those program which affiliate codes above 50% that I have in my database.

    Then once I have enough (not sure what enough is) data I could setup text ads.

    Thoughts?

  2. MikeL | July 7, 2008 at 4:11 pm | Permalink

    When I say Pick of the day, I don’t mean I’ll be doing a new pick every day. Maybe it would be better titled Editor’s Pick.

    Remember your text ads will point to your own pages. I think your text ads at the moment aren’t attractive and you might be better of with a list of recommendations like I propose in the post – you might need to differentiate between paid advertising and things you are yourself recommending.

  3. Dipsy | July 7, 2008 at 6:47 pm | Permalink

    Yeah text ads will point to my pages, but the program page, would have recommended and the coin on it, that kind of stuff.

    So how would you pick ?

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