Software Promotion + SEOThis blog covers a range of topics concerning the SoftTester Shareware/ Software Download site. Topics include software product releases as well as SEO and software development information and tips.

Not sure what’s going on in the last few weeks but the number of submissions on all of my sites has dropped. The drop isn’t drastic, but what’s more worrying is that the percentage of spam submissions has increased dramatically. I now end up rejecting 40 to 50% of submissions.

There seem to be a large number of sites/ blogs using free dvd converter packages for submission purposes. There are also an increasing number of other software download sites using similar programs to make submissions. Also, I’ve noticed a raft of new download sites being created with random names, like s666.info. This happened some years ago in the general web directory arena and resulted in the whole sector being devalued. I hope software download sites aren’t going the same way. Even if you aren’t worried too much about dubious submissions - content is content after all - since the majority of the submissions use very nearly the same text, it doesn’t take long to rack up a hundred or more pages with virtually identical content.

I had a discussion with Blue several months ago and he was shocked, he’d paid for a year upfront and found he wasn’t using it very much and had difficulty getting some money back, if he got any money back at all.

EE is like RentACoder its all about knowing how things work and asking the right questions. Most importantly, where possible ask the question and make the subject of the posting as simple as possible. The subject is all experts or coder will see in most cases before they decide whether to look further.

Again mentioning Blue, his boss(es) at work encourage him to keep up with, what start out as, technical hobbies. EE experts do the same, they love to show their technical muscles and improve their knowledge. Who knows their bosses may encourage them too.

Apart from the knowledge they obtain through looking at problems and building their knowledge everyday, there’s also a leader board. The expert with the best score gets sage rating, I think that the top rating, I maybe be wrong.

I pay monthly, back in 2008 or maybe 2007, I cancelled my membership and since then have been quiet months. I think it works out as about £7 a month.

In the last few days I must have received answers for 5 or6 questions and its helped my productivity no end.

Normally on EE I think the approved approach is to get guidance and advice where your given an answer and the expert doesn’t do the work for you. Some experts work to this rule and believe that you need to do your own work. I kind of see their point, I guess that’s what RentACoder is for.

However, I tend to start out asking for sample code, sometimes in my posting subject. Therefore experts know what I’m expecting.

In almost all cases I get an answer within an hour. As I say keep your subject simple where possible.

Another important point, is to try and show that you’ve done some work to find the answer. I find posting my code helps. Experts see that you’ve genuinely tried to find a solution and it boosts their egos further that they can push your code aside and show they are the experts Well perhaps

If you find yourself not developing your projects then’s the time to pause your membership. But you need to pay monthly to do this.

by JM

I’ve now got two plans for my I program, which I think I should try and do both.

Firstly, improve my main page and order page, fine tune it and make sure everything the customer needs to know they have. Then optimize the pages for new keywords, aim for good PR and get lots of good links. Have a free / lite version which will provide more downloads. The lite version will be single user. Hopefully this will lead to more download, a better sales strategy, better pages and sales.

The other plan is to create a new website, with a domain name of something like form filler dot com. Create lots of new additional templates and create a web page and a download for each. With a pad file program title of something like  “Contact System - Form Filler”. Again have the same sales strategy, lite / free etc.

So the program should be identical, apart from the name and the template selection.

I know the second plan involves more work and a new domain, but the url will be nicer.

I didn’t really post this here to get comments, but as a place where I’d be able to easily find it.

However, if you have any comments I’d be happy to hear them.

by JM

I’ve been making plans for all my projects.

Options :-

- Hmmm, improve the speed and functionality of the site I guess. Add extra dynamic pages.
- I guess I could add affiliate buy links etc, but this will require a lot of on going admin, requesting and being approved etc.

Of course I could share the data and use it in a second site.

Maybe I’ve missed or forgotten something big ?

Thoughts?

I’m pretty near having a version of my enhanced package ready to release. I’ve still got work to do like beef up my backend programs for analysing the sites it works with to ensure submissions work properly but I’m on the home run. The analysis needs to do more checks than are needed for my existing program. I think I might also do a beta run prior to release with a selected set of people.

One of the final things I need to do is decide on the sales model. With the existing version I sell at a low price for 3 months use. This price is fixed to be a competitive fee for doing a submission run for a single customer website. I also offer a higher price for 12 months use. I’ve had quite a few resales from customers on the low price and a number of one year sales too. With the new program I’m wondering what sales model I should use.

I could sell at a one-off price. The problem with this is that the website serves up data, so there’s an ongoing cost to me that I need to cover.

Some competitors sell on a site-by-site basis, i.e. you pay $20 say for submitting one site to all the supported dirs. This involves registering the customer website’s URL and so on to check the URL isn’t being changed during a submission run. I’m not particularly keen on this though since I think it’ll increase the support overhead each time someone want to change the site URL when they make a mistake or if someone wants to resubmit the same site.

So I could go down a similar route to the existing package I sell except charge a higher price. The new package also restricts use to a limited number of PCs per purchased login - to stop armies of submitters buying one copy and running a whole company off it.

I guess its not so much of a new idea, it has been suggested before.

My idea is so sell a 1 user version of my “I” program VERY cheaply.

Its current price is £13

I did think £5 but I could go for £3

Thoughts ?

I was just wondering about one of my sites, it does quite well for traffic, I think one of the reasons is that I used to regularly post on a forum, when I was developing my software, I had a signature link to my site. However, my traffic doesn’t lead to sales and therefore I could leap and say the forum posting did get me some traffic but not the right traffic.

Perhaps blog posting is the same as forum posting.

I know I blog here as I’m interested in discussing things, but on most blogs its more like a kind of newsletter or diary.

I’m thinking if I could find a topics which interest me that I could blog about them on someone elses blog and gain some links.

I guess one issue is that blogs aren’t like forums and unlike this blog, people don’t comment and post other posts out of interest.

I guess another issue is that I’m not passionate about jewellery or maths. Even finsing adjacent topics could cause me interest problems.

by JM

I spent an hour or so looking the site and noted a few things. Some of the points are subjective, i.e they might just be my personal likes and dislikes.

Performance for chosen keywords

Four keywords were mentioned by email and the site does well for each of them - top 10 in the results on google UK.

The pages could do with a tidy up in terms of their titles and meta tags. Taking one example, the page has a title:

Novelty + Fun Jewellery

This might be better as:

Fun Jewellery - Novelty Jewellery

Also, the page does not have a meta description. You might want to repeat the first paragraph in the meta description. Since the paragraph also talks above parties, you might want the title to be:

Fun Jewellery - Novelty Jewellery - Party Jewellery

In the sidebar, you have a link titled Novelty + Fun Jewellery. Possibly, you could split this into 2 or three separate links:

Novelty Jewellery
Fun Jewellery
Party Jewllery

OR include different links in the footer and sidebar, e.g. put “Fun Jewellery” in the sidebar and tuck the other two links away in the footer.

Pictures

The pictures on the site are better than when I last looked. However, on some of the pages there are a lot of words to read through before the pictures. It might be worth placing the pictures first or using the pics to split up the words into paragraphs.

On pages like http://www.enchantingjewellery.com/novelty-fun-jewellery/cat_10.html, I’d be tempted to make the pictures larger as I find it a bit hard to see the current ones.

Shopping Cart

I’m using IE8. Whenever I click on a Buy or Add To Basket button, the page simply reloads or blinks and I don’t really get the impression that anything has been added to a basket.

Also, I’m unable to see how I access my basket and checkout.

I always seems to end up with a masssive list of bookmarks and a long list of folders.

Then perhaps every year I take a backup and start again from scratch.

I’m getting in a bit of a mess now so I was thinking I’d like to start a fresh in a way where I don’t end up in a mess.

Do you specify folders and sub folders and sub folders etc?

by JM

A fair percentage of our customers want a CD copy. My wife handles the admin side of the operation and is ending up spending a couple of evenings a week burning CDs, printing address labels and packing items for mailing the next day. It’s getting to be too much of a burden. At one point we almost decided to stop offering CDs as the money we made wasn’t worth the time and effort involved. We carried on though because we felt a percentage of people might not buy if they couldn’t get a CD.

We currently use an inkjet CD printer that takes a fair time to print a CD. We burn the CD contents using a normal CD writer on my wife’s PC. Any ideas on a cheap way of offloading CD production and mailing OR a way we can carry on doing the work ourselves but speed up the process?