This posting was taken from our forum
Forum Admin
Since I finished my first product, I’ve submitted it to various distribution sites.
However, I’ve found that my MDBSecure product to be a lot more successful, i know it’s still early days, but it’s looking that way.
How have you guys done?
Have you paid for any advertising? Whats worked?
motherswan
I have bought some advertising. I have not yet found anything that works.
I would like to provide a complimentary copy of my 2 products to any of the members of this forum who would like to try them out. I use them regularly and feel that they are useful for small businesses, including software development and marketing. There is a lot of information about them on my website
On my website besides the product descriptions, there are screen shots. You can download a copy of the free (limited-function) version. If you’re interested in the full-function version.
Forum Admin
From what Zaphekiah was saying in his introduction
Quote:
| …the Orphalese programs, especially the Tarot program, which has led to lots of very encouraging emails, and helpful suggestions. |
|
Also from my own experiences, technical programs seem to do well.
Obviously fun, programs are used by anybody and everybody in their spare time, if they have their own pc, generally speaking.
Technical programs (used by programmers) are used by people who use the internet everyday a work. They use this sort of program everyday.
Having said this, I guess you could make an argument about any program which based on its success.
It could also be down to a particular distribution portal.
Comments?
Zaphekiah
After about a year of marketing the programs on the Orphalese website I am quite pleased with the interest I have managed to generate. I get about around a hundred downloads a week which generally lead to about two sales. Obviously this is not enough to give up the day job (the programs are all priced at ten dollars) but it is enough to make me feel optimistic about the future.
In case anyone is interested, I haven’t paid for any advertising, and I have generally avoided download sites. Instead I have concentrated on sending out lots of emails to related sites, requesting links. For example with the Vocab Builder program I wrote to lots of expat clubs, linguistic clubs and so on. I did something similar with the Crossword Editor and Tarot programs. Generally people are happy to trade links, and even if nobody comes to you from a specific link it will probably be picked up by the web crawlers used by the big search engines, which will get you a better placing.
Obviously it also pays to register with Google, Yahoo etc, and make sure you have good meta tags. About 90% of my visitors come from search engines, mostly Google.
The only drawback with this marketing technique is that it is very labour intensive. You have to spend three or four hours at a time copying and pasting into emails, making little changes, and all the time you would much rather be programming.
The other point is that you have to have a product that will appeal to a specific group of people. For example, for a generic product (like IdeasPad) I would select one possible use (say recipes) and then concentrate on marketing to food and recipe sites. You could even create dedicated versions of each product without necessarily branching your code, by supplying a different .res file to create a unique skin and the text for the caption on the main form. Generic programs are great, but people don’t always make the leap of imagination to see how they could use them. You have to point things out to them a bit.
Forum Admin
Did you ever change your price? How did you decide what was the correct price?
I must admit, I haven’t got a budget for advertising. I’m really surprised you haven’t got your products on distribution sites. The first reason being, as you mention about other sites, you’ll get better rankings from spidering. Secondly, what about all those potential users, who are just entering the interest area. They may start out looking on distribution sites.
I must admit, I wouldn’t pay to get on a distribution site, e.g. CNet. Also some D.Sites are better than others. For instance, I generally get a few downloads every day for my MDBSecure and HTMLSqueeze products from Programmers heaven. You can also add news topics, which also get sent out in their email newsletter.
I agree, your meta tags are vital, at least you can change them to suite your purpose, I’ve learnt that from some of my other sites.
So you post on newsgroups, discussion sites and send out newsletters?
I had thought about making Ideaspad more specific but, I didn’t want to limit it.
I do like your skin idea!
Are your products available in different spoken languages?
Zaphekiah
I don’t mean to say that download sites don’t work - I am not really in a position to judge. My worry at the outset was that people who download from those places probably wouldn’t read the small print about the .NET Framework requirements, would probably wonder why the setup didn’t seem to run, and if they got as far as installing the program successfully would not have seen my website, so the chances are the program would not be what they were looking for anyway. I do have one or two programs on downloads.com, but I am not aware of them ever leading to a sale. Having said that though, what harm can it do?
Forums and discussion groups fit in much better with my approach. For example I have joined and contributed to various Tarot Forums. They normally have a rule about no commercial posts, but if you stress that your program is shareware, that it is a free tryout and so on, they normally don’t mind.
Re the language thing, I did play around with it at the start. I think the .NET (or visual studio) approach to it -having various resource folders - is a good one. But it is far too much work when the program is in its development phase (and all mine still are!).
Re the price, yes - I started out a bit higher then dropped it. The idea is “pile ‘em high and sell them cheap”. Selling them cheap is easy, it is the piling high part that counts though! I might put my prices up when I get to a point that a program really feels “finished” though. At this stage I think the low prices are more likely to generate good publicity.
Forum Admin
I must admit, I’ve learned through experience about the framework.
I submitted Ideaspad to Tucows, which takes some time if you don’t pay. After 10 days (thereabouts) I got a message saying it had been rejected…. You may have read about this on the clickable link posting…. I won’t repeat myself…
Anyways, in my setup I have condition which popup up if the machine doesn’t have the framework. The messages refers them to a ReadMe.htm file, which I include in my distribution file. This has links to my site and instruction on getting hold of the framework, also a JavaScript box which tells them if they have it installed or not.
So it’s not so bad as installing it and finding it doesn’t work, it wouldn’t get that far.
Also my distrib files are 500kb max, so I don’t think it would upset too many people.
I’ll have to give some serious thought into making ideaspad specialised. I’ve not idea where to start. ???
motherswan
I have registered on several download sites. I get a few downloads from them, but I think most come from traffic generated by links and searches. I think if you don’t advertise, you just get lost in the shuffle on big download sites.
I have tried to attract webmasters and web developers (original intended audience) by providing some online tools: color selection, style sheet property selection, and javascript statement builder. The tools are among the most popular pages, but don’t seem to get a huge number of repeat visitors. I still think it’s a good way to attract
people, but I don’t know at this point how to make it work better.
I think that convering downloads to sales is bigger problem than downloads themselves. A lot of people are just surfing and only want free stuff. I wish I knew how to reach serious customers.
axsaxs
Some ideas about what I read above.
First of all I must declare our approach, that is: registering the product into every possible download site - CNet the only one we paid for, because we saw that download.com made the most visits.
LittleLite products are “Security” related, which makes us think that being too specialized (forum, direct links) can be a waste of time. (This is just an hypotesis).
I agree: the problem is not getting more downloads, but trying to raise the “conversion” rate. We are trying to focus on the difference between the registered version and the free version. Our approach now is: we let you play with our little program for 14/30 days, then the program won’t start anymore. So, when you buy the program you buy the 100% of it. Hopefully, if you started using the program and you effectively need it, you must buy it (reinstalling don’t work).
.NET: we are confident that Microsoft will help us with massive marketing campaigns and a lot of support in the near future (making .NET a default instead of an option, for instance). For now, our installer if you don’t have the right version of the framework or you simpy don’t have it, drives you to “Windows Update” MS page, which is what Microsoft advises to do. This approach was accepted by Tucows, too.
Price: our idea is that getting too low (under 10$ let’s say) will suggest to the customer that the program is not so valid, is buggy, is rubbish. Too high (over 40$ I’d say) can be a barrier - but not so much (especially if the customer is a small company).
These are just ideas, of course…
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