Marketing is about creativity. Outside of posting shareware on
download sites there are numerous promotional opportunities
available to independent software developers. The first thing
that I’ll mention is developers need to take full advantage of
their existing resources. Marketing or advertising should not be
considered an expense. If done effectively, sales should exceed
any time or advertising investment undertaken. Recently Dave
Collins from Shareware Promotions
http://www.sharewarepromotions.com created a graph to represent
the increase in traffic that a customer of his had experienced
while using Dave’s services. A picture is worth a thousand words
and it can be very effective in attracting new customers. Is
your application one that will save time? Will it help students
learn faster? Will it increase office productivity? Can that
information be represented in a graph? Do you have real life
testimonials, or information about how existing customers are
using your software to deal with their every day business? White
papers and customer testimonials can often be instrumental in
attracting new customers.
Software developers need not look far to find inexpensive or
free external resources for promoting their software. Buyers
Guides are excellent, yet underused promotional vehicles. A
number of different industries produce annual or semi-annual
Buyer Guides to assist their readers in finding products that
may interest them. Typically these guides offer a generic free
listing or upgrade listings for a fee. Buyer Guides tend to have
a long shelf life and can generate long term traffic.
User Groups are another excellent promotional source. Most User
Groups conduct SIGs or Special Interest Groups. These groups
usually meet monthly and address a different topic each month.
Frequently they will distribute software promotional material in
exchange for a door prize or group discount. Discounts are a
great way to target specific markets. Consider providing volume
discounts or discounts to specific sectors. The non-profit
community, is particularly sensitive to budget costs, and will
often recommend or promote software to others in the non-profit
sector, if you provide a discount.
Another great way to increase sales is to consider partnering
with other software developers that offer similar or
complimentary programs. The co-promotion can be as simple as
reciprocal newsletter promotion or as complex as integration or
software bundles. The promotion should be designed to benefit
both authors.
Additional items that are more commonly discussed that can be
used to inexpensively market software are affiliate programs,
link exchanges and newsgroups. Recently I have encountered
resources that assist with monitoring these items. Name Protect
monitors domain names and trademarks. Reports are generated
monthly and show the number of site links, and the availability
of similar domain names. Tracer Lock allows Deja News to be
monitored for specific keywords. Email notifications are sent
daily if indicated keywords occur in Deja archived posts.
Bravenet is another free resource that has been very effective
in generating referral traffic. A "refer a friend” script can be
added to websites and Bravenet monitors the number of customers
utilizing the script during given time frame.
Overall there are a number of creative ways available to
software authors to promote their wares outside of the
traditional download channel, don’t be afraid to experiment and
consider other approaches, you might be surprised.
Resources:
Software Marketing Buyers Guide Listings
http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/buyersguides.html
Shareware Promotions Graph
http://www.sharewarepromotions.com/case-studies.html Tracer Lock
http://www.peacefire.org racerlock/ White Paper Sample
http://www.notepage.net/whitepapers.htm Name Protect -
http://www.nameprotect.com/freemon.html Bravenet
http://www.bravenet.com
About the author:
About the Author: Sharon Housley manages marketing for NotePage,
Inc. http://www.notepage.net a company specializing in
alphanumeric paging, SMS and wireless messaging software
solutions. Other sites by Sharon can be found at
http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com , and
http://www.monitoring- software.net
