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DP Directory, Inc.
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Subscribe Now to Al Harberg's Software Marketing Newsletter, the best way for software developers to get free, usable marketing information. We'll never use your email address for anything besides sending you this twice-monthly newsletter.
It's All About Marketing
You can increase your software sales if you increase the number of qualified prospects who visit your web site. As I mentioned in the "Focus on Profits" article in my November 4, 2004 newsletter - http://www.dpdirectory.com/3news023.htm - I think developers need to concentrate more on profits, and less on web site visits, downloads, or even sales. However, there are a lot of valid reasons to drive qualified prospects to your web site, and a lot of effective ways to increase your web site traffic: (1) Post on Usenet newsgroups, in trade association newsgroups, and on message boards. Word of mouth advertising works. Find ways to get people to talk about your programs. Post useful information in Usenet groups and on message boards. Determine where your prospects post messages. Don't forget newsgroups and message boards where software buyers lurk and read, even though they may not post. Many developers choose an approach to newsgroup posting that is doomed to failure. You shouldn't visit newsgroups and announce that your software solves everybody's problems. This technique makes the newsgroups' loud-mouthed members attack you immediately, while the quieter members become silently offended. Instead, you have to join the community, make helpful suggestions, and only mention your products when it's appropriate. Include information about your apps in your email's signature file, so people can find your web site easily. People will visit your web site, and some will buy your software. And if you'd like to visit a friendly, moderated Usenet group and trade stories with other try-before-you-buy developers, visit the newly-revived comp.software.shareware.authors newsgroup. (2) Get magazines and newspapers to talk about your software. You can get editors to write about your software by sending them press releases. Magazines are scanned, studied, referred to, and enjoyed by readers who need help making their software-buying decisions. Tell the editors about your software, and these editors can tell thousands and thousands of their readers about your programs. Newspapers and magazines will drive prospects to your web site. My entire web site - http://www.dpdirectory.com/ - discusses how you can get these editors to tell their readers about your software. You'll find - An in-depth FAQ on writing a press release on http://www.dpdirectory.com/1howtowr.htm - Top ten tips for deciding who should send your press releases to the editors on http://www.dpdirectory.com/1whoshou.htm - Informative back-issues of this newsletter, including many articles on money-making press release campaigns, on http://www.dpdirectory.com/3newsltr.htm (3) Increase your search engine effectiveness. Tune your home page and product pages so that search engines will index you meaningfully, and search engine users will find you. Don't guess at the keywords that your prospects might use. Use the free tool at Overture - http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ - to find out what keywords real people really use. Or use WordTracker - http://www.wordtracker.com/ - to test the real-life effectiveness of keywords and key phrases. Build content-rich web pages that will attract web site visitors. For example, in the last 17 months, I've published 27 software marketing newsletters, averaging 2,000 words each. I've found that my site has gotten much better search engine rankings for the keywords that are important to me, and I get much more traffic than I had before. Content drives well-targeted visitors to web sites. Look into buying keywords and key phrases on the huge search engines, and on the search engines that people in your target audience use. (4) Manage your software on the download sites. Update your software regularly, and submit it to the download sites. Higher visibility in the download sites will result in more people visiting your web site. Being in the "What's New" sections of download sites increases your visibility. Look into advertising on CNET, Tucows, and the other large sites. Try to determine if it's cost effective to advertise in your market. There is no such thing as a shareware market. There is a market, for example, of novice PC users who want a mathematics drill program to teach their home-schooled 10-year-old the basics of arithmetic. Don't assume that the best place to buy advertising is the huge download site. Look into advertising on smaller, well-targeted download sites, and on non-download sites that reach your target audience. Don't base your advertising-buying decisions on another developer's tummy-feel of the cost-effectiveness of their advertising campaign. And don't base your decision on the experience of a developer in a different market segment. Either talk to somebody who is trying to reach the same folks that you're selling to, or stick your toe in the water and try a modest sales campaign of your own. Try to find a way to measure results before you pay any money. (5) Buy advertising on relevant web sites. Find the web sites that your prospects visit, and see if they sell pop-unders or banners or text links. Too many developers assume that the "best" place to launch an advertising campaign is on the mega-download sites. This is not necessarily true. For example, look at the magazine business. Few software companies buy advertising in the million-plus circulation magazines like PC World and PC Magazine. But if you look at the smaller, specialized computer magazines - the ones with circulations in the 40,000 to 100,000 range - you'll find dozens and even hundreds of ads for software. Bigger isn't necessarily better. "Targeting" will whoop "bigger" every time. I think you'll find that the same is true for online advertising, too. (6) Develop meaningful link exchanges. Link farms don't drive traffic to your site, and may actually hurt you in the search engines. Similarly, you're not going to generate meaningful web site traffic by being listed on some third-level page in a friend's web site, along with dozens of other on- and off-topic links. You need to find a way to convince high-traffic, highly-rated (by Alexa's traffic rank and by Google's PageRank) sites to link to you from one of their on-topic, highly-rated pages (Google rates pages, while Alexa's ratings are at the web-site level). Links from off-topic web pages won't drive a lot of traffic to your site. You need to make arrangements with other businesses in your field - ones that don't compete directly with you. And you need to offer them something in return. If you don't have a highly-ranked web page to offer in return, then develop a plan to create one (or more) of them, and try to swap based upon your 6-month plan to create a traffic-generator for your trading partner. (7) Postal mail your message to well-targeted prospects. I often read that post cards are a cost-effective way to send a message to potential software buyers. I don't agree. Catalogs produce more bang for the buck. For 13 or 14 years, before I moved my advertising to the Internet, I postal-mailed 80,000 16-page, 2-color, 8-1/4-by-10-3/4 inch catalogs every year. And the cost of printing and postage was less than the cost of sending post cards. The two key reasons for the low price were - By using 11-digit ZIPCodes, known as delivery-point barcodes to the US Postal Service, you can save a fortune on postage. - By using a web-press printer, you can save a fortune on printing costs. Unlike the quick-print companies that feed individual sheets of paper into their printing presses, a web-press printer can create tens of thousands of catalogs from a single sheet of paper (a rather large, rolled sheet of paper that requires a specially designed forklift to mount the roll onto the printing press). Finding a web-press printer is easy - just visit the folks who print your town's weekly newspaper or the weekly ad-sheet that you can pick up at retail stores around town. Finding a good web-press printer might take two or three visits to various print shops. You're not going to have a serious conversation with these folks unless you're talking about printing at least 10,000 pieces. As a quick aside - I've always wondered why 10 developers don't get together and create a 16-page catalog. The catalog would have 6 pages of "overhead" - front cover, back cover, order form, big-picture sales pitch about high-quality, user-friendly software. And there would be one page for each developer's software. Nearly every magazine and trade association rents its mailing list, so you'd have no problem finding a fresh, well-targeted list of prospects. And the total price would be surprisingly affordable. (8) Make your web site name memorable. Create a unique URL, with or without hyphens, that is easy to remember and easy to spell. If English isn't your first language, then ask for advice from colleagues. Radio and TV news directors won't be inclined to mention your web address if their listeners and watchers won't remember it. (9) Try other ideas. Try everything - Work with the computer user groups, bundle your software with hardware manufacturers' products, cross-market your software with other developers' apps, exhibit and speak at relevant trade shows, and write magazine articles for well-targeted journals. Try everything. It's all about marketing! The bottom line - As I've said so many times, the software marketplace is not homogeneous, and there are no "one size fits all" answers to marketing issues. There aren't enough hours in the day for every developer to thoroughly address every one of these ways to drive well-targeted traffic to their web sites. You have to pick and choose. If you're selling unique software into a strongly vertical market, you can achieve an enormous payback by finding your small but motivated audience, and providing them with a lot of information. On the other hand, if you're marketing a general-interest Windows utility or game, then you should work on press releases, search engines, and download sites, because these three areas represent your greatest potential for generating sales. Try, measure, refine, and try again.
While there are exceptions to every rule, it's usually a mistake to position your software as something that everybody can use. Your chances of getting press coverage increase if the editor believes that your program has special appeal to a certain demographic - that it has features or benefits which will make it more appealing to one group of users, even if that makes it less appealing to others. You don't have to blatantly tell the editors how you're positioned. They can sense your positioning from the way you present your program in your press release - - Are you marketing the newest software, with the newest technology? Or do you offer the oldest product, with the most established, credible, and bug-free track record? - Do you offer the least expensive application, so that many prospects can afford to buy it? Or do you sell the most expensive product, and worth every penny? - Is your application the most powerful product, with every feature known to humankind? Or is your app the easiest product to use, without the superfluous features that your competitors make their customers wade through to get to the important stuff? You can influence the editors' perception of the nature of your program without saying anything directly about how you want it to be positioned in the marketplace. This way, the editor of each magazine will evaluate how your program fits into the range of programs that are of interest to the magazine's readers.
Business Success Ideas
The Best Advice Ever for Becoming a Success at Work by Robert McCord (published by Andrews McMeel Publishing) The Big Picture - Here are 178 pages of aphorisms and anecdotes that will help you with business planning, strategy, management, leadership, finance, accounting, sales, marketing, pricing, competition, entrepreneurship, and all of the other business issues that we have to deal with every day. The advice comes from a wide range of experts. There are stories, checklists, and one-liners: "Ideas are a commodity. Execution of them is not." - Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Computers. What it Means for Software Developers - As with most business books, you have to translate the opinions from the general marketplace to the specifics of software development. Here are a couple of examples: . You might quickly gloss over the write-up about Wal-Mart's "everyday low price" philosophy, because you don't sell commodities, at discount prices, from a retail store. Or you could think about it for a while, and wonder if you're hurting yourself by putting your software on sale from time to time. Do your sales cause your prospects to defer the software-buying decision until a later date, when they can buy from you at a discount? And, if so, how many of them remember to return to your web site to make the purchase? . Michael McCarthy is quoted in 1997 in The Wall Street Journal as saying, "During the early 1990s, Frito-Lay researchers found that most people preferred a (potato) chip that broke under about four pounds of pressure per square inch. And consumers demand consistency. They would complain if chips were just eight one-thousandths of an inch too thick or too thin." You could quickly move on to the next story, without giving this one a lot of thought. Or you might think about how your users will react to the deviations that you've incorporated into your program's GUI. Will your customers embrace these GUI changes as exciting and innovative, or will they be turned off by them because your customers demand consistency? Like so many business books, the amount of wisdom you extract can often be a function of the amount of work and careful thought you're willing to invest in translating general business principles into your particular market niche. The Bottom Line - It's the kind of book that you can pick up, randomly select a page, and read for five enjoyable minutes. I found that a lot of the quotes and advice were not relevant to a mom-and-pop company in a high-tech world. But you can skim the parts that aren't on-target, and gather a lot of usable and thought-provoking material. I'll leave you with one last quote - "If Microsoft made cars...we'd all have to switch to Microsoft Gas." - Po Bronson, author of "The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest". "The Best Advice Ever for Becoming a Success at Work" was reviewed by Al Harberg. To UNSUBSCRIBE from this newsletter, send me a note. I'll remove your name immediately and permanently. To SUBSCRIBE to the email version of this newsletter, send me your name and email address. I'll only use your name and email address for this newsletter. I'll never spam you, or let other people have your name or email address. Please add al@dpdirectory.com to your anti-spam filter's friends-list. To REFER a FRIEND to this newsletter, click your email client's "forward" button. I thank you very much. And your developer friends will thank you, too. To SELL MORE SOFTWARE, bookmark this web site, and visit often. There's a lot of free, useful software marketing information on http://www.dpdirectory.com/.
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