software, productivity & more
Software Marketing
Source control your website for better SEO
Jul 20th
When multiple developers work on a single website project it is obvious to use a source control software such as SVN, CVS etc. But you should do it even if you are the only developer working on the project.
Why? Source controlling helps an SEO expert to analyze the impact of a change on website traffic.
Imagine that you have modified some pages of your website (page title etc). After few days you wonder why the sales have dropped. You have totally forgotten the last changes you made to the website. Your source controlled website will help you to track every change made to it. You can easily recover back your sales.
Thanks
ASP chooses a sensible name
Jun 17th
The Association of Shareware Professionals has renamed itself to the Association of Software Professionals (ASP).
Details of the name change can be found here.
I have been a member of ASP for many years now. If you are running a software company then I strongly suggest that you join the ASP. The members’ discussion group (newsgroup) will give you valuable tips for marketing your software, SEO, software registration, protection, new product development, product ideas, website feedback, product review etc.
Moreover, members of the ASP offer their products at discount price to other co-members. I take this benefit each year and save hundreds of dollars.
Thanks.
The Association of Shareware Professionals has renamed itself today to the Association of Software Professionals.
Watching topics/keywords on Twitter using RSS Newsreader
Jul 24th
Thanks to Dennis Crane who suggested that Twitter can be used to watch discussions about particular topic, your product, your competitors product using your newsreader (Bloglines etc).
How to do it?
Just subscribe to the following feed url:
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=(your keyword here)
Example:
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=google+chrome
Thanks.
MailChimp – Email marketing service
Jun 20th
When sending our email newsletters to our customers, we were always worried about our emails being marked as SPAM. And we didn’t know how to get away with it. We kept improving our email copy (subject, content, format etc), but still Gmail and others would treat it as SPAM.
For the launch of our product RecentX, we wanted to fix this for sure. Seeing the potential of this product, we want each of our customer to know about it. So we asked the geeks at Business Of Software forum. We were quite confident of getting a solution because all of us mISVs face this problem.
And yes, we got the answer – MailChimp
In our experience, this is a simply fantastic mass mailing service. We wanted to solved the SPAM problem. Period. And MailChimp did solve it. The emails which we sent from MailChimp was authenticated. So it did not get filtered by most of the anti-spam systems.
MailChimp website’s usability and looks are very impressive. They also have something called “Inbox Inspector” that sends the email to all major webmail services (gmail, hotmail etc) and verify whether it reaches their inbox and not the SPAM folder. Plus it shows how your email looks in each of those webmail services.
The campaign report shows all the required details. How many opened? how many clicked which link on your email?, supports Google Analytics etc.
MailChimp is free for 100 subscribers. I strongly suggest that you have a look at this service.
Thanks.
Predict the tech future with Engadget blog
Feb 12th
Engadget blog gets you very interesting tech news at your desk. It’s about gadgets such as laptops, desktops, mobile phones, cars or any new electronic items. You can see the market trends and make appropriate decisions for your business. What mobile phone platform is popular, which is not worth concentrating on. This is why I subscribe to this blog.
Thanks.
Lifehacker – A Must Read Blog
Feb 4th
You definitely must have heard of www.lifehacker.com . It is a must read blog for everybody, from all parts of life.
My main purpose of reading it is to get updates on new software, new web services, new version of existing software, what’s hot, what’s not, free downloads and other industry news.
Add to your blog reader now, if you wish to get the juice of what’s in, what’s out in this industry.
Get instant visitor’s feedback using Kampyle
Dec 20th
Andy Brice mentioned on his blog about how to get website/product feedback from within every page of your website using a free service called Kampyle.
About 2 weeks back, we added Kampyle to our website. Since then we have received some useful feedback about the product and website which we may not have received otherwise.
Kampyle adds a button to every page of your website so that the user can submit feedback effortlessly. You just have to add their script on the footer of your page.
GiveAwayOfTheDay
Nov 26th
GiveAway Of The Day (GOTD) site gives away a software for free, every day. This site can be a very good marketing tool for software companies, especially uISV.
Many of us may immediately reject GOTD and it’s quite natural. When given enough thought and based on my experience, I have written down some facts/arguments that will help you to take the right decision.
- If you have a innovative software that people normally do not search for, you will need to layout an extensive marketing plan. One way to reach the masses is by giving it away free and just for one day. This is when GOTD will be useful. You would be surprised to see the comments that you would receive on the GOTD site. The comments include appreciation, criticism, feature requests etc. This can be very good for your product’s future.
- GOTD pays you for giving away your software on their site. It’s normally $400.00 or so. If you receive a good response from the GOTD users, you can ask for more. If you have a product that does not sell much, this is one way to get that ‘extra income’.
- If you are going to launch a new version of the product, you can give away the current version for free. When GOTD users download your software from the GiveAwayOfTheDay website they do not register with you. So you wouldn’t have their email addresses. However, you can modify your current version (a link in your program’s menu etc) so that GOTD users can upgrade to the new version at special discount price.
- Some software vendors have a notion that it is very hard or impossible to sell to users who are crazy about free software. But there is a good % of GOTD users who do give money. Moreover, the software given away on GOTD is only for personal use and comes with no technical support. If your software’s quality is good, GOTD users will talk about it at different forums, their blogs etc.
That’s it for now. Hope these points will give you more insight towards marketing your software using GOTD.
The Association Of Shareware Professionals
Nov 1st
Yes. I would recommend that you join this association, especially if you are new to the software business world. The Association of Shareware Professionals (The ASP) is a forum of more than 1500 software professionals around the world. The most valuable thing is their private newsgroups where the software developers discuss about marketing, development, business tips, software protection, infrastructure recommendation, discount offers and much more.
Don’t go on their website. It may seem dull and outdated. But their private newsgroups are worth the $100.00 yearly membership fee.
Getting exact sequence of referrers/visitors to your website
Oct 2nd
Analytics software is very good in studying the indepth pattern of visitors, keywords, pages most visited etc. And Google Analytics is the best for such purposes.
In addition to Google Analytics, I use a free service called HitTail. Its main purpose is to track rare keywords that helped your visitors to come to your website. You can leverage on this information by using those keywords more frequently in your website content and blogs.
However, I use HitTail for only one purpose. It lists all the visitors (referrers) in the exact sequence chronologically as they visited your website. You can easily detect any new website that is linking to your website. Also you can see various keywords used by the visitors to visit your websites. It is easy. It is fun too. While, Google Analytics doesn’t yet give such data.