How do I launch and market a software product?

The title says it all
I am planning to launch a new software, for which I need a rough plan of action to get it to the market.

Here are the things that I've already done:-

• Built a website - http://www.paysketch.com
• Signed up for Facebook, Twitter and Google+
• Writing informative articles on the product blog and posting their links on the account pages for the social networking websites.

But I don't think this is enough. Besides this, what else do I do to get started?
How will people around get to know about the existence of such a product, because unless they do, I won't be getting any visitors or traffic to my website.

How, where and with that do I start? Can someone please help me with a step-by-step guide/link as to what all should I do and in what flow?

 

@digitalpoint seeking your expert advice on this..

 

Join some related forum with people that would use and benefit from your software, ofer a free trial there and they will come.
Join many facebook groups related to your product and post ads there
Add an affiliate program and also let other people market your software the way they know how

..this should get you started

 

@spyrit thanks for the pointers.
How and where do I find affiliates? If I were to just create an affiliate page and wait for interested businesses or individuals to contact me, it wouldn't work.. right! Can you help me with some pointers around this please.

 

well, it depends on the way you will offer your affiliate deal, if you go with something like clickbank or paydotcom or other known services for affiliates they already have a database of affiliates ready to join, depending how good your software is they might do the work for you.
If you just install an affiliate script on the other hand you'll have more control and won't pay anything to 3rd parties but will have to work a little harder for those affiliates.
I'd advise you to start with the forum posting on related forums, people that come and test your software if they like it they might also be interested in joining in as an affiliate, don't try to bring in affiliate, just offer the opportunity, make it appealing (softwars usually goes to 40-60% rev share) and market you software, clients and affiliates will come.

 

Well just find people that can be interesting in your product. Add some affiliate system that will help to promote your product. After you have your costumers, update the software, add aditional options and your business will grow. Using some images will not help you to give trust for your product, you can offer a completely demo or trials for few days. So if your softwares is ompetive with other available in business and users will find it valuable than you will make sales for sure.

 

Tell people about your great product via Social networks (in the proper groups and communities)
Launch ad campaigns with FB and Google (you'll have to input much more in the latter).
Launch PR campaign, sending PReleases to major media, dealing with software like (avoid over-spammed Press release publishing sites though).
Pay top bloggers to review your product and write about it in their blogs (it's best to make sure the product is of a really good quality before that).

Best thing to do is to hire a marketer, a special person, who's gonna be in charge of this activity.

 

Trade links, start your own top list website. When I sold software, trading links provided the most sales.

 

Just signing up with Facebook, Twitter and Google+ won't bring you much. Building a website and putting a product on it won't bring you sales either.

There is a lot more work going on if you want your product to be sold. Question yourself: ''How people will find you''? They surely don't know about your website yet and by that, your new accounts won't bring you anything.

For start, you should avoid any spamming techniques. It can seriously damage your and your product reputation. For example, posting on Facebook groups and communities is an absolute waste of time as almost every today's Facebook group is full of crap and people who only want to promote themselves and are also not interested in hearing what others have to say.

While press releases could bring you a lot, they can be hard to figure it out for someone who never used it before.

I suggest one technique for start. It's very easy to use. Just give product for free! But not to all, right? You need to earn something. People who are the owners of big blogs and websites would be extremely happy to receive a good product for free in exchange of giving a review for it. That's how people could easily hear about you and you could make some honest money really quickly.

You could also seek for a professional help. Reviews on popular blogs can give you a nice spike of traffic, but what you are going to do later when that's gone? You'll need to rank! If you product is about ''SEO'' for example, I'd suggest trying to rank for some keywords that will in long term bring enormous number of sales.

I could probably talk about successful launch of a product by days but I'm more interested to hear your questions. If there is something special you would like to ask, I'd be delighted to help you. Just send a PM if you need anything. I was selling lot of products before and I'm pretty sure that some of my techniques might be useful to you.

 

@VukasinI thanks for the awesome tips. I do have a few questions, but I am unable to initiate a private conversation (probably because I don't have as many likes here). Can you start a private conversation and let me join it.

 

You can also integrate a forum why not. So in this cases you will interact with your possible clients, this is great also to offer the public support for your product.

 

@laicen that's true and I realize that having a forum will provide a great interaction platform. However, I am yet to get a lot of people to buy the product. Until I get a handful of buyers/customers, a near empty forum with very few question and negligible engaging users might do more harm.

 

Yes that's true, just be positive. There are a lot of forums that have started without buyers/costumers. You can also invest a little bit for people that will post on your forum or will answer on posts. This will help you also in ranking, because a lot of threads can have good positions in google! Just create some interesting posts, and also some standart posts from different interests.

 

Providing a press release and possibly a demo version to relevant blogs would be a good next step.

 

Press releases are 99% useless.

 

Many a journalist has ripped their story directly from a press release, so I wouldn't say they are useless. In fact, they probably used more than people realize.

 

We're not talking about journalists, are we?

 

Hey Vivek ,
What you want is someone to partner with that knows how to do it for you that way you can focus on
what you are good at which is creating the software products.

Listen if you want to hit me up and I will take a look at your product for you and
maybe we will do a major product launch together and I will also provide a couple
of complementing products to add to the funnel ...

The way you were thinking there is too much time and labor involved
when you can just have affiliates sell your product for you..


Cheers

 

Well, I'm sure bloggers get a lot of their material from press releases too. The point is if your write a compelling PR, it makes someone more likely to write about your product or service simply because you're making his/her job easier.

 

We're not talking about bloggers either.