We are marketing software that you can buy online and are brainstorming on some new marketing ideas. We are already advertising with Google and Overture and did the basic seo. We came up with some other marketing ideas that we are going to try, I would like to hear some opinions or some other ideas. 1. We are going to offer the software for 1 week for a reduced price. 2. We are going to sell 60 units of the software for a special discount. We will put a counter on the page which shows the amount of remaining units. 3. We are going to set up a recommend this software to a friend form. Users can send a link to the page to 6 friends and recommend it to them, if 2 of the friends by it the person how recommended the software gets one version for free. 4. We are going to set up a support forum where you can get support for the software and read user’s opinions and more. I am looking forward to hear some opinions and ideas!
Recommend a friend is good, but I'm not sure about the way you are doing it. It sounds like if 2 friends buy it then their copy is free, otherwise they pay full price? If it were me, I'd just make it a standard affiliate program. Pay them X% on every sale generated by their links. If you are successful at it then you can get a lot of webmasters throwing up links to you. Since you are selling software, you can utilize clickbank and have ready access to all of the affiliates on their network.
Why don't you try putting a timer in the software so that it will run for seven days (or some other time period) after which they have to send you money to activate it again? This way, people can download it for free and try it before buying. Very effective promotion for a lot of software programs and will even get you into some of the freeware sites for additional publicity.
Thanks GlobalGamingNews! Clickbank sounds good to me! jrbiz we already tried that, but the results were not so impressive.
Make sure you get trial versions on all the software download sites. Here's the catch though - don't limit the functionality of your trial! Make it work for 10, 20 or 30 days, but make it fully functional. If you don't, people (like me) won't bother to download it.
Good thoughts on your promotions - What are you going to do to let people know about them? Email, keywords, affiliate banners, forums etc...?
Contact related forums and websites and start a contest....offer the product for free to a winner....we did this with endgadet at we saw our traffic soar!
I agree with WillB. Put your software on all the shareware sites (there are a ton of them - download.com the biggest). Promote your software to the organizers of those sites and ask for reviews. We developed some desktop software a few years ago and we got lots of Editor's choice awards which drove a lot of sales. You can then post those awards on your own site. DO offer a full functional 7, 14, 21 or 30 day trial. Be careful of hackers though, our software was comprimised weeks after we released it so you will need to build in security to your software to prevent hackers from finding a way around the trial (trust me they will so you'll need to add automatic updates to your software).
We will publish information about discounts on the homepage and in the campaigns with Google and Overture. Thanks for posting your opinions and suggestions!
I have to agree with the shareware sites idea. However, I think the key is to NOT limit functionality, as was said above. I will not download a limited trial copy.
As already mentioned, I too have only ever downloaded trial software that has full functionality. Some of that software never expired just threw up annoying popups asking me to register but because I loved the software I bought it! Never had a problem buying good software. I agree with MrLoofer regarding hackers - it will be hacked so expect that to happen if it's successful.