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How To Get Your Program Professionally Marketed?
one-man orchestra writes "I'm the sole programmer of a small, multi-platform, commercial audio program (a spectrogram editor). After over 6 months on the market, I realized that the program would never just sell itself, and that I need some real marketing done for it. Being a one-man orchestra is becoming increasingly difficult; I only can devote so much time to marketing, my skills in that department are lacking, and I'd much rather spend more time coding. Despite my lackluster part-time marketing effort, I still manage to make a modest living out of the sales. My logical assumption is that with someone competent taking care of that part, revenue could greatly scale up. But what's the right way to go about doing this? What type of people/company do I need to contact? What to expect? What to look out for?"
CPA marketers are the perfect answer for you. They do marketing online full time and know how to reach the target audience for you, and you also wont be paying for nothing but the sales.
They generally get ~25% of the sale price, and you wont need to try to get converting users from adsense or any other ad service where you just pay for clicks or banners and have no idea if they will actually buy your product. With CPA model other people will do that for you. This works great for both; you get to do what you know, aka the coding and dont need to spend your time on the marketing, and they get their pay depending on their performance. It also works good for minimizing fraud, since you will be only paying for real sales.
CPA companies usually also have a good support managers that teach you what to do and how to go about it. After all, they'll profit also depend on how many sales their affiliates can deliver to you.
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Do you have a web site? Have you done any search engine marketing (SEM)? How does your product rank for the keyphrase "spectrogram editor" (assuming that really is the keyphrase)? You could do some basic, but effective SEM yourself and for very little money.
I just Googled the term and there are no relevant links, which means you could probably get a high ranking pretty easily and quickly if you put up some quality information like an FAQ.
"Program" and "commercial audio program" are two different beasts. Have you sent press releases/info to the bigger music software news sites? (KVRAudio, harmony central, etc). Or to technical forums? (Gearslutz, ProSoundWeb, etc). It's not like you're selling an anti-virus package or an MMO, this is kind of a specialized market...
Clearly slashdot is broken. The first reply is a useful and informative comment? I don't come here to read that sort of nonsense, I come here for for 'soviet russia' jokes and legal advice without any connection to reality.
air and light and time and space
1. Embed security within your program. Generate (1) a version of the program with a unique lock and (2) a unique password (for that unique lock) for each customer who buys your program. Sell it by allowing the customer to download it.
2. Create a binding, toughly worded contract that each customer must sign by hand.
The aim of point #1 is to be able to trace the source of each pirated copy of your program. (The password that activates it immediately identifies the customer who pirated it.) You slaved for years to create it. You deserve all the profits.
The aim of point #2 is to facilitate suing the customer identified by the method implied in point #1.
To a degree, that's the price of doing business.
Don't give stuff away if you can't afford to (which is the beauty of selling software versus hardware).
Back in the day (which was pre-blog) I wouldn't give software to anyone who hadn't been published in a major trade publication. That kind of worked, and kept the guys looking for freebies in check to a degree, but you have to just accept that only a percentage of the people you contact will reply and only a percentage of the people who reply will actually write something. That's why it's a bit of a numbers game (lots of things in the funnel for a few things out).
For my book "Elevator Pitch Essentials" I have probably sent out 50 review copies and gotten 5 articles in return. That's kind of depressing, but it's the way it is.
I will say that the whole blog thing has changed the question of accreditation. I will send free copies (both PDF and hard copy) of my book to bloggers but I have had a very high success rate (80%) and it costs me nothing to send a PDF and only a few bucks to send a hard copy.
I always hated the phrase "You have to spend money to make money" when I was just starting out, but now I find myself telling it to people.