The internet is full of ‘great ideas’ for promoting your company and your product, but how many of them really work?
Our company has been promoting online for years, and the one lesson that keeps coming home is the old saying, if you want something done right, do it yourself. We’ve hired people and companies over the years who are supposed to be the best at online promotions, and not one of them has performed to the standard they ‘sold’ us on. Instead, our own efforts, with help from our friends, have surpassed those of every ‘expert’ to whom we’ve paid money.
I’m sure our company’s story is no different than hundreds out there: we spent money on webmasters who created sites that did not do what they were supposed to do, and worse yet, cost us time and money by breaking links with our old, homemade site. We hired online marketing experts who did nothing tangible for our sales. We paid sales teams who started off telling us how great our product was and months later complained that they couldn’t sell it because it ‘wasn’t ready’. Meanwhile we were selling it ourselves, directly.
So if there’s a lesson I’ve learned over and over it’s this: no one knows our story better than we do, and we need to tell it as many times as we can in as many ways as we can. Then, our online marketing resources can be used for advertising our own message.
What have we found we need to sell our product? There are a few key tools that you can use yourself, and we have found that they work for Selkie Software, with a modest, incremental build of momentum.
Of course you need a good website – it doesn’t have to be fancy. In our case, we offer data recovery software that will recover your files when they are trapped by a Windows crash – the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. So, what our potential customers need to see is what we do and whether we can help them. We provide a free trial download, so there’s not much risk. It helped when we put Paypal on our site since some customers seemed leery of using the less well-known systems – we started with eSellerate.
We had some very good advice from friends like Doctor File Finder (http://www.drff.com) and Don Watkins of PC Net-Online (http://www.pcnet-online.com), and one of the most useful tips was to set up PAD files. If you haven’t heard of them before, they are very useful tools. So that your head doesn’t hurt when I describe them, PAD stands for ‘Portable Application Description’ and it’s a form you fill out which carries all the important information for your software program or technology.
The program that creates the form, originally put together by software whiz Harold Holmes of Lincoln Beach Software, is usually found on the Association of Shareware Professionals site. At the time I’m writing this, that download is not active (unusual!) however you can get the free download here: http://www.brothersoft.com/padgen-8433.html
Don’t be intimidated by the form. As long as you take it step by step, and just enter your product’s info, you’ll do great. A tip here is that it will prompt you to validate your info before you ‘build’ your PAD file. Go ahead and do this once, or even a couple of times to tweak it, but in the end if you’re ready to start entering putting your software on other sales sites, create your final file. I’ll do a separate blog piece just on PAD files soon.
Once you have a link that ends in ‘.xml’ you are ready to start offering your software to other sites to sell. That’s the beauty of the internet: there are tens of thousands of software sites already set up to backlink to you and sell your software. I will talk more about this in the article that expands on PAD files. There’s also news release sites, blogs, and article posting sites that are hungry for good content and free ways to promote yourself. Most of these are useful.
I wish I had the money back that we spent on website experts and lame sales people. Then we could use it on ad words. Ad words are great for our industry; even though data recovery is one of the most expensive keyword categories, and our team is smaller these days but much more effective.
There are no shortcuts. We all get by with a little help from our friends, and a focus on our end game.
