The Business of Software

I just released a new version of Snip-It Pro, a code snip-It organizer I created. This was a significant rewrite, as I actually tried to correct all the design mistakes I made the first time around.

I also updated the site, especially the home page to hopefully make it clearer what the product does.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

http://www.snipitpro.com/

I greatly dislike code snippets because they encourage copy and paste but your video makes me want to use code snippets :-)

Your app looks VERY good. I hope you have a good marketing plan.

Thanks for the feedback.

Marketing, that's the rub. I didn't do a very good job with the first release, but still managed to sell a few copies a month.

Hopefully the changes I made, plus more effort to actually market the product will pay off this time. I just started giving away copies in exchange for blog/website reviews.

I might try adwords again, but my previous experience just saw click through rates going up and conversion rates going down until I gave up.

Other than that, I'm not sure what else to do.

You should try a BitDejour sale of your software.
I think it would sell a lot of copies.
I'd certain buy one from bitdijour.

:)

Actually, I will be featuring Snip-It Pro on Bits Du Jour, but it won't be there till Saturday July 11, 2009. It will be discounted 50%.

Hi David,

The site looks really nice.

My English is not very good, but in the testimonial:

"A fantastic peice of software! ", did you really mean to use "peice" instead of "piece"?

Regards,

Javier, good catch. I am a native speaker but apparently not a good speller. I fixed the spelling.

Thanks.

Looks like a nice application. You might want to make the price a bit easier to find. Good luck.

Hi David, welcome to the marketing stage of making a business out of software.  This is traditionally were developers realize that what they know about making great software they inversely understand about defining and reaching a market.

(Marketing is full of unnecessary jargon. It's actually quite simple, but the folks who specialize in marketing tend to be the good looking air-heads who spent all of high school flirting with girls and consequentially they're not really *good* at anything in particular and need the positive reinforcement that jargon provides.)

1st thing to consider is that there are two kinds of people who will buy your software:
A) Those who know they need it and are searching the web Right Now looking for it.
B) Those who could benefit from it, but they don't realize it yet.

Finding and attracting the Bs is harder than the As, so I'll discuss the low hanging fruits first.

The As are already looking for your software, your challenge is to help them find you.  This Interweb thingey is a big big haystack ... and your software is just one of a number of needles therein.  Here's some tricks:

Identify your customer.  Build a profile of what they're like.  What magazines do they read?  What sites would they visit?  Do they subscribe/read MSDN?  Are they Eclipse users?  Do they visit stackoverflow.com?

Get a whiteboard and write all that on it like they do in Number or CSI, stick some mugshots on it.  Pretend you're profiling a serial killer who and smoke a pipe (they're out of fashioned I know but it might inspire some latent Sherlock-Holmesian wisdom).

Work out what search words they would be using to find your software.  The terms you use to describe your software might not be exactly the same. 

i.e.

I see "snippet library"and "snippets" on your home page but no other terms.  Perhaps your market calls this "clipboard manager" or "code snippet organiser" or "magic snippety thingey" or "clipboard code templates".

....

(ops! premature form submission  *blush*)

Anyway the point I was about to get to is that it is CRITICAL that you define your software in terms that your market uses.  And for some software the terms used are fragmented because that product's niche is poorly defined.

How do you work out what people are searching for?

1. Find your competitors (if you have any) and analyse the content on their site.  If they are any good at SEO they've put all the best search terms on their site somewhere, probably in links and H1 tags on the various pages.

2. There is a google function that you can use to show the number of people searching for different groupings of keywords. 

3. You can use AdWords itself to show you a rough estimate of the frequency of various keyword combinations.

4.  Just because people are searching for "snippet manager" doesn't mean that'll match with "manages ......... your snippets" all that successfully.  There could be some blog where some guy talks about "snippet manager" all the time and he's going to get a better ranking than you.

Site content
----------------

Having worked out what the search terms are that your customers are using to try and find you now you need to splatter those ALL OVER your site.  The more occurrences the better.  Make sure you have those terms in the content; in the img alt tags, in the title attributes; as the words inbetween the <a> and </a> of links; as the URL,title, and H1 tag of your site's pages that you link to.

Every time you blog make sure you mention your critical search terms.

Viola!! You're now top of Google for your search terms.  Why?  Because you were cunning and deceiptful and tricked google?  No.  Because your software is The Best Snippet Clipboard Thingey on the market and therefore rightly deserves to be in the #1 spot - all you've done is helped Google to put you in the #1 ranking where you were destined to be.

:)

How that helps some.

Kind Regards,

Jason Glover

p.s.  Giving away your software for free in exchange for back links won't hurt either.

Jason, Thanks for the advice. SEO is not something I spent a lot of time on and definitely something I need to concentrate on.

And I am offerring free copies in exchange for reviews/links which I mention on the download page.

All this ambiguity in marketing makes me wish someone made a compiler for it.

:)

Mike, I just added the price to the front page, thanks for the suggestion.

Jason, Thanks again for the advice. It was just the kick in the pants I needed to go through all my html to adjust meta tags, title tags, alt attributes and header tags through my entire site. I just finished updating everything. Now to enjoy the rest of my memorial day...