With the advent of the internet, selling software online became a pretty big business. Companies began to market their products online and sell them to interested consumers. However, since most people wanted to try the product before they bought it, the companies began to offer evaluation or trial versions of their products on free download sites.
One such free download site, download.com, offers million of software downloads. If you’ve created your own piece of software and want to let the world know about it, you’ll want to read this lesson on how to make your software known with software submission.
A Great Product
You’ve just come up with a great program and know that people would buy it if they knew about it. The problem is that they don’t know about it. Your product stands right alongside millions of other programs on millions of other websites. Still, you try to sell it and you find that the sales are not existing. Some may say this is because the product itself is not good, but that’s not really true. In most cases, this occurs simply because the program is not being promoted.
Software Submission: The Ultimate Product Promotion
If you watch TV, you see a lot of commercials for a lot of different products. TV is an extremely popular form of advertisement because it allows the products to reach the people. When you think about it, the internet is really no different. Since there are literally hundreds of millions of people who browse the web everyday, companies have begun to advertise their products online. This is done in the form of ads on popular sites like Yahoo.
Software submission is just like advertisements, albeit done in a different way. Instead of paying for ad space, you’re instead giving download sites the right to make your product available to visitors. Whenever a visitor goes to a download site and types in a keyword relevant to your software, they’ll see your software on the page and may download it.
What are the Advantages to Software Submission?
There are a lot of benefits to submitting your software to download sites. The first is that you are exposing your product to many people. Anyone who visits the site (and a lot of people go in search of free downloads) will perhaps get the chance to see your product. If it’s a product that they find useful, they’ll be inclined to download it. If they enjoy the trial version, they’ll consider going to your web site and purchasing the full version. Therefore, you can think of the download sites as being a way of garnering potential sales.
Another benefit is that you are reaching people who may not otherwise hear about your product. The internet is a big place and it can be hard to separate your product from all the others. Software submitted to download sites will be grouped in its own category, making it easier for people to see your product and read what it can do for them.
What are the Disadvantages?
Just like anything else, there are some disadvantages to software submission. If, for instance, you offer a trial version that is easy to crack, people may download the trial version from the download site and then crack it rather than buying it from you. That’s why it is important to make sure your trial versions are virtually un-crackable.
Also, if you choose to stop offering the trial version, you might not be able to get it pulled from the download site(s) right away. It can take several weeks, if not months, for a download site to add or remove programs.
How Do I Submit Programs?
If you go to the various download sites, you’ll see that most, if not all of them offer the chance to manually submit programs. These programs are then checked by the staff of the site to ensure they are free of spyware and viruses. This process can take weeks, so many instead opt for a submission service. A very popular service is upload.com. For $79 a year, you can have your program listed on CNET.com and Download.com, among other sites. It’s a very quick way of getting your site out there, which is why you should consider it.
There are other web sites that offer software submission services. To find out about these, you may want to consider asking around on a SEO or software submission forum
Lesson 7 Wrap-Up:
Software submission is a highly effective way of getting more people to try and buy your products. In this lesson, you’ve learned why it’s beneficial, as well as how to submit your products.
Do you have any statistics: What and how many sites it is worth to submit. There are many sites that are worthless and it is probably better to just send to 10-20 of all sites, those that have high page rank. You may also wish to discuss PAD file creation and submission.