Strategy for Selling Software

If you are setting up a software development company and want to sell your own products, one route for selling software is to package your products as shareware. Shareware is a form of software distribution whereby customers can use your software for free for a trial period - it's a kind of try-before-you-buy means of selling software. Historically, shareware has quite often been associated with low-quality or simple software but this picture is changing.

If you want to sell software as shareware, make sure your software products have a sizeable market. It is essential to ensure that your software product will has a value in your chosen market - either because the software has unique features or is better than competitor offerings. Don't rely on a selling strategy of simply being cheaper than your competitors. These days, a lot of people realise that if they want to buy software they will possibly use for a number of years then cost isn’t a key factor when deciding to make a purchase.

Your sales and product development strategies must be based on writing a non-trivial, valuable program. There is a lot of cheap software - even free software - available. There are lots of big companies with large development resources allowing people to use software either for free or for a trial period. The distinction between fully-fledged commerical software and shareware is becoming increasingly blurred. Make sure your software has features that people are willing to pay for.

When selling shareware try to fill a niche and make a quality offering. One example of a niche is an “easy-to-use” version of a larger, more complicated software package. Note the key phrase here is “easy-to-use”, not trivial or cheap. People will pay to have complication taken away from them if the software offering still does an effective job. There is a risk here that some people will provide feedback indicating that your product is too simple and too inflexible. You must be careful in deciding which new features to add - are you willing to sacrifice simplicity and ease of use?

Many people will have made purchases they later regret simply because the product was cheap, e.g. a cheap power tool. Often, sooner rather than later you will have regretted the purchase, either because the product turns out not to be up to the job or breaks easily. People soon learn to spend a bit more money and get a product they know they can live with and continue to use for more than a couple of days. Selling software as shareware is a good way of reducing the risk of this happening with your software products - people can try out and live with your products for a period before deciding to purchase.

Small software companies can add value by offering good pre and post-sales support. A small software development company can often offer better support than a larger software company. Large companies can be unresponsive to support calls or can’t hold a meaningful discussion with a potential customer. With small companies there are few barriers between the company owner and the customer. Both sides can benefit from this - the customer can make his case and get a decision quickly and the company owner has a chance to build a relationship with the customer. Building a relationship with a customer may lead to future sales, for example if you release a major upgrade of your software.

When setting a price for your software product, don’t charge so little that you are literally working for peanuts. If a business’s products are too cheap, some customers may believe that the since the company does not value their own products why should the customer.

Read Selling Online for tips on software promotion via a website.

6 Things to Consider when Selling Software Products online

If you want to sell a software product online, the obvious route is to sell via your own website. If you want to sell software this way, you need to optimise your website to make it perform well in searches.

There is no easy solution for optimising a website to get good rankings in search engine results. No quick fix or magic trick is possible that will guarantee frequent visitors to a site and convert large percentages of your visitors into paying customers. The task of optimising a website for rankings, visitors and sales is an ongoing story of continual refinement and updates.

To sell a product online, at least 6 factors need to be considered:-

1. Do you have a product that has a reasonable market?
2. Determine how people search for your product or type of product. Do they use Yahoo or Google, what keywords do they look for?
3. Make sure the copy on your website emphasis the most frequently used search terms - plus long tail terms.
4. Make sure the copy on your website emphasis the most frequently used search terms - plus long tail terms.
5. Write the copy for your website to convince customers to buy your product.
6. Images are also important - or at least the names of your images are.

Point 6 can be very important. Google searches images and uses the image filename. Lots of people look for example images of invoices and I get a few hundred hits a month on my website for images of invoices and invoice templates.

Long-tail search terms are very important. For example, on my main website the search terms are invoicing software, invoice software and billing software. I’ve done research and found that these are the main search terms in the US and UK for my type of product. However, these search terms account for only 15% of my visitors. The rest of my visitors come from long tail terms that may only be mentioned once in the whole website. I don’t always deliberately put long tails into the text, I just write text, e.g. in the Support page or the Release History page that simply gives a good variety of words and phrases. I also examine competitor sites to see if they have combinations of phrases that I haven't included. I don't do any keyword stuffing, I just modify an existing phrase to include the long tails.

Due to the way search engines work, the people who find your website will already be interested in your product, or at least in the problem your product helps with. My feeling is that your website should then describe the benefits your specific product offers, i.e. why using your product will make handling security easier, quicker and cheaper for users. Be as specific as possible about the benefits so the visitor can easily understand how they can take advantage of your product.

The other thing to remember is that Google Pagerank isn’t everything. Pagerank doesn’t guarantee a page gets visitors. Monitor your web stats and see if any changes produce a rise in the number of visitors. Make refinements and see what effect they have.

Also consider whether you should rely entirely on search engines to get customers. Are there alternative methods of advertising your software? Can you get resellers for your software in other countries. For my invoicing software, virtual assistants make good resellers as they do invoicing for clients and I add features to make the software more suitable for their use.

Read Sales Strategy for more information.