If you have ever made and designed your own software, you will have likely already learned the lessons in this article. The same lessons can be applied to the businesses of most Internet marketers. The main lesson I learned was that it does not matter how good your software product is, the quality of the product does not ensure its financial success. Microsoft of course is an exception for a number of reasons. First off, Microsoft has always sold their product first to the computer retailer. Secondly, they have built the legal war chest to force businesses to pay for their products. They also have the war chest available to promote their products with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. My business is not a Microsoft and yours may not be either. So, we do not have the lock on selling our products as a necessity to the middle man, and we do not have the same kind of budget that Microsoft possesses. Even still, we should never ever give up on our hopes and dreams of success. NEVER GIVE UP HOPE! I am able to share this message with you from a position of experience. See, I am a programmer of moderate knowledge. I have undertaken software projects on several levels while searching for that infamous pot-of-gold. In the early, early days, I wrote three separate software packages for direct resale to the public. The first and second time, I supposed that it just was not the right package to get the attention of the public. The third time out, I approached the project with the shareware attitude. I sold one copy of the package. The fourth time out, I gave the software for free, but supported by ad revenue. Selling advertising on an unknown name is tougher than giving away the software. I gave away several hundred copies of the package, but did not sell a single ad lot, so I ended up serving my ads alone. The fifth time around, I finally got a grip on the challenge. I had developed software for my own use, and thought others might like the package. I was right. THE HARD, NAKED TRUTH I could have offered the package for resale, but it was software that could only be used by a very tight niche market. There were only about 500 people who I suspected might be interested in the product as a stand-alone application. If I sold the package for $100, I might could have made $50,000 on the product alone, but that is optimistic. At $100, I am willing to venture that my takers would have been fewer than 50 strong. So now, my gross earnings on the product may have been $5000. Realistically, I would reach my largest market base at about $20 per user. If I could have turned that $20 on the 500 users, then my earnings would have been a maximum of $10,000 earned on the product. Granted, that is not too shabby, but it is far from exceptional. It is definately not on the scale of Microsoft. THINKING OUTSIDE OF THE BOX I finally realized that if I were to offer my software as a service, then I could resell the service to the same people over and again. By offering the product as a service, I could then insure that I would have a continuous source of income to spur the upgrades that are discovered to be needed down the road. Over the last three years, I have tweaked and prodded the software to offer more and more value to the service and to increase the ability of my clients to get real value from my product/service. My service is designed to help writers of free-reprint articles to get their articles delivered to ever-expanding groups of publishers who are looking for great content to reprint. Since January of 2002, I have managed to triple the number of publishers and webmasters I am able to reach with my client's content. Along the way, I have been able to improve my program to add even more added-value services to my basic package. I could realistically increase the cost of my service by five times, and my clients would still be getting their money's worth from my service. And yet, more added value services are right around the corner. THE SOFTWARE OF MY FUTURE LABORS I have finally learned the lesson of how to sell my software online. With my future software products, some will be offered as a free service so that I can get the additional exposure, and others will be offered as pay services. I have earned more money for my service than I had ever hoped to earn as a software product. And the money is continuous which gives me the opportunity to receive additional benefits to my pocket book when I decide to upgrade the software. My latest individual software package has been put up on my site as a free service so that I may receive the additional exposure. If you are a webmaster and you are using content written by others to spice up your site's value in the search engines and in the minds of your visitors, then this new software will be of good value to you. In order to meet the terms of reprint stated by the writer of the content you are using, you must hyperlink all URL's in the article copy. Doing this hyperlinking by hand is a real painful experience, especially if you are using lots and lots of content written by others. By using my newest, most nifty little tool, all you have to do is to put the text copy of the article into the form and click "convert," and the software will hyperlink all URL's in the copy that you are working to prepare for quick and easy placement into your site. This software is called the "TPW Text-to-Hyperlink Conversion Tool" and it can be found at: http://thephantomwriters.com/link-builder.pl AN ADDED VALUE Even though this software is mostly used by the webmasters who take my client's content for reprint on their websites, from my site's article archives, this software is actually an added value to my paying client's as well. By targeting the software to those who will use my client's content for reprint, my client's are assured that there is no reason why the webmasters would not be able to hyperlink every article that is used from my website. My client's benefit from this tool because their terms of reprint are honored much more frequently than ever before. IN CONCLUSION By targeting my software to both sides of the equation, my user base and my client base, I am offering added value services to both groups and providing my potential clients more reason to buy my services. Perhaps as you look down the road with what you are going to be doing with your website, you will find more ways to extract more income from your own website. |
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