Promoting Your Software Product In 4 Simple Steps

We’ve previously covered the difficult topic of pricing your software, which is an important first step in the marketing process.

But how do you promote your product and get attention online? here are 6 simple steps to get you started whether you are promoting your Binpress package or any other software product you are trying to sell:

1. Forums and Q&A sites

If you’re active on any development forums the first thing to do is to add the product or component you want to promote to your signature. Don’t be shy, it’s perfectly acceptable to do some self-promotion as long as it’s low-key and appropriate to the forum in question. Make it interesting for people to click on by mentioning what your product or component does in a short sentence, instead of just giving out its name which. For example “Developer of Paypal PHP API Class – A Paypal API wrapper that simplifies using Express Checkout and Direct Payments.”

Q&A sites are similar to forums, but with somewhat different target audience. People are looking for answers to specific questions, and by contributing answers on questions relating to your product or component, you can increase your authority and often even give a direct referral to your product / component page.

Relevant Q&A sites include Stackoverflow, Quora and other StackExchage sites – Programmers, WordPress and Game development to name a few.

Search for keywords that are related to your component, and see if you can help solve some of the problems the poster had. Don’t be pushy, if another developer is having problems writing the last line of code in his project, don’t jump in and offer your complete component as a solution. Help him solve his problem, and just mention your component briefly, as if to show that you have the authority to answer his questions with the experience of having solved it previously.

Remember, you are not trying to convince the poster of the question to buy your component. What you are doing is creating a referral point for the hundreds of other visitors who will view this post over a period of time – some of which will prefer to buy a ready solution than start developing it from scratch.

We’ll share some more tips for subtle (yet effective) promotion on community sites such as Stackoverflow in a new post in the near future (make sure to subscribe to our feed if you don’t miss it).

2. Twitter.

This is a no brainer. If you’re not on Twitter, you should be. If you are, you already know you need to mention your components as much as possible. Tell the world when you release a new product or make a sale, try to help people who have similar problems (use the twitter search to find them), and leverage your components to build your own brand and market yourself (which in turn will get you a bigger crowd of followers, and more sales potential).

When twitting about your product, add relevant hashtags which any people use when searching twitter (such as the language, framework and platform your product is using).

Offering support on Twitter, to both users of your components and others is a good idea as well.

Users Say They’re More Likely To Buy If A Business Answers Their Question On Twitter

3. Leverage any other social media tools or community sites in a similar way

If you’re on any social media, forum or community, there’s a way you can use it to promote yourself and your components, subtly or shamelessly (we leave that part up to you  ).

Some additional good places to consider are of course about.me, LinkedIn, flavours.me, Twitter, Facebook and Quora. If you have more websites in mind, please share with us in the comments!

The more pages on the web that link to your Binpress component page, the more likely it is to show up on Google search result pages as well.

4. Your website or blog.

While a lot of developers use Binpress instead of having their own homepage on the web, it is always good to have a page with a roundup of your previous work, social media profiles, links, and pages around the web. Don’t forget to add your Binpress page to the list. If you don’t have site of your own, you should consider opening an account on about.me or similar services, which provides the opportunity to do just that – provide links to your separate online profiles.

Also, we find that writing a post about your component might increase the attention it gets, whether it’s from your blog readers (who are likely to generate more word-of-mouth traffic to your components when they bump into someone who needs them) or from search engines who tend to favor blogs over other types of websites.

In fact, linking to your component from your website or any other place on the web has the added benefit that you can get a better commission by adding your affiliate ID to the link, and possibly receive commissions on sales of other components generate from traffic you bring to Binpress. To learn more about how to receive affiliate commissions, visit our affiliate program page.

Using these tips you can get very effective results with as little as 15-30 minutes of work, and I can assure you that after that initial sale you will continue to reap the fruits of your 30-minutes-labour for a long long time – since every exposure to your components leads to more exposure in the long run. Try these today and you’ll be surprised at the impact it could make within the month.

Have additional marketing tips of your own? we want to hear about it in the comments!

Author: Adam Tal