Software Marketing Magic

I would like to make a quick mention about PRweb.

If you are currently or are thinking about submitting press releases about your product, i am of the opinion that prweb is the only service worth considering.

With a press release you will get the obvious benefit of getting information about your product, new versions etc out to the general public, and have a chance at the many jurno’s who follow the press releases from picking up your story.

The other benefit is for search engine optimisation. You get multiple types of submission packages and i recommend picking the SEO package and making sure that the press release has a link pointing back to your download.com listing as well as your website to increase their search engine rankings.

Its a touch pricey at $200 a press release (for the SEO submission) but can incredible long term results with great ROI. A press release will fit in very well as a follow up to the 10 step software marketing strategy and can have incredible benefits to increasing your SEO rankings, generating further traffic to your offer and thus increasing sales.

Go ahead and visit the link below and signup for a FREE account which will allow you to review all the press release submission, tracking and management options before you commit to submitting a release.

I thought I would start of the blog with a post about recruiting affiliates. This post came about after I was recently asked by a reader how to compete with competitors who offer very high affiliate commissions that you cannot match without becoming unprofitable.

This is a common problem when competing for affiliates online with any type of product, not just software. It can be quite frustrating trying to recruit affiliates when it seems your competitor is very happy to give away almost all his revenue to affiliates. These competitors will always fall into 2 categories. The one who is simply happy to generate a small amount of revenue either because this is not a priority for them, a hobby or side project or they simply don’t know what they are doing. Then you have the dangerous competitor that is using the high commission as part of his marketing strategy.

Either way, when faced with this problem, and its clear you are loosing many potential affiliates to them, you need to modify your own strategy.

1. If you do not want to increase your commission to match, you need to make sure that you have a higher quality product that converts site visits & downloads into sales better then your competitor. A good affiliate (the type you really want) will promote the product that is of better quality and converts to sales best, and NOT the product with the highest commission. One possible way to track your competitors conversion rates is to sign up as an affiliate for them and send them traffic (via adwords etc) and track the sale conversion rates. Yes, this will come at a cost, but its competitive research and is very valuable information when fighting for affiliates.

2. If you have multiple products or a “lite” + pro version of a product, you should promote one of the products to affiliates at a very high (even 100%) commission rate as a way to generate a large list of affiliates very quickly. You then promote your other products to these affiliates and if possible automatically approve them as affiliates for your other products, and since they are already promoting your 1 product, they are very likely to promote your other products which are set at more reasonable commission rates. This will result in affiliates promoting your other products when usually they would simply have passed over these products previously in the affiliate network list, since the affiliate rate was not as good as your competitor who was listed above or below you.

Another part to this is getting affiliates to promote a high commission product (perhaps a lite version) and then you integrate an “upgrade to pro” option or recommendation to another related product within your software package. Many users will upgrade (if you make it worth it to them) and you will then keep 100% of the revenue from the upgrade. When you work the numbers this can result in only making 5$ on your initial high comm sale, but an additional 20$ per purchase on upgrades later on. A total value of $25 per sale instead of $5. Plus you have generated a large list of affiliates!

Basically the theory is that you use low cost (or high comm) products to act as lead generators to generate a list of customers or subscribers (or affiliates) who you can promote other or more expensive(profitable comm) products to on the back end.

The above strategy is exactly why some companies seem to be able to sell their products at so crazy cheap (or at such high comm) and still make a large profit. Because they have an effective back end sales funnel. It really is critical to have multiple products and a back end funnel to be able to stay competitive online.

As I have mentioned before, an affiliate program and only a few quality affiliates can generate massive amount of sales for your business.

Let’s discuss the concept and the approach before we get to the “how to”.

The aim is to get other website owners, with high traffic, or people with large email subscription lists (newsletters etc) to promote your software to their visitors or subscribers.

Sounds easy? Not always. For one, most of these webmasters are already affiliated with other product owners or your competitors. They would be silly not to if they do in fact have good traffic or a large subscriber base.

To recruit these super affiliates, as they are called, you need be able to offer something with comparable or more value then what they are currently promoting.

Firstly and most importantly, no good affiliate will ever promote sub standard products or software as they know risking the trust of their visitors and subscriber base is business suicide.

This means you need to have a quality software product. Don’t even think about recruiting the top affiliates until you offer similar or more value then your competitors.

Secondly, you can tempt them with high commission per sale. As high has 75% in some case is needed to lure a top affiliate. This may seem like a lot, but the resultant sales can be incredible, and can far outreach your direct sales potential.

Further more you now have these customers on your “list” and can promote other products to them moving forward. People that have already bought from you are often 10x more likely to buy from you again (compared to prospects who have not bought from you before) due to the trust that develops by offering a valuable product in the first purchase.

The most successful product based businesses online are multi product business that offer a low cost product initially, at very high commission payouts (to lure the affiliates), which in turn builds their customer list, which then allows them to promote higher priced products or “professional version” type products on the back end. This is the way some companies somehow manage to buy pay per click and other traffic at such ridiculously high prices, at an initial loss, but still turn a big profit in the back end, and in turn manage to annihilate their competition in the pay per click bidding wars. You should seriously consider this strategy in your marketing efforts moving forward.

Ok, so once you have the following fields covered you can start your affiliate recruitment. Any less and you risk failure.

• Professional looking website with company information, about us page, well written homepage copy, help and FAQ pages, privacy policy, software end user licensing agreement, contact information (with telephone number if possible) and at lest 8-15 500 word content pages related to your niche, offering valuable information.
• Professional Affiliate Program with a well known network(s)(discussed next)
• Affiliate content such as banners, text, links, emails etc to help affiliates easily promote your product.
• Good commission rate (50% or higher). Will also be influenced by the competitiveness of your market and how high a rate your competition offers.
• A QUALITY PRODUCT

As you can see, all this involves monitoring and researching your competion to make sure you offer a quality product backed by a professional company (or trusted expert). Nobody builds a successful LONG TERM business on the net without a good product and a trustworthy “expert individual” or company backing the product. If you cant offer a product that is better then your competition, then you need to position your product uniquely by focusing on its benefits that differentiate your software from your completion. Find your USP!

Moving on. You begin by starting to sign up with the many software affiliate networks available. This allows you to get your product out there and seen by thousands of potential affiliate marketers. At this point you will simply be listing your product on as many networks as possible with the “hope” that affiliates will see and begin to promote your products. This can result in reasonable success but at the end of the day it is still “hope marketing” and is a passive approach.

Don’t miss this step however. It’s easy and will contribute to your growth. More importantly however is that these networks offer payment processing and other services useful to your company, and will also offer options to the affiliates you will try recruiting later on. Many will have a preference over a particular network, so you want to make sure you are available on their network of choice, to make the process as easy as possible for them.

Here is a list of the important networks to sign up with.

Reg Now

Avangate

eSellerate

Share-It!

ShareaSale

BMT Micro

Once you have signed up to these networks, review each carefully and you will find different tools and options they offer that can help you promote your product successfully within each network.

Note: Due to most of them offering their own payment processing, it can sometimes be a pain to manage, and will require some effort, but the end result of all this visibility can be very rewarding.

Ok, now its crunch time. Do you think you are ready to start recruiting your super affiliates? If so, guess what? I’m not going to tell you how!

That’s because I am firm believer in getting experts to perform tasks that I am no expert at. This is especially true with regards to affiliate recruitment since you most likely have only one chance to get those “top 10″ power affiliates (sometimes less in smaller niches).

Would you risk the possibility of instant success and hundreds of sales a month or day (that can sometimes be generated from just 1 top affiliate), by trying to do so yourself with minimal or no experience in affiliate recruitment?  I certainly wouldn’t and therefore wouldn’t recommend it to you!

Do yourself a favour and speak to some experts in affiliate recruitment and management. Just like the PPC management firms, they are only successful if you are successful.

Here are some options:

http://www.partnercentric.com

Pay Per Click advertising works great as long as you know what you are doing. It allows you to measure your advertising spend versus sales revenue dollar for dollar so you can make sure you profit (or know when to quit). Its even possible to know within 1 week of launching your campaign, if it is profitable or not, and allow you to make decisions quickly to minimize any losses you may incur on an unsuccessful campaign. Success also depends greatly on the type of software you have, its target market as well as the competitiveness of the market.

Pay per click is a great for getting instant traffic and sales, but can also spell disaster if you don’t be careful. Pay Per Click advertising refers to services such as Google Adwords (Those ads that appear on the right side of google’s search results and on websites with google adsense), Yahoo Search Marketing etc.

For now we focus on Google Adwords. Once you are successful here, its easy to duplicate the campaign on other networks.

First off, if you already have some sales data, you want to try and determine what you current conversion rate is, from user visit to download to purchase. You need this to determine what you can afford to pay per click to still be profitable.

Some basic math, but it must be said…

Lets say you get 200 visits a day, 100 downloads a day and 5% of downloader’s purchase the software. That’s about 150 sales a month. Your software costs $67. That’s $10 050pm.

You then work out how many visits converted into sales. 200 visits a day * 30 days = 6000 visits a month. 150 sales a month * 100 / 6000 visits a month = 2.5% conversion rate of visits into sales.

So, lets say you want to make a 50% GM on your software and spend only $5025 per month on advertising to make total sales of $10050pm…

You need to divide the advertising spend you have by the number of visits you currently receive per month which will show you the cost per click you can pay to reach your target. In this case $5025 / 6000 visits = $0.8375 per click. This can be a reasonable amount in some niches and impossible in other more competitive niches.

If you don’t have this sales data yet, you can use Adwords to send traffic and start tracking your conversion rate to obtain the data you need.

You can sign up free for google adwords here. Then proceed to (https://www.google.com/adsense/adsense-resources ). This will allow you to go through the free tutorials and training that Google themselves provide. This is almost enough to start a successful campaign. After all, Google wants you succeed and continue spending with them.

Go ahead and sign up to start familiarizing yourself with the service.

Google wants your ads to be relevant. Google’s business is providing quality search results for its users. It does not want irrelevant ads cluttering its search results. They have therefore introduced the Quality Score which scores your ad, keywords you bid on, and the page your ad links to, based on relevance to each other.

Simply put; If you bid on the “Video Conversion Software” keyword phrase, then your ad should include this phrase in its title and description and the page that it points to should be information about this exact topic (at least 500 words of text).

This will generally get you a good quality score. Sounds simple? You’d be surprised how many people get it wrong!

A good quality score allows your ad to rank higher in the search results while maintaining a low cost per click. Its sometimes possible to rank better then a competitor at a 5^th of the cost per click, simply because his ad and landing page text may be less relevant to the chosen keywords, then your ad. This can be the difference between profitability and failure.

Another way Google will influence your quality score is the click through rate that you get in relation to the number of times your ad appears in a search result for users (called impressions). The assumption is that if nobody is clicking on your ad, then its not relevant to what the user is searching for. Keeping above 2.0% click through rate will generally keep your quality score high.

Here is a great free report showing you exactly how to run a successful PPC campaign. This has been highly recommended by many of the top internet marketing “guru’s”.

http://www.creativedigitalmedia.com/dominate/frank/

By the way, these guys run a very successful PPC management company, and are experts in this topic, so if you are thinking about outsourcing your pay per click marketing, give them a shout. They will review your software and its market and won’t take on any projects they don’t think will be successful, so it may be a good idea running your software past them as a way to test its viability in this advertising channel.

Next we are will be looking at some PPC competitive analysis.

Firstly, sign up for Hexatrack. A free membership is available that will allow you to track 4 groups of 10 keywords for free, before you need to register. This can be more then enough for a single piece of software. If you need to, they offer a paid membership which allows you unlimited access.

I recommend going through all their tutorials and help to maximize the value you receive from the service.

Here is a short hexatrack walkthrough to show you what valuable information you can get from your competitors keywords. COMING SOON

To reiterate, PPC is competitive, but viable, sometimes hugely successful and other times disastrous. Fortunately, in almost any market, there is a path to take to a successful campaign. If you are like me and have the budget, id recommend leaving it to professionals who have been doing this for years and have proven track records.

For top notch PPC management id recommend (http://www.creativedigitalmedia.com/ ). The creators of that great free report I mentioned earlier on.

Further more, I fully recommend you searching Google for more PPC help. There is tons of great free information out there for you.

If you really want to DIY, check out these training ebooks:

Adwords Profits

Google Magic Adwords Formula

Next: Step 10: Affiliate Marketing

Outsourcing or in house writing of articles around your product or market segment can generate great traffic to your software, and in turn downloads, as well as increase your Google rankings while also establishing a good positioning in the marketplace.

Lets summarise the three main benefits of article marketing

• Article marketing provides great relevant text links to your software listing that helps with search engine optimisation

• Article marketing sends interested and qualified traffic from the article to your listing. Articles, due to their great content factor, rank well in search engines and can receive a lot of traffic themselves.

• Article marketing allows you to position yourself as an expert in the market or niche your software caters to and thus increases the level of trust in visitors and therefore increased likelihood in a purchase.

The third factor hints that its probably best if you or your team write the articles as you are the experts in the niche you have created your software for. Most of the time however, you don’t always have somebody available who can (or wants) to write. Writing is not for everybody, trust me, I don’t like it at all, and have only managed to write this course due to the fact that I am interested and passionate about the topic.

If however you are interested and passionate about the solution your software provides, you may be surprised by how easy and well you can churn out articles. Give it a try!

Now, what we need to do here is:

• Refer back to your keyword list, pick the 50 (or as many as possible) most relevant, targeted and highest searched keywords.

• Write a 500 word article on each keyword, or have one written.

• If the keyword is, say “DVD to Ipod“, title your article similar to this “DVD to Ipod - The easiest way to convert your DVD’s to work on your IPOD.

• Use your keyword within your article text as often as seems natural and easy to read.

• Remember, you are writing the articles for pure informational and helpful purposes. Do not punt your software in the article! They must be valuable to your readers. The best way to build trust in your niche is to offer valuable FREE information and content. Only at the end of the article will you refer to your software in your “signature”. Here is an example of an informational article with the signature at the bottom where you can refer to your software as the solution to their problem. http://ezinearticles.com/?Case-Study—Industry-Specific-Software-Marketing-Plans&id=586269

EG: “”Lance Winslow” - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; http://www.WorldThinkTank.net/. Lance is a guest writer for Our <??> Spokane Magazine in Spokane, Washington”

• Signup for Unique Article Wizard. A very effective and well know service in the internet marketing niche. They offer a platform for optimizing and distributing your articles effectively.

Important! Many services offer distribution of articles to hundreds if not thousands of websites. This is NOT what you want. This will result in duplicate articles all over the place and will completely dilute their possibility of ranking in the search engines. If you didn’t know already, Google hates duplicate content on the web. You only need your articles to appear in the top 50 or so article directories.

This should be all you need to do for now and will give you good results in the medium term. I must just make it clear that article marketing is VERY effective, but does take some time to bear fruits. Its for this reason so many people give up on it, so I implore you to keep at it and get some articles out each month, even if you target the same keywords, but write different content. You WILL see the results after some time.

Once last tip. Since you have these articles written, it would be a shame not to show them on your website as well. The problem we face here however is that it would then be duplicate content. What you should do is have them re-written so that the understanding is the same but the wording is no longer exact and in the same location etc. This will allow you to publish the article in two locations on the web (two article directories or an article directory and your website) without getting flagged as duplicate content, and having the page removed from the search engines index.

Another way to use re-written articles is to have two on each directory. You can get 50 written and then you get them re-written. You can then publish 2 versions on two directories with the end result of 100 unique articles in total. This can be very effective.

Another great “do it yourself tool” that can greatly assist you in your article marketing and dsitribution, is called SENuke. It has many futures beyond article marketing (which we will get into later), but for now, here is a video i have made on how to use it for AM! COMING SOON

Ok, we have now finalised all the medium to long term work. Now we begin to look at ways to make immediate sales. Check the next email!

PS: Remember to also check out Unique Article Wizard as it solves all your unique article and distribution problems.

Next: Step 9: Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC Marketing)

Of course we always want to maximize our results and sustain them moving forward. This is why you need to seriously consider monthly link building activities for your download.com listing.

This serves the purpose of improving your rankings as well as sustaining your rankings. You must note that the work we have done up to now will probably provide good rankings for the next 3-8 months, but at this point Google will notice that there is no longer a growth in the links pointing to your listing and will begin to “think” that people are no longer finding it useful, or it is no longer relevant, and your rankings will drop.

If you really want to maximize your long term results, based on your budget, you will need to invest in link building outsourced projects.

The most cost effective place to go is www.elance.com and post a project for link building.

Based on the fact that we don’t need high PR authority links, your project description can look something like this. It will get you the links you need at the lowest price.

—————————–

We are looking for Professional Link Builders for our Website. 100 Links Monthly required.

Rules for Link building. Links should be on

1) On established, static, and crawlable pages.

2) There must be no more than 50 outbound links on the linking page

3) One link per domain Ip Address (with anchor text).

4) Permanent links.

5) English language sites only (they seem to have the most value to search engines)

6) WHITE HAT Sites only.

7) Sites must be found on the first page of Google when their domain or company name is entered

No scraper sites, mirror sites, link farms or free for all link exchanges.

9) On topic article links are preferred.

10) Link page must be cached in google.

* Need only PR0 and above links.

* No link schemes, you are not permitted to submit our site to any reciprocal linking services such as link partners.com, etc.

* No blog comments

* Link pages must be attached to home page of the site.

* No rel=no follow links in the HTML

* No forums, newsgroups, or webrings

* No blog and ping sites

* No redirects or cloaking (eg, 301, 302, meta-refresh, Javascript redirects)

* No classified ads

* No dynamic links

* No directories

* No Commercial web rings

* No Google banned websites

* No use of Automated software (Zeus, Arelis, etc)

* Link pages must be related Travel, Accommodation, Hotels, Indian Tourism, or Indian cities info.

* All links must be from a different domain and IP address

* Links must be submitted on a staggered deployment

* Link pages must be static

* Links must contain our target anchor text and link to a given page

* Reserve the right to reject links that do not meet our terms

I’ll provide a document containing the desired Urls and title/anchors text.

You will need to provide me with the following document before any payment is made: exact URL, Site Name, Site Type, Google PR and IP address.

—————————–

If you post the above project you should get the links you require at around $500 per month, or per 100 links.

You should now begin to use a whole lot of different link anchor texts, some including your keywords and some not, like “click here” etc. so as to look natural to the search engines and maximize the possibility of ranking well.

Next we look at article marketing for SEO, traffic and publicity benefit.

Next: Step 8: Article Marketing

Ok, now this is where we really seal the deal and overkill the possibility of getting our download.com listing ranked well in the medium to long term.

I had initially struggled for quite a while to discover how to generate a lot of backlinks for the software listing on download.com. This was due to the fact that most link directories only allow you to submit a domain URL such as http://www.domain.com, and do not allow deep links such as (http://www.domain.com/yoursoftwarelisting.html

So the hunt began for deep link directories and to my great joy I realised there where quite a few! They may not be the mainstream directories you are used too, such as yahoo directory with high pagerank and backlinks, but this is not a problem at all.

Remember that due to download.com’s authority, it does not need authority or high pagerank links to its pages, as it already has the authority. All it needs are low quality links which allow Google to see that the page has “votes”, and it will generally rank well.

Ok, so what you want to do is pick 3-5 keywords (definitely the 3 you used in the download.com listing) and 2 others that are similar to the other 3 (contain one of the words etc), if possible.

You then want to add an extra word or two to the keyword phrases. EG: If your keyword is DVD player software you want to make it something similar to “great DVD player software“. This makes the links pointing to your page seem natural as the link text does not simply contain the keyword, which can be considered spam.

Think that natural links put up by people to websites wont just contain keywords, they will contain other non related words like “great”, interesting” “click here” etc and this confirms to the google spiders that the link is natural and genuine and not created or bought by yourself.

Now you need to append your product name to the keyword, and this will be your directory link “title”. Most directories want you to use the site or page name in the title. In this case the product name will suffice.

EG:

Jarad’s Player - Great DVD player software

Jarad’s Player - Cheap video player

Ok, now you type up a 150 character description including your main two or three keywords, if possible while still having the description make sense and look natural.

Now we visit http://www.lazyurl.com/deep-link-submission/ and order the biggest submit package you can afford. Obviously the more directories you submit to the higher your chances of success.

Here is my opinion on what you get using this service. Make special note of my comment on point 4!

• Manual submissions by an experienced editor.

Manual guarantees the submission (not necessarily the acceptance) is successful.

• Up to 12 URL’s each will get 100 Submissions.

If you have multiple software packages you can use multiple download.com URL’s to submit. I however suggest using 1 URL and then using the 5 different keyword phrases as the “titles” as mentioned above.

• Receipt of Submission: We will Email you a copy of all Web Directories and the location (category) of each submission.

Reports show you where your listing has been submitted to so you can perform confirmations to assure yourself that it has taken place.

• Slow “Natural” submissions available on request at no extra cost.

I recommend requesting this takes place over 3 months as Google likes to see the natural growth of links to a page. Sudden or instant growth seems dodgy and suspect to the search engines.

• Email Creation and Confirmation Package to this order so you Do Not have to bother with checking Directory emails.

This is great as they will manage the email confirmations of the submission meaning you don’t need to deal with 500+ “confirm your directory listing / submission” emails.

Ok, that was an easy but key step. Next we look at ongoing link generation for the listing.

Next: Step 7: Link Building Outsourcing

The obvious benefit from submitting your software to all the software directories is that it can give you great instant results by increasing your downloads per month, as your software will be listed on 500+ software directories.

There is another hidden benefit however, if you know what to do. As I mentioned previously, I will also show you a neat trick that I’m pretty sure only a few people have done before, and can really skyrocket your downloads in the medium to long term.

As you may have picked up from the last mail, we will be focusing on the download.com listing and getting IT ranked well in the search engines, instead of focusing on your website, at least at this stage. (Of course you need to also promote your website as well in parallel, and ill be speaking more on this later.)

The reason for this is that, due to download.com’s high authority, high page rank, domain age and millions of backlinks, its a lot easier and quicker to get the download.com listing ranked well, then it is MOST websites.

Of course if you have a page rank 6-8 website with over 100k backlinks that’s already ranking well for all your highest volume keywords, then you may not want to follow this strategy. Of course, you could still do so since, what could be better then having your website AS WELL as your download.com listing dominating the first page results!? This will double your traffic and downloads for your software. This is the ultimate point you want to reach in the long term.

Ok, back to the software submissions. Firstly, you need to create a PAD (portable application description) file which contains all your software information (some of you may already be familiar with this). This file is then submitted to software directories manually or automatically (by certain software products) and will result in the listing to be created on the directory sites (once approved).

The trick comes in here: You want to set your company name to your chosen target keyword, and your company URL to your download.com listing.

The reason we do this is because many of the software directories create a link on your listing to the company url and use the company name as the text in the link.

This means that we have the possibility of generating a couple of hundred relevant links from other software websites, with your chosen keyword in your anchor text, to your download.com listing. This of course is priceless and can get your listing ranked well in 1-2 months using this simple tactic alone.

The reason this works is because download.com is an authority website and all google needs to decide a listing or page at download.com should rank well is a some low quality links. We are in fact sending a couple of hundred decent quality, relevant links and including the anchor text in the link (google uses the anchor text as a way of telling what the end page is about and ranking it appropriately).

Now, we want to do the submission.

Our first option is to use an automatic software submission software tool, such as PROMOSOFT which automatically submits your site to +-600 software directories. (After research, this is the best tool on the market at the moment.)

In reality however, only about 300-400 are successful, so you can generate about 100 backlinks using this tool to do your submissions.

Also, once you purchase it you can do an unlimited amount of submissions of unlimited software applications, so this may be cost effective for you if you have multiple applications.

Go here for a video showing you how to create your pad file and submit with promosoft. COMING SOON

Using promosoft may be enough to get your rankings to where you want them to be, however, if you are really serious about getting your software listed on as many software directories as possible; I would go the manual software submission route. This guarantees successful submissions to all directories submitted to and increases the number of links to your download.com listing, and of course increases your exposure and download rate at the same time.

For this I recommend using software submit.net for the most cost effective and quality service. Obviously you need to submit to as many as possible, depending on your budget to take the most advantage of this tactic.

Software Submit

Ok so now that you have generated a few hundred backlinks to your software listing on download.com, how about we create another 600-1000 links, to seal the deal?

Next: Step 6: Deep Link Directory Submissions

Our medium to long term SEO strategy begins with your download.com listing.

Download.com has great authority in the search engines, meaning its pages can rank very well for just about anything, so we will be using this ranking power to promote our software in the free organic search.

Firstly you need sign up for an account. A free account is available which requires you to wait for 15 working days for it to be activated. Alternatively you can sign up for the basic $9 per month listing which gets you a 5 day activation lead time.

You want to start with the $9 a month listing as it is cost effective and gets your product visibility to all download.com users.

If however you have the budget, you should go for the $99 a month listing, which will allow you to use keywords for your listing, and in turn, increase the possibility of ranking higher. We eventually want to upgrade to this listing based on your sales success and budget moving forward.

The secret to ranking well in the search engines with your download.com listing is, somehow, having the keyword you have chosen inside your title tag. This is not easy however as attempts at adding the keyword after the product name field, has resulted in the keyword phrase being removed by the download.com approval staff, before publishing the listing.

EG. Your software is called: JaradsPlayer. You want to add the listing with the title “JaradsPlayer - DVD player software”. You can be sure the staff will remove the keyword after the product name, before listing the software. I find this odd, as this increases their chance to rank better in the search engines and of course get more visitors and thus more clicks on their advertisements, but they still seem to not allow it anyway.

The solution to this, which is not always easy for those of you with already completed, branded and marketed software packages, is to include your keyword in the software title. In other words, it must appear in the application itself, before it will be approved for the listing title. I have tested some of my own software by doing this and the results where great. If at all possible, attempt to do this for any software you list on download.com.

Ok, now for the description. You want to make sure you fill the description boxes completely with text. The more text, the more google likes the page, and the higher it will rank. You want to pick at least three keyword phrases you have chosen from your keyword research, and use them liberally within the description, but of course, try and make it look natural. Remember, the listing needs to sell the visitor, and get them to download the trail/shareware version, so try get a good balance between writing for the visitor and writing for the search engines.

Click here for an example of a download.com listing that has been successful with regards to ranking in the search engines and getting alot of downloads a week.

Note: With this listing I have managed to sneak the keyword in the title, past the approval staff. You can try this once or twice, but if you keep trying you may be banned.

Ok, now publish your listing. I’m assuming you have either used the $9 or $99 per month listing and it will be approved in 5 days max.

Next comes the clever little trick that will deviate from the way most people will do things, and greatly increase our chances to generate a lot of downloads in the near future. Watch out for my next mail!

Next: Step 5: Software Submissions to Software Directories

The beautiful thing about the internet is that most of your competitor’s sales tactics, advertisements and strategies are freely and easily available on the web, if you know where to look.

This gives you a great advantage when attacking a specific market with your software product.

For example, if you know a competitor is doing well you can, for free:

1.      See the copy your competitor uses on their website and use something similar for your own site to test its effect on your conversions.

2.      You can download their software and see how well it works, what features it has and additional benefits to the users, and modify your software to be equally or more competitive.

3.      You can see what ads they use in google adwords and track if those ads are profitable and “copy” the ad (not directly of course) to test its effectiveness. Use http://www.hexatrack.com free version for this. (more on this later)

4.      You can see their rankings in the free google organic search results and review their on page SEO factors such as the number of content pages, words on each page and home page (the more the better), keyword use in title and description tag as well as keyword density in the page copy. You use this data as an indicator of what google is looking for when choosing first page results for the keyword. For this I would use “SEO quake” and “Search Status” Firefox browzer plugins (http://www.seoquake.com/, http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/ ). Together they will display all this data you need by integrating into the google search results when you search for a keyword, or scanning and providing the detail on your competitors websites.

5. You can see how many incoming links they have and the anchor text of those links. (the text in the incoming link is called the anchor text and helps with ranking for that keyword phrase in the search engines, therefore you want a good distribution of your keywords in the link text for incoming links, while still looking like your incoming links are natural). For this I would use SEO Elite to make your analysis much easier.

Here is how i would use SEO Elite to gather information on my software competition: COMING SOON

Basically you need to know what your competition looks like on the first page of google, for each keyword you have chosen from your keyword research.

Go here for the official SEO elite training video’s. http://training.bryxensoftware.com/seo-elite-training-site/

That’s all the stuff you can find out mostly for free.

Now lets look at a more advanced competitive analysis service that has no peer.

Trellian Competitive Intelligence Tool. The granddaddy of competitive intelligence.

http://ci.trellian.com/

“Trellian compiles and analyzes internet usage statistics to create a powerful Competitive Intelligence tool that no business should be without.

Competitive Intelligence provides the means to monitor your competitor’s web sites to identify their major traffic sources. You can find out which sites are responsible for sending traffic to their pages, including search engines and the search keywords used.”

Go take a look at what they offer. I’ve gotten great value from their service that has turned into real profits, and have heard nothing but great reviews from others. You will get a genuine competitive edge over your competition based on the data you gather there.

PS: Later I will be going over how to use Trellian data to effectively crush your competition, so in the mean time, sign up and let it run for one competitor (find out which one using the video I mentioned above), since the data is gathered over time and only becomes useful after 2-3 months.

Next: Step 4: Download.com Listing