Well, this is exciting. I actually have a product to hawk now, so I can put to use some of the knowledge that I have gathered at work to promote myself.
My first stop: Search Engine Optimization. Basically, if someone is looking for the kind of product I'm selling, I want my product to appear on the first page of the search results of Google. Preferrably, near the top. And on all of the other search engines as well. But not necessarily for the name of my product.
Of course, the easiest way to do that is by using Google's AdWords program to place ads on Google's site. I had mentioned before that I had already activated my account, but I didn't explain what I was doing.
Here are the basics of how this works. You want to pick keywords that are popular enough that people will search for them, but not so popular that your message is drowned out in the noise. Here's an example. "editor" is a keyword that resonably describes Less Than Slash (that's my product), but it's a bad one. People could be searching for "magazine editor" or "photo editor", which isn't going to get me a good return. So the idea would be to use keywords that don't get lots of impressions (appearances due to the keyword used) but get no click-throughs.
Fortunately, Google has some tools to help with this. As a result, I'm getting about a 50% return on incoming visits. That is, half of the people that come to the site succeed in downloading the software. I'm currently making an assumption that everyone is coming in form the Google ads, since nobody else would know that the LTS site is out there. (Yes, if I wanted to be truly scientific, I would put a click-tracking page inbetween the download and Google, so I would know for sure, but I haven't gotten that far yet.)
But that's just the first step. I don't want to have to pay for every placement on Google. I want my page to show up in the listing because it's relevant. Then it will be highly-placed and free. Free is good. LTS is free.
So my first order of business is to get people that talk about the kind of thing that LTS does to link to my page. The easiest way to find out who these people are is to do a Google search for people that link to a competitor.
So imagine that I want to master the keyword "xhtml editor". I would search for "xhtml editor" in Google. The first entry in the list is usually the primary competitor. I take their url, in this case "www.bradsoft.com" and search for it in Google using this syntax: "link:www.bradsoft.com". This gives me a list of all of the people that link to bradsoft.com.
When I have the list of people who link to my competitor, I simply figure out who they are and either get them to change their existing link from my competitor's site to my site, or just get them to add my site. Usually, the list of people who link to a competitor are very cooperative with adding a new site, especially if you write them personally.
I might have some difficulty because it seems that this HTML-kit program (a competing product) has loyal customers who post links to the HTML-kit's web site via cute "Made with HTML-kit" buttons. So basically, I would have to email a ton of people and get them to try my software so that they can switch over. This is sounding like spam to me. But it gives me a good idea, since I can provide a little "bug graphic" in the program so that my customers can do the same thing and HTML-kit, but link back to me, thus improving my Google ranking. Woo hoo!
Another idea I had was to trek around to all of the online shareware distribution houses. This would include places like Download.com and Tucows. When I figure out their submission policies, I can try to get my software listed. As they say, these sites will typically get millions of hits a day, so getting listed there is perhaps a good way to generate traffic.
Here's a handy tool, in case you didn't know about it. Say you have a couple of things (like shareware outlet sites) you know and you want to get more like those that you don't know or have forgotten. You can use Google Sets!
Here is a list that Google Sets generated for me of places that I might try to get my software listed. How handy! Sometimes you can even use it to complete sets of different things, like the Nina, the Pinta, and the... um... Darn it! Problem solved.
Here are a couple of interesting results I received on Google Sets:
