January 2003

Hi ,
Welcome to 2003 and January's Software Marketing News.
Additional marketing news can be found online at http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com

2002 STATISTICS
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A bold registration company SWREG was kind enough to post their annual sales for 2002 broken down by country. The chart also includes the refund, chargeback and fraud rate. The numbers themselves speak to the industry potential. http://www.swreg.org/pages/country.htm

COPYRIGHTS
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Be sure to update your copyright notices on your website to reflect 2003, this sends a clear message to potential customers that you are a serious business. If you are not using server side includes, templates or style sheets for your websites, its time to start. If you website is in a template copyright notices can be updated with a single click.

REFLECTING
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With 2003 upon us, its time to look back and reflect on 2002. Were your sales up? Were they down? What was the reason for the increase or decrease? Tear into your logs and determine why they have increased or decreased. Knowing what works will make 2003 that much easier. Based on 2002 set goals and decide what works and where to focus your energies. What gives you the highest ROI (return on investment)for the least amount of time and effort?

If you don't currently monitor your logs put something in place for next month!
Log & File Monitoring Software

DIVERSIFY
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In talking to a number of authors I hear that the more financially successful developers have diversified. Like anything, there is security if you have a number of coals in the fire. This does not mean to spread yourself too thin, but consider alternative marketing approaches or complimenting your product line with associated affiliate programs.
Ideas to help you diversify:

1.) Consider licensing your software
2.) Consider starting an effective affiliate program
3.) Consider newsletter exchanges with other developers
4.) Consider bundling your software
5.) Create targeted web portals
6.) Consider PPC advertising
7.) Compliment your product line by reselling another developer's software
8.) Attend local industry specific trade shows
9.) Network with local businesses or user groups
10.) Send out a paper newsletter or ezine to existing customers
11.) Purchase development tools to assist with development
12.) Improve search engine ranking
13.) Increase exposure on download sites (consider outsourcing)
14.) Send a press release
15.) Consider rebranding software for aggressive resellers

Set and define goals make a list and select a handful of items that deserve your energy for 2003. Evaluate everything from development to marketing and decide where to focus.

MARKETING ARTICLES
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While wrestling with your plan for 2003 read some marketing articles. Perhaps an idea will take hold. One of the best resources for marketing articles is SharePromotions/Dave Talks - http://www.davetalks.com/

FROOGLE
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Froogle is Google's answer to a shopping search engine. While its traffic is insignificant now, its expected to grow with the support of Google. Froogle is essentially a "product" search engine, there are currently no paid inclusion fees. Data Feeds are accepted from merchants, and some pages that look like "typical" product pages are automatically included from the Google database. The engine is intelligent and tries to find pages that sell not just review or discuss the products. For right now Froogle is banning affiliate listings, so only those selling direct should submit.
More info
Other Shopping Engine - Deal Time

FOR SALE
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Downloadoholic.com is for sale. The site is being auctioned to the highest bidder with the starting price of $6000. If interested you can send your bid via email to sale@downloadoholic.com. Bids prices can be tracked at http://www.downloadoholic.com/sale.php

The purchase includes:
- Complete Ownership of DownloadOholic.com domain
- Complete Ownership of a custom built site using HTML, PHP, JAVAScript technologies (100+ php sources) and complete MySQL database (30+ tables)
- 2200+ already submitted articles (programs) / 870+ registered authors - Control Panel to administer DownloadOholic
- Hosting is conducted on a redundant RedHat linux server with connection to separate MySQL server in a power redundant highly secured facility. However, You may use any hosting provider you like and we will set it up for you. The hosting MUST be PHP and MySQL database compatible.
- Instructions on how to run and maintain the website.
-Tech Support

INTERNATIONAL EMAIL NEWSGROUP
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SWRUS have started an email newsgroup in English in order to accomodate english speakers members of the shareware/software community. In order to signup simply send an email to swrus-eng@yahoogroups.com with subscribe as the subject line.

TAXES
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Two important dates for those in the US, March 15 and April 15th depending on how you are organized one of those dates will be tax day.

NEW RESOURCE
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Ecommerce articles, web marketing tutorials & Internet guides includes information on affiliate marketing. http://www.tamingthebeast.net/

PREVIOUS ISSUES
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Many developers have expressed an interest in reading previous newsletters since the link is a bit buried, I thought I would include it in the newsletter. http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/articledirectory.html scroll to the bottom for newsletters!

PREVIOUS ISSUES
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Many developers have expressed an interest in reading previous newsletters since the link is a bit buried, I thought I would include it in the newsletter. www.softwaremarketingresource.com/articledirectory.html scroll to the bottom for newsletters! Thank you for your continued interest in softwaremarketingresource.com
Sharon Housley
Software Marketing Resource - http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com
NotePage, Inc. - http://www.notepage.net
Trusted Messaging - http://www.trusted-messaging.com
Monitoring-Software - http://www.monitoring-software.net
Messaging-Software - http://www.messaging-software.com
Instant Messaging Software - http://www.instant-messaging-software.com