It would be interesting to find out what factors people think have been successful in gaining or growing sales for their products. One factor might be time, another advertising and so on.
For me, my sales have grown almost directly in line with the number of visitors I get via search engines. I usually find there is a step change in the number of visitors and a corresponding rise in the number of sales every 3 months at around the time Google exports its PR values.
In the early days I used Google Adwords. This did attract traffic and some sales but only enough to break even - organic traffic has proved much more profitable.
In more recent months - say the last 3 - I have also begun to see a rise in repeat sales, i.e. people wanting more than one copy, and also word of mouth sales. I've put this down to achieving a certain critical mass of sales, i.e. enough sales for personal recommendations to be sufficient to encourage a few more sales.
One thing that did slightly dent the rise in sales was the UK school summer holidays, particularly the last 3 weeks before children went back to school. During this period, website traffic was slightly down, though it seems to have recovered this week.
by ML
I can't give a great deal of insight into software sales, although I'll have a look to see if I can see any pattern and report back later.
ReplyDeleteMy kids educational items on eBay definitely do better at certain times of the year. And at other times I have no sales at all.
Not long after I developed my programs, when I started to worry about why i wasn't getting sales I read some guides from shareware authors on the web. These were mostly about doubling your sales etc, perhaps this wasn't the best time for me to act on this, but I did. I have ideaspad always half price on my website and have a image showing that. Also I other a carrot, if they buy within the first ten days they get X, in fact I give everyone it, its provided when the program has the registration key entered.
I also provide a money back guarantee period, so people can buy the program and not worry that they have made the wrong choice.
I have tried advertising on websites, a similar site of softtester in germany. But this never led to any sales. I know gerhard used the same site and did get sales, he recommended it.
I tend to go round in circles thinking my program has bugs, or is missing a feature.
Your blog design looks cool. What template did you use ?
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