| LED Digest 1839: The Ins and Outs of Selling Shareware |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam,led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ................................................ July 14, 2004 Issue #1839 ................................................ .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Download Sites for Marketing ==-- ~ Don Baker "...get the downloader's name and email address before providing the download link." ~ Tom Aman "I have been selling shareware on the Internet since 1996..." --== Site Redesign Blues ==-- ~ Steve Pronger "Designers care about the merits of FrontPage, Dreamweaver or hand coding. Surfers don't." --== The End of Email as You Know It? ==-- ~ Sheryl Coppenger "[Spammers] now use distributed methods and overseas IPs..." ~ Kathryn Martyn "Calling the pool guy to complain and the pond scum won't make it go away..." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Random Spam Email ==-- ~ Diane Dennis ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Don Baker Subject: Download sites > Does anyone have experience of using shareware > download sites for marketing? - Rob Palmer, LED 1838 Rob, I can't comment on the download sites, other to say that I've used them and appreciate them. However, one thing you must do, assuming you're going to offer free downloads from your site, is to get the downloader's name and email address before providing the download link. That way you can follow up with an autoresponder sequence to continue building a relationship, and perhaps sell other products (your own or affiliate partners'). Whatever you do, from a long-term marketing standpoint you should get the downloaders' contact info. Don Baker NSI Partners www.nsipartners.com -------- new post - same topic ------- From: Tom Aman Subject: Download sites I have been selling shareware on the Internet since 1996, so I can pass on a bit of information. Actually, cracking the market is simple although it takes a fair bit of work. It is a matter of finding shareware / freeware sites and submitting your product to them. Requirements vary as to what is involved in the submission. Some will want the product release date as well as the size of the download in bytes / kbytes / mbytes/?. Some will want the URL of your site home page. Some will want the URL of the page containing the download link. Some will want the actual URL to do the download (with the result that the downloader will never see your site). Some will want to host the download on their site. Some will want links to the product's "readme" file. Some will want a screenshot or link to a screenshot of the product in action. Most will want some kind of product description and very often both a long and a short version. The maximum characters to be used for each description will vary from site to site. And these requirements will not necessarily mutually exclusive. Some sites will pick up new versions of the product automatically, others will require that you re-submit. Over a period of time I have built up a text file for my product that contains all of the variations I have encountered. Thus, when I need to do an update, I update all of the information in that file then do a "copy and paste" when submitting to the shareware sites. The one thing to bear in mind is that there is no way to predict how many downloads a week you might end up getting. Also, getting the actual number of downloads is almost impossible if any copies of your product are hosted elsewhere or end up being distributed on shareware CDs. As to whether you will get a download a month or millions a week will depend basically on the popularity of your product. If it is something that is perceived to be needed or is wanted by a lot of people and has no real competition, the download count will be high. If that is the case, expect competition within the year as someone else will likely produce something similar to try and get a share of the market. If it is highly specialized, then no matter how great the product, the numbers may be small. And all of that is almost impossible to predict. About all you can do is make it available then analyze your log files. And watch closely as you may find some surprises. One of my products is actually freeware. It allows the user to type in an HTTP URL then see exactly what is being sent and exactly what is contained in the response. I called it WebBug because I originally developed it as a debugging tool for my link testing product. (see http://www.cyberspyder.com/webbug.html for WebBug) I expected that a lot of people would use it as a fun program to satisfy their curiousity about the http protocol. What actually happened initially (remember that this was release when the Internet was still new) was that a lot of downloads came from .edu domains (instructors used the program a lot in teaching Internet details) and I received a lot of requests (from all over the world) for permission to include the program on free CDs being distributed with magazines. Tom Aman Aman Software http://www.cyberspyder.com -------- new post - new topic ------- From: Steve Pronger Subject: Redesign blues > It amazes me people will spend hours, days, weeks reading > the help files to learn all the functions of some web design > wizard when they could learn HTML coding in one-tenth of > the time! - Bill Davison, LED 1838 And so the debate over the "right" tools to create a website continues. Here's an easy way to get the answer: Does your site rank highly for related keywords? Does it provide the content (solutions) to what your visitor is searching for? Is it quick to load, easy on the eye and easy to navigate? Does it produce more income than what it cost to put it there? Yes? Then you used the right tool. Designers care about the merits of FrontPage, Dreamweaver or hand coding. Surfers don't. They see information on a screen. Steve Pronger http://www.stevepronger.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Sheryl Coppenger Subject: End of Email > ... why aren't mail servers configured to detect and delete > spam / viruses / worms on out-going mail rather than > incoming mail? - Brett Swooshman, LED 1838 ISPs have been doing that sort of thing for years, and as a result fielding complaints about spam that gets out and also about false positives. I have been an email postmaster for something on the order of 15 years. The past couple of years I've gotten out of that side of things so I'm not up on what everyone is doing now, but I do know that the big ISPs were doing rate monitoring for a while. If someone sent out a lot of mail the rate it went out would be slowed in order to give an admin time to respond if it was a spam run. That used to work somewhat when there were limited numbers of ISPs and spammers were forced to send all of the spam through their ISP account. Of course, many of them were using stolen credit cards and fake identities to create the accounts. Some ISPs used to block outbound port 25 (SMTP) as well. It's easier to rate monitor and filter if you force users to go through your mail server instead of letting users turn their PCs into their own mail servers. This also got some complaints, some legitimate, because some companies required their employees to send their email through the company's mail server (usually in order to keep a copy or at least have log entries) even when at home or on the road. A big problem is that spammers, even if based in the USA, now use distributed methods and overseas IPs to do much of the spamming. Many of the machines they use have been infected with a worm created for the purpose of opening a mail relay. Many overseas sites are early in the learning curve w.r.t. admin skills, responsibilities to the Internet community, etc. Their users (and for that matter US users) also are not very savvy about the importance of having current patches on the system and running firewall and antivirus software all the time. To give you an idea of how bad it can be, the last guy I went out with is an engineer. Supposedly he should have some technical savvy. He had a DSL line and left his computer on all the time. He had *never* applied a service pack / patch to his computer, which was a few years old. His idea was that as long as the computer was working OK for him, why rock the boat? He also bought something from a spammer once. <sigh> Sheryl Coppenger ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Kathryn Martyn Subject: End of Email > ... take time to send a complaint / report... invest 5 or 10 > minutes a day. It is worth it and it can make a difference. - Tom Aman, LED 1838 I'd have to disagree with the idea of spending 5 to 10 minutes a day on this pursuit. In my experience at least 99% of the spam is sent from non-traceable addresses, with spoofed addresses, non-working links, etc. etc. It's just a huge waste of my time to do anything but go through the mail and delete what's not legitimate and then get back to work. Laws and rules are meant for those who typically follow laws and rules. It's the same basic gun control argument. Criminals don't usually register their guns - they often use fake ID's as well - and guess what? Spammers by and large are not average everyday folk, but true-blue pond scum that we'd love to erradicate but no one has come up with a product that can kill the scum but not taint the water. Calling the pool guy to complain and the pond scum won't make it go away either - it just grows, and spam grows because it's too easy to sell CDs with millions of names to hapless idiots that buy them and then try their hand at spamming (I think that's where those messages with actually nothing to buy come from). My solution is to use MailWasher http://www.mailwasher.com simply because I can then scan each and every e-mail From and Subject and quickly decipher whether the mail is likely legitimate. Obvious spam is simply tagged for deletion, and the Likely legitimate gets more than a cursory glance - that's where I spend my extra 5 or 10 minutes (more like 5 minutes several times a day). I have not received a single unwanted e-mail from a legitimate company in I can't tell you how long because legitimate marketers are by-and-large following the new rules - but the criminal element will always exist outside the boundaries of what we like to think of as decent society. Kathryn Martyn, M.NLP Ending Emotional Eating, One Bite at a Time http://www.onemorebite-weightloss.com ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: Diane Dennis Subject: Spam emails with weird strings of words Hey Everyone! Thank you to everyone for all the help I get here. :) My (many) hats are off. ;) I have been receiving spam emails that have strange strings of words at the beginning and/or ending of the email. The words are always English and there appears to be no connection between any of the words used. Here's an example from an email I just received: "victorious hun gauntlet jersey thirst cassock amorous ballast emitted pipsissewa pomona except brimful muscovy camelback cruz debase cyrus detour alginate sleep" Can someone tell me what this is and why it is? Thank you all and good day! Diane Dennis http://www.thecontractorsgroup.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing." - R. D. Laing, |
