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How to collect money?
Ok now you are ready with your product and the website and you want to start selling your software. We estimate that over 95% of shareware products sold online are paid by credit cards. But here you are facing an issue that you cannot charge major credit cards (VISA, Mastercard, AMEX) unless you have a merchant account. There are software registration companies that will do this for you. Digital River is a leader in this area. They own and operate several software registration and credit card processing companies: Regnow, ShareIt, Swreg, eSellerate. There are also other independent companies such as Plimus, Avangate (Romania), CleverBridge (Germany), SoftKey (Russia). Service charges that these companies collect vary depending on your product pricing, additional features that you may order from them. It is the best to check each software registration company listed above to see if it suits your needs.
Marketing and advertising your software
This is a very broad topic but for shareware I would identify few major types of promoting your software. Submit your product to shareware archives. For example Filesland http://www.filesland.com is a software archive operated by our company. There are over 1000 software archives. You may use automated submission tool such as Robosoft http://www.rudenko.com This software utility allows to write a standardized software description and submit it automatically to about 1000 software archives all at once. Once your product is listed there you will immediately get first orders, people come to shareware archives Use Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. Yes it works. You may open a pay per click account at Google Adwords or Overture which is a Yahoo company now, put a few dollars on your account, write and ad and it will be displayed on thousands of websites at once. People will come to your site, download trial version of your product and if they like it then purchase it. Newsgroups: sometimes people online are looking for specific tool. This could be anything, say MP3 to WAV converter or Search and Replace tool. If you product has functionality that is exactly the same that the newsgroups poster is looking for you may post comments about your software. Not only you will let that person know about your software, but hundreds of other visitors will see that post over time. Email marketing. Yes I am talking about legit email marketing, not spam. There may be lists of users available that would like to purchase your product. They may subscribe to certain news and will be happy to see that a new software product is available. Forums, shareware archives and blogs may have these email lists. You would have to contact the owner of the website/forum/blog and arrange an email advertising campaign for it.
About the Author Nick Krotov is a webmaster for Filesland Software Archive managed by Ashkon Software software development company selling financial shareware since 2000.
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