Author: Manuel Lemos
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Last month viewers: 1
Categories: PHP Tutorials, Software Business
They would like to sell the products to the market without spending great amounts of money, unlike what they need to pay when they use well known channels like Google Adwords or Facebook Ads.
Fortunately there are better means that you can use to market your products. Those means take less money than you may be used, some of which are free for you to use.
Read this article to learn about how to market your software products with the least amount of money possible.
Contents
Meeting Other Programmer Entrepreneurs
The Problem of the Traditional Product Marketing Channels
Better Software Product Promotion Methods
How to Get Further Advice to Help Marketing Your Products
Meeting Programmer Entrepreneurs
First, let me tell you that if you are a software developer or work for a company that sells software tools or services, like for instance those based on API, there is a group on Facebook that you can use to promote your software products for free.
All you need to do is to join the group and follow the instructions in the post that is pinned in the group. Then you can tell about your product, ask questions about software product promotion, propose partnerships, etc..
If you need help promoting your product there, take a look at the existing posts about other products and make similar posts by describing what is the benefit that your product provides to your customers. Then tell what is the link to your product site page.
If you would like help we can do it for you. Just send an email to the PHP Classes contact email address or a private message to me on Facebook and tell me about your product so I can help you like I did with others before you.
English: Programmers Entrepreneurs
Portuguese: Programadores Empreendedores
The Problem of the Traditional Product Marketing Channels
Advertising is of course the most obvious way to let your market know about your products. However, the most common types of advertising act by interrupting some activity of the people that is exposed to it.
For instance, television channels show advertising spots in the middle of a show or between shows. Web page or mobile application ads are displayed in the middle or near the content or the user interface.
This is what is called interruption marketing, a concept described by the marketing guru Seth Godin in his book Permission Marketing.
Interrupting people while they are looking at something of interest annoys many users even when they are not paying for the access to the television channels or the sites and mobile applications that show ads. Often, these are ads are unsolicited, although users kind of expect them.
However, over time users get used to those ads because they always look a like and often do not aggregate value to the lives of the users that are exposed to those ads. This way ads become less and less efficient until the ad system companies give up on them and move on to something else, if those companies businesses do not die before it is too late.
Here at the PHP Classes site, as the creator and manager of the site, I admit I have been guilty of using these kinds of ads to generate revenue. I felt bad for that since the beginning but it was for the lack of better solutions to generate revenue for the site that interrupting ads were kept until today, I mean at the time this article is being written.
I still tried to introduce a premium subscription that makes the site not show ads but usually that is not a great motivation for the users to pay, as many users are used to not pay for many things on the Internet.
Better Software Product Promotion Methods
Fortunately interruption marketing is not the only way to promote products. Here follows some of the ways that I know that can be used to promote products and work well in the sense that they help leading people to buy the advertised products.
Sponsored Tutorials and SEO Tools
Tutorials are obviously a means to teach people about something. When you teach about a product, that can be a software product or a service or any other kind or product or service, you raise the interest of people of your target marketing.
If you show the benefits of your product for the people and how their lives can be improved, you will certainly will motivate those people to know more about the product and they will eventually buy it if they need it.
Here at the PHP Classes site we published many tutorials in the form of articles about software products that are from customers that paid a sponsorship fee. Those articles teach about the benefits of the product and how they can be used in practice to achieve a goal that the product customer wants to achieve.
For instance, this sponsored tutorial from the WIX company tells about how to build fast Web sites with a tool for creating sites for their customers. Interested prospect customers will want to know more about this tool.
To make this work for customers like WIX we need to use sophisticated SEO (search engine optimization) techniques that comply with Google Webmaster guidelines. At the same time we used a tool named 4DUser that was developed by us precisely for this purpose. We talked about the 4DUser tool before in this blog.
The good thing about good SEO optimization practices is that they can give site owners free traffic from search engines like Google, unlike using Google AdWords that usually you need to pay a lot of money for getting potential customers to visit your site.
With good skills and perseverance we have built Web pages from scratch that became authority pages on the matters that they cover. For instance, we created a page about the Best PHP IDE Tools that exist on the market, that not only reached the highest rankings in Google search pages for Best PHP IDE query, often it appears as a featured result.
We have published many sponsored tutorials at the PHP Classes site. If you are interested to advertise your software product here using our blog and our SEO know-how, you can click here to contact us now and we can even give you free access to the 4DUser tool for a limited period of time. Contact us now before the offer expires soon.
WhatsApp Transmission Lists
WhatsApp is a popular chat applications available for mobile or Web users. It provides peer to peer chat, as well group chat.
One feature that is not very well known are transmission lists. Those are like mailing lists but they work for chat users, like mailing lists work for email.
What you need to do to take advantage of WhatsApp transmission lists is to create a list and add people in your target market. When you send a message to people in your transmission list, all of they get the message at the same time, but if they reply, you can contact them individually, so other people in the list do not see your interaction with each person, unlike what happens in WhatsApp groups.
You do not have to pay to WhatsApp to use their transmission lists feature.
If you would like to take advantage of WhatsApp Transmission lists, contact us now so we can provide consulting on how to do it within the rules of WhatsApp.
Facebook Chat Bots
Chat bots is a way that Facebook provides for Facebook page owners to interact with your users in an automated way.
It works like this. You create a chat bot flow that is defined like a flow chart. The flow defined how your users will interact with your page by answering questions withing Facebook Messenger. The questions may lead to new actions or more questions.
Facebook Chat Bots can be used for instance to create a list of subscribers of a given page. When an update happens in your Facebook page, you can send private messages to all users that subscribed to your page via Facebook Messenger.
This is way more efficient than paying for Facebook Ads and above all it is free, I mean you do not have to pay to Facebook to use chat bots, as long as you comply with Facebook chat bot rules.
If you would like to take advantage of Facebook Chat bots, contact us now so we can provide consulting on how to do it within the rules of Facebook.
How to Get Further Advice to Help Marketing Your Products
Taking advantage of the Web features to market your software products using different channels of promotion is something that we at the PHP Classes site have done for the last 18 years. We achieve this using means that almost cost no money to implement, like using sponsored tutorials and SEO tools, Facebook messenger chat bots or WhatsApp transmisson lists.
We recommend that you use all of the methods if possible. But if you have questions or doubts on which method is better for you or you need help to implement these and other methods, just contact us so we can help you further.
If you liked this article, do not forget to share it with your friends and post a comment below with your questions, doubts, or even criticism if you feel you can help us to improve this article for all of us.
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