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Free Software Distribution and Promotion Everyone who is going to distribute and promote software has to have a plan. If you dive in without proper extensive research you will be sorry. This outline will help you establish a rock solid plan you can implement with confidence. If you have already started and are finding the myriad of problems that arise from improper planning or lack of experience this document may help save you. If you do not have the talents to perform each of these tasks then you will have to develop them or get some help from a fee-based software submission service. After following the path suggested by this document users returned a top two and a top eight search on Google after two weeks and people have been coming ever since. The first two weeks I recorded over 30000 hits on my site and thousands of downloads.
You must have a proper, simply designed website with good content and articles! If your website is empty or doesn't contain quality information or content, even if it is just about your single product, it will destroy your chances of getting placed into the DMOZ directory and Google. DMOZ is more important than Google! Google and most search engines get info directly from DMOZ. You will have to study DMOZ before submitting to any search engines. Some search engines have been blacklisted by the quality sites and association could get you blacklisted as well so be very careful, make sure you submit to DMOZ successfully. You need to thoroughly study each directory your are going to submit your website to including Google and Yahoo. Don't use frames or fancy websites to promote your software. Design a simple website from scratch and add to it little by little. Any documents you write to help yourself should be published (if appropriate) on your website to help others. Setup a secure forum to answer questions about your software. Provide valid contact information to establish your identity for visitors. Generate and customize a ROR sitemap xml file; you can find ROR resources by searching. Use a ROR sitemap generator and then go through the xml and customize it with <title></title> tags. ROR files (ror.xml) get placed in the root directory of your website, search engines use it to make sense of your website; its like an index for the search engines. There are other sitemap files (Google) but ROR is the minimum and useable by all. Example ROR Make sure you have all the basics covered like the meta tags needed by search engines, below is an example. <head> Keywords are important, do not try to make these up yourself unless you are a keyword expert. Use a keyword tool like the one at Google Webmaster Tools. There are also fee-based keyword services. You need to make sure all of your pages have this meta information including a properly designed title. Consult website promotion tutorials like www.apromotionguide.com for more help. Remember, Google caches a portion of your content. So, if you move files around on your website and update all of your links properly, people will still get broken links when they find you on Google. You need to leave the original file in place, remove the content, and place in a redirection link with a sentence telling users what is going on. Then you need to update your robots.txt file to Disallow the old files (the ones now with the redirect link) so Google doesn't continue to index that file and, in the future, provide more broken links to people.
You do not want to change your file's download location after you have submitted, it would be a nightmare. The last thing you need is the eye roll people give when they encounter a broken link. If you are not hosting the file on your site you need to use a reputable site like download.com to do it for you. Some software sites will automatically download your file and host it without asking so be aware of them. The file could fall behind and you may need to manually update their information. If you host the file make sure you have enough bandwidth allowance from your web host.
Use the various resources like search engines and news groups to find sites your target audience might visit to find resources. Try submitting to and contacting websites addressing subjects your software overlaps with. If you are offering a free quality product people are usually happy to let others know. You will also need to prepare a press release to help people who will want to inform others about your product. Press release advice can be found at www.asp-shareware.org. Don't bother submitting your software announcement on news groups that contain only ads. You want to find a news group that is active with real conversation. The news groups with active conversation are also indexed by search engines.
You need a Portable Application Description (PAD) file for your software. You can obtain PAD info and utilities by searching for them. Start at www.asp-shareware.org. You will find that a lot of shareware resources will be useful for promoting your software as well. They are usually glad to offer free software. There is a good application called PADGen for building your PAD XML file. This file gets uploaded to your website. When you submit your software they will usually ask for a PAD and some require it. You provide the URL to the PAD file on your website. The PAD file is actually a .xml file. Now you can change your description on SOME websites without visiting them depending on how they access your PAD file. Some websites check it every week or so and update their website but most only access the pad file when you prompt them to by resubmitting. Keep track of who you submit to and how they access your PAD file. Spend lots of time developing your PAD file and validate it before submitting. In your descriptions you need to avoid laundry list of features no matter how tempting. Your description needs to be an engaging paragraph that sucks people in. Lists of features do not do this. If you cannot write you need to find someone who can. A well written description is essential and accomplishes much more than a list of features. This ok:
This is Better:
Include a link to a more exhaustive feature list so serious prospects can get more information.
Search and Submit with Keywords Search for the websites that you will submit to manually on a search engine or directory like a user will. You can find what people typically search for by viewing the auto complete choices displayed when typing into the Google Toolbar search box or you can get an account at Google Webmaster Tools. It isn't necessary to submit to hundreds of websites. Most of the download sites take their files from a few key websites. You will, however, want to submit to as many high quality websites as you can find by searching. Do not trust auto submission services, they may get you banned! Submission of software takes anywhere from a few minutes on some websites (lower quality) to six months on tucows. Most quality sites take a couple of weeks or so.
Website - Software Promotion Cycle Website promotion goes hand in hand with software promotion because they promote each other! When you submit your quality software to many quality sites your Google rank is going to go through the roof. Each of the sites you submit to will link to your home page. You need to place a link to each website you submit to on your website. You don't have to use their graphics just use a text link, it doesn't matter. Some sites require you to place a link on your site because it helps out their Google presence.
Find blogs that deal with your subject or target audience. Ask the blog author to review your product; explain how the product will benefit him or his users. At the very least ask them to personally review the product and tell you what they think about it. Write articles that explain answers to common questions that you get. From what I gather Google uses algorithms to looks for articles. Even if your article is not that unique it can still be picked up by the mysterious web crawler as actual content increasing your chances of being ranked higher on Google. You need to generate unique content in addition to regular promotion strategies. As a free software developer you should have that half whipped. Produce CD packs and sell them on eBay to promote your software. Remember to develop and strategically use keywords in your eBay auction. I have often found auctions through Google so don't underestimate the power of a $4.00 eBay listing.
Resources
PADGen ROR Sitemap
Other advice can be found at these links.
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