This is a video of a “Promoting your software” talk I did at ESWC 2011. In it I discuss my experiences attempting to try every form of promotion known to man including: SEO, Google Adwords, magazine ads, affiliates, Facebook ads and hanging out in wedding forums using a female pseudonym. With real data! You can’t read the slide text in the video, but I have included the slides below.
A couple of people asked me afterwards whether anything I tried had worked. Yes! I wouldn’t have survived long as a microISV otherwise. But I didn’t really want to dwell on what had worked for me because it might not be relevant for different products with different price points in different markets. Also that isn’t the sort of information I want to give to my competitors.
Things were running a bit late due to problems with the projector, so I didn’t have time for the audience participation at the end. Projector problems are really not what you need when you are just about to do a talk to a room full of people! Many thanks to Alwin and Sytske of Collectorz for doing the video and to Dave and Aaron of Software Promotions for helping to sort out the unruly projector.
Successful Software 
Thanks for sharing
Hey Andy,
Good presentation. One more thing to add to the list of what doesn’t work: conferences. Has anyone else had success with conferences or trade shows? These seem to be better for brand building than direct sales.
Tradeshows are on the slide of “other things” at the end. I have thought about doing them, but I don’t think I would ever get a return on the amount of money and (more importantly) time I would have to invest,
That’s what I’ve found too. I invested in three conferences, got 1 trial signup, no sales. Maybe I just picked the wrong conferences.
I think tradeshows are more about brand awareness/credibility and getting feedback, than sales.
Thanks for posting this Andy, on the eve of launching my first paid product i found it most informative!
There are no video:
http://my.jetscreenshot.com/2/20111224-brfs-32kb
I can’t login in to viddler (says password not recognized). So perhaps something at Viddler is broken. I will try to contact them, but it ight take a while over Xmas.
Viddler pulled my video citing “violation of terms of service” (business use). I have had conference videos on Viddler for year, so I think they must have changed the TOS. The video is now hosted on DailyMotion.