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What Worked in 2000?
by Steve Pavlina,Dexterity Software
Hi Steve,Naturally, I was quite
impressed with your accomplish-ments
as outlined in your recent
dues letter to the ASP member-ship.
I’ve been a member of the ASP
since 1990 or so and I’ve been publish-ing
my shareware since 1985. I used to
hang around the ASP forums on CIS, but
when they moved to the internet, I never
bothered to monitor them. It is at your
“prodding” that I’m here now.
Anyway, enough of that. I was won-dering
if you could take a few minutes
(
that you did that were _most_ responsi-ble
for the increase in your sales over
the last year. I understand that partici-pating
in these newsgroups might be one
of the things. But what I’m wondering is,
if I had to pick the most important things
to do to increase my business, what
would they be?
Also, to get sales in excess of
$100,000, what is your cash marketing
budget, if you don’t mind me asking?
And how do you spend that cash? Indus-try
specific publications for your soft-ware?
Finally
you sell?
Thanks in advance and I hope this
doesn’t rehash something that might
have been asked before.
Karl Thompson
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I’m glad my prodding is working. :)
I wrote a long two-part ASPects arti-cle
that explains many of the most
important things to do to grow a
shareware business. It was in the May
and June 2000 issues, so it can be found
in the ASPects archive on the ASP site.
But to give a more condensed version
off the top of my head of the top six
things I think really made the difference
for me:
1) When designing a new product,
forget about the money, and ask yourself
what you can create that would be of real
value to people, so much value that if
someone else created the product, you
would buy it yourself. If your product
isn’t very attractive to end users, you will
be fighting an uphill battle no matter
how much marketing effort you put into
it. If you don’t have a product that you’d
be happy to sell to your own family
members, you won’t have the right atti-tude
towards selling it. Selling isn’t
manipulative when you think you are
doing people a favor by convincing them
to buy. That kind of selling can really
motivate you. If you have a product you
aren’t proud of, then you’ll feel manipu-lative
when you try to sell it, thinking
you have to trick people into buying it.
Selling becomes much easier when you
really believe in the benefits of your
product. So #1 is to take the time to
create a product you honestly believe will
benefit people. You can’t shortcut this
step,if you don’t believe in your product,
you will subconsciously limit your suc-cess
on some level. If you want to make
$100K per year or more, then you’ve got
to feel you deserve it first.
2) Enlist the feedback of reviewers
before you release a product. I have a
system that essentially allows me to only
release 5-star rated games from here on.
I get several friendly game reviewers to
check out my products before I release
them and tell me how they’d review
them. Then I take their feedback and
keep working on the product until they
absolutely love it. I did this with Dweep
Gold and spent an extra two weeks add-ing
features and making changes, so that
the reviewers would love it. I honestly
think that 5-star products will massively
outsell 4-star ones, so just keep working
until you get to 5 stars if you really want
a product that can sell. The extra effort
here is extremely cost effective. To take
a 4-star product to 5 stars may not re-quire
too much effort, but I think it can
increase sales by an order of magnitude.
3) Design your site from the visitor’s
perspective, and understand that the
purpose of your site is to sell, sell, sell.
Visitors should be able to reach your
order form from any page of your site
with just one click. Make a site that
you’d be proud of. If your site wouldn’t
impress you, then keep working on it
until it does. Periodically visit your site
and ask what you’d think of it if you’d
never seen it before. Be totally honest,
and use those impressions to create your
web site to-do list. If you have trouble
being objective, then enlist the help of a
friend who can.
4) Make your shareware version sell
the full version. Think of your product
from the user’s perspective, and just use
your brain to think logically about what
would make people want to buy it. Don’t
automatically use a 30-day trial just
because everyone does. Run experiments
and see what works for you. Sell the
sizzle, not the steak. Features are logical,
but benefits are emotional, and benefits
are what sell. My products have many
features, but what I sell are things like
fun, family togetherness, victory, accom-plishment,
and so on. Make it really easy
to buy. You must have a “buy now”
button in your product that goes directly
to your online order form.
5) Assuming you’ve got a 5-star
product you believe in and a web site to
sell it, the next step is pretty simple. Just
let as many people as possible know
about it. Use ADDS (www.a-direct.com),
Freelance Works (www.freelanceworks.
com), Shareware Promotions (www.
sharewarepromotions.com), automated
submission tools, etc. to get it out to all
the download sites. Send out a press
release using Al Harberg’s service to let
the rest of the world know about it
(www.dpdirectory.com). Gradually create
your own press list of web sites that
would post news about your products (for
me that means a gaming press list), and
send your press release to them. For
Dweep I spent about six weeks full time
doing virtually nothing but this.
6) Upsell. If you sell a $20 product
and can create a “pro” or “gold” version
to sell for $30 and do nothing more than
list it on your online order form, then
marketing experts will say that you can
statistically expect 30-60% of your $20
sales to become $30 sales – forever! For
me, I took a $10 product, raised the price
to $15 and added a $25 gold version.
When I first released the gold version,
80% of new customers bought it. Now
that’s settled down to about 60%. By
upselling, I have more than doubled the
amount of money my average sale brings
in. Yet to create the gold version from
the original version took only a fraction
of the effort it did to create the original
version from scratch. It’s a lot easier to
turn a $10 sale into a $20 sale than it is
to attract a $10 customer in the first
place. When someone has already de-cided
to spend $20 with you, you should
be able to convince that person to spend
$10 more about half the time. Note espe-cially
that upselling is not manipulative
if you are truly offering the customer
better value. I feel better about selling
Dweep Gold vs. Dweep because I feel the
customer is getting a much better deal.
You get 35 levels for $15 or close to 150
levels (and rising) plus a built-in level
editor for $25. For someone who’s al-ready
decided to buy the $15 version, the
$25 version becomes even more attrac-tive.
As you can see, there really are no
shortcuts. You can’t shortcut making a
great product, a great web site, etc. You
just have to be honest with yourself and
put in the time. I think the biggest lesson
I learned is to stop looking for the silver
bullet and just create the kinds of prod-ucts
I feel should deserve to make a lot of
money. That approach works.
I think that success in shareware (and
probably in any business) is roughly 10%
how and 90% why. Anyone here can
earn $100K+ per year if they want to. If
you don’t know how, just do what I do
and read lots of books on business, mar-keting,
sales, etc, and you’ll soon be an
expert in all those things. A lack of
knowledge of what to do isn’t what usu-ally
holds people back though. It’s sim-ply
a lack of purpose. That’s why I think
the first step of creating a product that
you will really want to sell is so impor-tant.
I know a lot of people who create
products that they don’t push because
they really don’t think too highly of
them. I’m certainly guilty of this too with
my older games, so I never push them. If
you create a product that you really want
people to have, you’ll be motivated to
learn the “how” to get it sold.
=============================================
Also, to get sales in excess of
$100,000, what is your cash marketing
budget, if you don’t mind me asking?
And how do you spend that cash?
============================================
This is where I do things a bit differ-ently.
I rarely pay for marketing per se,
but I am always willing to pay for results.
It is so easy to throw away lots of money
on marketing, even if you know what
you’re doing, and something like 90%+
of all marketing is either ineffective or
actually has an adverse effect on sales.
So here’s a real-life example of what
I do. A few weeks ago I was approached
by someone responsible for securing
content for a cable TV show about com-puter
and video games. We chatted for a
while about my games, and after check-ing
out my web site, he called me back a
few days later, saying that they were
interested in featuring one of my games
on the show. The catch, of course, was
that they wanted me to put up about
$15K for this “opportunity.” I could
actually afford to pay for this, but I never
plunk down money like this. Knowing
exactly where I was headed, I let the man
go on for a while about how much money
I’d make in sales from their millions of
viewers. I told him this opportunity
sounded incredible, and we calculated
that I’d need to sell about 1000 copies of
my program to break even. The guy
seemed confident I’d sell a lot more than
that. Well, I said, in that case, I’d like to
give the studio a cut of the action. I
offered to give them $10 per copy sold if
they fronted all the cash, so our out of
pocket cost was nothing. If the deal was
as good as the guy was claiming, the
studio would stand to make a lot more
money this way, and my risk would have
been nil. I told the guy that I had no idea
whether the TV feature would be effec-
tive in making sales, but if the studio was
so confident in its effectiveness, then
they should jump at my offer. Essentially
I turned the situation around by using
risk reversal on the studio. They are
currently considering my offer. If they
say no, I know it was probably a bad deal
to begin with. If they say yes, I have
nothing to lose and will probably make
some decent money from it, as will the
studio.
This basically sums up much of how
I do my marketing. I never pay for ban-ner
advertising, for instance, but I am
happy to give someone a cut of the sales
on the backend to keep my risk low. This
is a great way to separate the bad offers
from the good ones. Those who offer me
bad deals to begin with will never accept
a backend deal, but those with legitimate
opportunities will often jump at the
chance for a cut of the action.
So I would gladly offer any ASP member
with a good opportunity a cut of the
action ($10 per sale for Dweep Gold) if
you think you can get a decent number of
sales. For instance, if you have a newslet-ter,
and you are willing to insert a sales
pitch that I write, I would gladly split the
sales with you.
So developing new win-win relation-ships
is what I try to look for when doing
my marketing. Otherwise, I spend very
little cash directly on marketing (less
than $300 per month total), and that’s
only for ongoing things that are proven
effective for me.
Finally
you sell?
Five main products, with two more in
development. Eight products if you count
all the variations of Dweep.
======================================================
Steve Pavlina is President of the ASP
and CEO of Dexterity Software, an on-line
game publisher dedicated to releas-ing
retail-quality games through share-ware
channels. You can find Steve inter-acting
with Dweep addicts at www.
dexterity.com.
任何共享软件作者都能挣到一年10万美金以上的收入,只要他想的话 - 徐远明 - 2001-02-09 08:55:28
看不懂
Re:任何共享软件作者都能挣到一年10万美金以上的收入,只要他想的话 - tx117 - 2001-02-09 10:45:30
有没有谁翻译一下哟？ 看得好痛苦，还是没看懂。
如果说不想的话有两个可能 - Arden - 2001-02-09 10:57:07
1.他神经病 2.他已经每年赚一百万美元以上.
Re:任何共享软件作者都能挣到一年10万美金以上的收入,只要他想的话 - xap - 2001-02-09 13:01:33
哪里需要一年 5分钟就能搞定了 答案就是：抢银行！！！！！ 郑州银行大劫案前后只用了4分钟
Re:任何共享软件作者都能挣到一年10万美金以上的收入,只要他想的话 - flcaoz - 2001-02-09 14:04:16
问题是wenhunter已经通过这个途径赚到了这个数字以上，我一直要筹划机会请教这位大侠那
Re:任何共享软件作者都能挣到一年10万美金以上的收入,只要他想的话 - xap - 2001-02-09 14:10:27
哦？既然这样的话，那还是有请出来详细讲解一番吧 我也要踏入小康生活！！！
Re:任何共享软件作者都能挣到一年10万美金以上的收入,只要他想的话 - 雨枫 - 2001-02-09 16:42:31
10万美元一年的话，合一个月也就是8千美元左右，如果软件做的好的话，这也不算是什么很了不起的数字吧？可以负责任的说，那些比较有名的共享软件年收益肯定不是十万美金这么小的数量级。 希望各位不要鼠目寸光，把眼光放开一些比较好哦：）
Re:任何共享软件作者都能挣到一年10万美金以上的收入,只要他想的话 - xap - 2001-02-09 16:46:07
雨枫说说看比如蚂蚁、getflash之类的软件年收入是多少？
见过洪以容几次 - Arden - 2001-02-09 16:51:48
实在看不出他年赚10万美金啊. 有这些的朋友是绝对相信的, 但绝对也是极少数.
Re:任何共享软件作者都能挣到一年10万美金以上的收入,只要他想的话 - WebHunter - 2001-02-10 01:26:57
我知道跟NetAnt类似的Gozilla!,月收入在20万美金左右