Publish Your Software on the Internet
You have spent hundreds of hours developing a software idea. You created your flowcharts,
have written the code, tested the application, made any necessary changes, and now you are
ready to market your brainchild and reap the rewards for all of your hard work.
It wasn’t long ago that publishing your software would have included spending almost as much
time selling a publisher on your idea as it did to create it. If you were lucky enough to find
a publisher who was interested in your product, you would then submit your product and yourself
to their terms and conditions. You would wait through the lengthy production and marketing
stages, before finally seeing your software available to the market it was designed for… all for
a small percentage of the royalties.
That was the past. Today is a new day.
Publishing your software on the internet is a quick way to start realizing your product’s potential.
Internet publishing gives you instant access to millions of potential customers from all over the
world. Plus, it lets you remain in control of price and targeting.
Also, several methods for keeping your software from becoming shareware are available from,
you guessed it, internet sources. And finally, self publishing your software lets you
keep most of the royalties.
To do this, you will need some basics:
A web site to display your wares, which will include developing or paying someone to develop a professional looking web site. A shopping cart that is integrated with your web site so that potential customers can browse through the titles you have to offer and select the software they want for purchase. A way for the customers to pay for their purchases, such as secure credit card processing. A means of marketing your product to drive potential customers to your web site.
While putting all of this together will not take as much time as finding a publisher, it does still
take time and an investment of capital. This also means time away from utilizing your talents
developing your next product.
There is another option that more and more software creators are using to publisher their work.
They turn to an online market place that specializes in the sale of digital publishing.
A safe home where developers of all types of electronic media can post their products for sale,
online market places make it fast and easy to get your work out to the public. They do it by
providing you with the web space you need to properly advertise your item, a shopping cart and
purchase tools, and invest in marketing to drive potential customers to your software.
In many cases listing your software product is free, and a reasonable percentage of the sale is
collected from the marketing company to offset their cost. This is a small price to pay to
easily get your product to the public, and to allow you to do what you do best, create more software.
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