You are familiar with shareware, who isn’t? But, did you know that shareware titles may be downloaded over a million times a week? For example, last time I checked on www.tucows.com a title called Spyware Doctor 3.2 was downloaded around half a million times every week. A free shareware antivirus program called AVG AntiVirus Free Edition was being downloaded well over a million times a week from www.Download.com alone!
Now, think about this for a moment. If you had 500,000+ people looking at your product every week do you believe you could think of a way to make some money?
What do shareware developers know that most people don’t? Here are some ideas: 1. To achieve big download numbers try to develop an application that has mass market appeal. However, even niche market applications can do very well.
Second, you need to spend the money and time to create a product that out-performs everything else out there regardless of the cost. Most good shareware creates a “buzz” in the Internet community. People love passing on a good deal and if you can tell a friend about a five star rated program that is not only rated the best but is free to download you will have earned a whole pile of brownie points with your friends!
Remember two things. First, software is a digital product. Your cost per unit is zero because sites like tucows and http://www.download.com/ are only too happy to provide the bandwidth resources so that millions of people can download your software.
Download.com shows that over ten million people have downloaded a copy of Spyware Doctor from their site, so far. These free download sites do all your promoting for you because they attract literally millions of visitors a week. Tucow’s Alexa traffic rating is 988 while Download.com’s traffic rating is a phenomenal 89! That means there are only 88 web sites in the software category (that has over 7 million competing web sites) that have more traffic on the Internet. You will want to have your software listed on every site that offers free software to the public.
My research showed tens of thousands of such sites but there are probably more. Just type in free downloads or free software as a search term in Google, Alexa or Yahoo.com . You could not spend enough money to get anywhere close to that level of traffic. So, why bother? Why even have a web site?
Shareware Millions Most people are unaware of all the ways someone can make money giving away free software. Here’s some ideas Thomas Deedy told me about that might surprise you as much as it did me.
There are several powerful income generators that you could employ. For example, if you create a complicated program that has many applications you may want to offer paid support services. Some developers know the answers to every possible complication in the installation, development or on-going operation of their software. So, they create a powerful trouble-shooting menu tree that any technical person can follow.
You can actually sell support by the minute, hour or for an annual fee. You can install your trouble-shooting tree on a site accessible only by support staff. The database of solutions keeps growing until there is virtually no problem that a mildly technical support person can suss out by following the support issue tree.
Of course, every time that happens the programmer adds that problem or glitch to the trouble shooting menu until it is a rare day indeed when someone asks a question that has never come up before. When a customer encounters a problem he clicks on “help” (from within the software) and finds out that support is happily available for a modest fee by “clicking here”. He pays for support by the minute or by the hour.
Believe it or not 900 numbers can be a profit source with support. The user simply picks up the phone and is charged either by the minute of a flat fee.
An alternative would be to create a detailed installation and use video that shows actual screen shots of how to use the software and has a built-in trouble-shooting program. For a complicated and valuable program you could price the video/software combination at $250.00 and bundle it with two free hours of support services.
Now, imagine that 250,000 people have downloaded your software that’s designed for small businesses and would have cost them upwards of $2500 if something comparable was available. Let’s imagine for a second that just 2% of those 250,000 people decide not to be frustrated trying to install and use the software with the basic instructions.
That works out to 5000 orders for the video and trouble-shooting software @ $250 each or $1,250,000!
If you handle it this way you can actually automate the entire business and your costs are limited to the initial development costs for the software and the cost to create a powerful video tutorial and help file. You can outsource all this work simply by creating a detailed flow chart of exactly what you want the program to accomplish and how you envision it working for customers.
Then, go to http://www.elance.com or http://www.scriptlance.com or www.Vworker.com and enter your Project Proposal (no charge) to get a pile of bids from experienced programmers who want to work for you. You will be shocked at how reasonably you can get powerful software programs designed and built.
Once your shareware has been created and tested you own the rights. That means you can license the program to other companies to collect royalties on all their sales or agree that you will provide support services and keep 100% of the revenues from support.
I believe shareware development may be one of the best ways to build a million dollar revenue but you need few technical skills to succeed.
Support is where the big money is but some simpler software programs don’t really have any support issues; they are that good! Developers of simpler software can make money in other ways.
One way is simply to ask users for a monetary contribution, a donation, within the software. By inserting a pay-link for a donation to support the programmer many people who like the software will decide to contribute five, ten or twenty dollars. After all, they’ve received really useful software at no charge and they want to encourage the programmer to support his software and come out with newer, improved editions. And, that is exactly what programmers say:
————————————————————————————————————————– ” Please support my efforts to provide users with support and improve this software with a small donation. In return, you’ll receive a link to an extensive tutorial, help files and you’ll be advised when you can download the latest updated version of XYZ software. You’ll receive lifetime updates all for your small contribution of $10 or more.” ————————————————————————————————————————–
You can leave the amount of the donation up to the user but I recommend putting in three contribution levels: A $5 donate button, a $10 donate button and a $25 button that offers bonus software valued at hundreds of dollars at that level.
You can be sure a substantial number of people will contribute $$ but the capturing of the user’s name and email address may ultimately be worth more than the donation. Anyone who can build a massive opt-in emailing list has the potential to earn roughly a dollar per name per month. Major players like Mark Joyner built lists of around a million names. A single email to his list could generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales.
If you’d like to become a shareware millionaire try and find an application that will have wide-spread appeal. Look at what others have done and then do it better.
Finally here are a few more ways to make money with free software.
1. You’ll want to create a full version and a basic version from the start. Deliver the full version but make it function with an unlock code. Then, when users pay for the upgrade just send them the unlock code.
2. Offer users a newsletter and collect their emails.
3. I created a free lesson creator and reader for students. Then, I set it up so that teachers could purchase a much more powerful lesson creator which would enable them to create Advanced Lessons that they can sell on my site. I share the revenue from these Advanced Lessons. See www.Tutorbug.com
Yes, some of these ideas will take effort and cash to set up. But, I believe this may be one of the most realistic ways an ordinary person can become a millionaire almost overnight.
Before you spend big bucks creating software consider becoming a shareware posting agent to earn a fee on every paid upgrade. Click on shareware posting agent for complete details. This article, Let A Software Coder In India Make You Rich is released under a creative commons attribution licence.
September 7th, 2010
David Davies
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