Direct Access was featured on Bits du Jour on the 10th October and a 50% discount, on sale at 19.97$ instead of 39.95$.

The promotion ended with 17 copies sold at discounted price, plus 2 regular copies. It was great day

I would like to thank Ellen of Bits du Jour for the superb work done on the copy. She wrote it from scratch and patiently mended it according to my suggestions. She also gave me the right to republish it on my website. I believe she’s really good at presenting things from the customer perspective, something that’s really difficult for business owners who “created” their product.

I believe that important roles where played by:

• publishing a note in her blog and newsletter about the upcoming sale. From that day I could see traffic of people from bitsdujour downloading my software so that they are “ready” for the sale.
• the day before the promotion, a link in the main Bitsdujour page pointed to my website (I got roughly the same traffic on the 9th and 10th of October, about 80 visitors from Bits du jour - that’s what Google Analytics said)
• a post from the Direct Access lover Patrick McKenzie on his blog telling about the promotion

A lot of people sent comments and suggestion. It was a really interesting experience and if you sell software you should try it, just to see you products through Ellen eyes who is a great copywriter.

Here’s the original text, as appeared on Bits du Jour:

Launch Fast: Direct Access
We feel like we spend half our lives navigating between applications. We set up our PCs for efficient navigation a long time ago, but we run so many programs at once, and have so many web pages open, and have files in so many folders - we just figured that it was impossible to be as fast as we used to be.

But then we found Direct Access. Direct Access lets us get to anything - a specific web page, a folder, a document or a program - using just a few keys. We make the shortcuts, so they’re words that make sense to us and that we can easily remember. And we can use them from any program - we don’t need to leave the current program or document first.

Plus, Direct Access’s autotext feature lets us substitute any short key combination we’ve set up for any long phrase we frequently need. And because they work inside any program, we only have to remember one set.

Use Direct Access to:

• Start your email program with just “eml“
• Check your eBay auction without leaving the email you’re writing
• Edit your timesheet file by typing just “tims“
• Open your My Documents folder just by typing “mydox“
• Mute your speakers without leaving your current document
• Run your backup job by typing just “bak”

Direct Access lets you choose your own command words so you can pick something easy for you to enter and remember. Commands are executed as soon as entered or upon pressing a confirmation key (like F1) so they won’t get in the way of your other work.

And then use Autotext to really speed up your work. For example:

• Type “plmkq” and have it turn into “Please let me know if I can answer any other questions.”
• Have several different email signatures, and enter any of them with just the abbreviation you’ve chosen.
• Abbreviate your URL, cell phone number, street address, difficult html string, or any text that you find yourself typing over and over