Direct Access is available, today only, at 45% off at Bits du Jour. Don’t miss the chance to get at this very special price.

The offer is valid only today, 8th April 2009

Direct Access is available, today only, at 50% off at Software Deal of the Day, a new service, similar to Bits du Jour, where you can find great software at discounted price, for one day only.

Direct Access, on the 3rd May, was featured on Giveaway of the day. This is a Russian website which, each day, offers a special deal on a software application. Here’s a brief report on how the thing works and how it can help market your software. I got convinced on using it after learning the experience of my Italian friends at Incomedia with their web authoring tool Website X5 and our fellow entrepreneur Chris Thompson with GoCRM.

What is Giveaway of the day

When you list your software on Giveaway of the day you are basically offering it for free to anyone that requests it for one day only. Your software is listed on the main page of this site (which really gets a lot of traffic) for one day. The licensing process ensures that people get your software for free only for the promotion day.

The licensing can be handled directly by Giveaway of the day or you can create your custom registration system (which I warmly suggest). They package your application with their executable so that it installs only on the day of the promotion (users have to install and activate that software that day).

Why would you want to give your software for free? Basically to increase your visibility and future referrals. So, the idea is quite different from other deal of the day sites, like Bits du jour, which are meant to increase your sales for a day.

Normally, the license you offer has the following limitations: no support, no commercial use, no upgrades.

My experience with Direct Access

The Setup
I have my website hosted so I was a little scared not being able to handle the traffic, especially as I decided to use my own registration algorithm that generates the licenses and sends them via email to the users. So I asked my good friend Marcus Tettmar to host a backup of the registration server application which ended being handy as I had a couple of problems with the main server (very slow DB).

As you can see, the traffic is consistent: almost 12,000 visitors and about 37,000 page views and about 15GB bandwidth. As you can see from the charts, the peak is at 9am (Italian time) when the promotion starts with people who are lurking to get their giveaway: then traffic decreases to rise a bit around 3pm when Americans get up. I got a big number of users from Italy, too. Maybe it’s time to start localizing Direct Access.

Data for the 3rd May

Data for the 4th May

Comments arrive at bunches as they are approved by the moderator. I replied promptly and it looks liek that very appreciated by the community. In fact, although, the term say no tech support, I and Marcus – who helped me answering the comments –  walked every user through the registration process (which proved more complex than I anticipated). Also the number of email I received was conspicuous: more than 400. Fogbuz along with Direct Access proved to be of great help to quickly answer emails.

Andrew Klein, of BladedThoth.com, wrote a mini review of Direct Access (he reviews all the software listed on Giveaway of the day). He made good comments and gave me good starting point for future improvements of the product.

The problems I got
Fortunately, things went pretty smooth and the vast majority of users got their registration email in few seconds. The major problem I had was, as expected, with the license file delivery. My license is delivered as a lic file (which is a signed XML file). A number of support requests were related to license problems (email not received, spam filters, corrupted license file, license file embedded into the email instead as shown as attachment, people not proficient with using their pc and requesting assistance…) and some others to installation problems (mainly, people not having the .NET framework). In addition to that, as I used the term “register on my website” a number of people went to the register link on the nagarsoft.com website instead of the specific page for Giveaway of the day.

The Results
I still need to finish analyzing the data, but about 3,500 people registered Direct Access and got their license (which registration coming at a rate between 120 to 180  per hour). I assume that a number will stop using it but it will nevertheless give me a solid user base that will help me discover new uses of the software and shaping the development of the product and provide useful support and a number of them, hopefully, will upgrade to the future versions.

What kind of software performs best

Giveaway of the day is visited by people with different IT background and you get a lot of novices with very little experience. So it looks like that the software that work best is the one with no learning curve where the user can immediately start using it. Niche market tools won’t probably work very well and will get you overwhelmed with support questions.

How to get your software listed

To get your software listed, just write to the support team of Giveaway of the day and you’ll get a reply in few days. If they are interested in listing your software, they will be back to you in a few days and you will even get paid for it. You will send them a brief description of your software (and optionally a description of other software of your company) and you are all set.

Here are some suggestions to make things smooth:

1. Get your server ready: prepare to handle a peak of traffic (I got 12.000 unique visitors in 24 hours). So check with your provider (especially, if your website is hosted) if this will be ok with them or if you need to do anything. Fortunately, your application will be hosted by Giveaway of the day so downloads will not suck up your bandwidth. The Giveaway of the day people will package it in their own executable which will work on the promotion day only.

2. Monitor the forum and your email: people will come up with any kind of question about your software. If you are unresponsive, it’s very easy to get bad comments. Be ready to promptly answer by email and monitor the forum. I replied to each message and sent step by step instructions on how to complete the registration process if necessary. If you sending the registration code via email, problems will happen so be ready to handle things manually.

3. Have a backup ready: if you are implementing your own registration system, if you are on a hosted server, have a backup ready on another server, just in case. My server at webhost4life managed the load pretty well: I just had a couple of problems and having the backup registration server on Mjtnet server worked perfectly. Things can and will get a bit crazy!

4. Make things as simple as possible: try to simplify the procedure to register your software and provide instructional material on your website (screenshots and video tutorials work best). The video tutorials I have at http://www.nagarsoft.com/VideoTutorials.aspx convinced many people who were a little skeptic to download and try the software.

Conclusions

I think that Giveaway of the day is a valuable marketing tool. It will put your software in front of thousands of people. If you are a startup and would like to give your business a boost, this is a tool you should definitely try.

Technorati Tags: microisv, giveaway of the day, nagarsoft, direct access, promotion, software

Today, 1st May 2007, my good friend Marcus Tettmar of Mjtnet is celebrating the10th anniversary of Macro Scheduler. And he’s doing it with a super offer at Bits du Jour.

All version of Macro Scheduler are offered at 58% discount, today only.

• Macro Scheduler Standard at $40 (instead of $97)
• Macro Scheduler Pro at $81.24 (instead of $197)

Take advantage of this offer and start saving time, automating your repetitive tasks.

We send Marcus our warmest congratulations for the brilliant result achieved!

Technorati Tags: macro scheduler, automation, bits du jour

This is the second time Direct Access has been featured on Bits du Jour. Here’s a report of my first Bits du jour experience with the site.

For those who don’t know it, Bits du Jour is a deal of the day website for software. Every day you can get a different software deeply discounted (from 30% to 70%). Bits du Jour keeps 30% of the sale.

I offered Direct Access at 40% and the promotion ended with 40 licenses sold from Bits du jour plus other 9 that were generated directly from my website or my blog.

Bits du jour generate about about 6000–7000 visitors / day.

 Here’s how I managed the promotion:

• A couple of days before the event, I announced the discount via email to my customers.
• I displayed a banner on both my website and my blog announcing the promotion a few hours before the promotion started pointing the users directly to my sale page. This helped me to distinguish from the users who got to my homepage, discovered the discount and ordered the software from those purchasing from Bits du Jour (I got the idea from Nick Hebb. I also removed the promotion link from my website a few hours later (which resulted in a couple more sales)
• Watch the comments at Bits du Jour. A couple of users had questions and responding to them, resulted in few other sales.

From what I saw from my weblogs, on the 12th April, I got about 100 visits on my website from Bits du Jour. That means that many people tried the software before or purchased it on impulse without visiting my website. Traffic however, started to rise about a week before, when Ellen Craw (who manages the site) published the list of the new software on her blog. I’m still getting traffic from from it right now.

I think Bits du Jour is a great promotional tool to get the word out and increase the visibility of your product. Ellen writes the copy for you (which you can freely reuse on your website) and she’s a very talented copywriter.

So, my suggestion is to try it, both to find great software at discounted price and to promote yours!

Technorati Tags: bits du jour, direct access, nagarsoft

Today, 12th April 2007, Direct Access is on sale at bitsdujour.

Therefore, you can get it for only $24.97 (that’s 40% discount of the $39.95 retail price).

Get your discounted copy now

Technorati Tags: Direct Access, Bits du jour, text expander

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

News for deal seekers: Direct Access is on sale – only today -, 10th October, on bitsdujour at 50% off.

Bits du jour offers a new software at huge discount everyday. So, if you are looking for a deal, don’t miss it.

Bitsdujour
http://www.bitsdujour.com