How to Make Money from Software

We all are keen to be able to make extra income online. A while back I was listening to a cd from Yanik Silvers Birthday Bash where he had a ton of speakers stepping up to the mic to give their 2 cents on making money online. He had managed to get Corey Rudl ( Corey is no longer with us ) from the Internet Marketing Center to show up.  Corey was known for speaking fast.. this guy was like a machine gun when he talked. He was known for being one of the most successful internet marketers online.

He gave a number of different helful tips in regards to building a subscriber base but he also dropped a nugget that gave you some insight into his approach online. He said

" If I was to do anything online it would be create information products and software"

If you go look at what he offered on his website, you will find it was mainly information products and software with backend service like hosting etc. He had the it pretty much running on autopilot, managed by his staff which freed him up to go car racing which was his love.

Making Money from Software

I have had first hand experience in the trenches with this, have had some success and some non successful attempts. The software I have had created have been

Affiliate Organizer ( See the box on the right menu )
KeywordSwipe
Instant Blog and Ping

Affiliate Organizer was born out of my own business needs. I dont tend to look at calendars at all, or palm pilots, so trying to stay on top of all the information that you need to keep track off online such as passwords, login urls, usernames, contact details, forum urls, affiliate merchants ive joined, software ive bought, access codes, domains, hosting information, websites, blogs, upcoming seminars and events, teleseminars, offline appointments and so on.. I mean the list just goes on and on.

 I was literally up to my elbows in Paperwork and sticky notes and spreadsheets that I couldn’t find on my computer it was terrible. So i started looking around for a piece of software that could store all that information and even more, plus alert me to timed events that might occur tommorow, next week, 3 months from now.. even 2 years from now. It had to be able to alert me by email and onscreen.

Well their was no product online that contained all of that. Yes their was information management software but nothing that was exactly geared towards my type of business and needs. So I set about plotting out what it needed to have on a massive white board and I did this for about 2 months, adding bits to it as I became aware of things that were disorganized or I found myself wanting to remember.

End Result: Is good software that is used by many marketers online, has the solid backing of the top affiliate marketers online who use it aswell. Sales are sporadic now but in the early days people jumped all over it thanks to 3 good joint ventures with rosalind gardner, james martell and allen gardyn. Good feedback from people.

Instant Blog and Ping was my second bit of software I created, right now its no longer offered online and that is because it only had a shelf life of probably 6 months to a year. After that things progress and well I couldn’t justify keep selling it to people, though many of my competitors continue to sells theirs. I didn’t think it was right So I pulled mine off the market BUT that tiny bit of software cost me $900 to make and generarated me literally thousands of dollars over a span of about 8 months, It was still selling the day I took it down.

The idea behind this software was, their was a service being provided online called blogburner I think it was.. i forget now it was quite a while back. Rick Butts was the owner he had come up with the idea of providing a service based on a idea he got from Armand Morin.. see the process of how ideas come about? lol.. Anyway he was selling a service which basically took peoples website pages and automated the process of posting them to a blog and then pinging aggregation services.

I thought I would create software to do this, little did I know while my software was being created another guy came out with software aswell doing the same thing. Luckily he was charging like $299 for it. So when mine came out I decided to offer mine for $69.. how well did that go over? Well I had tons of people beating down on my site door to buy it and they became subscribers. Did the other guy get angry? Yes he did.. but by the time he started having a hissy fit 3 more people had brought out Blog and Ping Software. Jeff Alderson and a Pakistan guy.

The fact of the matter is all of our software did the same thing, except a few exceptions in features and pricing. What occured was we were providi to the same market but different kind of smaller groups within that market. I was catering to a market that did not want to pay over $70 for software and Jeff was providing to people who didnt mind paying $97 and the other guy was catering to people who were insane and enjoyed paying $299 for a product lol. ( sorry I have to laugh about it now in hindsight )

The fact is that in any market there will be similar products and I certainly dont agree with ripping off someone, and none of us did that as we all came out with out products around the same time.. give or take a week or so. Each of us Catered to a large market in different ways.

You only have to look at google, yahoo and chitika with the whole get paid for clicking ads idea. Google might have started the idea but that doesn’t stop people like yahoo and chitika from coming along and putting their spin on things does it? Car Manufactuers do the same thing.

Key is: Timing, and Differentiating yourself from the crowd in some way, to give people reason to buy your software.

This doesn’t work all the time. Here is an example: How many products have you seen online that let you place Flash video online? or Audio buttons..? I have seen loads of people do this and while I dont have their earnings statistics.. there is a good chance that if you tried bringing out software now in the same market.. You would fall flat on your face as its way to over saturated and their is the same software in nearly every pricing bracket, $47, $67, $97 and upwards.

Questions to ask yourself is.. is it really worth it? Do your research on the market and the current competition. Do you want to gain friends or enemies online?  Which brings me to my next Software

End Result : Generated me a crap load of money in 2005 and subscribers but only had a short shelf life

Keywordswipe

Now this software has been a love hate relationship. Yes it has made money and yes it continues to make the odd amount every now and then but usually the reason people refund on it is because they never read the homepage or watched the videos. The idea behind this software was unique and it was mine originally. In May I think it was of 2005 Page generators were big.. I mean you had Traffic Equalizer, Directory Generator, Nichemonster and so on… people were building these massive sites of like 50,000 pages in 1 hour.

Now I was doing some keyword research one day for one of my generated sites ,I was using Nichemonster at the time. I thought to myself man there has to be a quicker way to grab keywords for niches. So im browsing around on yahoo looking at some of the generated sites as yahoo was full of them at that time and I came across some that had thousand of pages and their pages were like

big-brown-dog.html or small-red-cat.php

I thought to myself instead of me slaving away doing the research for one of these generated sites which mainly consisted of tons of pages with adsense. If I had a peice of software where I could put the url of a site I had found on yahoo into it. and Hit Go.. It would be cool if it could pull in every page from that site and then Strip the page URL of its dashes and extension and place it all in a text file.

Example

Big-brown-dog.html

would become

big brown dog

The result would be I would have a massive list of keywords that someone else had slaved away researching in about  3 minutes.

Planning

So I checked online to see if their was any software out there that could do this, as understand I am not in the business of creating software that is out there if someone else has done a good job and their price is reasonable. If their had been software out their and it was selling for like $97 I would have bought it and saved myself months of hassle with a developer, risk and money.

Their wasn’t anything like that out there, so i had it made it cost me I believe about $300 could have be $400 i cant rememeber lol.. maybe I should put that in my organizer lol.

Anyway I put it online for $37 and well it sells on the odd occasion but refunds have been higher due to the fact that most people who buy it either want a free ride.. You know the types.. people who buy and then refund because they really had no intention of paying in the first place.   Plus this software has had odd issues with certain types of sites because the code on page generated sites is not clean, the navigation is crap and well the coder couldn’t  make it work with every single site on the net. Anyway with that aside.. At the time it did the job for what I wanted it for and it still works with many types of sites out there as a useful tool for grabbing keywords that you might not have thought about.

End Result : I got my money back and have made money from it. ( So it was successful )

10 Software Creating Tips and Questions

I am not going to proclaim myself an expert in creating software, but I have had 3 created and I have 2 in development right now, so I have got my hands dirty and have experienced the good the bad and the ugly sides of getting involved in it. So here are some tips that might help you

1. Is their a Need? – Be sure before you rush in with an idea you have to find out if their is a need, is their a market that would buy yours?, why would they buy it? If it exists already, do you really think its worth the risk, and hassle involved? Really be sure you have researched the market, estimated the costs involved through places like elance and rentacoder and the time involved. Dont base your idea on what you think someone might want, do a survey if you can and find out for sure what they want.

2. What will you price it?
 If their is a need, and you have found out how much it will cost will you be able to cover your costs of making it, what price are you going to put it at to cover the intital costs of developing it?

3. NDA Agreements -  If your idea is unique, make sure you have your coder fill out a non disclosure agreement, nothing worse than paying $2000 to have something created to find that on your first day marketing it online. Your software guy has gone out and sold it, Boom.. bye bye sales.

4. What Platforms will it work on? Just windows or mac? and if its just windows who is going to test it on 98, me, xp, 2000, nt? make sure to put all that in the description if you dont, they are not obligated to test it.

5. Free After Service – Be sure to mention you want at least 1 month after service included, as your pretty much guaranteed to run into bugs you have not caught and you dont want to have to pay more money to get them fixed.

6. Beta Testing - Who will test it? will you risk handing it to someone to test and have them take your idea? Do you have some trusted friends who would help?

7. How will you explain your ideas to your programmer? Do you have camtasia to record yourself showing your programmer issues and ideas?  You will need to have some way of taking snap shots of your screen. This has helped me tons to get across ideas.

8. Will you work on your timezone or someone elses? If you go with a USA programmer and you have to communicate chances are you will be on the same timezone or at least 1 or 2hrs apart.. If you go with someone from the east.. Their morning could be your midnight, I ran into this with blog and ping and got ill staying up into the early hours of the morning trying to explain why things were not working and what I wanted.. it can be frustrating and very tiring.

9. Be sure to state how you plan to pay - Many people want 50% upfront and 50% afterwards, this can be a disaster.. Elance coders tend to do this But you can tell them at the start that you can pay 30% upfront  then 30% after you get a demo that works and then the last 40% when the work is complete and fully tested. Dont ever pay them if you can intill you see something that resembles what your after and that you have tested out.

I ran into this on rentacoder I wanted to have some software made I told them it needs to do this, this and that.. be sure you can do this before you BID.. one guy was adamant about the fact that he could do it. I was nervous but he really thought he could do it while 90% said they could not do it. I went ahead.. Luckily in rentacoder you place money in ESCROW meaning they dont get it unless they provide the goods.

Turns out he gave me this software and well it was nothing like what I had asked for, not even close.. i mean this thing was like a Cooker, when I had asked for a washing machine lol.. Well the numbskull never got his money but he argued his point and rentacoder gave me my money back and gave him a bad rating for not listening to me. ( He wasted 1 month of my time, and risked me losing my money )

10. Get Solid Examples of their work, you will be suprised at how many people bid on your project to make software when all they have ever done is create websites for people? like yah ok matey… show me your work.. check their feedback is it good or bad? really do some investigating on them, do they have a website? Can you contact their previous clients?

Remember You have the potential to make good money from software but you have the potential also to lose a lot of money, alot of time and even get ill in the process. Be wise when you venture out and

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