Tips for Music Software Developers: The Competition

Developing music software is no easy task, let alone marketing and selling it when it’s complete. So it really gets on my nerves when I see software with so much potential only installed on just a couple of computers when it could have been thousands, all because the developer didn’t do a few key things. That’s why I’ve decided put together a series of quick tips to help smaller developers out. Music software developers to be precise.

Over the coming weeks I’ll cover writing simple press releases for music apps, what information needs to be on your product’s webpage and how you should display it, how to get noticed, the importance of software directory sites like SMM, and a bunch of other handy info. Lets get started.

Quick Tip 1: The Competition

One of the easiest ways to garner attention for your software is by holding a competition. Not just a competition on your own website, but a giveaway on an external music site like Hitsquad or MacMusic. The reason being that if you hold the competition on your own site you’re limited to your existing traffic and part of the point to running a giveaway is getting new people to use your software. That’s how external sites help -- you take advantage of their traffic.

We have allowed software developers for as long as I can remember to hold a one-week competition on SMM. We usually do something along the lines of having the user answer a question by visiting your website to get the answer so they can enter the competition.

While the competition is running a lot of users will of course download your demo version to check it out. It’s like entering a competition to win a Porsche. You would love to take it for a test drive even before a winner is announced and I bet when it’s time to hand the keys back, you will have become quite attached to it. The same applies to a software competition -- hopefully the user will find it to be an integral part of making their music and of course buy it even if they don’t win.

As you can see a software giveaway is

a) An effective way of boosting traffic to your product’s site

b) Getting your software noticed

c) Possibly gaining more sales

If you would like to hold a software competition on Hitsquad/SMM, contact Stacey or myself via our contact page at http://www.hitsquad.com/contact.shtml

If you have any questions about the tips, the comment box below is quick method of getting in touch.

Catcha,

Michael

:
Views: 2471

Back 22.11.2006