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?
Here are a few ideas how you can make money with shareware: First, you need the rights to a universally needed software program. Look for an application that most everyone on the Internet has a need for. However, there are plenty of niche markets with extremely high demand as well. Research the categories that are in high demand.
Secondly, if you find a niche market and a title you wish to develop make sure it out-competes and out performs the nearest competition. You want a product that is so far better than the shareware that’s on the market that word of mouth promotes it for you.
The good news is that shareware is a digital product. There are no delivery or manufacturing costs once bandwidth issues are handled. It costs you little or nothing to get your title into the hands of millions of users. Consider this an enormous source of free advertising.
The download numbers for titles like Spyware Doctor are astronomical! Download.com shows over 10,000,000 downloads so far. Sites like www.download.com get so much traffic that their Alexa ranking is among the best of any site on the Internet. If your shareware is listed on hundreds if not thousands of download/shareware sites your download numbers can soar.
Were you to search for free software, shareware or freeware on Google you’d no doubt see over a million sites listed. Simply by posting your shareware titles using a PAD file to numerous shareware sites you can get the benefit of free promotion.
Show Me The Money! When I was a bit less informed I asked my personal computer/Internet guru, Thomas Deedy, how these software developers made any money. His answer opened my eyes.
One of Tom’s favorite ways to monetize shareware is to offer support services. This is the “real” business and the shareware is just the means to feed it. Your technical person collects every possible support issue and puts them into a support database “solution tree”. Then, this tree is the way support staff troubleshoot problems.
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.
Some support services even use 900 numbers and charge per call. Or, they precharge for X number of hours of support. It is like a reserve account and users use it if needed.
On an expensive program you could sell a support package that includes video and troubleshooting software. For a shareware program that might sell for $2500 at retail you could easily sell this package for $250.
Companies are more than happy to pay $250 for a support package like this. The numbers could get very exciting if your shareware was downloaded 250,000 times and only 2% purchased support.
That works out to 5000 orders for the video and trouble-shooting software @ $250 each or $1,250,000!
If you outsource the production of the video and support software you have just developed an automated way to monetize your shareware that could make you a millionaire.
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.
As the creator of the project you own the copyrights and you’ll need to pay no royalties on your earnings. but, you can make more money if you sell a private label license to a software company.
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.” ————————————————————————————————————————–
It is easy to setup a donate button using PayPal. Set up three buttons if you like starting with $5 and go on up.
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.
My Advice: Get started on this project right now but avoid creating software that has too narrow a market. You want the most universally needed application you can imagine. You want to create a title that nearly everyone on the Internet knows they need and really wants. You could look at the download numbers and identify a massively popular program and then improve upon it (if that’s possible) by making it more powerful, easier to use or with special features that no other software has.
Here’s a few more ways to earn money giving away software:
1. Include an upgrade option. Let your customer download a pretty cool basic version for free; then show him that there is a new, improved and five times more powerful version available for just $39.95 that includes lifetime support and upgrades. If you add enough valuable features and show that they can’t really live without the more powerful version your sales will go through the roof!
2. Build an email list by offering something to your customers like an e-zine with insider user tips. Or, simply bribe them by offering them another of your software programs free when they register their copy of XYZ software that they just downloaded. As I said, above, owning a massive opt-in email list can be worth a fortune.
3. Create a “player” for games or lessons. Give it away with a package of outstanding free games or lessons. But, include an online, updateable link to new games (or lessons) with even more features. People love games! Once your publicity is out and the public is aware that they can get highly rated games free simply by going to your site or download.com and downloading your “game player” you will have an automatic customer base of hundreds of thousands and maybe even millions. It all depends on how good your free package of games is and the buzz that your package generates.
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 killer software titles consider becoming a shareware posting agent to earn a fee on every paid upgrade. Click on shareware posting agent for complete details. This article, Source Code Millions is available for free reprint.