In this guest post Christoph Engelhardt talks about why link building is an important part of online marketing and the most effective ways to do it. When you are promoting your product online, there is a myriad of different ways to do it: Display Ads, Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Social Media, Email Marketing, Online PR, and SEO – to just name a few. Deciding on the right method for your business can be tricky. They are all so different. Some of those methods can be turned on and off like a faucet; others are more like a flywheel that need a lot of pushing to get going, but will keep delivering results after you’ve stopped. Hopefully you’re in it for the long haul, so I’m going to talk about a strategy that is more of a flywheel: link building. Building links on the internet is a long-term strategy that factors into multiple traction channels.

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Inside this article you will learn: • How to supercharge your PR, SEO, and Content Marketing with outreach marketing. • How you can get more links to your website without angering the Google gods. • At least 3 different ways to find high-quality outreach and link building opportunities. • The secret to drafting the perfect outreach email.

I’ve been in online business for more than a decade now. I’ve been struggling with moonlighting multiple products to profitability, online marketing and SEO long enough to call myself “somewhat of an expert” on those topics.;-) I want to share with you what I have learned in those years to help you avoid making the same mistakes I made. Let’s get started.

On the ethics of SEO and link building SEO and link building in particular are often seen as scammy online marketing tactics and I won’t deny that there is some merit to that argument. SEO for the first 10 years has been a lot like the Wild West – minus the random killings. There was no one to effectively enforce the “law of the land” and spammers thrived.

Yes, you could cheat your way to the top of Google’s search results in the past. BUT, it is getting harder and harder with every passing day. Getting to #1 on Google today means you have to “dot the i’s and cross the t’s” in technical SEO (more on what this is later) and get some buzz going for your product – i.e. Build some links. “Link building” as a term is loathed by white-hat SEOs, as it implies spamming comment sections on random blogs and free web directories. They would much rather talk about “earning links” through “Content Marketing” and “Social Amplification”. That’s fine by me, but make no mistake: Having a rich and diverse link profile for your website is still THE major ranking factor for Google’s search results.

Spreading your links around the world wide web isn’t a problem per se. Links are what make the world wide web a WEB in the first place. But the way you do it makes all the difference: If you’re leaving useless comments on unrelated blogs, you’ll do more harm than good.

If you get your product reviewed (without paying for it) on a major website where your target audience hangs out, the value gained can hardly be put into words. Fundamentally, whenever you do any sort of online marketing you are building links. Sharing your content on social media? You’re sharing a link back to your content, because you want people to click that link. Buying Adwords?

You’re buying links right on Google’s website. Sharing your news release in a PR campaign?

You’re spreading your links. This means that, if you have a website, you’ve probably started building links without thinking too much about it. All you need to do is be more intentional and active in your efforts.

Why you should include outreach marketing in your marketing mix Building links helps you in two distinct ways: a) you’re getting referral traffic directly via the links you get, b) the links you get improve your rankings in the search engines, bringing you additional organic SEO traffic. In the long term, the SEO benefits will often have a greater effect on your traffic than the referral traffic you receive through the links. This is because a great link profile will lift your website to the top of Google across 100’s or 1000’s of keywords (all other things being equal)! That is why link building is related to SEO in most people’s minds. Traditionally it was done almost exclusively to get that sweet #1 spot on Google.

However, you should not neglect the sheer amount of traffic you can get from a well-placed link. Depending on where you get that link from (and we will talk about this in a minute) a single link can send you 1000’s of visitors. In fact, I advise everyone to completely neglect the SEO benefits when they think about where to get a link from. When you try to get a link from another website, here are the questions you should ask yourself: • Is this a trusted website in your niche? • Does that website have a big enough audience to send you meaningful traffic? • Is that website’s audience interested in your product at all?

You don’t want to get a link from a website outside your niche – especially not from a 3P-website (porn, poker, pay-day loans), no matter how good their SEO metrics are. Similarly, getting a link from Joan Doe’s blog that has two readers (her mom and her dog). Finally, you shouldn’t chase after getting featured on TechCrunch, even if they are a big ass website and you’re doing something in tech, because their readers are most likely not interested in what you have to offer. They are killing their time with their butts firmly planted in an office chair and are not looking to buy stuff. See how I don’t even mention SEO in there?

Focus on getting your links in front of your target audience. If you focus your outreach marketing on having a direct ROI from the referral traffic you get, you will be taking good care of the SEO-side of things automatically. Calculating the ROI of outreach marketing I hope that I have convinced you by now that outreach marketing is not a scam and you can do it without causing harm to your website or your brand (assuming you do it right). But before you rush off to get your outreach marketing going, we need to talk ROI. You’d be ill-advised jumping into anything without at least computing the possible ROI before you do it.

After all, you might have other (more valuable) options to spend what limited time you have. First you need to know how much you’re going to invest into getting one link. Say you’re investing two hours to write a guest post and an additional half-hour for outreach and administrative work related to getting that link and you value your time at $50 per hour. This means you’re investing (roughly) $125 into getting this single link. This number obviously depends on the website we’re talking about: Some websites like directories or profile pages won’t take you more than 10 minutes to get a link from (and links from them are worth less to you), while getting featured on a popular website in your niche might costs you an arm and a leg (but it might be worth it).

Now we know the costs, but how do we calculate (well guesstimate) the value of one link? There are two ways you can do so, let’s explore them – assuming we want to get a link from this blog:.

• Go to • Enter the URL of the website you’re trying to get a link from into the box (i.e. ) and hit RETURN. • Search for the “Domain Authority” value (45). • Multiply that value by $2.5 (). This gives you a rough guesstimate of the dollar value of any link on the web – in the case of Andy’s website that’s roughly $110. It’s a great rule of thumb for small and medium sized websites. The problem with this method is, that Domain Authority is capped at 100 – so no link can be worth more than $250 with this method.

But clearly, getting featured on the or will have a slightly (!) higher value than that. The second approach is more complicated, but it takes into account the specifics of your business. We are going to work our way backwards from the sale for this one. • We need your customer lifetime value (LTV – say $200) and your conversion rate from visitor to sale (CR – say 1%) • Multiplying LTV * CR we get the average value per visitor (VPV – that’s 0.01 * $200 = $2) for your business • Dividing the cost for the link by the value per visitor (cost / VPV) we get: $125 / $2 = 62.5 This tells you, that you need to get at least 63 visitors from the link to break even on your time investment. That isn’t too big a number and it can be even lower, if you have a higher LTV or when you get the link in front of just the right audience (which will increase the conversion rate for that cohort).

The only question that remains – and that I sadly can’t answer for you – is this: Will you get 63 people to click on that link on that website? If you can answer this question with a “Yes”, I think you should chase that link down. Lastly, remember that we don’t take SEO into account here at all.

It is hard to measure the effect of a single link, so consider it gravy on top. The Good, The Bad, The Ugly – which links you want and which you want to avoid Now that we’ve covered the fundamentals, it is time to talk a bit more in-depth about where to get links from and which websites you should definitely avoid. As mentioned before, you don’t want to get any links from websites in dubious niches like poker, porn and payday loans.

These are not good company for a respectable website. You also don’t want to have too many incoming links from the 1000’s of free web directories (startup directories anyone?) out there as it may harm your standing with the SEO gods. Having a few (high-quality, say ) directories link to you isn’t a problem, but having 100’s or 1000’s certainly is. The same goes for comment spamming random blogs around the internet, creating dozens of free blogs on WordPress.com or Tumblr, and poorly written, mass-produced guest posts all across the web.

That’s not to say that blog comments or guest posts don’t have value. You just need to do it right. If it can be automated (or outsourced for $0.50/hour to developing countries), you’re doing it wrong.

The rule of thumb is to get links that take significant work to acquire. This will keep you in good standing with the SEO gods. The way to go about link building/link earning/outreach marketing today is to find suitable websites, find a contact there, develop a relationship and eventually you will get a link from it. Case in point: Andy and I go back well over a year.

We’ve been to conferences, chatted a lot, he gave me advice on, we even had lunch together when I visited his home town. NB: I wasn’t after getting a link from Andy – in this case it just happened – but building a relationship always comes before building a link. [Editor’s note: I approached Christoph to write an article for this blog] Here are some ideas where you can get your links placed: • editorial content on websites in your niche (news articles, blog posts like this one, etc) • lists of related products/websites/etc (like LinksSpy.com on ) • partner/sponsors directories (e.g.

This or ) Website content (blog posts, news articles, etc) usually results in a spike of traffic and then it slows down to a crawl. Lists and partner directories on the other hand will give you a more constant flow of traffic. Just look at these two images below: One is from LinksSpy getting published on ProductHunt – and the other is the traffic from when someone included LinksSpy on their ProductHunt list (with a small spike in the middle when that list was itself mentioned on a newsletter). Finding Outreach Opportunities But how does one find these websites? I’m quite sure you could name a few websites in your niche off the top of your head, but that will ultimately give you maybe one or two links – which won’t turn you into an overnight success. You need more; you want more.

Option A is to just Google for it. Use terms like “best $PRODUCT_NICHE in 2015” or “$NICHE blog”. If you want to get really smart(-y) you can use one of the tips from and search for “blog for us $PRODUCT_NICHE”. You can also use blog directories like and look for opportunities there.

Here’s a quick link you can use: (Replace “NICHE” with your own niche after the page loads) Option B is to use, where people are constantly searching for industry experts to do interview round-ups. Just search through the list and see if you can make a meaningful contribution to any of the interviews. You’ll usually get a nice mention in the process. ( Bonus for content marketers: You can post your own interview questions and convert the answers into a blog post with built-in content promotion – all the experts will want to share it) Option C is a bit more involved. Using and the URLs of your competitors you can find the places where they get their links from. Knowing where they got their links from allows you to contact the very same websites and get the same links.

This list isn’t complete – there are way more ways to find outreach opportunities. But these three will allow you to find the first few, get your feet wet and experience the success that comes with building links. You can always go deeper later on.

Competitive Link Analysis Options A and B are pretty much straight-forward, but you’re likely wondering by now “why would I want to get the same links my competitors already have?” Well, there’s a reason your competitors are ranking ahead of you in Google’s search results. Aside from them nailing technical/on-site SEO (), they have more and better links than you have. A little spying on your competition to see what works can’t hurt. Secondly, getting links from the same websites as your competition will (theoretically) put you on par with them. In reality you won’t be able to replicate the link profile of another website and you wouldn’t want to either, as they might have a bunch of dodgy links. What you can do is combine the best links from a number of competitors, effectively giving you a better link profile than any of your competitors. When I say “competitor” I use that term loosely. 2 Auto Fighter Runescape Cheats on this page.

It can be either an actual competitor, another website that ranks ahead of you in the search results, a website in your industry or any number of things. You can use all of them to find valuable link opportunities. How to Find Websites Linking to your Competition There is a number of websites that show you the backlink profile of any given website. There is Moz’s (Which I have mentioned above), then there is,, and. They all give you information which websites link to the website (your competitor’s website) under scrutiny, but with varying levels of detail.

I generally found Ahrefs to be most accurate, but OpenLinkProfiler and Moz are free(-mium), so we will just use those for now. Here are the steps you need to take in OpenSiteExplorer to get the valuable links for your competitors: • Open in your browser • Enter your competitor URL in the form field. E.g.: ““ • Set the following parameters: • Target: this root domain • Link Source: only external • Link Type: link equity • select “Group by subdomain & show social/contact links” • This will give you the This list groups the incoming, external links by the domain they originate from. Additionally links that do not pass SEO juice are filtered out. Looking through this list you will find some interesting websites you can ask for links.

You can also see where the links were published (e.g. Blog posts, partner lists). Repeat the process for as many competitors as you like. When you examine multiple competitors make a special note for each website that links to more than one competitor. For example links to the following “competitors” for Andy’s website: • • • • These websites (the ones that link to many competitors) are often a good selection for your first batch of outreach targets. They have given links freely in the past and they have talked about your competition, which suggests they will be open to a cooperation with you.

Incidentally, LinksSpy was built to find these websites. Caveat: You still need to apply sound judgement whether you want a link from a given website or not. Some websites might be ‘dodgy’ and you would risk getting slapped by Google if you get a link from them. Or maybe they are really great websites and you would love to get a link from them, but you know that you won’t get a link from the New York Times a week after launching with six active users.

Putting the “Outreach” into “Outreach Marketing” By now you should have a list of at least a hundred outreach targets. There are two more steps remaining on your way to making millions of dollars, getting world-famous, and saving the planet. That’s your plan – right? As a first step you need to find contact details (i.e.

The email address) of an author on that website. A few ways to find the right email address: • Look around for a “Contact Us” page.

• Check if the author’s name is a link (if so check that page for his email address). • Check the author’s social media profiles.

• Try to guess the right email address (e.g. Will often work – works great for this!). If all else fails, you can always try your luck with “” or ““. Drafting the Perfect Outreach Email Lastly, you (just) need to send the actual outreach email. If you’re cold emailing someone, it is best to not ask for favours/links right in the first email. What I recommend instead is to ask for their expert’s opinion on an article you have written.

Everyone likes to be seen as an expert and to be asked for their opinion – as long as the topic interests them. Five out of ten times they will – at least – share your article. At this point you’ll be off to a good start: You’ve already got some value (social media mention!) and started to built a relationship that might end in a link for you. So here are a few tips on how to write a great first outreach email: • Include the person’s name in the salutation (“Hi Andy” beats the hell out of “Hi/Hi there/Hiya!”). • Keep it short.

• Do some research. It is really annoying to get emails from people who obviously haven’t bothered to find out what your blog/website is about and who the audience is. • Find something you genuinely appreciate about them/their work and mention it. • Be sincere. Don’t write something if you don’t mean it.

• Don’t ask for a link. Repeat: DO NOT ASK FOR A LINK. Motivational tip: When doing outreach marketing, always set your goal as “send X emails per day”.

Don’t focus on “get X positive replies per day” as this is demotivating. “Send X emails per day” makes every email sent a small success, whereas with “get X positive replies” every email sent (without a reply) is a small defeat. Get started with Outreach Marketing now Wow. That certainly was a LOT to swallow.

So here’s a short recap for you: • Link building/outreach marketing is a long-term strategy that boosts your SEO and PR efforts. • You can do it in an ethical way without spamming blogs/people. • Searching for “$NICHE write for us” on Google and competitive link analysis as described above are excellent ways to find outreach opportunities.

• Drafting a good outreach email involves research and the email should be focused around the person you’re contacting. • The immediate goal of outreach marketing is not to get a link, it is to build a relationship. Links and social shares will follow. You’ve got all the information you need: • You have a big list of outreach opportunities now.

• You have the contact details for each opportunity. • You know how to craft an outreach email. All that is left now, is for you to go out and hit those contacts. Build relationships and you’ll get links. Christoph Engelhardt is the founder of – a SaaS application built to help SEO and PR agencies dig up the most valuable outreach opportunities for their clients’ websites. Running a software company from a laptop while travelling the world sounds like a dream lifestyle. But what is it really like?

Steve McLeod was kind enough to share his experiences as a nomadic software entrepreneur. Running a one-person software company while travelling doesn’t work. And yet I’ve been doing it for years. I’m writing this in Patagonia, in a hotel lobby. There’s pop music playing too loud to fully concentrate. The Internet connection is sketchy; in fact I’m writing this now because the Internet is unavailable again.

The chair is not good for my posture. The table is too high for comfortable typing. My productivity is abysmal. I’m partway through adding a new feature to my software, and doing it in this environment is unproductive.

There is a big glacier an hour’s drive from here that I’d rather be viewing. I know that tomorrow or the next day, when I see the glacier, I’ll come back to the hotel too exhausted to code or to deal with customer support.

What does this mean for my business? Low productivity and poorer-than-intended customer support response times, which lead to lower sales. My alternative to spending a decent part of each year travelling would be to stay in my home city, working better, selling more software and earning more money. Here are some real problems I’ve faced working on the road: • In Ukraine my MacBook Pro’s screen stopped working. I didn’t intend to return home for another week. I had to choose between returning home earlier; trying to get the computer serviced promptly in a foreign country; supporting customers for my Mac software for the next week on Windows computer in Internet cafes; or buying a new computer and trying to get all my development tools on it.

• In Turkey, YouTube was blocked. Which was mostly a good thing for productivity, but as my video demo was hosted on YouTube at the time, I couldn’t monitor it. • In Syria, Facebook was blocked. Okay, that was incontrovertibly good. • In Turkmenistan there was no Internet in my hotel.

Or any hotel, just about, except on age-old computers in one hotel’s inaccurately-named “business centre”. No WiFi in cafes. For a few days my company was getting no attention. • Travelling in a shared taxi for hour after hour between obscure locations in Iraq (true story!) left me utterly spent. All I wanted to do after getting into a hotel is to relax.

But that customer support backlog is nagging, nagging, nagging at me. • Skype is blocked in Qatar and in some other countries.

This really ruins the conference call you had planned. • In Lebanon I needed to update my product with a critical fix. The Internet at the time in Beirut was so bad, it would take an hour to upload my 20 MB software. During which time I’m hoping not to get a network disruption, from one of Beirut’s daily 3-hour power outages. My 2-minute scripted solution for building and uploading updates, followed by a 5-minute smoke test turned into a 2-hour task, during which time I need to keep ordering coffees so as to keep the staff happy in the cafe supplying me with WiFi.

• Coding while sipping a cocktail in a beach-side bar in the Caribbean is difficult. The brilliant midday sun makes the laptop screen hard to read. Actually that doesn’t sound too bad at all. A very real risk includes getting my computer stolen, which, by some miracle, has not happened yet. How do I make this running-a-one-person-company-while-travelling thing work? Here’s some things I do: • I keep everything in multiple online places.

I use DropBox for documents and code. I use GitHub too. Without excuse, everything needs to be recoverable without drama if the computer breaks or gets stolen. • I set aside frequent rest periods where I can get through a backlog of harder customer support issues and work on new features or bug-fixes. It is actually nice sometimes to not climb Andean glaciers nor to see orang-utans in Borneo, and instead to do something prosaic like working for a day or two. • I try to be disciplined in keeping my customer support inbox empty. When I arrive at a new hotel after a long, dusty trip, before rewarding myself with an ice-cold beer, I’ll force myself to tackle the inbox.

• In recent months I’ve been outsourcing customer support. I pay my support representative a monthly fee in return for which she deals with what she can handle herself each day. This helps so much. • I aim to spend my months in my home city in high-intensity bouts of feature-adding, taking advantage of having a good work environment. • I produce desktop software.

Not SaaS, which would be terrible to support and monitor in these environments. • Moving source control from Subversion (which needs an Internet connection to be usable) to Git has helped a lot. • I concentrate on keeping my software as solid as I can, and the user experience as smooth as possible. These two things help reduce the customer support load. • I try to keep things in perspective. Yes, getting my computer stolen would be a minor catastrophe.

Yes, a sketchy Internet connection is annoying. Yes, some customers might get irritated at the occasionally slow support. But here’s the other side: Three years ago the city I grew up in was destroyed by two earthquakes, killing hundreds and destroying a significant amount of the city. A year before that I suffered a terrible personal tragedy.

Do other things matter so much that I should sit at home to keep customers as satisfied as possible? Although my lifestyle might seem enviable, it can be lonely at times.

You don’t realise how nice it is to be able to regularly catch up with the same friends for dinner or a drink until you can’t do this for long periods. Luckily, I often manage to find someone I know well to join me for part of each trip. Here in Patagonia and beyond, my girlfriend is travelling with me for two months or so. I’d not be travelling for so long anymore without companionship. On the other hand, my one-person software company has enabled me to reach a goal I’ve long had: to travel to more than 100 different countries. I earn a decent income from my work and thousands of customers love my software. And that is enough for me.

We tend to hear a lot about software industry success stories. But most of us mere mortals have to fail a few times before we learn enough to succeed.

In this guest post William Echlin talks about the hard lessons he has learned about creating and selling software products. Probably, like you, I started developing my own software application a few years back. I had this dream of working for myself and becoming financially independent.

The money side was a nice goal to have but ultimately I was looking for the fulfilment of working for myself. Sound familiar? Well, if it does, you may have learnt many of the lessons I’ve learnt. I don’t mind admitting now that I got carried away. I got carried away with building a test management application to the extent that I forget about many of the key things you need in place to build a successful business. After a few years work I’d created the leading open source test management application (a product called QaTraq that’s still available on Source Forge but a little dormant).

It had cost me time, money and effort. I’d achieved some success with building and marketing a free product. Next stop taking it commercial. This is where it gets brutal. About a year into leaving a full time job I’m taking the last £1,000 out of the joint bank account. I’m making some sales but it’s damn tough. A few months later and I’m in the supermarket £15,000 in debt wondering if my credit card is about to be rejected for the families weekly shop.

You read about this sort of thing in biographies on successful entrepreneurs. These guys take it to the limit and then succeed and make millions. Sounds so glamorous. When your wife, 3 year old son and 1 year old daughter depend on that credit card being accepted believe me it’s NOT glamorous. Building a business has always been about balancing design, development, sales, marketing, support, testing, etc. When you’re a one man band that’s not easy. You try to do everything.

You’re bloody brilliant at building the product. The trouble is, once you want to make a living out of it, that “building” is almost the least important bit. After I’d spent 5 years building my product I stumbled upon one very useful piece of advice. It was a little late for me but maybe it’ll help you.

“Learn how to market and sell before you build your product. Learn these crafts by picking a product that’s already been built and act as a reseller”.

That’s worth reading again (it’s counter intuitive). What’s being said here is that if you can’t market and sell a product (ANY product) then the odds of succeeding with your own product are slim. If you can’t “market and sell” what on earth is the point in wasting all that time, effort and money building your own product?

If you’re never going to be able to market it, and sell it, why build it? So find a product in a slightly different sector and sign up as a reseller. Save yourself the time and effort of building a product and practice marketing and sales with someone else’s product first. Create a web site, develop an ad words campaign and start promoting with social media. Sell the product! If you can’t get the hang of this why bother building your own?

If you can get the hang of building your own marketing machine it won’t be wasted effort. If you’re clever and pick the right product / sector you just need to switch the product on your site a year or so down the road.

Once you’ve built the marketing and sales engine switch it to sell the product you’re building. I’m not saying that this is the only way to go about it.

I’m just saying that if you don’t have the determination to learn, understand and be successful with marketing and sales early on, then it’s unlikely you’ll succeed with your own product. So why waste time building it. It’s a tough lesson to learn. One I learnt the hard way. And the specific lessons I learnt the hard way? Well I’d do these things first if I was ever to do this again: 1. Create at least one lead generation channel as an affiliate for another product.

That lead generation channel will probably be a web site and as part of that you’ll need to master things like: • Google Adwords • Social media • Email marketing • Blogging • Link building All these things take a lot of time. Do you have the determination to learn and execute on all of this? Spend some time in a sales related role. Initially I was working in a full time job whilst building my own product in my spare time. The best thing I did was offer to help the sales team with product demos. I learnt lots from working closely with sales people (I didn’t like them very much, but that’s a different matter) and clients. If you can’t do product demos to clients, or you can’t talk to clients confidently then you don’t stand a chance of selling anything.

People buy from people and a product demo is THE place to show case YOU (and the product) 3. Spend time learning about re-marketing. A lot of money goes into getting that initial lead. Don’t waste it! Understand Google’s re-marketing campaigns. These allow you to follow the people that came to your site and continue serving them banner ads on other sites.

Understand email marketing once you’ve captured an email address. Yes I hate most of this when I’m on the receiving end. The reality is that it works though. That’s why companies do it (and why Google make so much money). I’ll tell you now that your business won’t survive if you don’t master some of these techniques. And if your business doesn’t survive then every ounce of effort you’ve put into building that application is wasted!

Spend time learning about cross selling. A significant amount of revenue can come from cross selling other products. When was the last time you went to a restaurant and they didn’t try to sell you a bread roll? When was the last time you flew somewhere and they didn’t try to sell you priority boarding? For you this might be in the guise of selling your leads to other companies that have complementary products.

It might be providing different editions of your application. There are many other ways to add additional revenue streams to your prime product sale.

These streams are absolutely critical to the success of your business. Don’t try to become a sales person. You don’t have to be a sales man/woman to sell. Some of the best sales people I’ve worked with are those that just go out of their way to HELP the customer. They understand their niche inside out and have the gift, not to sell, but to HELP. People that are looking to buy something want help. They want an itch scratched or a problem solved.

If you can help them with a solution then you’re most of the way towards making the sale. Forget all this rubbish about psychology and techniques to influence people. The best thing you can do is enter the mind set of helping!

Go out of your way to help. I don’t have all of this right by any stretch. I know one thing though. Products don’t sell themselves. And if you’re not prepared to start learning about sales and marketing you won’t sell your product. It was all a bit ironic for me though. I spent years building my own test management product to help software testers.

It even started out as the leading open source solution in it’s market for many years. I mastered SEO and created a great lead generation process (the oxygen of any business). I created a version which I put a price on and sold to companies. I even sold to a number of significant companies. But I just couldn’t do all of it. I couldn’t balance the design, development, testing, marketing, sales, support, etc. It’s brutally painful when this dawns on you.

In the end what I’d really mastered was lead generation. I ended up with a web site that attracted my target audience but failed to sell much. When you realise that, you realise that it’s the product. Nothing wrong with the marketing and sales. It’s the product.

There were better products out there. Kind of tough to swallow but as soon as I did, I moved on. These leads, or rather people (because leads are actually real people), were looking for help. I just needed to provide them with the right product and services.

So I started reselling other products and providing consultancy around those products on my website. In the end I had one of the toughest bits right.

If you get the lead generation right you’ve built a marketing foundation that you can build any type of business around. For me I just wished I figured the marketing piece out before I’d built my product. Now I just work on my marketing.

Oh, and I help companies with their software testing and test management. For me at least, it’s much easier this way. William Echlin has spent 20 years in testing, working on everything from air traffic control systems to anti-virus engines. He had a bad experience in his early childhood trying to effectively manage test cases with vi (he’s still a huge fan of vi but recognises that text files make a lousy repository for test cases). In an attempt to deal with these childhood demons he became a consultant on all things related to test management. I believe that the best way for most small software vendors to make money off their software is to charge for it. So I was interested to spot a post on BOS by someone who had tried ads, toolbars and charging to monetize the same piece of software.

He kindly agreed to share his experience anonymously. Obviously it is only one data point, but the results are pretty unequivocal. I developed a freeware program six or seven years ago. A piece of utility software, for either home or business use, in an extremely crowded and competitive niche. The downloads grew organically and settled into what they are now, around 30,000-40,000 per month. I’ve never used any paid advertising, but have always had a forum and been responsive to user queries. That, coupled with regular updates, built the software a fairly loyal user base.

My original idea was to make money by attracting visitors to the website and using Google Ads. This isn’t generally done on software sites, but it kind of worked for me (I still had a day job though). Eventually it was making one or two thousand dollars per month. I experimented with toolbar installer offers – Bing for the US and UK, Ask for the rest of the world. The revenue wasn’t too bad, but the ads made more. Eventually I decided to try selling a ‘Pro’ version of the software, with even more features.

I planned to keep the free version as a ‘gateway’. Note the free version still has more features than non-free competitors. It took about 6 months to write (evenings and weekends), and was finally released (with no marketing, apart from the website) in Jan 2012. As you can see, from the first full month the sales revenue brought in ten times what the toolbar did. I wound down the site ads, and eventually removed the toolbar (you can see the revenue tail off in the chart). I quit the day job! This is a guest post by Joannes Vermorel, founder of the.

Software developers seem to be herd animals. They like to stay very close to each other. As a result, the marketplace ends up riddled with while other segments are deserted, despite high financial stakes. During my routine browsing of software business forums, I have noticed that the most common answer to Why the heck are you producing yet another ToDo list? Is the desperately annoying Because I can’t find a better idea. This is desperately annoying because the world is full (saturated even) with problems so painful that people or companies would be very willing to pay to relieve the pain, even if only a little.

A tiny fraction of these problems are addressed by the software industry (such as the need for ToDo lists), but most are just lacking any decent solution. Hence, I detail below 3 low-competition software niches in retail.

Indeed, after half a decade of running, I believe, despite the, that I have acquired insights on a few B2B markets close to my own. Firstly I will address a few inevitable questions: Q: If you have uncovered such profitable niches, why don’t you take over them yourself? A: Mostly because running a growing business already takes about 100% of my management bandwidth. Q: If these niches have little competition, entry barriers must be high? A: Herding problems aside, I believe not.

Q: Now these niches have been disclosed, they will be swarmed over by competitors, right? A: Odds are extremely low on that one. The herd instinct is just too strong. Do I have to pay you if I use one of your ideas? No, I am releasing this into the public domain. I expect no payment if you get rich (unless you want to!) and accept no liability if you fail miserably. Execution is everything.

And don’t trust a random stranger on the Internet – do your own market research. Before digging into the specifics of those niches, here are a couple of signs that I have noticed to be indicators of desperate lack of competition: • No one bothers about doing even basic SEO.

• No prices on display. • No one offers self-signup – you have to go through a sales rep. • Little in the way of online documentation or screenshots are available. However, lack of competition does not mean lack of competitors.

It’s just not the sort of competition that keeps you up at night. Through private one-to-one discussions with clients of those solutions, here is the typical feedback I get: • Licenses are hideously expensive. • Setup takes months. • Upgrade takes months (and is hideously expensive).

• Every single feature feels half-baked. By way of anecdotal evidence – during a manufacturer integration with our forecasting technology a few months ago at Lokad, we discovered that the client had been charged $2,000 by its primary software provider in order to activate Remote Desktop on the Windows Server where the software was installed. Apparently, this was well within the norm of their usual fees for the inventory management system in place. Granted, just being cheaper is usually not a good place to be in the market.

Yet, when a competitor’s software is designed in such a way that it takes a small army of consultants to get it up and running, they can’t just lower their license fees to match yours – assuming that your design is not half-baked too. The competition would have to redesign their solution from scratch, and give up on their consultingware revenues. So you are in a great position to. With a market managing over, one would expected retail be saturated by fantastic software products. It turns out this is not the case. Not by a long shot – except eCommerce (e.g. Online shopping carts) which attracts a for no good reason.

Some salient aspects of the retail software market: • Most retailers are already equipped in basic stuff such as point-of-sale, inventory management and order management systems. So you don’t have to deliver that yourself. On the contrary, you should rely on the assumption that such software is already in place. • As far the Lokad experience goes with its online sales forecasting service, retailers are not unwilling to disclose their data to a 3rd party over the Internet. It takes trust and trust takes time.

Interestingly enough, at Lokad we do sign NDAs, but rather infrequently. We are not unwilling, but most retailers (even top 100 worldwide ones) simply don’t even bother.

• Retailers have a LOT of data, and yet unlike banks, they have little talented manpower to deal with it. Many retail businesses are highly profitable though and could afford to pay for this kind of manpower, but as far I can tell, it’s just not part of the usual Western retail culture. Talents go to management, not to the trenches. Niche 1: EOQ (Economic Order Quantity) calculator Retailers know they need to keep their stocks as low as possible, while preserving their service levels (aka rate of non stock-outs), see this for more details. If the marginal ordering cost for replenishment was zero, then retailers would produce myriads of incremental replenishment orders, precisely matching their own sales. This is not the case. One century ago, F.

Harris introduced the economic order quantity (EOQ) which represents the optimal quantity to be ordered at once by the retailer, when friction factors such as the shipping cost are taken into account. Obviously, the Wilson Formula (see for details) is an extremely early attempt at addressing the question. It’s not too hard to see that many factors are not accounted for, such as non-flat shipping costs, volume discounts, obsolescence risks etc. Picking the right quantity to order is obviously a fundamental question for each retailer performing an inventory replenishment operation. Yet, AFAIK, there is no satisfying solution available on the market. Systems just graciously let the retailer manually enter the EOQ along with other product settings. Naturally, this process is extremely tedious, firstly because of the sheer number of products, secondly because whenever a supply parameter is changing, the retailer has to go through all the relevant products all over again.

The EOQ calculator would typically come as multi-tenant web app. Main features being: • Product and supplier data import from any remotely reachable SQL database[1].

• Web UI for entering / editing EOQ settings. • EOQ calculation engine. • Optional EOQ export back to the ERP. Pricing guestimate: Charge by the number of products rather than by the number of users. I would suggest to start around $50/month for small shops and go up to $10k/month for large retail networks.

Gut feeling: EOQ seemingly involves a lot of expert knowledge (my take: acquiring this knowledge is a matter of months, not years). So there is an opportunity to position yourself as an expert here, which is a good place to be as it facilitates inbound marketing and PR with specialized press. Also, EOQ can be narrowed down to sub-verticals in retail (e.g. Textiles) in case competition grows stronger. Niche 2: Supplier scorecard manager For a retailer, there are about 3 qualities that define a good supplier: lowest prices, shortest shipment delays, best availability levels (aka no items out-of-stock delaying the shipments). Better, sometime exclusive, suppliers give a strong competitive edge to a retailer.

Setting aside payment terms and complicated discounts, comparing supplier prices is simple, yet, this is only the tip of the iceberg. If the cheapest supplier doesn’t deliver half of the time, “savings” will turn into very expensive lost sales. As far I can observe, beyond pricing, assessing quality of the suppliers is hard, and most retailers suffer an ongoing struggle with this issue. An idea that frequently comes to the mind of retailers is to establish contracts with suppliers that involve financial penalties if delays or availability levels are not enforced.

In practice, the idea is often impractical. Firstly, you need to be Walmart-strong to inflict any punitive damage on your suppliers without simply losing them.

Secondly, shipping delays and availabilities needs to be accurately monitored, which is typically not the case. A much better alternative, yet infrequently implemented outside the large retail networks, consists of establishing a supplier scorecard based on the precise measuring of both lead times (i.e. The duration between the initial order and the final delivery) and of the item availability. The scorecard is a synthetic, typically 1-page, document refreshed every week or every month that provides the overall performance of each supplier. The scorecard includes a synthetic score like A (10% best performing suppliers), B and C (10% worst performing suppliers).

Scorecards are shared with the suppliers themselves. Instead of punishing bad suppliers, the scorecard helps them in realizing there is a problem in the first place. Then, if the situation doesn’t improve after a couple of months, it helps the retailer itself to realize the need for switching to another supplier The scorecard manager web app would feature: • Import of both purchase orders and delivery receipts (this might be 2 distinct systems). [2] • Consolidation of per-supplier lead time and availability statistics. • One-page scorecard reports with 3rd party access offered to the suppliers. Pricing guestimate: Charge based on the number of suppliers and the numbers of orders to be processed.

Again, the number of users having access to the system might not be a reliable indicator. Starting at $50/month for small shops up to $10k/month for large retail networks. Gut feeling: By positioning your company as intermediate between retailers and their suppliers, you benefit from a built-in viral marketing effect, which is rather unusual in B2B.

On the other hand, there isn’t that much expert knowledge (real or assumed) in the software itself. Niche 3: Dead simple sales analytics Retail is a fast-paced business, and a retailer needs to keep a really close eye on its sales figures in order to stay clear of bankruptcy. Globally, the software market is swarming with hundreds of sales analytics tools, most of them being distant competitors of Business Objects acquired by SAP years ago. However, the business model of most retailers is extremely simple and straightforward, making all those Business Intelligence tools vast overkill for small and medium retail networks. Concepts that matter in retail are: sales per product, product categories and points of sale. That’s about it.

Hence, all it should take to have a powerful sales visualization tool setup for a retailer should be access to the 2 or 3 SQL tables of the ERP defining products and transactions; and the rest being hard-coded defaults. Google Analytics would be an inspiring model.

Indeed, Google does not offer to webmasters any flexibility whatsoever in the way the web traffic is reported; but in exchange, setting-up Google Analytics requires no more than merely cutting-and-pasting a block of JavaScript into your web page footer. Naturally it would be a web app, with the main features being: • Product and sales data import from any remotely reachable SQL database.[2] • Aggregate sales per day/week/month. • Aggregate per product/product category/point-of-sales.

• A Web UI ala Google Analytics, with a single time-series graph per page. Pricing guestimate: Regular per-usage fee, a la Salesforce.com. Starting at $5/user/month basic features to $100/user/month for more fancy stuff.

Gut feeling: probably the weakest of the 3 niches, precisely because it has too much potential and is therefore doomed to attract significant attention later on. Also, achieving a wow effect on first contact with the product will probably be critical to turn prospects into clients. Market entry points Worldwide, there are plenty of competitors already for these niches. Yet, again, this does not mean much. Firstly because retail is so huge, secondly because it’s a heavily fragmented market anyway. First, there are big guys like SAP, JDA or RedPrairie, typically way too expensive for anything but large retail networks.

Second, there are hundreds of mid-market ERPs, typically with a strong national (or even regional) focus. However, those ERPs don’t delve into fine-grained specifics of retail, as they are too busy already dealing with a myriad of feature requests for their +20 modules (accounting, billing, HR, payments, shipping etc). Hence, there is a lot of space for razor-sharp web apps that focus on one, and only one, aspect of the retail business.

Basically, leaving aside all other stuff to either ERPs or other web apps. In order to enter the market, the good news is that mid-size retailers are pretty much everywhere. So you can just use a tiny bit of networking to get in touch with a couple of neighbouring businesses, even if you don’t have that much of a network in the first place. Then, being razor-sharp in a market where very little online content is available, offers you a cheap opportunity at doing some basic SEO based on the very specific questions your software is addressing.

Q: I am interested, I have questions, can I ask you those questions? A: Naturally, my rate is 200€/h (no just kidding). [1] Don’t even bother about providing a super-complicated setup wizard.

Just offer a $2k to $5k setup package that includes the ad-hoc handful of SQL lines to match the existing data of the retailer. We are already using this approach at Lokad with. Alternatively, we also offer an, if the retailer is willing to deal with the data formatting on its own. [2] Again, I suggest an approach similar to the one of Salescast by Lokad: don’t even try to robotize data import, just design the software in such a way that adding a custom adapter is cheap.

Joannes Vermorel is the founder of, company motto “You send data, we return forecasts”. Lokad won the first Windows Azure award from Microsoft in 2010, out of 3000 companies applying worldwide. He has a personal blog that mostly deals with. Is a real issue for every software company, large and small, and it isn’t going away any time soon. So when I heard that fellow microISV owner Nikos Bozinis had created a tool to help software vendors fight piracy, I asked him to write a guest post. He kindly agreed to write this post about software piracy, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and his product.

Why buy something when you can download it ‘for free’?. People around the world seem to have very lax morals when it comes to abusing digital content. Downloading the latest movie or windows software from rapidshare.com somehow doesn’t strike them as theft — it’s not like stealing a loaf of bread!

The traditional music industry is already down on its knees as a result, and software may be the next to follow. Software authors and music enterprises are fighting back by tightening the DRM (Digital Rights Management) of their products in a futile effort to stop online piracy.

But usually crackers have no problem circumventing any protection system that we can dream up. To add insult to injury by such reinforced software protection and activation systems. A little bit like the war on terror, isn’t it?

A different line of defense for ailing copyright owners is the (DMCA), a US law with global reach for copyright protection (the european EUCD equivalent is not as broadly known). This law is very broad, and not without, but it works – closing down websites that distribute illegal content and removing copyright infringing downloads from file-hosting websites with summary procedures, among other things.

So if you discover your software illegally distributed in some warez website, you can send a so called “DMCA section 512 takedown notice” to the website host and they are expected to remove that particular file from circulation —. Software Piracy I have been a microISV for over 10 years so lets forget about the entertainment industry and concentrate on my field, software. There are and that’s just for Windows.

Many are created by very small to medium sized companies — many even run by a single programmer/webmaster/marketer/entrepreneur. I bet that all these programs are cracked in one way or another — at least those popular enough for crackers to care about them. If you search for warez or torrents you will find the software you want for free, either the latest or an older working version.

Piracy statistics from (click image to enlarge). I sell a file manager called. I track how many people install the program every day and also I have a good guesstimate for the number of people using cracked versions of xplorer². I estimate over 70% of the regular users use one of the known keygens. Imagine if this 70% didn’t exist or it was converted to regular paying customers! How is it done? Downloadable software falls into 2 categories: those that run in trial mode until you buy a key to unlock the full functionality; and those that are special downloads for customers that pay the registration fee.

In all cases some sort of unlocking takes place using a plain key, or a license file, or online activation, or some combination thereof. Many ISVs write their own licensing code, while others rely on off-the-shelf protection and licensing products (Armadillo, WinLicense etc). Imagine you shipped your source code along with your program, then it would be trivial for even amateur crackers to bypass your protection and run the program without paying.

Very few vendors supply source code, but people in the know can read off your licensing logic like an open book using specialized reverse engineering tools (softICE, IDA and other debuggers and disassemblers). Then they can create a ‘patch’ or modification to your executable that bypasses the protection. An even worse type of compromise is a keygen. When the cracker uncovers the logic of your unlock keys, he can create a program to generate such keys which look and behave exactly like the legitimate ones you sell to your customers. Then he doesn’t need to patch your program, he just supplies this keygen to the warez community and everyone can help themselves to your program. You can guard yourself against such attacks using for your keys. Is there a perfect protection system?

In short, no. If you consider that your program is presenting its logic to anyone with moderate experience in machine language, then sooner or later any protection can be circumvented. Professional protection schemes utilize encryption to protect sensitive parts of your code, but even they won’t withstand the cracker test. And remember the harder your DRM the more likely your program will be mistaken for malware (!) as many viruses and trojans use encryption tricks. Even if there was a perfect system, your sales would still be at risk.

All that’s required is some of your customers to post their unlock key in a warez site, and the game is lost. Dnn Community Edition on this page. You would then blacklist that serial, until another one was leaked and so on. The warez scene There are people who don’t spend any time in Facebook or YouTube.

They surf the internet for free stuff. Cracked versions of commercial software (aka warez) circulate in some shady forums that bring together the crackers with the downloaders e.g. Browse a warez site and you will find any software, movie or music you fancy, with an assortment of popups and dodgy advertisements of the usual internet 3P products (Pills, Poker and Girls [sic]). For your convenience there are even specialized search engines that search a number of such forums simultaneously, e.g.. These forums do not host the actual files. They refer the traffic to specialized file hosting services like rapidshare.com.

To make the most of warez you need to buy a subscription to access such file hosting sites (e.g. Unlimited downloads from $9/month). Incurable cheapskates could get away without paying anything though, as you can download for free after a forced (nag) waiting of a minute or two. A bit more up-market are download sites where to gain access you need to purchase a subscription, e.g..

I have never paid to enter such a site, but they promise access to any download you can imagine. So you pay a monthly fee to download as much as you like. Note that this is different from paid-for hosting mentioned above.

I suppose that you need a file hosting subscription on top to get the actual files downloaded. With so much stuff available for free I don’t know if this approach makes economic sense. Finally there are traditional peer-to-peer file sharing networks, where people share their software music and video through torrents.

After the demise of Napster torrents are still strong, with completely decentralized databases immune to legal intervention. The downside of torrents is their inherent unreliability, so people in a hurry will prefer the immediate gratification of a full download from rapidshare.com and the like. Why do they do it? It is easy to understand why someone will prefer ‘free’ software instead of paying up. But what about the crackers, the people who circumvent the DRM and distribute these warez. Why do they do it?

Here are a few plausible motives: • For kicks. The traditional hacker stereotype is a. Cracking into a software’s protection and stripping it clean must be a pleasure in itself, a ritual destruction of the evil Death Star. Marxist theory claims that private property is theft. This concept has struggled with real tangible property, but digital property is the ideal trophy.

Many groups feel that software and music should be free (!) so taking down the big media and software corporations is a noble cause for them. But many small ISVs fall victims too, and the real motives are far less revolutionary • For profit. Marx is dead; long live Das Kapital. Warez downloads are big business in a number of ways: • Direct subscriptions charges to access the downloads • Selling password unlockers (e.g.

You download something in a ZIP archive which is locked and you need to buy some software to unlock it) • Distributing malware. Many downloads are packed with malware (), from straightforward scams and ransomware to trojans that, waiting for instructions to launch a or send spam.

You *can* remove illegal downloads If your software is available to download from warez sites, either compromised (patched or keygened) or simply accompanied by a simple serial number to unlock it, you will definitely lose sales. The good news is that, using DMCA provisions, you can have these unauthorized downloads removed. Without these downloads prospective users will have no choice but to buy your software — or move on to your competitor’s cracked software. Here is how to remove illegal downloads: • Find your download links. All illegal downloads end up in a host like rapidshare.com or megaupload.com (I know of more than 100, but there are 10-20 big player websites). A standard Google search for your software name plus ‘crack’, ‘keygen’ or ‘rapidshare’ will find some hits, especially if you.

Even better use specialized warez search engines like with just your software name as a keyword — the results will be just downloads. • Validate download URLs. Some of the download links you discover may be dead (e.g.

Click on each one to see if they are valid or 404. • Send DCMA notices. Group the download links by provider (rapidshare, hotfile, etc), and send a DMCA notice to the abuse email address of each website. Usually this is abuse@website.com (e.g.

Each website lists the steps for filing DMCA notices for file removal. This sounds like a lot of hard work, and it can be, but it works. File sharing websites like rapidshare.com run a legitimate business — they are not responsible for cracks — so if you send them a polite DMCA takedown notice they will remove the copyright infringing downloads. The DCMA takedown notice Strictly speaking when you send a DMCA notice you are making allegations of copyright infringement, which is a serious crime. You would imagine that a formal complaint should be launched under the guidance of a solicitor/lawyer. Given the amount of copyright infringement that goes on, the red tape would bring everything to a standstill.

The beauty of the DMCA law is that it simplifies the procedure. Sometimes a plain English email explaining the situation to the download site, along with a list of your download locations is all that’s required to have the links removed. A few websites require a more formal DMCA email including details such as your company address, contact telephone numbers, and some boilerplate statements like “I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate”. You can find many online so I won’t repeat them here.

The general idea is that you present yourself as the copyright owner and declare the download URLs as unauthorized, and therefore infringing your copyright. Torrents slip by DMCA is very good for removing illegal downloads hosted in popular file sharing websites, but it is powerless against torrents. There is no single source for the download, as the files are kept in many computers. You would have to contact each and every person who shares illegal copies of your software in the peer-to-peer network. This would be hopeless and a waste of effort. Thankfully for the ISV, torrent use is on the decline. People prefer direct downloads of the full package instead of slower peer-to-peer downloads.

The sales pitch Anyone can search and remove illegal downloads manually. I was doing it the hard way for quite some time, each time I released a new version of my software tool (there’s a lot of cracker activity for each release as they need to update their patches and keygens). However this is very tedious, as you must: • enter shady warez forums to search for your keyword, facing annoying popups and adverts you wouldn’t want your wife to see • search many locations to ensure you get as many download URLs as possible • validate each download URL to see if it is still alive or dead • organize download URLs and write DMCA takedown emails for each file hosting website Even if one wipes all the illegal downloads, new ones will appear over time. So the locate-report-remove cycle must be repeated regularly. This was the motivation for writing, a tool that simplifies the removal of illegal downloads. Crack Tracker is a desktop tool, with a meta search engine that securely scans warez databases for your downloads. You supply the search keyword (e.g.

Your software title or company name) then crack tracker will do an exhaustive search, collect a list of suspect download locations and verify the links with robotic efficiency. After you examine the results you just hit a button and the relevant DMCA emails are sent automatically. It doesn’t get any easier than that. Crack Tracker doesn’t have a fancy user interface but it is very easy to use. It knows of more than 120 file hosting websites and works with 6 major warez search engines (the list is expanding). It is free to try as a search engine; to send the actual DMCA emails you need a registration, but I believe the price is very reasonable, especially if you consider the money you lose in pirated versions of your software.

Why don’t you try it for free and see how many cracks of your software it finds? Nikos Bozinis ditched his Process Systems Engineering PhD to run his own microISV since 1999. He also writes a focusing on file management and occasionally on programming, debugging and running a software business.

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