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?
Learn what millionaire shareware developers already know. Here are some tips: 1. You can acquire the rights to an existing shareware program. Some developers create great programs but fail to promote them. Sometimes you can purchase the source code very inexpensively.
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.
My research showed tens of thousands of such sites but there are probably more. Just type in free downloads or free software as a search term in Google, Alexa or Yahoo.com . You could not spend enough money to get anywhere close to that level of traffic. So, why bother? Why even have a web site?
Can You Get Rich With Shareware? Mr. Thomas Deedy, a developer and closet genius, revealed many ways that shareware developers make money giving away software.
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.
These developers sell support packages for as much as $150 an hour by charging by the minute. Or, they sell annual support contracts for $250.
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.
A more advanced approach is to professionally prepare an installation and support video with actual screen shots from the shareware. You can include a troubleshooting menu and sell the training and support package for $250 including a couple hours of live support if needed.
Now, imagine that 250,000 people have downloaded your software that’s designed for small businesses and would have cost them upwards of $2500 if something comparable was available. Let’s imagine for a second that just 2% of those 250,000 people decide not to be frustrated trying to install and use the software with the basic instructions.
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.
Once your shareware has been created and tested you own the rights. That means you can license the program to other companies to collect royalties on all their sales or agree that you will provide support services and keep 100% of the revenues from support.
This may be America’s easiest way to become a multimillionaire and you don’t even have to be a programmer to do it!
Simpler shareware programs don’t require much if any support but they can be equally profitable.
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.” ————————————————————————————————————————–
You can leave the amount of the donation up to the user but I recommend putting in three contribution levels: A $5 donate button, a $10 donate button and a $25 button that offers bonus software valued at hundreds of dollars at that level.
Part of the value of using an upgrade or donate button is that you capture the emails of your users. You can build a wopping big subscriber list which may actually be worth more than the donation. A good opt-in list can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.
If you’d like to become a shareware millionaire try and find an application that will have wide-spread appeal. Look at what others have done and then do it better.
Finally here are a few more ways to make money with free software.
1. You’ll want to create a full version and a basic version from the start. Deliver the full version but make it function with an unlock code. Then, when users pay for the upgrade just send them the unlock code.
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. I created lesson authoring software to make free lessons. You could download it free. But, I also made an upgrade version that permitted the teacher to make Super Lessons that could be sold on my site. So, I make money from people purchasing the Professional Lesson Authoring Software for $1995 and from sale of the Super Lessons. Of course I split the revenue for the Super Lessons with the authors of these lessons. See www.Tutorbug.com
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 your hard eanred money creating software consider becoming a shareware distributor to earn a fee on every paid upgrade. Click on SHAREWARE DISTRIBUTOR for complete details. Free reprint avaialable from: Source Code Millions.