Hi! I have been lurking in BHW for a few months, so I feel like this place is a second home! Thanks everyone for the inspiration here. I didn't know which category to put this, so I put it under this one (my main favorite!)

I have a photo software that I hired someone on Elance to make for me. It is a customized photo enhancer. Long story short.. Tried SEO (wh), backlink building, software submission sites (robosoft), etc, etc.

Longer story shorter, too few sales!! Average 1 sale/2 wks

Now, people who actually buy are really happy with what they get, the testimonials on my ws are real. But so little traffic, so little sales. I get so discouraged, ready to ditch the whole idea, then I make a sale, get all pumped, try a few more techniques, perfect the site, link build, forum post, whatever, then no sales, feel like I am wasting my time!

Now, I know, anything that makes even $1 has potential, and thats what I think too. So anyways, thought I would ask any advice you can provide would be great! My website is www.imagic-photo.com

Thanks!

Advertise

Start an affiliate service. Go to http://cj.com and request more information. They will set you up quickly. Then the affiliates will do all the work!

I also do not like your website's layout.

Pay the affiliate $16/sale. You make $21ish.

I have an affiliate service, through Clickbank. Payout is %75. Do you think CJ would be better? Or maybe RegNow?

Dunno...

Email people in the beauty section of Craigslist (make a message about how it's worth their while to test this out)
Download a bunch of photos, use your software on them and upload to various sites are packages (niches should work well) You can watermark each photo or provide a before/after or just after...
Use a similar idea to the craigslist one but instead print flyers and head offline to anyone that might find the software useful.

What's the difference of this software and say, a big name image editing software like Photoshop or GIMP?

When I launched some software it took 6 months before I actually saw consistent sales, just keep at it, find every traffic opportunity you can.

Actually, this is a technique you can do with photoshop, that I hired a freelancer to make a standalone software. The real difference is the 'Lighting' feature.. ok, you would have to try it out on some pix to see, but what it does is basically adjusts certain settings on a blending layer mode, that gives the photo a sort of 'modely' effect..

(spilling the beans here), I think it works well on, lets just say, erotic pictures. So I had a batch process function built in, that does the same adjustment to all pix in a folder, for those people who have albums of their favorite 'busty' model, that make them look more like how playboy models look.. all modely and stuff! I know, whenever I've posted a link on an adult forum, with before/after pic example, I had a sale the very next day. My posts get removed, though, for spamming tos, whatever.

So, yeah, that sucks, because, a major drawback is that the software uses gaussian blur in the code, which to not sound teckie, is slooow for large pics, whereas the average person now has, you know, 300000 megapixel cameras, which take a year to process.. which brings me back to the 'model' pics.. these grabbed from the net are small enough to make it efficient and cool to work with.

So, that's where I'm at. Also, thx blackfitted, for your good suggestions, and jamesjr7 for yours, I know, site is kind of sucky, could make a kicka** flash site, but that would be seo suicide. (not that wh seo has helped all that much!!

IMO the sales page needs some work, just my opinion as the look of the page doesn't draw me in at all.

You've mentioned making it flashy but that would be SEO suicide...maybe...but as it sits now it's affiliate suicide. Besides, a site doesn't need flash to look good...in fact, myself personally, I'm not big on fully flashed out sites.

Also...you have a free trial version of the software. I'm guessing, only guessing, that an affiliates ID isn't tracked into that free trial...thus, if I (an affiliate) send you traffic and said traffic messes with the demo then buys later...as the affiliate that referred the free trial user, how do I get my commission?

Other than that, it looks like a cool product...some before/after pics would be very helpful I think.

Anyhow, just some thoughts....mostly from an affiliate point of view (and not all affiliates point of views, just mine...lol

Matt

I like it!

I have a market niche for you and will tell you how to approach it and make those sales. I don't have the time to JV it with you for promoting it but I do have two markets who I believe will snap this up in a second.

If you're interested PM me and I'll tell you who and how.

I'm going to download the trial and see how this works...

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Struggling with Offline Consulting? PM about 1on1 Phone Consultation (USA Only).

You need make your site look much better than that to get sales.

Invest $80 in a beautiful minisite design. Add a Samples section with lot of "Before" "After" photos. Create a screen capture while you are using the software and post in on your site as well as Youtube.

The plain black is not good background color for a Photo enhancer software.

I agree with the others that the biggest thing holding you back is your website design. The different color fonts pull my eyes around the page and make it hard to read linearly. The font itself is hard to read on the black background. Your header looks disconnected from the page, almost like it is not even part of the product. Think how resumes are put together. You want it to be clean, concise, and drive home how valuable what you are selling is. Honestly you might consider hiring a pro to build the sales page for you.

Thanks everyone for the advice. I have been thinking of changing the design around, to a clean, nice white bg, with samples page, etc. Will give it a go! About traffic, I am unsure what to do. What sort of audience to present this to, that is, as most people are so fixated on their Photoshop. Don't get me wrong, I love photoshop too, but my software is different.

Oh, heres an idea. I'm not sure if I read this in this forum or came up with it myself:

Post the software, some pics of before and after, and hype it up. On Warez forums.

Then offer some invalid license key and the TRIAL software. Make sure you upload it on rapidshare.

Well, I sold another one today.. yay! Now, I need to make sales on a consistent basis.. ideal would be 2x/day, but obviously more the better. Now my problem is, I have no idea where the heck these sales are coming from. That is, to my knowledge, they are coming from 2 main sources.. shareware sites, and google/yahoo search. I installed google analytics code, but don't know how to tell where the sales are coming from. Kind of frustrating. Kind of like running a store, only you dont know if the big yellow smiley face sign is working, or the nice salesperson, or the storefront.. if I knew, I could double my efforts on the known technique. Well, still always cool to have $37 for a digital product that costs $0 to ship!

Yah, you definately need to redesign your site, make it look more professional, get rid of that black background for one.

I sent you the complete marketing plan for promoting your software to specific niches. Let me know how it goes for you.

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Struggling with Offline Consulting? PM about 1on1 Phone Consultation (USA Only).

My best suggestion is to get your free edition into as many magazines, newsletters and ezines as you can. Especially the print publications that come with CD's attached.

Do some research and find every one that discusses either digital photography/photo editing and just general freeware/shareware/trialware and contact the editors/publishers with your software. Ask if they have any special requirements for inclusion in their publication and meet them whenever you can.

I released a trialware version of a program of my own once and just a single listing in PC Utilities (no longer published sadly) which included the trial version of my program on the CD brought me almost 2 thousand registrations of my software over a 3 month period. Then a small startup approached me about buying the program outright to include in their own catalog, so I set my price at "the last 3 month's earnings" and doubled my money without ever having to create any updates or give any user support for the software. It was one of my sweetest deals ever.

In your case, because I think photography enthusiasts would be interested in what you have, I'd go after those publications first. Hit any digital photography blogs you can find too. Contact the blog owners, tell them you think their readers would appreciate your software and offer the blog owner a free registered version in exchange for an honest review on their blog. Don't require them to say nice things, tell them complete honesty in their review is desired. Even if they trash your software (worst case) in the review it's still a free link and will bring you targeted traffic.

Once you've covered everything you can find related to digital photography and image editing then go for the general software places to get listed or reviewed. They're great too, but the traffic won't be as targeted for you.

If your free version has a nag screen or easy path to upgrade the registration then what I've just described should lead to more sales for you.

Good luck with it.

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My Grandpa: "Sh!t or get off the pot!" -- the best advice I ever got...

Apply to be an advertiser with an appropriate CPA network ( try CJ or ClickBank ). Setup a landing page and give raise the price of your product a 8 bucks, and give 8 bucks per sale, that way you make the same amount and dont have to work at all

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move the demo of the house to the top, above the fold, so people can immediately see the benefits of using your program. As it sits that's the best thing you have going. And what is with the small type at the bottom of the page?

How many UVs are you driving to your site?

Your site needs a 100% retouch. It's like selling an ebook; just worse!

Try to give it some credibility; your info/about page, pictures you've used it with, real testimonials and a front page that'll leave the customers to actually wanting this product. Right now customer gets confused, too much text for their own good (even if your visitor is "quality", they need to be "SUPER QUALITY" to wanting to proceed)

Thanks everyone for your advice, I am redesigning the webpage now. The 'super tiny text' at the bottom is an rss feed, supposedly to help with seo/fresh content. Cant tell if it has worked so far. Probably will ditch that idea.

Hello, thanks again everyone for your ideas! So, I completely redesigned my website, www.imagic-photo.com. Hoping the cleaner look will drive more sales. Now, all I need is a good way to deliver targeted traffic to it. Thought about forum posting being a good way, but sort of time consuming. Any ideas about lots of quality traffic, that wont take a year to obtain?

In addition to my last post, I'm sitting here thinking, hey It would be great to, rather than post to a whole bunch of forums, make 50 articles, sign up with Adwords, etc. Better to focus on attaining affiliates to do all that stuff for me, and in return they would get their commission. Problem for me is, actually finding affiliates to promote my software. Not that I'm lazy, but I have tried posting on forums, SEO, youtube vid, etc. Ok, maybe I am lazy, but isn't that sort of what an affiliate program is for? Just a few random thoughts!

Get a new logo on your website , you are promoting graphic stuff remember that, you need a more graphical website. IF you are selling food irl and your shop is looking like a garage who is gonna buy your stuff .

I am not sure if this will work but I think you could create basic tools in the same niche like bulk image grabbers, image editors, image uploaders, gif animators etc & distribute them free of cost. You need these tools to get really viral so you could probably develop toolbars, widgets, browser add-ons etc. Then you can advertise your main software (which is not free) on all these tools or maybe auto-install the demo version along with each of the free tool.

Since you said it works well on erotic pictures, why not distribute a free erotic picture finder and then promote your main software through that ?