Vol 4, No 13
Week of August 3rd, 2008

SoftGram Spotlight: Using Robosoft to Boost MicroISV Sales; The Softletter 2008 SaaS Survey; The Softletter 2008 CTO Compensation Survey

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In This Issue's Softletter

• SaaS Deal Basics: What Needs to Be in Your SaaS Customer Agreements, Part I of II
  
• Changing the Way We Communicate, Part I Iof II
  
• The Softletter/Prolexic Website Security Survey, PartI I
  
  
• Proposal Management Resources

The 2008 SaaS Survey Is Now Open

Take the Survey Now

Dear Colleague:

Welcome to the 2008 edition of our industry standard SaaS survey. The purpose of this survey is to track new developments in the rapidly developing SaaS software sector and develop a complete profile of what successful SaaS companies are doing to succeed in this dynamic market. When complete, this study will provide the most accurate and up-to-date snapshot of the SaaS industry available. This survey is aimed at software developers/publishers who are currently selling SaaS products in the commercial software marketplace. If your company is not deriving at least 50% of its revenue from sales of SaaS systems and services, please do not take this survey.

Everyone who supplies data for this survey will receive a complimentary copy of the summary results in the October and November issues of Softletter. Of course, all responses will be strictly confidential. We won't disclose or identify data about any individuals or about participating companies. Rick Chapman, Softletter's publisher and managing editor, will be presenting detailed analyses of the results in his presentation at SaaS University: Marketing, Sales, Infrastructure and Finance Conferences, 2008 in San Francisco on October 16th.

This is a big survey: based on your answers, you will fill out approximately 70 to 80 questions, but we've made them as simple and easy-to-follow as possible. We estimate that this survey will take from 15 to 25 minutes to complete. Please note that many questions require you to provide an answer in order to proceed through the survey.

Please be sure to provide a valid E-mail address when completing the survey as the summary results will be sent via E-mail via an electronic version of Softletter. We're sorry, we can't mail the survey results.

Take the Survey Now

The 2008 Softletter Chief Technical Officer (CTO) Compensation Survey

Take the Survey Now

Dear Colleague:

As you may know, Softletter, now in its 24th year of publication, publishes a series of annual salary surveys that cover senior job titles in the software industry.

We're looking for some fairly standard information--in particular, a comparison of "base salary" vs. "variable pay" (bonuses, commissions, etc.) for your most recent full year and for the previous year. We'll use this data to identify trends and current compensation benchmark that you can use to see how your own salaries compare to pay levels at comparable companies.

In addition, we compare salaries based on company development stages, an important factor that's rarely taken into account in other salary surveys.

As usual, everyone who supplies data for this survey will receive a complimentary copy of the final report. Of course, all responses will be strictly confidential. Everyone who supplies data for this survey will receive a complimentary copy of the summary report in an upcoming issue of Softletter.

Of course, all responses will be strictly confidential. We won't disclose or identify data about any individuals or about participating companies. Also note that we will be sending the summary results via E-mail; if you provide us with a non-working address you won't receive them. We're sorry, we don't have the time to deal with whitelist verification and suggest you add softgram@softletter.com and rickchapman@softletter.com to your approved recipients lists to ensure you receive the survey results.

Take the Survey Now

Final survey results will appear in either the August 15th or August issue of Softletter.

Many thanks for your help!

Merrill R. (Rick) Chapman, Managing Editor
Softletter
34 Sugar Hill Road
Killingworth, CT 06419
860-663-0552
rickchapman@softletter.com

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Using Robosoft to Boost MicroISV Sales

by Ryan Smyth, Renegade Minds

They used to be called shareware, trialware, sometimes freeware publishers but today the preferred term is MicroISVs, small publishers, usually one or two programmer shops focusing on a niche market. Sometimes the dream is to grow big, sometimes just to make nice living, or a bit of useful supplemental income. Regardless of their ultimate goals, all MicroISVs are faced with the challenge of getting the word out about their products while operating under "micro" marketing budgets. Ryan Smyth, a
Canadian expatriate currently living in South Korea and president of MicroISV firm Renegade Minds, publisher of Guitar and Drum Trainer, a nifty program we're using as we learn how to imitate Bob Dylan, explains how his use of Robosoft has helped him build sales and search engine goodness.

Robosoft is an automatic submission utility that submits PAD (portable application description) files to a database of approximately 1200 download sites worldwide. (the products full database is 1600, but at any one time about 25% of database will be unavailable because of closures, domain changes, downtime, etc. For most software companies, about 600 to 800 sites will be appropriate for your product and Robosoft does a good job of categorizing its internal database. To most effectively use
Robosoft, you must first create a PAD file with an editor or specialized tool, import it into Robosoft, and allow the product to scan its database, determine which sites currently list your product as available for download, and upload the PAD file. You can control which sites you upload to via Robosoft, and I urge you to not ignore
international sites, particularly German, French, Russian, and Aisian sites; one of the products I've promoted, ALZip, is regularly one of the top five downloaded products at several of the top German websites.

While making sure your product is widely available via download sites is very useful and the time saved not submitting your product manually to these sites valuable, the key to making the most effective use of Robosoft is writing effective PAD file descriptions and thus boosting your SERPs (search engine results page) results via the download sites. Download sites function as effective drivers of search rankings, and one dirty little secret is that some of these sites seem to be primarily no more than MFA (made for Adsense) domains (I'm not going to identify which sites fit into this category because I can't be sure which are and aren't, though I have my suspicions.) Nonetheless, the "halo" effect thrown off by the download sites in the aggregate can drive your ratings for keywords and phrases you've identifed as being effective in promoting your product to top ten positions.

For example, I identifed via Googles Trends analysis tool that the phrase"free media player" was an important keyword for a product (not my own) on whose behalf I was executing this strategy. For an example of how you'd research this, type in the following phrase and study the results: http://google.com/trends? q=free+movie+player%2C+free+media+player.

My competitors for this phrase were firms such as Apple and Real Networks, but soon after my Robosoft submissions my product showed up in Googles top five rankings. An ancillary benefit of this strategy is that you should also see your "second click" results, clicks that go to another site first, then click over to you, rise dramatically.

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