It’s got to be the single-most asked question in the software business world. Beginning startups – both rolling in VC hay and bootstrapping – ask it. Existing software companies, as they get whacked around by a changing market (Mobile, where’d that come from?) and changing user expectations (You mean, I don’t just run in my browser?) ask it. The polite form of the question is, “How do I/we define what product to create?“. What they’re really saying is, how the hell do we invent (or re-invent) a software product that will sell like mad before we go broke like in out of business?

The traditional way to cope with this is,

1. Founder has brilliant idea,
2. Team works like slaves to bring it to market before anyone else,
3. Startup gets funded by VCs whom Founder sells idea to and lo and behold!,
4. the Software arrives at Market, to adoration and sales.

Except for the other 9 out of 10 startups whose software arrives to a vast collective yawn and are dead meat in 3 months.

When William Gibson said “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet“, he could have been talking about how Google is reinventing its search results right now and incidentally altering the likelihood your software company will be found in 2010 Q1 by prospective customers worldwide.

There are three big changes confirmed and now being rolled out:

1. Adding real time search results to your Google results,
2. personalizing those results like never before and
3. giving every Google user a sidebar of options controlling the freshness of their results.

And there’s two other changes – Page Preview in results and the Wonder Wheel (no, I didn’t make this up) – that are not confirmed, but are also getting rolled out piecemeal at least in the United States and are strong bets for next quarter worldwide.

So you’ve tried endlessly tweaking your AdWords, starting a blog and even begun Twittering this year, and you’re still on the second or worse page of Google results for the keywords that matter most. How are you going to change this for 2010? Consider creating and maintaining a microsite.

A microsite (at least for the length of this post) isn’t a brochure-like static page about your product, or a shady way to generate inbound links. In fact, it only just touches your product and does everyone in your market a valuable service. A microsite is a way to monetize for reputation/attention a chunk of all that expertise you’ve built up, in the same way your software monetizes that expertise for money.

How would you like to be able to say this?

“Just a week after launching the sites they got to the first page of Google results for the main keywords… the .NET microsite ranks #1 for .NET logging as of today“.

What makes a person want to whip out their credit card and buy your software?

Hint: It’s not being nagged about how many days they have left in their trial every time they run your program.

It seems logical to nag the user.  Remind her that the trial is “time-limited, so act now!” like a fast-food commercial.  Remind her that she’s using your software for free, and doesn’t she feel guilty about that?

Sales people say “Pressure until they pay“, which for software trials means you should ask for money or at least guilt the user into paying. But you and I don’t like used-car sales techniques, and neither do your potential customers.

Want to sell software in China?

I bet you do. It’s a multi-billion dollar market (packaged software accounted for US$4.7 billion in 2008) that has seen positive growth even through the recession. Admittedly, there is a software piracy issue that shadows the country, still it’s a huge market and provides sales opportunities, especially in the B2B area.

A good enough reason for Avangate to partner with AliPay, China’s leading online payment service and part of giant Alibaba Group, so Avangate vendors can accept Alipay for China domestic payments in Chinese Renminbi (RMB or CNY).

Just in case you missed it, we are organizing our first Software Selling Conference in China that will take place on December 5th at the Park Plaza Beijing Science Park.

If until now China was just a very big country or a very fast developing market, now it’s getting personal:  I’m going there and join for a couple of days the Avangate Chinese sales team. Well, I should say we are going there, as 3 geeks and one lady are going to play a very serious and challenging role of the host at the event :) We are going to try to make it fun.

What is this event all about?

For a start I am looking forward to meeting some of our clients I’ve been working closely with on web analytics implementations or a/b testing.  Talking about testing, this is going to be the main focus on my presentation: Effective and tested ways to increase conversion rates. I will also try to make things interesting and hold a workshop just after the presentation, analyzing a website from the audience… depends on who will volunteer. Nothing staged there.