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.

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.

I’m sure you all know that Black Friday traditionally marks the beginning of the holiday shopping season in the US. Well, nowadays big retailers are starting to promote Black Friday sales more than a week in advance. But that’s not the point of this post.

The point is that Black Friday (Nov. 27th) and Cyber Monday (Nov. 30th) are definitely useful dates to keep in mind.

Why?

Simple – in 2008, the Black Friday weekend brought along an 18% increase on the total spending in the US compared to the year before, which, given the context of the economic downturn, was a more than good figure. Other reports show a 15% increase in Cyber Monday online sales, with only 1% increase in Black Friday sales compared to the previous year. Either way, sales went up.

Selling software over the Internet with Google AdWords has a lot of traps that we should learn to avoid as good as possible, so that our ads reach more targeted prospects every day. One of the trickiest aspects we should be in control of is the use of negative keywords, because they are the toughest candidate for wasting our money and for getting on the nerves of Google users, as it was eloquently explained by Linda Bustos on Get Elastic blog.

Negative keywords in your AdWords keyword list are those for which your ads will not show in search queries containing them.  You can get the general information about negative keywords directly from the AdWords blog.

When you’re trying to sell software through PPC campaigns, your goal is to obtain qualified leads to your software selling business, not to get as much and as untargeted traffic as possible. And that’s when negative keywords come in. Or out, actually:).

Don’t Lose Users on the First Screen!

This is part 4 of a 5-part series: How to convert more software trials to purchases.

Nothing’s worse than opening new software and staring at a vast white screen with millions of toolbar buttons.  Now what?

1. Most users don’t care enough to find out.
   They want to solve a problem, not root around in your menus.  They don’t care about your “project” paradigm or your innovative new work flow concepts.
2. Of course you also have to satisfy your power users.
   They probably don’t want paperclips popping up every five minutes distracting them from real work.  Power users are the ones who are going to spread the word about you, tell all their friends to download your software, and Tweet and blog about how awesome you are, so you have to keep them happy too.

Use a “Tips” Newsletter to Follow Up on a Trial

Photo credit: blue out

This is part 3 of a 5-part series: How to convert more software trials to purchases.

What do you do with customer’s email addresses during their trial?

• If the answer is “nothing“, then you’re wasting data.
• If the answer is “follow up with ‘account management‘ stuff and ‘do you need anything‘ questions“, then you’re bothering most users.  Even at best, you’re not thrilling anyone.

You should be using it for a special, 3-emails-only “Tips Newsletter“. There are several goals of the newsletter.