What if I told you that five changes to your software could increase revenue 25-50%?

It’s possible because of two facts: most trials don’t convert, and you’re too close to your software to see its obvious flaws.

The conversion rate from visits to sales according to a study presented by Andy Brice is around 1% with specific variations.  But the abandon rate on software trials is astonishingly high.  In an informal poll of a few software company owners I know, everyone agreed that 80-90% of downloads never become real trials.

In a way, that’s good news, because it means there’s lots of room for improvement.  Think about it – if only 20% of your potential customers make the leap from download to trial, shouldn’t it be possible to squeeze out another 5-10%?  That would be 25-50% more trials even with the same number of downloads!  And more trials means more revenue.

The Intel® Business Exchange Software Store in Europe has just been launched, bringing a new sales channel for selling software to European countries – with localized sites for the UK, Germany,  and France (official launch to follow by the end of the month). Good news.

We are, of course, proud to boast that Avangate provides the hosting, billing and process execution of the new market place… that the Avangate eCommerce platform is the core engine of the European Intel® Business Exchange… More good news.

Focused on SMBs
Yes, indeed, Intel ® BX is focused on SMBs – providing an advantage for this market. Why was there a need for this? Because SMBs often struggle to find technology products, services and support that fit their particular budgets and needs. The Intel ® BX Software Store helps them quickly and efficiently find the software solution they need to help implement business solutions. That’s why the store features extensive product details and facilitates customer ratings and reviews.

There’s two trends – the Cloud and the Crowd – afoot in the software world, and if these trends have gotten buried by all the day to day trivia, let me give you a quick rundown on how they’re changing our industry.

Way back say two years ago, one of the first checks you’d write launching your startup would be to a graphic artist for a couple thousand dollars to execute your new company’s logo. It wouldn’t be cheap, but it would be good and they’d been recommended to you as someone who did good startup logos.

Now what you’d do is spend $39 at 99designs.com to post a design contest for your new company logo for say 1/4 of what you would have paid and let the crowd of 31,000 graphic artists submit designs to you. Then watch as 56, 92 or 124 (actual numbers) designers submit logos for your consideration. Joe the Graphic Artist might be good, but is he better than a hundred other graphic artists?

What’s the one thing your startup needs more than great code, a killer marketing message or a compelling offer? Attention. Without attention, no one will know your startup has created the must-have web, desktop or mobile app of 2009, or that you even exist.

So how do you get attention? In this post I’d like to suggest 3 ways to get attention when you don’t have the kind of money it takes to hire a great PR firm with connections that will do more than spam every online writer with a heartbeat and an email address.

Be an expert – and share that expertise.

Two recent examples of this. First there’s Amy Hoy, who with her husband Thomas (script.aculo.us) Fuchs and two partners recently launched freckle time tracking. In early January as step one of her getting attention of her target market segment – developers and web designers – campaign Amy released a free ebook on credit card processing. Now this is one of those boring, utterly necessary subjects that a free ebook with great presentation + good graphics + humor + sourcecode is irresistible linkbait. And just to add value, Amy’s now working on version 2: a great reason to share your email even if your inbox is already stuffed.

How to optimize website images from a SEO perspective.

Product images, screenshots, your beautiful team members, catchy images for your website content, corporate images, logos, icons, you name it – all your online images should join forces and work for your website success, rigorously planning to embrace the new era of universal search.

If you want to get the most out your images though, just sitting and watching how pretty they are won’t help you too much. You need to optimize your images to get faster loading times and attract more traffic to your website. You can do that by paying your highest respects to search engines rules. This article presents most common techniques of optimizing images for image search engines like Google Images, Yahoo Images or Live.

Most (non-geek) people think that shareware is a type of software. Well, actually is not a type of software, it’s a way of marketing software. From the vendor’s perspective it looks like offering a 15-30 days trial should be more than enough to test the product and buy it before it expires. But even with a trial period:

• Some of the users will request a refund after the purchase saying the product is not doing what they need even after they tested it in the trial period;
• Some of the users are not convinced to buy the product in the trial period.