Join us for an informal gathering in Mountain View!

If you’ve met with one of the Avangate guys or gals, then you probably know that this year we worked hard. We attended lots of conferences, had presentations, booths and wrote a lot of white papers and other articles. But you should also know that we also like to play hard and relax with our friends and partners.

That’s why I’m happy to invite you at the Casual Drinks with Avangate – Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at the Tied House in Mountain View. It’s the perfect time to come meet the Avangate US team and schmooze with other people from the software business. The event will be hosted by Casey Potenzone, VP Sales, and Daniel Nicolescu, Business Development Manager.

Discovering the fan part of your partners and mingle with software people seems like having a good time to me. Or at least because it’s easier to explain what you do to people that talk the same business language like you do, it should be a relaxed, informal schmooze. Of course I also happen to know that Daniel is an excellent wine expert so it’s always nice to be around him at parties ;)

If it sounds like fun to you too, register now here.

Download free white paper: "Best Practices in Software Affiliate Marketing"

At any time, but especially during recession periods, a software vendor needs the most cost-effective tools that can bring him extra revenue or at least keep the sales volumes constant. He needs to have a good exposure of his brand and his product(s) on the Internet.

Affiliate marketing is one of the ways to go in the software business. The costs for doing such a campaign are low and the results can make the difference.

But how can a vendor attract affiliates that sell software?

Here are a few simple things to do in order to get the most out of an affiliate marketing campaign:

• Having an affiliate sign-up page on the vendor’s website
• Communicating through a dedicated e-mail address for affiliate matters
• Creating customized landing pages on the vendor’s website
• Sending marketing materials to the affiliates
• Being present on affiliate forums and blogs
• Keeping in touch with your affiliates

This is only the beginning. To be truly “affiliate efficient”, a software vendor must continuously monitor the activity of the affiliates and to pay them commissions according to their performance.

We’ve prepared a white paper: “Best Practices in Software Affiliate Marketing” (yes, it is free!) which will help you find out more about attracting affiliates, solving the channel problem and preventing affiliate fraud. We hope you’ll enjoy it and don’t forget to leave us some feedback on it.

Check out even more affiliate marketing articles on our dedicated website section!

Are you as “affiliate efficient” as you would like to be?

On Friday a lot of new people made it to the ISDEF conference. In the morning we had a presentation about doing business with Nokia. Smartphone/PDA software might just be a good development area in the next years.

In the afternoon I had a round table with other eCommerce providers where we answered questions about the software/shareware industry.

We have discussed about the differences between the affiliates and resellers, mainly explaining that affiliates work best when you only need online sales and promotion, while the resellers are better for longer term business developments and offline distribution.

The next question that came up was about the conflict when both affiliates and the software vendors are bidding on the same AdWords keywords. While the positions expressed where very different, the conclusion was that some niche affiliates (especially if you are talking about local markets) might be able to do better AdWords and take advantage of the long-tail. So the decision to let affiliates do AdWords should really be based on efficiency.

Almost 2 weeks ago we got back from the 18th edition of the Software Industry Conference held this year in Boston, Massachusetts. I know it’s taken me a while to write this, but I can explain. It’s called jet lag plus hundreds of e-mails.

It was a busy and successful participation for us: 3 presentations, 1 hospitality suite where we met with the participants (some of them our clients and partners), exhibit night, nice parties, and networking with beer, chocolate and sea food (OK, I’ll admit it, this was my favorite).

I really enjoyed presenting, thanks to Paris Karahalios for inviting us on the (you can download the presentations): Social Networking Media panel (I got a lot of friends on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, so I think the presentation reached its goal), as well as the Effective Advertising & Marketing panel.