How to promote a new product/service? [closed]

Question

This is often a bit of a problem for lone developers working on a product or a service. How can they get the word out about their product?

I recently finished a project of mine and I'm struggling a bit to spread word of it.

What do you think is the best way to promote your new product/service?

Although this question isn't strictly programming related, it's a good question for programmers wanting to get their creation out and about.

Hideous

The link to AnyHub here: charliesomerville.com/tools leads to DemoVu. – Falsecard

Can you tell us what sort of product or service it is? For products alone you can have Web apps, platform dependent software, mobile apps etc. There may be vastly different ways of promoting each of them. – Biweekly

The reason I didn't post that was because I didn't want this question to seem like a plug in itself. – Hideous

Woah... I didn't notice that link was faulty... I'll fix that now! – Hideous

Answer 1

You should have a short tutorial explaining what your product does and how to use it without having to install anything or fill out a single form. I'm not exactly sure what AnyHub (The OP's website) does with my files, how I would share or manage them or why you are doing it for free.

Look at Web 2.0 sensations and see how they streamline the process from hit to customer. For example Twitter has the What, Why and How buttons right there on the front page and nothing else to distract you from them. It also has motivating testimonials there too, and is themed to represent the idea.

Also, you should be trying to find a point of pain that many people have and try to ease that. Twitter knows it is getting impossible to tell your friends what you are doing via email, sms, blogs, feeds, rss and so on so takes care of it. What do you provide (other than an alternative pricing model?) Tell me on your website.

Falsecard

Answer 2

The internet (obviously).

If you're going at it alone, grassroots via Blogging, Facebook, and Twitter work.

You can also purchase google ad words, and other ad-related venues.

You can consider an open source version of your project, or joining tradegroups/ forums related to whatver problem your product addresses, and start to build a following (but please DONT spam these groups).

Evolutionary

"and other ad-related venues." - like StackOverflow ! :) – Illness

Answer 3

Mobile phone applications are really easy to promote nowdays, thanks to Apple's iPhone App Store paradigm. Now all major players (RIM, Nokia, Palm, etc) are opening their own application stores which takes away much of the promotion effort from the developer. As long as your application, game, etc is interesting it will sell by itself. Nevertheless, everything depends on the first week you launch your app and it is up on the list of the newest arrivals.

In the desktop world things are more difficult although Sun recently announced a similar promotion scheme for Java applications. More might follow, but it will depend on Sun's success or failure.

I believe (and actually hope) that centralized "selling services" will be the primary way of buying applications, games, plug-ins, services, etc in the near future. It is far too convenient to pass.

Upper