Most people love to be creative and build their music, art, poetry, creative writing, software, consulting practice, children's toys, shareware, needlepoint, whatever. A lot of these people are my friends. I do think most people hate to do marketing instead of their artwork. This is what makes folks like me and Robert so bizarre. We actually like doing marketing as much as making things. It is fun for us to promote. For us marketing is making things. It is making a market.

I was looking at my stats charts for downloads this morning as I obsessively do each morning and because the chart for downloads is orange I got to thinking that marketing shareware is a lot like trying to build a campfire. Although in theory wood is flammable you can’t just grab a log and put a match underneath it to start a fire. The traditional way to make a fire is to start with the small kindling like little sticks, newspapers, and woodchips. This kindling is like the marketing to an initial group of people through easy to reach places like posting PAD files to all the shareware sites. The problem is that kindling isn’t a fire that will keep you warm at night or cook your marshmallows. Kindling is just a miniature fire and will burn out quickly if you aren’t careful. A full fire requires bigger wood to burn starting with the next size of wood including big sticks and small chopped logs. The rough equivalent to these are reaching more permanent and influential venues like magazine publishers, reviewers, and real users who tell their friends about the product. If you can get these to burn you may have enough flames to build the next level of a fire, which is the fire you set out to make in the first place so you wouldn’t freeze (or starve) to death in the first place. That is the big log that can burn for hours but also can put out the entire miniature fire that you managed to get buzzing. This big log is the market coming to you in a wave to let you know they are interested and want to be regularly reminded of what you have.

The problem with marketing shareware that doesn't work or isn't valuable to the users is that it is like marketing wet wood. If you can’t get folks to stand-up to realize that they are using the software and it is valuable to them then you can’t just pile lots of marketing stuff on top of the product and make it move. You also have to do a lot of wandering around in the woods to gather-up all the pieces of marketing kindling and small sticks that is time consuming. So recently we have installed bugzilla to track bugs and features to make sure we are getting the right stuff into the product, I am looking into making screen videos using Windows Media Encoder to highlight the product, and I would like to make case studies of how real users actually work with the product as a tool to become more productive in their jobs with a variety of jobs represented.

Getting that initial burst of fire has gotten easier recently with the advent of blogs, smarter search engines, and standardization among shareware sites – but that also means that everyone knows that there are good tools to use. At Viapoint we have been using the linking tools from any competitor or related products to find the links to them to identify who is paying attention to our category of products and then sending these people emails to inform them that we are a unique offering. At some point we will try to make this process work more automated through our own software. I also have been using some tools that come with a listing of all the shareware sites that accept PAD files and another one that lists all the sites and will simultaneously search the sites 60 at a time to display whether your product is listed in them yet or not as well as which version. The kindling part is quite easy actually and now as we work to move up to bigger chunks of marketing wood to light on fire like product announcements and real relationships with a dedicated group of press I am noticing that the kindling can quickly do what happens in a real fire if there is no next piece of wood to catch, it flashes hot quickly and then goes out. So we may need to kindle more than once to get the fire going.

I was never that great at building campfires. The last time I did build one I did it at a KOA campground in Acadia. We used a special fire starter log that still was difficult to get to work even though all the wood we were using came from a dry shed. We did eventually manage to get enough flames going to make some s'mores.