Announcing the Software Project

I am soon to embark on a new project which will entail developing a PHP based website designed to be subscription-based. This will be very different to anything I have done before on this blog and I promise you that even if you are not a programmer yourself, you can still benefit from this kind of project yourself (read further to see how).

Back to my Software Roots

The job that I quit in order to start this online business was that of a C++/C# Developer. I have been in software development since 1997 but I have never done web development until now. When I first quit that job, I didn’t really have a plan but I figured that software would be part of it and I intended to do Internet marketing as an interim way of earning some quick money. HAHA! :-)

The trouble was, I simply never got an idea. Trying to develop software without knowing what to develop is like trying to write a book without a story. You need to know the goal first. About a year ago I figured out that things weren’t going as I had expected but I just went with the flow. After six months in business I realised the software thing just wasn’t happening so I stopped trying to come up with an idea and forgot all about it.

Then I started the AdSense project and in doing that I found many shortcomings and irritations with the web-based software I was using and the programmer in me kept saying, “I can write my own…” and so here I am.

Mixing Software & Internet Marketing

The main reason it has taken me so long to announce this project (I first started getting ideas for this back in September), is that for me developing software has always been a full time job but a lot of my time is already taken up writing for two blogs, doing the AdSense project and now The Bloggers Bible plus lots of other time that just seems to disappear when you’re involved in IM. I had to find a way to free up my time.

I have cut down the writing I do for my second blog, I’m going to invite some guest posters to do the odd post here (don’t worry, it’s mainly going to be me!), I’ve pared back my blog reading drastically, I have stopped almost all usage of social media sites, I’m putting the AdSense project on hold, I’m going to finish off the whole of the Bloggers Bible lessons as soon as possible so it is all out of the way and I am not taking anything else on!

Once the Bloggers Bible is finished, all I will be left with is this blog and I can dedicate the rest of my time to my new software project.

What I’m Going to Blog About

Now this is where this particular project will be quite different to all of the others I have done before. This is an Internet marketing blog, and not a software blog so don’t expect to see any technical posts about PHP or anything to do with the development process. There will be a separate blog for the software itself but only after release and more for the benefit of those using it who want to see latest features, bug fixes and so on.

Software takes time to develop and because I still have a lot of learning to do with PHP, I estimate it is going to take a few months before anything is available for release. I’m being deliberately vague because I really don’t know how long it will take and in my own personal experience, any software I have ever written has always taken far longer and turned out far more complicated than I first anticipated!

So for the next few months, that will give me a chance to blog about other stuff. I still have a big backlog of post ideas sitting in a document so I can write about all of those whilst there isn’t a project to talk about. Now as I get nearer to releasing something then things will change.

Marketing the Software

Marketing software will be unlike anything I have done before. To start with, I am making this a subscription-based online-only software – it is not a download so the whole payments handling will be very different from a downloadable product like an eBook. Users of the software will need their own accounts to store all of their data so I will need to learn about and use a membership system like aMember.

How do you market online software? You can’t distribute demo’s like you would a download but you can provide cut down versions, free trials and so on. At this stage I have only the vaguest ideas of what I will do here but I’ll be blogging about all of that.

Promoting the software itself is pretty much like promoting anything else I suppose so I’ll blog about my promotional efforts as usual. So as I get near to release I will be able to blog about all the stuff I am doing to promote it, manage members, manage payments and anything else that will be of interest.

What is the Software?

Again I’m going to be very vague – it’s related to Internet Marketing and will consist of online tools but that’s as much as I’m going to say right now because I know what I am like and the chances are that any ideas I have now might be totally different to what actually gets produced :-) I don’t believe in trying to plan things out in detail so I just let things evolve naturally.

I want to release something as early as possible so I can have people using it and as soon as I get to that stage I will be asking the users of the software to tell me what new tools & features they want to see rather than me trying to second-guess what they want. However, I will start by developing the tools that *I* want to use right now!

For the Non-Programmers Out There…

I can imagine some of you are sitting there thinking, “that’s very nice but you’re a programmer and I’m not, how can I use this?”. Simple – you hire programmers to do the work for you. Yes that involves money up front but heck, not everything can be zero-barrier entry! There are two huge websites called Elance and Rent A Coder whose sole purpose is to bring together technical and programmer types looking for work with people who need work done and don’t have the skills themselves. I know people on both sides – I have a friend who uses Elance to get work and another friend who has used both sites to get programmers, artists and other professionals for IM projects.

If you have an idea, and some cash to pay somebody to implement it then you can still use all of the marketing information that I will be sharing in the project. As I said earlier, I’m not going to be blogging about any of the technical stuff because that is simply not relevant to 99% of the readers here but all the marketing is.

Software is big business these days. The person I mentioned who uses Rent A Coder to find professionals, had some Facebook games coded for him. One of them was making him $200,000 a MONTH before he sold it. Unfortunately he doesn’t share his secrets with me – bastard :-)

Future of the AdSense Project

There were a few things I learned when doing the project:

1. It takes even longer than I thought it would to make money
2. I did not get the click amounts I had hoped for
3. I have worked harder to build links to my niches sites than to this blog (what?!)
4. The sites will continue earning while I leave them to mature for a while

Point number 3 dawned on me last week when I started writing about link building. This blog has thousands of in-bound links but the vast majority of those were not built by me. As I was spending all this time working at building links for niches sites that were earning me just a few bucks per month I suddenly asked myself, “why on earth aren’t I doing this for my blog?”. Silly isn’t it – the things right under your nose that you miss.

So, I’ll also spend a little time applying some of the techniches from that project – the link building ones anyway, to this blog and will document any results that I see accordingly. But as for the niche sites themselves, they are all just going on hold. Nothing seems to change, or if anything the traffic creeps up over time which is good so it certainly won’t hurt them not to be worked on.

At this time I honestly don’t know if I will continue the project in the future. Point number 2 put a major spanner in the works. When I started the AdSense project I did it to make money, not just as a little time filler. I did some calculations and figured that a good site could bring in perhaps $200 per month which would be worth the time investment. But that was based on getting over $1 per click and I have been getting probably less than $0.10 for each click. That brings down potential earnings for a small site down to $20 a month which woudl need a LOT of sites to make any decent income. I know it can be done because others are doing it but I haven’t figured out the secrets yet.

The Next Month or So

For the next few weeks my main priority is finishing the lessons for the Bloggers Bible. Many people have asked me if I am going to release it as a PDF file and the answer is yes. The next question is usually, will that be that free too? And the answer to that is no :-) I hope to release that early December around the same time as Yaro Starak releases his own new blogging course. His is very different though – purely video based coaching where as mine is purely eBook-based but hopefully they will compliment each other nicely.

Blog-wise, I have a few more posts in the AdSense project that I still want to publish – the one about building unique RSS feeds and one more link building one. They don’t really belong in the AdSense project now but I’ll leave them in there for consistency and then close that project. I’ll publish a post asking for guest posters soon with all the information that you’ll need to submit a post, and after that I’ll be able to get into my new mode of blogging about whatever I feel like, without having project updates to worry about.

One last thing, I’m not going to make a project page for this yet because other than this intro post there will be nothing to add to it for a few months I imagine so I will make one when I have something new to add. So this will be the last you hear about the software for a while and you’ll probably all forget that I’m doing it until I suddenly announce something next year :-) Actually, I’ll put in a little progress update into my monthly stats posts.

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