Schewanick Computer Services

As a shareware download site webmaster I have some suggestions for the shareware authors out there that submit their programs to download sites.

I spend many hours a week reviewing submissions submitted to my site and cannot believe that lack of effort put in to product descriptions by some authors when they are making their PAD files. You would be surprised at all the one and 2 sentence product descriptions with misspellings and grammar errors that I have come across.

I realize that many shareware authors are from non-English speaking countries and do not have a good knowledge of the English language but if you decide that you wish to market your products to English websites it would be a good idea to have someone with a knowledge of English to proofread your descriptions. Many visitors to download sites will click right out of your product page if they cannot understand your descriptions or find too many grammar and spelling errors.

The second and more important part of getting exposure is to provide detailed, keyword rich product descriptions. On many download sites you are competing will maybe 100's of other products that can do the same thing as your product and the better your description the more apt the visitor will be to try your program. Just saying "X product is the best DVD ripper on the net, try it now" isn't going to get much attention. The visitor wants to know what makes your product better than program Y and what it can do for you.

Also how do you get exposure on a download site among 1000's of other products? Search engines are how! A large majority of downloads generated by a download site come from direct links to the program information page from a search engine and the best way to get those organic search results for your program is to write a detailed keyword rich description for search engines to spider. If your program is in a very competitive market and you write a 1 or 2 sentence program description your program will never rank well where as a program in a competitive category with a detailed keyword rich description that is listed on many sites can easily dominate the search engine results. Can't get better exposure than that!

You've just finished a great program and marketing and getting exposure for that program takes a lot of work, but before you go through the tedious process of submitting it to the literally 1000's of download sites out there, spend some time on the product descriptions in your PAD files.

About the Author
I am a shareware download site webmaster that runs 3 shareware sites with my main site Canistota Software at http://www.canistotasoftware.com