My "payment" is that I place a link to the software's download page at the end of your resource box. The exact phrase is "Submitted with Article Distributor", and Article Distributor is linked to
http://www.after5webdesign.com/software.html. All told, it eats up 89 characters of your resource box. This means that if your resource box is rather full (say 200 characters), my link gets cut off. Also, you are welcome to delete this link, but taking the time to do that kind of defeats the purpose of using a program to submit articles.
This does not help as much as you might think because Google discounts sitewide links. Once they see more than a few dozen links on one domain, they quit counting. It also doesn't really target any of my keywords.
I am working on Version 3.0 now (I've kind of dropped development of 2.0 because VB6 sucks at working with XML), and one feature of Version 3 will be a pay version that does not put a link in your resource box. Another feature will be that it will submit to more article directories than just the ones using the article dashboard script.
I know it sounds corny, but my other "payment" is a belief that I am doing something good and helpful. I personally find it insane to pay $367 or even $127 for software that just submits articles. When Windows (a mildly important thing like your operating system) only costs $199.95 and it only takes 60-80 hours of development time (being incredibly generous here) to make your software, why should I charge hundreds of dollars? Let's assume I spend 80 hours coding and want to make at least $500 an hour for my time. I also assume I will sell a mere 400 copies of my software, so I should charge $100 per copy. If I only spend 40 hours coding, I can get by charging $50 to still make $500 an hour. If I sell 800 copies, I can charge a paltry $25. I guess my philosophies might be different than most, but I blame it on good parents.
Posted: Tue Nov 22, 2005 12:58 pm