My advice: blog about the things you enjoy, and maybe you'll get rewarded The other day, scouring my server logs, I found somebody did a Google search for DivX for Mac. For no reason, that registered with me, because nobody ever searches this site for DivX, let alone "DivX for Mac." I'm not even sure if the 'i' and the 'v' were lower-case, but I remember the search. While never thinking I'd ever need to know this again, somebody else came by the site, doing the same thing. Only this time, they left me a message:

Big thanks for blogging about our DivX for Mac 6.5 product (http://macstansbury.com/free-updated/divx-for-mac-65.htm) a while back. It’s great that you found our product blog-worthy. So to show our appreciation, we thought we’d give you and a friend some free serials for the Pro version of our newest update (www.divx.com/mac/).

Then there were serials given. Free ones. From the DivX folks. Ones with email addresses that end in @divx.com. This, my friends, is what I refer to as "teh awesome." Mostly because I'm a penny-pinching miser, but also because it's a great way to virally market your product. My advice: give stuff away and hope it gets you press Cory Doctorow came up with a novel way of selling his book: he gave it away. From Forbes:

I've been giving away my books ever since my first novel came out, and boy has it ever made me a bunch of money. When my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was published by Tor Books in January 2003, I also put the entire electronic text of the novel on the Internet under a Creative Commons License that encouraged my readers to copy it far and wide. Within a day, there were 30,000 downloads from my site (and those downloaders were in turn free to make more copies). Three years and six printings later, more than 700,000 copies of the book have been downloaded from my site. The book's been translated into more languages than I can keep track of, key concepts from it have been adopted for software projects and there are two competing fan audio adaptations online.

Then he goes on to explain that by giving away his book, those who wouldn't buy it, wouldn't buy it regardless, and those who would buy it probably will at some point, or already have. It's the same concept with 37 Signals' book Getting Real. But it's not quite the same for software. No, for software, especially those of the licensed variety, you'll need to market the product somehow. What better way than to seed a few serials out to bloggers? Sounds like an idea to me! So, for a sale DivX was unlikely to get, they get a glowing review of their marketing, and I'll now feel the urge to test out DivX, possible creating things I didn't intend before. Plus, with the extra serial, I'll have to figure out who gets it. Appealing to the blog-owner has now made an immediate impression, which is what excellent marketing is supposed to do.

status: published
lastmod: '2006-12-06T00:07:16.000Z'
author: John Stansbury
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