First off, I'm impressed overall with your website. I agree with some of the comments that have already gone by but overall it's very polished! I'm also impressed that you have an email list signup on your site. It might help to make it a bit more clear what *problem* people have that your software will solve, though, especially "above the fold." I'm thinking you might want to polish your screencast a bit -- get a $40 headset for better audio quality, and work off a script so that the presentation is more organized and there are fewer "ums." If you think you could sum up what WF does visually (without audio), you might want to consider modifying the static image of the app on the screen to instead be an auto-playing, looping, silent mini-screencast (with captions to show what's going on) so that just from loading your web page, somebody will be able to immediately see what this is doing. I've been experimenting with this on my own site, using a modified "Video for Everybody" http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody so that the movie plays with the HTML5 <video> tag, with reasonable fallbacks if not available.
Anyhow, on to your question about contacting a blog. I think that the approach you are taking ... trying to put a single egg into a single basket ... is probably not really going to get you anywhere. Even if you get a nice write-up about the launch, a bunch of in-bound links from that day is not going to last for very long. Take a look at your assets, and see how you can make use of them, and especially leverage things. Contacts you have in the Mac developer community? Bloggers you have been in touch with in the past? Fellow active users of other apps? Followers on Twitter? Existing members of your email list? Time between now and launch to build up some excitement about the product? (What I referred to as "salting" in my profile of Viewfinder's launch -- <http://www.karelia.com/mac_indie_marketing/viewfinder_from_connected_f.html>) If you don't have much of the above, I think that now is a good time to start working on building up some of them. If it takes "cold call" contacts with mac journalists and bloggers, then do it -- but plan on reaching out, personally and individually and non-sleazily, to LOTs of them, and offer them previews of your app (either as downloads with a promo license code, or maybe you could do an iChat demo, or something like that). Be liberal about this! Some of them may think the app is cool and spread the word about it. If they are linking to you pre-launch, be sure you have your email list collector front-and-center so that people who are interested will be notified the moment it comes out -- maybe offer a pre-launch discount or something. What can you do, or offer, to get as many people onto your email list so that when launch day happens, they are informed about and ready to buy? What other developers can you work with, and perhaps work out a deal where they will notify the members of *their* list about this cool new application that's just being launched, and what special deal their readers are going to get for perhaps signing up for your email list (pre-launch) and/or buying your app (post-launch)? I think that the Mac software market has gotten so crowded nowadays that one can't just show up and be a wallflower, hoping somebody will notice them. That might work once in a blue moon, if your app is so mind-blowing that a single person can't help tell all their friends about it, but most software is not *that* exciting. Just my two cents' worth. On Mar 3, 2010, at 3:50 PM, Benedict Lowndes wrote: > Hi MacSB, > > My first Mac app is nearing 1.0 and I'd like to start promoting it more > widely. > But how do I do that? > > I had thought I'd email one of the large Mac blogs where they feature apps > and invite them to review it. At first I thought of TUAW, but after > reviewing their recent posts it seems like they actually don't often feature > Mac OS X applications, now I'm thinking about MacWorld. > Is it naive to think I could just email one or two and expect to get a > response? > Can anyone recommend a site with an engaged Mac audience who might be > suitable for my product? > > Also, I've seen you all give great feedback to others on the presentation of > their products, so I'd be really grateful for any feedback on WindowFlow, > see: http://windowflow.com > > > Thanks! > Ben > -- > Ben Lowndes > Technology Solutions, Web & Application Development > > http://lowndes.net > Phone 0409 184 787 > -- Dan Wood Twitter: http://twitter.com/danwood Karelia Software — Sandvox for the Mac http://www.karelia.com/ He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it. — Martin Luther King, Jr. ------------------------------------ MacSB email guidelines: http://tinyurl.com/2g55d6 Use MacSB-Talk for off topic messages: http://groups.google.com/group/macsb-talk Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/macsb/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/macsb/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: [email protected] [email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
