XML Tribune

Recently I decided to add the TrialPay offer to the payment options for XML ValidatorBuddy. I already learned about TrialPay months ago but never took the time to set up a product or just even to create an account. Of course it doesn’t take just “5 minutes” as TrialPays says but after one hour I successfully added ValidatorBuddy as a new product. Now I have to wait until it gets approved and then I can add a link to the TrialPay page as an additional payment option to my web pages.

We will see if the typical ValidatorBuddy user, and close-but-not-really customer, also likes one of the TrialPay offers…

I just stumbled over this very good blog: http://blog.asmartbear.com/

Definitely worth reading if you run a microISV.

A few weeks ago I removed all PAD files from my server because I was tired of updating the content and I never noticed any real traffic coming from all of the download sites anyways. The whole PAD file misery was already discussed in detail and if you want to know more you can read a lot about it here. Just search the blog for PAD

Every now and then I get a PAD polling error sent by one of the many download sites I added my PAD file in the past. Of course this is also a little bit strange because those sites are actually of a higher quality and to appear there could also be a benefit. But the vast majority of sites where my PAD is known don’t care if it is still accessible or not. They just took the details from the PAD to fill there own pages with content to get hits for advertising. With a lot of “stolen” content and a lot of links they get a high page rank pushing your own sites from the first pages of the search results. Nothing new here…

To come to an end. If you consider to submit to hundreds or thousands of download pages please don’t do it. Add you software to some selected places like download.com (even the free of charge plan) or tucows.com if you are a patient guy and provide content instead. Don’t waste time to get registered anywhere just to bring clicks to other people.

Two years ago I also started with creating and submitting PAD files to many, many download sites all over the internet. I hoped that I will get thousands of visitors coming to my pages to learn more about the tools I provide. Well, I can remember a few hits coming from download.com.

There are some articles from other bloggers out there writing about how those download sites are working and that you can even submit a not working .exe file and get their highest star-rating with congratulations how wonderful your software is and everyone is happy to have you here on the download page. I regulary read Scott Kanes blog at The Recursive ISV and if you are interested in the details you will find some entries about the PAD file misery there. In general I recommend to read Scotts blog as he gives you valuable insights and tips how to be successful as a Micro ISV.

However, starting with yesterday I totally removed all PAD files from my server. Now I wait until I get the first notifications about failed polling of the PAD files from the download pages. But I wouldn’t be surprised if I get only a few of them. I expect that most of the pages don’t care if the software is really still accessible and alive.

In any case I don’t expect any decrease in the number of visitors at all. Frequently providing content people are looking for is more powerful then submitting to hundreds of download sites.