Do you love a bargain? Of course you do. Everybody loves a bargain. If you love software bargains in particular, then you owe it to yourself to check out Bits du Jour because they offer a new software bargain everyday. If you’re on the consumer side of the equation, then you can keep tabs on their daily software offering via this RSS feed. If you’re on the developer side of the equation, then advice below is aimed at you.

Last Wednesday (October 25^th, 2006) FlowBreeze Flowcharting Software was featured on Bits du Jour. I had such a great day that I wanted to do my part to help spread the BdJ gospel, hence this blog post. But it goes beyond that. I also want to help developers get the most out of their one day experience.

My Visitor Logs Are Giving Me the Finger

Every week it looks like my web stats are flipping me off. That’s because Wednesday is my peak traffic day, so the bar chart spikes in the middle. Oddly enough though, it’s just a so-so sales day. By far the most orders are placed on Fridays.

Thinking about this sparked the idea that if I’m going to do Bits du Jour then I might as well make the effort to maximize sales. The typical software company sells 5-25 copies when featured on Bits do Hour. FlowBreeze sold 39 copies. So I thought I’d share the things I did to help make the campaign a bit more successful:

• I ran a newsletter announcement. Many of my subscribers are already customers, but that’s fine since many of my orders have come from organizations that have already purchased a license.
• I plastered links (with a graphic and a testimonial) to Bits du Jour all over my web site. I think some developers may fear cannibalized sales. While that’s a possibility, my viewpoint is that I would rather have 39 customers at 1/3 the profit then 13 at full profit. Every additional customer is the opportunity to gain word of mouth marketing and tell you when your software has problems or could use a feature or two.
• I ran the campaign on my peak traffic day to maximize the casual visitor exposure. My site attracts a lot of visitors to the articles, but most aren’t interested in buying anything. We all love free content, but we also all love a bargain. So I mixed the two ideas.
• I doubled my Google AdWords CPC and received 3x my normal hits. Unfortunately, my web analytics was not set up to track the Bits du Jour sales through my payment processor. I have no idea whether this resulted in additional sales, to be honest.
• I ran a Google AdWords campaign announcing the 1-day sale with links directly to Bits du Jour instead of to my site. The quality score was lower, reducing my position and increasing my costs, so I cancelled that after 2 hours of 0 clicks and resumed my normal AdWords groups (but with the CPC doubled, as stated above).

Overall, the main point I wanted to get across was that you can maximize the results by brainstorming a few ideas and lending at least a small effort to the promotional activities.

More About Bits du Jour - 7 Months and Growing Strong

Bits du Jour is a part-time venture started 7 months ago by Ellen Craw. There are many deal-a-day sites on the web, the most popular one being Woot, but none of them specialize in software. Ellen noticed the market gap, had the vision, and created a nice WordPress-based site. She has grown the traffic solely by word of mouth. The day my software was featured, Bits du Jour had over 5700 visitors – not bad for a site with no paid marketing.

Ellen attracts developers to sell their products by frequenting on-line developer newsgroups and forums. To sell a product on Bits du Jour, the software company must discount their price (typically 33-50%) and pay a 30% commission to Bits du Jour.

According to Ellen, Bits du Jour currently averages 11 sales per day. However, since Labor Day that number has grown to 17 sales per day, with an overall range of 5-25 sales per day. And there’s no doubt in my mind that the number will continue to rise as the word about it spreads.

So if you’re a small software company, I encourage you to go to Bits du Jour and sign up today. If you’re a software consumer, I urge you to go grab that feed.