Where to promote premium plugins?

[Michael Stott]

Hi all,

 

I've been working on a Wordpress plugin that I have recently released. Does anyone have any recommendations of good places where I can promote this?   (apologies for the shameful promotion below).

 

The URL to the plugin is here:

 

http://www.mysmashaffiliate.com/

 

I'm thinking either forums, or blogs that review plugins? (review copies can be provided)

 

Cheers

 

Mike

[John Logsdon]

Mike

Good luck with this.

Have you looked at CodeCanyon or one of the mass systems. Ask WPMU DEV.
Promoting this sort of plugin on your own is difficult - there is so much out
there.

But the IE problem must be fixed. Have you thought of serialising rather than
JSON'ing which does essentially the same thing although slightly less
efficiciently. There must be a Javascript version of serialize/unserialize.

HTH

--
Best wishes

John Logsdon

[Michael Stott]

Thanks John,

 

Urghh I know, IE is an absolute pig to develop for, we are hoping to iron this out this week and release an update at which point I'll look to promote it more. (I'm effectively building up my "to do" list of where to market the plugin).

 

CodeCanyon I have some experience of through this plugin

http://codecanyon.net/item/social-gallery-wordpress-photo-viewer-plugin/2665332?WT.ac=follow&WT.seg_1=follow&WT.z_author=stormgate

 

Although Woody tells me THEY set the price, and they also take a 50% cut (dropping to 33% if you sell elsewhere). Do people find this useful? I wanted to try and promote it independently on my own for a bit but obviously if the consensous is go with CodeCanyon I may have to conceede.

 

I've just joined Warrior forum which seems OK - except they're now mostly a paid forum and it's about $80 to get a post up on the WSO forum (warrior special offers).

 

Cheers

 

Mike

[John Logsdon]

Mike

I haven't tried selling through CodeCanyon but one of my users did purchase a
theme via ThemeForest and the support was abysmal because the author in
Romania had gone awol after selling quit a few thousand of the sexy-looking
theme to the unsuspecting at $35 a shot.

I tend to avoid theme bundlers because most of them tie you into their control
panels - ie they replace the standard theme controls in WordPress which makes
it difficult to move themes. I don't know about plugins though - I use
Simple:Press on one site which seems OK (developed in the UK...).

I realise the cut CC takes is pretty large but then it is a market and would
help you build up a user base. I notice that Jigo in Peterborough are on and
they write Jigoshop and other interesting software. I guess you could use
them or someone like it to get the product out there and after a year or so,
or for other products, go independent.

Or MWUG/WPUK could develop its own marketplace...

Other than that, you could offer a cut down version via WordPress itself for
free and hope to sell some Pro versions.

HTH

[Mike Little]

Harsh critique follows, don't read if you are of a sensitive nature.

One thing you should do is use the correct WordPress logo and spelling!

Nothing screams "poor effort" more than spelling WordPress wrongly (capital W, capital P) and using the wrong logo (http://wordpress.org/about/logos/)

Not to mention using a preview version of iShowU to record your video (which won't play, by the way) -- If you can't spend $50 on IShowU, why expect someone to spend $60 on your product?

I also notice your site isn't using pretty permalinks. And the pages don't validate either -- 29 errors in the home page, 24 errors on the example book store page.

As someone else mentioned you will need to fix the issue with IE, I'm not sure it's a problem with IE though: the same origin policy is a valid security concept (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same_origin_policy) and I'm surprised if it is working on other browsers, or perhaps the problem is something else.

Finally, I can't see any mention of licence on the site. Don't forget all distributed plugins should be licensed under the GNU GPL Version 2 or a compatible licence.

This was harsh, but first impressions are important, and that was unimpressive.

Mike

--
Mike Little
http://zed1.com/

[Michael Stott]

Mike,

 

Firstly, please do critique me harsly - it's my first plugin attempt and I am grateful for your comments. I'm pretty new to all this but I do like to continually improve and your feedback is very useful.

 

On the plus side, it's a nice blue theme though :)

 

Please see below for my reply.

 

One thing you should do is use the correct WordPress logo and spelling!

 

 

Nothing screams "poor effort" more than spelling WordPress wrongly (capital W, capital P) and using the wrong logo (http://wordpress.org/about/logos/)

 

I can definitely tweak this, I used iconfinder to find a free commerical use logo to use for the plugin (I do spell it right part way down the page). I didn't realise about the logos, thanks for the links.

Not to mention using a preview version of iShowU to record your video (which won't play, by the way) -- If you can't spend $50 on IShowU, why expect someone to spend $60 on your product?

 

I will be updating this video, I used video.js to embed it but will improve (using a proper version) and host using vimeo or something like that. It appears to work in Chrome.

 

I also notice your site isn't using pretty permalinks. And the pages don't validate either -- 29 errors in the home page, 24 errors on the example book store page.

 

I'm working on this too, it's been winding me up, I use a self managed server and for some reason the apache2 rewrite doesn't seem to want to play nicely with the permalinks. Re validation - Thanks for this, I'll look into the W3C validator and improve these.

 

As someone else mentioned you will need to fix the issue with IE, I'm not sure it's a problem with IE though: the same origin policy is a valid security concept (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same_origin_policy) and I'm surprised if it is working on other browsers, or perhaps the problem is something else.

 

http://m.cg/post/13585340040/cross-domain-ajax-in-ie8-and-ie9

 

Finally, I can't see any mention of licence on the site. Don't forget all distributed plugins should be licensed under the GNU GPL Version 2 or a compatible licence.

 

On the site as well as in the plugin file? I will defintiely add this then. Thank you.

[Michael Stott]

I've spent some time on the plugin tonight following Mike's comments. Thanks for the feedback Mike, I hope you are as brutally honest with more of my ideas for plugins. I am not averse to constructive feedback.

It's now IE friendly :) and I've sorted out the permalinks which was a random issue and I needed to manually mod my .htaccess but its there now.

The boxwork with the small p will have to stay until my artwork man can fix this up.

http://www.mysmashaffiliate.com/

Still looking for an alternative to the IshowU for the Mac OSX, does anyone use anything they'd recommend? 

Cheers again

Mike

[Rhys Wynne]

Hi Mike,

Month 2 of my premium plugin here, so can help a little bit :-). Are you at the next meetup? Can put you in contact with a few bloggers who will review you plugin for a free copy :-).

Also I wrote a post a while back where I gave away a copy of my blogger outreach spreadsheet with 25 sites I have had some level of success in promoting to. Maybe you may find it useful - http://bloggingdojo.com/blogger-outreach-25-bloggers-who-will-promote-your-wordpress-theme-or-plugin/

Hope that is okay, any queries, please let me know.

Cheers :-)

Rhys

[Mike Stott]

Rhys,

That sounds excellent yeah ill get myself down to the meet on the 19th?

How do they normally work for knowing who is who?

I'll check out your link shortly. What's your premium plugin and how's
it working out for you? Are you going it alone or via code canyon.

Am I right assuming WordPress.org don't offer a marketplace? Is there a
reason for this?

Mike



Sent from my Windows Phone
From: Rhys Wynne
Sent: 10/09/2012 22:15
To: manchester-word...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [MWUG] Where to promote premium plugins?

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[Mike Little]

On 10 September 2012 21:41, Michael Stott <mikemay...@gmail.com> wrote:

I've spent some time on the plugin tonight following Mike's comments. Thanks for the feedback Mike, I hope you are as brutally honest with more of my ideas for plugins. I am not averse to constructive feedback.

It's now IE friendly :) and I've sorted out the permalinks which was a random issue and I needed to manually mod my .htaccess but its there now.

The boxwork with the small p will have to stay until my artwork man can fix this up.

http://www.mysmashaffiliate.com/

Hi Mike,

It's looking much better now. A couple of minor issues I noticed.

There's a typo on the home page: Under shortcodes galore, linnks should be links

At the bottom of the home page is mentions leaving a comment but comments aren't enabled.

When you click through to an individual book page from the example book store, two of the download sample icons are really fuzzy. Aslo, not of the icons mean anything to me -- I can guess the Amazon icon represents Kiindle format, but I don't know what the others represent.

Still looking for an alternative to the IshowU for the Mac OSX, does anyone use anything they'd recommend? 

The app that I use is Screenflow (http://z1.tl/screenflow) which I use to produce videos like this http://mikelittle.org/videos/adding-category-page/

It's a little different than many, but has great capabilities for a reasonable price.

Mike

[Daniel McClure]

Hey Mike, 

I would definitely consider the WarriorForum for your plugin, especially with the affiliate nature of your plugin. I've personally made thousands selling on there. One thing I would advise is to take a look at what other WSO sellers are doing because it's definitely a different beast than your standard sales pages. Also you might consider launching with WarriorPlus - http://www.warriorplus.com/ - It's an affiliate platform especially for the forum and can help you gain a lot of traction. And last but not least if you decide to go the affiliate route on the forum and have a Facebook account then add me and I can get you added to a Facebook group that is dedicated to hooking up WP sellers and affiliates on the Warrior Forum -  https://www.facebook.com/danielmcclure 

Hope that helps!

Daniel McClure