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Our company develops a Windows based desktop software product (photo and media document management software for small teams). The first product version will be free of charge. The next major release will be commercial.

Could you please give me advices how to effectively promote the Freeware window desktop software.

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Is it one of the tools at prograce.com? If so, which one? – David May 15 '12 at 14:43
No. This is the Daminion at daminion.net. – Murat May 15 '12 at 17:00
Any ideas are welcome ) – Murat May 16 '12 at 13:41
It's not a domain I'm familiar with. But at a high level, who are your target users? Your web site should give some high level areas where the software is useful so readers make the link more easily, some of your descriptions are a little more technical than marketing. Detailing your target users and the areas in which they work is the first step to working out how to reach them. – David May 16 '12 at 13:51
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But again, that's a list of technical features, you need to explicitly explain to possible users how this saves them time and money in particular use cases. The above list and much of the web site sound like an engineer talking, engineers are generally poor at marketing (no disrespect, but that's why they are engineers). – David May 16 '12 at 14:56
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you probably are already aware of this but just wanted to share some ideas which I would have tried.

  1. Download.com I would definitely try and get my software listed there and see if they have some sort of promotions I can purchase. New and noteworthy kinds of things can give you an instant boost.

  2. Other download sites There are plenty of other download sites for windows software which are not as popular as download.com - but you should try and get your software on as many of them as possible.

One of them which I end up using besides download.com regularly are softpedia.com

The biggest advantage of these sites are that they show up on search engines very well.

  1. Google Adwords I would definitely spend some money here and optimize for google search adwords as plenty of times, I myself end up clicking on ads while searching for software.

  2. Windows 8 Marketplace Windows 8 is going to have a marketplae and it will be a good idea if you can try and get your app into it. Win 8 is scheduled to launch Nov 2012 - so its not that far off and early mover advantage might be valuable.

  3. Magazine and blog reviews In India, magazines like Digit, Chip, etc carry DVDs with software. You can write to as many relevant magazines as possible and get them to review ypur software as well as include it in their DVDs. Same for popular bloggers in your product's area of interest.

I'm sorry if all these ideas sound generic. I had written some Windows tools many years ago and I had submitted it to download.com and tucows.com then which were very popular.

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