Great product, erm, about this marketing thingy?

Hi,

I have spent the last few years developing a great software product and an ebook to go with it. No, nothing to do with making money on the net, it's a different niche though a large one.

The book has no DRM, the software uses a serial key which is checked online for previous use (once only).

The site has a forum, users can also have their own blog, I have a full ticket support center and there's about 40 articles (written by me) on the site. It gets around 50 unique visitors a day but no-one uses the blogs and barely the forum.

The software has been extensively developed, based on my own use and feedback, it is now slick, easy to use and if I may say so, darn good. Certainly nicer than the competition.

But sales have sucked.

I've tried various price points to no great avail, in fact the lastest version sells best at its current $50 price, though that may need adjusting due to the depression thing.

I tried PPC years ago and found it not cost effective, ie it was costing me more than it was bringing in sales. I also found my organic results dropped while using it and crept up after I stopped, which really put me off ever using it again.

So basically my product is now highly polished, it's nice and while it will never be 100% finished it can sit alongside anything out there and not be ashamed of itself (and probably easier to use than near all of them).

It's already listed on almost all the download sites and I've based around a bit with some link building but it's very slow going.

My budget is tiny and almost non-existent.

Basically years of hard work producing a great product but only around one sale a week, yet I hear on here people knocking up some crap ebook and making multiple sales per day. Ouch. OK, I get the point, I need to do some marketing.

I'm not a beginner at this stuff but am somewhat bewildered as where to even start really. Writing articles doesn't overly appeal, partly as I do that for other people (at 2 cents a word, native English speaker, I'm cheap!) and partly as it's a long slow process. Writing for others is an immediate return and actually making me more money than sales of my own product. If I concentrate on writing articles for myself I'll upset my clients, lose my income and no guarantees it will make much difference, certainly not in the short term.

Those that actually buy my product and communicate with me seem to love it to bits, so at this stage further polishing of the product seems the wrong approach, but then again sales come from a trial download, so I dunno.

My current plans are:

1. Restore my (dead for some reason) autoresponder and once again demand emails for downloading. About a year ago that script stopped working, and not for the first time. I don't like hosted services so a recommendation for a GOOD autoresponder script sub $100 would be appreciated.

2. I'm working on blending the blogs and forum into one major community site which will have an online version of my software for paid members, free tools for free members. Its a major project, about 40% complete at present.

What I'd like, ideally, at this time, is knowing where I can find a decent marketing company where I can throw a little cash at them and they know what the heck to do?

Right now I'm too busy earning a living to do anything that takes a lot of time, though if I can boost my own sales I can cut back on working for others and then hit the whole articles and social networking etc stuff much harder.

So, any good low-priced marketing companies I can trust, any good autoresponder scripts for follow-ups or other ideas?

??


B.