Mac Indie Marketing
Eleven really useful, free marketing eBooks
Following a tip on the MacSB list, I picked up copy of the ebook "MicroISV Sites that Sell" since it was on sale. It's pretty good, especially if you really just haven't given much thought to the message on your website and whom you are trying to reach. I really liked the section where it asks you to really try to identify who your potential customer is. I've picked up a lot of eBooks (usually for free) over the years, and while this isn't necessarily the best, I can recommend it.
However, I thought I would go through my collection of eBooks come up with some other recommendations for fellow Mac indie developers (and anybody else who is interested, since they can apply to all kinds of Internet-based businesses.)
All of these are free, though some need you to get on their mailing list.
(IMPORTANT: If you run across a free eBook download, you will often be asked to provide your email address. I suggest you set up a special email address just for your marketing downloads. While I've never gotten actually spammed, some of the marketers who are offering goodies tend to be a weeeeeee bit heavy on the hype — you'll come to recognize the Impact font, the loooong sales letters, the yellow highlighting, and so forth. So it's nice to be able to keep your real address separate!)
I'm turning this into a blog
I'm reading Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust (which I just added to the sidebar) and it's a great book. It has inspired me to add some more content to this little corner of the Karelia website and provide some more insight about marketing, from the perspective of the Indie Mac community.
To be a bit more clear about the intent of this blog, I've changed its URL; however the old url of http://www.karelia.com/marketing/ will still work as a shortcut.
I'm hoping to add more content here as I run across interesting ideas or see nice examples of other indie Mac companies and their marketing efforts. It's a huge market out there, and very hard for a Mac developer to get their stuff noticed. I am hoping that some of the insights that I pass along, further fueled by the discussion in the comments on these posts, will help us all out.
I should note up-front that I may be linking to commercial products, packages, training, and so forth from time to time, and that some of these links may be affiliate links. (The amazon.com book list in the sidebar is an example of this.) While this is potentially an additional stream (or trickle) of income for Karelia — you can call this "Integration Marketing" that I mentioned in my C4 talk — I will only link to something that has my true recommendation, that I would heartily suggest even if they didn't have an affiliate program. There is a lot of junk out there and it would be a disservice to recommend anything that I don't find to be truly useful.
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