Now comes the research portion of your software project.

If you have not yet registered with the site (or sites), you can do that now.

Then, go through the "top sellers", or "hot buys" list for each site.

 Visit the product page for each item and note down (Excel or are text file are both fine) the following:

• Name of product
• General category (e.g. Helpdesk, advertising, security)
• Any questions and features that are often mentioned.

Once you have done at least 20, go back over them and pick a general category you want to create a product for.

Go back through those products and note down all you can find out about the features they have, and those that are asked for.

You will use this to plan out your list of requirements before you create your product.

Note that while this shortcut gets you lined up on a product that people want, you are unlikely to end up on the top sellers list yourself unless you do a really good job.  Many of the products you find there will have been around for several years.  This is a quick way to get a product done and selling so you can use the revenue for other things.

Much like any other for of selling, to sell software, you need to start with a target market.  A group of people who are likely to be interested in what you have to offer them.  Fortunately, the internet makes this quite easy to discover, though it can take some time.

For the purposes of being able to sell without needing a web site or anything else that might cost, you need to go looking for a specific type of web site.

It needs the following features:

1. To be popular.  Fortunately, Google already figures this out for us.
2. To be focussed on a target group or market
3. To host and process payment for software products for you
4. To not charge any set up fees.
5. To have a "most popular" or "top sellers" list

Any easy way to get a ready made target market is to produce "add-ons", these are often referred to as "modules", "extensions", or "add-ins".  These are small pieces of software designed to extend or alter the behaviour of existing applications.  Your target market is then defined as the owners of that application, or a sub-group of them.

Some examples of applications you could target are:

• Photoshop
• DotNetNuke
• PHPNuke / PostNuke
• Microsoft Word / Excel / Access / etc
• FireFox
• Joomla
• WordPress
• Internet Explorer

I recommend you do some searches for programming languages you know, and  see what you can come up with.  I'm going to go with "DotNetNuke" for this as I'm familiar with it from previous work I've done.

Searching Google for dotnetnuke purchase commission brings up a number of sites.

Two that are potentially useful are:

• SnowCovered.com
• DotNetNuke Marketplace

You are likely to arrive somewhere deep inside the site, so make sure you check out the home page.  Both these sites are suitable for this because they meet all the criteria that I specified earlier.

If you want to follow along with this process, go and do your research now, I'll be posting the next step within a few days.

I must apologise for the long time between posts.

I'll be posting the first part on creating and selling a software product for $0 shortly, but in the mean time, I just wanted to let you know that I've released a guide to customer service that you can get from this site Customer Service Guide. It's just $4 until the 1st of Jan, and $10 after that.

It should be useful to anyone running, or looking to run a business, especially one which is mainly online.

I hope everyone has had a great holiday, and I'm looking forward to a fun and profitable New Year with you all.

By the way, if anyone has suggestions or questions for other guides they would like, drop a comment here and let me know about it.

Yes.  You can do it.  And since I like the idea of showing how, and someone else though it would be interesting, I'll go through it.

This will take me a few posts to go through, from locating an apropriate website, identifying a product, producing the product, and putting it up for sale.

Points to note:

• This is not hugely cost effective, you'll be giving away ~25-30% of your revenue to someone else in exchange for not doing payment processing
• I don't recommend this for long term use, but it works well for getting some cashflow up front.

You WILL need:

• A PayPal account (if you want to get the money quickly)
• The ability to program, or someone who will do the work in exchange for a profit share.

Things you need to do:

• Locate a website that acts as a "marketplace" and processes the payments for you
• Research the products that sell well
• Create a product specification
• Create the product (or get it created)
• Package it
• Set it up on the website
• Write sales copy for it