After releasing CustomBar a couple days ago, and spending most of my waking time since then advertising it and submitting it to download sites, it occured to me that getting immediate exposure and maintaining that exposure are two different beast.

As long as you are willing to put effort into it, it's pretty easy to get a decent amount of downloads in your first. CustomBar has done terrifically so far in this area, and is also boasting a very good conversion rate. However, the moment that there has been a pause in advertising (July 3rd's wore off, download.com listing won't be up for a few days, and I only started submitting to other file sites today) downloads have dropped signficantly. While this drop doesn't concern me at the moment, since I have plenty more ways to get exposure, it has caused me to think more carefully about the future.

Expecting to maintain the same sort of download rate that you get when first releasing an application is probably not that realistic. I'm interested in getting as close to this as possible though. Many successful people here have products that are doing well years after release (two I can think of offhand are Dweep and The Journal) This thread is hereby for ideas on how to maintain a steady stream of downloads after you have used up all the one-time benefits of being a new release.

Here are the things that I can think of that will help drive-in downloads months or years after release:

Regular Updates: this has the benefit of allowing you to rise back to the top of some file sites and have your update mentioned on some software news sites. People tend to mention new updates to their favorite software to others. It also keeps your "last updated" date from discouraging downloads by making it clear that this is product is still supported.

Link Exchanges: good link exchanges, such as navbar buttons, can result in links that are prominently visible for a very long time.

Maintaining a Community: I think that it's important to give people a place to discuss the product. Having active members of the community means having active "sneezers" that are happy to recommend your product to people they meet. The really big products, such as Mozilla, Winamp, and Trillian, all have many very devouted and loud fans. These people do a lot to convert even more people to these programs. Anything that encourages community building, such as forums and user-submitted downloads, falls under this.

Releasing Additional Products: releasing new products and cross-promoting old ones with new ones can help making it easier to launch the new products while also feeding some fresh traffic to the older programs.

File Download Sites: while most of the traffic received comes in the first while, especially on monsters such as download.com, some traffic will continue to roll in. There's also the added search engine ranking benefit, which can also bring in more downloads as people find the program through searching.

Continued Advertising: continuing to find new places to advertise and maintaining advertisements such as banner ads in places that are generating profitable traffic.

There must be many more ways to keep traffic coming long after releasing 1.0 and I have a gut feeling that I'm missing some really big ones. How do you maintain downloads of your product after a long time has passed?

Regular Updates: this has the benefit of allowing you to rise back to the top of some file sites and have your update mentioned on some software news sites. People tend to mention new updates to their favorite software to others. It also keeps your "last updated" date from discouraging downloads by making it clear that this is product is still supported.


With a great product like yours, you can definatly add "Release SDK" or a "Modification tools" for games its "Release level editor". Look at Milkshape who has a great SDK for plugins and exports for your own savefiles, I think that the main program hadnt been updated for about a year and only plugins that were built by other people were added. Later on you can release level packs, or new missions/campaigns, which generate a healthy, active community.

I'd like to add one more thing (which people might still be afraid of) is adding network capabilities. I'm looking at games like StarCraft (I know its retail, but bear with me for the example) which people still play. why? because after it has established a large fan community, people began to brag and want to play the game against eachother. I think that Battle.Net is the only reason why StarCraft is still alive, people are playing with even today, years after it came out (unlike a retail product which should fade away after a year or two).

you could try and get it on magazine cd's

david