Selling Softwares! What are the costs?

One of the great things about selling software online is that the barriers to entry are extremely low.

For starters, you don’t need to sink a lot of money into starting up your business. In general you’ll have the following costs: start-up costs, product creation costs, and marketing expenses.

Start-up costs include things like buying a domain name and hosting, designing the site, purchasing an autoresponder, and other products and services you need to get up and running fast.  Most of these expenses tend to be very minimal,

such as less than $10 a year for a domain name, about $10 a month for hosting, about $20 a month for an autoresponder, etc.

 

Certain services like designing your site and getting the sales copy written will be more expensive.  However, depending on your own skill level, you can drastically reduce these expenses, or even eliminate them.  For example, if you prefer to design your own site and graphics, you don’t need to hire someone else to do it.

Another way to keep your already low start-up costs even lower is to barter.  For example, you can trade some of your software in exchange for a service such as copywriting or web design.

The second expense that you’ll have are your product creation costs – in other words, the expenses involved in developing the software that you’re going to sell. Product creation costs are all over the board, depending on what route you take. You can spend as little as a few dollars on a piece of software, to hundreds of thousands of dollars for design and development costs.

Later on this site you’ll learnwhere to go to get your software developed,including some of the most reliable andcost-effective methods.

Finally, your last major category of expenses involved in setting up your own software business are your marketing and advertising costs.  If you’re just getting started and you’re on a tight budget, these costs need not be high either.  While you can use paid advertising like pay per click search engines, you can get just

as good results (sometimes better) using free marketing methods like affiliate partnerships, joint ventures, co-promotions, organic search engine optimization, newsletter marketing and similar.