How/Where do you actually market/sell your plugins?

[Tangerine_Sounds]

@Matt_SF All really good points.

Again, Im no expert but I've read / listened to a few books on the subject.

For anyone completely new to all of this there are some influencers in this field you could look at:-

• Graham Cochrane. His focus is on creating courses and online communities but also building an audience through email. Check out his book 'How to get paid for what you know'.

• Gary Vee (Vaynerchuk). He is big on organic social content to drive awareness. Check out his book 'Day Trading Attention'

• Alex Hormozi. His book '$100M Leads' is all about finding an audience and selling to them.

That's probably enough for now.

My struggle is how to apply the principals to a specific niche.
The authors I have named are not targeting musicians as their customer base (actually that's how Graham Cochrane started but he's kind of moved on from that).
A lot of the advice is to find a problem or pain point that your customers want solving. You could say that for musicians that problem is 'I want my music to sound awesome' and our solution is 'buy my plugin'. But there's a lot of competition out there so its difficult to stand out.

Ultimately there is no 'one size fits all' formula for any of this so its about trying different things and seeing what works for you.

[hisefilo]

My 2 cents. I insist. If you create a plugin that reads your mind and makes drums grooves just by thinking about it, all marketing techniques will work. If you do a sampler with a string pad. None will. Product is the key in my modest opinion. I prefer to use my limited time for creating.

[d.healey]

@hisefilo said in How/Where do you actually market/sell your plugins?:

Product is the key in my modest opinion

I would take that further and say it's the audience.

If you don't have people who want to buy then it won't sell. So you could start with the audience and work backwards to a product.

[hisefilo]

@d-healey absolutely. The good thing in my case is that I am the audience because we are among them. We know the insights. We’ve been using vsts for many many years. At least in my case.

[Chazrox]

@d-healey I would take that even further (lol) to say Identify your demographic, and fulfill a need or a want. Best scenario.

[tomekslesicki]

@hisefilo I would also recommend Flodesk - great pricing model (they charge you a fixed low fee monthly, and don’t limit your audience or emails sent), good automation features and nice design options. Quite possibly the best newsletter service I used so far. And I used a lot.

[aaronventure]

@tomekslesicki did you try the Amazon AWS email service? It's literally pennies.

[orange]

I use Amazon SES with a plugin called The Newsletter on Wordpress. It really does the job for a few dollars.

The only downside is that it is integrated into the Wordpress system so it uses the sources of the server, and has a limit on the number of hourly emails. If set above the limit capacity, it creates problem on the site.

But other than that, it beats MailChimp and many other services.

[d.healey]

@orange I used to use The Newsletter too, very good, but check out FluentCRM it does this same thing but also has automations.

[orange]

@d-healey I’ll check that thanks

[DanH]

@d-healey is it paid for the automation stuff?

[d.healey]

@DanH Nope, it's all included and integrates with WooCommerce.

[aaronventure]

@d-healey David, did you talk about tax collection issues and MoR pricing? I recently found out about www.polar.sh and they seem to be a good new deal.

Plus the open source angle.

[d.healey]

@aaronventure Looks like it's an all-in-one solution so I would have to put my products with them instead of on my WooCommerce site, is that correct?

For VAT I'm all set, it's just US taxes I was thinking a MoR would be of benefit for me. I'm considering Stripe tax, they charge $0.50 per 10 API requests per transaction, but I can limit it to just the few states that have an economic nexus thing, so shouldn't cost me too much.