Are extensions still a million-dollar industry?

In 1995, I started ThePowerXChange. This was after four years as a corporate trainer where I often also functioned as a reseller of QuarkXPress XTensions to my training customers. In the last 17 or so years, I've made millions of dollars selling extensions (collectively XTensions, Plug-ins, Add-ons, Add-ins, and so on), but it begs the question: Are there still millions to be made? Of course there are, but the way you sell, promote, and even deliver them is different. That is the catalyst for this blog.

We have different challenges today than the early days and many of those challenges come in the form of messaging vehicles. At ThePowerXChange, I feel as though we've tried everything, and believe me, we've had lots of failures, but we obviously had lots of successes, too. I would like to think that despite the number of failures, I at least came away a bit smarter.

In the pages of this blog I will share with you some of our tried-and-true messaging vehicles, but more importantly I will share with you the results of our new forays into the world of social-media optimization (SMO) and search-engine optimization (SEO), and how -- or whether -- you can use it to sell your software technology. These are methods that are common to many industries, but I will tell you about them as they apply to us; those of us in the business of software for publishing.

Before 9/11, at ThePowerXChange, we were just motoring along and enjoying reasonable success and growth. Our big campaigns before this pivotal period were what we called PUNs (product-upgrade notices). It was a form of variable-data printing -- when very few companies even knew what that was. We used Xdata and QuarkXPress to customize postcards to our customers telling them when a product they had purchased had been revisioned. They were hugely successful. Depending upon the product, we would see 80% of the customers purchase the upgrade. Our customers loved that the postcard contained all of their purchase history, the product name, the version -- all the things that are taken for granted today with any variable-data job.

After 9/11, it was a whole, new world. Had anyone told me that my company would be affected by a bombing on the eastern seaboard, I would have calmly explained to them how little they know about my business. As it turns out, I would have been wrong -- completely wrong.

For the eight months after 9/11, our phone simply did not ring. We had a shopping cart site, and the cart remained empty. Out of sheer boredom, we started contacting our customers and asked them how we could help and we ended up developing a nice little niche business that while it generated no income, created more good will than I could have bought with a truckload of money.

We had a fair number of customers in the region of the twin towers in NYC and many of them had been booted from their offices due to the quarantine. These companies were also without their software and computers so we researched, wrote letters, and re-delivered their entire library; including their major apps from Quark, Adobe, Meta, and Macromedia. The great thing is, once everyone got back to work, they remembered us and many are still our customers today.

At the same time we started researching shopping-cart software and how to drive traffic. My support manager took over the shopping cart research and together we settled on Searchfit. The benefit to this proprietary solution was that they created static web pages for each product. This increased the number of relevant pages at our site and moved us up the search-engine rankings quickly. I took on the electronic marketing and started email campaigns, click-thru advertising, co-op eMarketing, link exchanges, and more. I read everything in could get my hands on about how to take advantage of the very inexpensive or free marketing available through the web.

Nearly eight years later we still spend nearly all of our marketing budget on search-engine placement and figuring out how to best employ these new and some not-so-new tools to promote the extensible-technology market. We have launched all new SMO campaigns that include LinkedIn, Plaxo, Yahoo, Google, Revver, YouTube, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, GoogleBase, Google Analytics, Google Search, Google AdSense, Amazon, Flickr, BlipTV, MeFeedia, RSS, link exchange, click-thru ads, banner ads, affiliates program, co-op eMarketing and announcements with our partners, and news and press releases.

So here, on the pages of my blog, I will tell you about what we've done, what we're doing, and where we're headed. I'll try to give you ideas about projects you can implement and maybe we'll find ways to work together to benefit you and your market. At the very least, you'll come away with a sense that we share your pain. If you're like me, it will make you feel better to know that you are not alone.