phpguru.org

It's often said that if you want to watch the latest technological developments unfold, keep an eye on the "adult entertainment" industry. I don't recommend you do that of course ;p (well, unless that tickles your fancy...). However the Internet Marketing industry is very often at the forefront of using technology creatively too.

I recently read an interesting example at Neil Shearing's internet marketing strategies blog of combining .NET desktop software with a PHP backend.

Neil got a team of coders to create a desktop app for him, and then got another team to set up a whole set of server-side marketing scripts to capture people's email addresses, get them to recommend their friends and so on. We all know PHP is often slated by "real programmers" as a scripting language only useful for kiddie's home pages, and its nice to see a serious marketer choosing PHP to power the backend to a serious piece of viral software with the potential to go load-mad. His marketing tactics for Real Link Finder are also interesting. He is giving away the software (not as in open source, but still free as in beer). As far as I can tell he's not making any money with the software at all - its free to download with none of the usual "upsells" and so on. Presumably he is just hoping to build a large list of email subscribers he can market to further down the line.

My own experience trying to market my Knowledge Base software product is that people who subscribe to the updates list are much more likely to invest in the service than first time visitors, and its something I'm going to concentrate more on - getting people to give me their details so I can keep them up to date with the latest developments (I spend sooo many hours working on that site!) and remind them every now and then about the site.

I'm also trying to think of something I can build that will act like Neil's blog commenting software - as a "front end" (in marketing-speak!) to get people interested in Web Support Solutions.

But as you know by now, I'm no marketer! Anyone got any ideas on what that software could be?