Intro
This concise article will tell you in plain English how you can promote your software easily and effectively.

Submit your software
I recommend submitting your software to upload.com. It costs $79 dollars a year, but is well worth it. It will display your product on download.com and its partner network made up of 20 other major download sites. Download.com is so popular that if your product was only listed on download.com it would still be worth the yearly fee.

Use Rudenko's (submit.rudenko.com) software submission service to submit your software to hundreds of software archives. Unlike auto-submit programs, Rudenko has employees manually submit your software to each archive so it is less likely to be rejected.

Rudenko's software submission service is also beneficial because most of the software archives will have a link to your website. Relevant pages that link to your website increase your link popularity. The higher your link popularity the better your search engine ranking will be, especially in Google. Rudenko's software submission service costs $70 and if you include "David Mahler - 10% discount" in the comment field you will receive 10% off.

Promote through your website
If you have a website than you can promote your software for free by utilizing effective search engine optimization techniques.

The two key factors for search engine optimization are effective titles and clear body text. Make sure that the titles are relevant, unique to each page, and include key phrases that are likely to be searched. Body text should be clear, concise and saturated with key phrases. Feel free to add your key phrase as many times as it seems natural to do so. Before you publish your masterpiece, test your website copy by reading it out loud to yourself or to a friend. If it sounds awkward you probably need to take a few of those key phrases out. Remember it is important to write for both people and search engines.

For more information on search engine optimization I highly recommend highrankings.com.

Have someone else do the work
Websites like shareit.com and cj.com allow you to partner with affiliates that distribute your software for you. This is an easy way to get your product out there but you can expect to pay a commission to the affiliate.

Conclusion
Whether you are a sole proprietor or a major corporation, these software marketing techniques will be effective in promoting your software.

David Mahler started his business (Small Business Services) creating websites in 2002. His company has since extented his services to Intranet design, database design and website copywriting.