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In this podcast I chat with Mike Potter from the Flex marketing team about marketing your Flex application, what's new in Flex 3 as well as open source as it relates to the Flex world.
Marketing your Flex Application
Is a gallery of Flex apps on Flex,org. The only criteria to get you app in the gallery is that it needs to be built in Flex and have a public facing URL, showing or using Flex in some way. It's for just about anybody: consultants, small companies, large companies, independents come one come all. The Flex showcase currently has about 250 applications listed in it.
2. Adobe of Site of the Day
If you're a Flash fan you might remember the Flash Site of Day from way back, well this is the same thing but for sites built with any Adobe technology. It's right on Adobe.com so definitely high traffic and great for your Page Rank for you SEO nuts:) The other benefits of this program are that your app might get used in other Adobe PR, like the Edge Newsletter.
Is for business leaders looking to showcase their innovative application of Adobe technologies. The benefits include increased exposure, closer relationships with Adobe and peer to peer networking.
4. User Groups
Get out there and get involved in your local Flex and other user groups. User group lead are always looking for new content and presenters. Flex.org has a list of user groups related to Flex.
5. Get in touch with evangelists.
All the members of the Adobe evangelism team focused on Flex are interested in learning what cool new apps are being built on Flex. Guys like Ryan Stewart, James Ward, Ted Patrick, Mike Potter all have blogs that are well read, track them down and send them an email about what you're up to.
6. AIR Marketplace
If you're Flex app can also run in AIR or has an AIR component, consider submitting it to the AIR marketplace. It's new and Adobe is putting a lot into promoting it.
Mike's writing an article on this in the next couple weeks for ADC, be sure to check his blog to find out more.
Flex 3
The main new feature is the AIR integration. There's enhancements to make it easier to integrate content from Creative Suite products into your Flex app, thus improving the designer / developer workflow. There's also be a lot of work reducing the size of Flex apps.
Open Source and Flex
The Flex framework itself is open source and you can find out more at Opensource.adobe.com. There you can get the source code and daily builds of the SDK, submit bugs and patches and few people are even committers.
Flex.org is built on on top of Drupal, and is interesting model for combining Flex with other open source frameworks like AMF PHP.
Thanks for being on the podcast Mike. Let's schedule that chat about Flex debugging tools! Mike Potter can be contacted via his blog.
If you have any ideas for or would like to be on a future podcast please email me. Here's the feed so you can subscribe to the podcast.
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Great tips Andre,
It is hard to promote flex apps as the major search engine can't index them properly.
Using these channels is a great way to promote you product.
Looking at your target market would help as well. Posting your application on say adobes marketplace or Flex.org might not target your audience that you want. Most people who go to them sites are Developers and designers for the Adobe products and flex.
But getting your product on the Adobe site of the month would be better if your target market is smaller or more of a niche market, as that helps with distributing and SEO.
Nothing beats the old marketing as well as getting out there and tell people about your product and creating some buzz.
Again Andre great tips.
Hey Rhys,
Google is now indexing Flash content to some extent: http://www.insideria.com/2008/01/googles-probably-indexing-flas.html
I don't think it will be indexed as well as an HTML site though.
That's a good point about these methods getting exposure primarily in the developer/designer audiences. So I guess unless you're targeting that audience, the main benefits will be peer recognition and marketing yourself as a kick ass flex developer:)
Thanks for the comment.
Is it difficult to set up a podcast link so its a little more obvious, and keeps us from clicking on the "listen" link to listen to some robotic voice? That robotic voice is okay if you're really hard up and can't see, but it sure is a turn off when you're expecting to find a *real* podcast - its truly garbage in comparison.
I eventually figured out that I had to click on the "podcast" link to get what I was looking for..... ugh...
That's a good point about these methods getting exposure primarily in the developer/designer audiences. So I guess unless you're targeting that audience, the main benefits will be peer recognition and marketing yourself as a kick ass flex developer:)
chat, peer recognition is always good regardless of the are one is working it. But true it is even more important for the like of devs etc. how to break a habit