Writing efficient open source product summary and promoting project

Question

I've been working on an open source project on sourceforge a few months ago. One thing I noticed is that a well written summary could make a huge difference for the product. I literally saw traffic going to almost nothing when I made a poor change to project summary.

One more thing I noticed is that not only summary has to be appealing, but also take into consideration some technical aspects, such as (for example): contain all the necessary keywords for it to be searchable and produce the best match for a hypothetical search potential user will make in order to find it.

Here comes the question now: can you share your tips and tricks for writing an efficient product summary, and otherwise promoting your project, whether it's on sourceforge or somewhere else?

Answer 1

Good keywords and an appealing summary are the best thing you can do.

Answer 2

Play to your strong suit, open source. Well I guess you are doing that by open sourcing your question here :-) Beyond stackoverflow, ask the users of your project what they like about it and ask them to blog about it and include a link back to sourceforge in their blog posts. If some of your users don't have blogs, ask them to take a stab at writing the summary page for you and then combine the best of all the submissions to product the final page. Finally remember that in a good open source project lots of talents are required including programmers, designers testers etc. Don't overlook the value that good tech writers and marketeers can bring as well.

Answer 3

Write the summary from the user's perspective. We the geeks tend to focus on the programming language it was written, what cool technologies it is using, and so on. Well this is not what the user is looking for. The user wants to get his job done. So focus on usability and the features from the user's point of view.

Here is an excellent example of what this means in practice. (Substitute "my non-open-source-ISV" with your open source project while reading).

Answer 4

Here is what we use to do to promote our open source software

1. Carefully draft our web site, so that it can be located by search engine using unique keyword. Currently, by searching through "free stock market software", we are in the 1st page.
2. Post through freshmeat, whenever there is a new release.
3. We will have a new release notification, to current existing users.
4. We have addthis button in our web site.
5. We post message through high traffic stock market forum, to introduce this free software to them. However, this is not a good way. As sometimes, the forum moderator will flag us as spam.
6. We publish new release news, through facebook.
7. We publish new release news, through twitter.
8. We write a blog about our open source project.