Creating a PAD file to promote shareware is one of the most popular ways that shareware professionals use to promote their software on the internet. Promoting shareware is made so much easier with the use PAD files.

What does this file contain?
PAD files are XML documents that contain all of the vital information about your shareware application.

But why do you need to create a PAD file?
Well the main reason is that it saves a lot of time. When you try to submit your free shareware or freeware on freeware and shareware directories you are being asked to submit a lot of information. So, as you can understand it takes a lot of time to repeatedly input this information to each and every shareware directory. To save you from all this hassle, you can create a PAD file which contains this information and a lot of shareware and freeware directories are able to read your PAD files. This means that you would not have to repeatedly go on giving information about your shareware, simply submit the URL and maybe a custom category.

You will find that a lot of shareware directories allow you to submit the URL of your PAD file. This means that you would have to create and upload the PAD file to your website first before submitting the URL of your PAD file to the directories. Make sure not to include the version number of your application in the file name as the filename should not change. And in addition to that if you have to update your software and want to include the relevant information in the PAD file, you just need to make changes to the original PAD file uploaded on your website. In this way the shareware directories would automatically make changes to the PAD files and your PAD files would get updated. This goes without saying that the URL of the PAD file must remain the same.

There are many shareware directories that announce any changes made to software. This means that if you release a new version of your software, the directory would announce it on their pages. This generally results in increased traffic to your site. So, creating PAD files to promote your shareware can be a very good idea.

There are a lot of tools available on the internet that help you to create PAD files and you can make use of them. These tools have been developed to make it simple to create a PAD file. We recommend the Association of Shareware Professionals PAD tools.

So, we have just given a cursory look at the whole concept of PAD files and the use that it can be put to. Hope it proves useful to you.