At the Appforce event yesterday a number of partners asked how they could participate in the salesforce.com community and promote their AppExchange Apps.

It goes without saying but the best way to start is by building a great product that makes customers successful. From there the news will spread like wildfire. When salesforce.com customers meet at local user groups, partners solutions inevitably come up. A great case in point is DemandTools. I don’t think I’ve been to a salesforce.com event where they haven’t been mentioned, and if you look at their AppExchange reviews you’ll see why.  

The next suggestion would be to attend the salesforce.com events where you can get to know the employees. If you can build relationships and help them understand your product, they’ll introduce it to their customers when the question comes up. Often times they are also a great source of product feedback.

Over the past couple months I've also seen several partners who have effectively used Blogs to reach salesforce.com customers. ArrowPointe, a Salesforce Consulting Partner has a blog called Perspectives on Salesforce which has built up a big following and we reference their best practice ideas all the time. Kieden, the AppExchange Partner who does search engine marketing is also putting out great best practice content to show how their product works with Salesforce.

Finally, we’d love for partners to participate on the message boards. For the good of the community we want to avoid spamming solicitations, but if a customer has a question and you think you’ve got a solution, we invite you to join the discussion. Here is a good  example by Charlie of Spanning Partners.