I'm thinking about listing one of the applications on a few of these sites. It's software I wrote to make my life easier as a digital photographer, then released as freeware in the hopes of drawing more traffic and awareness for my site.

Right now I'm looking at the "submit your program" page in softpedia; I'm assuming the rest work pretty similarly. They require a URL to the .zip or .exe file on your server, which can be downloaded from their site. So this will cost bandwidth, and possibly bring traffic to my site.

Worse, there's a good chance they would start to out-rank me for the app's name. Exif Harvester gets about 300 clicks from search engines a month; that's low volume, but highly targeted. This is analytics software for digital photography, and on a digital photography web site, with links to galleries. Awstats says most people click other pages from here before leaving my site. I don't think that would be the case from a generic "get software" site.

So, on balance, would this be worth it? The goal is to raise my profile; the hospitality industry needs landscape photography, and I'm doing some portrait work. Hosting the software myself gets people looking at my photos, and from there hopefully recommending them to friends. I'm not sure whether these download sites would help with that or not? Advice?

It sounds a bit specialized, so I don't think it would be enough bandwidth to crash your server. Not like getting on the front page of Digg, apparently. I mean, honestly, how many people will be interested enough to download and install it? You're limited to one O/S ( I'm guessing Windows ), people who like photography a whole lot, and who use that site. Your bandwidth usage should go up some, probably more than a little, but not a horrific amount. And it sounds like it will introduce you to new people, since that's what you seem to be after.

And the bright side of them hotlinking to your exe file is that when you change the software, it's automatically published.

You should have an about us function that launches a new window or tab to your web site. If you're a .NET guy, you would use System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(url) and the default browser will do its thing. If people like that app and you make it easy for them, they'll check your web page out. Plus, if it's a photo application, put a photo in the about dialog, like a teaser to get them into your site.