Month: September 2008

Affiliate Scheme For TicketDesk Pro

I’ll be sending out an email about this shortly to all the owners of TicketDesk Pro (TDP), but I thought it might be a good idea to note it here first.

The affiliate scheme for TDP is now up and running and the first few people to spot it have already signed up.  We’re paying 50% commission on a $47 price tag at the moment, but we’ll be putting the price up within a couple of weeks to $67, and then after another couple of weeks or so to $97.

That means your commission payments will rise from $23.50 to $33.50, and finally $47.50 per sale.

And you know what?  Because TDP is such a great application, you can be proud to promote it.

I mention that because just the other day someone told me they were promoting something that they didn’t think was as good as a competitor product, but the product they were promoting paid out more commission so it made more sense to them.

Personally I don’t do that, but I know it happens all the time, and it’s one of the thing many new product owners miss the point of completely.  If you’re too cheap, you’ll get fewer affiliates promoting for you.  That’s one of the reasons you get super launches with everyone and his dog promoting trying to get their fat affiliate commission.

I digress. 🙂

Sign up for TDP, do a promotion to your own list, and watch them thank you for letting them know that the price is going up.

BTW, any ads I show on this site for my own products do NOT use my personal affiliate links, including the AdSpurt ads you see that are under test.

So if you’ve sent a prospect and got them cookied, and they later visit this site, your cookies will remain intact and so will your commissions when they buy.  My success is tied closely to yours, and I always want you to get full credit for everything you do.

And on that note, as I add my other scripts to the same affiliate system, the affiliate ID you get when you register for the TDP scheme will also work for the other products too, you just change the site URL.  So if your ID is 95467, you’d just use that same ID when linking to my other products.

That’s all coming soon.

(The exception to this is SmartDD, which is stuck on the old affiliate scheme for quite a while yet.)

There aren’t any promo tools available for TDP at the moment, just your affiliate link, but I’ll get some put together and put them on the affiliates page when they’re ready.

And here’s a special offer as I always like to have an offer of some kind.

If you make a sale of TDP using your affiliate link by the 15th October when I raise the price to $67, I’ll give you a copy of AdSpurt for free when I release it.

AdSpurt is a keyword driven advertising system for ClickBank, PayDotCom (and any other affiliate scheme) that will allow you to monetise any web site you have with content on it.  You can see some of the hover ads it generates here on this blog, but it will also auto generate plain old single underlined key word links too.

It also has some distinct advantages over other methods of advertising, but I’ll let the cat out of the bag on that another time.

TOMORROW I’ll also let you in on another method you can get a copy of AdSpurt for free too.  Watch out for that, as I think you’ll like what I’m going to tell you. 😉

Finally, here’s the link to sign up as an affiliate for TDP:-

http://www.ticketdeskpro.com/affiliates.php

Go sign up now while it’s fresh in your mind, and then see if you can win yourself a free copy of AdSpurt.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business

Private Label Rights For SmartDD LITE

The sale for PLR for SmartDD LITE will be on Thursday at 3.00pm GMT (10.00am EST).

Believe it or not we’re still debating the price and how many copies. We know it’s a balancing act. If we get it wrong you may not buy.

Here’s what I know to be true. For every 100 copies sold, only 1 person will actually do anything with their purchase. The rest will let it gather dust on their hard drive. It’s the 1 percent rule – the 1 percent that actually do anything towards improving their business or even getting started online.

So this means you have very little competition.

With just a little bit of effort you can take the code that took us umpteen man weeks to develop, shine it up and have your own brand digital delivery software.

The longest it will take you to do that is a month. If you’re quick and focussed you can probably get it done in 10 days or less with very little effort on your part.

You know what? That’s what always amazes me. With just a little application and patience you can get some amazing things done. But many people don’t bother.

Now I know you might be saying “but you have developers who will do the work for you”.

That’s true. But if I didn’t, this is what I’d do. This is what you can do.

#1 – Go here and get yourself a really nice sales page design done, together with a software box. Cost $87.

#2 – Go to ScriptLance.com or eLance.com or Guru.com – there are others. Take your pick or use them all. Sign up and post your job as requiring a redesign of a script you have. Say it’s a CSS design around a php script and that it’s an easy job and that any competent person could do it in a couple of hours tops.

Offer $100 and wait for the bids.

You’ll get some spam bids almost immediately where they haven’t even read your requirements. Wait at least 3 days (7 is better), to get some real bids. You’ll be able to tell the difference between the spam and the real bids when you see them, trust me.

Accept a bid and pay no more than one third down. Pay the next third when they show you the design, and pay the final third when you have the code in your hands. NEVER give feedback until at least 10 days after you have the code, and NEVER give it before the job is complete no matter how much they plead – tell them it’s company policy when dealing with contractors.

#3 – While all this is going on, rewrite the docs in your own style with your own product name, register a domain, write your sales copy and generally do all the things you’d do when setting up a sales page and product.

#4 – When you have the sales page design and the re-design of the code done, put it all together including a JV sign up page.

#5 – Start writing to potential JV partners and point them to your JV sign up page. Offer them 60% – 75%, and normal affiliates 50%.

Just keep on keeping on. And look around for your next product. I always say it’s not hard, but it’s not completely easy either.

That little bit of effort is what keeps the 99% from moving forward and succeeding, and of course makes it a whole lot easier for us 1-percenters.

And that’s why if you make just that little bit of effort, you’ll quickly rise above everyone else. It really is as simple as that.

If you think you’re the 1 in 100 that can do this, then on Thursday it’s your chance to get the ball rolling.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business

Feedback From PLR For SmartDD LITE

There’s been lots of feedback for Private Label Rights for SmartDD LITE. The way I always look it is, for every 1 person that makes a comment, there’s 100 others thinking something similar.

So there have been suggestions in pricing going from $18 (!) all the way up to $197.

The figure that Paul and I had in mind was $297 per licence which I mentioned earlier this year (keep reading, that’s not the price we’re going to use). With a little effort, you could start to see a return on your investment within a month or less depending on how you approach it.

The reason we chose that price was because:-

#1 – It would remove those people who weren’t serious or who “don’t get it”.

#2 – It would increase profitability for those people who *are* serious as they would be loathe to sell at ridiculously low prices.

But…

Knowing that $297 was a little bit of a shock for *some* people, even though it’s a sure fire way of keeping the price and the profits up for those that buy, we decided to listen to what people have said, and so we’ve decided to consider a lower price

And another but…

Rather than keep the licencing fairly loose while selling at $297, if we’re going to sell at the lower price, then we would do what some people have suggested, and put some provisos in the licence to make sure that people don’t shoot themselves and other buyers in the foot.

I would like to point out the natural and inevitable conclusion of a price war between two (or more) sellers.

You BOTH go out of business, and the customer can’t get what they want any more.

Nobody wins. When the dust settles, the final seller is making pennies on their sales, and the market has been trained to expect a very low “going price”.

Been there, done that, never going there again. It’s a fools errand.

I’d also like to do a bit of explanation here too.

It seems that some people don’t understand the sometimes subtle difference betweeen Resale Rights, Master Resale Rights and Private Label Rights when applied to digital products.

Rights Meanings

Resale Rights (RR) typically allows you to resell the product, but not confer the rights to resell onto your customers. So you can sell, but they can’t.

Master Resale Rights (MRR) typically allows you to resell and pass on the rights to resell to your customers and so on.

Private Label Rights (PLR) typically allows you to resell the product, rebrand it, call it your own, but doesn’t allow you to sell PLR yourself. Sometimes you *do* have the rights to resell with PLR.

White Label Rights (WLR). Quite rare, but I thought I’d include this. Typically, licencing of the product is held by the product owner and the reseller is granted a set number of times they can resell to their own clients while rebranding the product so that it looks like their own.

This usually applies to service type of products (but not always) such as an autoresponder service you can sell to your client as if it were your own. To the client it looks like it *is* your product as it’s often hosted on your domain.

Okay?

In order, MRR will see the price of a product plummet to a dollar within a week (the bottom feeders as someone mentioned), RR will usually see the product keep its price, although you are sometimes allowed to give the product away which can be useful as a list builder in giveaways etc. Because new customers can’t compete with you by reselling, the price doesn’t come down.

PLR normally sees the product hold its price unless the right to sell PLR is given in which case like MRR it quickly plummets to a dollar.

WLR products will always hold their price as it’s controlled by the product creator.

So those people that bought Resale Rights for SmartDD LITE at a snip way back in April should have made their money back many times over because of their customers inability to resell and compete with them. (If you didn’t, what do you think you’re doing wrong?)

This offer is now for PLR, which as you can see above is quite different.

Taking on board what people have said, here are my provisos with PLR for SmartDD LITE which differ from normal PLR.

#1 – You must rebrand.
#2 – You must not use my name (or Paul’s) or mention SmartDD or SmartDD LITE.

That’s it. That will hold the price for you and weed out the bottom feeders.

To rebrand, you can fairly easily use a text search and replace, and do a rename in all the PHP files, and in the docs. You might have to edit a few screen shots, or do a few yourself. Additionally you could tweak the CSS files to change the colours and layout.

Alternatively, you can get someone on ScriptLance to do a more professional job for you including a complete redesign of the appearance probably for less than $100. Which to my way of thinking is a lot less hassle.

A few other thoughts.

I know some people will say to themselves “Well what’s the value of a product like this given the market – isn’t it over saturated?”

My answer – Nope the market isn’t over saturated. The market is HUGE and growing bigger every day, and I don’t have the resources to cover it all. If you really think it’s over saturated, do a bit of promotion for SmartDD and see what happens. 😉

Here’s an example.

The other day while on Tim Knox’s blog, I saw a post by Tim answering a subscriber question which showed perfectly how a lot of people still don’t know anything about digital delivery and how it works.

Just because *you* may know all about digital delivery (or any other subject) doesn’t mean that everyone else does. We all make the mistake of thinking something is common knowledge just because we know it and the people we hang out with know it too. That’s not true.

And we all undervalue the information in our heads when in reality it’s a gold mine if handled properly.

Anyway, back on track and let’s get this ramble finished.

Your comments made me stop and think about pricing. I sort of expected that.

I had a chat with Paul and we don’t want to give PLR away. But by the same token we don’t want to make it so expensive that no-one buys.

Going back to the value we believe SmartDD LITE is worth, Paul and I expected total revenue from the sale to be about $3,000 – that was our target – $297 x 10.

We’ve come to a compromise. We’ve made some concessions. You’ve read the two provisos we’ve added above.

We’re going to run a “nickel” sale for PLR. We’re going to start the sale at a much lower price and we’ve also halved our revenue target.

But, the incremental price isn’t going to be a nickel. We’re going to make it higher than that.

We’ve decided to sell 20 copies instead of 10, thereby reducing the cost of each copy.

As usual, first in gets the best price, but the final price on the 20th copy still won’t be outrageous by any means. We’ll run the sale until all copies are gone or 48 hours have passed, whichever comes first.

If you’re interested in this, stay tuned. I may throw in a couple of other nice little freebies that will make you a very happy bunny, so let’s wait and see what happens.

-Frank Haywood
P.S. I know I said I’d run it on the 16th, but I’ve had a nasty end of Summer cold that’s knocked me for six and I haven’t been able to trust my brain while I’ve been taking Ibuprofen. While it makes me feel better, it always wrecks my ability to think clearly, so I don’t like to take any chances…

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business

PLR For SmartDD LITE

On Tuesday 16th September, I’ll be making available 10 Private Label Rights (PLR) licences for SmartDD LITE.

The PLR licence will allow you to do what you like with SmartDD LITE other than sell PLR yourself.

Interested?

Well…  How much should I charge?  Leave a comment and let me know.

If I don’t get any comments I’ll choose a price depending on what I believe it’s worth.  I already have a price in mind that I believe is fair, but I’d like to see what you think.

The sale will be first come first served.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business