Month: January 2011

Jan

2011

Sales Helper Plugins

Update: The sale is now LIVE and is currently $15.00 for the next TWO sales.

Sales from 101 onwards will be $27.00 until the products are officially released later this week.

***

Tomorrow (Tuesday 1st February – already!) I’ll be running a PRE-ORDER sale for two really cool little plugins.

The first one allows you to add a special offer to your sidebar that counts down, expires and disappears. It’s cookie driven and won’t re-appear if the visitor refreshes the page (unless you want it to).

I’ve wanted something like this myself for a long time as more than once when visiting other sites, I’ve been tempted by seeing a little countdown timer and eventually just HAD to click it before the time runs out to find out more before it’s too late.

Curiousity is a powerful emotion to deal with, and I’ve always figured if it works so well on me then it will work really well on other people too. Including your visitors… 😉

The second plugin has been designed directly to enhance your sales copy.

Consider this.

There are two types of people that hit your sales pages. The readers and the skimmers.

What I do is I tend to read the headline, read the first sentence, scroll to the bullets, then skip to the price. I may then read some more copy if it looks interesting enough. Occasionally I’ll go back and read all the sales copy.

Sometimes I just jump right to the bottom to read the PSes. (Did you know that your second PS should contain your most important message?)

I *may* then also decide to watch a video if I think I need to know a little more before I buy, but videos are always low on my personal priority list. That’s just me.

Talking to other marketers, it looks like my behaviour is fairly typical. Some people prefer to watch a video, but of the group who prefer sales copy, I’m right in there as Mr Average. 😉

And… Someone I know is a mad tester. He reckons that his best performing sales copy consists of little more than a headline, bullet points and testimonials, but also says it depends on the product being sold.

When I stopped to have a think about this, the bullet points angle probably makes a lot of sense as bulleted info allows you to absorb all the key points very quickly. So people who get turned off by vast amounts of sales copy are okay with that method.

But I always find I want to know more detail before I commit to a purchase.

And that’s where the idea for this plugin came from.

What it allows you to do is create short, snappy bullet style sales copy which lets people do what they like best – skim – and absorb the key points very quickly.

If they need to know more about each point, then they can just click it and it unfolds to reveal more detailed copy about that particular point.

This method actually has a double benefit and puts both you and your visitor in control.

Your visitor has a chance to happily skim your sales page very quickly because you’ve nicely bulleted it all out for them.

And because each block of revealed sales copy is specific detail about the point in question, they’re the ones making the decision to view it.

This is really important because what you’re doing is engaging your visitor, and drawing them into the message you’re trying to convey to them.

And… Because the block of revealed sales copy is much smaller than a full page, they’re very likely to read all of that section, then repeat the process for other bullet points, and eventually read the whole of your sales copy.

All in small chunks.

This plugin increases your chances that a visitor to your site will give you ALL their attention.

Okay?

So this pre-order bundle gives you a plugin that drives people to your offer, and also a plugin that improves your ability to make the sale once they’re there.

The plugins are in test now, and they *may* be available tomorrow, but it’s much more likely that they’ll be ready on Friday hence this pre-order sale.

When they’re ready, then just like the Clone and Backup plugin I’ll be adding them directly to the affiliate scheme at full price and sold individually.

Tomorrow (1st Feb) at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST), you’ll be able to get both plugins for the price of one, with a starting price of $10.00 for the first 50 sales.

-Frank Haywood

P.S. Speaking of Clone and Backup, we’ll be releasing the new version tomorrow if it gets through test today, and then the sales page and affiliate scheme for it will go live. 😉

Hopefully there’s a surprise unadvertised bonus to go with the plugin, IF it all works out okay…

P.P.S. The WordPress Sales Page Template Pack is now at $15.00 for the next THIRTEEN copies as I write this.
http://www.frankhaywood.com/wordpress-sales-page-template-pack-3/

Jan

2011

WordPress Sales Page Template Pack 3

Update: The sale for the WordPress Sales Page Templates is now LIVE and is currently $15.00 for the next FOUR copies.

***

Tomorrow (Friday) I’ll be running a low cost sale for 5 really cool sales page designs in a gorgeous selection of colours. Good looking sales pages are always incredibly handy to have and I’ve paid a lot of money over the years for both custom and generic sales page designs.

And while it’s true that sales copy is the most important aspect of your page, if you combine it with a good sales page design then it will make the difference between a sale or not.

To make this a more attractive proposition, as well as the regular HTML versions of the pages the sale also includes WordPress Page Template Plugin (PTP) versions of the sales page designs.

What this means is you’ll be able to upload the supplied plugin and then select any of the five designs from a drop-down as the template to use for your new WordPress page.

And THAT means you’ll be able to create sales pages on your WordPress site as if they were regular HTML sales pages.

It’s incredibly useful. In fact it’s so useful, that all my sites will soon be driven by WordPress.

The reason for this is it’s far easier to create a sales page using the plugin and a template than it is do it the “old fashioned” way with an HTML template.

And of course any time I want to change the design, I just select a different page template and everything changes except for the sales copy.

Simple.

First a word of warning though, and I know people sometimes don’t take me seriously when I say this.

Until it’s too late…

When the full version of the Unified Page Template Plugin (PTP) is released (we’re very close), then all the template packs we’ve released so far will be set to a standard $27 per design pack or $7 per individual template design.

(We’ll also “retrofit” all the templates you may have purchased, so don’t worry.)

This is your chance to get all five of these designs for just TEN dollars, but only if you’re one of the first 50 to buy.

The sale will start tomorrow Friday 28th 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST), with the first 50 copies being at $10.00, the next 25 at $12.50, and 76-100 at $15.00.

After that the template pack will rise to $27.00 until the PTP site is launched.

I do these temporary ultra low prices as a thank you for being a subscriber. 🙂

Here are 60% original size screenshots of the designs. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

-Frank Haywood

For Valda:-

Jan

2011

Multiple Streams Themes 5

Update: The sale for Multiple Streams Theme 5 is now running priced at $27.00.

***

Apart from the beautiful and well thought out design, the theme itself includes the following WordPress 3.x features.

o Custom Headers
o Custom Backgrounds including colour picker
o Custom Menus

We’ve also included a set of options with this theme.

Just go to “Appearance >> MST Options” and there you’ll see you can do things like globally hide or display sections of your site just by checking and unchecking boxes. So you have global control of the header, top boxes, and top and bottom ads. This is very useful when you’re building a site and trying to decide which appearance you want it all to have.

On the options page, you can also easily add footer text such as menu and copyright content, and also any site analytics code in the footer if you don’t already own the Scripts Manager plugin.

You can even change the appearance of your blog posts as we’ve included an alternative “single.php” file which is the bit of code responsible for displaying single blog posts. Just swap the original one out and replace it with the alternative to alter the look and feel of your blog posts.

Next up is the appearance of pages. We’ve included 4 page templates rather than just the one that most themes supply.

#1 – Default Template.
#2 – One column page, no sidebar.
#3 – One column page, no sidebar, no three top boxes.
#4 – No top widgets.

So now when you create a new page on your site, you can decide which of the above formats (on a case by case basis) you want it to appear as.

And speaking of pages, we’ve also included the 5 squeeze page templates plugin that we released with the last theme. This plugin enables you to easily add autoresponder “squeeze pages” to your blog to assist you in building your mailing lists.

Other plugins included are the Ads Manager and Redirection plugins to help you place ads on your site, and redirect pages (via your affiliate links if you wish) respectively.

Finally (?) we’ve included blank PNGs and JPEGs of all the ad graphics, banners and header used in the theme, as well as Adobe Photoshop PSDs.

This means that if you don’t have Adobe PhotoShop, you can still use the blanks and a free program like The GIMP to edit the banners etc to your own needs.

I hope you’ll think this carefully thought out bundle is well worth the discounted price we’re offering for the first people to purchase today.

The pricing will work like this…

1-50 = $10.00
51-75 = $12.50
76-100 = $15.00
100+ = $27.00 until offical launch of the Multiple Streams Themes site.

Offering these low prices to you is my way of saying thank you for being a subscriber.

You can see an installation of the theme on the link below.

http://mst005.multiplestreamsthemes.com/

-Frank Haywood

Jan

2011

Clone and Backup ready – new Multiple Streams Theme

I’ve just been testing out the final v1.0.0 release of the Clone and Backup plugin, and it works a treat.

After all the comments we received about hosting requirements we decided that this first version shouldn’t be just limited to cPanel.

Now I love cPanel as it has some really cool features in it, but I know that not everybody is as big a fan as I am.

So we decided that for v1 of the plugin we’d skip the cPanel centric attitude and instead create a version that would work with any hosting platform.

I do have to say that we haven’t tested with other hosting platforms (such as hSphere), but because of the approach we’ve used we can see no logical reason for it not working just fine.

(Please raise a support ticket at http://support.plugingreat.com/ if you have problems with the plugin.)

However, there’s always a trade-off when you want to do things for a broader audience.

In this case it means you have to go create the database and user/password at the destination site. This will take you about 2-3 minutes if you don’t do it very often and probably less than 60 seconds once you’ve done it a few times.

At any rate, if you’ve just registered a new domain and assigned a web host, it’s very likely that you’re already going to be logged into your web control panel. Yep?

That’s the logic we’ve used when thinking about this.

So by going with that trade-off, it means you cant (yet) get the plugin to auto-create a database for you with cPanel. The next step for us is to add in that cPanel functionality as I think it will address 80% of our intended audience.

And it will certainly make things easier for me too. 😉

Then we’ll investigate hSphere and any other popular and common web hosting platforms that we get asked to look at.

This means that if your host uses a proprietary web control panel then it’s unlikely that we’ll provide a streamlined database creation method for it. You’ll have to stick with the generic v1.0.0 method.

Okay?

How it works is like this.

#1 – You create and maintain a copy of WordPress somewhere and we suggest on a sub-domain for convenience. We also suggest this installation has no posts/pages/comments and has all your favourite themes and plugins installed and activated and up to date.

So you have a fully functional copy of WordPress that you’re going to use as your master.

#2 – You take out a new domain or sub-domain (or use an existing one if you like) and while going through your normal admin functions to set it all up, you also create a database for WordPress on that domain, and assign a user and password with full permissions. Your web host is responsible for explaining this to you if you don’t already know how to do it.

#3 – On your master copy of WordPress go to the PG WP Clone admin function and fill in the 6 boxes – destination site, FTP user and password, database name, user/password and click the “Clone This Site” button.

After 15-30 seconds – it may take longer depending on the number of themes/plugins/files etc – your new WordPress installation will be complete and you will be given a link to visit your new installation.

All the login details, active plugins and theme etc for your new WordPress installation will be the same as your master.

🙂

You can now go back to your personal download page and grab the plugin only, with the docs to follow in a day or so. I wanted to get the plugin out to you as quickly as possible for test and feeedback.

It’s easy to use.

(If you didn’t bookmark your personal download page, then please raise a support ticket at http://support.plugingreat.com/ and someone will look it up for you.)

If you don’t have the Clone and Backup plugin, you can still get it with a ten dollar discount at $27.00 from here.

***

Finally… The latest in the Multiple Streams Themes is now complete, and on Tuesday at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) I’ll be running a 50-copies-only sale at $10.00.

I had this theme designed for my own personal use on the free Page Template Plugin site (available soon), but it’s so good I decided to release it as one of the Multiple Streams Themes.

It’s a “softer” cleaner brighter theme in light blue and white, and I’m also tempted to use it on my personal blog as it contains all the features I want that my current theme doesn’t. So don’t be surprised if you see it change in a few days when I decide for sure. 😉

It comes with a hefty selection of pre-designed banners including blank JPEGs and PSDs for them, plus umpteen sidebars, a selection of built in page templates, plus plugins (Ads Manager, Redirection, Squeeze Page Templates), and a set of theme options too.

The theme options allow you to turn on and off the header, top boxes and top and bottom ad areas, change footer text and add analytics code if you don’t have the Script Manager plugin.

And of course the theme supports the WP 3.x features of custom menus, custom header, and background. That last one allows you to further lighten the feel of the theme or darken it down if that’s your preference.

It’s really nice… 😉

WordPress Clone and Backup

Update: The sale is now LIVE and is currently $27.00.

***

One of my developers is almost done with a plugin that will enable you to create an identical copy of one of your existing WordPress sites onto another.

It’s an incredible time saver.

This is what you can do:-

Maintain a single up to date default blog on a sub-domain.
Add all your favourite themes and plugins to your default blog.
Then in a few seconds copy it to a new site.
Repeat.

Then when you need a new blog creating, all you have to do is enter the FTP and cPanel details of the target site and click go.

A few seconds later your target site contains an exact copy of your original blog and all you have to do is tweak a few things like the name and tagline etc, and you’re ready to go.

I guess you could also use it in reverse to back up your existing live blogs to a backup site on another sub-domain too.

It’s certainly something I’ve wanted to be able to do for a long time and I know there are a few unsatisfactory alternatives out there, but I didn’t feel that they fit my exact requirements.

There’s one that’s an expensive monthly service, and another that’s a Windows application. There’s also a plugin out there, but I think it’s a little too expensive for what it does – maybe if it had a few extra features it would be worth it.

Anyway…

The developer reckons the beta will be ready Wednesday or Thursday next week, and when it’s done I’m going to add it directly to the affiliate scheme at full price as I know it will be a very popular plugin and plenty of people will want to promote it.

But…

In the tradition of the past 12 months and because I like to regularly say thank you for being a subscriber, I’d like to offer it to you at a hefty discount on pre-order.

In return, I’d like a little feedback please. Things like how easy it was to install and use (once you get it), how much time it will save you, any enhancements needed (I’ve already thought of some cool upgrades for later versions), and so on.

Does that sound reasonable for such an amazingly cool and very useful plugin?

The plan is that I’ll make 50 available on pre-order for $10.00 tomorrow (Friday 7th) at 6.00pm GMT, then raise the price to $12.50 for the next 25 and $15.00 for the next 25 before setting the final price at $27.00 (maybe even $37.00, we’ll see).

This gives you the chance to get this plugin at the lowest price it will ever be for a very short time.

An important note though…

I’ve had lots of people miss these deals and then write to me asking if I could give them the same deal at a later date.

I never do as that’s just not fair is it?

First come, first served, be there or be square. You know the score. 😉

Until tomorrow…

-Frank Haywood