Month: February 2011

Feb

2011

Blog Flipper And Client Licence

Please note that this is for email subscribers only. The email you should have received will contain an auth code for the licence, just print off the email or make sure it’s nice and safe somewhere.

Please don’t contact me saying you didn’t get the email and I could I re-send it. Or similar. The answer’s no.

I’ll repeat this again. This is for email subscribers only and the email contains an auth code. The email and the auth code together make up the licence. One is no good without the other.

Okay? 🙄

***

I’ve decided to…

…do something a little crazy.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and my gut instinct was to say “Yes, do that.” but I felt I had to think this one out for a bit and rationalise it to myself.

(Did you know we all do that? We make decisions based on what we *want* to do, and then rationalise it to ourselves to justify what we’ve already decided to do or done. Aren’t we all a bit funny? Anyway…)

This is what I’ve decided to do.

Everyone that’s bought or buys ANY of my WordPress plugins or themes up to 31st March 2011 gets a full client / blog flipper licence. Keep this email or print it out as your proof I’ve granted you that licence.

What this means is that if you build a blog with any of your purchases up to the 31st March, you can sell the blog (flip it) with all plugins included and still use the plugins on your other sites. You can repeat this as many times as you like.

My definition of blog flipping is YOU own the top level domain, develop it to the point where it’s actually worth something, ie it’s getting traffic and earning money, and then you sell it for about or at least $200.

Fair enough?

Also, if you develop sites for your clients using the plugins or themes you’ve purchased up to today, then that’s fine too.

No extra purchase is necessary in either case, but you’ll have to issue a document (paper or digital) explaining that there are premium plugins or themes used on the site, and that support is NOT included with them.

They’ll need to purchase individual plugins if they want support for them – use your affiliate link if you like (scheme still being worked on – we’ll get there this week).

What it DOESN’T allow you to do is sell the plugins or themes. Or give you a loophole by which you can do so – please don’t abuse these rights I’m giving you.

If you want to make money from sales of these plugins and themes, send people to me if you want to do that using your affiliate link.

I think that’s very fair, and…

This is just a thank you from me for being there as a subscriber.

When (finally! *sigh*) the PluginGreat site goes live and the affiliate scheme too, with all plugins and themes at full price…

Then anyone buying the plugins or themes will have to purchase a flipper/client licence too if that’s how they intend to use the plugin.

Until 31st March, any plugins or themes you buy or have bought to that point include a full client / blog flipper licence. IF you have the email and auth code issued today.

Sound good?

-Frank Haywood

Feb

2011

Delayed Widgets

Update: The sale is now LIVE and is currently $17.00.

***

This Friday I’ll be releasing a new plugin called “Delayed Widgets”.

What it does is modify ALL of your existing widgets by inserting a timer delay in seconds to the bottom of every one. When the delay is reached, the widget reveals itself by “unfolding” itself in the sidebar.

“Why?” I hear you ask…

Well, consider this.

I’ve said this before – one of the biggest problems for a marketer is getting and retaining attention from site visitors. Anything you can do without being too “in your face” (and driving them away) is going to be a benefit to you.

By careful use of widgets that remain hidden until the right moment, you can improve your chances of a subscription, or a sale, or whatever it is you want your visitors to do on that particular page.

This is because the human eye is drawn to movement.

To perfectly illustrate this, a few moments ago before I sat down to write, I was gazing out of the back of the house when a bird I hadn’t seen took off from one of the bushes.

My attention was instantly on it. It’s as if my conscious mind had no choice than to look at it.

If the bird had remained unmoving, I simply wouldn’t have noticed it.

As marketers, we can turn this peculiarity of the human eye and brain to our advantage.

For example, if you take a look at the top of this blog, you’ll see that my main subscriber sign up box (in the sidebar top right) reveals itself a few seconds after the rest of the page has been drawn.

Me doing this now makes it impossible for any visitor not to notice it. 😉

Even if they don’t act on it, they have surely seen it and it’s in their awareness as is the offer. All done without a pop-up.

Even better is that you can do this with ANY widget you want particular attention focussed on.

So say you’re running a promotion as an affiliate and you have a time sensitive ad that you want people to see more than anything. If you just run it as a “regular” ad on your blog, it doesn’t matter how pretty it is, there’s a good chance it isn’t going to be noticed.

But if the visitors landing page draws itself, and then a few seconds later your ad appears in the sidebar, it WILL be seen.

This new plugin improves your chances of the stuff you WANT to be seen to actually BE seen by modifying all your existing widgets.

This coming Friday (18th Feb) at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST), the Delayed Widgets plugin will go on sale at a starting price of $10.00 for the first 50 sales.

-Frank Haywood

Feb

2011

Slider Manager

Update: The sale is now LIVE and is currently $27.00 until the plugin goes officially live.

***

Demo slideshow. Some of these images have text with links in them, some of the images are clickable, and some have both.

[pgsm-slideshow id=”1″]

***

Since September/October time, I’ve tried out or looked at over 20 different image slider managers. These have either been WordPress plugins or standalone scripts.

If you look around you’ll see so many of these that I thought there must at least be ONE that does what I need, but can you believe NONE of them do?

All I wanted to do was to put in sliders at the top of some of my sales pages to rotate between screenshots and other banners, and also place a selection of clickable different slider ads in my sidebar that only occupied one position and showed a different ad every few seconds.

I also wanted the slider images to display text and HTML with clickable links.

I wanted to be able to make the whole slider image itself clickable so I could put “Click Here” graphics on the image.

And finally I wanted it to work with any theme.

That’s not a big requirement is it? But the small list of things I need the plugin to do are VERY useful to us marketers.

Here’s the thing. I’ve found that there’s no plugin that does all of what we need.

There are plugins that allow me to add ONE slider to a page or post, but not multiple sliders.

There are comprehensive plugins that do image gallery management and display, but not sliders.

There are plugins that allow clickable links OR clickable images, but not both.

There are plugins that only work by editing the theme code and pasting in some PHP.

And so on. I don’t think ANY of the sliders worked with widgets.

It’s almost unbelievable isn’t it? But I’ve seen this same issue time and time again.

Developers write code for other developers. Most developers don’t get or understand (or even want to) marketing.

Developers miss the little subtleties that we marketers require. And it’s the little things that make the difference between what works and generates additional revenue for us, and what ends up as frustration.

So…

I think you can guess what’s coming?

I’ve had version 1 of a plugin called Slider Manager developed, and it does ALL the things we need most of all from a slider.

My #1 priority in developing this was to get it working and keep it simple. Sometimes you can’t avoid complicated, but I try to avoid it wherever possible.

So what you can do is create multiple sliders (groups) and of course multiple images within each slider.

Within each slider group, you specify the width and height, pause and animation time, and a selection of animation effects.

Each image can have text and a HTML link added to it, or you can make the image clickable. Or BOTH. 😉

When you save the slider group it generates a short code tag that you can then add anywhere in your posts and pages and also in your text widgets.

It’s dead simple to use, and we’re working on making it better with full image management and an AJAX/jQuery re-ordering method to make it all drag and drop for the next version.

But tomorrow, Tuesday 8th February 2011 at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST)…

You can get this first version with a free upgrade to the drag and drop version when we release it…

At a starting price of just $10.00 for the first 50 sales.

-Frank Haywood