Month: July 2011

Jul

2011

Coffee, Plugins, and a New Theme (mst009)

Special Offer Closed

The theme is now available for $27.00 until it goes officially live.

***

You may have noticed my slight absence recently – maybe not – I’ve been on a coffee fuelled race testing the affiliate scheme, prepping all the PLAhh stuff I’m delinquent on (I now have the PSDs hurrah, it’s a miracle!), running a few test WSOs (I’ll share the results soon) and generally getting sites into a state where I can open them at last.

I’m usually quite busy, but it’s nothing compared to what I’ve been doing this last two weeks and I’m a little bit hyper right now as I gradually discharge some of my outstanding responsibilities. Thanks for your patience with me, I’m really grateful for that, and I’ll publicly explain what’s been going on soon.

Anyway…

While we’re STILL waiting for MST007 to be completed (you may already know the sorry tale about this, but I’ve MORE to tell soon) the original designer has just about completed MST009.

As usual it’s really nice (my wife wants this one on a blog she’s putting together with a friend), and I think I might end up using this one on the PluginGreat site. Notably, he’s gone for a different slider routine that auto-adjusts itself depending on how deep the image is.

This means that instead of being stuck with a fixed depth slider, you can now make your images as deep or as shallow as you like to suit both your taste and your blog.

When this sale is over, this theme will be the first one I’ll put on sale on the MST web site.

(Yes, at last I’ll be doing that too. It’s ALL happening at once…)

Now then. When I make it live, I’ll put it on sale for ~~$27~~ and add the others as I go, but in this pre-launch sale it will be available to the first FIFTY customers for just $10.

Okay, so what’s it look like and what features will it have?

First, here’s a screenshot, middle click it for a slightly larger version. What you can’t see in these shots is there’s a very nice crosshatch effect on the background:-

[br]

With this theme, you get ALL the nice pro-blogger stuff that the MSTs are becoming known for…

It comes with a good selection of pre-designed banners including blank JPEGs / PNGs and PSDs for them, plus umpteen sidebars, 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 slider, top boxes and top and bottom ad areas, change footer text and add analytics code if you don’t have the Script Manager plugin. The theme as standard now also supports the WP 3.x features of custom menus and backgrounds.

It’s all done, I’m just waiting for my designer to upload the final version, hopefully tonight (Wednesday).

***

In the meantime…

The fifty-copies-only-at-$10 pre-launch sale for MST Nine will go live on Friday 29th right here at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST).

(I reckon it’s worth $10 just for the editable banner ads, let alone everything else. You’d pay over $100 for these on Banners Mall.)

🙂

*Phew!*

-Frank Haywood

P.S. My designer is, in this order:-

o Completing this theme.
o Retrofitting MST008 with the slider.
o Completing MST007 – I’ll explain all about this shortly.

Jul

2011

HTML Switcher – The Last Plugin?

Update: The WSO has just been approved, and you can get to it here:-

HTML Switcher – 5 Star 5 Pack

If you intend to promote it, go to this WSO+ approvals page and request approval and I’ll do it right away. I’m around for the rest of the evening probably until after midnight so it shouldn’t be an issue.

***

Tomorrow, I’ll be doing a sale for what *may* be my last new WordPress plugin for a little while… We’ll see.

I have a lot of work to do promoting all the other ones, and I have staff working on some exciting standalone scripts like Affiliate Click Pal.

Speaking of which, I’m now 95% confident I’ll be releasing that to you on Monday if you pre-ordered it.

(I’ve just received a new version that can now send out emails to both customers and affiliates, and it’s ready to go but depends on me doing the written documentation and videos over the weekend. I know you’ll want that doing, so please bear with me, we’re nearly there.)

Back to this last plugin…

The original idea was for a plugin that could switch the payment button depending on where the traffic was coming from. The reason being that if it was affiliate traffic, then it could show a ClickBank button, and if it was plain old search traffic, it would show a PayPal button and you get paid right away.

But I then realised it would be more realistically used to switch in and out absolutely any HTML at all.

So for instance if the traffic to the site was from a search engine, then the plugin would detect this, and show a snippet of HTML according to the rule you set up.

This could be an image/banner ad, or a special deal for new subscribers or whatever.

We also included the ability to add multiple rules, and we decided it should be as flexible as possible in order to show different HTML for different circumstances. So you can add multiple click sources to one of your rules, and also use * wildcards with them.

Like this:-

*.google.*
*.yahoo.*
*.bing.*

If none of the rules are met, then it will show some default HTML you added, or even nothing at all.

That last one is so that if someone has bookmarked your site or is following an email link that you’ve sent them, then clearly they’re already regular visitors, so you won’t want to show them an ad to subscribe.

Make sense?

Tomorrow at 6.00pm GMT I’ll be running what I believe is this last plugin sale for a while through this blog.

It’s NOT the end of an era though, as I don’t intend to stop altogether. This will just be a little pause in the process while I readjust everything.

Maybe I’ll have another one for you in a couple of months time…

***

The 50 copies only $10 sale will start tomorrow evening at 6.00pm GMT (1.00PM EST or Summer variants).

-Frank Haywood

***

P.S. PLAhh customers will get some nice news over the weekend. 😉
P.P.S. MST007 *should* be finalised tonight and as soon as it is I’ll release it to you.
P.P.P.S. As I said above, ACP will be out on Monday.
P.P.P.P.S. *phew*

Jul

2011

Delayed Widgets and Delayed Text Widgets

Offer Closed

***

Hamant Keval posted a comment on the post for the sale I ran this last weekend asking how the subscription box slide-down in my sidebar worked:-

“While i was here I noticed that you had that subscription form appear in a slide down – I could not stop my eyes from going there!

What is that plugin ?
I would like that one for sure

Thanks again for these great super sales“

It *is* a cool effect, and I do that with a plugin I released at the beginning of the year called “Delayed Widgets”. It adds a little delay timer to ALL of your widgets (where possible – most of them) so that you can choose how long before the widget reveals itself in your sidebar(s).

It *was* currently on sale at $17 here on my blog, but as Hamant is so excited about getting this I asked him if he’d like me to run a quick sale, and he said yes. (I have a tight schedule on at the moment and I’m running out of time.)

So effectively immediately for the next couple of days, I’m making a final 30 copies for sale at $10 her in this post.

As a sweetener, I’m also including a bonus copy of another similar plugin called “Delayed Text Widgets”. It’s a direct text widget replacement that functions in exactly the same way as the regular WordPress text widget, but is often easier and more appropriate to use.

And as a second sweetener, I’m including RESALE RIGHTS with the SECOND bonus plugin “Delayed Text Widgets”. (Not the main plugin.)

Hmm, here’s a thought. My affiliate scheme is *just* around the corner. You could add your affiliate link for the bigger version of this plugin “Delayed Widgets” into the bonus plugin and distribute it.

When people click it to find out about the bigger plugin, they get cookied.

When they buy, you earn 50% commission. When they buy any other one of my products, you continue to get 50% commission on everything. ACP refreshes the ClickBank cookie and so artificially extends it longer than the normal 30 day CB cookie.

So, you get:-

#1 – Delayed Widgets for personal use on all your blogs.
#2 – Delayed TEXT Widgets that you can give away or resell with your aff link included, promoting Delayed Widgets.

Sounds pretty cool doesn’t it? 😉

If you already purchased this plugin earlier this year, then go back to your personal download page and you’ll see that the second resale rights bonus plugin has been added. 🙂

Offer Closed

-Frank Haywood

P.S. In a couple of weeks I’m hoping to show you a plugin I’ve just come across that I think is totally awesome. It’s one of those easily underestimated “OMG, this is GENIUS” plugins and I wish I’d thought of it myself. More on that soon. 🙂

Jul

2011

Content Replacement and Subscribers Only Weekend Sale

Offer Closed

Update: Image for Content Replacement plugin for Lars.

***

Today 8th July at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST plus Summer variants), I’ll be opening a weekend sale for two of my favourite plugins. You may have missed them in the last 12 months, and now is your last chance to get them at a discounted price before they get added to the affiliate scheme and go live.

There are THIRTY copies available in this weekend sale.

The first is called the Content Replacement plugin, and what it does is replace small (or large) snippets of text and code on your blog posts and pages based on a date and time.

I use it all the time, in fact I’m going to be using it today to run part of these sales.

So what you can do with it is set a time and date you want the text or HTML to appear on your post, and another time you want it to disappear. Both fields are optional so you can do things like publish a snippet of content right now and have it disappear at 9.00am tomorrow morning.

Or set some content to appear tomorrow at 9.00am and have it stay there forever.

It’s incredibly useful, and I didn’t realise how useful until I started using it.

It works by you adding the HTML and setting time(s) and date(s), and it then creates unique [short-code-tags] for you. You then paste these tags where you want the text or HTML to appear, and when they’re active they show, and when they’re not, they don’t. Simple.

You can also stack them so that you can have text and HTML swapping in and out at different dates and times.

Today at 6.00pm, it will cause some text and two payment buttons to appear for each of the plugins, and at 9.00am on Monday, the payment buttons will disappear and be replaced by text that says “Offer Closed”.

Once I’ve set it up, I can forget it and go worry about other things. 😉

The other plugin is called “Subscribers Only”, and this one I don’t use on my personal blog, but I do use it on other blogs in my network.

It’s very useful for gathering WordPress subscribers.

It works in a similar way to the Content Replacement plugin above, but in this case the content only shows when someone joins your blog as a WordPress subscriber.

So once you’ve added your code and placed it on the page where you want it to appear, your WordPress subscribers won’t see anything out of the normal.

However, non-subscribers instead see a little padlock symbol and a message saying the content is for subscribers only with a link where they can go subscribe.

It’s very cool and I use it on niche blogs together with the WordPress Autoresponder.

For this final weekend sale, both plugins are just $10 EACH if you missed them first time round.

After this weekend, both plugins will increase in price (at least $17 each) and be added to the affiliate scheme, so it’s well worth getting them now if you don’t already have them

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. 😉

You can see the payment buttons appear as if by magic at 6.00pm GMT (in about three hours time as I write this).

-Frank Haywood

Jul

2011

An Apology And Some Exciting Updates

I have some really exciting news to share.

(Well… I’m excited about it, you may not be.)

First a very public apology.

In the last few weeks and months:-

I’ve lost some full time staff that are now part time.
I’ve had to fire someone (which I felt dreadful about) because he was working “full time” for me and also “full time” for one of my friends. Yeah, we both fired him when we realised… I know this must go on a lot with remote workers, and there are some tell-tale signs.
I’ve had new staff start, do a week or two and leave.
I’ve advanced money to new staff who begged for it and had them disappear.
On top of this it’s just plain difficult and time consuming to find *any* staff, let alone good ones.

It’s been a rough ride. But I guess this is something that happens to a lot of people, and always looking for the positive, I’ve learned a lot about hiring good remote workers.

But this bumpy and frustrating journey I’ve been on has meant that a few things have slipped. I’m now TWO months (well, one month and a week) behind releasing the latest PLAhh material.

I sincerely apologise for that, and I WILL fix this.

I have some new staff. I have both June and July’s packages pretty much complete apart from a little bit of crucial work to sweeten them up. I could release June’s as it is and add the extras later, but I’d rather complete the package and then release.

I’m hoping that all the work will be complete by next Friday 15th and with any luck I’ll have already released the packages before then. Thank you for your patience and to the kind words from people I’ve already explained this to.

***

Now the exciting part.

A bit of background first though.

A couple of weeks ago when I ran a pre-order sale for Affiliate Click Pal (ACP – will be released this Monday coming), I had a couple of blog comments and a few emails that all said pretty the same thing…

“Will it be able to do PayPal too?”

Now that would be just great wouldn’t it? It’s certainly something I’d like to see in ACP, so yes I’ll get that done in a later version. It will probably take a couple of months to get there is my guess. We’ll see.

What I *have* done is made sure it has some integration in it for sites that use PayPal scripts and the ?e=PayPalEmailAddress method for affiliates.

This then got me thinking.

Something I’ve wanted to do for several *years* now is release a low cost, easy to use, feature rich PayPal script. The PayPal IPN system is awesome – clearly a lot of thought and planning went into its design to make it so very flexible.

So what I’ve done is I’ve hired a new guy just to work on this project. It’s been incredibly difficult finding the right person to do this for a whole raft of “attention-to-detail” reasons. But after 12 months of searching I found the guy and have him on board.

He believes he’ll have the first prototype for me to play with tomorrow. And phase one will be complete by the end of next week.

There’ll then be another load of work to add in all the “feature rich” parts I mentioned above. But this shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks is my estimate.

Once you find the right people, it’s amazing what you can get done in a very short space of time. Ideas have never been a problem for me, but finding good people to implement them is an ongoing struggle that I’m finally getting the hang of. 😉

This brand new script will use the ?e=PayPalEmailAddress method for affiliates I mentioned above, and be totally focussed on PayPal and the flow of traffic both through your site and onto other sites.

It will make it easy to get a sales page type site up quickly and easily and with a built in affiliate scheme. This is something I’ve struggled with myself, so you’ll probably appreciate this as much as I do!

Amongst many things, it’s been designed in such a way as to make it easy to:-

Install and setup.
Promote your other (and other product owners) sites.
Get traffic for free.
Get new affiliates on board (every customer automatically becomes an affiliate).
Build your mailing list.
Administer your sales.
Do secure digital delivery.

I’ve seen a number of missed opportunities in some similar scripts over the last few years.

Every time I’ve seen one or realised something that would work really well, I’ve written it down in my notes.

I now have a *lot* of notes…

This new script will perfectly complement ACP. I eventually see the two of them working hand in hand together, with ACP being the “step up” to the next level when someone is ready.

It’s my intention that both scripts should talk to each other with this new PayPal script passing customer, sales and affiliate information back to your central ACP site where you can administer everything if you choose.

So my vision is a low cost entry into the world of product sales with this new PayPal script, and then upgrade to the more expensive ACP when it all starts to take off.

If you’re feeling a little bit excited now, then you should be.

I’m all but doing backflips. 😉

And that’s because I finally have the right people doing the right jobs.

The world has been waiting for this.

***

Okay, that’s enough excitement for today. (Or is it?)

Just a final note to say that tomorrow I’ll be running a couple of low cost sales for a couple of plugins that you may have missed in the last 12 months if you’re new here.

The first is for a plugin I use all the time, in fact I’ll be using it for the sales tomorrow.

It’s called the “Content Replacement” plugin and enables you to schedule small snippets of content in and out of your blog. I use it to display payment buttons at the appropriate time, and then later remove them when the sale is over.

That way I can be out and about and not have to worry about the sale going ahead. It just works.

Very useful.

The second related plugin is called “Subscribers Only” and which allows you to hide content on your blog from non-subscribers.

If a visitor to your blog isn’t a WP blog subscriber, then instead of seeing all of an article, you can withhold small but crucial parts of it. So they don’t see the bit you’ve hidden, instead they see a little padlock symbol and a message saying the content is for subscribers only with link where they can go subscribe.

Cool huh?

Both sales will start the same time tomorrow at 6.00pm and will continue over the weekend until Monday morning when the Content Replacement plugin will automatically remove the buy buttons. 😉

More info about the sale tomorrow.

-Frank Haywood