Product Ideas

Feb

2015

Clever Marketing, I Think…

There’s some very clever marketing I’ve just come across. Or at least I think it’s clever on the face of it, I haven’t quite thought it all through yet for the pros and cons. It’s hot off the press of my mind and onto here.

When (if) I find out more about how this works I’ll let you know.

At any rate it’s certainly something I’ve filed away in the back of my head for future reference.

So what is it?

A couple of days ago I was sent an email about some FaceBook software. I don’t use Facebook in my personal life but of course it’s very important for a lot of people including my own family members.

(My dad has a FaceBook account that he uses to “stalk” the rest of the family, leaving funny and vague comments on various posts the family make and any photos they upload. My eldest son is often killing himself laughing at things his grandad has written…)

That aside, when I hear about some new software, I always go check it out because you never know what use it might be.

It turns out this software lets you post optin boxes together with teaser videos on FaceBook.

Don’t confuse this product with a ~~$67~~ launch that’s going on at the moment that I guess you’ve probably had emails about. (Not from me.)

This product isn’t that, it’s something very similar, but doesn’t have ONE of the features of the larger product.

In any case… I took a look at the sales page, watched the explanatory video (it could be a service, I haven’t bought yet, but it looks like it) and scrolled to the bottom to see the price – it was a one-off ~~$20.02~~ on a rising price sale, which I thought was reasonable.

So far so good?

I then forgot about it but left the page open in a tab. I’ve been hibernating my laptop the last couple of days so I knew it was there for when I got back to it.

My inbox has had quite a few emails for this (slightly?) bigger ~~$67~~ product, so I took a look and thought it was just like the one I’d left open in a tab. It’s not the same thing, and it’s definitely a different product as it also has a countdown timer you can add, which the first product didn’t have.

So I decided to go check out the details of both on JV Zoo, and did a search for the first product. I then got stopped in my tracks because I found 38 products that matched the description.

I opened the first one and clicked the sales page.

It was the same product, same sales page, different price – $11.

I clicked on some of the others – all the same domain, same sales page, different prices, with the lowest I could see at $7, all with different sellers offering different commission rates for affiliates in JV Zoo.

Hmm. Brain engaged and I did a bit of thinking.

The clever marketing bit was that the creator of the product didn’t appear to be selling it himself. I could be wrong.

Each page had its own reference in the URL (?r=9999) which I originally thought was the affiliate ID. I now realise it was a way of identifying each vendor and so placing the correct payment button on the sales page.

My guess is – because I haven’t bought yet – is that the original creator is selling a service, and so will gather the name and email of each person who signs up for it regardless of where they’ve come from.

It’s as if he’s selling it with 100% commissions, but isn’t inserting himself in the sales process at all.

In other words, he’s building a list of buyers without any of the hassle or risk associated with being a product vendor.

I’ve not seen anyone else do this, and it could well be the start of something big – a new trend in selling and list building. I’ll be keeping an eye on this.

I just thought you’d like to know, and to say that you heard about it from me first. 😉

-Frank Haywood

Sep

2013

Project Email Part 1

If you use email at all then I expect you’ll find this useful. 😉

This series of blog posts, videos and emails will eventually become part of a saleable product so pay attention if you want to see how I go about creating a learning product. Then you can use this methodology as a guide for your own product creation.

Start the video then change quality to 720p and go full screen.

Gradually over time there have arisen some situations related to email that I think need to change. I’m certain that the changes I’m going to discuss in this series of blog posts and emails will prove to be a substantial improvement of your business situation.

This will arise from both different methods of handling email that you may not be doing at the moment, and also with your email marketing – autoresponders.

So let’s get started with a discussion about email clients and then we’ll move onto autoresponders.

I’ve noticed over the last 6 months or so that an increasing number of small business are using free email services such as Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail.

I don’t think this is a good idea for two reasons.

#1 – It looks unprofessional to your customers to be receiving a business email from fredbloggs @ yahoo.com, or studly111111 @ gmail.com etc. 😉

#2 – You don’t own the email account, the free email provider does. And they can close you down any time they like.

Ask yourself what it would do to your business if a spam complaint resulted in your free email account being closed.

Nightmare?

Consider Gmail.

Yes we all have Gmail accounts but only because we have to if we want to use any of the Google services such as YouTube, GDrive or Gdocs.

But… Google have a history of closing without warning any service they lose interest in.

They did it with a really useful online graphics editor a couple of years ago, and more recently they closed their RSS reader service too, annoying a whole load of techies out there.

Email could be next if new legislation requires a tax on email addresses, or makes free email addresses illegal to prevent the increasing amount of spam. I don’t think that last one would be a bad thing, and sooner or later a politician is going to have that idea too.

To the public it wouldn’t be a big deal. They’d use their ISP email addresses instead.

But as a business owner, you should *really* be taking charge of your own email and not trust it to chance.

I’d also like you to consider that many free email providers don’t care if the email gets to you or your clients and customers or not. It simply isn’t critical to them. What do they care if they filter 2 million emails out of their network today and yours happens to be one of them?

As far as they’re concerned they’re providing free not business email services, and you can’t afford to rely on them as part of your business.

So learning point number 1 is:-

You shouldn’t rely on free email services as part of your business.

All make sense so far?

In a couple of days or so I’ll show you how *easy* it is to set up an email account within cPanel, and also set what are called DKIM and SPF records – very important!

Now then. To make this whole exercise doubly useful, I’ve created a first video – an overview that explains how I’m going about creating the learning product and what it’s going to be about and where it’s leading to. And iot also explains a lot of things not covered in this email.

If you watch the video and like it, then feel free to give me some love back by sharing and even embedding it on your own site. And of course let me know what you think by leaving me a comment on the post.

IF you’re thinking of leaving a comment on this post with your thoughts, then all I’ll say is that’s a good idea and it’s DEFINITELY in your interest to do so as I’d like to later reward all contributors for their input and views. 😉

-Frank Haywood

http://www.frankhaywood.com/tag/project-email/ <== Click this for a list of all Project Email posts.

Dec

2011

Personal One On One Coaching Part 2

I had lots of replies and kind words to my last blog post about my depression a few years ago.

In that post I said I’d tell you why I made it. It’s important.

With me, it was my trial through depression and the recovery time that followed that bought me to the place where I realised it was time to strike out on my own. In my case I thankfully had no choice in having to do my own thing as following my depression I effectively became unemployable.

I can take advice, and I can learn stuff just like I’ve always done, and even ask for help. But what I can’t do is have anyone tell me what to do. I can’t help that side of it any more, the barriers just go straight up and whoever’s doing the telling is wasting their breath. It’s quite different if I want the advice or knowledge.

When I finally moved into the digital products market place (in my case software) I believed for a short while all the nonsense I was told about how easy it was running an online business and how you didn’t have to do any work, ha-ha. I say “nonsense” because it really is.

Running your own business takes work and determination no matter what the business type.

There is no “short cut”, no “magic bullet”, no “loophole”, no “weird solution” or “ancient remedy” that many of the methods sellers would have you believe. You just need to choose something you’re happy with and work at it until you get better at doing whatever you do.

Obvious really isn’t it?

If you’ve been going through this yourself, or trying to get started at it, then you’ll have found that to begin with many of your days bring new problems to go with the pile of existing ones and the need to discover ways of solving them. And you find yourself “working” long, unproductive, pointless days when what you really need to be doing is focussing on the money that will drive your business forward.

More than 60% of people give up at some time in the first 6 months for whatever reason, and I suspect the biggest reasons to be a lack of focus and just plain not knowing what to do. This results in trying out lots of different things – “thrashing about” – until finally throwing the towel in.

I’ll repeat it again in case you weren’t paying attention further up the page, you need to choose something you’re happy with and work at it. 🙄

Usually and in my experience, whatever that something is, then you’ll find there’s always going to be a core set of requirements.

From my own perspective, I chose to sell software. Some days I wish I’d just gone into ebooks as I’d have total control of my own product creation process, but I don’t see that as being as much fun as working in software. I’ve always liked computers, but that’s just me. Something else might light you up in your case, or you may be similar to me.

Whatever it is, you need to do something you enjoy, or at the very least feel confident and determined about.

And I can help if you let me.

In a few days time I’ll be opening what might be my last ever personal coaching programme which will run through January and February 2012.

I say might be last ever because I have a project starting in March that will consume a chunk of my time and may eventually take me in a different direction (still with software). We’ll see, it’s very early days yet.

The last coaching I did was four years ago so you can see it’s not the kind of thing I do on a regular basis and that’s why I think it’s a bit special.

I won’t be pushing you through a one-size-fits-all sausage machine. I know that more than a few of the coaching programmes I’ve seen tend to operate on a “come one, come all” basis, but that’s not how I do it.

This will be personal coaching, tailored for you. The way I think coaching should be done.

There are some provisos that come with it though, and these are only there to make sure you’re not signing up for something that isn’t appropriate for you.

#1 – The coaching will be in the IM (Internet Marketing) niche.

#2 – The coaching won’t attempt to cover things I don’t do myself such as CPA and PPC, or network marketing. I have very little knowledge of those and I’m not really inclined to find out, it’s just not my bag.

#3 – The coaching will cover things like product creation, traffic, list building and automation by outsourcing. The stuff I personally see as vitally impotant to most online businesses. I’ll give you more information on what I will cover with this personal coaching in my next post.

#4 – You’re prepared to work hard at it and work under your own initiative with my guidance. Yes as your coach I’ll do some hand holding and pointing you in the right direction, but the sooner you take responsibility for your performance the better. I can help you achieve that very useful attribute.

#5 – You commit to the ethic of product creation. To be in the “game”, you need your own products to either give away (to list build) or preferably sell, and I can’t see any reason why you shouldn’t be able to create or have one created for you after 30 days or less. Once you know what you’re doing and you’re really cooking with some useful outsourcers, a week or less for product creation is completely do-able.

On that last one, having your own product(s) is vitally important as from that point on you can start list building. The size of your list bears a direct correlation to the size of your business. Simple isn’t it?

That okay for starters?

More information on personal coaching in my next post.

-Frank Haywood

Sep

2011

PLR Membership Re-opening

Update: The PLR membership is now OPEN and is currently $27.00/month until I reach my target number of subscribers. At that point I'll increase it to the regular price of $47.00

You can get to the sales page here:-

http://www.plahh.com/

***

Tomorrow (Thursday) I’ll be re-opening my PLR membership at a temporary reduced price, and I’ll reveal that price now. It’s just $27 a month for PLR to TWO product sets.

Or put another way, it works out as $13.50 each… 😉

But that price is only valid until I fill up my remaining slots to make the membership viable for me to continue to run. (It’s been touch and go.)

Each month you’ll get PLR to 5 sales page designs, PLUS additional PLR to either a WordPress plugin or theme, or a PHP script or other program, or a special report or video set created by me.

It’s a pretty good deal.

Just the five sales pages alone are worth your membership.

Ask anyone. If you were to pay to have ONE sales page created for yourself, they’d cost you $47-$97 depending on who did them for you, and all you’d get back is the design with uneditable PNG or JPEG files.

With the ones we supply you get Private Label Rights to the entire pack of 5, PLUS all the PhotoShop PSD source files. In addition we make sure there are no hard-coded text in graphics (wherever possible) and in the few cases there are, we also supply blank JPEGs or PNGs so you can use your favourite graphics editor to add your own text.

Okay?

As for the cost of developing the WordPress plugins and themes, you’re talking anything from five hundred to two thousand dollars and upwards – go find out for yourself. So I think it’s fair to say that every month you’re getting between $750 to $2000 worth of products you can rebrand and call your own.

At the special relaunch price of $27 it’s not just a good deal it’s a smoking deal!

***

First I’d like to give you a bit of background about the membership. I opened it in November last year, and everything went fine until about March when my one and only designer took an office job in Singapore. He still does some part time work for me.

Then I had to fire one of my plugin developers as he was supposedly working full time for me and (when he slipped up) we found out he was also working “full time” for one of my friends. (No wonder he was getting slower and slower…)

This left me with a full time plugin developer and a part time designer.

And then to make matters worse, my remaining developer decided to go look for an office job too and also went part time in June.

While this was all going on I just couldn’t find the right people to fill the gaps left behind and from April until now I’ve been struggling to fulfill the promise of 2 monthly PLR products as part of the membership.

It even got to the stage last month where I’d just about decided to close up shop on the membership as I couldn’t see how I could continue to deliver products like I had been – I’m certainly not a designer or a plugin developer.

And then out of the blue I picked up two new designers, one of whom can create WordPress themes. Hurrah!

I then (by accident) found a part timer who is now in training to become my full time PA and Project Manager in March 2012.

But the icing on the cake is I also found a new full time coder, AND just this week my part time developer has increased her weekly hours to almost full time.

Suddenly I have a full set of staff and that makes the membership viable again. And I also have enough “give” in there to make sure that if someone leaves then the membership won’t suffer like it has this year.

***

To kick off the relaunch of the membership with a bang tomorrow, I’m adding in some extras. So instead of you joining and getting one month’s worth of products, I’m including a few more bits and pieces too.

The current product set is for August, but I’ve left July’s active too. September’s will be ready next week.

So when you join tomorrow, you not only get July and August’s membership products, you’ll also get September’s too when I add it in a few days time.

That’s THREE months worth of membership in this first month. (For existing members I’ll put something else in so you don’t feel left out.)

Forget pretty good, forget smoking, this is a RED HOT deal.

But ONLY when you join tomorrow at just $27 / month.

When I fill the minimum membership slots I need, then the price goes back up.

I’ll give you some additional details tomorrow and re-open the membership at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST).

-Frank Haywood.

Aug

2011

YouTube, 720P and Private Videos

I opened a new YouTube account recently so that I could show videos on the Warrior Forum as it seems that’s the only way you can do it.

I have to say I’ve found it quite useful. There have been a few good changes since I registered my first account a few years ago, and one of those is that you can view videos at 720p. The really interesting thing about this is that if you have the bandwidth, 720p actually loads faster than the default 360p.

Pop it up to full screen at 720p, and the quality is so good it’s getting very close to the quality I recorded it at. Great stuff.

And…

You can turn off ads!

How many videos have I watched and thought “Flaming Google putting ads everywhere!” Now I’ve found out it’s not Google at all, it’s the individual user turning them on.

You can even make videos private, although I’ve not tried that yet.

In all this now means I can do a pile of tutorial videos (optionally for staff only if I make them private I guess) and you can watch them at really high quality without sucking any bandwidth from my server.

I wonder if the whole private video thing also lets us share them automatically to individuals via an API? That would be really cool wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t need a dedicated server or Amazon S3 to store your videos for your members, you could just use YouTube’s storage and bandwidth instead.

If it’s possible, there’s another product idea eh? 😉

-Frank