Frank Haywood – Page 15 – Product Creation, Traffic, List Building, Automation = Internet Business

Sep

2013

Subscribers Only Plugin

Update: The sale starting at $10.00 for the first 25 copies of the Subscribers Only plugin for WordPress is now live. Included as part of this sale only is a full developer (client/flipper) licence.

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Today at 6.00pm GMT, I’m running a sale for a very cool little plugin called Subscribers Only. It’s designed to boost the number of WP subscribers to your self-hosted WordPress blogs and I’m going to be using it quite a lot very shortly to do just that.

When a visitor views a page or post with protected content on it then they’ll see something like this:-

In the screen shot above they can see the first section and the last sentence. In order for them to see the hidden content in the middle then they have to subscribe by following one the links. They’ll then see what they couldn’t see before:-

Is that cool or what?

It’s very easy to set up too, just a little bit of copy and paste.

More subscribers means more customers.

THE most important thing we have to do as business owners is gather subscribers names and email addresses, and many of us have an autoresponder setup of some sort to help us with that.

An “out of the box” WP installation supports the idea of subscribers to your blog – let’s call them WP subscribers to differentiate them from autoresponder subscribers.

This plugin directly helps you to add more WP subscribers to your blogs. Once they’re there, then you can export and import into your autoresponder. (There’s more I want to talk about that quite soon too – it’s all change and there’s some exciting stuff coming your way.)

Anyway…

Getting WP subscribers can be a little bit of a problem for most people – you need to give visitors a real incentive to become WP subscribers, and many site owners aren’t sure of the best way to do this.

WP sort of helps you to do this by including an option where you can only allow people to leave a comment if they first register as a WP subscriber.

But all that seems to do is is stop people from leaving a comment altogether unless it’s really in their interest to do so. A lot of blog owners are using this to prevent spam, so it’s not really working as it was originally intended.

Now wouldn’t it be good if you had a method of getting people to subscribe in order to read your posts? Sort of like a WordPress Membership. But the only problem with that is somehow getting people enthusiastic enough to subscribe, especially if they can’t read ANYTHING until they do.

There’s no way of them sampling your articles first, and of course if everything is hidden behind a membership, then you lose all the nice SEO effects of having plenty of content on your site.

What you really need is a method of hiding some of the content so that people can read part of an article, get hooked in, and then only be able to read the juicy bits by first becoming a subscriber.

Aha!

This concept is DYNAMITE.

Imagine this.

You write a post or a page that explains how important it is to do something – the WHY – but then leave out the crucial bit that explains the method of doing it – the HOW.

All they see is a message saying something like “This content is for Subscribers Only”.

Get it?

The only way that people can read that missing content is if they follow the link and join as WP Subscribers, then once they’re logged in they can see all the hidden content.

Do you see the power of that?

Anybody that’s read the first half of an article will almost always want to read the second half. In fact you don’t even need to withold half the content, you can do it with just a paragraph as long as it has the information in that they want to know about.

And inquisitiveness is an incredibly powerful feeling – we all know the phrase “curiosity killed the cat”.

The entire human race is hard wired with curiosity built in. The Subscribers Only plugin taps into that curiosity and gets people to subscribe to your blog.

The sale for the Subscribers Only plugin goes live today, Sunday 8th September at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) and will run for 48 hours.

The first 25 copies are just $10 with a price increase after that so the faster you get in the lower the price you’ll pay.

-Frank Haywood

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Aug

2013

Comment Reward Summer Sale

#1 – It increases the number of REAL comments on your blog.
#2 – It improves your SEO by adding more user driven content.

As you might think from the name, the Comment Reward plugin rewards people for leaving comments on your blog, by sending them an email they will really WANT to receive. 😉

Why would you want to do this?

You know how people only go certain places because other people go there? And the only thing that makes the place popular is because – people go there – it’s a self fulfilling prophesy if you like.

Once the buzz is going, it doesn’t stop.

Just like real locations in the real world, a busy blog means more interest. The more interest you have, then the busier your blog. Makes sense doesn’t it?

I used to be a big fan of certain pubs just because they ran “happy hours” between 6-7 to liven things up a bit. My reward was cheaper beer. (Sadly, happy hours have since been outlawed in the UK…)

Just like real world promotions, if you reward your visitors, then they’re more likely to come back and make your blog look busy to other visitors.

What your visitors won’t find out until they leave a comment of their own is that you’re rewarding them for their comments by using the Comment Reward plugin.

They will get a welcome email from you which could contain some useful information, and could also have a link to a downloadable freebie.

You can create many of these reward emails depending on how many comments your readers leave and even tell them when the next reward will be available to them just to encourage them to leave more comments.

Once people know what’s going on the plugin virtually compells them to come and make comments on your blog. And if other people see your blog is busy because of all the comments, it encourages them to join in too.

More visitors, more comments, busier blog, more comments. People come back.

And so it goes round and round.

The result?

A really busy blog. More returning visitors, raving fans, and subscribers too if your offer is good enough.

Because let’s face it, someone might be okay with leaving a comment to begin with, but they might not want to subscribe to your mailing list.

However, if you reward them for their comment then they’re much more likely to be okay with signing up to your mailing list, especially if you make them a really good offer (more on this another time).

Do you want that?

You can get yourself going in the right direction just by installing the Comment Reward plugin.

The Comment Reward plugin is just $17 until 31st December 2014.

-Frank Haywood

Aug

2013

Sale – Slide UP Ads

Update: The sale for Slide Up Ads is now LIVE at just $17.00 and INCLUDES a full developer (client/flipper) licence.

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Here on my blog you’ve almost certainly noticed the Slide Up ad at the bottom of the screen and maybe even used it to become a subscriber – it’s a fixture here and there’s a very good reason for that.

Here are some examples from the supplied PSDs. You can easily amend the background colours by use of a slider to give the hue you require, and you can change the icons/graphics by adding any one of the thousands of free icons available or your own images.

You may be VERY surprised to know that when I first introduced it, then my subscriber sign-up rate increased by 249% in the first week.

By doing absolutely nothing extra to my blog other than installing this little tool, then since then I’ve dramatically increased the number of subscribers.

Here’s the feature set.

79 pre-defined templates for the slide-ups
All Photoshop PSDs are supplied for all templates
Also included are no-text PNGs for use with any graphics editor
An easy to understand method of creating your own templates
An optional colour picker if you want a plain background slide-up
Autoresponder sign up code parsing and reformatting
Comprehensive rules system that governs when and how often the ad shows
THREE ways of visitors closing the ad, selectable by you
Two different “Content Types” for the ad – autoresponder and link/HTML
Finally, a way to reset the ad when you create a new one

I have proven beyond any measure of a doubt that putting a slide-up ad on my blog increased my mailing list sign-ups by 249% in the first week of use. I know that sounds incredible, but it’s something that just can’t be ignored.

My stats for the 12 months leading up to the installation of the script were for approximately every 17 visitors, someone subscribed. I get a lot of repeat visitors who are already subscribed, so I’ve been okay with that figure of 17-1 and I thought it was pretty good for a blog.

But it turns out I was WRONG. Big time wrong.

By using a slide-up I immediately pushed that number up to nearly 6-1.

After a week of use I found I was getting a new subscriber for every 6 or 7 visitors – that’s just under 2.5 times more subscribers for the SAME amount of visitors.

You have GOT to take notice of results like those, and it’s been one of the most amazing things I’ve seen. (That was when I then had my own bigger, better, Slide Up Ads plugin created.)

If you see the same kind of results as I did (and why not?) then for every 10 new subscribers you’ve been picking up from visitors to your sites, then suddenly you can push that number up to 25 from the same amount of visitors just by using this plugin.

Considering the industry standard rate that a subscriber to your mailing list can mean up to a dollar a month in income, then you have to ask yourself just what are you losing by not using it?

The special for the Slide Up Ads plugin will close without notice and is just $17…

The nearest competing product to it sells for ~~$47~~, so this is a real bargain.

It’s worth a lot more to you than that though when you put it to good use.

Here’s a screen shot of part of the admin panel:-

And a picture of the drop-down rules:-

The colour picker if you’re using a plain background:-

And the buttons that can be added to the slide up ad:-

Note in that last image that there’s the usual X (which always appears on the ad), an optional minimise button which will allow the visitors to close the ad for a period you decide, and also an optional power button which will close the ad permanently until you use the “Reset Viewers” check box on the admin panel settings page.

That’s a plenty big plugin spec. 😉

-Frank Haywood
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Jul

2013

WP PLR Tutorials

There’s a link to a WP PLR tutorial site further down, but first…

I had an email from Ted G (hi Ted!) asking how to move the WordPress page tabs (the menu items that run along the top of the page).

I’ve been taking it for granted that everyone that uses WP knows this and I’m a dummy for doing so. Of course not everyone knows all the ins and outs (neither do I) and it’s stupid of me to make such a silly assumption.

I apologise for that assumption, and I’ve made a short video for Ted and everyone reading this who don’t know how to do it.

At the other end of the scale, another customer (hi Martin!) has created something that has blown me away.

He’s built a huge (and I mean MASSIVE) site of high quality WordPress training. (It’s something I’ve considered doing for a long time but I don’t think I need to do it now.) It’s not just videos he’s created, but also lots of text and screenshots, diagrams and flow charts, infographics, the lot.

Better still, Martin has released all this with
Private Label Rights (PLR).

So now there’s two very cool aspects to this.

#1 – If there’re things about WP you want to learn, then this is the way to do it, there’s no two ways about it. And as a sideline you could set up your own tutorial service too.

#2 – If you already sell WordPress products or services then these are ideal to provide to your customers.

For example, let’s say you have offline clients that you’ve set up WP site for, and they’ve asked about how to use it.

You could spend a lot of your own time showing them what to do.

Or you could give them access to the training material that “your team” has put together for you.

Either way you get to charge them for it.

I know I’d be VERY hard pushed to go to the level of detail that Martin has and this is something that is well worth checking out.

I’m talking about tutorials with WordPress training videos, HUNDREDS of screenshots, diagrams and flowcharts, infographs, links to resources, links to related tutorials, PLUS blog posts, training emails, updates and additional training content.

It’s a VERY cool deal and you can get to it here.

-Frank Haywood

Jul

2013

Google Fonts in WordPress

I’m feeling a bit over-excited at the moment because I can now add any Google font to any page or post on my blog. I just checked and as I write this there are 629 web fonts available in the Google font library.

I have a small sub-set of those installed here on my blog and I’d like to show a selection of those to you here as I feel these are amongst the most useful when writing.

Please note that these are all TEXT and NOT GRAPHICS.

You can swipe across them and copy the content to test it out if you don’t believe me. 😉

Architects Daughter

Bangers

Chewy

Gloria Hallelujah

Henny Penny (Harry Potter I reckon)

Indie Flower

Knewave

Kranky

Love Ya Like A Sister

Permanent Marker

Rock Salt

Slackey (this looks like the SpongeBob font)

Special Elite (a typewriter style font – very nice)

I like to think you’d agree with me when I say this is pretty amazing.

Most important though is it’s incredibly easy to use and to add new fonts.

If you want to be able to do this too, then you need this:-

http://www.frankhaywood.com/wso-10ssp/

-Frank