Frank Haywood – Page 30 – Product Creation, Traffic, List Building, Automation = Internet Business

May

2011

Affiliate Scheme

Update:

Thanks for all the kind comments.

I hit a bit of a problem today and I’ve been forced to put this back until the weekend. 🙄

And unfortunately I won’t be around tomorrow and until Friday afternoon, because of a scheduled hospital visit.

Many apologies, I know it will be worth the wait…

***

I know a lot of people are waiting for details of the affiliate scheme. I get an email or two about it every week and that’s been going on for a while now.

I’m sorry it’s taken so long to get going, but it IS up and running now and I’ve been testing and fiddling with it the last couple of days.

And it’s a GREAT scheme. I know it’s me that’s saying that (and why wouldn’t I?) but I don’t think I’ve ever seen any affiliate scheme that has more potential to generate you as much income as this one, and here’s why.

#1 – Software sells itself.

You may have missed the bit of fuss about this a few weeks ago, but I have to agree with the marketer who raised the point, as it’s true. While many people will now hesitate to buy the latest fad in learning, a useful tool is almost always seen as a good buy and chargebacks are low.

#2 – You’re not just joining an affiliate scheme for one single product.

I see this is one of the biggest problems with many affiliate schemes. The person running the scheme may have several other products and services, but typically when you join an affiliate scheme for one product you’re not able to reap the rewards of the sales of any other products.

So you end up sending buyers to the product owner who then sells his or hers other products to the new buyers without having to give you a cut.

NOT FAIR and NOT with this scheme.

All my products (and if you didn’t know – I have a LOT) are part of the SAME affiliate scheme.

Promote ONE product (even a free one) ONCE, and you earn 50% commission from sales of ANY and ALL of them through the prospects you send.

You’ll even be able to just link to one of my blogs and the prospect will get cookied. If they buy, you get the commission.

I can see that depending on how good you are at traffic, it should be a reasonable expectation to make a full time living just from promoting my products let alone anyone elses.

And I don’t think I’m being over the top with that statement, I think it’s a perfectly viable thing to be able to do.

At this stage I don’t know the numbers yet, but certainly you stand more chance of earning a commission through this scheme than most others because of the benefit you get of multiple chances of a sale

#3 – You can link to any landing page you like.

Including your own write ups or reviews, or even your own sales copy, and still get your prospects cookied.

We have the technology… 😉

Now I can’t say I’ll allow this to continue permanently as it *might* get abused, but certainly in the early days of the scheme I’m going to allow you to create links to any page you like.

If it does show signs of being abused, I’ll stop this aspect but leave any links you already created in place and untouched.

#4 – I’m going to randomly hand out $100 every month to one of my affiliates, and it could be YOU.

I’m having a bit of code written that will randomly select an affiliate each month. If this is popular (and I don’t see why it wouldn’t be) then I’ll increase that amount, and add in some additional variants to increase your chances.

But you have to be in to win it. 😉

This aspect will come online in the next 3-4 weeks.

***

Okay…

You know what?

I’d definitely sign up for this scheme if it was me reading about it. 😉

But before I give you the link to the page (tomorrow, Wednesday), I’d like to tell you about a new plugin that I’ll be using as part of this scheme, called the Promo Tools plugin. I’ve just received the final version today and given it a quick testing and it seems to be perfect for our needs.

In case you don’t know what a promo tools page is, it’s usually a page dedicated to supplying an affiliate with a set of promotional tools together with their affiliate link embedded in them.

And that’s exactly what the Promo Tools plugin can help you with.

It will allow you to create pages that you can fill with promo tools you create for your affiliates such as pre-written blog posts, articles, emails, forum signatures and banners.

With this plugin, once you’ve set up the tools, all an affiliate has to do is paste their aff link into the box at the top and every single promo tool on the page gets auto-populated with their affiliate link.

Then they can copy the code for banners etc and paste it directly into their web site.

It makes the whole process a lot easier for them and the easier you can make it, the more attractive it becomes.

Shall we see how easy you find it to use? 😉

More news on this and the affiliate scheme tomorrow (Wednesday).

Have I missed anything?

-Frank Haywood

May

2011

WordPress Updates RSS Feed

Update: The sale is now LIVE and is currently $15.00.

Sales from 101 onwards will be $27.00 until the plugin goes officially live.

***

~~Tomorrow~~ Today Wednesday 4th, I’m going to be pre-releasing a cracking little plugin that I can’t believe no-one has done before.

Again, it was James Dunn who wrote to me asking if it was possible that we could supply him with a smart phone app that could somehow pick up plugins etc, that needed updating on WordPress blogs.

He wanted it to be able to keep an eye on a selection of client sites and then notify him when a theme or plugin or WordPress itself needed some update attention.

My first reaction was to say no, but I thought it would be a good idea if WP blogs could somehow tell us they needed updating in some way. (Apparently there are some expensive monthly services that will do this.)

So I had a little think and did a bit of research, and this is what we came up with.

The plugin will create a new RSS feed on your blog, listing everything that needs updating. You specify an obscurely named feed, and a URL is generated from that name.

Then all you have to do is use the RSS feed reader of your choice.

Most new smart phones have RSS readers pre-installed as free apps, or you can get them at very low cost from the relevant market places.

OR…

You can get yourself a PC based RSS reader, and there are even small free apps that sit in your Windows system tray and monitor feed activity.

Whatever your choice of platform, when the feed gets updated, you get notified and you can then go give the blog some update love by following the admin link in the feed. 😉

Really cool huh? And blimming useful too – I already have it installed on a dozen different blogs…

Anyway…

Tomorrow at 6.00pm GMT, I’m pre-releasing it at just $10.00 for the first 50 buyers.

Be there or be square. 😉

-Frank Haywood

Apr

2011

Backlinks and Traffic Plugin

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

***

On Thursday 21st April, I’ll be running a PRE-ORDER Easter Special for a new plugin called Backlinks and Traffic.

Funnily enough there are two parts to this plugin. 😉

Part One: Backlinks – is all about getting people to create links back to your site, and rewarding them for doing so.

Part Two: Traffic – is all about rewarding people for sending you traffic.

Now normally you can do this kind of thing by running an affiliate scheme, and you can still do that in parallel if you want to. But this new plugin is all about an extra, additional method of reward that will get people talking about and linking to your site. The reward can be anything you want, such as a direct cash payment in return for backlinks (yes I pay for some of my backlinks), or even an attractive product or service you can offer them.

If it’s something they want, then it will be worth their while to take a few moments out to create a few backlinks.

Here’s the thing, and one of the driving principles behind this. Many people are time rich but money poor.

They have time to go create backlinks for you, but they may not have the money to buy one of your products.

So what you can do is, you offer them your product for free in return for 10, 20 or whatever you decide, backlinks.

This is a win-win for both of you, and here’s why. They get the product for free. You get those all important backlinks to your site. And an even better idea while doing this is to tell them to join your affiliate scheme and use their affiliate link – that way it’s even more of an attractive deal to them.

They get the product for free, and also the opportunity to make some money from affiliate sales.

Just don’t make the mistake of saying to yourself “No I don’t want them to use their affiliate links.” Of course you do. Don’t actively do anything to block the flow of enthusiasm and you will reap the rewards from following that approach.

You WANT people to be excited and chat about your site on forums and blogs. Don’t you?

Every link is a potential sale and a potential new subscriber. 😉

Now looking at the second part of the plugin, you may decide you also want to give them an additional reward for sending traffic to your site. Let’s say for instance that you “know your numbers” and that for every 100 new visitors to your site, you pick up 60 new subscribers and a sale. And of those 60 new subscribers, 4 of them eventually purchase one of your other products, and that you get 6 sales of third party products you promote to them.

When you crunch all the numbers, this may mean to you that for every 100 visitors, your total earnings are $100 after affiliate payments and payment processor charges etc.

This in turn means that you could easily afford to pay 10 cents per visitor – that’s just 10% of your earnings – as an additional bonus payment of $10 per 100 visitors. If you didn’t want to pay cash, then you could even just supply another product for free.

How ATTRACTIVE do you think this would be to any potential affiliates that read about it?

Very? 😉

Part two of this plugin – the traffic bit – will count the number of clicks coming in from sources that are registered by the people promoting your site. We use a simple method of doing this, but it works a treat!

In fact the method we use allows people to link directly to your site without using an affiliate link, which means they can link to your site from forums without having their links removed by a moderator. 😉

Is that cool or what?

Like the Lightbox Popup, I’ll be releasing the Backlinks and Traffic plugin on pre-order in just over 24 hours as I write this, on Thursday 21st April at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST).

More news tomorrow.

-Frank Haywood

Apr

2011

LightBox Popup Plugin

Update: The plugin is currently $27.00 until it goes officially live at $67.00.

***

Tomorrow (Tuesday 12th April) I’ll be releasing a customer requested plugin called LightBox Popup in a pre-order sale.

Now before you go “*yawn* Oh frank there’s lots of these types of plugins available”, I’d like you to stop and consider that I always go that extra little bit further when coming up with these.

And I don’t embark on a project until I’ve had a good look round to see what alternatives there out there…

The plugin has taken over a month to develop going through various prototype stages and adding in more and more features until we’re ready to release this first version, and I hope you’ll appreciate how much thought has gone into it.

The original request (from James Dunn) was for a method to create a lightbox popup that could have HTML pasted into it. It seems that it wasn’t as easy for James to find what he was after, and after having a look round myself I agree with him.

James said (shortened form):-

“I’d like a pop-up, lightbox, overlay, modal… In that box (for this specific application) I need to put some HTML for a 1SC form where the visitor can enter their name, email address, and a question/comment… I need to be able to put the HTML in for the 1SC form so it will send the input to the 1SC system.

I found tons of lightboxes that will allow me to put photos, videos, iFrames, etc, but only one or two that would allow me to put just straight HTML in the box. I found one that would allow me to put a widget in the box… but the setup menu on it doesn’t work… I think it’s just another buggy plugin).”

I decided that yes this would be quite a useful plugin to create and I’d certainly find it very handy on some of my own sites. So, putting my thinking cap on I came up with the initial spec and then started building on it.

It now does a LOT of other stuff that wasn’t in James’ request. 😉

Now you can paste your HTML in there as requested, and then there are a few “Extra Settings” that we thought would be very useful for you too.

#1 – You can enable or disable the plugin without deactivating it.

#2 – You can reset the visitor cookie if you change the nature of the lightbox and want them to see it again if using it in “Trigger” mode. The triggers are time delay from the visitor arriving, or if the visitor is about to close the page, and also optionally if the visitor clicks on an external link.

#3 – You can change the colour of the lightbox backgound using either pre-selected colours from a drop-down or use the custom colour picker. You can even set the lightbox background to transparent to make it seem like a regular DHTML popup.

#4 – The rules for displaying the popup are the same as we created for the Slide Up Ads plugin. “Normal”, “Nth View”, “Nth view with initial” and “Nth day”.

#5 – You can choose from some pre-set sizes or set it to your own custom size.

#6 – You can set the position of the popup according to the most commonly used options.

#7 – You can set a custom (HTML) “Thank You Message” which optionally replaces the contents of the lightbox if using it as a sign up box, or alternatively set a “Thank You URL” to redirect your visitor to.

***

The plugin is all done and pretty much ready to go as it is, but I’ve just asked for a couple of minor changes to be made to it, which is why this is going to be a pre-order sale.

The full plugin will be likely available by the end of the week at which time your personal download page will be updated.

Update: The plugin is currently $27.00 until it goes officially live at $67.00.

-Frank Haywood

Mar

2011

New Multiple Streams Theme – MST006

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

It comes with a nice 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, and bonus 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… 😉

More on this in the next 24 hours, when I’ll post a link to some videos.

You can get a sneak preview of the theme here:-

http://mst006.multiplestreamsthemes.com/

-Frank Haywood