Frank Haywood – Page 31 – Product Creation, Traffic, List Building, Automation = Internet Business

Mar

2011

Affiliate Link Pal

Update: The sale for Affiliate Link Pal is now LIVE at $27.00.

We’ve now updated the plugin and zip, so if you go back to your personal download page you’ll find there’s a new version in there.

***

This Friday I’ll be releasing an exciting new plugin called Affiliate Link Pal.

I hope you’ll agree that there’s a little spark of genius in this one. Ahem.

If you use a third party affiliate scheme like ClickBank or Infusionsoft or e-Junkie or whatever, then the problem is they don’t let your affiliates create links that point back to YOUR site. So your affiliates are always boosting the rank of those third party sites instead of your own.

Or maybe you use a self-hosted sales centralisation script that includes an affiliate scheme.

It might work great with your main site as it gets all the backlinks from affiliates, but it’s not so good with your satellite sites as they don’t get any links at all.

And it probably even creates long and complicated “unfriendly” links too.

It’s an annoyance we’ve probably all had to live with at one point or another, and if not, then it’s just waiting to happen.

Until now.

Using Affiliate Link Pal will enable your affiliates to create a “friendly” URL that points back to your individual site regardless of the actual affiliate link. When a prospect clicks the friendly link, the plugin redirects the prospect off to the real affiliate link.

So it goes like this:-

Friendly Link >> Unfriendly Affiliate Link >> Final Landing Page

Now you might be wondering at this point why the affiliate should bother to take this extra step, and not just use the original unfriendly affiliate link instead.

There’s two good reasons.

The first is, what do you think looks better for the affiliate of these two links? (Don’t bother clicking them, they don’t go anywhere.)

http://domainA.dom/aff/hop.php?aff=fred&item=65

http://domainB.dom/secret-free-trial/

Now I *hope* you’ve said the second one, because that’s the kind of link your affiliates will be able to create. 😉

I’m sure you can see how your affiliates will be excited to be able to create interesting links with a little bit of imagination.

The second reason your affiliates will be eager to create these friendly links is sales page customisation.

We’ve included the ability for you to create customised short code tags such as their name, which then allows you to mention them in your sales copy, giving it the more personal touch.

You must have seen custom created pages that say things like “Fred Bloggs and John Smith introduce…”, well the John Smith bit could be your affiliate’s name.

So the combination of “interesting” URLs plus page customisation is a double whammy to get your affiliates to take a few moments to create an SEO friendly link for you.

Their benefit is better, more clickable links, and yours is more links pointing directly back to your individual site. It’s a win-win for both of you.

As far as I can see, this plugin will work with ANY affiliate scheme. Affiliate Link Pal is NOT an affiliate scheme plugin itself, it’s meant to complement any existing affiliate scheme you may be using.

This coming Friday (4th March) at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST), the Affiliate Link Pal plugin will go on sale at a starting price of $10.00 for the first 50 sales.

-Frank Haywood

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

Jan

2011

Sales Helper Plugins

Update: The sale is now LIVE and is currently $15.00 for the next TWO sales.

Sales from 101 onwards will be $27.00 until the products are officially released later this week.

***

Tomorrow (Tuesday 1st February – already!) I’ll be running a PRE-ORDER sale for two really cool little plugins.

The first one allows you to add a special offer to your sidebar that counts down, expires and disappears. It’s cookie driven and won’t re-appear if the visitor refreshes the page (unless you want it to).

I’ve wanted something like this myself for a long time as more than once when visiting other sites, I’ve been tempted by seeing a little countdown timer and eventually just HAD to click it before the time runs out to find out more before it’s too late.

Curiousity is a powerful emotion to deal with, and I’ve always figured if it works so well on me then it will work really well on other people too. Including your visitors… 😉

The second plugin has been designed directly to enhance your sales copy.

Consider this.

There are two types of people that hit your sales pages. The readers and the skimmers.

What I do is I tend to read the headline, read the first sentence, scroll to the bullets, then skip to the price. I may then read some more copy if it looks interesting enough. Occasionally I’ll go back and read all the sales copy.

Sometimes I just jump right to the bottom to read the PSes. (Did you know that your second PS should contain your most important message?)

I *may* then also decide to watch a video if I think I need to know a little more before I buy, but videos are always low on my personal priority list. That’s just me.

Talking to other marketers, it looks like my behaviour is fairly typical. Some people prefer to watch a video, but of the group who prefer sales copy, I’m right in there as Mr Average. 😉

And… Someone I know is a mad tester. He reckons that his best performing sales copy consists of little more than a headline, bullet points and testimonials, but also says it depends on the product being sold.

When I stopped to have a think about this, the bullet points angle probably makes a lot of sense as bulleted info allows you to absorb all the key points very quickly. So people who get turned off by vast amounts of sales copy are okay with that method.

But I always find I want to know more detail before I commit to a purchase.

And that’s where the idea for this plugin came from.

What it allows you to do is create short, snappy bullet style sales copy which lets people do what they like best – skim – and absorb the key points very quickly.

If they need to know more about each point, then they can just click it and it unfolds to reveal more detailed copy about that particular point.

This method actually has a double benefit and puts both you and your visitor in control.

Your visitor has a chance to happily skim your sales page very quickly because you’ve nicely bulleted it all out for them.

And because each block of revealed sales copy is specific detail about the point in question, they’re the ones making the decision to view it.

This is really important because what you’re doing is engaging your visitor, and drawing them into the message you’re trying to convey to them.

And… Because the block of revealed sales copy is much smaller than a full page, they’re very likely to read all of that section, then repeat the process for other bullet points, and eventually read the whole of your sales copy.

All in small chunks.

This plugin increases your chances that a visitor to your site will give you ALL their attention.

Okay?

So this pre-order bundle gives you a plugin that drives people to your offer, and also a plugin that improves your ability to make the sale once they’re there.

The plugins are in test now, and they *may* be available tomorrow, but it’s much more likely that they’ll be ready on Friday hence this pre-order sale.

When they’re ready, then just like the Clone and Backup plugin I’ll be adding them directly to the affiliate scheme at full price and sold individually.

Tomorrow (1st Feb) at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST), you’ll be able to get both plugins for the price of one, with a starting price of $10.00 for the first 50 sales.

-Frank Haywood

P.S. Speaking of Clone and Backup, we’ll be releasing the new version tomorrow if it gets through test today, and then the sales page and affiliate scheme for it will go live. 😉

Hopefully there’s a surprise unadvertised bonus to go with the plugin, IF it all works out okay…

P.P.S. The WordPress Sales Page Template Pack is now at $15.00 for the next THIRTEEN copies as I write this.
http://www.frankhaywood.com/wordpress-sales-page-template-pack-3/