Frank Haywood – Page 42 – Product Creation, Traffic, List Building, Automation = Internet Business

Apr

2010

WordPress AutoResponder Nickel Sale

UPDATE: The Nickel Sale is over but you can purchase the WordPress AutoResponder using the payment button below.

***

As you might have guessed from the title, the plugin I’ll be launching is a WordPress autoresponder.

I’ve long thought about how nice it would be to have a simple autoresponder *plugin* rather than have to mess about with setting it all up in an autoresponder service. I don’t know about you but I’ve always thought it a bit like using a sledgehammer to crack a peanut.

I have plenty of little niche blogs that I’d like to gather names and email addresses through, but because they’re niche sites, it’s never seemed worth the hassle of setting it up in the autoresponder service I use.

I mean, come on, how useful is it in my main niche to gather a list of people interested in petrol lawn mowers for instance? 😉

Even ignoring the niche aspect of the plugin, I figured that for lots of people just starting out that the last thing they’d purchase is a monthly autoresponder service.

If you stop and think about it, there are plenty of bloggers out there setting up their first sites who have read that they need to be gathering email addresses, but aren’t quite sure about it all, and don’t want to commit to a service.

So I looked around to see what was available in the way of AR plugins for us marketers. I expected to find at least one half decent plugin, but to my surprise the one that really looked promising didn’t allow you to gather a name – all you could get was an email address.

Also, the interface was a bit clunky and it meant you had to go to different areas of the WP admin panel to do different things. I wanted it all in one menu area.

And then there was no widget so you could easily place the form in the sidebar like I do on my personal blog. I know that’s very effective, and is important to have in.

There were a couple of other plugins that sort of claimed to do the job, but it was clear they’d all been planned by developers not marketers. Many of them are just simple list mailers and have no kind of delayed autoresponder ability. It seemed that nobody really knew quite what it was that WE needed.

And that’s why I created this plugin.

I fully intend to turn it into a powerful tool that’s a first choice for bloggers, and my pledge is that all minor version releases up to v2 will be free upgrades. I have some great ideas for it as I really know what’s lacking from many autoresponder services – I’ve felt that pain.

So on Friday 30th April at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST), I’ll be kicking off this nickel sale.

***WARNING***

The last nickel sale I did a few months ago went a bit pear shaped as the autoresponder service I was using failed to send out the email until nearly 2 hours after it was supposed to go out. Many people were left waiting for it but didn’t get it until many sales had already gone through, and so didn’t get as good a deal as they would have done.

So my advice is, if you want to be one of the first to grab it and get it at it’s lowest price, keep an eye on my blog.

Regardless of whether or not the email is sent out on time, if you hang around on my blog at start time, you’ll see a post appear with the location of the nickel sale. Okay?

That’s how lots of people got in early last time, and that’s probably how it will happen this time too.

-Frank Haywood

Apr

2010

Fame And Traffic

For a long time now I’ve been saying that having a personal blog is a very good idea, but a lot of people still don’t get it.

People like to buy from people, not from busineses, and as an example of what I mean, the first thing I always do when considering purchasing a product is do a quick search for the product owners name.

If I find it, I take a quick look at the site just to see if there’s a real person behind it all and for peace of mind, and in most cases it’s a blog.

Usually if there’s a couple of other products they have for sale, I check them out too, and at any rate blogs are good place to see if there’s any special deals going on, like product bundles at a reduced price. I’ve managed to pick up a couple of those and been really pleased with the purchase.

Make sense so far?

But there’s also a traffic aspect to owning a blog too, which isn’t apparent until you stop to think about it.

My answer doesn’t vary…

You can buy traffic, or you can generate it yourself.

By buying traffic I mean any method that costs you money. Pay per click, banner ads, directory listings, affiliate traffic (you pay a commission), hiring content writers to write articles and submitting them and so on.

Generating it yourself is for all those people who have the time but not the money to buy it.

And doing it yourself (or seeming to) is a lot more effective in most cases than paying for it, as it’s the “Holy Grail” of traffic generation – highly targetted.

It’s certainly easy to do.

#1 – Write something interesting and useful for your target niche and post it on your blog.

#2 – Go hunting for similar blogs in your niche and leave valid and interesting comments. Can I EVER stress this enough? No “me too” comments EVER. Okay? If it’s a good enough comment, then REAL people will start to click through and find your site. When they do, capture their name and email address.

#3 – Sign up to a few forums in your niche, put a link back to your blog in your signature, and get involved in a few interesting threads. I’ll say it again, no “me too” comments. Be helpful, and don’t discuss stuff you don’t understand. If you see a thread that’s gone bad, such as a flame war or has gone over the top in some way, DO NOT COMMENT. If you join in, you will be seen as a jerk and won’t be taken seriously. Remember, you want to help and be interesting. REAL people will start to click through and find your site.

#4 – Goto #1.

If you have products for sale, then list them somewhere prominent on your blog, but not “in-your-face” prominent. The sidebar near the top after your sign up box is just fine. (Remind you of any blog you know?)

Traffic that comes through to your blog means people will find ALL your products. If you run affiliate schemes for your products (and you should be), then people signing up will drive even more traffic directly to your sites.

Wow! It’s as simple as that, it really is.

You may even want to pump it all up a bit… How?

Well, here’s a brilliant method I’ve just learned about that will bring in a torrent of traffic to your blog.

Yes it takes some work, yes you might find it a bit scary, but if you have the chutzpah and energy to do it, the rewards are incredible.

And… you don’t have to go at it as hard as this person did, you can also scale it down just to try it out. But definitely, definitely… Doing it will bring you in highly targetted traffic, guaranteed.

You can read more about it here:-

http://www.frankhaywood.com/go/htbwt/

-Frank Haywood

Mar

2010

How To Easily Get Lots Of Backlinks

This is a simple enough method, and can be done fairly quickly and easily.

You register on a forum, go to your user control panel, and then enter just two backlinks in your sig (signature) section. You DON’T need to make a post, just register and add your backlinks in your sig using either HTML or bbcode depending on the forum.

The next time that search engines hit the site and crawl it, your backlinks will be found via the members directory.

Easy huh? And you can leave it at that if you want to.

You may be thinking that this is spam, but well… it’s borderline and I think it’s okay as nobody ever has to see the links, just the search engines.

However…

If you want to go a little further, and leave a couple of USEFUL comments too (I can’t stress this enough) on an existing post, then that’s fine. But for goodness sake, don’t make it a “me too” post. Make sure your comment actually adds to the thread and is helpful in some way, and is at least a couple of paragraphs. (The same goes for blog commenting.)

It won’t get deleted, and you help someone. The universe is happy with the trade and so is the forum owner.

The benefit is that there are some threads on posts that can end up getting decent PR (if you’re worried about such things), and the idea is your backlinks will carry more weight. But if you do decide to do this, you do have to take a little bit more care.

It’s usually a good idea to register, make your comments, wait a week, and then log back in and add your sig in the control panel. Most forum software will then auto-add the sig to all your posts.

It’s a good way of getting backlinks and is used by all marketers in the know.

But registering with forums can take a little time to fill in all the fields. Even if it only takes you a minute or two, wouldn’t it be better if you could shave that down to seconds? That’s where Roboform comes in.

Roboform will remember all your passwords and details against different identities you create, and then auto-fill fields in forms for you.

Click-click-done.

It takes seconds instead of minutes.

As I write this they’re currently having a “St. Patrick’s Day special” until the 17th and have knocked 20% off the regular price.

This is on top of another discount they’re currently running which expires TODAY and means you can get Roboform for $23.95 and also second and even third licences at an extra $7.95 each. You can also get a Roboform2Go licence for $15.95 instead of $39.95 which will work with a USB drive so you can carry it around with you. VERY useful.

It’s something I’ve been meaning to buy myself for ages, but never got around to. I’ve instead been relying on my browser to remember my passwords where security isn’t an issue, and keeping the rest in my head or in an encrypted text document for reference when I need it.

Yeah daft in a way I know, but you get into these habits and they tend to stick.

So when I spotted this discount, I jumped in and grabbed myself a copy of Roboform, a couple of additional licences for staff, and also a copy of the USB memory stick version.

Now at last with Roboform I won’t have to worry again about passwords, registering on web sites, etc as all the fields will be retained and filled in for me.

I hope this has all been useful for you.

You can get Roboform from here:-

http://www.roboform.com/

-Frank Haywood

Mar

2010

Writing Experiment

I’m doing a bit of an experiment in blogging. (And I also wanted somewhere I could just write for pleasure, about me and mine.)

One of the things that marketers always want more of, is traffic. The idea is, the more traffic you have, the more sales you’ll do. Hmm, yeah, okay, not always true, but a good general principle to adopt. (What you actually need is well targetted traffic, but even so, any traffic is good.)

I’ve always said you can get traffic just by writing, and that you also don’t need to go out and get loads of backlinks either. The concept is, if you write about anything and everything, you’ll start to get search engine traffic because some of what you write will end up on the first couple of pages of Google. (The power of WordPress and the pings it sends to the highly spidered global update servers.)

So I took out a new domain a couple of weeks ago using “Frank Haywood” with a .me extension. (Work it out, okay?)

I don’t want to link to it just yet as I want to see how much search traffic it will get just by me doing nothing but writing about stuff that occurs to me, and that I want to write about there and then. (It’s good practice for writing other stuff.)

This is proof of concept that just using a self-hosted WordPress blog and then writing every couple of days or so will start to pull search traffic. No backlinks, article marketing or ANY kind of marketing, just writing about stuff that happens to me or pops into my mind, with no thought for good taste or any of the marketing stuff.

As a result, I’ll begin to see the kind of things that people are searching for, and I’ll learn this almost randomly – it’s based purely on what I decide to write on for pleasure.

There’s absolutely no monetisation on the site whatsoever yet, and there are only links out to stuff that I find interesting, and NOT marketing related.

Okay?

So three weeks ago I took out the domain, and a week ago I got my first two visitors via Google search for a write up of a cheap camera I bought from Tesco on an impulse buy because of the price. (It’s a good camera too – I’m pleased with it.) The camera itself is small enough to fit in my coat pocket, so it’s great for taking with me wherever I go, and I can pretty much forget about it until I need it. It took me about an hour to do the write up.

Since then I’ve had another 7 visitors to the site, all from Google search, and all for that camera.

Now while I didn’t write about the camera to make money from the review of it, I did write about it for pleasure and lo and behold, I started to get traffic. I could monetise it by sending people off to the Tesco site using my aff link, but I’m not going to bother as that’s not what that site’s about.

For now. 😉

But you tell me. How hard is it to get traffic?

Isn’t this proof enough that if you pick a product that looks like it could be popular, and do a little research and a write up about it, that you will inevitably get visitors?

Now here’s the thing. People agonise over how to get traffic and then more traffic. It’s the one thing I get asked about more often than anything else.

I’ve proven to myself again that it isn’t that hard to get traffic, and yet people still seem to have a difficult time getting the right traffic to their sites to match their topic. That’s what I get told.

But maybe, and this is a message to everybody who’s interested in earning a living online, you should be looking at it the other way round. Maybe you should instead be looking at what people are searching for, making sure there isn’t too much competition, and then supply them useful content based on their interest, and then use your affiliate links to monetise it.

See the subtle difference?

Many people choose a topic that’s either too broad or too competitive.

The learning point here is if you want to make money from blogging, then choose a more tightly focussed topic and make sure there’s some interest, but also not much in the way of competition.

You’ll then find if you write about the subject and because you’re filling an empty content gap, Google etc will be interested and take notice of your site.

Okay?

I’ll continue to write for pleasure (and to blow off steam every now and then) on that site, and maybe sooner or later I’ll come across some niche or another that gets a lot of interest, purely by accident. Who knows what it might be, and when that might happen?

I won’t lose any sleep over it because that’s not what that site is for, but it’s certainly an interesting experiment to do, don’t you think?

-Frank Haywood

Feb

2010

I’m Not Overseas – You Are

Or… How To Alienate 30% Of Your Subscribers

I just received an email from a well known marketer (I’m on a LOT of mailing lists) that referred to me as an “overseas person”.

It struck me as disconnected and dumb. We all do daft things every now and then, often when we don’t have our brains engaged, but this was just dumb, dumb, dumb. One of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen any marketer do, and an extreme case of being parochial without realising it.

Because of course…

He’s overseas, not me. I’m at the centre of civilisation here in the UK, while he lives in what used to be one of our colonies in a country that didn’t even exist as such a couple of hundred years ago. So of course he’s the the one that’s overseas, not me. Ahem. 🙄

Hmm… Do you see how a simple but ill thought out comment can be misconstrued and instant defensive barriers put up? I’ve now unsubscribed from his mailing list.

Here’s a simple tip as to how not to alienate or upset people. Unless your mailing list is specifically about one of the following topics and people are actively interested in receiving information about them, you should never mention any of these. I’ve unsubscribed from more than one mailing list because of it.

#1 – Sex.

#2 – Politics.

#3 – Religion.

I guarantee if you start talking about any of these taboo subjects, you will upset people.

For instance, you might criticise your government for their style, and instantly you’ve alienated about half your readers. Or you may say that Jedi is the only true religion, and you thereby manage to upset a HUGE chunk of people.

Nobody wants to hear what you have to say on these subjects unless they’ve joined your mailing list just so they can find out.

And almost equally, I didn’t join that marketers mailing list just to hear myself pigeonholed as “overseas”.

-Frank Haywood