Frank Haywood – Page 46 – Product Creation, Traffic, List Building, Automation = Internet Business

Nov

2009

Work With Me For 2 Months

Would you like to work with me for 2 months? With direct access to me when you need it, via Skype? Then read on.

When I first started down this business path a few years ago, I realised fairly quickly that I couldn’t do it all on my own. There was too much to learn and I floundered.

I quickly realised I needed help and so I went to a couple of seminars, signed up to a coaching programme and formed a mastermind group.

That realisation that I was stuck and then having the guts to admit it to myself was one of the cleverer things I’ve done. (I’ve done some pretty stupid stuff, but you live and learn.)

I think that the one thing that I can attribute most of my success to was the coaching programme, but also being able to talk to other people in the mastermind group was good too. The group lasted about 4 months before we all went off to do our own thing, but I made some good friends, and still talk to some of them fairly regularly on Skype.

It’s been good. I wouldn’t be where I am today without that – I’m fairly certain I’d be all washed up by now, dreams shattered.

Instead I have quite a few products out there, several good working relationships and some solid plans for 2010.

It doesn’t all happen at once. It takes time. But looking back I now know that if I’d had someone knowledgable I could have turned to when I needed it, even for a short space of time, it would have made all the difference, and I’d be a lot further down the road than I am now.

In fact, I didn’t really need the coaching, I just needed to able to talk to someone who’d been there before me so I could ask what to do next. Yeah I know that sounds a bit like coaching, but there’s a subtle difference, believe me. The coaching programme I was on was in a set format, very rigid – weekly webinars followed by a mass Q&A session once a month, where we all had to sit in a queue to ask questions. Not great.

What I needed was someone I could turn to regularly, someone who I could ask questions of, as and when I needed to, and not have to wait a month for the next chance.

It would have made all the difference early on.

Now… I’ve always wanted to help other people, and over the past few years I’ve quietly helped a few people here and there where I could. I knew it wasn’t always enough, and really wasn’t that good because I’ve been too busy to do it properly.

So this is what I’ve decided to do for you if you’ve read this far.

I’m putting aside the whole of January and February so you can tap me up on Skype and ask me anything you want about Internet Marketing related stuff like product creation, list building, copywriting, how to approach potential JV partners, autoresponders and so on.

Effectively you’ll be working with me for 2 months, and will have the same kind of access to me that my existing JV partners and friends have.

At this point I reckon you’ll be thinking “How much is this going to cost me?”

Well, I told one of my friends what I wanted to do and he said “How many people you going to do this for bud?” I replied “10, but from experience I could probably take up to 15.”

“Two grand a head.”

“Nope,” I said “that’s more than I want to charge.”

“Well I’d charge at least a thousand, but that’s the least I’d do what you’re talking about, it’s crazy to do it for any less, it will take up virtually all your time. Think about people calling you all hours of the day.”

Hmm…

Well I don’t want to charge that much, but I can see his point. So I’ve had a think and I reckon I’ve come up with a good compromise that will keep the price low enough to be affordable to you.

I’m still mulling it over in my head, and please just bear in mind that I can only do this for a few people. I know that if you’re one of the lucky ones, you’ll see it as one of the best decisions you ever made, and from my perspective I’d love you to come join me.

I’ll tell you more about it tomorrow.

-Frank Haywood

Nov

2009

Short Formula For Copywriting

Okay this is more of a check list than an exact guide, but you should make sure it’s done in this order.

#1 – Give an example that graphically demonstrates the idea behind the product that you’re trying to sell.

#2 – Tell your reader what you want them to do. Not just “buy it”, but something like “use this to…”

#3 – Give them the reason to do it. Tell them it will improve this, that or the other.

Now that is as simple as I can possibly break copywriting down into, but that is absolutely the essence of it. Let’s just take a look at the 3 steps.

The first one engages their emotions and imagination. This is vital. People buy (or do) things because they want to, not because they need to. The only things that people need to do are drink, eat, sleep etc. Everything else is driven by longings from the emotional soul of their body – their wants. So activate their interest with a good example – stories are important.

While they’re still in this imaginative state of mind – some refer to it as a hypnotic daydream – steer them in the direction of what you want them to do. You will often have to be careful about it and plant the idea in their mind by suggesting it to them rather than telling them outright. Sometimes you can tell them exactly what to do, but it depends on the circumstances.

Finally, give them the reason to take the course of action you’ve suggested to them. If you get it right, you’ve completed the rationalisation process for them which is the third and final stage.

The whole concept behind this three stage process is we do things because we want to do them – we are all creatures driven by our emotions but don’t often admit it even to ourselves. After we’ve decided to do something, then we look for ways to rationalise the decision to ourselves. Not the other way round.

The three stages get the reader into a receptive frame of mind, suggest a course of action (which engages the “want”), and then finally offers the rationalisation we all need before we do anything.

Mind blowing isn’t it?

Example. Instruction. Reason.

As long as you get these three stages into your copy, in that order, everything else is cake.

If you appreciate this post, then I would appreciate a link back to it from one of your blogs or other web sites. You doing that for me keeps me motivated to write more stuff like this. Thank you.

-Frank Haywood

Nov

2009

Product Creation Golden Tip

Here’s a little tip that I’ve found works wonders for me, and I was talking about it to a friend the other night. In fact it works so well I could probably pad it out and sell it as a product in its own right and people would be glad to pay for it.

It’s really mind bogglingly simple, and is extremely effective. It came about almost by accident, and this is GOLDEN. You’ll have one of those “Aha!” moments when it sinks in. It’s one of those things that most people leave until last, when it should be done before most everything else.

Are you ready?

Once you know what your product is going to be, and it’s all taking shape in your mind… here it is…

Write the sales copy FIRST.

“WTH?” I can hear you say. “But the product isn’t ready, why would I write the sales copy if I don’t even have a product?”

Three golden reasons, and when you’ve done this once you’ll realise how strong they are.

#1 – It clarifies exactly what the product is going to be. You’ll find yourself coming up with additional ideas and bulleting them in.

#2 – It absolutely COMMITS you to a course of action because you’ve done what would for many people be the last thing first, and no-one likes to think they’ve wasted their time. You’ve made an investment. It motivates you (trust me on this) because you want to join all the dots and get to the end point you’ve already put in place.

#3 – Probably the hardest job to have to do is writing the sales copy – it can be a real struggle and is one of the reasons so many people outsource it. When you’ve done everything else and you’re as good as ready to launch your product, then if you’re anything like me, by that time you’re running out of steam. There is NOTHING so hard to face in the product creation process that is so difficult as having to write up the sales copy when you have no enthusiasm for it.

Think about that last sentence. At the beginning of a project, your enthusiasm is on a high, you feel very motivated, and it’s easier to write your sales copy because your mind is buzzing with ideas.

Four years ago when I started on all this, my first product was SmartDD. It had been completed, the sales script was in place, and everything was done apart from the sales copy itself. It took me nearly two months to write before I even had the guts to launch it.

I found myself going round in circles, removing bits, adding new stuff, removing it again, and generally putting it off. I procrastinated a lot. I finally decided it was ready when somebody told me I was being a jerk and just to “Get the damn thing out there!” but I wasn’t happy with the copy until months afterwards, and I still tweak it here and there even now.

Nowadays I move a lot faster simply because I do the sales copy FIRST. And I don’t agonise over it either. I make it good enough and tweak it later.

Everything else is a lot easier to do once the sales copy is done.

Try it, you’ll be amazed.

-Frank Haywood

Nov

2009

Windows Notepad Replacement

This is part of a new category here on this site dedicated to Cool Software. Some of them are installable desktop tools, some are web applications, and some are services. These are tools I use myself day to day, many of them are free.

These tools are the result of many hours of careful search, stumbling around, word of mouth and dumb luck. I thought it might be a good idea to share these tools as this will almost certainly help you.

First up are a couple of free text editors.

One of the problems I regularly see is when people use the built in Notepad editor in Windows – it doesn’t work the way you would expect it to. Crazy I know, but Notepad will embed hidden characters and sometimes apply some strange formatting and justification if you’re not careful. I see this happening when comments are left on my blog posts, and also on forum posts.

I know what’s going on because I’ve done this myself and learned the hard way.

This is what happens. You decide to leave a comment or a forum post, write a few sentences or a couple of paragraphs and the phone goes, or someone comes to the door or whatever – you get distracted.

Thirty minutes later, you go back to your writing, gather your thoughts and finish what you were doing. You press the submit button, and you find you’ve been timed out or you’ve lost your network connection, and you get an error message.

You press the back button, but it’s no good, you’ve lost everything you’ve typed in.

Aaagghhh!

Now you’ve learned a valuable lesson, and you decide that from now on you’ll type it all locally into a text editor and save it regularly instead of typing it into an online form. When you’ve finished and it all looks good, you copy and paste it into the text box on the blog or forum. It’s a good habit to have.

The problem is, if you’ve used Windows Notepad, it will sometimes format the text for you, inserting line breaks at the end of each line. It looks okay, but when you copy and paste it into the web form, all the formatting breaks.

So that’s one good reason not to use Windows Notepad, and here’s another – it’s just not very good. Here are two MUCH better ones.

Notepad 2

This first Notepad replacement is ideal for carrying around with you on a USB stick as it doesn’t require installation, doesn’t create any registry entries, and all you need do is double click the executable. (Why oh why – sorry – did Microsoft ever introduce the registry? It’s caused us all no ends of problems with having to re-install applications every time we move PCs or have to re-install Windows. In the good old days, all you had to do was copy the files back to the PC and run them. It was easy. I’m always delighted when I find an app that doesn’t require installation.)

You can get Notepad 2 from here:-

http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html

Notepad++

This is a little more feature rich than Notepad2, and adds a menu item to the Windows shell, so when you right click on a text file or HTML or whatever, one of the options you see is “Open in Notepad++” – VERY useful.

You can see the full feature set and download it from here:-

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

Enjoy.

-Frank Haywood

Update: Tom Brownsword left a comment saying that there’s a portable version of NotePad++ that you can use on a USB stick, along with a load of other apps on the same site that will all fit on a 512MB USB stick. Cool!

Nov

2009

Putting A Product Together And Releasing It – A Case Study

This case study is all about WordPress Affiliate Pages.

What do you think was the first thing I did?…

Okay, I won’t tease, let’s go through the steps.

#1 – I have mailing lists and blog readers. So the first thing I did was to let them (you) know I had something new for WordPress, and what it was. Doing this gets an interest sparked.

#2 – I wrote a few notes of things I needed to do. I have a crib sheet in my head and it was just a matter of ticking it all off mentally. (I really should write it down.) I made notes of the key words I wanted to target.

affiliate page(s)
sales page(s)
wordpress theme
wordpress plugin
wordpress

#3 – I used the Google keyword search tool to find likely names for the product and web site. I wanted a name that was at least already getting a little bit of search for it. Then I looked for free domain names until I found one for a name that was getting search, and was free.

I found that WordPress Affiliate Pages was free, but I compromised and registered WPAffiliatePages.com instead. I didn’t want to use the name WordPress and then later find I had to close it down. Call me a chicken if you like, but I think this is a sensible thing to do.

#4 – I spent two hours writing the sales page copy. I prefer to do this in a plain text editor so I don’t have to think about formatting etc and can just concentrate on the words. I’m writing this blog post in a plain text editor right now. A few hours later I read it back to myself and changed about a third of it and added some new content. I find waiting a bit before doing this works best for me.

#5 – I looked through my PLR graphics and templates that I’ve amassed and found a sales page template I liked the look of. I edited the header in Photoshop and uploaded it to the site with my sales copy to take a look at it in place.

#6 – I deleted the page and installed WordPress. I turned off “pinging” as I didn’t want the world to know about the site just yet. Then I re-created the sales page within WordPress using the WP Affiliate Pages method.

#7 – I set up the customer mailing list and added a couple of autoresponder messages to the queue and tested it out. I made a mistake and used the wrong domain for the email address, as someone later pointed out to me. I’d used “WordPress” in the domain name instead of “WP”, D’oh!

#8 – I edited the sales copy in Dreamweaver and applied formatting and styling, plus a few images. I added new box outs and moved the bullet points nearer to the top of the page. I applied a style to the bullet points which applied some pretty ticks and crosses. (The funny thing is, I got these from a competing product I’d purchased but wasn’t impressed with.)

#9 – I spent an hour re-writing the headline. This is the most important part of the sales copy. I’m not happy with it and I’ll do some split testing to make it better. I wrote the PSs for the end fairly quickly and I knew I’d have to engage my brain to come up with something better. Later.

The PSs are the second most important part of your sales copy as people will often read the headline, then jump to the bottom to read the summary in the PSs.

This is your only chance to get people intersted enough in your offer to get them to read at least the beginning of your sales copy. Your opening paragraphs should be designed to draw the reader in so that they read the next bit. And the next bit. And the next bit. Eventually they’ll skip down, so it’s usually a good idea to get some bullet points in fairly early as people look for those.

#10 – I went through the copy and made sure to change the words to reflect the keywords I wanted the page to rank well for. So if I’d used “sales pages”, then I changed *some* of them to “WordPress sales pages”. It’s important not to overdo things and make your copy appear as natural as possible.

#11 – Satisfied that the hard work had been done, I relaxed and started to think about the product.

Now I know that might come as a surprise to some reading this, but the product is usually the easiest thing to do. I find that writing the sales copy often defines the product in my head so that I have a better understanding of what it is I want.

But the biggest reason for writing the sales copy first is that in my experience there’s nothing worse than creating a product and then facing the daunting task of writing the sales copy afterwards. So I always write the sales copy first.

Then when the product is done, you’re nearly ready to go.

#12 – I installed SmartDD and the Nickel Script and added a couple of dummy files so that I could create them in both scripts. I configured everything to test it all worked. I created the download pages for both scripts and did a couple of test purchases. Everything worked. Good.

At that point, to my delight I found that the affiliate part of SmartDD works just fine with this method, and I added the sales helper code and order button form code to the SmartDD version of the sales copy. Things were really cooking.

#13 – I added a list of videos I wanted to make to my notes.

#14 – I wrote the PDF that accompanies the videos. It wasn’t complete, but it was good enough to start the nickel sale. I’ll work on it and make it bigger and better with screen shots later.

#15 – I made the videos. It took about two hours to record and edit them, and a further hour to produce and upload them into a directory.

#16 – I created the videos page using the sales page template and password protected them. Pretty much done.

#17 – I decided to put the nickel sale back by 26 hours to give myself a breather and because the bonus WordPress themes weren’t complete. I sent an email out to let everyone know. This helps build the anticipation.

Just a matter of waiting now.

#18 – I checked everything out and spotted a couple of glitches. Of course I didn’t catch everything…

#19 – I spent an hour just before making the nickel sale live writing and re-writing the PSs. I’ll apply some split testing when the real site goes live. I sent an email out to everyone to let them know we were nearly there. I wrote a blog post on this site and got ready to publish it.

#20 – The broadcast email I’d set up went out and I made the blog post live at the same time.

All done. The nickel sale was live.

Another couple of problems came up with the videos.

Firstly, when I produced them suitable for the web sites (.swf files), somehow they were set to not play until 50% had downloaded. I realised today how that happened as normally the time is set to 10% and they start playing almost immediately. It was because I’d re-installed Camtasia on a new machine and it was using the default setttings. Annoying but easy to fix as you can just open the .xml file in a text editor and change that value from 50 to 10.

Secondly, the third and MOST IMPORTANT video – how WPAP works – became corrupted when I uploaded it. I’d checked all the videos through and it was fine when I tested it, so I’m still not sure what happened there. It took 15 minutes to upload a fresh copy and all was well. I sent an email out to everyone who’d signed up to the WPAP customer list apologising and to let them know to try again.

#21 – A day after the sale started. The WordPress themes were done and I uploaded them to the download pages. I worked on the PDF adding in detail about the “must have” plugins I use, plus some optional others I use on some of my blogs.

I sent out an email letting customers know the WordPress themes had been uploaded and asked for some testimonials which started to appear on the blog. Thank you!

#22 – I updated the sales page with the first of the testimonials.

#23 – I created and tested the affiliate process. Set up affiliate autoresponder. Created affiliate sign up page. Added a link to affiliate page at bottom of sales page.

#24 – I created a simple affiliate page and then announced the affiliate program.

#25 – I created an animated 125×125 GIF for affiliates to use.

#26 – To do – search through my PLR library and find some decent looking sales page templates and edit them for general use.

#27 – To do – add more videos. Lots of ideas on this to make WP Affiliate Pages a bigger product. This will make all the nickel sale purchasers VERY happy as they’ve purchased at a low price to begin with.

#28 – To do – Create a short video showing the pages in action on a WP blog and upload it to YouTube. Then embed the YouTube version into the sales page.

#29 – To do – Take some screenshots to add to the sales page.

#30 – To do – Update the promo tools page. Some more static and animated banner graphics to be created. The promo tools page will enable affiliates to enter their PayPal email address and then create copy and paste code for their emails and web sites with their affiliate link embedded. Maybe do a video showing people how to embed banner code into their blogs using text widgets.

#31 – To do – The real biggy. Promote. Find JV partners and encourage affiliates. It should grow legs and run on its own as the affiliate scheme pays 100% commissions, ie it has a strong viral component. The benefit to me is I build a new list interested in WordPress and blogging. I intend to release further WordPress based products and one is already out in the form of AutoBlog Plugin and AutoBlogging 101 which I’ve been able to promote to this new list directly, and I’ve even run another nickel sale for Autoblog Plugin (still a lot of work to do).

And there you have it. Not everything is perfect. So what? Sales are coming in and the word is spreading.

It’s a new product in my collection and is another source of traffic to my marketing funnel.

A key principle for me in all this is I used the 80-20 rule and did things to the point of them being “good enough”. I used to agonise over getting everything “just right”, but I’ve learned that it’s far more important to get it done and out there than make everything perfect from day 1.

Q. Do you apply the 80-20 rules to your business or do you prefer to get everything just right? What do you think?

-Frank Haywood