script

Dec

2011

Affiliate Click Pal – It’s a Monster

Offer Closed

***

Today Friday 30th December at 6.00pm I’m running a final pre-release sale for Affiliate Click Pal (ACP).

Yes I know some people reading this thought they’d never see the day, but ACP is finally done. (Those people who purchased in the pre-order sale several months ago will now be able to go back to their download page later today and grab the first release version of the completed script.)

It’s a monster.

What started off as a fairly small but entirely useful *little* script that allowed you to unify all your sites through a single ClickBank account is now a HUGE MONSTER of a script that incorporates all sorts of related things.

So…

It now has secure digital delivery – that wasn’t in the original plan.

It now creates secure order buttons for you – that wasn’t in the plan.

It has a built in autoresponder and broadcast mailer for both customers AND affiliates – that wasn’t in the plan.

It has built in integration with ImnicaMail, Aweber and Mailchimp – that wasn’t in the plan.

It now unifies multiple ClickBank accounts – that wasn’t in the plan.

It gives you full control over affiliates and their percentage commission via the use of multiple ClickBank accounts – that wasn’t in the plan.

It now uses secure download templates like SmartDD – that wasn’t in the plan.

Or you can optionally redirect buyers to a URL – that wasn’t in the plan.

It has a multi-level of granularity of control over both saleable items and affiliates – that wasn’t in the plan.

And there’s other stuff too.

I now look at this whole project and and I’ll openly say that my handling of it was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done. What I *should* have done is released the very small script that I originally promised and then built on it from there.

But what happened was I got the first small release version back and spotted a couple of minor issues with it, and then asked if we could just have this “one little thing” added to it…

And then this became a cycle for the next few weeks and eventually months.

The dang thing just got way bigger than I expected it to and I let it all get out of control.

I’m really sorry if you’re one of the people that bought this on pre-order expecting to get it a couple of weeks afterwards – I’ve apologised individually to people who’ve asked about it.

The good news is I’m *much* happier releasing this as it stands now than the original script I envisaged. In fact the original script was planned to be very much like Easy Click Mate only better and at half the price.

Now it’s a much more well-endowed script that does some pretty cool stuff.

For example, just taking one of the key points from above. Originally it was intended for you to be able to unify sales of multiple products across multiple sites through a single ClickBank account. That alone would save you a small fortune in opening vendor accounts with ClickBank as you can now use the full 500 products available to an account but spread across lots of different sites. Woohoo!

But then I realised that this meant that everything you sold would be at the same commission rate as it can only be done at the vendor account level. What if you had some products you wanted to apply a 50% commission to, and others a 60% or 75% commission? With ClickBank you can’t normally do that, so if you wanted to pay JV partners or super affiliates a higher rate of commission as a reward for promoting for you, it was impossible to do.

Until now.

Now you can open a second vendor account with ClickBank and set a different commission rate. Then in ACP you specify that the item you’re selling should be linked to that vendor account instead and it all gets handled automatically. You can also flip individual affiliates (or groups) between different commission rates any time you want to without them having to change their affiliate links. 😉

Today at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST), I’m running a final end-of-year sale and making ACP available for just $17.

There’s no doubt in my mind that this is a $97 product given the development time and effort that’s gone into it. If you don’t get it today, then in the new year it will go on sale for a month at $27 during the launch period, then $47 and finally $97.

Now’s your chance to get it at a massive discount at only $17.

-Frank Haywood

P.S. In case you’re wondering, it’s NOT a WordPress plugin it’s a standalone script and so will need a touch more work to install as you have to create a database for it first. It’s not hard to do (5 minutes or less) and well worth the little bit of one-off effort needed to centralise all your sales.

Jul

2011

An Apology And Some Exciting Updates

I have some really exciting news to share.

(Well… I’m excited about it, you may not be.)

First a very public apology.

In the last few weeks and months:-

I’ve lost some full time staff that are now part time.
I’ve had to fire someone (which I felt dreadful about) because he was working “full time” for me and also “full time” for one of my friends. Yeah, we both fired him when we realised… I know this must go on a lot with remote workers, and there are some tell-tale signs.
I’ve had new staff start, do a week or two and leave.
I’ve advanced money to new staff who begged for it and had them disappear.
On top of this it’s just plain difficult and time consuming to find *any* staff, let alone good ones.

It’s been a rough ride. But I guess this is something that happens to a lot of people, and always looking for the positive, I’ve learned a lot about hiring good remote workers.

But this bumpy and frustrating journey I’ve been on has meant that a few things have slipped. I’m now TWO months (well, one month and a week) behind releasing the latest PLAhh material.

I sincerely apologise for that, and I WILL fix this.

I have some new staff. I have both June and July’s packages pretty much complete apart from a little bit of crucial work to sweeten them up. I could release June’s as it is and add the extras later, but I’d rather complete the package and then release.

I’m hoping that all the work will be complete by next Friday 15th and with any luck I’ll have already released the packages before then. Thank you for your patience and to the kind words from people I’ve already explained this to.

***

Now the exciting part.

A bit of background first though.

A couple of weeks ago when I ran a pre-order sale for Affiliate Click Pal (ACP – will be released this Monday coming), I had a couple of blog comments and a few emails that all said pretty the same thing…

“Will it be able to do PayPal too?”

Now that would be just great wouldn’t it? It’s certainly something I’d like to see in ACP, so yes I’ll get that done in a later version. It will probably take a couple of months to get there is my guess. We’ll see.

What I *have* done is made sure it has some integration in it for sites that use PayPal scripts and the ?e=PayPalEmailAddress method for affiliates.

This then got me thinking.

Something I’ve wanted to do for several *years* now is release a low cost, easy to use, feature rich PayPal script. The PayPal IPN system is awesome – clearly a lot of thought and planning went into its design to make it so very flexible.

So what I’ve done is I’ve hired a new guy just to work on this project. It’s been incredibly difficult finding the right person to do this for a whole raft of “attention-to-detail” reasons. But after 12 months of searching I found the guy and have him on board.

He believes he’ll have the first prototype for me to play with tomorrow. And phase one will be complete by the end of next week.

There’ll then be another load of work to add in all the “feature rich” parts I mentioned above. But this shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks is my estimate.

Once you find the right people, it’s amazing what you can get done in a very short space of time. Ideas have never been a problem for me, but finding good people to implement them is an ongoing struggle that I’m finally getting the hang of. 😉

This brand new script will use the ?e=PayPalEmailAddress method for affiliates I mentioned above, and be totally focussed on PayPal and the flow of traffic both through your site and onto other sites.

It will make it easy to get a sales page type site up quickly and easily and with a built in affiliate scheme. This is something I’ve struggled with myself, so you’ll probably appreciate this as much as I do!

Amongst many things, it’s been designed in such a way as to make it easy to:-

Install and setup.
Promote your other (and other product owners) sites.
Get traffic for free.
Get new affiliates on board (every customer automatically becomes an affiliate).
Build your mailing list.
Administer your sales.
Do secure digital delivery.

I’ve seen a number of missed opportunities in some similar scripts over the last few years.

Every time I’ve seen one or realised something that would work really well, I’ve written it down in my notes.

I now have a *lot* of notes…

This new script will perfectly complement ACP. I eventually see the two of them working hand in hand together, with ACP being the “step up” to the next level when someone is ready.

It’s my intention that both scripts should talk to each other with this new PayPal script passing customer, sales and affiliate information back to your central ACP site where you can administer everything if you choose.

So my vision is a low cost entry into the world of product sales with this new PayPal script, and then upgrade to the more expensive ACP when it all starts to take off.

If you’re feeling a little bit excited now, then you should be.

I’m all but doing backflips. 😉

And that’s because I finally have the right people doing the right jobs.

The world has been waiting for this.

***

Okay, that’s enough excitement for today. (Or is it?)

Just a final note to say that tomorrow I’ll be running a couple of low cost sales for a couple of plugins that you may have missed in the last 12 months if you’re new here.

The first is for a plugin I use all the time, in fact I’ll be using it for the sales tomorrow.

It’s called the “Content Replacement” plugin and enables you to schedule small snippets of content in and out of your blog. I use it to display payment buttons at the appropriate time, and then later remove them when the sale is over.

That way I can be out and about and not have to worry about the sale going ahead. It just works.

Very useful.

The second related plugin is called “Subscribers Only” and which allows you to hide content on your blog from non-subscribers.

If a visitor to your blog isn’t a WP blog subscriber, then instead of seeing all of an article, you can withhold small but crucial parts of it. So they don’t see the bit you’ve hidden, instead they see a little padlock symbol and a message saying the content is for subscribers only with link where they can go subscribe.

Cool huh?

Both sales will start the same time tomorrow at 6.00pm and will continue over the weekend until Monday morning when the Content Replacement plugin will automatically remove the buy buttons. 😉

More info about the sale tomorrow.

-Frank Haywood

Nov

2010

48 Hour AdSpurt Special (Re-Launch)

Update: This offer is now CLOSED.

***

One of the BEST products I’ve ever released is a script called AdSpurt, and today and tomorrow I’m running a $20 special for it plus another bonus script thrown in for good measure.

AdSpurt is designed to allow you to quietly monetise any kind of site via ClickBank and PayDotCom ads.

I would always recommend monetisation by affiliate program over something like Google AdSense, even though AdSense seems to be the choice of many. (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Just because lots of other people do something doesn’t mean it’s right – it usually means they haven’t given it much thought.)

I tested it for 3 months before release and proved to my satisfaction that this type of ad receives 6 times more clicks than other ads.

And while AdSpurt is quite a sophisticated program, it’s also been designed to be very easy to use.

As an example, if you have a niche autoblog on a particular topic, you choose your keywords, choose your ClickBank or PayDotCom ad and save.

Then whenever any of your selected keywords are used, AdSpurt will automatically turn them into either a DHTML hover ad (double underlined links), or a regular link using your affiliate details.

And because there’s a LOT of thought gone into this script to get it just right, we made sure your affiliate links are cloaked and look like direct links to the target site or page. We’ve done this by using javascript to generate the links AFTER the page has been drawn. 😉

i.e. A visitor arrives at your site, the page gets drawn in their browser, and then javascript we’ve written reads all the text on the page and then adds the links in afterwards.

Is that cool or what? 😉

Since we released it, there’s never been a similar program released by anyone else, and I personally think that’s because it would be a gargantuan task by any developer to duplicate it.

It actually took us 18 months to get right.

We packed all sorts of cool features into this script, from faster, BETTER search of the ClickBank database than even ClickBank do (check it out for yourself if you don’t believe me), to Flash driven graphs generated from your click through stats.

AdSpurt normally sells for $47, but as I’m about to do a redesign and relaunch of the web site, I’m doing a subscribers only 48 hour special for just $20.

And to sweeten the deal, I’m also going to include a copy of the Instant Survey Script (ISS) for free (normally $27) for exactly the same reasons as AdSpurt.

Using ISS you can quickly and easily create surveys and find out exactly what it is your visitors are interested in.

This two for (less than the price of) one deal at just $20 for both scripts is running for 48 hours or until I hit 100 sales, and you can grab it at the $20 price on the link below.

***

Update: This offer is now CLOSED.

-Frank Haywood

Nov

2010

Script Manager Plugin – You Should Get This

This is one of those unassuming but useful little plugins that you’ll end up using time and again across all your blogs. In fact I’ve been trying to imagine how I’ve managed without it all this time.

It allows you to easily and simply add third party javascript code (for tracking and external scripts) to your header and footer area on your blog, either across all your pages and posts or only on some of them if you prefer.

You don’t realise how useful this is until you need to do it.

Traditionally you’d need to add the code directly to the theme’s header.php and footer.php (which can be fiddly), but as soon as you change or upgrade themes, your code changes are always lost.

And as I’ve had it pointed out to me, some themes will break if you go adding javascript to the header.php or footer.php, and now I’ve been reminded, I can remember that this has happened to me at least once.

Not any more.

Now you just add the code to either the global plugin settings, or on an individual post or page and the plugin will automatically insert the code into the right bits of your blog. When you upgrade your theme, or switch to a different one, the code remains and everything carries on as normal.

So, like I said, this is an unassuming plugin that I think you’ll find entirely useful.

Or as Hamant Keval (hi Hamant) said:-

“That is one awesome plugin…”

I’m releasing 50 copies today at just $7.

When all 50 copies are gone I’ll set the regular price, but you’ll get it at a very nice discount until then.

Update: The price is now $17 until I set the final price which will likely be $27.

-Frank Haywood

Nov

2010

Extra Added Control

I know that title sounds like it might be for a hair gel, but it’s actually for a new WordPress plugin I’ve had developed called “Scripts Manager”.

Here’s the situation I’ve been in umpteen times, and I’m sure you’ve either hit it yourself or at least you will eventually, it’s just a matter of time.

First the background…

A plugin like Slide Up Ads will automatically insert the javascript required to make it work into all the pages and posts within WordPress.

You just activate the plugin and it’s done.

But I’ve found there are plenty of instances when I’ve wanted or needed to use an external non-WordPress script which requires me to add some javascript to all my pages manually.

For instance, imagine you need to insert some tracking code or another bit of javascript on all (or most of) your WordPress posts and pages.

Usually, either the code has to go into the header above the </head> tag, or it needs to go into the footer, just above the </body> tag.

The only way that WordPress allows you to do this is to go into the theme editor and update the themes header.php or footer.php to include your code.

Now that might seem okay, but in practice what happens is a few weeks down the line, a new version of your theme is released and you update it. Or you find a better theme and decide to use that instead.

This has happened to me, and I figure it must have happened to you too.

When you update or change your theme, all the code modifications you put in get overwritten. D’oh!

More than once I’ve found I have several days tracking missing from one of my sites, all because I forgot to get the tracking code and place it into the updated version of the theme. (I use the StatCounter.com tracking service, and it’s well worth it.)

You’d think I’d learn, but it just seems to be one of my blind spots…

At this point you might be smugly thinking, “Ah, I use the free Google Analytics for my tracking, and I have a plugin that does that for me.” 😉

My advice for what it’s worth is to get rid of GA immediately. This is a prime example of the case where many people follow the crowd and put themselves in a situation where they hadn’t even considered the consequences.

This is what those consequences can be…

If you use GA or AdSense, then a competitor can pay a few dollars and find every single one of your websites. (I’ve actually done this myself to study the structure of how one of my competitors was working his network of sites.)

And of course the other BIG downside to GA and AdSense is that if you upset Google, they can easily de-index ALL your sites because you’ve kindly let them know where they all are by adding tracking code to them.

The crowd is often wrong (1 in 5 times – 80:20 rule), and if you think hard about things and then follow a different path you’re much more likely to have the edge and to succeed.

That’s been my personal experience.

So I decide to get this plugin created to end once and for all the problem of updating and changing themes, and losing my StatCounter code.

And of course, I made it a little more flexible than I actually needed it to be, because… well you never know when it might come in handy.

Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, you’ll see there’s a new admin section where you can paste your metatags and javascript into the appropriate area.

In that section, there are global areas where the contents of each will appear on every post and page.

These global areas are for:-

Header Scripts
Footer Scripts
Onload Scripts

That last one is for those unusual little instances where you need to run the script after the rest of the page has been loaded.

(I found recently that by using this plugin, it solved a problem with a script where all the pages on my blog were being blanked out in the Opera browser, but not in IE, FireFox or Safari. Very strange, but now fixed.)

And then we took it a little bit further, because in some cases you might only want your code to appear on certain pages. 😉

So on every page and post in the admin panel, there’s a new section underneath the editor where you can either:-

Overwrite the global settings.
Append BEFORE the global settings.
Append AFTER the global settings.

Between the global and the post/page settings, this gives you total flexibility over where your scripts are active on your site. 🙂

On Friday (5th) afternoon, 50 copies of the plugin will be available for just $7. When all 50 copies are gone I’ll set the regular price, but you’ll get it at a very nice discount until then.

Watch for a new blog post tomorrow.

-Frank Haywood