ticketdesk pro

TicketDesk Pro Price Increase to $67

Just a short note to say that (just like I said it would be) TicketDesk Pro is now $67 instead of $47. I’ve also put the commission rate up to 75%, so if you don’t have an affiliate link set up on your installation, you’d better go set one up now.

The next price increase will be in the new year and will likely be to it’s true value of $97. We’ll then hold it at that price and hopefully release v2 some time in the spring with a small upgrade fee to existing customers, likely $17 for a short while (48 hours) and then $27 afterwards.

If you were one of the people wise enough to buy TicketDesk Pro in the nickel sale earlier this year, you know what a bargain you had. 🙂

It’s worth me pointing out that in line with all my products, this is not a “per-domain” licence. When you buy TicketDesk Pro you can install it on as many domains as you personally own.

This makes it ideal to be used as a niche help desk and is very useful when you’re working in several different niches.

When we release v2, we’ve got lots of great new features to add into it, including as many features as we’ve been asked for as we’ve actually come up with ourself. My personal favourite is the ability to charge for support cases, and its partner feature of being able to run a central support desk for other businesses transparently.

What I mean by that last one is you’ll be able to run a business providing support for other businesses, and the fact that you’re doing so won’t be obvious to the end customer raising a support ticket.

I really like that idea as there’s a strong business case and growing industry in exactly that market. As more and more people start up internet businesses and see them begin to grow, they eventually reach the stage where they want to farm out the mundane support requests like “where’s my download link?” etc.

I can’t absolutely promise we’ll do that for the first release of v2 as the list of new feature requests is getting bigger, but closer to the date I’ll keep you informed here and via the TicketDesk Pro customer mailing list.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business

TicketDesk Pro v1.2

In case you missed it the other week, or you’ve dropped off the mailing list, there’s a new version of TicketDesk Pro been released, v1.2. This addresses a bug mainly for moderators where they only have certain departments allocated to them.

We think most people using TicketDesk Pro won’t have fallen foul of it as only two people spotted it, pretty much at the same time, but it’s a good idea to grab the update. I’m not sure if I’ve also mentioned there’s a German language file included too. This was kindly donated by Sebastian Schertel of http://www.perfect-marketing.de/.

Also, I’ve decided to scrap the use of JV Manager to handle the sales process of my products and I’ll be using SmartDD for everything instead.

It makes sense for a number of reasons. SmartDD now supports ClickBank as well as PayPal and is a lot simpler to use. The functionality of SmartDD is also very similar to JVM, but more logical.

And of course SmartDD is in active development. Did I mention we’re working on membership functionality within SmartDD? Paul tells me it’s 2/3rds done, so that’s something to look forward to. It will be a minor v3.x release, so you’ll get that upgrade for free if you’ve already purchased v3.

The main reason I’ve dropped JV Manager is because I monitor the flow through my sites. When I flipped the TicketDesk Pro site over to JVM, I saw a huge increase in abandonment on the pages where the customer / prospect is asked to enter their email address. And also on the following page where the customer / prospect is asked to enter their name, address etc. details.

I spent a good few hours searching for the code that forces that, tried a few things to remove it, tried some other stuff like changing the fields to say “optional”, but it made no difference. Eventually I decided enough was enough – I’d spent far too much time fiddling with it – and since I’d first installed it, we’d released SmartDD v3 which now handles ClickBank sales and has a simple affiliate scheme for PayPal.

So that was that.

In case you were wondering, the correct process is to only ask for a name and email address if you’re giving something away. If you’re selling, make the sale FIRST, then gather their details afterwards, and give your customers a choice of whether or not they join the mailing list.

Now I’m using a single installation of SmartDD on one site and letting that handle the sales process of all my other products. Eventually I’ll also flip the SmartDD site over to it as well (currently running on the Butterfly Marketing script), but not until memberships are working. It will take a while as there are something like 15,000 members now. Even with a bit of custom migration code, it will still take a while to get right, but will all be worth it in the long run.

Hmm, I can feel a bit of discussion about the abilities of SmartDD v3 coming on, so let’s save that for another post.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business

Affiliate Scheme For TicketDesk Pro

I’ll be sending out an email about this shortly to all the owners of TicketDesk Pro (TDP), but I thought it might be a good idea to note it here first.

The affiliate scheme for TDP is now up and running and the first few people to spot it have already signed up.  We’re paying 50% commission on a $47 price tag at the moment, but we’ll be putting the price up within a couple of weeks to $67, and then after another couple of weeks or so to $97.

That means your commission payments will rise from $23.50 to $33.50, and finally $47.50 per sale.

And you know what?  Because TDP is such a great application, you can be proud to promote it.

I mention that because just the other day someone told me they were promoting something that they didn’t think was as good as a competitor product, but the product they were promoting paid out more commission so it made more sense to them.

Personally I don’t do that, but I know it happens all the time, and it’s one of the thing many new product owners miss the point of completely.  If you’re too cheap, you’ll get fewer affiliates promoting for you.  That’s one of the reasons you get super launches with everyone and his dog promoting trying to get their fat affiliate commission.

I digress. 🙂

Sign up for TDP, do a promotion to your own list, and watch them thank you for letting them know that the price is going up.

BTW, any ads I show on this site for my own products do NOT use my personal affiliate links, including the AdSpurt ads you see that are under test.

So if you’ve sent a prospect and got them cookied, and they later visit this site, your cookies will remain intact and so will your commissions when they buy.  My success is tied closely to yours, and I always want you to get full credit for everything you do.

And on that note, as I add my other scripts to the same affiliate system, the affiliate ID you get when you register for the TDP scheme will also work for the other products too, you just change the site URL.  So if your ID is 95467, you’d just use that same ID when linking to my other products.

That’s all coming soon.

(The exception to this is SmartDD, which is stuck on the old affiliate scheme for quite a while yet.)

There aren’t any promo tools available for TDP at the moment, just your affiliate link, but I’ll get some put together and put them on the affiliates page when they’re ready.

And here’s a special offer as I always like to have an offer of some kind.

If you make a sale of TDP using your affiliate link by the 15th October when I raise the price to $67, I’ll give you a copy of AdSpurt for free when I release it.

AdSpurt is a keyword driven advertising system for ClickBank, PayDotCom (and any other affiliate scheme) that will allow you to monetise any web site you have with content on it.  You can see some of the hover ads it generates here on this blog, but it will also auto generate plain old single underlined key word links too.

It also has some distinct advantages over other methods of advertising, but I’ll let the cat out of the bag on that another time.

TOMORROW I’ll also let you in on another method you can get a copy of AdSpurt for free too.  Watch out for that, as I think you’ll like what I’m going to tell you. 😉

Finally, here’s the link to sign up as an affiliate for TDP:-

http://www.ticketdeskpro.com/affiliates.php

Go sign up now while it’s fresh in your mind, and then see if you can win yourself a free copy of AdSpurt.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business

Another Email Consumption Update

Okay, I think I now have a solution for me which keeps me informed by the people who need to inform me, while cutting out all the noise from emails.

The goal is to give me more time to work on my internet business by cutting everyones biggest time consumer – email – down to next to nothing.

I have a Skype account that very few people have access to.  My closest friends online, who are just as busy as me and don’t do idle chatter, my developers, and my students.  I might hold one conversation a week average through that medium.

I have my support desk via TicketDesk Pro which has given me back 90 minutes a day of my life by cutting support time down from 2 hours to 30 minutes.  Most of the regular questions have the answers inside the Standard Responses (SRs).

I now have a private forum by which I can communicate with my developers, and where everything is recorded for all projects.  No more hunting through emails.

So that I don’t have to keep checking it every 30 minutes or so, I’ve created a unique email address where all notifications of new posts or responses from the private boards are sent to.

I’ve set up PopTray with just that one email account.  I’ve set it so that a double click on the PopTray system tray icon opens the private forum in my browser, and a middle click opens up the PopTray mail window where I can delete the new notification message.

And that 3-way punch seems to be working really well.

#1 – A Skype account that very few people have access to.
#2 – TicketDesk Pro to handle customer issues.
#3 – A private forum with email notifications picked up by PopTray.

I’m not sure if this exact set up would work for you, but it means that for me I can now largely ignore my email as the people that really need to get hold of me can.  I’ll leave this in place for another couple of weeks and then I may at last be down to checking my email once a week.

Maybe a variation of this would work for you and you can get a whole chunk of your life back.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business

Email Consumption Update

A few weeks ago, I said I’d cut down on my email, and that I was going on a low information diet. In reality I was already on the low information diet, and I was just reducing my intake even more to improve my internet business.

I know this is going to sound a little shocking to some, but for several years now I haven’t read a newspaper or watched the news. My reason for that is I just find it too damn depressing, and it distracts me from living my life. So I cut it out.

If the news is really important, then I’ve always figured that someone would tell me, or as happens more often nowadays, they ask my opinion.

When I had a job, that stance served me well as the office would be chattering about whatever the newsworthy item was about, and I’d ask a couple of questions, get some stares and a few dropped jaws because I didn’t know anything about it, and that would be it. I was updated.

Watching people walk away shaking their heads made me smile.

And before you say “yes but you could never hold an informed opinion about anything”, I say so what? The news as it is reported is made up. It’s someone else’s opinion of a second or third hand recollection of something that might or might not have happened the way they think it did.

History is the same. The ultimate winners always become the good guys and get to write history the way they want to.

Anyway, I always accept “news” with more than a pinch of salt because we’ll never know what really happened, just what was reported. Why hold an opinion when you don’t know all the facts, and why bother in the first place? Most (99.99% +) “news” doesn’t affect the day to day running of my life.

It’s just an idle entertainment.

So back to email…

As you might know if you’ve been reading my blog for a while now, I’ve cut down on email checking, and at one point got it down to three times a week, and even twice for a couple of weeks. The call was strong, but I resisted.

But because I’ve been doing a lot of communication with one of my developers (David) over a project or two we’re in various stages with, I found myself checking my email more and more, and soon I found myself checking one email account two or three times a day again. Grrr.

I don’t have to check my email for any support issues as I now use TicketDesk Pro for everything.

As an aside, I now find I can answer all my support questions once a day and it takes me 30 minutes. That’s because I have my own copy of TicketDesk Pro help desk fully loaded with Standard Responses, including pre-defined URLs. The answers to most questions are just a quick select and “add” away. (That’s a killer benefit of TicketDesk Pro.)

So the email problem has reared its head again, albeit on a smaller scale, and I stopped to have a think about it. I need that communication with business partners and staff, but I don’t want to be distracted by other things while I’m checking my email from those people I *want* to hear from.

Thirty seconds later I had my solution. A private forum. Perfect.

We can hold all discussions about various projects and issues in different threads. Everything is held together, no more searching through emails, and more importantly, no distractions. It should actually improve all our productivity. All I have to do is leave it open in my browser.

So at some time in the next couple of days I’ll set that up, probably on an existing SMF forum I have as I really like the way SMF works.

My email consumption should go back down to checking twice a week. Remember my goal is ONE hour per week to handle all email.

Yeah I know that sounds severe, but if you don’t have goals, you don’t have directions.

So what do you think? Could you achieve an hour a week to check email? What do you think of my forum idea? Do you know of a better solution?

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business