The nickel sale for my brand new WordPress plugin “Comment Bait” is now live.
The price is starting at just $1.97, and rises by 5 cents with each sale.
The first 20 people to buy will get it at under $3.00.
You can get it here:-
-Frank Haywood
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
Getting more traffic to your blog seems to be quite easy. About three weeks ago I installed Semiologic Pro (SP) including the Semiologic Theme onto this blog.
At that time when I checked with SEO Quake, I had just 95 pages indexed in Google. Today I checked again and I see I now have 658 pages indexed…
You can check for yourself here.
Or of course if you have SEO Quake for FireFox you can use that too – that’s where I got the 658 and above URL from.
Now, there aren’t 658 pages of content on the site, but for some reason which I now put down to Semiologic Pro, Google has now paid attention to all my “tag” pages, all my “archive” pages, all my “category” pages and so on. Yes I do have the “canonical” variable set for all my pages, but it hasn’t stopped Google from indexing the tag pages etc.
I’ve noticed that SemioLogic Pro has changed the format of the tag pages and this is probably one of the reasons that they’re now being indexed. Example:-
http://www.frankhaywood.com/tag/pareto/
For good measure, Google is also including a good few cloaked affiliate links (!!!) and some WordPress searches. In case you didn’t know, Google started including searches in its index a little while back by using keywords in form boxes and indexing the results.
What this all means is I’ve suddenly seen an increase in visitors from search traffic. It’s early days, but my estimate is somewhere between a third and a half as much more traffic as I was getting before I introduced Semiologic Pro to this site.
A 50% boost in traffic just for installing a new theme and plugins is pretty good don’t you think? It wasn’t hard to do.
More traffic means more subscribers and more sales, it’s inevitable. Knowing this has now given me an incentive to get my finger out and upgrade all my niche blogs.
Now I know that more traffic is something that you want, you’ve told me so. I asked earlier this year what the number one question was and the overriding response was “how do I get more traffic to my sites?”
I guess a related question that is probably driving that is “how do I make more sales?” or “how do I make more commissions?”
Okay, here’s the easy to do solution for your all your niche sites.
#1 – Go get SemioLogic Pro (otherwise known as SemioLogic Reloaded).
#2 – Use the WP Affiliate Pages method to build your sales sites.
For #2, that’s what I’m now doing for all my sales sites, and I’ve set myself another task ahead to convert the ones that aren’t yet running under WordPress.
From what I can see, when you add SemioLogic WordPress becomes an extremely powerful platform that pulls in traffic. If you then combine it with the WP Affiliate Pages method you have a dynamite combination.
When you stop to think about this, people agonise over improving conversions, and do split testing in order to make more money. The concept is if you can improve your visitor to sales conversion ratio from 1% to 2% you’ve just given yourself a 100% pay rise.
Which is great.
The downside is it takes a lot of work.
You can achieve similar results by doubling the amount of traffic of course. And if you can do that with little effort – just by installing a new theme and plugin set – then it’s a far more effective way to spend your time.
(Of course there’s nothing to stop you from going ahead and split testing too if you have the time.)
I believe this is something you should go and do right away. I dithered over buying SemioLogic Pro for nearly 3 years as I was unsure of the benefits. Let’s face it, claims are often made that turn out to be hollow.
What tipped me over the edge was seeing some big name marketers converting their own sites to this platform. Now I’ve seen the results, I’m really glad I did it.
Finally, the nice touch with SLP is like my own products, it’s not a per-domain licence (I hate that), you can install it on as many domains as you personally own.
-Frank Haywood
UPDATE:
Three weeks on from making this post, and there are now 885 pages indexed in Google. I have to say I’m amazed and a little worried that it will all crash and burn, but I have faith in SLP and what it can do. I’ll keep my fingers crossed. 🙂
Good news. I’ve decided to make this available to everyone for free.
Woohoo!
At least for a little while anyway.
The so-called “short” report I’ve been working on to go with the AutoBlog Plugin is now finished.
It all got a bit out of hand. It’s as simple as that.
I started out intending to write 5 or 6 pages and realised while I was writing that it would create more questions than it would answer, so I just kept going. And 40 pages later it’s done.
Actually, that’s not true. There’s a lot more to be written on the subject, this is really just a flavour for it. At some point I’ll create a much fuller product and go into AutoBlogging in more detail.
If you didn’t get the WordPress plugin in the nickel sale, you can still get it at a nice discount for another 2 or 3 days until I set up the proper sales page for it. It’s currently $13.02 as I write this, and I’ll set the final price at either $17.00 or $27.00, I haven’t decided yet.
Anyway…
Here’s where you can download Autoblogging 101.
[LINK REMOVED – You can still get the report by signing up to my blog notifications on the top right of the home page.]
And if you want the plugin before the price goes up, you can get it here.
http://www.autoblogplugin.com/
-Frank Haywood
After all the interest in my last post about autoblogging, and all the questions too, I’ve had a bit of a rethink about it.
I now realise that for most people, just releasing the plugin and docs isn’t going to be enough. It also needs a short report explaining a few things in more detail.
So after wrestling with that one yesterday, I decided to sleep on it and I’ve just made the decision that’s what I’m going to do.
I’ll now release the plugin (plus a short report I’m going to write today) on Saturday (26th September) afternoon. That will also give more people a chance of grabbing it in the nickel sale as I know that some of my subscribers are currently in full time jobs.
I’ll start the nickel sale at 4.00pm GMT, that’s 11.00am EST I believe, if the US is still on daylight saving time.
So I’m sorry about that, but I reckon that’s the best way to approach it.
I’ll just cover a few of the questions raised in that last blog post now, and I’ll try to put more detail in the report. Of course I’m a little pushed for time right now so we’ll see how far I get with that – I’ll likely continue to update the report until I’m happy with it.
I can also see there’s probably a need for something with a lot more detail in it, so I’ll release that as a separate product at a later date.
Elise asked some interesting questions about original content, sourcing articles, and posting frequency – here’s my reply to that.
Yes the blogs are profitable, but that’s really no big achievement when you stop to think about it. If you get traffic and you select the right monetisation method that’s appropriate for that niche, then you’ll make money from it.
By that I mean that if your chosen niche is a physical product such as footwear, then it makes sense to monetise the site via Amazon / eBay. If your niche is about fish care, then you may be promoting ClickBank products.
I’m not a big fan of AdSense, but I understand that in some cases it’s easier to use that method of monetisation. You might want to do that initially but it’s always worth investigating to see if there isn’t a trick you’re missing, and there’s better money to be made using a different monetisation method.
Also, maybe the product is your own and you’re running a blog to draw traffic.
Next, concerning the time it takes.
If it costs me 4 hours of my time to do market research, register a domain name, install WordPress via Fantastico and add the various plugins and queue the articles, then my time is well spent. I have both reseller hosting and also a dedicated server, so those are fixed cost overheads for me anyway, the only real cost apart from my time is the .com (if I can get it) domain registration of $9.69 from NameCheap.
As soon as the blog passes that $9.69 (which sometimes happens quite quickly), then I consider it as in profit, ignoring the value of my time, but even if you cost it out as $30 / hour then it might take anything from 6-18 weeks to make my money back, and then it’s in the black.
Learning Point: Have plenty of niche sites all earning you a little money.
Now for sourcing articles.
It’s not as difficult to grab a pile of on-topic articles as you might think.
You could spend an hour of that four hours and end up with enough to last you a couple of years with two posts a week. All you need to do is use one of the many article directories out there and just enter keywords in their search box. Then copy and paste, copy and paste and so on.
It really doesn’t take that long once you get into the swing, and there’s the side benefit that you’re scanning and vetting the articles for suitability as you go. I mention that as for instance I grabbed a pile of articles about lawn mowers (using an automated method I’ll mention in a moment) and about a quarter of them were off topic.
Learning Point: It’s well worth checking out the content of the articles and not just blindly posting them.
There’s a quite useful $10 tool called Article Gatherer which will scrape articles from two of the biggest article directories and output them as text files. You can get that here:-
http://www.frankhaywood.com/go/ag/
About the SEO plugin.
Yes I’ve been using the SEO All-In-One plugin, but I don’t bother tagging the articles or writing descriptions for them, I just let the plugin do its thing.
An alternative to that plugin is Headspace 2 which will auto-tag via Yahoo, and also attempt to add keywords for you based on the content of the article.
http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/headspace2/
I normally post several articles over the first month, maybe 3-6 a week to get it all started, then 1 or 2 a week after that. Sort of like when taking a course of antibiotics, your first dose should be a double dose to quickly build up the antibiotic in your system – well that’s what I always do anyway. That’s advice from my mother who is now a retired nurse. 😉
BIG TIP. You can also get full article email notifications from one of the article directories when any new on-topic articles are posted, so once you’ve set up all the post-dated articles, you could just add those new ones immediately as they appear in the article directory.
Here’s the page you’re after:-
http://www.submityourarticle.com/articles/publishers.php
And you can also do something similar at:-
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/article_announce/
Either sign up to Yahoo, or join the group if you’re already signed up. You’ll then start receiving full article emails from there too.
Once you’re receiving those emails, if you use something like Outlook Express that will filter emails on keywords, you can get it to take the strain by moving the emails into relevant folders, or I guess even just discarding them if they don’t meet your keyword criteria.
As the related emails start appearing in your niche folders, you can just copy and post them directly and immediately on your niche blog. Alternatively, if you’ve enabled blog posting by email, you could reformat them and forward them to your blog, which is probably faster.
Okay, that’s it. It’s also worth reading my replies to other questions in that last post, as there are a couple of other tips in there too:-
Installing and configuring WordPress and plugins, and also cloning existing WordPress installations.
The penalty for duplicate content myth.
Finally, I’m sorry for delying the release of the plugin, but I think it’s the right decision to make, and together with the report will make it a better product purchase for you.
Here’s the launch time again.
Saturday 26th September, 4.00pm GMT (11.00am EST). The starting price is $1.97 and will increase by 5 cents with each sale.
-Frank Haywood
