wordpress

Feb

2011

Delayed Widgets

Update: The sale is now LIVE and is currently $17.00.

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This Friday I’ll be releasing a new plugin called “Delayed Widgets”.

What it does is modify ALL of your existing widgets by inserting a timer delay in seconds to the bottom of every one. When the delay is reached, the widget reveals itself by “unfolding” itself in the sidebar.

“Why?” I hear you ask…

Well, consider this.

I’ve said this before – one of the biggest problems for a marketer is getting and retaining attention from site visitors. Anything you can do without being too “in your face” (and driving them away) is going to be a benefit to you.

By careful use of widgets that remain hidden until the right moment, you can improve your chances of a subscription, or a sale, or whatever it is you want your visitors to do on that particular page.

This is because the human eye is drawn to movement.

To perfectly illustrate this, a few moments ago before I sat down to write, I was gazing out of the back of the house when a bird I hadn’t seen took off from one of the bushes.

My attention was instantly on it. It’s as if my conscious mind had no choice than to look at it.

If the bird had remained unmoving, I simply wouldn’t have noticed it.

As marketers, we can turn this peculiarity of the human eye and brain to our advantage.

For example, if you take a look at the top of this blog, you’ll see that my main subscriber sign up box (in the sidebar top right) reveals itself a few seconds after the rest of the page has been drawn.

Me doing this now makes it impossible for any visitor not to notice it. 😉

Even if they don’t act on it, they have surely seen it and it’s in their awareness as is the offer. All done without a pop-up.

Even better is that you can do this with ANY widget you want particular attention focussed on.

So say you’re running a promotion as an affiliate and you have a time sensitive ad that you want people to see more than anything. If you just run it as a “regular” ad on your blog, it doesn’t matter how pretty it is, there’s a good chance it isn’t going to be noticed.

But if the visitors landing page draws itself, and then a few seconds later your ad appears in the sidebar, it WILL be seen.

This new plugin improves your chances of the stuff you WANT to be seen to actually BE seen by modifying all your existing widgets.

This coming Friday (18th Feb) at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST), the Delayed Widgets plugin will go on sale at a starting price of $10.00 for the first 50 sales.

-Frank Haywood

Feb

2011

Slider Manager

Update: The sale is now LIVE and is currently $27.00 until the plugin goes officially live.

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Demo slideshow. Some of these images have text with links in them, some of the images are clickable, and some have both.

[pgsm-slideshow id=”1″]

***

Since September/October time, I’ve tried out or looked at over 20 different image slider managers. These have either been WordPress plugins or standalone scripts.

If you look around you’ll see so many of these that I thought there must at least be ONE that does what I need, but can you believe NONE of them do?

All I wanted to do was to put in sliders at the top of some of my sales pages to rotate between screenshots and other banners, and also place a selection of clickable different slider ads in my sidebar that only occupied one position and showed a different ad every few seconds.

I also wanted the slider images to display text and HTML with clickable links.

I wanted to be able to make the whole slider image itself clickable so I could put “Click Here” graphics on the image.

And finally I wanted it to work with any theme.

That’s not a big requirement is it? But the small list of things I need the plugin to do are VERY useful to us marketers.

Here’s the thing. I’ve found that there’s no plugin that does all of what we need.

There are plugins that allow me to add ONE slider to a page or post, but not multiple sliders.

There are comprehensive plugins that do image gallery management and display, but not sliders.

There are plugins that allow clickable links OR clickable images, but not both.

There are plugins that only work by editing the theme code and pasting in some PHP.

And so on. I don’t think ANY of the sliders worked with widgets.

It’s almost unbelievable isn’t it? But I’ve seen this same issue time and time again.

Developers write code for other developers. Most developers don’t get or understand (or even want to) marketing.

Developers miss the little subtleties that we marketers require. And it’s the little things that make the difference between what works and generates additional revenue for us, and what ends up as frustration.

So…

I think you can guess what’s coming?

I’ve had version 1 of a plugin called Slider Manager developed, and it does ALL the things we need most of all from a slider.

My #1 priority in developing this was to get it working and keep it simple. Sometimes you can’t avoid complicated, but I try to avoid it wherever possible.

So what you can do is create multiple sliders (groups) and of course multiple images within each slider.

Within each slider group, you specify the width and height, pause and animation time, and a selection of animation effects.

Each image can have text and a HTML link added to it, or you can make the image clickable. Or BOTH. 😉

When you save the slider group it generates a short code tag that you can then add anywhere in your posts and pages and also in your text widgets.

It’s dead simple to use, and we’re working on making it better with full image management and an AJAX/jQuery re-ordering method to make it all drag and drop for the next version.

But tomorrow, Tuesday 8th February 2011 at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST)…

You can get this first version with a free upgrade to the drag and drop version when we release it…

At a starting price of just $10.00 for the first 50 sales.

-Frank Haywood

Jan

2011

Sales Helper Plugins

Update: The sale is now LIVE and is currently $15.00 for the next TWO sales.

Sales from 101 onwards will be $27.00 until the products are officially released later this week.

***

Tomorrow (Tuesday 1st February – already!) I’ll be running a PRE-ORDER sale for two really cool little plugins.

The first one allows you to add a special offer to your sidebar that counts down, expires and disappears. It’s cookie driven and won’t re-appear if the visitor refreshes the page (unless you want it to).

I’ve wanted something like this myself for a long time as more than once when visiting other sites, I’ve been tempted by seeing a little countdown timer and eventually just HAD to click it before the time runs out to find out more before it’s too late.

Curiousity is a powerful emotion to deal with, and I’ve always figured if it works so well on me then it will work really well on other people too. Including your visitors… 😉

The second plugin has been designed directly to enhance your sales copy.

Consider this.

There are two types of people that hit your sales pages. The readers and the skimmers.

What I do is I tend to read the headline, read the first sentence, scroll to the bullets, then skip to the price. I may then read some more copy if it looks interesting enough. Occasionally I’ll go back and read all the sales copy.

Sometimes I just jump right to the bottom to read the PSes. (Did you know that your second PS should contain your most important message?)

I *may* then also decide to watch a video if I think I need to know a little more before I buy, but videos are always low on my personal priority list. That’s just me.

Talking to other marketers, it looks like my behaviour is fairly typical. Some people prefer to watch a video, but of the group who prefer sales copy, I’m right in there as Mr Average. 😉

And… Someone I know is a mad tester. He reckons that his best performing sales copy consists of little more than a headline, bullet points and testimonials, but also says it depends on the product being sold.

When I stopped to have a think about this, the bullet points angle probably makes a lot of sense as bulleted info allows you to absorb all the key points very quickly. So people who get turned off by vast amounts of sales copy are okay with that method.

But I always find I want to know more detail before I commit to a purchase.

And that’s where the idea for this plugin came from.

What it allows you to do is create short, snappy bullet style sales copy which lets people do what they like best – skim – and absorb the key points very quickly.

If they need to know more about each point, then they can just click it and it unfolds to reveal more detailed copy about that particular point.

This method actually has a double benefit and puts both you and your visitor in control.

Your visitor has a chance to happily skim your sales page very quickly because you’ve nicely bulleted it all out for them.

And because each block of revealed sales copy is specific detail about the point in question, they’re the ones making the decision to view it.

This is really important because what you’re doing is engaging your visitor, and drawing them into the message you’re trying to convey to them.

And… Because the block of revealed sales copy is much smaller than a full page, they’re very likely to read all of that section, then repeat the process for other bullet points, and eventually read the whole of your sales copy.

All in small chunks.

This plugin increases your chances that a visitor to your site will give you ALL their attention.

Okay?

So this pre-order bundle gives you a plugin that drives people to your offer, and also a plugin that improves your ability to make the sale once they’re there.

The plugins are in test now, and they *may* be available tomorrow, but it’s much more likely that they’ll be ready on Friday hence this pre-order sale.

When they’re ready, then just like the Clone and Backup plugin I’ll be adding them directly to the affiliate scheme at full price and sold individually.

Tomorrow (1st Feb) at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST), you’ll be able to get both plugins for the price of one, with a starting price of $10.00 for the first 50 sales.

-Frank Haywood

P.S. Speaking of Clone and Backup, we’ll be releasing the new version tomorrow if it gets through test today, and then the sales page and affiliate scheme for it will go live. 😉

Hopefully there’s a surprise unadvertised bonus to go with the plugin, IF it all works out okay…

P.P.S. The WordPress Sales Page Template Pack is now at $15.00 for the next THIRTEEN copies as I write this.
http://www.frankhaywood.com/wordpress-sales-page-template-pack-3/

Jan

2011

WordPress Sales Page Template Pack 3

Update: The sale for the WordPress Sales Page Templates is now LIVE and is currently $15.00 for the next FOUR copies.

***

Tomorrow (Friday) I’ll be running a low cost sale for 5 really cool sales page designs in a gorgeous selection of colours. Good looking sales pages are always incredibly handy to have and I’ve paid a lot of money over the years for both custom and generic sales page designs.

And while it’s true that sales copy is the most important aspect of your page, if you combine it with a good sales page design then it will make the difference between a sale or not.

To make this a more attractive proposition, as well as the regular HTML versions of the pages the sale also includes WordPress Page Template Plugin (PTP) versions of the sales page designs.

What this means is you’ll be able to upload the supplied plugin and then select any of the five designs from a drop-down as the template to use for your new WordPress page.

And THAT means you’ll be able to create sales pages on your WordPress site as if they were regular HTML sales pages.

It’s incredibly useful. In fact it’s so useful, that all my sites will soon be driven by WordPress.

The reason for this is it’s far easier to create a sales page using the plugin and a template than it is do it the “old fashioned” way with an HTML template.

And of course any time I want to change the design, I just select a different page template and everything changes except for the sales copy.

Simple.

First a word of warning though, and I know people sometimes don’t take me seriously when I say this.

Until it’s too late…

When the full version of the Unified Page Template Plugin (PTP) is released (we’re very close), then all the template packs we’ve released so far will be set to a standard $27 per design pack or $7 per individual template design.

(We’ll also “retrofit” all the templates you may have purchased, so don’t worry.)

This is your chance to get all five of these designs for just TEN dollars, but only if you’re one of the first 50 to buy.

The sale will start tomorrow Friday 28th 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST), with the first 50 copies being at $10.00, the next 25 at $12.50, and 76-100 at $15.00.

After that the template pack will rise to $27.00 until the PTP site is launched.

I do these temporary ultra low prices as a thank you for being a subscriber. 🙂

Here are 60% original size screenshots of the designs. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

-Frank Haywood

For Valda:-

Jan

2011

Multiple Streams Themes 5

Update: The sale for Multiple Streams Theme 5 is now running priced at $27.00.

***

Apart from the beautiful and well thought out design, the theme itself includes the following WordPress 3.x features.

o Custom Headers
o Custom Backgrounds including colour picker
o Custom Menus

We’ve also included a set of options with this theme.

Just go to “Appearance >> MST Options” and there you’ll see you can do things like globally hide or display sections of your site just by checking and unchecking boxes. So you have global control of the header, top boxes, and top and bottom ads. This is very useful when you’re building a site and trying to decide which appearance you want it all to have.

On the options page, you can also easily add footer text such as menu and copyright content, and also any site analytics code in the footer if you don’t already own the Scripts Manager plugin.

You can even change the appearance of your blog posts as we’ve included an alternative “single.php” file which is the bit of code responsible for displaying single blog posts. Just swap the original one out and replace it with the alternative to alter the look and feel of your blog posts.

Next up is the appearance of pages. We’ve included 4 page templates rather than just the one that most themes supply.

#1 – Default Template.
#2 – One column page, no sidebar.
#3 – One column page, no sidebar, no three top boxes.
#4 – No top widgets.

So now when you create a new page on your site, you can decide which of the above formats (on a case by case basis) you want it to appear as.

And speaking of pages, we’ve also included the 5 squeeze page templates plugin that we released with the last theme. This plugin enables you to easily add autoresponder “squeeze pages” to your blog to assist you in building your mailing lists.

Other plugins included are the Ads Manager and Redirection plugins to help you place ads on your site, and redirect pages (via your affiliate links if you wish) respectively.

Finally (?) we’ve included blank PNGs and JPEGs of all the ad graphics, banners and header used in the theme, as well as Adobe Photoshop PSDs.

This means that if you don’t have Adobe PhotoShop, you can still use the blanks and a free program like The GIMP to edit the banners etc to your own needs.

I hope you’ll think this carefully thought out bundle is well worth the discounted price we’re offering for the first people to purchase today.

The pricing will work like this…

1-50 = $10.00
51-75 = $12.50
76-100 = $15.00
100+ = $27.00 until offical launch of the Multiple Streams Themes site.

Offering these low prices to you is my way of saying thank you for being a subscriber.

You can see an installation of the theme on the link below.

http://mst005.multiplestreamsthemes.com/

-Frank Haywood