Frank Haywood

Other Scripts Coming In 2008

Going on from my post yesterday about AdSpurt, I thought I’d mention a couple of other things we’re working on for your internet business.

I don’t want to give the game away entirely, but one is a script that will turn affiliate marketing on its head. I am totally convinced that this product will shake the entire marketing world to its core, and the whole landscape of blog and forum marketing will change forever.

Good or bad? I don’t know. I’ll just be making the gun, other people will be firing it.  (Okay, I’ll fire it a bit too.  More than a bit in fact.)

Here’s a double warning though, just for you, a (hopefully loyal) reader of this blog.

#1 – If you haven’t created your first product yet, just GO and get your act together and get yourself sorted okay?

I don’t care if you don’t know where to start with creating your first product or what it will be about, just get your thinking cap on right now and remember there’s nothing new under the sun.  Just because someone else has already done it doesn’t mean you can’t do it too.

Otherwise we’d have one kind of car, one kind of pen, one kind of shirt and so on… It’s all the different flavours of the world that makes things interesting, so add your own flavour and style to the mix.

#2 – And if you don’t yet have a blog like this one that you post to regularly, GO and sort that out too.

Do NOT be tempted to use Blogger or BlogSpot or any other free blogging service, you WILL regret it. It should be a self-hosted blog (ideally WordPress), and if you don’t know where to start, post a comment here and I’ll put something together for you to show you how to do it, what plugins to use etc.

You’ll see that script in use here on this site within the next month or so.

The second script has been in the making since 2001, and is a full blown Content Management System (CMS) with a difference.

Instead of having loads of crappy little features that no-one but a geek would be interested in, this is written with YOU in mind. It’s been designed for online business owners to run their internet business through.

It’s already in use on several different WORKING sites in test (the site owners don’t realise what they’ve got because they haven’t been told), and I’ll soon be adding it to the Vendiva.com site and using it as the platform to run my own internet business.

So I guarantee you it will be kick-ass when we release it towards the end of the year.

As well as those two major scripts, there are some other nice little projects and products that I’ll be releasing soon too, so keep your eyes peeled.

-Frank Haywood

(The next script released after AdSpurt will likely be the Instant Survey Script.)

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business

Nickel Script Videos

I’ve uploaded three videos to the Nickel Script web site that show you how to install, set up and use the Nickel Script. You can view them here:-

http://www.nickelscript.com/videos/

On Friday, if all goes well, I’ll also upload the latest version of the Nickel Script to the download page, and add a fourth video to explain the additional changes.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business

Monetise ANY Website

18 months ago in January of 2007, I had a chat with a friend of mine about how to easily monetise web sites and increase revenue to our internet business.

Most people just use Google AdSense, but I’ve never been convinced that was a viable method as the rewards were too low. I like to see tens of dollars per day, not cents, so it’s never appealed to me, and you’ll never see AdSense on any of my sites.

I know lots of people agree with me on that one, and I read just a couple of weeks ago how someone said they were “blind to them”, and how she filtered them out without even thinking. I’ve even seen AdSense written as “Add Cents” which just about sums it up.

Anyway, in this chat, we had a few ideas, and I even asked one of my developers to have a think about one of the methods, but nothing came of it at the time and it got put away.

Then in about November of last year, there was one of those breakthrough moments. Suddenly we had a method that would work and was almost as easy as AdSense to use.

But instead of Google getting the lion’s share of the advertising revenue, we could have it all instead. That’s MUCH more appealing to everyone.

After all, these are our web sites so why should we share the advertising revenue with a third party? That doesn’t really make sense does it?

Why would you want to give 80% of the advertisers revenue to a middle man? Okay, 5 or 10 percent maybe, but not most of it. That’s just taking the mickey.

You might say “AdSense is easy”. So what? The ease of use should mean you give up the majority of the income? I don’t think so.

Food for thought eh?

So anyway, work started on a script that has changed names a couple of times, and has ended up as being called AdSpurt.

Just like AdSense, you paste a couple of lines of javascript code onto your web site. Once you’ve done that, there’s a little bit of extra work to be done in the admin panel of this site liberating script.

This is how it works.

You enter your keywords into the admin panel, enter your affiliate link to the product you’re promoting, and specify which style of ad is to be shown, there are two to choose from.

Now, wherever the keywords appear on your web site, it automatically gets turned into a link. One kind of link is a “normal” link with your affiliate ID embedded inside it, and the other is a “hover ad” which you can easily identify as a double underlined link.

This means you can take any site you own with content on it, for instance a blog like this one, and monetise it with the high performing ads that you choose.

You earn ALL the commission, there’s no middle man to take your share of the advertising revenue.

Excited yet?

It gets better.

We’ve added the ability to search the ClickBank market place from within the admin panel, choose a product, enter your keywords, click “Create New Ad”, and immediately include the ads on your web site.

AdSpurt will ask for your ClickBank ID during install, so all the ads automatically get generated with your own affiliate link embedded.

For your convenience, we’ve also included a clever proxy script which will allow you to run multiple sites from the same AdSpurt installation and admin panel.

In addition, if you’ve created several ads using the same keywords, then they get automatically rotated so that different ads are shown each time. And looking at it from the other direction, you can also create multiple keywords for the same ads.

Simply put, that’s multiple ads per keyword, and multiple keywords per ad.

Finally and for good measure, to tie this all up we’ve also included a stats page where you can see how well each ad / keyword set is doing, allowing you to split test and find the best performing products. You can download this data as a CSV for further analysis.

Phew!

NOW are you excited? I am!

The possibilities are limitless, and I’ll be working on a bonus product for this that’s almost as good as AdSpurt itself. I know the method works, I just have to write it up.

Imagine this. Create a blog on your niche subject. Populate it (completely legitimately) with brand new articles on your niche topic from article sites. Write a few of your own articles and submit them yourself to article directories. Add your keywords to AdSpurt, and watch the traffic come rolling in.

Keep adding articles from article sites, and over time your blog will be recognised as an authority site. It may take a while, although there are a few short cuts you can do.

Rinse and repeat with your next niche.

Sounds good? Yeah, I know the finding and adding articles is a bit of a pain, but what if you knew how to semi-automate that process? Well, there is a way, and that’s the bonus I’ll include. Actually there are several ways, but they all involve buying extra scripts – I’ll show you how you can do it using software you already have on your PC.

Now although AdSpurt is complete, I won’t be launching it for another month or so, and when I do it will be at $47 for a short while, eventually rising to $97.

But of course, I need some testimonials and a bit of feedback about the product, so here’s what I’ll do.

I’ve just received the final working version of AdSpurt which I’m playing with right now, and in return for some feedback from you, I’ll give it to you for a short time for a much lower price.

I’ve yet to decide when and how I’ll do it, but you’ll be the first to know about it here on this blog.

ONLY subscribers to this blog will get the details as I’ll be putting them in a good old password protected post. If you want to subscribe, go to the home page and over on the right near the top you can enter your name end email address.

-Frank Haywood

(DO I have to say it? Oh okay then. DON’T use your ISP or a free email address to subscribe. The chances of you getting a business email through your providers mail filters are next to nil. Use an email address off one of your web sites instead.)

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business

Server Problems At The Planet

Just a quick post now my server is back up.

You may have read about problems at The Planet data center, but just in case you haven’t, you can find out what happened below.

The explosion took out 3 walls and was caused by a short in a transformer. Fortunately, no-one was hurt.

http://forums.theplanet.com/index.php?showtopic=90185&st=0

-Frank Haywood

Update: The server seems to be responding extremely slowly on port 80, while all other ports are operating at full speed, so I’m not sure what’s going on there. Time will tell…

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business

How SmartDD v2 Protects Your LARGE Downloads

When I released the original SmartDD (v0.98), there were a couple of minor niggles with it that made themselves apparent over time.

I think that the most annoying one for people was securely delivering large files.

To begin with the file size wasn’t a problem, but after a few months I started to get more and more support questions about why some files wouldn’t download.  After clicking on the link, the web page seemed to hang there without doing anything, and finally timing out.

We eventually realised what was happening.  Because of the way that SmartDD delivers files securely, it takes up a memory buffer on the web server equivalent to the size of the file.  If you’re delivering an ebook, it isn’t a problem as the zip files involved are only about 3-5MB.  The delay while creating the memory buffer is almost unnoticeable.

But if you’re delivering a video or an MP3, or any other large file, then it can take several seconds to create the memory buffer.

This became a problem when the file was very large and the time went over 30 seconds.  Many servers are now configured to time out after 30 seconds without a “keep alive” signal from the application.

Another problem was that an increasing amount of servers are being configured to only allow 8MB of memory to be allocated to an application.  Again this is a problem for people who want to deliver large file sizes securely.

Well, we fixed that in version 2.

Now you can specify a normal URL to a file and SmartDD will hide the real link while delivering it via the normal HTTP method.

While this isn’t as secure as the file system method, it’s still very secure.  The reason it isn’t as secure as the file system method is because you have to put the file inside your web space somewhere.  With the file system method you can store your file above the web root where no browser can get at it.

So, if you have small files (less than 8MB), use the file system method for very secure storage and download of files.  If you have larger files, use a URL to the file and SmartDD v2 (and above) will still hide the real location.

The reason I’ve said v2 and above is because we’re almost ready to release v3.  We have to do a little testing first, but when we’re done I’ll roll it out.

There will be a small charge for upgrading to v3 from v2, but I won’t be asking you to part with another $97.

I’ll post more details about the new features etc, here on this blog when I can.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business