list building

WordPress AutoResponder Nickel Sale

UPDATE:  The Nickel Sale is over but you can purchase the WordPress AutoResponder using the payment button below.

Buy now

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As you might have guessed from the title, the plugin I’ll be launching is a WordPress autoresponder.

I’ve long thought about how nice it would be to have a simple autoresponder *plugin* rather than have to mess about with setting it all up in an autoresponder service.  I don’t know about you but I’ve always thought it a bit like using a sledgehammer to crack a peanut.

I have plenty of little niche blogs that I’d like to gather names and email addresses through, but because they’re niche sites, it’s never seemed worth the hassle of setting it up in the autoresponder service I use.

I mean, come on, how useful is it in my main niche to gather a list of people interested in petrol lawn mowers for instance?  😉

Even ignoring the niche aspect of the plugin, I figured that for lots of people just starting out that the last thing they’d purchase is a monthly autoresponder service.

If you stop and think about it, there are plenty of bloggers out there setting up their first sites who have read that they need to be gathering email addresses, but aren’t quite sure about it all, and don’t want to commit to a service.

So I looked around to see what was available in the way of AR plugins for us marketers.  I expected to find at least one half decent plugin, but to my surprise the one that really looked promising didn’t allow you to gather a name – all you could get was an email address.

Also, the interface was a bit clunky and it meant you had to go to different areas of the WP admin panel to do different things.  I wanted it all in one menu area.

And then there was no widget so you could easily place the form in the sidebar like I do on my personal blog.  I know that’s very effective, and is important to have in.

There were a couple of other plugins that sort of claimed to do the job, but it was clear they’d all been planned by developers not marketers.  Many of them are just simple list mailers and have no kind of delayed autoresponder ability.  It seemed that nobody really knew quite what it was that WE needed.

And that’s why I created this plugin.

I fully intend to turn it into a powerful tool that’s a first choice for bloggers, and my pledge is that all minor version releases up to v2 will be free upgrades.  I have some great ideas for it as I really know what’s lacking from many autoresponder services – I’ve felt that pain.

So on Friday 30th April at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST), I’ll be kicking off this nickel sale.

***WARNING***

The last nickel sale I did a few months ago went a bit pear shaped as the autoresponder service I was using failed to send out the email until nearly 2 hours after it was supposed to go out.  Many people were left waiting for it but didn’t get it until many sales had already gone through, and so didn’t get as good a deal as they would have done.

So my advice is, if you want to be one of the first to grab it and get it at it’s lowest price, keep an eye on my blog.

Regardless of whether or not the email is sent out on time, if you hang around on my blog at start time, you’ll see a post appear with the location of the nickel sale.  Okay?

That’s how lots of people got in early last time, and that’s probably how it will happen this time too.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business, list building, software

I’m Not Overseas – You Are

Or… How To Alienate 30% Of Your Subscribers

I just received an email from a well known marketer (I’m on a LOT of mailing lists) that referred to me as an “overseas person”.

It struck me as disconnected and dumb.  We all do daft things every now and then, often when we don’t have our brains engaged, but this was just dumb, dumb, dumb.  One of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen any marketer do, and an extreme case of being parochial without realising it.

Because of course…

He’s overseas, not me.  I’m at the centre of civilisation here in the UK, while he lives in what used to be one of our colonies in a country that didn’t even exist as such a couple of hundred years ago.  So of course he’s the the one that’s overseas, not me.  Ahem.  🙄

Hmm…  Do you see how a simple but ill thought out comment can be misconstrued and instant defensive barriers put up?  I’ve now unsubscribed from his mailing list.

Here’s a simple tip as to how not to alienate or upset people.  Unless your mailing list is specifically about one of the following topics and people are actively interested in receiving information about them, you should never mention any of these.  I’ve unsubscribed from more than one mailing list because of it.

#1 – Sex.

#2 – Politics.

#3 – Religion.

I guarantee if you start talking about any of these taboo subjects, you will upset people.

For instance, you might criticise your government for their style, and instantly you’ve alienated about half your readers.  Or you may say that Jedi is the only true religion, and you thereby manage to upset a HUGE chunk of people.

Nobody wants to hear what you have to say on these subjects unless they’ve joined your mailing list just so they can find out.

And almost equally, I didn’t join that marketers mailing list just to hear myself pigeonholed as “overseas”.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in Human Behaviour, internet business, list building

How To Create List Builders

Probably the best thing you can do for your online business is to build a mailing list.

It’s always an eye opener for people when I say that the size of your business is a direct reflection of the size of your mailing list.  Okay that’s not 100% true as there are other variables which I’ll talk about shortly, but it is a good indicator.

There are many ways to list build, and a favourite of many people is to offer a freebie in return for a name and email address.

The problem with only using this method is you get what are called “tyre kickers” on your lists.  Now that’s not a bad thing as over time you can educate your tyre kickers into becoming buyers, but generally speaking if you’re building a list, you want to build a list of buyers rather than tyre kickers.

I’ve found that if you have say 10,000 people on your mailing list that there’s a small core of a few hundred people who tend to take notice of what you say.

(If you’re reading this then you’re probably one of those people, and to you I say Thank You!)

If you think about it, this is one of the variables I mentioned above.  It’s entirely possible to run a successful business online with just those few hundred people.  It’s not always size that counts!  It’s the responsiveness of the people on your mailing list that really makes the difference, and that’s obvious when you stop to think about it.

So ideally you want to build lists of a mix of freebie seekers that you can educate over the long term, and more importantly buyers.

I’ve already mentioned the most common way of building a freebie seekers list – you just give stuff away in return for a name and email address.  You might now be thinking to yourself, “Okay so I have to sell stuff in order to build a list of buyers, and that’s harder than it sounds.”

True.

And one of the reasons it’s so hard to build a buyers list is you don’t get enough proven buyers visiting the site where you’re selling your products.  Just increasing your search engine traffic isn’t enough, as you could just end up with a pile of freebie seekers at your site who have no intention of buying anything.

So how do you increase the number of proven buyers to your site?

Here it comes.  The answer is in four parts.

#1 – You create a low cost product, usually under $17, under $12 is better, and $7 is the magic number.

#2 – You run an affiliate scheme, and let affiliates and joint venture partners send you traffic that consists of people who listen to them.  These people are already warm and there’s a better than average chance they’ll buy.

#3 – You pay 100% commission directly to the affiliate and straight into their PayPal account.  Affiliates love this and are always eager to promote.

#4 – On your download page you get them to join your mailing list.  There’s a simple technique you can use that will turn almost 95% of buyers into subscribers.  I’ll tell you about that next time.

What happens is as you pick up buyers they immediately turn into affiliates who are all willing to promote your product.  Think – they were impressed enough to buy it and so why wouldn’t they be impressed enough to also promote it and make back the money they spent buying it?

So you end up with a constant stream of buyers and affiliates, all busy buying and then promoting your product, and ultimately building you a list of buyers which is exactly what you want.

You don’t make any money from this product, but you can later sell something else to your list of buyers, or even promote someone elses product, maybe another 100% commission item.

There’s also another option where you even upsell directly during the sales process, and take a cut of that sale rather than the front end one.

There are even more variants on this entire process.

You could put a squeeze page on the front of your site, and get a name and email address in return for a freebie, and then offer the full price item as an upsell, and maybe even do another upsell to something else.  The full price item could be 100% commission and the second upsell 50%.

Or you could use a DHTML popover on your regular sales page to capture the name and email address instead.

Using either of those you build a list of freebie seekers and a list of buyers at the same time.

It’s up to you really how you do it, but I’m sure you can see the benefit?  Doesn’t all this make perfect sense?

The question you might have now is how you can do it.  You need a script that will handle the sales process.

Well first up, both the free and paid for versions of SmartDD will allow you to run a 100% affiliate scheme and also run one time offers at a different percentage commission.  Or the Nickel Script will also allow you to run fixed price sales at 100% commission too, but no upsells.

However, probably the simplest method is to use a script that’s specially designed to handle the exact scenarios I’ve mentioned above.

Now the thing is, I thought everyone knew about this script, but I just shouldn’t take things like that for granted as I’ve had several people tell me recently that they’d never heard of it.

What you actually buy is an ebook that describes in detail the advantages of using the above method and exactly how to do it.  And what comes with it is the script that will allow you to use this method and pay your affiliates instantly and automatically directly into their PayPal account.

Better still is that there are no databases to set up – the whole thing runs off flat text files just like the Nickel Script does.

But the icing on the cake is the price.

Just $7.

You can get it from here:-

http://www.frankhaywood.com/go/7ds/

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business, list building, software