Product Ideas

Oct

2010

One Door Closes, Another One Opens

This weekend just gone I formally handed over the domain and running of PLR Code Mine (PLRCM) to James Cunnington the lead developer. James has pretty much been running the site since the end of May / beginning of June and will continue to do so.

As part of this I cancelled all the subscription payments so that members wouldn’t be rebilled to me.

I now have no ties or affiliation with PLRCM, James is the man who will look after you from now on, and if you were a member, he’ll contact you soon if you wish to resubscribe. He tells me that last months product will be with you shortly, and deeply apologises for the delay.

Okay?

Well that’s one bit of news, and here’s another.

More than a few people have told me they really liked what PLRCM was doing for them as the products weren’t the usual run of the mill ebooks or article packs. The PLRCM membership entitled everyone to a new Private Label Rights PHP script or WordPress plugin (often both) each month, so it hit the right chord for many.

And from a personal point of view, I learned a lot about memberships and what does and what doesn’t work. (Especially about membership scripts. Some of it painful.)

The core idea is sound. Supply nice little products to the members for a fraction of the price it would take a member to have them developed individually, and also remove the pain of getting them created in the first place.

As a member, you can then give away (or sell) the products in return for a name and email address and build your mailing list.

In case you were in any doubt about this, a decent mailing list is core to your online business. Many people say (and I agree) that no mailing list means no business.

This got me thinking about what other Private Label Rights material might be popular with people who were interested in building (or starting to build) a mailing list.

Yes, ebooks and short reports are okay if the material is good, but there’s a lot of those given away already by lots of other people.

It works. It could work better. And it does work better if it’s something a little different. And if the product changes regularly.

People always want something new. I know I do. And I’m people too. 😉

I figured it would be good if I could come up with a membership that rotated the type of product each month to offer something new.

These are the (first) product ideas I came up with as I already know these are popular.

Web design / sales page / squeeze page templates.
WordPress themes.
WordPress plugins.

I’m sure that with a bit of head scratching and some feedback I can come up with some other product ideas too.

Okay?

So what I’ve done is I’ve asked my graphics guru (he creates the Multiple Streams Themes) to come up with a sales / squeeze page five-pack. And I asked one of my plugin developers to write the Redirection plugin which I included in the recent sale of the latest Multiple Streams Theme.

Two things. Two products.

#1 – I’ve seen the first two sales page designs from the five pack, and they’re gorgeous. No exaggeration. They are beautiful. The other three are being finalised now.

#2 – Version 1.1 of the Redirection plugin has just completed testing with a couple of extra little features, and it’s great.

This coming Friday 22nd October, it’s my intention to open up a new PLR membership where I’ll be including BOTH of the above products at an incredible knock down price as a sweetener for the introduction of the new site.

If you already have a mailing list and you sell just the first product to it for a giveaway $5, you’ll make a killing. Even one of this five-pack of sales page designs is easily at least a $17 product on its own.

In fact you could give one away as a list building “taster”, and upsell to the other four and make money on the deal that way, or in fact any other way you can imagine.

AND you get Private Label Rights to the Redirection plugin too as an introductory bonus.

Sounds good?

More news and screenshots tomorrow. 🙂

-Frank Haywood

Sep

2010

A WordPress Theme Designed And Coded

A couple of weeks ago, and just before I came down with a slight fever, I started talking about having your own unique premium WordPress theme created. Here’s the gist of it.

The same designer who created the two very successful Multiple Streams Themes for me will create a WordPress theme for you to your specifications. No-one else in the world will have a theme like yours.

You will own it outright and you can do anything you like with it. Give it away, sell it, have it designed for a client, whatever you want to do with it.

It’s yours and yours alone and we’ll have no control at all over what you do with it. It will be completely copyrighted to you:-

http://www.frankhaywood.com/your-very-own-premium-wordpress-theme/

And I also then spoke about the importance of having a game plan.

If you decide that having your own unique theme created is the thing for you, then you also need to make sure you know exactly what your game plan is and how you expect to make your money back on the expenditure. I like every project to pay for itself within at least 2 weeks of launch:-

http://www.frankhaywood.com/the-importance-of-having-a-game-plan/

Let me put it like this. If you sold your new theme directly to your mailing list of say a few hundred people and without any other promotion, then I would expect you to easily make at least a thousand dollars if you sold it at $10 a copy.

If you have a larger mailing list, then you’d make a whole lot more money.

This is only true as long as you know what you’re doing.

Now I’ve taken care to say all this because I don’t want you to buy this design service if you’re not going to at least double your money on the deal and do it quickly.

You may not care about this, but I do.

The only exceptions I can think of with this is if you’re going to give it away to promote a site and build your mailing list in preparation to making money, or it’s for some other long term promotional plan you have running, or it’s for a site you have that you want to look a little bit special.

I also want to point out that right now at this point in time, I have no idea if there’s any demand at all for what I’m offering.

I know people like to buy WordPress themes if they’ll help them make money, and I also know that clients like well designed and functional WordPress themes.

But what I don’t know is if anyone will want to dig in their pockets and have a custom theme designed and coded for them and then cash in like I have. This is certainly not for everybody.

Okay?

I’ve spoken to the designer, and he’s told me he can take on TWO jobs. The graphic design and conversion process to a WordPress theme from beginning to end will take 2-3 weeks depending on the complexity and the number of design changes you ask for.

It will go much faster if you already have an idea of what you want from a theme and can show us a site you already like the look of.

Right…

In a couple of days time, I’ll put up a buy link on this blog to purchase a theme creation and the first two buyers get the job done for them and I’ll then take the buy link down.

If you want both slots, buy one and then do it again. 😉

One of two things will happen. Either both slots go immediately, in which case the link will disappear almost as soon as I put it up, or I’ve done such a good job of asking you not to buy if you’re unsure, that no-one will buy.

I’ll say it again, this is NOT for everybody.

-Frank Haywood

Aug

2010

The Importance of Having a Game Plan

I want to talk today about how important it is to have a game plan.

What do I mean? Well having a game plan for one aspect of your business might run something like this:-

#1 – You create a new product.
#2 – You release it with 100% instant commissions using the 7 Dollar Script.
#3 – You send an email out to your subscribers letting them know it’s on sale.
#4 – You tell your buyers that you’re offering instant 100% commissions directly into their PayPal account and that here are some tools they can use to promote it – banners and the like – with their aff link built in. All they have to do is copy and paste the code.
#5 – You contact a few people who are likely Joint Venture partners and tell them it’s 100% commission. Some promote and get all the cash, and you get another pile of buyers join your mailing list.
#6 – You tell these new buyers about your affiliate scheme etc. and they start promoting for you too. Some of these people will be succesful marketers and will have their own mailing lists.
#7 – Go to #1.

Okay? I’ll testify that you can run a very successful business that way, that naturally grows over time.

Having a game plan allows you to make and take low-risk decisions. Low risk because you pretty much know what the outcome will be – long term you’ll make a profit on your efforts and increase the size of your business.

I believe this is where most people fall over.

Most people try a little bit of this and a little bit of that – which is fine – I like to try different things out too – but they don’t concentrate on their core business. The stuff that really works.

And that might be because they’ve never really found anything that works.

Or not given it enough of a chance to make it work.

I’ve found that you need to set yourself a few rules that you work with. I call them my #1 Rules, and I have plenty of them for all sorts of different situations.

I’ve found that as long as you concentrate on the #1 rules, any other lesser rules you might set yourself don’t really matter that much or don’t have a big enough impact on your business.

(This is a rule in itself, called the 80-20 rule. I do almost everything by the 80-20 rule and I think most successful business owners do too without realising it. I ask myself – “Do I need to do something about this, or just let it go?” – 80 times out of 100 it can just be let go.)

My #1 rule related to having a game plan is:-

“Every project must pay for itself as soon as possible.”

So if I take new staff on, I want to see results in 2 weeks that at least pay for their keep for the month. There are no free rides, and nobody in my business is an expense.

You could probably adopt this yourself. Think about it.

You may believe that you can’t afford to take anyone on full time. But if what they do for you brings in enough income to pay for their keep, and you end up with new products and a new long term income stream, then it was well worth hiring them wasn’t it?

But let’s say that you’re not ready to make that commitment yet and you want to see how things go.

You still need a unique new product. The emphasis here is new and unique. I’m not saying you can’t do what someone else has already done, I’m saying that PLR probably isn’t going to cut it if you’re looking for JV partners. (There’s at least one exception to this and I’ll talk about it another time.)

I’ve had many people approach me to promote products that I’ve quickly realised were PLR, and I take that as an insult because I’m quite capable of using PLR to create products myself thank you. I don’t like being suckered into promoting products that may be quite widespread as it does my reputation no good whatsoever – that’s my logic and I’m certain most other marketers feel exactly the same.

PLR is great. But it’s of no use when dealing with JV partners unless you’ve taken the time to make extensive changes to it and it really is your product. (Most people can’t be bothered and that’s where they get it wrong.)

You need something that you know no-one else has.

And you need to be able to make genuine claims like “I created this myself” or “I paid $xxx to have this created for me.”

(Believe me when I say this will make you feel a whole lot better when you come to promoting it.)

Tomorrow is your chance to have a totally unique WordPress theme created for you from scratch and to your specifications by one of my designers. They are all extremely talented, and I want to point out that it does take a (relatively) long time to put together a theme because there’s a lot of work involved in doing it.

First there’s the design itself (2-3 days), then converting to a WP theme (4-5 days), and finally the coding tweaks such as extra sidebars and additional page templates (2-3 days).

It’s a big job. If you were able to do it for someone else, ask yourself how much would be a fair price for you to charge for the service.

If like most people you wanted someone else to do it and could then find the right person with the right level of design and PHP coding skills (it’s very hard), then the designer would probably charge you a couple of thousand dollars at least, apply restrictions on what you can do with the finished product, and likely not supply the PSDs for you to edit.

My designers are brilliant graphically and their level of PHP coding ability is high (you’ve probably already seen their work), but charge a lot less than you might expect.

With a fair bit of legwork (it’s not easy finding good people), I have an opportunity to take on a couple more designers, but as I said above, one of my rules is I need to make sure I have work for them and that they pay for their keep.

As long as I can pay their fees and get your job done as well as my own, then I consider myself to have made a profit from it.

From your perspective, as long as you have a game plan and can immediately make your money back on the work, it’s well worth doing.

If you don’t have a game plan or you don’t have a clue on what to do then this isn’t for you. Wait until you’re truly ready.

Here’s two game plans that I know work well from personal experience.

#1 – Get a theme made. Sell it to your mailing list. Immediately make 3 or 4 times your investment followed by ongoing sales through your affiliate scheme.
#2 – Get a theme made for a client. Charge your client 3 or 4 times your investment.

And if you don’t have a mailing list or a client, then here’s your chance to get a product made for you and get your business off the ground, just like I talked about above:-

#3 – Get a theme made that will appeal to pro-bloggers and the IM niche. Sell it for $10 with 100% commission using the 7 Dollar Script, find a few JV partners to kick start it and build a mailing list of buyers. Promote some other related product to your new list and make your money that way.

And that’s how business is done. 🙂

You make an investment, you follow your game plan and you make back your money and then some.

Watch out for more news tomorrow.

If you want to know more right now about having a game plan and how to approach your business, go watch the presentation on 30 Day Projects.

Update: A slight temperature and an overwhelming need to sleep scuppered my plans to launch this week. I’ll get back to you with this shortly.

-Frank Haywood

May

2010

The Importance Of Having Good Staff

I’m back.

Sorry, what was that? You didn’t know I’d been away? Good. I’ve been ill for the last two and a bit weeks, and I’ve hardly been online, but now I’m back. I’m glad to say that the business didn’t collapse while I was away.

I can see there are a few things to clean up, but mostly, everything continued to work. I think. I’ll know more over the next couple of days as I dig in.

Let’s see.

Most support tickets have been answered (still the odd one or two that need my attention but I’m working on it – thank you Ava).
Articles for my niche sites have continued to be written (thank you Ava).
PLR Code Mine has been looked after by James Cunnington, the lead developer (thank you James).
Work has carried on with software development for WordPress plugins at PluginGreat.com (thank you Edesa).
The new designer has been doing his thing and created 3 new sales pages for PLR Code Mine products and is about to start on some WordPress themes for a new business / pro-blogger WordPress themes site (thank you Ronald).
My low cost eCover Actions for Photoshop are almost complete.

Okay, not everything is perfect, but each mistake is a learning experience, and things get better.

I like general posts like this to also be a learning experience for everybody that reads them (thank YOU), so let’s take a look at the background behind all this.

Here’s the premise.

I can’t do everything and neither should you. I have to rely on other people to do their thing, and so should you.

The downside is, as we take a back seat, and because we apply our personal touch to day to day matters less and less, then things aren’t done in the same way as you or I would do them. It’s inevitable. Some are done much better, some are not so good, but the important thing here is that we’re not doing them.

And if we’re not doing them, then it releases us to do other more important things like a bit of planning (aargh) and thinking (ook), and come up with a few new product ideas (aha).

And it also releases some time to come up with ideas for additional income streams, and to investigate and test to see if they work.

If we rely on other people to do the things we used to do, then we can spend more of our time on the really important things to any business.

Now don’t get the wrong end of the stick here, because I’m fairly sure I already know what you’re thinking.

“I can’t afford to take on staff just yet.”

Am I right? Let’s assume so. If that’s what you’re thinking, then you’ve got it all backwards.

The thinking for most new(ish) online business owners is that they personally are responsible for making all the money, but this thinking is false and is a leftover from having a job. I used to think the exact same way, and I believe it’s fairly common.

But when you had a job (maybe you still do), then did the business you were working for operate in that way? Of course not.

It just takes a little change in attitude and the way you think about your business to realise that it’s impossible for you to do everything.

I can positively say right now if I were starting all over again, the last thing I’d do is try to do it all myself, because that’s what I did, and it’s crazy!

We all have to relinquish control to other, trusted people.

Those people are then responsible for making the money for the business, and we’re the ones who oversee it all. (Even that can be handed out to someone else if you want.)

So let’s look at the statement above about not being able to afford to do it. Let’s pull it apart and show it for the nonsense it is, and that’s very easy to do.

Here’s the way you should look at it.

Everybody in your business earns their keep. There are no passengers, and no free rides. If you’re at an early stage in your business, then you simply can’t afford to be carrying administrative clutter.

One of my #1 rules (and I have several for different circumstances) is that every project pays for itself ASAP, and by that I mean within 30 days. Hand in hand with that is that everybody either adds value to the business and is directly related to income, or they’re no longer a part of my business.

I don’t talk about this much, but in the last 12 months I’ve had to fire several people for either not performing, not doing what they said they would by the date they said they would, or not communicating with me about it. Some have done more damage to my business and reputation than would have happened if I hadn’t taken them on, but the important point is things over all have become much better, and I’ve learned to spot the good staff very quickly, and reward them for jobs well done.

And one of the important lessons I’ve learned that I’d like to pass on to you is to take your time over hiring someone, but don’t waste any time in firing them. (This idea of firing goes for customers too, but more on that another time.)

If you’ve made it clear what you want them to do, and they say they understand, and then don’t do what you expect of them, then they’re damaging your business and your personal livelihoood and they must go.

This isn’t being ruthless, it’s being focussed.

Either the people around you are helping to build your business or they’re against you. This is black and white thinking and is not negotiable. It might even upset some people, but look at it this way.

You can’t afford to hire two people, have one who is great and the other one fail to perform, because the bad one then wipes out the efforts of the good one.

All your staff must be good. And once you have good staff around you, things really start to change.

(I believe I’ve written before about the importance of only thinking positive thoughts and only taking positive action and dismissing and ignoring all negativity, and this is a very good example of it. If I haven’t published anything about this yet, then you can be sure I will. There’s no point in giving negativity the time of day as focussing all your efforts and working towards your personal goals little by little is a key way to succeed. Some people will unfortunately drain you and drain your business. You don’t need them. Most people are just like you and me, and are golden. But all it takes is one or two jerks to bring you down and suck up all your time. Most of the time, they don’t even see their own whining negativity. Learn to ignore them – they won’t be around for long and they’ll become a problem for someone else who will listen.)

It’s an amazing feeling to find staff who are as good as you, and an incredible feeling when you find people who are actually better than you are. I know that sounds a little egotistical, but from what friends have said to me, a lot of us think that we’re the only people who can do a job properly the way it should be done. And of course that’s just not true is it?

There are plenty of people who can do any job better than you or I can, it’s just a matter of finding them, and hiring them at the right price. And having the right staff will even allow you to automate important parts of your business.

If you want to know how I find my staff, and what I look for, then please leave a comment and if there’s enough interest, I’ll write about it here.

-Frank Haywood

Feb

2010

Really GOOD Membership Software

I’ve looked all over the place for a GOOD general purpose membership script, preferably for WordPress. Have I found one?

I’m still looking.

A weakness I’ve noticed in many of the membership scripts is you’re either IN the membership, or you’re OUT of it. It doesn’t seem like there’s been enough thought given over to all the different methods of actually handling members.

Even the the one I’ve found that has considered that you might not actually want members to be just in or out is flawed. The assumption is that it’s a drip fed membership concerned with supplying content as learning rather than as products.

Here’s the specific scenario I’m thinking about where the content is product, as with PLR Code Mine.

Someone joins a membership today. They’re a member for three months and then for whatever reason they drop out. Two months later, they rejoin. What would you expect to have happened in this scenario?

What I expect from a really good membership script is that if someone has been a paid member for 3 months, then they should ALWAYS have access to that content, even during the times they’re not a paid member. So if the content they’ve purchased is updated, they get the benefit of it.

If they then drop out for two months, then as administrator I should be able to specify that they shouldn’t get access to that two months worth of content. They’ve missed the boat.

I may also wish to sell it to them at a much higher price than if they’d been a regular member, to allow them to catch up.

So when they rejoin at month 6, they now have access to months 1-3 and 6, but not to month 4 and 5. They can purchase month 4 and 5 at say three times the regular membership price if they wish to, at which point they then have perpetual access to it, even if they drop out of the membership again.

To me, that would be a perfect membership solution. But I’m damned if I can find anyone that does such a script.

I have found one where a lot of thought has gone into membership as learning, but not where membership involves a product. What happens there is that when the member rejoins at month 6, then they get access to month 4, not month 6. And the workaround suggested by the very helpful developer / owner involved just doesn’t cut it. Grrr…

There’s nothing for it, I’ll have to get my own done. I can see from other sites that I’m a member of that there’s a real need for such a script, as they all have the same issues. I’m either in or out, and once a month has gone by, the back products get removed.

I just find it difficult to believe that no-one has ever sat down and thought about this. Fortunately for me, it’s such a glaring omission it leaves the door wide open for a BETTER membership script than the rest of the stuff on the market, doesn’t it?

Watch this space.

-Frank Haywood