clickbank

Jul

2011

An Apology And Some Exciting Updates

I have some really exciting news to share.

(Well… I’m excited about it, you may not be.)

First a very public apology.

In the last few weeks and months:-

I’ve lost some full time staff that are now part time.
I’ve had to fire someone (which I felt dreadful about) because he was working “full time” for me and also “full time” for one of my friends. Yeah, we both fired him when we realised… I know this must go on a lot with remote workers, and there are some tell-tale signs.
I’ve had new staff start, do a week or two and leave.
I’ve advanced money to new staff who begged for it and had them disappear.
On top of this it’s just plain difficult and time consuming to find *any* staff, let alone good ones.

It’s been a rough ride. But I guess this is something that happens to a lot of people, and always looking for the positive, I’ve learned a lot about hiring good remote workers.

But this bumpy and frustrating journey I’ve been on has meant that a few things have slipped. I’m now TWO months (well, one month and a week) behind releasing the latest PLAhh material.

I sincerely apologise for that, and I WILL fix this.

I have some new staff. I have both June and July’s packages pretty much complete apart from a little bit of crucial work to sweeten them up. I could release June’s as it is and add the extras later, but I’d rather complete the package and then release.

I’m hoping that all the work will be complete by next Friday 15th and with any luck I’ll have already released the packages before then. Thank you for your patience and to the kind words from people I’ve already explained this to.

***

Now the exciting part.

A bit of background first though.

A couple of weeks ago when I ran a pre-order sale for Affiliate Click Pal (ACP – will be released this Monday coming), I had a couple of blog comments and a few emails that all said pretty the same thing…

“Will it be able to do PayPal too?”

Now that would be just great wouldn’t it? It’s certainly something I’d like to see in ACP, so yes I’ll get that done in a later version. It will probably take a couple of months to get there is my guess. We’ll see.

What I *have* done is made sure it has some integration in it for sites that use PayPal scripts and the ?e=PayPalEmailAddress method for affiliates.

This then got me thinking.

Something I’ve wanted to do for several *years* now is release a low cost, easy to use, feature rich PayPal script. The PayPal IPN system is awesome – clearly a lot of thought and planning went into its design to make it so very flexible.

So what I’ve done is I’ve hired a new guy just to work on this project. It’s been incredibly difficult finding the right person to do this for a whole raft of “attention-to-detail” reasons. But after 12 months of searching I found the guy and have him on board.

He believes he’ll have the first prototype for me to play with tomorrow. And phase one will be complete by the end of next week.

There’ll then be another load of work to add in all the “feature rich” parts I mentioned above. But this shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks is my estimate.

Once you find the right people, it’s amazing what you can get done in a very short space of time. Ideas have never been a problem for me, but finding good people to implement them is an ongoing struggle that I’m finally getting the hang of. 😉

This brand new script will use the ?e=PayPalEmailAddress method for affiliates I mentioned above, and be totally focussed on PayPal and the flow of traffic both through your site and onto other sites.

It will make it easy to get a sales page type site up quickly and easily and with a built in affiliate scheme. This is something I’ve struggled with myself, so you’ll probably appreciate this as much as I do!

Amongst many things, it’s been designed in such a way as to make it easy to:-

Install and setup.
Promote your other (and other product owners) sites.
Get traffic for free.
Get new affiliates on board (every customer automatically becomes an affiliate).
Build your mailing list.
Administer your sales.
Do secure digital delivery.

I’ve seen a number of missed opportunities in some similar scripts over the last few years.

Every time I’ve seen one or realised something that would work really well, I’ve written it down in my notes.

I now have a *lot* of notes…

This new script will perfectly complement ACP. I eventually see the two of them working hand in hand together, with ACP being the “step up” to the next level when someone is ready.

It’s my intention that both scripts should talk to each other with this new PayPal script passing customer, sales and affiliate information back to your central ACP site where you can administer everything if you choose.

So my vision is a low cost entry into the world of product sales with this new PayPal script, and then upgrade to the more expensive ACP when it all starts to take off.

If you’re feeling a little bit excited now, then you should be.

I’m all but doing backflips. 😉

And that’s because I finally have the right people doing the right jobs.

The world has been waiting for this.

***

Okay, that’s enough excitement for today. (Or is it?)

Just a final note to say that tomorrow I’ll be running a couple of low cost sales for a couple of plugins that you may have missed in the last 12 months if you’re new here.

The first is for a plugin I use all the time, in fact I’ll be using it for the sales tomorrow.

It’s called the “Content Replacement” plugin and enables you to schedule small snippets of content in and out of your blog. I use it to display payment buttons at the appropriate time, and then later remove them when the sale is over.

That way I can be out and about and not have to worry about the sale going ahead. It just works.

Very useful.

The second related plugin is called “Subscribers Only” and which allows you to hide content on your blog from non-subscribers.

If a visitor to your blog isn’t a WP blog subscriber, then instead of seeing all of an article, you can withhold small but crucial parts of it. So they don’t see the bit you’ve hidden, instead they see a little padlock symbol and a message saying the content is for subscribers only with link where they can go subscribe.

Cool huh?

Both sales will start the same time tomorrow at 6.00pm and will continue over the weekend until Monday morning when the Content Replacement plugin will automatically remove the buy buttons. 😉

More info about the sale tomorrow.

-Frank Haywood

Jun

2011

PRE-ORDER Sale – Affiliate Click Pal

Offer Closed

As a thank you for being a subscriber, I’m releasing 50 PRE-ORDER slots for my new unified affiliate script – Affiliate Click Pal – at just $10 each this weekend.

Let’s run through a quick list of the features and benefits.

o Saves you a pile of cash by using only ONE ClickBank vendor account (1x$50) for all your sales pages on all your sites
o Up to 500 landing pages per vendor account instead of one
o Handles multiple vendor accounts not just one
o Can handle thousands of saleable items and affiliates
o Generates globally unique (GUID) affiliate links
o Generates secure order links (GUID) for your sales pages
o Digital delivery – sends customers to the download page
o Customisable affiliate variable – no more “affid”
o Affiliate groups – only some groups can promote special items
o Variable commissions via different vendor accounts for same saleable items
o Pass parameters to third party scripts via short code tags – [affpaypal] [affemail] [afffirstname] [afflastname]
o Customers automatically get added as affiliates
o Default page by vendor account for affiliates who use CB hoplink instead of their unique URL
o Support for third party scripts that use the ?e=PayPalEmailAddress method
o Looks really cool… 🙄

These features (and some others) are all included in the first release version of Affiliate Click Pal, and there’s a big pile of other stuff waiting to be added.

How about a few screenshots? You can middle-mouse-click the images to open them up full size in a new browser tab.

Admin Panel #1

Admin Panel #2

Affiliate Panel #1

Anyone that buys Affiliate Click Pal in this pre-order sale will get all the upgrades we have planned up to v2, and we have a LOT of stuff in the pipeline. 😉

Eventually this script will be one of my flagship products and will likely cost a whole lot more than you see here.

This is your chance to get Affiliate Click Pal at the lowest price it will ever be.

The PRE-ORDER sale starts tomorrow at 6.00pm BST (British Summer Time or GMT+1), which is pretty much the same as 1.00pm EST.

Be there or be square.

And please leave a comment after the tone. 😉 We’re all interested…

-Frank Haywood

P.S. After several people have asked me about this, I’ve TEMPORARILY re-opened the nickel sale for Corner Peel Ads. Another day and that’s it.

Jun

2011

Affiliate Scheme Madness and Beta Testers

I know I’m a little crazy sometimes and I do change my mind about things, and if you’ve noticed this about me, this next bit should come as no surprise.

Right after getting the unified affiliate scheme all installed, configured and ready to announce to the world…

I decided I didn’t like it.

I’d used a third party script which is quite good (and certainly does what it says on the tin and I know is used by some marketers I’ve purchased from), but me being me, I started to spot holes in it and areas for improvement. And some other bits which I thought were pointless or could be done in a different way as to make more sense.

So… Dum-de-dum-de-dum…

I made a list of improvements, created a first rough outline of what I wanted and asked one of my developers to go do some work on it. Since then it’s gotten a bit big and feature rich and still isn’t finished yet. It’s not a plugin, it’s a standalone script, but we’ll be making sure it will talk to any related plugins such as Affiliate LINK Pal and the Promo Tools plugin.

In fact I’ve now realised that it will eventually become my flagship product and possibly replace SmartDD at some point. There’s no PayPal support in there at the moment – just ClickBank – but PayPal could be added later.

This new product is going to be called Affiliate CLICK Pal (ACP), and while I’ve already taken out the domain, there’s nothing there yet.

The script itself does something which I think is quite clever with CB accounts.

As a CB vendor yourself, you’ll know that CB only allow one landing page per CB vendor account, which I’ve always thought really sucks.

Especially as they now let you have up to 500 products in your vendor account.

It seems they want to make a bit of money selling you new vendor accounts ($50 first one, $30 additional accounts) for every single site you create. And that they expect you to run each site you want multiple products on with that single landing page I mentioned.

So under normal circumstances, an affiliate may want to promote a product on one of your multi-product sites, but all they can do is direct traffic to your main landing page. And if the prospect then buys something on another of your sites, the affiliate gets nothing as it’s done through another CB vendor account.

As you can imagine, this is quite unattractive to affiliates.

What ACP will do is allow you to run ALL your sites through a single CB account saving you a pile of cash on multiple CB vendor accounts, and enabling your affiliates to get links for any of them that will direct their traffic to the correct landing page. If a prospect then later buys one of your other products on another site, they earn commission for that too.

Doing it that way makes it VERY attractive to affiliates.

And what we’re also hoping to do as a side-bonus is, if you already have multiple CB accounts (and we’re able do this), you’ll be able to merge them all into a single affiliate scheme. In theory it should work, but in the real world it may be impractical. We’ll see.

What I’ll need soon is a couple of beta testers as this will be quite a big product and I don’t think I can test it totally in-house.

Are you interested?

You will need to have a ClickBank vendor account in use on a live site and be willing to use ACP on your live site to manage affiliate link generation.

You’ll also need to set up at least one other site to test out the redirection and some other things.

The reward is a free copy of the script, plus some other bonuses. 😉

If you think you have time to test this out and you have at least one sales site and CB vendor account, and you want to give it a whirl to look for bugs and try to break it, just leave a comment below.

-Frank Haywood

Nov

2010

48 Hour AdSpurt Special (Re-Launch)

Update: This offer is now CLOSED.

***

One of the BEST products I’ve ever released is a script called AdSpurt, and today and tomorrow I’m running a $20 special for it plus another bonus script thrown in for good measure.

AdSpurt is designed to allow you to quietly monetise any kind of site via ClickBank and PayDotCom ads.

I would always recommend monetisation by affiliate program over something like Google AdSense, even though AdSense seems to be the choice of many. (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Just because lots of other people do something doesn’t mean it’s right – it usually means they haven’t given it much thought.)

I tested it for 3 months before release and proved to my satisfaction that this type of ad receives 6 times more clicks than other ads.

And while AdSpurt is quite a sophisticated program, it’s also been designed to be very easy to use.

As an example, if you have a niche autoblog on a particular topic, you choose your keywords, choose your ClickBank or PayDotCom ad and save.

Then whenever any of your selected keywords are used, AdSpurt will automatically turn them into either a DHTML hover ad (double underlined links), or a regular link using your affiliate details.

And because there’s a LOT of thought gone into this script to get it just right, we made sure your affiliate links are cloaked and look like direct links to the target site or page. We’ve done this by using javascript to generate the links AFTER the page has been drawn. 😉

i.e. A visitor arrives at your site, the page gets drawn in their browser, and then javascript we’ve written reads all the text on the page and then adds the links in afterwards.

Is that cool or what? 😉

Since we released it, there’s never been a similar program released by anyone else, and I personally think that’s because it would be a gargantuan task by any developer to duplicate it.

It actually took us 18 months to get right.

We packed all sorts of cool features into this script, from faster, BETTER search of the ClickBank database than even ClickBank do (check it out for yourself if you don’t believe me), to Flash driven graphs generated from your click through stats.

AdSpurt normally sells for $47, but as I’m about to do a redesign and relaunch of the web site, I’m doing a subscribers only 48 hour special for just $20.

And to sweeten the deal, I’m also going to include a copy of the Instant Survey Script (ISS) for free (normally $27) for exactly the same reasons as AdSpurt.

Using ISS you can quickly and easily create surveys and find out exactly what it is your visitors are interested in.

This two for (less than the price of) one deal at just $20 for both scripts is running for 48 hours or until I hit 100 sales, and you can grab it at the $20 price on the link below.

***

Update: This offer is now CLOSED.

-Frank Haywood

Dec

2008

AdSpurt Now On Sale

AdSpurt is a self-hosted php program that you can use on all your sites to replace or complement the existing advertising in your internet business. However, I see it as a direct replacement in most cases. AdSpurt creates hover ads.

With little warning and absolutely no fanfare, AdSpurt is now on sale for $47.

However, don’t despair as I’m running a short term special offer – more on that in a moment.

Before I get to the details of that offer, the price of $47 for AdSpurt is a temporary one and the final target price is $97. And just like TicketDesk Pro, AdSpurt is being sold via ClickBank and I’ve set the commission at 75%.

This means that for every sale of AdSpurt you generate, you’ll make getting on for $35 in commission, paid every 2 weeks via ClickBank.

(By the way, in case you didn’t know, ClickBank will now pay you directly into your bank account, which is a great improvement if you ask me. You have to receive 3 paper cheques / checks first, but then you can opt to get paid directly. My experience says the money turns up in your account either the next day or the day after – this in itself is worth being amazed at here in the UK given the way the UK banks conduct themselves – poorly.)

Okay, the special offers.

#1 – Everyone who signed up for early warning for the release of AdSpurt will get it for $17 for roughly 48+ hours – let’s say until 9.00pm GMT (4.00pm EST) on Saturday 6th December.

#2 – Every subscriber to this blog gets the same duration but for $22 – I have to differentiate between those people who took the time to sign up and confirm to get AdSpurt, and I think an extra $5 won’t break anybody’s bank. See the password protected post below – your password will have arrived by email if you’re a subscriber to this blog.

After 9.00pm (GMT) on Saturday, the price goes up for both those groups to $27 until Tuesday 9th at 9.00pm (GMT) at which point the special offers are removed and AdSpurt becomes $47 for everyone until I put the price up.

If you go to the AdSpurt site now:-

http://www.AdSpurt.com/

you’ll see it’s on sale for $47, and clicking the link will take you to ClickBank to pay. But don’t buy via that link yet.

The special offer locations will be communicated to the AdSpurt sign up group via email, and subscribers to this blog can get their link via the previous post which is password protected. The password will have been sent to you via email.

If you’re an RSS subscriber, I’m sorry. The deal is for email subscribers only.

Here’s early warning. If you’re an RSS only subscriber, sign up to receive emails of blog posts in the sidebar at the top right on the home page now. I’ll shortly be releasing a monthly subscription service (hopefully in the next week) at 50% off to all my blog subscribers.

It’s very exciting, and something I’m sure you’ll want. More on that in another post.

All sales for AdSpurt (and also TicketDesk Pro) will be handled by a centralised install of SmartDD.

(And the upcoming subscription service TBA will be handled by a prototype of SmartDD that handles memberships and subscriptions.)

I’m very pleased to say that SmartDD v3 is now an extremely powerful script, and in my opinion is much better than many of the more expensive scripts out there and is set to soon get even better.

But then I would say that wouldn’t I? 😉

-Frank Haywood