internet business

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

Dec

2008

TicketDesk Pro Price Increase to $67

Just a short note to say that (just like I said it would be) TicketDesk Pro is now $67 instead of $47. I’ve also put the commission rate up to 75%, so if you don’t have an affiliate link set up on your installation, you’d better go set one up now.

The next price increase will be in the new year and will likely be to it’s true value of $97. We’ll then hold it at that price and hopefully release v2 some time in the spring with a small upgrade fee to existing customers, likely $17 for a short while (48 hours) and then $27 afterwards.

If you were one of the people wise enough to buy TicketDesk Pro in the nickel sale earlier this year, you know what a bargain you had. 🙂

It’s worth me pointing out that in line with all my products, this is not a “per-domain” licence. When you buy TicketDesk Pro you can install it on as many domains as you personally own.

This makes it ideal to be used as a niche help desk and is very useful when you’re working in several different niches.

When we release v2, we’ve got lots of great new features to add into it, including as many features as we’ve been asked for as we’ve actually come up with ourself. My personal favourite is the ability to charge for support cases, and its partner feature of being able to run a central support desk for other businesses transparently.

What I mean by that last one is you’ll be able to run a business providing support for other businesses, and the fact that you’re doing so won’t be obvious to the end customer raising a support ticket.

I really like that idea as there’s a strong business case and growing industry in exactly that market. As more and more people start up internet businesses and see them begin to grow, they eventually reach the stage where they want to farm out the mundane support requests like “where’s my download link?” etc.

I can’t absolutely promise we’ll do that for the first release of v2 as the list of new feature requests is getting bigger, but closer to the date I’ll keep you informed here and via the TicketDesk Pro customer mailing list.

-Frank Haywood

Nov

2008

How To Organise Your Daily Tasks

I’ve been having a few problems getting myself organised. Which is something that’s pretty important to your internet business.

The simple reason is I’ve been doing too many things at once and then dropping the ball.

The #1 culprit is distractions. I’ve cut out a lot of email and I only check it once a day now, apart from a couple of clean accounts that I’ve set up PopTray to notify me of when email comes in.

But that still left plenty of tasks on the table, many of which were 30 minute jobs, some were longer.

I first tried a handwritten note book, but that got completely disorganised in itself as I was bumping jobs up or down the list.

Then I tried a text document which was better as I could just delete things as they were completed, and it was easy to re-order tasks. However I sometimes missed a self-imposed deadline which didn’t really matter that much, but it was more of a problem when someone was waiting for me to do something.

Then I tried a wall chart and post-it notes. This was a method I’d used years ago when I had a job. It’s okay, but the notes kept falling off when the kids walked past.

But for the last month or so, I’ve been using the free version of HiTask.com.

This is a really cool little web based app that lets you organise your tasks, meetings, birthdays, etc. and also allows you to make notes and – a big plus – get reminders by on-screen alerts if you have the page open, or by email if you don’t. Use a clean email address in conjunction with PopTray to get an alert in your system tray.

It’s well worth checking out.

-Frank Haywood

Nov

2008

Send In The Bulldozers

Here’s an idea for you, something I’ve wanted to do myself but haven’t had the time to do it.

First, scour your hard drive and put together a mega package of products, something like the subscriber offer I make to everybody when they sign up to my blog notify list.

Create a regular sales page for the mega-package at $47 or $67. Next, create a nickel sale (I’m assuming you have the Nickel Script) for the same deal, in a sub-directory of the site, and keep a local copy of the entire set up on your PC to use as a template that you can use to quickly upload.

On the download page, put a sign up form and use the words “To register your purchase, enter your name and email address in the boxes below. This is currently the only way I can keep you informed of updates to this package.”

95% of people will signup after their purchase, and this will build your mailing list.

Finally, write to other marketers offering to set the sale up with their name as the directory, and with their PayPal address in the config so that they get 100% of the sale paid directly into their PayPal account.

e.g. http://wwwYOURMEGAPACKAGEDOMAINHERE.com/johnsmith/

Explain that nickel sales are dynamite and that you will start it at $0.07 and increase the price by 5 cents with each sale. Give them 2 carefully worded emails that they can send to their lists to warm them up before the sale, and a 3rd email to give them the link.

If they make a typical 300 sales, the final price will be $15.07 and they will make $2,263.50 in about a day.

No average marketer (non-guru) in the IM niche is going to refuse that as long as they haven’t already done too many similar offers to their lists. (I think I may have done too many recently, and I’m trying to rectify that…)

You will have nearly 300 brand new buyers on your mailing list per JV partner.

Have a game plan to offer them some useful freebies, maybe a video or two and a report you’ve created yourself, as well as some useful blog posts to enamour them with you.

Then after you’ve given them some very useful and valuable free info, send them an email to a product you’re promoting to make your money from the deal. Ideally, it would be a product that you’ve created of course, but if you’re in a hurry you can promote someone else’s.

Make sure it’s a good one!

Set all this up as an autoresponder series.

Then all you need do is find people who are willing to promote the deal for you, one at a time. Set up a brand new directory for each marketer, and leave it in place permanently.

You now have a system you can just plug in and run. This method of running a promotion with one JV partner at a time is called a bulldozer launch, and is an immensely powerful way of building a list (your list is your internet business), and making some back end money yourself.

-Frank Haywood

P.S. If anybody wants to do something like this with me for the Nickel Script itself, just raise a support ticket on my help desk at http://www.Vendiva.com/support/ in the “Personal Message” department.

Nov

2008

Are You Getting Ready For The Christmas Sales Rush?

I am. And I’m getting a little bit excited as I intend to earn a few commission payments from people who are buying their Christmas gifts online.

I’ve just purchased something that looks like it holds great promise, and I’ve already taken my first steps with it. The principle is both obvious, simple, and utterly brilliant.

Ideally I’d like to be able to test it all out before I told you about it, but really it’s just too late in the day to do so.

But never fear. I’ve spent some time looking over it all (just skimming so far), and I realise that no matter when this is implemented, if you follow the process, then it will work. I have no doubt about that.

The reason I have no doubt is because I did have doubts, and so I spent about 3 hours today looking at a few of the example sites, and examining their rankings and incoming links.

What I’ve found has made me very excited. These sites are ranking on page 1 of Google with just a few incoming links purely because they have ZERO competition.

The reason they have no competition is because it looks like this market has been almost completely overlooked.

And because it’s largely untapped (oh joy) is why I’m getting really worked up about the potential to earn some FAT commission cheques earned in the run up to Christmas.

So tomorrow I’m putting aside 4 hours to put together my first site based on the methods I’ve been learning about. This will include market research, domain registration, page optimisation, the lot. I may not bother with PPC initially until I know the site is converting using just free traffic.

I know that my next site should take me about an hour or so less, and that eventually I reckon I can get it down to under 2 hours.

You can bet that once I have the one up, it’s already pencilled into my plan to add two per day going all the way up to Christmas. If I can teach my 11 year old how to put them up, then I’ll have him doing them too, and also my wife.

In fact why stop at Christmas?

I can see that the methodology behind this is a true money earner all the year round. I believe without a shadow of a doubt that this will work, but I want to get the first site or two up before I give you any more detail about it.

If you’re not excited yourself, if you can’t feel my enthusiasm for this already, then you must be as jaded as I am.

Because… I was very wary after purchase, thinking I was buying yet another piece of junk. (We’ve all done it, right?)

This is far, far from it and I honestly wish I’d come up with this myself. I have a few experiments running at the moment, but this is better than anything I’ve come up with! Having said that, I know I can use a few of these methods in my own exercises too.

Cracking stuff.

Give me a day or two, and I’ll let you know how I’m getting on.

-Frank Haywood