I’ve just had a few weeks of things going wrong.

I launched a rather nice membership product/service recently – that’s going well – and after some of the feedback I got I decided to update the WordPress plugin that runs the service. Adding the couple of extra features that people wanted seemed a good idea.

Well, it would have been if it hadn’t taken over 3 weeks instead of a few days, as I originally anticipated. I made the mistake of promising timescales that just didn’t happen – bad idea. I don’t code WordPress plugins myself so the best I can do is take the word of developers giving me timescales. Unfortunately, they sometimes give you optimistic timescales.

Lesson #1: Until it’s in my hands and working, a new piece of software is not finished and ‘due dates’ are not set in stone. Be honest about that and expect hiccups. Developers are only human and they can’t always know how long something will take.

Lesson #1a: You can’t promise something that isn’t 100% within your own control. I can’t really promise something that somebody else is doing. I can give an estimated date, but unless I’m the one doing the work, I have to build in some hiccup time.

What made it worse is that one developer disappeared on me so I had to find a replacement fast. The replacement made all the right noises and understood my deadline and promised the work was easy enough to complete on time. Then he told me he couldn’t do it at all, the day after it was due….

Lesson #2: Sometimes, people will say anything to get the job – a promise is not the same as the delivery of that promise.  Measure by delivery, not the intensity of the promise.

So what to do? Once bitten, twice shy, right? Twice bitten, well that’s really shy! How about employing 2 different developers at the same time to make sure one of them comes through? Sounds like a good safety net to me.

Except if they both deliver the code you have to spend time testing both sets – it takes twice as long. Multiple coders may be a good idea if you’re sending a space shuttle up into space, but for a simple WordPress plugin modification I think it’s overkill.

Lesson #3: Don’t overcomplicate something because it’s gone wrong in the past. Be realistic about why it went wrong instead.

I recently lost internet connection for a couple of days and decided to work at my brother’s house. I’ve now realized that when I bought a desktop machine recently, to replace my dead laptop, it wasn’t exactly something I could drag around with me. It didn’t seem like a big deal since I have a couple of older laptops I could use.

Or I did, until my laptops decided not to play. I’ve had 3 separate laptops die on me – the last one on the day I took it to my brother’s house to use his wifi. In fairness they are all old machines and they were backup to the backup, so they were overdue for retirement.

Lesson #4: My desktop machine is fast and cool, but it relies on my internet connection. If that goes down I can’t work unless I have a reliable machine I can actually take where the wifi is. So I need a new backup laptop now – I’m sure my wife thinks that’s just an excuse to get a cool new toy, but I don’t want to be without the means of doing what I need to do ever again – at least as far as I can avoid it.

Once I had the updated plugin (which now works great) I tested it and that took a fair chunk of time. That’s ok. I then realized that I could speed up the production of the content for my service if I used a slightly different technique. Cue another day of testing.

The new technique I use works and it works really, really well. I estimate it will now save me about a day every month which is pretty cool. Better yet I can use it on other things I have planned so I’ll get extra mileage out of it.

Lesson #5: Sometimes it’s worth a little bit of extra time now to save time repeatedly in the future. I think some people call that “sharpening the saw”.

What’s the end result of this?

• I have a working plugin which is designed in a more flexible way for any future updates.
• I have a method for preparing content that eliminates drudgery and minimizes chances of mistakes
• I know of a couple of developers not to rely on!
• I’m aware of a weakness in my setup that I can now take care of

I can’t pretend it’s been fun – the stress of trying to get what I felt was a simple change done in a timely way for the members is something I’d rather avoid. I don’t like the feeling of letting them down, making them wait for their update.

I have, however, spotted ways to guard against such things in the future. I’m sure other things will crop up, but at least I have some coping strategies for these ones.

So what’s the point of this post? It occurs to me that some of you must hit roadblocks when you’re trying to set up internet income streams. How many of you don’t manage to break through those roadblocks? How many of you could break through those roadblocks if you kept going?

That’s the point, I think. Keep going. If an obstacle comes up then keep going, until you’ve gone round it, or removed it, or ignored it – whatever you need to do to get to the next checkpoint.

Then do the same with the next obstacle. I sometimes think they’re just a way for life to check whether we’re really serious about doing something!

So, do you have any roadblocks you haven’t managed to conquer yet? Add your comment and let me know.

Related posts:

1. Make your blog posts more flexible

Just think of how much money is made buying and selling collectable comics that have a face value of a few cents. That’s pretty niche, but it’s still big business. Conventions exist to cater for the demand and a whole chunk of cash changes hands just in that one tiny area.

Think of eBay – that started out, so the story goes, as a way for the founder’s girlfriend to swap Pez sweet dispensers!

Well niche blogs are really just the same idea, but in the blogging world. It relates to blogs which have a fixed area of focus. It could be in the health area, or in an even narrower niche like high blood pressure. These are just examples, the actual niches can be anything. If a few people are interested in it, then yes, it’s a niche. So ‘learn to speak Klingon’ is definitely a niche (and bigger than you may think).

So just go out and set up a niche blog and you’ll be able to start attracting visitors to that blog. Easy, right? Well, not if you’re like most people (me included) and you just don’t like the time and effort it takes to produce the content. Hey, the internet is supposed to be about easy money, right? Hard work is supposed to be a thing of the past.

What if you really could start a niche blog the easy way? With quality content delivered for you. That would be quite a nice way to build up a blog real estate empire. There are people out there selling such blogs already. All you have to do is pay your money, rewrite the content and then… wait, do what? Rewrite the content yourself? More work.

Ok, so here’s the point of the post. I’ve just launched my niche blog building service. It builds niche blogs, so far so same as everyone else. What my service does that’s special is give each member their own version of the content. You’re not going to get exactly the same content as 500 other people. The full details are at the sales page at instantblogwizard.com

I’ve sent an offer to all my subscribers – a total of 7 of them will get it completely free. The first 5 who comment here and tell me how much the opening offer saving is get it for nothing (well I want you to at least take a look at the sales page!). I’m then keeping 2 copies back for later commenters, so that anyone in a different timezone still has a fair chance. I will decide which 2 commenters get the free copies.

UPDATE: As at 16:30 GMT 12th March the 5 free copies have been allocated. There are 2 more copies available and if there are more qualifying comments than that I’ll pick the 2 commenters who I think should have the free copies. I’ll leave the comments open for a while to give people chance to make their comment and get a free copy of the system.

UPDATE: As at 22:11 GMT 9th March the first 3 free copies have already been allocated.

Please note, if you’re not already on my subscriber list when you make the comment you will not qualify for a free copy – so sign up now if you haven’t already done so. You can do that over on the right of the page.

Related posts:

1. Quick Thank You
2. Link Building
3. Smart DD

Of course I get a lot of spam, as we all do, but I filter better than 90% of it before it hits my email client. I still end up with thousands of emails building up (sales records, receipts, passwords, that kind of thing).

I use Mozilla Thunderbird, which is free and it’s great, but if you have a lot of accounts in it and lots of incoming email, it does slow down. Plus, who wants to keep thousands of emails in front of them all day long? You only need the ones you need and the rest should be filed somewhere neat and orderly.

It occurred to me that many of you might be in the same boat and looking for a nice, simple solution.

There’s a free program called MailStore Home, which addresses the issue of email bloat perfectly. I don’t really know why the creators of the application give the personal use version away for free, because I can’t imagine that many people would upgrade to the Server version for organizations. But I’m glad they do give it away and I find it a tremendously useful resource.

You can archive all your emails, even from several different sources, into MailStore Home, where it’s kept safe in a database for as long as you want. You can also burn archives to disc if they get too big. Best of all is the facility to search through the entire database (reasonably) quickly, searching for any keyword. You might remember that you got an email with Snagit licence codes, as I did when installing Snagit to capture some images for this post – but what if you can’t remember when you got it, or from whom? No problem.

One quick search later, using the keyword ’snagit’ and MailStore Home had found the relevant emails for me. Previously I’ve made notes of licence numbers, printing off the original purchase email, but MailStore Home is much neater and easier.

You can see the application in the images here.

Main application panel

Search page

Results appear in the left column

Displaying the licence code

You can download a free copy over at Mailstore.com and you’ll find it works with most popular email clients, including Gmail, which is very handy. If you receive a lot of email and want to keep it safe, MailStore Home is a good utitility for doing just that.

Quick tip: create a couple of folders for emails from your favorite marketers. As you archive the emails you’ll have a great library of their campaigns. If you go back from time to time and study what they do and how they do it, you’ll see some regular patterns emerging. If you then study those patterns you’ll see what the marketers do that they don’t tell you about. A lot of marketers keep a few tricks up their sleeves, but in using them they leave a trail that you can follow. That trail is easier to see when you can look back through a particular folder of messages and see how each one leads to the next.

Archiving those folders means you can look back for inspiration at any time. You can even, if you want to, analyze marketing techniques used at different times of year. If big marketers are using a particular technique every summer for example, or at the start of the winter, there’s likely to be a very good reason for it.

All in all, MailStore Home is a handly little tool and available for free.

Related posts:

1. Hot Copy Product Review
2. Do Google obey TOS?
3. Marketing Scams

Both of them are ‘big’ products, with a (normally) high price tag. And for most people they are probably more than you need to get started. But they have both been offered for ‘free’ and I’ve downloaded my copies of both applications. Even if it’s going to be a little while before you’re ready to use them, since they were free you’d have done well to get a copy, ready for the future. Whether you should use them immediately is a different question.

The Butterfly Marketing launch suffered severe server problems (try saying that fast!). The Delavo launch was smoother, but kept getting delayed. Now I have both scripts, what have I done with them?

Well, with BFM I’ve done nothing yet. The whole launch issue thing put me off. It was so problematic it makes me wonder how the software will perform. My instinct is to let the other launch attendees do some site building and see how they get on. If they hit problems, someone will find a solution, which I can benefit from later.

Delavo, however, I’ve installed on a new domain and I’ve added my first product to it. It’s live right now and if you want to have a look – or better still, make a purchase – just visit sublimeproductsmarketing.com. There’s a great set of squeeze templates with audio for sale as the first product – price is pretty good too.

I have to say that the Delavo installation went pretty smoothly. I’ve installed a lot of scripts over the years so I have a lot of experience, but even so, I think it’s a pretty decent install. The power of the basic package is pretty good. It’s not ‘all singing and all dancing’, as I’ll cover later, but it’s a powerful tool for anyone who wants to centralize their marketing operations.

The one thing that some people are already complaining about is the fact that you need to buy a bunch of plugins to get the basic Delavo install up to the full power of Fantasos. A lot of the juicier facilities within Delavo come courtesy of plugins, so you might end up spending a bit of money to upgrade it. Currently that figure is just under $1,000 – if you act fast.

Not everyone will need all the plugins – I certainly don’t, for example. And the basic package is still very capable. It’s also going to be possible to buy individual plugins one at a time. So if I need a facility later, the $97, or whatever they’ll be charging, will be a relatively small price to pay.

In reviewing these packages I can see that they’ve both gone for the ‘do almost everything you can think of’ philosophy. There’s pretty much nothing, one way or another, you can’t do with them. But I’m reminded of what happens to a very large number of Swiss Army Knives: they get left in drawers to go rusty.

What I believe is important for most people, most of the time, is to find a tool that fits and get skilled in using it. Whether that tool is the 7 Dollar Secrets, DL Guard, BFM, or Delavo, it’s really all about what you do with it and not always about how powerful it is. And the simpler tools are often a good way to learn, before progressing to the meatier products.

None of this applies to you if you’re already an experienced marketer, using high end software solutions. But when it comes time to advise a beginner, it’s not always the best thing to recommend what we use ourselves. A beginner may just need something very different.

For me, therefore, I wouldn’t recommend any beginner to jump in with BFM or Delavo. They’d have to learn too much. When many beginners don’t even know what the clipboard is – or even what webhosting means – learning about scripts like those is just too much.

Related posts:

1. Butterfly Marketing
2. Butterfly Marketing Campaign
3. Butterfly Marketing Manuscript

So, I did what I’d advised my subscribers to do and I went to the site when I got the early notification. Credit card in hand, I was ready to push whatever purchase button was on there.

Except I couldn’t.

The site broke down within a couple of minutes of opening. In fact it was so bad at one point that Mike Filsaime had to publicly ask his visitors to stop trying to place orders because his technicians couldn’t even login into the server to fix it.

Bit of a public mess. And as you might imagine a lot of people got angry that they had to wait, or that they might not get a copy.

About 6 hours later I got my copy so I’m now good to go. Great. But a lot of people are still feeling annoyed. Personally, I think they should be learning from the whole experience, both the good points and the bad points.

Let me break down what I saw as good and bad:

Good:

• Very effective use of affiliates to generate lots of interest
• Extremely high value offer
• Regular updates as to how it was going
• Prizes for the affiliates that meant even newbies had a shot at a prize
• Very clear disclosure that there would be a continuity element
• Honest admissions that their newsletter wasn’t so good before
• Highly persuasive case study testimonials

Bad:

• Not expecting a lot of people to be ordering at once. Come on! Over 45,000 people pre-registered for early access! Isn’t that a bit of a clue?
• Not adequately testing that their site would cope with high numbers of people ordering at once, as opposed to viewing at once.
• Using what appeared to be poor code, not optimized for transaction speed (at least according to someone even more techie than I am)
• Having no backup server/site/order button ready to go ‘just in case’

Not such a big list of things that went wrong, is it?

I suspect most of us are not going to have 45,000 people chomping at the bit for one of our product launches, but it shows what can go wrong. Now of the items I’ve listed as going wrong, all but the first one should have been solved by the technical guys on Mike’s team. The first one, though, is something any of us could contemplate.

It doesn’t require technical knowledge, just a bit of forethought. The second item on the list should have been done – testing of a web site is extremely important. In Mike’s case he’s got a full team of people who could have helped with that and he’s got programmers who could have created ’stress’ tests to simulate a worst-case scenario.

At least they kept people informed as best they could on their Ustream video, although it was a little galling to see them sitting there at times, looking like they weren’t even breaking a sweat to get the thing fixed.

I suppose what it translates into for the average marketer is that anyone can get it wrong, but not everyone has the resources to put it right the way Mike has done. Offering to have extra copies of the product made for anyone who missed out costs hard cash.

And don’t expect too much sympathy from a large crowd if you’ve got it wrong. There were people on the Ustream chatrooms who were very aggressive.

For my own part I apologize profusely if you had wasted time waiting for this to work as a result of my recommendation. Sorry.

I hope you managed to get your copy. If not, there’s still a bit of time left since he’s effectively reset the clock and if you order today you should be able to get your copy at Butterfly Marketing.

Related posts:

1. Butterfly Marketing Manuscript
2. Butterfly Marketing
3. Butterfly Marketing Campaign

I’ve received various emails from people promoting it. Indeed, I’m promoting it myself, although hopefully without pushing it in your face. I’ve also received emails from someone who is launching a product that’s ’similar’ to BFM. It’s similar in the sense that it handles product sales, affiliates, memberships – the whole shooting match.

The other product looks good. I intend to get a copy, if I can. I like to collect these things as much to learn from them as to use them and there’s always the chance that one of them will turn out to be the ideal fit for what you want to do. It’s like trying on several jackets to see which fit best and which look good…

The point of this post is to mention a pre-emptive tactic used by the other marketer. He clearly knows he’s up against BFM and he also knows that the whole word and his dog has been emailed about it. So he’s referred to it obliquely and his advertising emails ask his subscribers whether they’d rather buy something that’s a couple of years old (Butterfly Marketing), or something brand new for 2009 (his product).

Quite a provocative question, isn’t it? Which would you rather have? Something old, tired and with a catch, or something brand new with no catch?

That’s a marketing technique that’s as old as the hills. Ask a loaded question that can only be answered one way and guess which answer you’ll get? Everyone is going to prefer something without the catch.

The power of the question is in putting forward two views as if they are given facts. They’re not facts, they’re marketing speak. It’s interesting especially because this marketer is leveraging all the buzz about Butterfly Marketing to plant a little seed of doubt in his readers’ minds. Here’s an alternative way to look at the same ‘facts’:

Would you rather put your entire business in a script that’s brand new and ‘untested’ in the real world, or would you rather use a solid, mature product used by a host of top marketers every day to run their multi-million dollar businesses?

If the question was asked that way, what would be the more likely answer? Hmm, might be different than the other question.

If you take away anything from this post, please take away this: when somebody asks you a question and they’re trying to sell you something, the question is frequently loaded. Not always, but enough to make it important to ask yourself why that particular question is being asked.

Related posts:

1. Butterfly Marketing
2. Butterfly Marketing Campaign
3. Butterfly Marketing Meltdown

This campaign, however, is different and I say that as someone who had an online disagreement with Mike Filsaime in the past. He’s going to be giving away an updated copy of his Butterfly Marketing home study course, the updated manual and the 2.0 version of the software. The Butterfly Marketing scripts have been selling for a genuine $1,997 and he’s decided to give the latest version away. There are a couple of conditions, as you might imagine.

1. There are only 5,000 copies – sounds a lot, but there’ll be a lot of interest in this
2. You have to pay for shipping and handling ($30-$40, depends where you live)
3. You have to take out a subscription to his print newsletter
4. You have to be quick enough to get one of the 5,000 slots – there’s a way to do that

The Butterfly Marketing script is a powerful solution to running an internet marketing empire – or just a single site. It’s probably overkill for most people with a simple salespage site, but for anyone who wants to take their online marketing to another level it offers features to make you drool.

When it first came out I couldn’t afford it, so I used cheap solutions. That’s actually how I got started, using the scripts from the $7 Secrets – which cost $7. I still use them for some projects, together with other software such as DL Guard. I’ll admit it – I like collecting software and I like installing stuff. I’m a little bit of a geek when it comes to that.

But $1,997 was way out of my reach back then. Well, on 24th March at 1pm EST, it’s expected that many tens of thousands of people are going to queue to get chance to own a copy of the complete Butterfly Marketing package, genuinely worth $1,997. Mike reckons only 1 in 15 in that queue will get the chance.

I won’t be in that massive queue. I’m getting in ahead of everyone else 1 hour early.

I signed up for the pre-notification list, so I get a head start on the public. I don’t intend to miss out on this because it’s too good a deal to miss. As for the newsletter, although you have to sign up to get the software, you can cancel at any time so there’s no issue there.

There’s a way you can get in early too.

If you’ve come to this post as a result of one of my newsletter emails, you’ll know that I’m making an offer to anyone who signs up through my link and gets a copy of the software. You’ll also know that the offer takes away any technical know-how issues that might make you hesitate to get such a powerful software solution. I’m not repeating the offer here because, frankly, I couldn’t cope if thousands of people take me up on it.

For anyone who wants to learn more about how to get a $1,997 software and home study course for the cost of shipping, click here now.

P.S. When you visit that page and sign up for pre-notification you’ll get an hour head start on everyone else too. And after sign-up you’ll also get to see some case study videos of what other people have achieved with this software. My favorite story is of Jordan Hall, who is a young man – he’s practically a kid – who’s made a lot of money using this software. I urge you to watch his video after you sign up for pre-notification. There are lessons in there for everyone who pays attention.

P.P.S. You should watch this campaign just for the stunning lessons it gives in marketing a product and adding value upon value to make it almost irresistible. If you took the hidden lessons just from this one campaign and added some of them to your own marketing, you’d likely increase your results significantly. I speak as someone who’s had an online argument with Mike Filsaime in the past. This campaign is superbly well executed and I’ll be incorporating some of the lessons I’ve discovered in it, into my own campaigns in future.

Related posts:

1. Butterfly Marketing
2. Butterfly Marketing Manuscript
3. Butterfly Marketing Meltdown

I’ve just received an e-mail from a marketer whose products I buy on a regular basis.

His products are software tools which are of value for Internet marketers. The particular product he’s promoting in this e-mail is one called SmartDD V3. under normal circumstances I would have sent out a promotional e-mail myself, as an affiliate, but Frank is restricting the sale to 50 units in total and he has already e-mailed his subscriber base so I don’t expect any units to be left by the time this post is published. You can, however, see the post, if you wish, at this address: www.vendiva.com/xxx

Sorry! Frank’s pulled the page as at 12th March.

If the page is still there I would certainly recommend that you pick up a copy at this discounted price, particularly because version 4 is due to be released fairly soon and Frank’s usual tactic is to give free upgrades, or at the very least to give an extremely heavily discounted price for the upgrade. Version 4 will have full membership capabilities, which meansyou can use it for selling on eBay, running a shopping cart,protecting your digital downloads, running a physical product (CD/DVD) business and running a recurring income membership site. To call it full-featured is an understatement.

I seem to collect software scripts like most people collect collectable items and I have probably five or six membership scripts, which range in price from free to over $1000. Frank’s membership script is one I have been looking forward to, but I had no idea what sort of features would be in it. Well, he’s now let the cat out of the bag by mentioning that he is already using the script himself on a particular membership site he runs. I am a member of that site so now I know how it operates. Having seen it in action and used it as a member I’m excited at the prospect of getting my hands on the script.

For anyone who is thinking about running an online business, whether you intend to sell digital products, physical CD/DVDs, or memberships, Smart DD V4 will be an exciting script to help you do it more easily and efficiently. I’d strongly recommend you get hold of a copy of it, even if you have to pay full price for it. And if you can get hold of a copy of Version 3 at the discounted price of just $27 it’s a steal. It might already have sold out, but take a look here, just in case it hasn’t.

By the way, there’s an upsell one-time-offer after you buy. He’s offering Ticket Deskpro and Adspurt for $20. I have both them of them (you can see TicketDesk Pro in action at my support desk) and I’d recommend getting them while they’re cheap, too. Adspurt in particular is a clever way to make more money by automatically linking to keywords in your site. If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog it’s ideal for monetizing content you might otherwise not make a penny on. If you use any kind of auto-building on your blogs (I may have an announcement on that myself in the next few days) it’s ideal for adding to your revenue easily, quickly and on auto-pilot. If I sound like a fan of Frank’s products, it’s because I am. I’ve paid real money for them and I use them myself, so I know how they work.

And they do work!

P.S. By the time this is published there’s a serious chance that the 50 discounted copies will be sold out, but I thought I’m mention it just in case anyone gets chance to pick one up. If you miss out, I apologize in advance! I wanted to let everyone know as soon as I could, but 50 copies is very limited. Smart DD is also much more powerful than the DiscMojo software I mentioned yesterday, but you know what? Since DiscMojo is currently free it’s worth getting hold of a copy anyway. It never hurts to have more than one tool in your toolbag.

Related posts:

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I’ve had an experience recently that has made me re-define the whole question of excellent customer service.

A marketer whose products I normally buy sent out a mailer promoting a sale of a product I already bought from him. He also hinted that there was a great product available as an OTO at a stunning price. Naturally I was curious because he didn’t mention what the offer was. The only way to find out was to buy the front-end offer.

His products have always proved worth having. I think I have them all now, so I didn’t need the front-end product again, but it was worth it to me to find out what his OTO was. Turned out it really was a superb offer on a piece of software that can

automate most of your internet marketing, including integration with Kunaki, if you want to offer CD or DVD products.

Unfortunately for me, I had bought the very same product some months before. It’s an unlimited license so I don’t need a second copy. Frankly, for me, it was worth the $7 on the front-end product to find out what the OTO was. In fact I already own and use the OTO software to sell physical CDs that give me access to a whole different marketplace. It works like a dream and quite honestly I just forget it’s there.

Here’s where the re-definition of customer service comes in. I got an email from the marketer a while later. He asked me whether I wanted a refund since I already had a licence to the software. How’s that for good customer service? He pro-actively checked with me to see whether there I had made some mistake and offered to rectify it.

There are 2 things going on here that are important. The first is that his offers are genuine offers so I had no hesitation in buying to find out about that famous OTO. I knew it would be something great and I knew it would be a great price. On both counts I was right.

The second is that  in going the extra mile with me, by contacting me about a possible refund, he’s just virtually guaranteed I’ll continue to buy everything he puts out. I might as well give him the password to my PayPal account and tell him to just charge it whenever he launches a product!

There were several steps employed to gain my custom and – more importantly – my word of mouth advertising.

1. Offer good, solid products
2. Ask a fair price
3. Deliver what you say you will
4. Pique the customer’s interest
5. Make a limited offer genuinely limited. If it’s just a ploy, people see through it and don’t like it. Ever seen those phoney “buy before midnight” messages on those cheesy salespages?

Because he’s given me good value and good products I’m giving my friend something valuable in return – word-of-mouth recommendation. He has a limited time offer on a great Nickel Script, just $7. It’s like the $7 Secrets scripts with a boost and when you’ve bought that you get the chance to buy an incredibly powerful internet marketing script. I’ll tell you now that the offer price is just $20, way below market value.

If anyone buys from my link here I’ll offer free installation of the OTO software on 1 domain. Check out the deal from Frank Haywood now.

, customer service

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1. Give It Away
2. Smart DD
3. Giveaway Fever

It’s a script that increases the price after each sale so it’s useful for putting a little bit of time pressure on a potential customer. Especially when, as in this case, I’m offering a valuable bonus in its own right. Because it’s a valuable package I don’t want it to sit there forever so I’m limiting the sales.

So my hosting account Cpanel told me I don’t have enough disk space to work on the database.

Not right – I have plenty of disk space. There’s an issue with the hosting server.

I’ve spoken to my hosting company and they can’t do anything immediately. They’re a good company, so I expect they’ll have this fixed well inside 24 hours (very well inside), but it’s now put my plans on hold because I can’t set up the script.

Good job I hadn’t left it to the last minute. I think it’s always a good idea to build in a bit of downtime when you’re planning something. You never know when you might need it.

So I’ll switch to a product I’ll be launching next week and spend my time productively on that, instead.

It actually took my hosting company more than 24 hours to fix the problem. The first time round the live service agent had to pass on the details to the more technical support team and didn’t pass on all the information I had provided about the problem.

End result: they had to start asking me what the problem was all over, but this time by email. The service tech. who handled the issues also didn’t seem to understand, despite being told exactly what the issue was. He clearly didn’t read the information I had provided him, because he tried to replicate the problem by doing something totally different and told me I had plenty of space.  That was not the actual issue.

Anyway, it’s resolved itself now and I believe it was a temporary issue with the hosting company’s own machines, rather than my bit of space that I rent from them. Fortunately I’ve spread my various sites around different hosting companies so if a major problem occurred with any one of them I wouldn’t be wiped out.

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That opens up a number of possibilities for what you can do in your blog posts. I’ll be installing it later today and putting it through its paces. Since I have a number of scripts, php and javascript, from Robert Plank,  I’d like to try them out on my blog.

You can read the full details about the plugin and download it from here: automateyourbusiness.com

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Well, you can get a free backlink on a PR4 directory at the moment over at scskl.org

Gobala Krishan over at easywordpress.com has an interesting post about an automated directory submitter software and how to cut out some of the time it takes to work through 2000 directories.

I won’t repeat the full post here, but it’s well worth a read and he gives you the link to download the free software. You can read his post here.

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Don, the developer who’s bought it, has plans to fix the current bugs and release an updated version in the next week or so. It will be well worth downloading once it’s released.

He’s also told me he has several other plans to extend the product and increase its shelf life. It’s already quite a capable script, but over time it should have a few nice features added to it.

One thing I’ve seen over the last 6 or 7 months is just how few people take the time to read the manual. Don’s pushing for customers to look at the existing wealth of information that should solve most problems. Seems like a sensible idea to me.

For anyone who doesn’t want to learn how to install, get in touch and I can install it for you.

I have a similar product myself which I haven’t yet started to promote, but it will be relaunched in the next few weeks. I’m undecided whether to stick with the original name of Profit Twister, or change it. We’ll see.

If anyone’s interested in promoting it as an affiliate when I launch, just get in touch and I’ll give you more details of the commission structure.

Tags: 7dollar secrets, Jon Leger, Profit Twister, digital download delivery

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Seems a strange thing, to suggest that you can make a ton of money by giving away what you’re selling. But we’re already familiar with trial-size bottles of shampoo, scent, toothpaste. And think about the food court in some shopping malls: as you walk around you’re often confronted with the invitation to try a free sample of the food.

The food thing is a good example. You try one of the tasty snacks on offer and if you like the taste of it there’s a pretty good chance you’ll either get something then, or remember for next time that you liked the taste. That’s a clear example of giving something away and actually gaining paying customers.

But in that example, notice that you only get a taste – not the full dish. It leaves you wanting more.

Computer magazines are very hot on giving free software away these days too. You usually get an earlier version of software, or a time limited demo, and you get the chance to put the application through its paces and see if it’s for you. If it is and you’re tempted by the upgrade offer, voila!, you become a new customer.

Well, the same thing is becoming big business in the online world too. But up until now managing a giveaway promotion has been pretty hard to do. What with co-ordinating all the partners who get involved and listing the products available.

I just bought some software to automate it all for me. I’ll be doing a JV giveaway event in the near future and it makes no sense to have to do everything manually. Why re-invent the wheel, right?

So I bought Giveaway Manager from Brad Smith.  It’s currently on offer and the price is due to go up in the next day, so if you want to save a chunk of change and get a product that could cause your business to go viral, now’s the time to jump right in.

And watch this space for my own Giveaway event!

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And that, which increases traffic, means more money in the bank.

Producing a site map can be done by hand – if you have the time. Or you can use one of the many tools available. Some are paid and some are free. I discovered a very flexible free one today and wanted to share it with you here.

Visit GSiteCrawler here.

You’ll see it’s a free download, but the author gives you the opportunity to make a donation. If you use it wisely this little program should result in more visitors to your site. With the extra money you make, why not send him a small donation?

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