I recently took part in the promotions for Butterfly Marketing and Delavo, the successor to Fantasos. Fantasos itself was the successor to JV1.

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
4. Butterfly Marketing Meltdown
5. Viral Marketing – Does It Work?