Other Recent Articles
What happens when you’re ill?
I’ve been very quiet recently, for a number of reasons. A couple of illnesses, a house move, power outages and then being flooded. All great fun in the overall scheme of life – well it is when you look back on it years later, at least!
But it’s rather disruptive to a good work cycle so it’s pushed back several things I’ve been planning. And as many of you will know, catching up is sometimes not easy.
Anyway, I’m just putting the finishing touches to a new product. It’s an automatic niche
Hot Copy Product Review
I’ve just received my copy of a new course on sales copywriting.
For most of us, sales copy is the one thing that will make a huge difference to our revenues. You can have a great product, you can have traffic and a great looking site, but if your sales copy doesn’t convert visitors into customers, you’re throwing money away – every visit. So it makes sense that anything that can help us to achieve more sales with good copy is definitely a good thing!
Here’s the problem: most of us aren’t very good copyrwriters. There are lots of reasons for that. So some marketers turn to other people to write the copy for them. And that costs. If you get someone to do it for $500 you got a bargain. If you’re launching a serious product it might cost you thousands. That’s why I’m interested to see whether this $97 video course lives up to its own sales copy, which is very persuasive. Then again, it wouldn’t be much of an advert if their own copy was no good, would it!
Hot Copy Flowchart
HotCopy Downloads!
The whole product is massive. Some of the individual videos are 179 mb in size – and that’s when they’re zipped!
It will take me a little while to go through the whole course, but I’m especially interested because I have a couple of product launches coming up in a week or so. I’ll be seeing how this course can help me with those.
Once I’ve finished the whole course I’ll update this post with a full review, warts and all.
I should disclose here that one of the course marketers is a personal friend, but we know each other well enough that he’ll expect me to say what I think of this course, bad or good. If it’s bad, I’ll tell you and of course it’s good I’ll be very happy to tell you that too.
UPDATE 3rd November 2009: Although the rest of this review is
Increase Your PPC Conversions
I’ve just seen a new product launched which claims to help increase your conversions if you run PPC campaigns. Actually, it’s not limited to just PPC, it’s for landing and sales pages of almost any kind.
The kicker is that it’s a WordPress theme which doesn’t look anything like WordPress. It’s designed for creating single pages that look like standalone sales pages, or landing pages. There’s none of the usual ‘furniture’ that you get on blogs, so there’s nothing to take you off the page itself. No distractions = more sales, so the theory goes.
It’s a sound theory and as far as the product goes it’s not badly priced at $47. You can take a look at it by clicking here.
Before you do though, I should tell you that it’s relatively easy to create a WordPress theme that does this. Easy, that is, if you already know how to do it. If you don’t know how, it’s as clear as mud.
I’d like to gauge the level of interest for such a specialized theme, because if there’s enough interest I’ll create one and sell it for considerably cheaper than $47!
So how could you use such a theme?
- Have a separate and unique landing page for every product you promote
- Control all your landing pages within your WordPress dashboard
- Use suitable keyword URLs for your pages – no more hunting for keyword domains
- Avoid ‘leakage’ – once a visitor lands on your page there’s nothing else to take them off it
- Use the scheduled post feature of WordPress to change the main “landing page” for your site every week – you could offer a special deal that lasts one week and then sit back and watch as it updates itself. You’re not limited to weekly deals – you could have a different deal every day of the year, if you wanted to. You could even have different deals hourly on special days, like 4th July! Keep your visitors coming back for more!
- Create single page product review ‘mini sites’ around a central topic. You can link them if you choose, or leave them unlinked and separate.
If you’re interested in acquiring such a theme please leave a comment here.
If there’s enough interest, I’ll create the theme and offer it for sale at $17. For anyone who leaves a comment here you can have it for just $7.
So to recap: if there’s enough interest in having such a theme I’ll create one especially and for anyone who comments on this specific post you can have a copy for:
$7
UPDATE 17 July 2009: I’ve created the theme and it’s sold well at $7 and it’s now selling at $17, although I’ll be raising the price to $27 soon because of all the extras I’m adding to it. For everyone who’s commented on this post I’ve decided to give you a copy of the theme for free as a thank you for joining in and commenting. Emails should be with you shortly. If you haven’t received an email please let me know and I’ll take care of it for you.
I’m creating a plugin that will make this theme even better. I haven’t yet decided whether to charge for it, or add it to the theme itself, but I think it will add a great deal of flexibility so I’m looking forward to announcing it once it’s ready.
Back up your email
I don’t know about you, but I get a lot of emails that I want to keep.
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.
