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Delavo and Butterfly Marketing
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
PLR Content
I’ve just finished putting together a pack of PLR articles in the health niche, specifically about high cholesterol. You can read the full details at plr-cholesterol-articles
PLR is one of the easiest ways to get good content for your websites and blogs because, essentially, you’re sharing the cost of having it written with other buyers.
I’ve had an American MD write 8 of the articles in the pack, although you can’t use his name for contractual reasons. These are solid, well written, informative articles that you can use on your blog or website, to create a report, in your autoresponder sequences – almost anywhere, in fact.
And at just $17 it’s a lot cheaper than having them written yourself. I know because I’ve just spent $262.22 on having them written!
If you’ve ever had a bad experience with PLR I’d urge you to look at www.sublime-products.com/articles/products/plr-cholesterol-articles/ because you will be pleasantly surprised at how well the articles are written.
Butterfly Marketing Meltdown
To understand this post, you might need to read this first.
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.
Butterfly Marketing Manuscript
It’s just over 17 hours until Mike Filsaime gives away the $1,997 Butterfly Marketing course and software and I’m contemplating whether to email my subscribers to remind them. I’m thinking that they might be sick of all the emails they’ve seen about it.
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.
