The best way to motivate your visitors to comment is to offer them information that’s inspiring, helpful, and compelling. But it also helps to develop an interactive, dynamic relationship with them. And one way to do that is to reward them.

WP Incentive is a plugin that will do just that. You can offer them a free digital download for their first, tenth, and twentieth comments (WP Incentive is fully customizable, so you can decide on the appropriate interval).

The plugin also comes preloaded with four digital gifts, which again, you can customize with items of your own choice. Setup and configuration are a snap, and there’s a video that steps you through the easy setup procedure. And the beauty of this plugin is that once setup, everything is fully automated. Just set it and forget it.

Make sure that the gifts that you add to the plugin have value – there’s already way too much digital junk out there, and you don’t want to lose the trust of your visitors by ‘rewarding’ them with something valueless. Make it special, and useful.

You can check it out here. Right now it’s less than ten bucks, and they have an affiliate program as well.

WP Incentive Plugin – Keep Your Blog Visitors Coming Back!

I’ve started doing some research on useful Twitter tools, but search results can be not only overwhelming, but also difficult to judge the sincerity of those ‘reviewers’ who endorse anything with an affiliate program.

Please help me out here. What Twitter management tool do you use, and why?

I appreciate your time!

1. Learning HTML gave me greater control over troubleshooting problems when they arose
2. I didn’t want to suffer the expense or the learning curve of a program like Dreamweaver.

A few years back I purchased XSitePro web design software version 1. I fiddled with it a bit, but it was buggy and hard to use. I realized that while this was an application that held great promise, it needed further development before it could really be competitive. So it gathered some cyberdust on my hard drive.

Soon I discovered WordPress. I was impressed with both the ease of installation and the abundance of features available through plug-in modules. But as much as I love WordPress, it’s not always suited to the kind of site I want to build – for myself, or my clients. Many of the existing templates, for example, still look like ‘blogs’ – although this is beginning to change, thankfully.

But once a WordPress template is selected, I sometimes feel like I’m working inside a box that just won’t let me do certain things I want to do. I recently had a client who selected a gorgeous template that may suit most people right out of the box, but my client wanted different sidebar content on different pages, and this theme did not allow for that.

The theme author provided no support for this type of modification. Bottom line is that after a lot of research I figured out how to hack the theme to make the change my client wanted.

And while many of the free WordPress themes that are available are basic enough to work with easily, many more of them are very complicated and can be really difficult to work with. Not a problem if you want to stay within the confines of the theme’s default settings, but that’s rarely the case when I’m building a new website.

So I’ve realized that I need other alternatives to website creation. I had three basic requirements:

1. Ease of use
2. Flexible enough so that I could easily build something as simple as a landing/optin page, or a far more robust site
3. Fully-featured (lots of styles, easy graphic integration, autoresponder form integration, easy FTP process, etc.).

So I cracked open XSitePro 1.0 – and believe me, it had been so long since I last used it, it was stuck shut. Although I’d not been terribly impressed with this first version, I’d been hearing some great things about v. 2.0. I paid for the upgrade to version 2 of XSitePro website design software and got my download.

What I saw immediately were some vast improvements over the first version. While it has a comprehensive built-in help module, I found it pretty intuitive. With just a few clicks, I’d created my first ‘project’ – a complete website structure all set up, ready to start building, page by page.

Like any new ‘toy’, the first thing I wanted to do was just play around a bit – and my snooping revealed a huge selection of attractive, professional templates

A few more clicks around the application and I discovered a ’snippets’ library, which allows me to quickly add little snippets of code to easily add certain features to a web page – again, just a couple of clicks, and the element is inserted. Similarly, there’s a script library that allows me to pop in a script to allow my visitor to print the page, add the page to their ‘favorites’, and much more

It was apparent that a lot of thought went into the development of XSite Pro web design software, to make sure that it can meet the needs of a modern website. It provides for easy PayPal and Adsense integration, and it’s SEO-ready, with its site map, SEO analysis tool, and more.

Adding content is as easy as using a word processor. The WSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get) lets me easily see what my page content will look like.

Once a website is ‘complete’ (with quotes because really, websites are dynamic and ever-changing – or should be), the process of uploading the site to my web host’s server was a snap. There’s a page on which you supply your FTP details, click on publish, and bam, done.

As much as I love this program, the XSitePro web design software application is not perfect. There have been some updates that were only available on the forum, and not built-in to the auto updater. All updates, critical and not, should really be available through the auto updater.

Also, I discovered that in editing some pages that may have involved trying to change the style of a headline – make it a different size or color for example – that if I backspaced through the existing headline, I sometimes lost my formatting. When I examined the HTML code for my page, I saw that some of the tags were messed up by backspacing or deleting a section in the WSIWYG editor. So I’d like to see the editing capabilities be a little tighter, but the company seems to be on top of many of these issues, and in fact welcomes feedback from XSitePro users.

I’ve also found tech support to be rather slow in their response time. Great people, and knowledgeable, but response time could be better. However, having a users forum that allows for interaction among XSitePro users takes a little bit of the edge off this shortcoming.

All in all, I’d give XSite Pro web design software 4.5 stars out of 5. I love the software, and the company cares about its customers and how to make its software better.

When I need a blog, I use WordPress. But for everything else, XSite Pro is my go-to application of choice.  Visit the site to check it out for yourself.

Hosting your blogs at both Blogger.com and WordPress.com is free. While Blogger.com is still far more popular, especially for new bloggers, many seasoned bloggers have begun to migrate from Blogger to WordPress. Let’s take a look at the features and limitations of hosting your blog with WordPress.com. Bear in mind that we’re discussing the hosted version of WordPress, not the self-hosted version (downloadable at WordPress.org).

Here are some of the features and benefits associated with hosting your blog at WordPress.com:

1. It’s free (though there are costs associated with ‘premium’ services)

2. It includes 3 gigabytes of file storage

3. Select from more than 60 themes

4. Basic stats system is built in

5. Virtually spam-free

6. Sidebar widget-ready

7. Large active community for help and support

8. Automatic backups of your blog

9. All upgrades are performed seamlessly, in the background, automatically

10. Any large traffic spikes will be managed by WordPress.com’s server load-balancing

Now let’s have a look at some of the limitations inherent to using WordPress.com as your blogging platform:

1. Your money-making ads cannot be displayed (no Adsense, Chikita, etc.).

2. WordPress.com reserves the right to display THEIR ads on your blog. You can opt out of this for $30/yr.

3. Want more storage space? It will cost you. You can add 5 more GB for $20/yr – and it goes up from there.

4. Mapping your own domain name to your WordPress.com blog will cost you $10/yr.

5. Few customization options. To access the CSS code for your theme will add another $15/yr to your costs.

6. If you violate the WordPress.com Terms of Service your blog will be deleted.

As bloggers, we have a wide array of choices for blog hosting solutions. By understanding what our choices are, we will be better positioned to select the blogging software that is best suited to our needs and goals.

Among the many blogging software choices available, WordPress is by far the most popular.  We’ll look at the reasons for that in a few moments, but first let’s clarify the differences between the two main categories of blogging software:

1. Hosted blogs refer to those blogging platforms that are hosted for us by other companies on their servers. Two examples of hosted solutions are Blogger.com and WordPress.com.

2. Self-hosted blogs refer to those blogs which we set up ourselves by downloading blogging software such as WordPress (from WordPress.org) or Movable Type, and installing the blog software on the servers of our own web hosting company.

So in the case of hosted blogs, you simply go to their site, create an account, choose a template from their selection, and start blogging. The main advantage of hosted blogs is that they’re free and simple to use. The primary disdvantage is that their features – that is, what you’re able to do with them and what you can add to them – are very limited.

On the other hand, while self-hosted blogs are not free, the fees are quite reasonable and they have tremendous feature advantages over hosted blogs. You also have sole and complete control over when and how to implement the many features available. While the tradeoff is that you must also manage all the behind-the-scenes actions and issues, including software upgrades, most consider this tradeoff well worth the effort.

Some further clarification. Note that the hosted version of WordPress is found at WordPress.com, while the self-hosted (i.e. downloadable) version of WordPress is located at WordPress.org. At WordPress.com, you create your free blog on WordPress’s servers, and they maintain control over what limited feature set and templates to make available to you. At WordPress.org, you would download the software and install it on a web host of your choice, at your expense, but you maintain full control over your blog.

With respect to self-hosted blogging solutions, the advantages that WordPress has over other offerings (such as MovableType) are numerous:

1. WordPress is completely free. MovableType has several levels varying from free to very pricey.

2. WordPress is ‘open source’. This not only means that it will remain free, but that its source code is readily available to developers all over the world, enabling them to enhance the functionality of WordPress by developing such things as themes and plugins (feature-enriching modules).

As a result, there are thousands of feature-enhancing plugins and crisp colorful themes from which to choose. In fact, the choices are so many and varied that the process of selecting a theme from the thousands available, for instance, can be quite overwhelming.

While there really is no substitute for the self-hosted blogging platform, many bloggers actually use both the hosted and self-hosted solutions. When used properly, hosted blogs that are complementary to our self-hosted blogs can provide a ranking boost. We’ll talk about the SEO benefits to using blogs in an upcoming article, so watch for it.

If you share my belief that our goal as an online marketer is NOT to simply ‘make the sale’ but rather to acquire what we hope to be a lifetime customer, then you know that having a smooth, reliable product delivery process is paramount.

I’m going to review four methods of delivering an infoproduct to the customer following the payment process. We’ll start with the worst method and end with the best.

Manual Email Delivery

There are two methods used when delivering the product via email.

a. Product is delivered as an email attachment

b. A link to the download is included in the email. This could be a direct link to the downloadable file or a link to a page, from which the customer can download the file.

In an age in which immediate gratification is the norm, making customers wait for sometimes many hours before delivery just is not good business. They will wonder if something has gone wrong, may become annoyed, and lose faith.

Moreover, many ISPs may view an email with attachment as a security risk and either block it at the server, or the customer’s email program may mark it as spam. Including a direct link to the download is somewhat better, but the customer still has to wait for manual delivery of the email, and using a direct link doesn’t enable us to build our list.

The best way of implementing this method is to provide a link to a download page which includes the option for the customer to opt-in to a mailing list. Forced an optin in order to get the download can have a negative impact on customer perception.

Overall Rating: Poor

Automated Email Delivery

This method has some of the same drawbacks as the first method, although it has the great advantage of being able to be delivered via autoresponder. This provides the customer with the instant delivery method he or she is expecting, but sill suffers the same risks of being routed into the spam folder where the customer may never see it.

This is not to say that there is no value in this method of delivery, but rather that it is better utilized as a secondary, backup method of product delivery.

Overall Rating: Fair

Automated delivery through PayPal

In an earlier post we talked about how to create a PayPal button to include on your website for payment processing. As mentioned in that post, there are several customization options for your PayPal button.

For one thing, you can specify the URL for your product, which  can be either a direct link to the file itself, or a link to a ‘thank you’ page from which the file can be downloaded. Once again, the advantage to redirecting to a page rather than directly to the download file is that you can use the page to communicate valuable information to your customer. That information may be the opportunity to subscribe to your newsletter, or to download some extra bonuses, and so forth.

The benefit to this method is that it has a backup plan. That is, in addition to being redirected to the download or download area, the customer will also receive an email from you with the download information. When you’re creating your button, you will be able to add customized notes to your customer in the email that is generated.

The limitation of this method is that while the payment button itself is encrypted with your information (if you accept the default, which is to encrypt), the file location itself is not encrypted. With the file location being somewhat transparent and there being no time limit on the download, an unscrupulous customer may share the download link with others.

While PayPal is the most popular online payment processor, there are others as well. These others enjoy the same advantages – and suffer the same limitations – as does PayPal.

Overall Rating: Good

Automated Delivery with Download Protection

The last, best, and in my opinion, the only method we should use to deliver our infoproducts is by using a delivery method that both hides the file location from the customer and also sets a time limit on delivery.

This strategy can be implemented by using download protection software, which is composed of a script which, once installed on your webserver, will establish a window for downloading that you specify, provide an encrypted link for downloading, AND send a customized email to your customer with the purchase receipt and download information as well.

After some fairly extensive investigation into what specific applications could do this for me, I settled on DLGuard Download Page Protector. This application provides all this and more. It also provides for creating membership sites, and will soon have a full-blown affiliate management module added to it as well.

I purchased this product a few days ago and have already installed it and am using it to protect one of my products. I’ll be digging more deeply into it and will soon post a full review of it for you.

Overall Rating: Excellent

While the process is not difficult, it can be an impediment and a psychological barrier that prevents people from moving forward with their plans to collect payment on a product they want to sell.

The first thing to do is to view the following video. I reviewed a number of videos on YouTube on this subject until I found this one, which is pretty well done.

One aspect that’s not covered in the video is the ability to use your own button graphic rather than PayPal’s graphic. This can be done easily by clicking the ‘customize appearance’ link on the button creation page. Simply add the URL for the location of the image you want to use for your button, which you will have already had to upload to your server.

So to review the process outlined in the video above:

1. Log into your PayPal account

2. Click on the ‘Merchant Services’ button near the top of the page

3. In the ‘Tools for existing PayPal merchants’ section near the top, select the ‘Buy Now Button’

4. Complete all the fields in Part 1. If desired, click on ‘customize appearance’ to change the button text, the button size, or to use your own button graphic.

5. Steps 2 and 3 are optional, but Step 3 is very useful. If you want to direct your purchasers to a particular URL (from which they can download the file(s) purchased, there is a field in this section for that, as well as other useful options.

6. Click the ‘Create Button’ button at the bottom. This will take you to a page where you can download your button code.

7. Embed the HTML code on the page or pages of your website where you want your payment button to appear.

That’s all there is to it. So go ahead, get your sales page organized, create your button, and start watching those sales roll in!

I’m in the process of developing my first infoproduct, and with the ebook now complete, my next step is to write a sales page for the product. One of the elements on the sales page, of course, will be the ‘order button’.

Rather than using an unattractive, nondescript button, I’d like the order button to be colorful and classy. I did some research, and finally settled upon a suite of buttons that gave me everything I wanted and more. In addition to order buttons, there are also buttons to subscribe, join now, download, sign up now, and more.

Not only that, but the package I ordered came with full Master Resale Rights. This mean I not only can resell the product, but I can resell the rights to resell the product as well. So I’m happy.

Editing ‘From the Desk of’ and Date Sections

Typically, when you purchase products with sales rights, you also get a sales page that must be customized and uploaded to your web host’s servers. There are just a few elements on the sales page that need editing.

The first section is in the salutation area of the sales page. There are two text changes to be made here. One is to put your name in the “From:” section. Easy enough.

Just below that is the date. The sales page I received was set up with a static date, but I wanted the sales page to reflect the current day and date. This can be done easily with one of the many widely available snippets of Javascript code. All you need to do is copy and paste this code into the HTML document following the “Date:” section. Here’s the snippet I used:

<script language=”JavaScript”>
<!–
var now = new Date();
var days = new Array(
‘Sunday’,'Monday’,'Tuesday’,
‘Wednesday’,'Thursday’,'Friday’,'Saturday’);
var months = new Array(
‘January’,'February’,'March’,'April’,'May’,
‘June’,'July’,'August’,'September’,'October’,
‘November’,'December’);
var date = ((now.getDate()<10) ? “0″ : “”)+ now.getDate();
function fourdigits(number)    {
return (number < 1000) ? number + 1900 : number;}
today =  days[now.getDay()] + “, ” +
months[now.getMonth()] + ” ” +
date + “, ” +
(fourdigits(now.getYear()));
document.write(today);
//–>
</script>

Editing Price and Closing Information

There are some additional text edits on the lower part of the page that must be completed as well. These include removing the generic place holder for a name, and putting your name in instead. The original page designer made it easy to identify the phrases that need editing by using a pink font color. Don’t leave them pink, however – that color was just used to draw your eye to it for editing purposes.

Two more edits are needed. One is a simple text edit of the price you want to charge. The rights to this product specify that you cannot give the product away, you must sell it. But you can decide on the selling price.

I changed the price on the sales page from $17.00 to $5.00 – which both meets the terms of service and creates what I hope is an irresistible offer to my customers.

Payment Processing and Product Downloading

There is one more edit needed on the sales page. The sales page includes an ‘order now’ button, but that button is not clickable. The button needs to have the payment processing code embedded. From the customer’s perspective, two things have to happen:

1. Pay for the product

2. After payment, be redirected to the download page.

I will cover each of these steps in my next two posts. And when I’ve got it all put together, you’ll be able to pickup this same package. It includes over 250 professionally-designed buttons, 28 guarantee seals, and Master Resale Rights.

]]> http://www.newbietrail.com/how-to-edit-the-sales-page-for-your-mrr-product/feed/ 0 http://www.newbietrail.com/23-list-building-videos-for-a-buck/ http://www.newbietrail.com/23-list-building-videos-for-a-buck/#comments Mon, 19 Jan 2009 21:43:24 +0000 Kat http://www.newbietrail.com/?p=158 A couple of days ago I told you about the outrageous offer I received from John Delavera for over 100,000 articles that I could use on my blog, website, newsletter, and so forth – for a buck.

I’m not sure what’s going on here, but I got another crazy offer from John this morning – a set of 23 list-building videos for again, just $1. Again, I scoured the sales page to see if I could figure out the ‘catch’ – it’s not uncommon for these $1 deals to be little more than a forced-continuity promo for a membership. But this is the real deal.

If you want to jump right to the offer page, click here: John Delavera’s List Building Explosion. Otherwise, read on.

List Building Explosion will show you how to master list building, and start driving profitable traffic and sales to your website and affiliate products. Here’s John’s description about what this video series includes:

• A Collection of 23 Professionally Recorded Videos – This complete video series will teach you everything you need to know about list building.
• Advantages of Building a List – Before you actually start building your first list, I want you to understand the advantages, so you can use them to their fullest extent.
• How to Choose an Autoresponder Service – Having an autoresponder is a crucial aspect of list building, and a huge timesaver. I will show you the best choices out there.
• What You Need to Know About the CAN-SPAM Act – Learn the legalities of email marketing, and what you need to do to make sure you are following them.
• How To Create a New Autoresponder - I will show you everything you need to know to get your first autoresponder up and running, including a detailed discussion of all the options available to you.
• How to Place Your Autoresponder Form on Your Website – Watch me over my shoulder as I place my autoresponder form on a website (You will also receive a template that is all ready for your autoresponder).
• How to Create and Send Out Emails to Your List – I will show you how easy it is to create and “queue” emails for your list, so it can run on autopilot.
• How to Track and Monitor Your Statistics and Sales – Tracking your emails and sales is extremely important, so you can understand which ones are performing the best. I will show you how to do it.
• Invaluable List Communication Tips – I will show you the five most important things you need to know to run a profitable email list campaign.
• The Importance of “Bait” – I will show you how important “bait” is, and how to create your own to start getting list signups today.
• How to Create an Effective Squeeze Page – I will show you what goes into an effective squeeze page (you will receive a squeeze page template, all ready for your autoresponder).

Also included is a List Building Explosion PDF guide valued at $27. They forgot to include the guide as part of the download, but I immediately received an email with a direct link to the download.

When I purchased, I was pleasantly surprised with not having to step through a series of OTO offers before reaching the download page. However, on the download page itself, there were several additional tempting offers.

So really, for a buck and no strings attached? No brainer. Here’s the link:

http://www.upandrunning.net/go/listbuilding.php

With those 7 plugins installed, I then install a suite of additional plugins, selecting those plugins that are consistent with the goals of the blog. This customization varies from one blog to another, but when other plugins are needed, these are the ones I turn to.

1. cformsII – contact form : cforms is a highly customizable, flexible and powerful form builder plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi form management, you can even have multiple forms on the same page!

2. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator: This plugin creates a sitemap for your WordPress powered site. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator which is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel. Some of its features include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.

3. WP-Sticky: Adds a sticky post feature to your WordPress’s blog.  When a post is made ’sticky’, it sticks to the top of the page instead of being pushed down by a subsequent post. Beginning with v.2.7, WordPress also offers a sticky-post function in quick-edit mode, but because WP-Sticky differentiates between sticky posts and announcements, it offers a little more functionality.

4. Sociable: Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites!

5. CommentLuv: Pass a bit of luv onto your commenters by providing a titled link to their last blog post. This plugin attempts to parse the feed of the comment author by visiting their site and looking for their feed while they type their comment and appends it once they submit. Entice them even more with the new info box ajax popup showing their descript, gravatar and other sites they visit.

6. MaxBlogPress Favicon:  With this plugin you can have your very own favicon in less than 10 minutes. Favicons are an excellent branding tool for webmasters and blog owners. They help you create brand awareness by displaying a little favourite icon (favicon) in the title of our blog next to the URL.

7. AdSense Manager is a Wordpress plugin for managing AdSense ads on your blog. It generates code automatically and allows positioning with Widgets.

8. Pagemash Pagemanager: Customise the order your pages are listed in and manage the parent structure with this simple ajax drag-and-drop administrative interface with an option to toggle the page to be hidden from output. Great tool to quickly re-arrange your page menus.

9. SEO Slugs: The SEO Slugs Wordpress plugin removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve search engine optimization. The plugin strips common words like “what”, “you” or “can” out of your post slug to make it more search engine friendly.

10. WP Post Ratings: This adds a rating system add the bottom of each post, allowing each user to have there say on how good your post is. It is powered by Ajax, making it very unobtrusive, and to be honest, configured correctly, can be very elegant. You also have (my favourite option) the option to style the ratings star images with you own. You can also show the rating results in the sidebar, this is also done in an elegant way.

Be sure that the plugins you install are compatible with the version of WordPress you’re using. And remember, these are just my recommendations – you may find others more closely suited to your needs.

If you know of a useful plugin, please tell us about it!