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March 10, 2008

Big Delays in PayPal Sandbox

PayPal have a sandbox that mirrors the functionality of the live payment processing site so developers can test out their scripts.

Unfortunately there are currently delays of hours for a response from the Instant Payment Notification feature. This makes it almost useless as a testing tool i.e. you can only do a couple of tests and then go live with your script using your customers to debug any oddities that your script may have under the various usage scenarios.

Their support forum is full of people struggling to understand what is wrong with their script when half the time nothing is wrong with their code.

Only recently, they seem to have added a feature to speed up time for recurring payments simulations. Before this, I set up a test of a monthly subscription and this test carried on running for over a year with monthly emails to my inbox making me think I had made new sales. People that have simulated yearly subscriptions are maybe going to get these emails for years to come unless they log in and switch it off.

What PayPal should have done was create some good quality code that everyone can take and use like a module and not have to test their own versions at the front end in this way. The code examples they do provide look like they were thrown together in half an hour.

Developers should not be wasting days of their lives getting this basic functionality to work. Given that PayPal/eBay make a ton of money from this system, I think they should have fixed this issue a long time ago.

Thrown under: Website Graphics and Design by Andy @ 4:42 am


January 24, 2008

Don’t Make These Mistakes with your Projects

Most people seem to re-invent their own wheels when working on projects.

I posted about this on my new forum that I mentioned in the last post.

Check out this valuable info. (register and contribute):

Leveraging Your Coding

Thrown under: New Topics by Andy @ 6:17 am

January 20, 2008

New Internet Marketing Forum

As keen as I am to blog, it can get a bit lonely so I do find myself drawn to other blogs and some forums.

However, the 2 forums I visit are either too busy or too quiet. Also, many blogs are more like advertising space for both the blogger and the commentators, so I felt a need to create my ideal community site.

So I made the Excelorize Internet Marketing Discussion Forum! It’s only a few hours old. I have posted some stuff there including a post about affiliate marketing. So maybe this could be the start of some major new forum?

It should be fun regardless of the outcome :-)

Thrown under: New Topics by Andy @ 7:33 am

January 14, 2008

Ultimate Email Capture Form

Today I was very impressed with the design of this Email Capture Form:
grandstaff-signup.jpg

I think it is amazing and possibly the best “Sqeeze Page” I ever saw. I am not talking about what it is advertising but the way it entices the visitor to sign up with their email details.

For starters, the graphical design is very nice with shadow effects and good use of color.

The headline emphasizes the hot word “lazy” in a cool way. The man behind the business adds his name to brand himself and assure past customers that he is backing it.

Then, we have a nicely designed book image graphic to make you imagine what you will soon be getting your hands on. And the book image has an attractive woman pointing to big money stats on a laptop screen.

Who can resist a “How to” on getting rich with a team of Lazy people?

And the topic addresses what most people are finding and turns it on it’s head i.e. most people will be lazy, but you can profit from them because of that fact.

Then there is the mention of the “secret” and everything you learned so far was a waste of time.

Look at the call to action arrows! There is even an audio to further sell you on signing up. And, the hand written text is telling you how to think even!

Even the form is a bit unusual with a cancel button which is maybe another good idea to assure people, even though it does nothing more than clear the form.

Finally, there is some text to say it’s a “free PDF download”.

Who could resist this?

I found this “squeeze page” on a Traffic Exchange. I often take snapshots of these kinds of pages for my own future reference and store them in a “swipe file”. I suggest you do the same.

This particular Traffic Exchange is one of the few I can stand to use since it has a 10 second timer and I learn about good ways to sell online from it by observing pages like the one mentioned above.

Most people using traffic exchanges will be people wanting to make money for very little effort. So I don’t personally want to build a list of lazy people. I prefer them to email me after they joined whatever I am promoting. That way, I only get to hear from people that take some action.

So my Ad on this Traffic Exchange is like this:

downline-builder.png

It doesn’t look anywhere near as good as the example I mentioned before, but I think it has some good elements in it.

I have the product box image that adds perceived value to my download offer. It probably makes people think it is software that automatically makes them money at the click of a button. But I don’t tell them what it actually is anywhere on the page.

All I want them to do is download my item which is actually a PDF report that they will hopefully print out. Then I have got my marketing material physically in their home!

In the footer area I give the product high perceived value by saying that I reserve the right to slap a price tag on the download of $97 after 100 copies have been downloaded.

So I think that I should get a high percentage of people downloading this report. Plus I will not hear or have to communicate with anyone that doesn’t take action since they will only find out how to contact me by doing something with the report.

Creating Ads like these is what makes marketing fun. I often laugh when I create these kinds of Ads. You have to be honest with what you present but creative in how you make people think.

Incidentally, the reason these kinds of Ad pages are so brief is that they only have 10 seconds to get their message across.

You can sign up for free with my favorite Traffic Exchange and try these techniques out yourself. Also, start saving snapshots of good marketing pages. Use “Alt+Print Screen” in Windows to capture an image of the window to the clip board. Then you can paste it to your Paint program and save to disk.

Thrown under: Web Marketing by Andy @ 6:04 am

January 5, 2008

How to Create an E-book

This is the approach I took to create my first e-book. It was more like a report since it was only 16 pages long but there was no difference between this and an e-Book apart from the length.
more …

Thrown under: Web Marketing by Andy @ 4:51 am

January 3, 2008

Internet Marketing Food Chain

I thought it would be a good idea to share my methods for creating products since one way to make a lot of money online is by marketing your own products.

As the owner of the product, you can sell it yourself for over 90% profit margin if it is a down-loadable product. Also, you can recruit affiliates to market it on your behalf to leverage your sales.

In terms of an Internet Marketing Food Chain, the lowest end is the blogger hoping to make some money from Ad clicks since they have the worst return on investment (time and money). Hey, sounds like me here :-)

Next is the affiliate who can make a percentage on sales of other people’s product. Even though there are huge benefits of not having to deal with customers and the order process, you have a large number of other places where people can buy the same products that you are advertising. This is why the product developer rises to the top of the Internet marketing food chain.

The methods I have used to make products include publishing an e-Book and writing Software. Another method I want to try soon is creating Video products. I will only teach you my methods after I have put them into practice.

Also, I want to show you some ways to create worthwhile products that are not just re-hashed existing material that is simply slapped together and put in a new shiny, fake product box. I’ll start with how to create an e-Book in the next post.

Thrown under: Web Marketing by Andy @ 3:17 am

January 2, 2008

Plan for Success

I realized that one of the easiest ways to achieve more success in 2008 is by creating business plans. During 2007 I had ideas in my head and did things in a haphazard way, sometimes even forgetting to do things. Now I have untangled most of the random network of sites that comprises my Internet Business, the fog is starting to clear and I can finally start making moving forward with a clearer direction.

While everyone and their dog is either chatting on marketing forums or blogging, I think the real money lies with product creation. Just look at most individuals who make a lot of money online, they are the people selling their own products. Some top dogs capture the market for blog readers and make money that way. Others take high risk with Ad spend and make big money from affiliate marketing.

I don’t want to take huge risks with $5 per click Ad campaigns, or spend 8 hours a day blogging with the hope of beating bloggers that are already rich. So, I think a more realistic approach and ultimately better in terms of freedom will be to develop products.

In industry, all products are developed according to a project plan. So, following the initial idea and some market research, there must be a plan in place detailing the steps to take to reach the end result. And these steps are detailed against days of the week so I know what I should be completing on each day or range of days.

Plans can be applied to personal goals too. So instead of just stating the end result, you are far more likely to achieve it if you have a step by step plan to achieve the goal. Also, it will show you how realistic it is to achieve the success you are after.

And as you follow your plan and adjust it, you can easily see if you are on course or need to adjust what you are doing.

I used a spread sheet for my plan. It’s quite simple; a heading with the name of the project, a list of tasks and colored cells in the horizontal direction highlighting which days I will be doing each task. I think it’s called a Gantt chart.

So why not plan your success rather than setting silly New Year resolutions?

Thrown under: Web Marketing by Andy @ 5:23 am

December 27, 2007

Online Diary

I was planning to become more organized with a daily journal. I think the best way to implement this is with a private blog. This way, it’s easy to enter notes, they are date stamped, you can categorize them, include hypertext links and search the archives.

It seems like a better way than random notes, spread sheets and writing in a note book or conventional diary.

To kick this off I installed WordPress into a directory below another WordPress installation which I tried to password protect. For some weird reason I couldn’t get it to work with the directory password protected. The .htaccess file in the folder above kept causing it to redirect to an error 404 page. Even by inserting some .htaccess rule that should stop this happening I still couldn’t fix it.

So, in the end I installed a password plugin to password protect the blog.

Thrown under: New Topics by Andy @ 2:21 am

December 23, 2007

Christmas Email Strategy

As Internet Marketers it is difficult for us to just send an email, we need to monetize it and add some viral element to it, the last thing we want to do is send an email that has no links in it and worst of all, links to another marketer’s site. This problem is worst for us at times such as Christmas where we need to email some kind of electronic greeting to our friends and contacts.
more …

Thrown under: Web Marketing by Andy @ 4:45 am

December 14, 2007

Number of Blog Posts Required to Make Money

After reading about ShoeMoney® exceeding 1000 posts to his blog I was thinking about the benefits of having so many posts. Maybe there is a critical mass of posts where you can’t help but generate income provided you have some monetization in place?
more …

Thrown under: Traffic Generation by Andy @ 3:36 am
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