BeardyGeek.com

Some of you may or may not have noticed the build up around Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula over the past 4 weeks. Every blogger and his uncle seems to be a JW affiliate, so the bonus offers have been coming thick and fast.

I never had the intention of buying the PLF, but what I have been doing is watching everything that Jeff has been putting out over the last month, and there’s a lot of content there.

So I’m going to summarize here what I’ve picked up from Jeff’s launch process, and hopefully it will help anyone out there who wants to launch a product but can’t afford the $1997 price tag of PLF 2.

Sideways

The first we need to do is differentiate between an old style launch, and a new style one.

In the old style we would create a whopping big sales page, get some traffic to it, and let it do it’s stuff.

The new way is to turn the sales letter on it’s side, and turn it into a serial spread over 2, 4, 6 weeks or longer.

The main advantage to this is that your sales pitch is effectively broken up into bite size chunks that your prospect can digest. Because who really reads the whole of a sales page anyway?

Free Content

During this sideways process, you need to giveaway content to keep people hooked in, and to provide proof that your product or service works. Video is the key medium at the moment, but it could just as easily be free reports. The more people hear what you can do, and what your product will do for them, the more they will come to trust you. And ultimately, the more they trust, the more likely they are to buy.

Social Proof

This is where you show people that others are using your product successfully, or that you are having lots of interest in your new product. If people think that others have bought it or are interested, they will be more comfortable buying it themselves.

Mental Triggers

Throw in mental triggers like scarcity, time limits and price increases in the right places to give people that extra nudge to buy.

Offer

Finally get to the offer and guarantee. Hopefully by this stage you will have built up some good anticipation, and people will be banging your door down to buy this thing.

List Building

Throughout this whole process, you will have also been building a list. Get your traffic organically, PPC or through affiliates, and make sure you grab that e-mail address. They might not buy this time, but what about next time? As they say, having a list is like money in the bank.

Conclussion

I can’t say for myself whether this works as well as reported, but surely anything is better than a 30 page sales letter. I’ll be trying this process out for myself when I launch my new membership site in a couple of months, so I’ll let you know how it went.

New Membership Site for Budding Web Developers

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Hi Guys,

I just wanted to let you know that I am currently working on a new membership site to teach budding web developers the ropes.

I’ll be concentrating on PHP, MySQL and AJAX development, with a view to building some great Web 2.0 applications.

The big focus of the site will be learner support. There will be loads of content in the form of videos and text, but most importantly I’ll be around to answer any and all questions about the lessons. That way you won’t be left high and dry with just a bunch of content.

I’m looking to launch this in about 2 months time, so if you are interested please subscribe to my newsletter, so I can keep you up to date with the latest developments.

Cheers

Stuart

Update April 24:

The launch site is now live, and includes a series of quick start video tutorials for Web 2.0 style development. Check it out here.

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Get Quality Backlinks AND Make Money!

I read the other day how Yahoo was going to start supporting semantic web standards.

The semantic web is something that is often associated with Web 3.0 (if that’s what you want to call it!), and will allow greater data exchange, better and more targeted search, and generally open things up for a super mash-up. Take a look at Wikipedia’s definition of Web 3.0 for more info.

One of the formats that Yahoo will initially support is hAtom, which is a microformat especially for blog entries.

So, I thought I’d take a look at it and try and implement it in the BeardyGeek blog.

First Steps

To add an hAtom feed to your blog, all you need to do is add some class names to what are probably existing divs or spans in your blog template.

For example, if you have a div around your entire content that looks like this:

<div class=”content”>

you just need to add an extra class tag called hfeed:

<div class=”content hfeed”>

To have more than one class, just separate them with a space.

There are 3 more main tags that you need.

• hentry - the outer tag for each blog post
• entry-title - the tag for the post title
• entry-content - the tag for your post content

And that’s it. Easy as pie!

How I changed my Wordpress Theme

Ok, here’s what I changed in my theme.

Header page - At or near the bottom is a div tag - <div class=”content”> - I changed that to <div class=”content hfeed”>.

Single Post - I added the hentry tag to <div class=”post”> so it now read <div class=”post hentry”>. I then added entry-title to the <h2 class=”post-title”> so it read <h2 class=”post-title entry-title”>. And I also add entry-content to <div class=”postentry”> so it read <div class=”postentry entry-content”>.

Main index template - pretty much the same as the single post page, as the tags are all the same.

Testing

To test the feed, I downloaded Greasemonkey plugin for Firefox. I then downloaded the RSS Panel X script for Greasemonkey, which allows you to view a page’s feeds in a small JavaScript window. This is ideal for testing in this case as it supports hAtom.

Once you have these installed and running (tip: install the plugin first, then the script installs automatically), just load up your blog page. If all went according to plan, you should see your hAtom feed along with your RSS feed.

In fact, you can test it out here, as I have my hAtom feed up and running!

Good luck, let me know how you get on.

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Hi Guys,

Whilst doing some market research today, I came across 43things.com.

Now I have seen this site many times before, although I am not an active user.

But today it hit me what a great research and possibly marketing tool this is.

It’s often said that to make money online, all you have to do is:

1. Find out what people want and
2. Sell it to them.

Well on 43things, people tell you what they want to do. And you can see how many other people want to do the same things.

Plus you can comment and put links in your comments.

Not sure if anyone else has used 43things in such a way before, but I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Innovation is defined as ‘the act of introducing something new‘. In this article I want to give you some ideas on how you could be more innovative everyday.

Some people are said to have ‘Eureka’ moments, when something just clicks in their head and they have a brilliant new idea. But this idea is usually the fruit of a seed planted in your mind, at some point in the past. It didn’t just pop in there, it’s been growing as you’ve been feeding it over time.

And using the tips below, you will be able to be more innovative more regularly.

1. Fail

I hate to start the list on a negative note, but this is one of the most important points. Be prepared to fail. Because if you are trying to innovate, you will fail more than you will succeed. The trick here is to do it quickly. Know when you’ve failed, accept it, and move on. If you spend a year flogging a dead horse, you have wasted the opportunity to try many other more successful ideas during that time.

2. Learn

This actually comes in 2 forms. Firstly, learn from you failures. You’ve probably heard that a million times, but you’d be amazed at how many people ignore this. It’s important to analyze where you went wrong, and improve the next time.

Secondly, learn new stuff. Learn about what interests you, about what fires you up. Learn for learning’s sake. Because you never know when some piece of information is going to pop out at you, enabling you to make a connection that no-one else has made. Read the rest of this entry »

Virtual Learning Environments - the Future of Internet Marketing?

The Art of Seduction Marketing

Hi Guys,

Copyblogger has just announced it’s new job board.

On closer inspection this appears to powered by JobThread. From their site, you can install either a job widget, which shows job ads based on your blog category and keywords selected at sign up.

Or you can go for the full job board, where you charge what you like for ad postings, and then split the money 50/50 with JobThread.

This is a great idea if you have a high traffic site like Copyblogger, where you have the readership to justify charging for job postings.

As for smaller sites, the widget may be more appropriate, although time will tell whether this will be a good earner.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this one.

iPaper and Internet Marketing

How I got Traffic by Complaining on Twitter

Web 3.0 - How to Put Semantic Tags in your Blog

I have been thinking recently about Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), as they seem to be ideal for the delivery of ‘paid for content’. In particular eCourses, which could range from Internet Marketing to Knitting!

This type of delivery is going to become huge in Internet Marketing. eBooks will still have a place out there, but with the increase in computing power, and the speed of the average net connection, rich media is the way forward for content delivery.

There are various ways this type of content could be delivered:

Blogs

Your material could be put on a blog. The advantages here are that it is a very flexible platform to publish any sort of media on, from videos and podcasts to articles and images. Plus it would be very quick to get set up.
The downside is that if you have quite a lot of content, this format doesn’t lend itself well to structured learning. How do you tell people what material you need them to look at first, without having to create an index page that links to all your content pages and blog entries?

Content Management Systems

I looked at CMS systems such as Drupal quite seriously. You can customise them quite easily, and add navigation through various administration panels. But it’s still really only 1 step away from a blog, and has some of the same disadvantages.

Open Source VLEs

Now we’re getting a bit closer. There is an open source package called Moodle, which is built specifically to admininster and deliver courses. It has modules for payment, course enrollment, blogs and forums. Various media can be embedded in it’s pages.

But I found that this might be a little too structured, depending on your needs of course. If your material is to be delivered over a fixed period of time, Moodle is probably ideal. But if your content is a little more open ended, lets say for a membership site where the content just keeps on expanding, this format might not quite offer that sort of flexibility.

Custom Built

Now I can tell you what my next project is going to be! I found a new site called the Encyclopedia of Life. It’s aim is to catalogue every species of animal on the planet. No I’m not getting into animal conservation. What I did notice is the layout of their pages. Just go and look at them now (if it’s working, they had some problems with their servers due to load). Take a look at one of the animal entries. They are just beautiful.

See how much content they managed to get on 1 page! Everything is Ajax, so there is no page reloading. There’s a tabbed media frame at the top, which can display images, video, maps, audio. Then there is a contents panel on the left, with an Ajax refreshing content pane in the middle.

Now relate that page to the delivery of course content. Wouldn’t it be great to deliver your content in an environment like that?

A Framework in Development

So, with that in mind, I am going to be developing a new framework which will concentrate on the delivery of new media on the web. So watch this space!

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