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The Gods of Karma are surely on my side this week. I want to share with you a story of Twitter, Aweber blog links and lots of Traffic.

OK, just over a week ago, I started my launch of my Web 2.0 Application Tutorial site. My landing page has a video which introduces users to a quickstart video tutorial series, and then an opt-in form where they put their name and email address.

I had just signed up to Aweber and, being an impatient soul, set it up quickly and threw my form out there.

Then I put out an ad on Adwords, on Google’s content network, to get some traffic to my page.

Where are the confirmations?

So, I started getting traffic, and some opt-ins, but I noticed that not a lot of people were verifying their sign-up, which meant they weren’t actually on my list.

I was on Twitter and I thought I would let the world know my woes. I have about 80 people following me at the moment. I typed in “Wondering why people are not confirming after signing up to my Aweber list”.

A few hours later I got a Twitter back from Justin Premick, who is on staff at Aweber. He offered to look at my page and see what he could do about my confirm rate. An hour later he got back to me with a load of advice, which I implemented, and thankfully it made a big difference. I have to say that after this experience, I would wholeheartedly recommend Aweber, based purely on their customer support.

Blog it

Anyway, I thank Justin for his help, and he asks me if he blog about this example. Of course I say “sure, go for it”. If it helps someone else out then great.

When I checked his blog post on Aweber, he had kindly linked to my site, which I thought was very nice of him.

Then yesterday, I started to get an awful lot of sign-ups to my list. Up until now I was getting about 6 - 10 sign-ups per day. Yesterday I got 51. I checked my stats, and sure enough, I was getting a ton of traffic from Justin’s blog post. In fact in the last day and a half, I have had 512 uniques from his post. Awesome.

It’s a small world

So it just goes to show, you never know who’s listening or reading what you are putting out there on the web. Just one random comment into the ether can bring great rewards.

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A sales filter would be something along the lines of ‘give away the razor, charge for the blades’. I found a great example of how to do this in an internet marketing context yesterday, and I’m going to walk you through it.

I had a look at Joel Comm’s Adsense Secrets (I won’t link to it, I’m not an affiliate. Go google it.) I followed a link to it from Yaro Starak’s blog, as he said that it was for sale for only $9.

Now considering this product has been selling for the last few years at $97, that’s quite a reduction!

Now scan the sales page. When we get near the bottom, we get the offer. You will see there are several bonuses that you get with this product. Take a careful look. The second one is 1 months free subscription to his new Top 1% newsletter. Bingo!

You see, once you have bought Adsense Secrets, and after the free first month, you are automatically charged $29 per month for this subscription. You have to contact Joel if you don’t want to take this out.

Sneaky? Or smart business? I’ll let you decide that one.

So how could you use this technique in your own sales process.

Let’s look at the points to cover:

1. The Irresistible Offer
   Make it quite clear how much the product should be worth, and what you are now selling it for. Make it so that it’s almost impossible to pass up. Make it a no-brainer. You could even give it away for free.
2. The Back Door Product
   This will be a product with a higher value than your main offer product. In fact it’s probably the product you actually want to sell. Offer a the first month free, get them hooked, and then up-sell. If you go for the opt-out, you don’t even have to up-sell. But you might upset a few people.

Whether you go so far as to make that product opt-out, like Joel, or opt-in is up to you.

It will be interesting to see if there are any complaints from people who didn’t read the offer properly.

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A recent report in Business Week states that Google in now investing in a DNA screening startup Navigenics. The size of the investment is currently undisclosed.

This follows it’s 2007 investment of $4.4 Million in 23andMe.

So where, if anywhere, is Google heading with genetics?

Perhaps long term, when more is understood about the intricacies of DNA, we could be searching Google for a matching organ donor, a lost relative, or even paternal matches.

Or how about demographic targeting? Serving ads to only those with blue eyes, or hair loss traits, or weight problems.

Maybe it’s a bit far-fetched, but ultimately DNA is just lots of data. And if there’s one thing that Google can work it’s magic on, it’s data.

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The Anatomy of a Sales Filter

I got my usual pop-up from the Apple Updater the other day.  But along with the obligatory Quicktime and iTunes update, there was a new arrival.

Apple’s Safari browser was on the list.

When did they sneak that one in there?  I didn’t even know you could get Safari for Windows.

So I left the box ticked (notice it’s ticked by default, nice trick), and thought I’d give it a try.

The first thing I noticed was that there was no ‘Home’ icon/button?  WTF?

I found the menu that let me add this and all was well with the world.

I’ll keep tinkering and let you know what I think.  I guess one benefit is that I can now test any web pages I create in Safari now as well as the usual Firefox and IE.

Plus it looks quite pretty.  Yes I am that shallow!

The Anatomy of a Sales Filter

People sometimes put computer programmers in the same category as brain surgeons and rocket scientists. They believe they are an elite group of brain boxes, and only a chosen few have what it takes to make it.

Well the above probably is true of brain surgery and rocket science, but it certainly isn’t the case with computer programming.

Getting Started

There are an awful lot of resources out there on the net for would-be programmers. But a problem for someone just starting out is ‘What language should I start with?’. Once you have chosen that, you then have to worry about IDE’s (integrated development environments), frameworks, deployment options, methodologies. It’s all just too much!

My Advice

If you want to develop applications for the web, you can’t go far wrong with PHP as a programming language. It’s relatively easy to learn, and is the most widely used across the internet. Match that up with MySQL and you have the ability to create data driven websites.

For an IDE you can use Eclipse. And the cherry on top, for those nice Ajax effects, is Dojo, an Ajax framework.

The best thing about all the above tools is that they are completely free.

A Little Help

We all need a little help from time to time. I have just created a set of Quickstart Video Tutorials which should help you get going. By the end of the series you will have a working web application (albeit a small one). You will need to sign up to get these videos, and I’d be grateful for some feedback on them.

Enjoy!

New Membership Site for Budding Web Developers

Take a look at this video for your daily dose of inspiration. This will bring a tear to your eye, especially if you’re a parent.

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After the deafeningly silent response I got to my last post, asking for Twitter followers and followees, I decided to take the bull by the horns and go and get my own Twitter friends.

I found a list of 300 (and growing) internet marketers at Marketing Pilgrim, and started following them.

Results?

Bear in mind that I did this today, my followers went from 9 to 24. I am also meeting a local SEO marketer for coffee next week who I met through Twitter.

Downside

The downside here is that there are a lot of tweets to read through. I am following 118 people, but I don’t know how the guys with over 1,000 friends cope.

Conclusion

I’m just trying to let it wash over me, soak it up, and hopefully pick up a few golden nuggets from the ocean of tweets.

But life is a bit like that. You wade through a whole pile of mundane crap every day, but all it takes is just one little piece of information to make all the difference.

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