Archive for the ‘Internet Marketing Tools’ Category

Here’s an inside look into the All Mom Content PLR membership. This membership gives you 51 pieces of fully-editable and monetizable (let’s pretend that’s a word…it’s a GOOD word) content for the mom market.

Side note: All Green Content comes with a free license to Speedy APLC Publisher, a must-have for PLR and WordPress publishers.

I’ve been spending the last few weeks, getting things “freshened up” with my virtual empire (man, I mean empire – this thing is getting MASSIVE. ).

We’re gearing up for some big changes around here (HINT: You’ll be seeing a certain brilliant blonde around here more often), so preparing for that has been taking up a lot of time. It’s amazing how much stuff there is to cover when getting someone up to speed on a particular project. But you know what? It’s SOOOOO worth it. Sometimes the best things come when you work together.

But here’s the main reason for this post…

I’ve also been getting our PLR stuff organized and freshening up our educational materials. And as I was going through our sites and updating information, I noticed the copyright dates. It’s hard to believe that Mila and I have been doing this for 3 1/2 years now and PLR (private label rights) content is still going strong.

I remember when PLR first hit the “Internet marketing scene” in a big way and there were a lot of people that were so against it. Some ghostwriters felt it devalued their work, some people said it was “unethical” and the arguments went on and on.

Well, ghostwrters didn’t go out of business. In fact, the ghostwriter service I have with Annette is still going strong and growing every day – as are countless other ghostwriting services.

And the sky didn’t fall on business owners who decide to leverage the work of others to deliver informative quality content to their readers. Imagine that!

If you’re not totally familiar with PLR, let me back up a second and explain. PLR is basically content that you have editing and publishing rights too. It’s prewritten articles, reviews, ebooks, reports…basically any type of content (and actually, you can get PLR audio and video too).

It’s an inexpensive option because PLR providers sell numerous licenses to the content to the others as well. It’s good search engine food (we show you how to make minor edits to draw in free search enging traffic), great for adding to autoresponders, bundling into the reports, auto-uploading to your WordPress blog and more. You can use it to promote your own products, add affiliate links and/or ads. So many possibilities.

If this all sounds overwhelming and you’re not quite sure how to use PLR, here’s good news. Or if you’re using PLR, but don’t feel you’re taking full advantage of it…this is also good news.

We’ve just updated our Massive Content Creation Made Simple guide and the email tips that go along with it. You’ll find TONS of ideas for using PLR content, overcoming any obstacles you may be facing and we’ll also show you where to get the GOOD PLR (outside of our own offerings here, of course! ) 

Anyway, while I continue my clean up and reorganization around here, I encourage you to sign up for your free guide and email tips.

=> Click here to learn How to PLR (for free)

I’ll be back for more updates and freshened up stuff. Talk soon!

I just sent an email to my customers and subscribers, comparing what I have traditionally used for membership sites (Amember) and what I’ve been lucky enough to try (Wishlist Member). I’ll post the text from that email below, but first, here’s a series of 4 videos showing you how Wishlist Member works (click the graphic and the video will open in a new window):

Or click here to watch.

It’s fairly simple and straightforward. Armed with the Quick Start Guide, I installed it by myself and got it figured out. Lynette (my techy) must be very proud of me!

Anyway, here is the email I sent out comparing Wishlist Member to Amember:

Hi,

Last week when I emailed about the membership site
strategies, a few commenters asked about scripts or software
to manage their own membership sites.

Good and very important question!

Personally, I use Amember as it was one of the good ones
available when we put together our first memberships in
2004. It integrates with PayPal, 2Checkout, manages your
affiliate program and more.

It's pretty powerful stuff. You can find out more and see
the features of Amember here.

But recently, I've been talking to Stu McLaren and was
invited to check out his Wishlist Member. It's a WordPress
plug-in that allows you to:

-> Set up multiple membership levels
-> Do a simple installation (Man, even *I* did it myself!)
-> Provide incremental content delivery
-> Integrate with PayPal, 1Shoppingcart and others.
-> Offer secure RSS feeds
-> Give sneak peeks at content
-> Create custom error and other administrative pages

Wishlist Member details are here.

Both memberships can actually do very similar things (except
Amember doesn't do sneak peeks or have as much control over
error and other administartive pages members will see). On the
other hand, Wishlist doesn't manage your affiliate program.
You'd have to add that in.

Amember is currently $179.95 (one-site license) and Wishlist
is $97 for one license. Wishlist allows you to purchase a
multi-site license. If you want Amember for more than one
site, you have to purchase it again.

Add to that, if you want to compare pricing. If you want to
plug in WordPress and give incremental content with Amember,
you'll have to shell out another $100 for those Amember plug
ins ($40 for WordPress, $60 for Incremental). Just something
to think about.

BOTTOM LINE:

Overall, Amember is the more powerful program (you can plug
in more stuff, it has the affiliate program built in), but
Wishlist has incredible simplicity and makes it easy for
anyone with a WordPress blog (or someone who is about to
start one) to create a membership site.

Plus, Wishlist's feature list is nothing to sneeze at.
There's some good stuff there. I'd say the creators Stu
McLaren and Tracy Childers...have stronger marketing
strategies in mind with the features they've created. For
example, the sneak peeks, control over various pages, etc.

If you want to easily turn WordPress into a membership site
and want strong control over your marketing process try Wishlist.

If you want a more complex delivery of membership content try Amember.

Again, there is no affiliate component to Wishlist, but that
can certainly be incorporated.

Hope that helps!

Take care,
Alice Seba
Your Partner in Online Success

All you graphics whizzes out there may yawn at this, but my graphical abilities are limited to resizing and cropping images. I have great help with my graphics, but sometimes I wish I could do a few of things on the fly when an idea is sparked.  

Here’s a cool video that shows what’s possible with Photoshop. It’s not a tutorial, but simply a sped-up excerpt from David Peters’ Learn Photoshop Now tutorials that shows you cool stuff you can do. I particuarly was intrigued by what he did with the lighthouse…pretty darned awesome.

If you go to the Learn Photoshop Now website, you’ll see another quick demonstration that shows some cool stuff. I’ll definitely be learning about that removing wrinkles trick. I’ll be needing that in the next few years.

Whether you get your news from CNN and traditional medial or directly from social media, many (but of course, not all) have learned about the epic battle between Ashton Kutcher and CNN to reach 1 million followers on Twitter. It was all a publicy stunt with good intentions and to raise/send money to Malaria No More.

Interestingly enough (but not really surprisingly), Mr. Kutcher beat the huge, long-time news organization in the race to a million followers. In a recent post, Joel Comm talked about the power of new media and compared CNN’s social skills (or lack of)  to Kutcher’s ability to engage his followers.

Joel wrote:

“After all, isn’t Twitter made up of over TEN MILLION citizen journalists who are always on the scene and able to report breaking news before CNN has a clue what is taking place?”

And he’s right…but is the WORLD receiving that message yet? As Joel pointed out, there are only 10 million + users on Twitter.  However, those 10 million users do share what they learn on Twitter on their blogs, with their friends, etc…so the reach goes beyond the actual users. But I simply wanted to share an interesting story about two 30-something women and how they got their “breaking news” last night.

Last night at about 10 PM PST, I hopped on Twitter and learned a couple of things:

• Kutcher was trying to beat CNN to 1 million followers in support of Malaria No More.
• Oprah was going to make her first tweet on Friday.

Several hours earlier, my friend learned the same information from CNN and other traditional media. My friend is the same as age as me, uses a computer at work (but doesn’t have one at home). She recently purchased an iPod and goes to her sister’s house when she needs to update her iTunes.

Now, it doesn’t matter that she found a few hours earlier – obviously, she connected to her media of choice earlier in the evening than I did…but I find it interesting that we found our news in two COMPLETELY different ways. So while some claim the downfall of traditional media…it ain’t dead yet.

Now, is there a marketing lesson here? Not much – other than there are many ways to reach a target market. I just mostly find it really interesting that my friend and I had the same news to share with one another today (and that she finds news about Twitter interesting, even though she’s never been to the site), but our sources for the information were completely different. We may be in the digital age, but not all of us have gotten there yet.

After last week’s post about my struggle to integrate all the parts of my business into one system, a decision has finally been made – and all the pieces of the puzzle are starting to fit together.

After a final discussion with Josh Anderson, we are moving to Nanacast and have actually chosen to plug in the Get Response to manage the lists (it is a full integration where cancellations of subscriptions will remove the member from a particular mailing list).

This means a move of about 20 autoresponders (I’m scrapping a few as we move), about 30 or so products and several memberships. We have a lot a work ahead of us, but I’m so glad to have help from Lynette Chandler, Melody Spier and our new intern, Diana Walker to help with the process. And even thought it’s going to be a TON of work, I’m excited about going through everything – making sure everything is up-to-date, efficient and effective. It’s going to be a TRUE Spring Cleaning for my biz.

If you’re a customer, member or affiliate – please don’t worry. We will keep you in the loop about the entire process and will try to make it as simple as possible for you. And trust me – it will ALL be worth it. This will allow us to do a LOT more to help you build your online business.

Sigh…yep, it’s that darned old thing called technology that has created a few bumps in the road (and contributed to that mess of Christmas light cords I mentioned last week!).

With all kinds of products, services, programs and memberships being added…the process went kind of haywire. I originally started with Quicksales.com (a private label of shopping cart) for my digital products, but then when I wanted to add recurring payments with management of membership areas, it got complicated.

To accommodate the need for automatic membership area management (passwords, access, etc.), we started offering memberships by using Amember. Interestingly enough, I could plug Amember into Quicksales (1SC) and I paid about $97 to purchase the plug-in, but the plug-in was limited for a few reasons:

1. To manage your members lists, it would not communicate back with Quicksales (1SC) when a member cancelled their subscription. That meant, if I set up a list in the Quicksales autoresponder, it would become outdated as people left.

2. Quicksales (1SC) doesn’t do recurring payments through PayPal (or 2CO or most 3rd party services for that matter). Basically, a merchant account would be the only option.

3. The process of renewal and adding memberships was cumbersome to customers. Where Amember without the plug in allowed members to add subscriptions quickly and easily by logging into their account, the 1SC plug-in made the process unecessarily complicated by making the customer fill out the 1SC form again.

So…we did a big of working around it and I integrated the systems somewhat. Lynette also did some coding where affiliates could be credited for sales using their original affiliate links (from Quicksales), but the process was manual for us to calculate and affiliates didn’t get sales notifications. What a PITA!

In addition to the manual affiliate process on memberships, my customer lists are splintered. I have a “customer list” in Quicksales (1SC), but it overlaps with my member list in Amember. I HATE sending out duplicate emails to people who have spent their hard-earned money with me.

SO ARGH…I got myself into a pickle. I was trying to work with a system I was already using, so I wouldn’t disrupt my affiliates or my customers – but it’s too messy now.

One thought was to move everything over to Amember, but I think it has its shortcomings and the biggest of which is list management and I want to do it 100% right this time. They’ve made other improvements over the years, but there are so many additional features that would be good to see.

And when it comes to starting something new, I’m EXTREMELY cautious. I do know thing can be absolutely perfect, but I’ve looked at countless other options and none were quite right for me. If I’m going to move, it’s got to be at least NEAR PERFECT.

Then Enters a Possibility

A couple of weeks ago, when I went to the Canada Marketing Summit, I bumped into Josh Anderson. Although I missed his presentation, he very excitedly told me about his system that is PERFECT.

Of course, I’m skeptical.

He told me to take a look at his Nanacast Business Centralization & Automation System and I told him I definitely would. I know that Josh had previously expressed frustrations with other systems that I echoed and was thrilled that he had the technical team to come up with a solution.

So my new intern, Diana Walker (if that page is blank, come back later…she’ll be posting updates), have spent the morning reviewing the features and possibilities. It is most definitely a very robust system and is created from the savvy Internet marketer’s perspective. Many features I won’t even need to touch, but many of the key things are a solution to my many woes.

We’ve watched all the introductory videos, and have compiled a list of questions for the Josh’s team to see if this might be the solution we’re looking for. A couple of things that concern me:

• There is no autoresponder component built in to the program. However, there is FULL integration with Aweber and by full I mean Nanacast optionally communicates with Aweber when a member cancels their subscription, so they can be removed from your list.

• The built in affiliate program is set to credit the first affiliate referral. It tracks this via IP & not just cookies, but I believe the last referrer should get the credit for clinching a sale. I’m also not sure about the possibilities with cookie-stuffing on this (I need some techy to explain), but I assume Josh has taken care of it, but will ask. Just clarified with support that this was a previous feature of the system, but they now operate on a last referrer system tracked by IP and cookie.

* But side note, one cool part of the affiliate program is that it can set up to automatically deliver bonuses from particular affiliates if they wish to include some incentive to purchase. Of course, that’s where I see their might be a problem with giving the sale to the first referrer. If people are buying because of bonuses it will generally be from the last person who referred them. Hmmm. The bonuses are delivered by the customer using a coupon, but I’m not sure exactly how affiliate credit works.

There are a few other things I’ll be asking before I take the plunge, but this could be it. And if it is, that means more exciting products & programs for you…and if you’re my affiliate, everything will ALL be automated and there will be some pretty cool new features.

And hey, if all the technobabble (from the perspective of a non-techy) is of interest to you, I’ll keep you up-to-date on what direction we turn to from here.

So I had a few light bulb moments during the call with Craig Cannings of VA Classroom on the Social Media Boom.

As you know, I often challenge online business owners to be cautious with social media. It’s a big social net out there and it can grab you and never let you go if you’re not careful. For me, my own business assets (websites, blogs, mailing lists, products) are always my main focus and the use of social media is an extra and a complement to what I do.

In other words, take it in Sweetie-Stride:

As you know, we Internet Marketing Sweetie’s are social creatures and we like to help people, but more importantly we are very careful with our time. We constantly work to maximize our time and results from time spent on our businesses. With that in mind, a few things came from the call yesterday:

• Don’t jump in whole hog into every social media site or your key business activities may suffer. Craig actually shared the top 10 sites on the call and that has helped me figure out some new directions to explore. Oh…and no, you don’t have to do all 10 at once either. That’s just asking for trouble.

• Outsource certain activities involved with your participation in social media. NO…I’m not suggesting you hire someone to pose as you and post updates to Twitter or Facebook. Your social participation is required, but as Craig talked about on the call (you can get the recording here), there are plenty of related activities and tasks that you can assign to a VA, for example.

• Use social media as the amazing research tool it can be. This is actually something Lynette mentioned in a comment on a recent post, but Craig brought this up to…and it really gave me some food for thought. He talked about research, reputation management and again, these are items that can be easily outsourced, so you can focus on the big picture and what to do with this information -  instead of worrying about all the time-consuming fact-gathering details.

If You Missed the Call

You can still sign up to get the recording. Just click here to get on the notification list.

If You’d Like to Maximize Your Use of Social Media without Getting Bogged Down in the Details

Craig offers training for VAs to use social media for their clients. If you have a VA that you work with, consider enrolling them in the course…so you and your VA can work out a plan to use social media effectively without it taking you away from your business.

In fact, one of my VAs is about to embark on this training. I know I don’t personally have more time to dedicate to social media, but have quite a few ideas from the call that I want to put into action. I just want to make sure she has the right info and tools to do it right.

Here’s how to get the course info and enroll (and get a $50 tuition discount):

-> Information and sign up link

To get the discount, enter coupon code: imsweetie

A big thanks to Craig for a great call!